Fog of Dead Souls

by Jill Kelly

  “Then how did he get in or out?” Sandy asked.

  “We don’t know. We suspect he went out of the window to a floor below. There was a big party going on in a couple of suites on the second floor with a lot of coming and going of people not registered at the hotel. He could easily have slipped in among them.” Hansen shrugged and shook his head.

  “We’ve also been checking his calls. Richardson only made calls from his cell to his answering service Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon. Though there were two calls made from the room phone-one to the Three Coins and one to this B&B.”

  “Joel called the restaurant to check on the dinner reservations,” Ellie said. “And he called the B&B to tell Sandy and Arlen what time to meet us.”

  Arlen spoke up. “I talked to him briefly. We agreed to meet at seven-thirty.”

  Sandy nodded in agreement.

  “Dr. McKay, did you hear his call to the restaurant?” Skopowlski moved closer to the table and stood a bit behind Hansen.

  “No, but I was running a bath part of that time,” Ellie said. “He just told me he’d done it.”

  “Do you think the other man was at the restaurant, that he worked there?” Sandy was pale, Ellie thought, and she bit her lip in that familiar way as she spoke.

  “We don’t know—that seems a long shot,” said Hansen, looking down the table. “The reservation girl at the Three Coins couldn’t confirm that it was Richardson who called although the name was checked off, but they were busy in the late afternoon and the phone rang a lot. Several calls came in for the chef, one of the waiters had a sick kid—everything checked out.”

  “Will you find this man?” Ellie’s voice was small and tentative as if all the fear was now taking hold.

  Hansen sighed and looked her in the eye. “I don’t know. We will certainly try. But I don’t know. However, we don’t believe you are in any real danger now. We actually don’t think this was about you, not you personally. We think it was sexually motivated, that Richardson was a voyeur and that he had planned to kill himself once this was done. We don’t think the other man will have any interest in you now that Richardson is dead.”

  “But are you sure?” said Sandy.

  “No,” said Skopowlski, “but we think Richardson paid him—he withdrew a lot of cash on Friday afternoon, which we didn’t find in his things. So if the man was paid for his work, he won’t be working for Richardson again.”

  Hansen looked over at Ellie. Her eyes had turned empty, lost. He touched her hand. “Dr. McKay? Ellie, are you okay?”

  She blinked and looked at him. “No,” she said, “but that’s my problem now, not yours.”

  14

  In the fall, the dining room at the Grand Canyon lodge closed down at eight. After the cake, Ellie and Al soon found themselves alone in the big room. The waitress encouraged them to take their coffee into the great hall and sit by the fire. She’d come for the cups later. But they left the table empty-handed and headed back toward the guest rooms.

  As they approached her door, Al put his arm around her shoulders. She stiffened and he loosened his grip but didn’t let go. With his other hand, he pulled the key out of his pocket and opened the door.

  “May I stay with you?” he asked. His voice was gentle and he looked into her eyes, but then looked away, hoping that would give her more space.

  Ellie took a deep breath. “No,” she said and then let the breath go. “But I’ll come to you. I’ll come to you a little later.”

  Al nodded. “414,” he said. “Back toward the main lobby, take a left and then follow the signs. And take your time. We’re in no hurry.” He smiled at her and saw that she seemed a little calmer, a little more sure. He handed her a key to his room.

  She went in and closed the door. He waited a moment to see if she would change her mind, but he heard nothing, so he turned and went to his room. He hung up his jacket, took off his boots, then stood there a bit perplexed. He wasn’t a pajama kind of guy. He’d slept in the all-together for most of his life, married and single. But he couldn’t answer the door naked or get into bed before she came. What if she just needed to talk for a while? He wished they’d already been through this part so they could be easy together.

  In the end, he stripped his fancy clothes off and hung them up and put on an old, soft pair of jeans. Then he flossed and brushed his teeth and used mouthwash a couple of times. He didn’t know what else to do with himself. He felt fifteen again—and not the good part of fifteen.

  He turned down the bed, propped up the pillows, and lay against them. The digital clock read 8:30. For the first time in years, he thought about June Marie. She’d been the daughter of his mother’s closest friend and she came to stay summers with them to get out of the noise and dirt of Chicago. Those summers had been happy ones. He taught her to ride and rope as he learned for himself to be a cowboy. In high school, they’d written to each other every week or two, long-distance sweethearts—soul mates, she’d called it. He pined for her when he went away to college, told her he’d marry her when he was through. She’d never said yes, but he assumed it was understood. Then his senior year, there was a long silence between them, and his mother wrote that she had married a Jewish boy from her neighborhood and they’d joined the Peace Corps and gone to the Philippines. That summer he’d come to the Canyon to work in the park and Nature had worked her magic, helping him to heal his heart. Three years later, he’d met Annie and married her and they’d had thirty-five years on the ranch together before she was gone.

  He hadn’t thought he would marry again. And certainly not a stranger, a stranger with troubles he couldn’t even fathom. His friends would think he’d lost his mind. And maybe he had. But he was tired of worrying about his own life problems, tired of using Gracie as a false kind of comfort, tired of being alone in his life. He believed that people needed each other, like that corny Barbara Streisand song, and in an instant in the Maverick Bar, he’d decided to need Ellie.

  He woke to find her sitting on the bed next to him. She wore a long, soft black coat with a hood that made her look like a priestess from the King Arthur book he’d read when he was eleven. He reached up and touched her face and a wave of sadness came over him for this wounded creature who’d come into his care. But he wasn’t at all sure that he was magician enough.

  “I was tempted not to wake you,” Ellie said.

  “I’m glad you did.” He stroked her cheek and she leaned into his hand and then lay down beside him, tucking the coat around her. They lay like that for a few minutes until he moved his head and looked at her and saw that she was watching him. He kissed her then and felt her kiss him back, a deep kiss, and he was glad.

  After a few minutes, she sat up and undid the one button of her coat and he saw that she wore a white cotton gown underneath. The sleeves were loose wings of sheer fabric and lace and went almost to her wrists. The lacey neckline left her throat bare and accentuated the fullness of her breasts and the near roundness of her shoulders. It was simple and elegant, modest and provocative. Desire surged through him and he put his hand on her waist and pulled her down to him. She lay for a moment with her head on his shoulder and her hand moving on his chest as if to take his measure. Then she turned her face up and they kissed for a long time.

  But when he moved his knee up between her legs and pressed against her, she flinched and pulled back, her breathing suddenly sharp and ragged. He slowed his pace then, stroked her flank through the gown and held her close until she quieted again.

  “Ellie, it’s okay,” he whispered. “I won’t hurt you and I won’t let anyone else hurt you.”

  She pulled back to look into his eyes. She searched them for a long time and then pressed her mouth to his. He unbuttoned the gown, pushed it aside, and saw the marks. He stifled a gasp and then gingerly moved away from her. She lay still, barely breathing, her eyes shut tight. Only the few tears sliding down onto the pillow betrayed her.

  He kissed her eyes and said in a low, gentl
e voice. “Ellie, look at me.”

  After a moment, she opened her eyes and met his. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “The past is the past. Our lives are from now on.”

  The skittish animal in her looked out at him. He was unsure how to treat her, whether to acknowledge the marks or ignore them. Her impassive face gave him no clue. Finally, he propped himself up on the pillows and pulled her to him. He waited a moment to find the right words. “For better or worse, Ellie. That’s how it works with me. I’ve married all of you. You’ve married all of me. I come to you battered, scarred, old. I don’t care. You come to me battered, scarred, old. I don’t care about that either. We don’t know each other but we will. We have the rest of our lives to sort that out. Or at least I hope so. And I want you, naked or not. When you’re ready.”

  She said nothing, but her breathing grew even and slow after a while, and her limbs slowly relaxed. He reached down, pulled the comforter over them and turned out the light. When he awoke hours later, he was alone.

  15

  After her conversation with the detectives, Ellie went up to lie down in her room at the B&B. She felt exhausted and wired at the same time. She felt as if she’d been assaulted again, and yet she could fathom little of what she’d heard.

  All that week, she’d clung to the idea that she and Joel were both victims, even though some part of her knew that wasn’t logical. She needed to believe that he had been murdered and that she had been hurt by someone else. She’d told herself a story about the killer being interrupted before he could kill her too. All that week she’d refused to talk about what had happened. She didn’t want Arlen’s or Sandy’s speculations. She didn’t read the paper or watch TV. She spent the time instead mourning Joel and his untimely death and feeling the absence of a man she’d come to care for. Now that illusion was shattered, yet she didn’t know what to do with all that she had found out. She felt a pressing need for it not to be so.

  She knew she should call her sponsor. That’s what the program said to do. But how to talk about all this? Her sponsor wasn’t a therapist, wasn’t a professional who could help her make sense of what Joel had done. She knew she should go to a meeting, but she didn’t have the energy to find one, let alone sit through the readings and sharing with people who had no idea what she’d been through. She hoped Sandy would come in and talk to her but she didn’t. Sandy was in shock, too, probably. And what could she say anyway? That she’d never really liked Joel? How would that help anything now?

  She paced the room, restless, anxious, a taut-wire tension ratcheting up in her body. On a pass by the window, she saw Hansen and Skopowlski talking on the sidewalk. She hurried down.

  Hansen wasn’t surprised to see Ellie come out the front door. After decades of this work, he was no longer surprised by anything that a victim or perpetrator did. He sent Skopowlski off with the car and followed her into the dining room. He closed the pocket doors on both ends, nodding to Sandy and Arlen, who stood talking in the kitchen.

  Ellie had taken up a post at the French doors so he sat himself at the end of the dining table, a good distance from her. He relaxed his shoulders and jaw, a technique he’d learned in a stress-reduction course. He found that it helped him and it helped people talk to him more easily. Then he waited.

  “The Joel I knew wouldn’t have done this to me,” she said, shaking her head. “He was a gentleman, you know, the old-fashioned kind who opened car doors and held out a chair and stood up when I came into the room. I didn’t care about any of that but he insisted. He was polite. He was respectful. There was a—I don’t know—a kind of elegance about it, about him.”

  She looked over at Hansen, who was watching her face. He nodded so she would go on.

  “I didn’t think Joel liked sex much. We saw each other for five or six weeks before we slept together. He wasn’t eager or pushy about getting me in bed and that was fine with me. He was my first sober relationship.” She looked at him to see if he understood.

  “Tell me about that,” he said. He watched her whole body shift as she went into teacher mode.

  “I started drinking pretty young, in college. And I drank for many years. So sex and drinking, well, they went together, you know. Sex is easier somehow when you’re drunk or stoned. At least it was for me. When I got sober two years ago, I didn’t really know how to be with somebody. In the first year, they tell you to stay out of a relationship because the drama can get you drunk again. But after two years, I was ready to try and Joel, well, he made it easy. He was not very affectionate but he made few demands, let me take it at my own pace. It all seemed perfect.”

  “Did you ever see a mean streak or anything that told you there was another side to him?” Hansen kept his voice low, neutral, just talking.

  Ellie shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. He was very intense when it came to his work. And he was often moody if he lost a patient, like he had that Friday.”

  Hansen felt a spark of something. “Tell me about that.”

  “I don’t know the details. It was a young man with gunshot wounds. He must have died, Joel was irritable on the trip to Gettysburg. I learned that when he got moody, he hadn’t been able to save the patient. I do know that what he liked was the challenge of the surgeries. Once he’d saved a woman who’d been thrown through a windshield. She was badly hurt, like liver and spleen and intestines all mangled, and he was able to patch her up. And there was a Latino kid who was bleeding to death from knife wounds all over his body and he saved him too. He seemed very proud of those things, and I was proud of him for doing it. That’s not work I could do.”

  Hansen wondered if she could hear the eulogy in her voice—and the denial. “Did he care about these patients?”

  She looked at him and a curious expression crossed her eyes. She pushed off from the wall and came over and sat down next to him. “I teach literature, you may know that.”

  Hansen nodded.

  “Literature is about stories, the stories of people and relationships. The first couple of times Joel told me about his cases, I asked questions about their stories. How had they ended up in the ER? But he didn’t know. He was only interested in their bodies, their wounds. He wasn’t interested in their lives or their … their selves, their spirits. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t cold about it. He just seemed to care about getting the job done. I figured he’d seen so much carnage and violence that he’d had to tune it out and focus on his technique.”

  She reached out her hand and touched the edge of his sleeve, as she had done earlier that morning. He could feel the warmth of her hand through his jacket and shirt. “There was something wrong with Joel, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes, I believe there was.” He paused.

  “I feel so foolish,” she said, “so stupid. All these things I’ve told you add up to something, don’t they? Something I couldn’t see.”

  “This is not your fault.” He could feel himself overstepping his role as detective, but he couldn’t stop. “You had no reason to look for it.” He saw her go pale then and he knew they were done.

  “I’ll go find your friend. You should rest now,” he said and he got up and left the room.

  Sandy helped her upstairs, insisted she take off her clothes and get back into bed.

  “You’ve had a terrible shock, honey. Sleep a while. It will help.”

  Ellie felt worn out, wrung out, but a little clearer for having talked to Hansen. She rolled over on her side, curling up as tightly as she could. Then she closed her eyes and saw Joel’s face, and suddenly she felt like she was choking. She got up from the bed and went to the closet. She found the valium stuffed deep into the pocket under her dirty clothes and she took two. In less than ten minutes, they had worked their magic.

  Ellie woke with a start. She had dreamed again of Joel. He was sitting on one bed in a cheap motel room and she sat on the other. He was handing her bottles of whiskey and she would drain each one and then lay it carefully down as if it were a sleepin
g baby. His look was clear, charming even, and she felt a deep surge of desire for him. Then there was a knock on the door and she went to answer it. When she turned back, Joel was gone but the bed was littered with bottles.

  She heard the knock again and found herself in her room at the B&B. The door opened quietly and Sandy stuck her head in. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” Ellie lied. “Come in.”

  Sandy sat on the edge of the bed. She patted Ellie’s shoulder where it lay under the comforter. “Arlen needs to go home. He can’t take any more time away. And I need to get back too. Are you feeling up to going home? Detective Hansen says they don’t need us to stay any longer.” She smiled sadly at her friend. “Maybe you can start to put this behind you.”

  Ellie was tempted to laugh, but she knew it would come out bitter. She couldn’t imagine putting this anywhere. But she took a deep breath and said yes, she could pack up and go. The sooner, the better.

  Within an hour, they were in the car. Their drive retraced the route from the Friday night before. Ellie stared out the window at the countryside. It had been the longest week of her life.

  16

  Good morning.” Al found Ellie in the dining room at the same table they’d shared the night before. Her head was bent in concentration over a notebook. He watched her for a moment before going up to the table, then waited until she looked up before sitting down across from her. She smiled back at him and closed the notebook.