The Last Day of Emily Lindsey

by Nic Joseph

  It was widely accepted as fact, and yet here I was, sprawled on my back, my arm neatly bandaged, the razor disinfected and back in my nightstand drawer.

  The cutting had started when I was fifteen. The visions had been particularly bad at that time, worse than the nightmares, and I spent my days looking for any and all ways to keep Nell and Mike from finding out. After a close call at Nell’s birthday party one Saturday afternoon, I locked myself in my bedroom while the party continued just steps outside my door. Everyone, Nell included, thought I was simply having a temperamental teenager moment; in reality, I’d ducked out of the room just as the vision was starting.

  As I sat in my room listening to the laughter out in the living room, I felt helpless. I was angry at myself for jeopardizing my relationship with Nell and Mike. For a reason I still, to this day, have not been able to pin down, I’d grabbed the first thing I could find—the jagged tab of a Coke can—and used one of the edges to make a small cut on my finger. As I watched the blood bubble up and then begin to slide down my finger, I’d felt an immediate sense of relief from the pain inside of my head.

  That feeling of release hadn’t changed in more than twenty years.

  I stared at the ceiling a long time, the symbol that Emily had drawn filling my vision, the guilt of what I’d just done heavy on my chest. I must have dozed off for a couple of hours, because the next thing I knew, there was sunlight on my face, and the alarm clock next my bed said it was six thirty.

  I got ready, pulling on a long-sleeved shirt, and headed to the station.

  Gayla was already there, and she looked wide awake. In typical Gayla fashion, she got straight to the point. “Hey, sorry about last night,” she said. “Mary called me about something else, and then she asked me how things were going, and I thought I should fill her in. But it wasn’t the right time, and I should have waited to give her my…opinion.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, and I’m sorry for being a jerk about it.”

  “I’m sorry, you’re sorry, blah blah,” she said, and I smiled. “Enough of that. Look, I’ve been digging around on Carmen Street, trying to see if there’s anything interesting on there.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Sure did,” she said, spinning her laptop around so that I could see the screen. “Emily took on a lot of people, but none as bad as Ryan Griggs.”

  “The pharmaceutical guy.”

  “Yep,” she said. “We need to stop by there today. I’ll give them a call.”

  “Okay, but I have to stop by Pat’s first.”

  Gayla gave me a look, but she nodded. “Okay.”

  I looked back down at the computer screen. “So what did you find?” I asked, leaning forward to look at the screen.

  She’d pulled his personal Twitter account and scrolled down a few weeks back. She hovered the mouse over one post in particular.

  2w ago. @CarmenStreet keep talking bitch must be nice to hide behind your computer.

  “That’s the president of one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the region?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Don’t know that it’s evidence of his involvement in this, but it sure seems like proof that he’s got a temper—and that he hated her guts.”

  I nodded slowly, staring at the screen. “Yeah, but her guts are fully intact. We need to go make sure his still are, too.”

  • • •

  Since the shooting at Glenwood Bank, I’d met with the bank teller who’d been shot, Patricia Michaels, eight times. Once a week for almost three months, except the one time I was sick, the time I had to work late, and the time I had to cancel for Nell’s birthday. As I drove to Pat’s apartment that morning, I thought hard about canceling for the fourth time.

  Truth was, I thought about canceling on her almost every week. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have the time, or that I should probably be working on the case, or that it was out of my way. It was that I knew it would be as awkward and uncomfortable as it had been all other eight times I visited.

  But I wouldn’t let myself back out. I couldn’t let myself. The moment I started canceling, I knew how quickly it would all go to shit. I’d skip this week for some very important reason, and then I’d skip next week because I skipped this week.

  All I had left to hang my hat on was my consistency.

  My visits went the same way each week. I’d give Pat a call on her landline right before I left my home. She always answered on the first ring and told me she looked forward to seeing me.

  “Drive safely,” she’d say before hanging up.

  I drove the thirty-five minutes or so to her apartment complex. She lived on the second floor of a five-story elevator building in a quiet neighborhood filled mostly with retirees. That evening, I pulled into my usual spot, a few doors down from the apartment building.

  I walked up to the front door and pushed the buzzer for 2C. It only took a few seconds for her to buzz me in. It had taken a while for us to get there. The first few times I’d stopped by, she’d grilled me for at least ten minutes to make sure it was really me.

  “How do I know you’re who you say you are?” she had asked, her voice wobbling through the intercom.

  “Because we just spoke about thirty minutes ago. It’s me, Detective Paul. I can show you my badge when I get upstairs.”

  “Yes, but by then, you’ll already be inside, won’t you?”

  I’d actually considered going home that day, as I stood outside talking into the rectangular metal box, wondering what the hell I was doing there. What I thought my visits were going to do. How long I could keep it up. But I had stayed, and finally, she had buzzed the door open.

  Secretly, I had been a little bit disappointed that I had missed my opportunity to run away.

  I pulled the door open and stepped inside. I headed straight back toward the elevator, unbuttoning my jacket as I walked along. There was something about her building that trapped heat, and today, it was downright oppressive. I already knew what the second story had in store for me. I wasn’t sure my weekly visits would have lasted this long if she’d lived on one of the higher floors.

  I stepped out of the elevator, and even though her apartment was several feet down, I could hear her unlocking the door. She always timed it just perfectly. I stepped up to the door just as it swung open.

  “Hello, Detective Paul,” she said, wheeling herself backward in her chair to let me inside.

  “Hi,” I said. We didn’t say anything else for the first couple of moments, which was sort of our pattern. I took off my jacket and hung it up, because Pat was particular about things like that, and I wanted to make her comfortable. I’d learned in the last few months that what made her comfortable was having everything in its proper place.

  After I hung up my coat, I followed her into the living room, like I always did, and she wheeled up to the side of the couch. “How are you feeling?” I asked. “How’s your week been?”

  “Not bad.”

  Our conversations always started out slowly, and I was still getting used to it. Gayla would have pulled her hair out trying to fill in the silences. The few times we’d talked about my weekly visits, Gayla had tried her best to get to the bottom of my behavior.

  “It’s some kind of guilt thing, right?” she had asked. “That’s got to be it. You feel like you could’ve done more, moved the gun just a little bit to the right, so she wouldn’t be in that chair at all. Right?”

  “It’s not weird for me to want to go visit someone from a former case,” I had said.

  She’d raised her eyebrows in a no-bullshit kind of way. “You’ve seen a lot of victims, a lot of hurt folks in your time,” she had said. “But you’ve never been this committed to going to visit them on such a regular basis.”

  “What about Barry? The teenager who was in the fire at Piermont High School. I went by to visit him.” />
  “Yeah,” she had said. “You went to visit him twice? Three times maybe?”

  “Look,” I had said. “You know this is different.”

  “Yeah,” she had said. “I do. I just don’t know how long you can keep it up.”

  That conversation had occurred around the two-month mark.

  And here I was, another month in, still sitting in Pat’s living room.

  “Do you want some tea today?” she asked.

  I knew to say yes. Saying no could change her mood completely. “Sure, that would be great.”

  She pushed back and wheeled into the kitchen. She reached for a couple of mugs that were already sitting out on the counter and then rolled herself over to the table, where the tea was also already out. I wondered if it had been sitting there since last week.

  “I’m sorry, but I only have Earl Grey,” she said. “I haven’t had a chance to get anything else.”

  It was the same conversation we had every week, but I just went with it. I really didn’t need any caffeine, but I’d once offered to pick up something else, and that didn’t go over so well either.

  She rolled over to the stove and heated up a pot of water before turning back to me.

  “How’s work going?” she asked. “Any interesting cases?”

  She knew that I couldn’t tell her about what was going on in any of my cases, but I did try to give her some general information about them, because she always seemed very intrigued. Plus, it gave us something to talk about.

  “I’m on a new case, and it’s giving me a lot of trouble,” I said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

  She rolled up to the table and placed a tea bag into each of the mugs. “Why?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

  In another lifetime, before she became a bank teller, Patricia had been a teacher at a middle school on the southwest side of the city. She still spoke in a calm, soft way, and I imagined that her voice used to work wonders on the children.

  “There’s a woman involved, and she won’t speak to me,” I said. “She knows a lot about what happened, but she won’t say a single word. And I’m not sure how to handle that.”

  “Maybe you should talk to her,” she said. “Maybe you’re putting too much pressure on her, asking her to speak when she’s not ready.”

  “But she’s the one who needs to talk,” I said. “She’s the one who knows what’s going on. It’s frustrating, because she’s right there, right in front of me. But I can’t get to her.”

  “I understand that,” she said. “But try it my way. When you meet with her again, you should just speak to her.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “The right thing will come to you,” she said. “Maybe tell her a little bit about yourself, take some of the pressure off her.”

  I couldn’t explain to her why that plan wouldn’t work without giving away too many details of the case. I couldn’t tell her that Emily’s refusal to speak to me wasn’t a deliberate choice; it was like trying to convince a ghost to speak to me.

  I nodded and thanked her for the advice. Pat rolled over to the stove and turned it off, lifting the pot of hot water. I resisted the urge to stand up and help her. I knew she would chastise me if I did. I’d made the mistake of trying too hard the first couple of times I’d come to visit. Now, I sat there, my body tense, poised to spring into action if she started having trouble with the pot, which was about halfway filled with water.

  Patricia rolled back to the table and slowly, with shaking arms, poured water into each of our cups. I was careful not to let out a sigh of relief when she was done.

  “Sugar?” I asked, picking up the sugar and scooping a spoonful into my own cup. That was my contribution.

  She nodded, and I added some to hers. With shaking hands, she set the hot pot down on a towel.

  Making tea for a guest hadn’t been so much trouble for sixty-three-year-old Pat a few months ago. Before the shooting, she’d been active, choosing the stairs over the elevator, doing small fitness tapes in her living room every now and then. Now, as I watched her lift her mug to her lips with shaky hands, I had a hard time imagining the woman she must have been.

  We said goodbye about twenty minutes later at her front door, and like always, she looked tired. But happy.

  “See you next week,” I said.

  She nodded. Pat never said it first, maybe because she didn’t know if I was actually coming back. But I knew that she was waiting for me to say it. I was her only visitor in the past week, and there would be no one else until I returned.

  “See you then,” she said. “Drive safely.”

  As I drove away from Patricia’s apartment, Gayla’s question struck me.

  How long could I keep this up?

  I don’t know if it was learning that Patricia didn’t have a single family member to come visit her—she was the only child of two only children, who’d both passed away—or that I’d seen the moment when Crane’s bullet struck her in the back that had made me come the first time, but after that, I would have had to make the decision to stop coming.

  And that was almost impossible.

  As I headed to meet Gayla at the Griggses’ house, I thought about Patricia’s suggestion. Maybe we needed to stop focusing so much on what Emily wouldn’t say and focus on what we knew. We knew how she’d gotten home. We knew that about an hour before her husband found her, she’d been cognizant enough to hail a cab, tell Cruise her address, and pay for it.

  I needed to use what we knew and find a way to crack her, to get her to talk.

  Because that was the only way to find out what happened to her.

  And maybe the only way to find out why we seemed to share the nightmares and what that symbol meant.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ryan and Eleanor Griggs lived in a massive peach-and-ivory house out in the northern suburbs of the city. We were only about twenty-five minutes away from where the Lindseys lived, but we might as well have been on another planet. A planet that included “Big Money” or “Green” in its name, or maybe just dollar signs where there would normally be the letter s. Even the air smelled richer. As I followed Gayla’s car through the Griggses’ neighborhood, I took in the enormous homes, the perfectly manicured lawns, and the expensive cars in every driveway.

  Gayla stopped her car in front of the Griggses’ home, and I pulled up behind her. We both stepped out onto the street and, with our doors still open, leaned back to take the house in.

  “Dayum,” she purred. “If I lived in a house like this, I’d probably be a pretentious asshole, too,” she said.

  “Possibly dead asshole,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Possibly.”

  Gayla had filled me in on Griggs back at the station, and as tough as his brash personality was to swallow, it was hard not to be impressed by his steady and determined climb to the top.

  Griggs had started at Kelium fresh out of college at twenty-three and was a manager by the time he was twenty-seven. In a magazine interview about thirty rising stars under thirty, he was quoted as saying that the best business advice he could give was to find out who the people who mattered were and make those people like you.

  “Make them really like you,” he had said. “It only takes one person to open each door. When you’re up against an obstacle, find the person who can break it down for you, and make them like you. It’s not about impressing them with your educational background or résumé or this or that. Just get them on your team, whatever that takes. For most people, that means figuring out one of their obstacles and solving it for them. It’s not as hard as you might think.”

  Griggs became the youngest CEO of the company at thirty-nine, and now, ten years later, with his shoulder-length hair and in-your-face personality, he’d established a solid reputation for always getting what he wa
nted.

  “I called his office, and they said he’s not in today,” Gayla said. “According to his assistant, it’s not unusual for him to work from home. Hasn’t been in for about a week. She hasn’t heard from him during that time, but that’s apparently not that weird either. I called the house earlier—nobody answered.”

  “Looks like somebody’s home,” I said, pointing to the shiny black sports car in the driveway. We walked up to the front door, and I pressed the buzzer. From inside, I could hear the melodic chimes as they floated through the house.

  Nothing happened for a few moments, and I reached over to press it again.

  After another beat, the large door opened slowly, and a short, balding man peered out.

  “Yes, hello,” he said, standing rigidly at the door. “How can I help you?”

  “We’re here to see Ryan Griggs,” I said.

  He squinted. “Yes, sir,” he said. “And who are you?”

  We introduced ourselves and pulled out our badges. He reached for them both and looked at them carefully before handing them back. He stepped back and let us inside, closing the door behind us. I took my hat off and held it in my hands.

  “If you’ll be kind enough to wait here,” he said. He walked away toward the back of the house.

  When he was out of sight, Gayla spun around and faced me, her eyes open wide, an expression of astonishment on her face. She placed her fingertips at her temple and made an exploding motion as her jaw dropped down.

  “A butler?” she said with a hiss. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  I smirked. “Maybe he’s their…cousin?”

  “He asked us to ‘be so kind as to wait here,’” she said. “That man is their butler. I didn’t know that was actually a thing.”

  I choked on nothing, and a chortle escaped me. “Wait, so let me be clear. You’re saying that you thought butlers were, what, fictional characters?”

  She frowned, and I think she was giving it real thought. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I guess I did. I mean, I get that some people much more fortunate than me have maids and au pairs and regular cleaning services. Hell, I can have any of that with Groupon. But an actual ‘be so kind as to wait here’ butler? Who butles? That’s ridiculous.”