“I’m Kohlar, Dave Kohlar. You called about my sister. Is she all right? Is she…?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Kohlar. I’ll find you a detective.”
“Just tell me if she’s all right. Please.”
Shirley turned around, gave him a sympathetic look, and continued to a door over in the corner of the room.
Dave’s thoughts tumbled all over each other, scrabbling for the forefront. The one that came most readily and painfully to the surface was of a little blonde girl lying on the ground, blood in her hair, little chest shuddering. Another thought repeatedly told him that calls about Sally meant trouble; they always had. And although no one ever wanted to tell him over the phone what the problem was, this time felt different. This time felt final. Permanent. This time, he was fairly sure that Sally was—
“Mr. Kohlar?” The detective that came out to see him had a kind face, a good-looking face, and short-cropped light brown hair. From the polo shirt and slacks, Dave could tell he worked out and evidently had better taste in clothing than Dave did. He was, Dave thought with a strange non sequitor twist of bitterness, the kind of guy he’d always pictured Cheryl leaving him for.
“Hello, I’m Detective Corimar. We spoke on the phone.”
Dave nodded. “I’m Dave. Will you please tell me what’s going on with my sister?”
He could see from Corimar’s face that the news wasn’t good. “Mr. Kohlar, please, this way.” Corimar led Dave through a door and to a chair by a desk.
Dave frowned. “Isn’t this…Anita DeMarco’s desk?”
Corimar offered a warm smile. “Yes, actually. I’m covering her cases while she’s on maternity leave. You know her?”
“Yeah, uh, yeah, you could say that. She investigated my sister’s disappearance a while back.” Dave took the chair offered.
Corimar wrote something down on a legal pad and then looked up at him. The smile was gone. “Mr. Kohlar. I am really very sorry to have to inform you of this.”
Tears blurred Dave’s vision. The rest of what the detective said and whatever he managed to respond sounded far away, like it was coming through a long tunnel. “There was an accident…She’s gone, Mr. Kohlar…”
“How?…What happened?”
“…She fell in the catacombs, beneath her living facility…”
“…Suicide?”
“We’re investigating…”
“…You don’t think it was a suicide?”
“We’re looking into it…”
“Was there a note? Anything?”
“It was a word, Mr. Kohlar. HOLLOW. Does that mean anything to you? Anything significant about that word?”
That last part came clearly through the haze of grief. A word. A single word. An awful fucking string of letters that yes, actually, did mean something to him, but nothing he would ever admit to, not now, out loud to this pretty-a way to find him. And he wouldn’t.
“No, nothing.” He thought he’d said it out loud, but his lips felt numb, and his head, his hands, his legs in the chair didn’t feel entirely there with him in the station.
“Can I get you something? Cup of coffee, maybe?”
Dave shook his head.
“Are you up to this right now? We can always—”
“No, if you’ve got questions, ask them. I’d rather do this now.”
“Understood.” The detective scribbled something else on the legal pad. “Mr. Kohlar, did Sally have any problems with anyone? Anyone she didn’t like maybe or was afraid of? Anyone who gave her a hard time?”
Dave shook his head. “No, not one. People liked Sally. She was like a kitten. People thought she was helpless. Fragile. She was, I guess. People always wanted to take care of her.” Dave had the strangest case of déjà vu, like he’d explained this to police before. He looked at the officer. “Someone killed her?”
“It’s too early to say. I’m just trying to get a picture of her life. An idea of what she was like, who came in and out of her daily existence, that sort of thing.”
“No one. She had her doctor and me. I don’t think she even had a lot of friends at Oak Hill.”
“So you aren’t aware of any friends she might have had at the assisted living facility?”
Dave cringed a little, perhaps more sensitive than he should have been to undertones of accusation that he wasn’t there enough for his sister to be aware of her friends. “No. No one that I’ve seen her with.”
Corimar nodded. “Okay. I think that’s it for now. Here’s my card. If there’s anything else you think of that might be of importance, no matter how small or unrelated it might seem, just give me a ring, okay? Again, I’m very sorry for your loss. Jenkins there will help you with arrangements and forms to sign.”
“Thank you.” Dave got up on shaky legs and followed Officer Jenkins. The rest of the afternoon blurred by. When he lay down later that afternoon in the dusky gloom of his apartment, he found the detective’s business card, crumpled and worn from the sweat of his palm, still in his hand. He tossed it on the floor by the television and sank into exhausted sleep.
Jake Dylan sat on his couch, elbows on his knees and hands dangling between his legs, staring at the baggie of heroin on the coffee table. He suspected that it belonged to his sometimes-friend Scott, who, despite never having done drugs in his life, seemed bent on ruining Jake’s sobriety lately. Maybe that sounded paranoid. Sure it did. And he couldn’t be sure, of course, couldn’t prove it, but there was no other explanation. Jake was very nearly sure that he did not buy the heroin himself or bring it into the house, so unless he was going crazy, someone was fucking with him.
He wanted it, though. He didn’t much care whose heroin it was. He wanted to get high.
Jake stole a glance at his cell phone, which he’d taken out of his pocket and placed gingerly next to the bag of heroin. He could call Erik, his sponsor. Or he could just pick up the baggie by the ziplocked corner and throw it away. Flush it. Burn it. Snort it. Shoot it up. Get rid of it.
His hand reached for the cell and drew back.
He didn’t need this shit. He’d been having some bad nightmares lately that had put him a little on edge—faceless parades of his aunt’s boyfriends in fun house distortion, towering over him, smacking him into walls, shoving him into closets, stuffing him down, down into places that light and air couldn’t reach. They didn’t have faces. Or rather, they had a stream of faces, one bulky body passing from one hateful twist of mouth or blazing eye to another. In the dreams, his brother couldn’t (wouldn’t) protect him. He could sense Greg just outside the periphery of his dream-vision. There but not there. Aware that he was being hurt in an intellectual sense, but completely devoid of compassion or anger or fear or anything that had compelled him to protect Jake when they had been kids. It hadn’t often come to physical confrontations in real life—maybe two that he could remember. But the things they said…God, the things they said drove Greg to mouth off with a quick tongue, while they drove Jake to drug-induced apathy.
The heroin on the table looked soft, inviting, not quite pure white but dazzling in his eyes just the same.
When the cell phone rang, he jumped and darted a hand out to grab it with a brief flicker of hope that it might be Greg that winked out, really, before his hand even closed around the phone. The incoming number registered only as “Unknown Name, Unknown Number.” He pushed a button and said, “Hello?” His eyes never left the heroin.
There was a crackle of static. “Hello, Jake.” The voices that spoke sounded choppy, overlaying each other like the signal came from some long tunnel, maybe, or under some heavily tree-shaded road that wreaked havoc on cell phone reception. Greg sounded like that the last time I—
“Who’s this?”
“Don’t you remember me, Jake?” The voices melded into one.
Jake felt cold across his back. It was his aunt’s voice. His dead aunt’s voice.
She made a clicking sound with her teeth that Jake loathed. It meant she was disappointed.
Or angry. Or frustrated. Or too tense to have him around, messing up the vibes in the air that surrounded her already unsteady calm. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”
“Who are you?” he repeated. “Who are you really?”
“You know who I am,” she said, but the sound on the other end of the line wavered, and for a moment he heard that other voice, a threaded multi-voice of male and female timbres. The cold spread to his gut.
“Where are you calling from?”
“Look out back.” The line went dead.
Jake pushed the hang up button and set the phone down next to the heroin. The sensation in his stomach was like taking a wrong step off a curb or sliding on ice—that slippery freezerburning feeling in the groin, like something awful was about to happen. Something he couldn’t stop. Baaaaad high. Like the other times. Like the time he smoked that joint laced with PCP and all the people on the street started melting like wax hellip;
He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hands for a moment, trying to settle his stomach and push away thoughts of that…whatever it was.
It couldn’t have been his aunt on the phone. Maybe it was one of her old boyfriends calling to mess with him. Maybe it was Scott, or one of Scott’s friends, whichever idiot left behind the baggie of heroin. He opened his eyes, dropping his hands to his knees.
The baggie on the table was gone.
Jake frowned. He peered under the table, then on the couch around and under him. He slipped off the couch and looked underneath it and underneath the cushions. The baggie was nowhere to be found.
He stood slowly, wary eyes on the empty space where the heroin had been, and crossed through the kitchen on the way to the back door. The kitchen was small, as the rest of the house he rented on Cerver Street was small. The windows boxed out most of the light. Usually he liked it, the cocooning dark. But there was something in it now, something thick and cold and coppery that he couldn’t quite place. It felt wrong. Very wrong.
The back door, heavily painted wood that swung on uneasy hinges, groaned as he pulled it open. He squinted into the afternoon sun through the screen door. It took him a minute for his eyes to adjust enough to see the figure that stood at the far end of the yard by the tool shed. Its head was bent, and the dyed blond hair, darker at the roots, covered some of the face. It wore a dark pink halter and capris that clung to the sizeable thighs. Strappy pink sandals showed off badly painted toenails.
Jake ran a hand through his dark, spiky hair, exhaled slowly, and opened the screen door. His eyes felt dry and heavy in their dark sockets as they kept up a steady stare. As he stepped outside, he pulled a pack of Marl-boros and a lighter from his shirt pocket. He tapped one out and lit it, his eyes all the while on the dark roots of the head across the yard from him. The feeling had come back in his stomach, the sensation of falling and being unable to stop it. He sat down with a heavy thunk on the top porch step.
Keep it cool, brother. It’s not her. Can’t be her. Keep it cool and don’t do anything stupid and this whole thing will pass. Even bad highs go away eventually.
But Jake’s heart pounded in his ears.
The blond head picked up, and it took everything in Jake’s power not to cry out, not to bolt from that step and back into the house. He couldn’t do that; to do that would be to admit this was real or that he was crazy, bad-tripping on some kind of stress high or something. It would mean he’d lost control. If he stayed…it couldn’t be real if he could stare it down, right?
The figure, seeming to sense his recognition, turned its head in his direction. The shriveled mouth, painted over in waxy pink lipstick, worked up a small smile. The eyes glazed over behind cloudy cataracts. The left hand made a fist, and then relaxed it into a little wave.
“Hey there, Jake,” his Aunt Naomi said.
He took a long drag and let the smoke seep out of parted lips. His eyes narrowed. He felt the heartbeats in his neck, his wrists. His stomach swung out and away from him. The hand that held the cigarette shook.
“Wanna give your aunt a smoke, Jakey?”
Jake exhaled a stream of smoke but didn’t move. The ingrained response to get up and do as he was told was overridden by an underlying fear that once he reached that thing that looked so much like his aunt it would wrap one of those clawlike hands around his wrist and tear both the cigarette and his hand away from him. Stress-trip hallucination or not, he didn’t want it touching him.
“No, nothing like that,” an alien voice in his head responded to his thoughts. “I won’t touch you, Jakey. I won’t have to. I can hurt you right from here.” His aunt smiled at him, revealing rows of shark teeth.
Jake’s fingers tightened around the cigarette, pinching the end of the filter. He tried to stand, found his legs wouldn’t support the effort, and fell back onto the porch, scrabbling away from her until his back banged into the bottom of the screen door. Pain thumped across his spine.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I think you know.”
It wasn’t her. Couldn’t be. But Jake said, “You’re dead.”
The thing that looked like his aunt laughed; it was her smoke-crusted, throaty chuckle, just like he remembered.
“I’m ageless. I won’t die. Come on. You know, don’t you?”
Jake thought it might be right. He did know. Only the last time he’d seen it, in one of those awful newly sober dreams, it looked sort of like a man, with a man’s long black trench and black hat. And it didn’t have a face.
After a moment, it said, “You killed her, you know.”
Jake felt weak and more than a little sick. He pressed his back against the door, hoping, he supposed, to pass right through it into the safety of his house.
“I didn’t. It wasn’t my fault. There wasn’t anything I could—”
“You left her alone.” His aunt took several rapid steps closer, and Jake cried out, his feet pushing uselessly against the porch floor. He dropped the cigarette, his hands smacking down against the wood to hoist himself up. He managed to get up off the floor, and then fell to sharp pain in his wrist. He reached up, grabbed the door handle, and pulled himself to his feet.
The Aunt Naomi–thing stopped when it got to the base of the steps. Its cloudy eyes caught fire, two tiny points of flame that burned out quickly into dark pits of ash. It leaned in with impossible balance, the top half of its body floating parallel to the porch floor, its legs keeping the angle of the stairs while its feet remained firmly planted on the ground at the base of the steps. It made his aunt’s body look broken.
It coughed and spat a wad of something black and quivering just in front of his feet. “You should have killed yourself, you selfish brat. You should have died with her, instead of leaving her.”
Jake felt tears burning his eyes. His tongue lay heavy in his mouth, too heavy to move. He shook his head emphatically, groaning a little.
Inside, the cell phone rang, and Jake jumped. He chanced a quick glance over his shoulder. The phone rang again. He turned back to his aunt.
Whatever it had been was gone. Gone.
He’d stared it down. Not real. Not real. His lips formed the words, as if that would make them true, but no sound came out.
The phone rang again.
At his feet, the black phlegm dried and fell apart, no more than dirt, like the dirt around the shed. He kicked at it to get it away. His left wrist throbbed, and the palm of that hand burned. He turned it over and found the crushed remains of his cigarette there, gray-black ash around a tiny pit seared into his skin.
The phone rang a third time and kept ringing. He looked out over the yard.
He was alone. With his arm, he dabbed at his cheeks, which felt cold even in the late summer wind, and to his surprise, he wiped away tears.
It hadn’t been his fault. He hadn’t killed Chloe. He’d never made her do anything she didn’t want to do—never.
Except…
“I don’t know, Jake, I’ve never done heroin before. I’m scar
ed, Jake. I’m really scared.”
The new wave of tears felt hot on his skin.
He hadn’t killed her. But he couldn’t bring himself to mouth those words.
Jake pulled open the screen door and went inside, shaking his hand out as he crossed back through the kitchen to the den. The cell phone sat alone on the table, still ringing. No heroin baggie.
He noticed how pale his hand looked when he reached for the phone.
When he answered, dead air greeted him.
Dorothy “Dorrie” Weatherin knew every hateful inch of her own body. She knew how the inside curves of her thighs rubbed together when she walked and how they billowed out from the hems of her shorts when she sat. She felt the backs of her thighs curve around the edges of chairs, while the fronts of her thighs jiggled with every step she took. She saw how her skin folded on her back when she twisted to look at her view from behind in a mirror. Her hips made almost two curves between her waist and her legs, saddlebags that slid back to an ass like two large marshmallows. The skin under her arms jiggled when she waved. She saw double chins in every picture anyone took of her. Her large breasts drooped on the top of her gut. And her stomach—God, her stomach. When she wore low-rise jeans, she felt it hang over the belt line. When she wore waist-cut pants, it made a pregnant bulge beneath the fabric. When she stood naked, studying the ample curves, pressing into the skin to try to feel some muscle definition underneath, it made her want to cry. She imagined smoothing off the extra pounds as if they were clay and she a sculpture still in the making. She thought of the fat like cheese to be shaved off in layers with a grater. She thought of it like water balloons that she could prick a hole in, letting all the insecurity and extra baggage slowly leak out.
It wasn’t just the aesthetic aspect that got to her, either. Her gynecologist and general practitioner both got on her case about her weight as a health issue. She had high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She got winded when she walked up stairs. Sometimes her chest hurt.
So at twenty-six, Dorrie decided it was time for a change. No more “but she has a beautiful face.” No more being called “full-figured,” “zaftig,” “breeder-built,” even “big-boned.” No more well meaning (she supposed) advice that echoed condescension in her ears. She was tired of being in the “posey” category in women’s clothing magazines, indicating a plump, round form. She wanted to be a daffodil. Even a tulip. She wanted to be thin. Fit. Healthy. Strong.
Found You Page 3
