Skin and Blond

by V. J. Chambers

  Neither of them were in the dining room either, but the table was set. There were only two plates, one for each of them. They’d known I wasn’t coming home for dinner.

  They’d known about the concert, then. Why hadn’t they come?

  I yelled for them again. Screamed for my mother and father. For the first time, I felt fear instead of annoyance and confusion at their absence. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before that something bad had happened to them. Maybe it was because I was a teenager, and I felt so invincible. Maybe it was because the only violence I knew of was either far away in news stories or cartoonish in movies and television shows. But right then, terror gripped me.

  I went into the den, and that was where I found them.

  Our den was a room that we used as our actual family room. The living room was a formal, decorated room that we never entered except when we had guests or on occasions like Christmas morning. My mother liked to keep the living room pristine and untouched, like a home featured on HGTV or something. By contrast, the den was sloppy and comfortable. The saggy couch didn’t match the two recliners, and the television set was in here. This was where my family relaxed together.

  And this was where I found my parents’ bodies. They were both face down in the carpet, neither of them moving. Their throats had been slit, and there was blood everywhere. Their hands and feet were bound with blood-stained duct tape.

  What struck me at the time was the color of the blood. How dark it was in the places where it pooled under their bodies, almost black in its concentration. I’d never seen so much blood before.

  I remember that it didn’t seem real. And that’s something that I’ve noticed throughout my life. Real violent death always seems fake somehow, as if it’s a bad special effect.

  It wasn’t the way it looked that convinced me, though. It was the smell.

  The road kill smell—coppery and meaty. The smell of death.

  I couldn’t stay in the room with them like that. They weren’t my parents anymore, they were dead shells. That bothered me more than anything—more than the bad smell. The fact that they could… stop like that. That someone could cut them and bleed them out, and my parents would just be… gone. How could a thing like that happen? How could someone be moving around, walking, and talking and then… just… not? Surely that wasn’t possible. Surely that was utterly ridiculous.

  Dead.

  I started screaming. I screamed and screamed, and I ran out of the house. I stood on my lawn and screamed.

  But my parents had probably screamed when they died. And either no one had heard, or those who had turned to their affairs, not wanting to get involved.

  So, eventually, I had to pull myself together, and I had to go back inside that house and go to the phone and call 911.

  Which I did.

  I was a suspect for a while. Not long, because I clearly had an alibi. I’d been at the show choir concert, after all. On stage in front of everyone.

  But I became intrigued by the process by which they cleared me when I was called in for questioning. Before, I’d never given much thought to the idea of law enforcement as a career. Before the death of my parents, I’d been fairly set on being a veterinarian, in fact, even though my family didn’t have any pets. I just thought it sounded cooler than being a human doctor, and I guess I wanted to save animal lives or something.

  Not that I’m a bleeding heart for animals or anything. Because, you know, I’m not.

  Anyway, after the death of my parents, I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a homicide detective. It was all I could think about, and it became my mission in life to achieve that.

  My parents were dead, you see. There was nothing that could be done about that. They were empty and broken and over. But the police could work on finding their killers. That was something to do. A response to death, instead of simply sitting around and trying to accept something that didn’t make any sense.

  They caught the men who did it. They’d been sloppy. They were strung out on drugs, and they broke into my house to try to get money. They were so strung out that they didn’t realize anyone was home until it was too late. They killed my parents because my parents had seen their faces.

  They’d managed to steal only three hundred dollars.

  It was still senseless after I knew why my parents had died. But at least there was something that could be done in response. The men were arrested. They went to trial. And they were both sentenced to life in prison.

  That was what I wanted to do with my life. Respond to senseless death. It made me feel better, as if there was some order to the universe, as if everything wasn’t simply black and formless chaotic pain. It was my salvation.

  And it was the only thing that I had left.

  I didn’t get to do it very often, not since I’d had to begin working as a private investigator. But when a murder case came my way, it was proof that I still had something to contribute to the human race.

  That was what was bothering me. The Madison Webb case. I didn’t want to give it up.

  I slugged down some more water. Well, what the hell? I didn’t have another case right now. There wasn’t any reason not to keep looking into it, was there?

  At once, I felt better, like a heavy load had been lifted from my chest.

  Well, sort of better. I was still dead drunk, after all, and the room was still spinning.

  Ugh.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I woke up on the couch around eight o’clock, my head pounding and my mouth tasting like rotten sauerkraut. I didn’t remember going to sleep. The gallon jug of water was next to me, so I downed the rest of it. I seriously needed water. I felt as if I’d been run over by a truck.

  But I had something to do, so that motivated me a little bit. It was a spark that gave me a bit of hope. A reason to live or something. I don’t know. Anyway, I got in the shower, and I brushed my teeth, and I felt almost human after that, but still in the grips of the worst hangover that I’d had in years, worse even than the one after the blackout with Colin Pugliano.

  Ugh.

  I grabbed my typical breakfast and coffee from The Sunshine Skillet. I took it to go, and I headed in to the office.

  I didn’t stay there, though. I went back to my file cabinet, got the file that Pike had given me, and then I took to the interstate.

  It didn’t take too long to get up to Jinn Springs. Once I had exited, I started looking at street signs, trying to locate the other victim’s house. She lived only three blocks from the interstate, in a small house that sat in between two sets of townhouses. The house looked squat and lonely on its tiny yard.

  I parked my car in the driveway like I knew what I was doing. Official-like, I marched up to the front door and began briskly looking about for the spare key.

  I found it in two seconds. It was underneath the mat.

  Really, people needed to stop doing that. If a person was going to hide her key under the mat, she might as well leave the door unlocked, in my opinion.

  And frankly, a locked door wasn’t much of a deterrent for any thief worth his salt. Locking the door might keep out some teenage hoodlums, but it wouldn’t do much against any kind of experienced criminal.

  I didn’t lock my own doors.

  But I lived in Keene, and nothing bad ever happened in Keene.

  I unlocked the door and let myself into the house.

  The door opened onto one room that contained both the living room and the kitchen. Together, they took up the whole of the bottom floor, except for a small bathroom in one corner. There was a set of steps leading up to a loft bedroom. This house was really not much more than a one-bedroom apartment, actually.

  The first floor looked lived-in but not overly messy. There were unwashed dishes in the sink. Not many, just a skillet and a plate. A throw blanket was crumpled at the edge of the couch and the couch pillows were all on the floor.

  I figured that the girl who’d lived here… I consulted the file…
Sarah Aaron was her name. I figured that she’d probably done the stuff with the blanket and the pillows.

  Before I climbed up to the loft, I put on a pair of rubber gloves. I didn’t want to disturb any of the evidence in the scene if the police up here eventually did decide that this was a murder. Clutching the rail with my gloved hand, I ascended the steps.

  The loft wasn’t much of a bedroom. It had low ceilings and it barely took up half of the span of the second floor. But Sarah did have a dresser up here and a closet. It was open, and her clothes didn’t seem disturbed.

  Her mattress sat on the floor, and it had been stripped, just like Madison’s had been.

  Noticeably absent, however, was any sign of a struggle.

  Things had been knocked over in Madison’s bedroom. This room didn’t really have anything like that, but then it didn’t contain much furniture anyway. There was possibly nothing to knock over.

  I turned around in a circle, surveying the room. Sarah had a little cork board over her bed. There were some pictures on it. Two young women with their arms around each other, grinning at the camera. A picture of a clean-cut guy holding up a beer in salute. The rest of the cork board was covered with little notes. Pick up dry cleaning by tomorrow. Get car inspected. Let out dog for Angela on Friday and Saturday.

  I started to take a step towards the wall to read the others more clearly, but I stopped, because there was something in my path.

  I knelt down and picked up Sarah’s cell phone.

  Huh. So Sarah hadn’t taken her cell phone either, had she?

  I turned it on and unlocked it.

  I couldn’t take Sarah’s phone with me. I’d taken Madison’s because I had permission from her brother. In this case, however, I wasn’t working for Sarah’s family, so I couldn’t just take things out of the house. In fact, I should be careful to put the phone back right where I found it.

  So, as quickly as I could, I flipped through Sarah’s text messages.

  Nothing jumped out at me. She was making plans to go out with friends or chatting casually.

  I looked in her missed calls instead.

  And I recognized one number straight away. That was a number for the Renmawr Women’s Center.

  I scrolled through her recent calls and called her voicemail. I might not get lucky, because she might have deleted it, but…

  Yes.

  “Hello. This is a reminder for. Sarah Aaron. You have an appointment on. Monday at three o’clock. To confirm this appointment, please press one. To cancel this appointment, press two. To be connected to our offices, press pound.”

  Shit. They were both having appointments at the same clinic? How much did I want to bet that they were both abortions?

  * * *

  I cradled the phone between my neck and shoulder and held up a finger at Brigit, who’d just got into the office.

  “Hi there, this is Sarah Aaron. I missed an appointment, and I need to reschedule,” I said into the phone.

  “Oh, Miss Aaron, thank goodness you called,” said the person on the other end of the phone. “People are looking for you. We were alerted by the Jinn Springs police department to make sure that we got you in touch with them. Where are you? Are you okay?”

  Damn it. Now, I’d ruined everything. The police would think that Sarah was alive, when she wasn’t, and it would give a false idea that she was alive when she probably wasn’t.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. Actually my name is Detective Ivy Stern, and I’m trying to get some information about Sarah’s case. I thought it would be easier pretending to be her.” It was illegal to impersonate a police officer, so I had to ride a fine line here. I couldn’t come out and say that I worked for the police, but if I sort of implied it, that was okay.

  “Oh. Well, that’s odd. Because we just spoke to someone from the Jinn Springs—”

  “I’m not with the Jinn Springs department.”

  “I’m sorry, you said you were a detective?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you with the police department in Renmawr?”

  “Not in Renmawr.”

  “So, which police department then?”

  Damn it. “I’m actually looking into the matter privately.”

  “Oh, well then, I’m sorry. I can’t reveal information about a patient unless it’s to law enforcement.”

  “Of course you can’t,” I muttered. “Thanks anyway.” I hung up the phone.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. So, I was going to have to find another way to get information on Sarah Aaron. This was tricky. I didn’t even have the benefit of having a client close to her who’d hired me. I could go and talk to the family, I supposed, but what would they think of me? It would be odd to be investigating a case like this out of the blue. I could explain that I was investigating a connected case, but that wasn’t strictly true. At any rate, I kind of doubted her family was going to know about her scheduled abortion.

  Brigit was confused. “What are you doing? Did we get a new case?”

  “No,” I said. “We didn’t. But since we don’t really have anything else to do, I thought we might as well keep digging into this Madison Webb thing.”

  “Really?” Brigit grinned. “Awesome.”

  I was glad she was on board. I passed her the file that Pike had given me. “So, I got this from Lieutenant Pike yesterday when I went to try to turn him onto investigating Andrew. Another girl disappeared.”

  Brigit sat down across from my desk. “Wait, so you don’t think it was Andrew anymore?”

  “Well, there’s no evidence tying him to the murder,” I said. “All we’ve got is a hunch that he’s a bad guy. So, I thought I should just check out this other girl anyway, right? I went by her house this morning—”

  “You broke in?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I went by her house, and I found out that besides the connection of the missing bedding, both Sarah and Madison left behind their cell phones.”

  “So, it doesn’t look like this girl left on her own either.”

  “Nope,” I said. “And then I looked through her cell phone, and I found out that she had an appointment with the same clinic that Madison did.”

  “Whoa,” said Brigit. “So, how does that connect?”

  “No idea,” I said. “But maybe it’s some crazy right-wing fanatic or something? Some guy who thinks that girls who have abortions should be killed?”

  “Maybe he’s not killing them,” said Brigit. “They were both taken before their appointments, right? Maybe he’s kidnapping them and forcing them to have the babies.”

  I considered. As ideas went, it wasn’t impossible.

  “We have to make sure that Sarah was having an abortion too,” I said. “But the clinic won’t release information to me.”

  “What are we going to do, then?”

  I smiled. “Well… it’s funny that you’d bring up the idea of breaking in—”

  “No,” said Brigit, shaking her head. “You can’t keep doing that.”

  “Oh, come on, Brigit,” I said. “Do you want to be a detective or not?”

  “What? You want me to do it? I don’t know how to break in someplace, especially not an abortion clinic.”

  “I want you to help,” I said. “Do you think you can do that?”

  She chewed on her lip. “Well… what would I have to do?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I waited outside an exit door to the clinic, doing my best to look casual, like I belonged there. A place like this clinic had a lot of security, and I figured it wasn’t worth trying to breach that to get inside. No, it was easier to sneak inside.

  To do that, I needed Brigit’s help. I had her pose as a walk-in. Places like this almost always had a sliding scale payment form, and I knew she could get in for free if she pleaded low income. Right then, as long as everything was going according to plan, Brigit was filling out new patient information—which I’d told her to lie about. Every single thing
, from her name to her address to her allergies. Once she was finished, she’d be taken back to see a doctor. But in a clinic like this, they always took a urine sample, so they’d send Brigit to the bathroom.

  That was her cue to sneak over to this exit and let me in.

  It could be any second that she came to the door. I just had to wait.

  I peered out into the parking lot, which I could sort of see from my vantage point here at the exit. There was a big row of overgrown bushes in the way, and I could only see through the haphazard gaps in the greenery.

  We hadn’t had any trouble getting in, although there were a few protesters outside the clinic. They seemed mostly bored, holding up their signs that said things like, Abortion stops a beating heart, and It’s a child, not a choice. Maybe it was because it was early evening, near the end of the business day. Perhaps if we’d gotten to the clinic earlier, then they would have been more energetic.

  I totally understood the position of protesters, actually. I had a pretty strong stance against murder myself, and if I truly believed that abortion was murder, I’d probably be on the front lines, too, trying to stop it, or at least trying to punish the people who were doing it.

  I didn’t think so, though. I hadn’t since a few months after my parents died. It wasn’t a hot topic of conversation in my house, but I knew that my parents both found the idea of abortion distasteful. They weren’t the kind who’d go picket a clinic, but they didn’t think it was a great idea. I remember my mother saying that there was so much access to free birth control, she didn’t understand how people got themselves into that situation in the first place.

  So, if you’d asked me back then, I probably would have made some kind of noncommittal answer about abortion—that I didn’t see why it was necessary with all the birth control out there or something. If someone had challenged me on it, really pushed me on the controversial topics like whether or not it was acceptable if the mother’s life was in danger or in the case of rape, I would have folded like a deck of cards, because I really just didn’t think about those kinds of things.