by David Bell
“Something wrong with her?” he asked.
My hands were shaking. I felt off-balance. Above my head, the cloying Muzak continued to play, indifferent to my little drama with the girl who looked so much like Marissa.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t even know who she was.”
Chapter Two
I thought about Marissa a lot that evening.
It’s safe to say I was feeling sorry for myself. Indulging in nostalgia and self-pity at the same time.
I drank beer on the couch in my apartment while a basketball game I didn’t care about played on the TV. A pile of work waited in my briefcase, but I ignored it. I ate some cheese and crackers but gave up on my plan to cook the spaghetti I had bought at the store. My only company was Riley, my aged mutt, whom I had rescued from the local Humane Society shortly after my divorce. By the Humane Society’s estimates, Riley was at least twelve, maybe older. He didn’t like to do much. As I sat on the couch brooding, he sat at my feet, hoping for cracker crumbs.
Marissa and I had met during our freshman year at Eastland. We fell in love right away. She got me like no one ever had. And no one has since. I didn’t even have to say anything to her, and she understood me. How many people meet someone like that in their lives? I did. And then it was all taken away in a house fire when we were juniors in college.
That was why seeing the girl in the grocery store shook me to the core. I’d managed to go on with my life. I’d managed to tell myself I’d gotten over Marissa and her loss.
But I hadn’t.
That was why I sat on my couch drinking beer that night. I never drank very much, never more than one in a day, if that. But when I came home from the grocery store, I threw back three and then four and opened a fifth, wondering who that girl was. And why she had acted so spooked when I spoke to her.
* * *
I fell asleep on the couch, the TV still playing, the open but unfinished fifth beer on the coffee table before me. My neck felt like hell from sleeping at an odd angle, and a trail of drool ran down my chin.
Something pounded against my apartment door.
Someone was there, beating on the door. Each heavy knock caused a miniature earthquake in my skull. I winced. A hangover at my age. Pathetic. I vowed to never have more than one beer again. I vowed to stop thinking about Marissa.
I’d do anything if the person outside my apartment would stop hammering on the door. But they didn’t.
I looked at the clock. Six fifty-three a.m.
I normally woke up around eight. Made it to the office by nine. I felt like shit. I needed a shower. Coffee. Food. I stood up, feeling a little wobbly. I looked down at Riley. He hadn’t barked despite the pounding on the door. He never barked.
“Nothing?” I said to him. “Not even a growl?”
His tail thumped against the floor. He yawned.
“One of these days, I’m really going to need your help,” I said. “I hope you’re ready.”
Riley walked off toward the kitchen, which meant he was hungry.
I still wore the pants and collared shirt from the previous day’s work at the Housing Authority. My tie and my shoes were off, and I needed to pee. But whoever was outside the door really wanted to talk to me. They pounded again, shaking my brain.
“Stop,” I said. “Jesus.”
I thought about calling the apartment complex’s security guard and asking him to come by to see who was making the racket. It wasn’t the knock of a friend or someone selling something. But my desire to make them stop overwhelmed any fears I had about who was out there. I stumbled to the door and looked through the peephole.
It took a moment for the scene outside to make sense to me, but when it did, my heart started racing.
I understood why the knock was so heavy.
Through the peephole I saw two uniformed police officers and a detective I already knew.
“Mr. Hansen?” the detective said. “Nick Hansen? We know you’re in there. Open up.”
“Shit,” I said.
A rough morning just became rougher.
* * *
The morning sun nearly killed me.
It poured in when I opened the door, its rays penetrating my eyeballs like knitting needles. I took a step back, feeling like a man under siege.
“Can we come in?” the detective said.
I didn’t have to answer. He was already stepping across the threshold with the two uniformed officers right behind him.
“You can do anything if it means you’ll stop knocking,” I said.
Detective Reece stood about five nine, a few inches shorter than me, but he was powerfully and compactly built. I suspected he had wrestled in high school. Or maybe played nose tackle at a small college. He looked like that kind of guy. He didn’t offer to shake my hand, but I’d shaken it before, the last time he and I had encountered each other. He had nearly crushed my fingers.
Reece saw the beer cans on the coffee table, and his eyebrows went up. He was probably a few years younger than me, and his hair was thinning. He wore it cropped close to his head, and his suit coat looked too small for him.
“It’s recycling day,” I said.
“Think green, right?”
“Exactly,” I said.
He pointed at Riley. “Does the dog bite?”
“Only his food,” I said, trying to sound light.
But Reece wasn’t smiling. He looked around the room, taking it all in. The TV still played with the sound down. It showed highlights of a hockey game. There were dirty dishes in the sink, discarded gym clothes on the floor. I needed to pick up, and I would have, if only I’d known the police were going to drop by.
“Have you seen your ex-wife lately?” Reece asked.
“Not in six weeks,” I said. “Not since . . . that night we met.”
“The night of the late unpleasantness,” Reece said.
“I wasn’t stalking her.”
“She said you were.”
“I was trying to see Andrew,” I said. “I told you that then.”
“Her son from a previous relationship,” Reece said. He stopped looking around and turned to face me. The two uniformed officers stayed near the front door. They acted like they didn’t hear anything we said. “Not your son.”
“Gina and I were married five years. I got to know Andrew well. We became close, and I just want to see him from time to time. It’s not unusual. I just wanted to see the kid.”
“But she didn’t want you there, and you showed up anyway.”
“Is that what this is about?” I asked. “Did Gina decide to press charges? That was six weeks ago. I thought it was over.”
Reece gestured toward my cluttered dining room table. “Why don’t we sit down and talk, Mr. Hansen?” He waited for me to move. “Please?”
He acted like it was his apartment, and I was the guest. He’d reversed everything and taken over my turf. I couldn’t say anything to stop him, so I sat down. Reece took the seat across from me, and he reached out with his hand and brushed some old crumbs off the table and onto the floor. Then he took out his phone and started scrolling through it. I waited. For all I knew, he was checking his Twitter feed or looking up movie times.
“Can I ask—”
“Where were you last night, Mr. Hansen?” Reece asked.
I looked over at the beer cans on the coffee table, the deep indentation in the couch where I’d slept without a pillow or a blanket.
“I was here,” I said.
“All night?”
“All night.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes. I usually am these days. Riley was here.”
“What time did you get home from work?” Reece asked.
“About six fifteen.”
Reece nodded. He looked down at his phon
e, tapped it a few times, and then looked back up at me. “I’m going to show you a photograph of someone. I want you to tell me if you know this person, and if you do know them, I want you to tell me where you know them from.”
“Okay.”
He turned the phone around so that I could see the photo. I should have guessed who it was going to be before he even handed it to me.
It was a photo of the girl from the grocery store.
Chapter Three
It looked like a driver’s license photo. Not many people look good in those, but the girl from the store did. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and she wore a friendly smile, a far cry from the look of fear she flashed at me when I had spoken to her the previous evening.
“Do you know her?” Reece asked.
I cleared my throat. A little of the emotion from the grocery store welled up in me again.
“I think I know what this is about,” I said.
“You do?”
“Yes,” I said. “After what happened with Gina, and then the way this girl acted in the grocery store when I spoke to her, you’re over here thinking I’m some kind of serious creep. Someone who is stalking strangers now and not just my ex-wife.”
“What happened in the grocery store?” Reece asked.
“If you just let me apologize to her, I will,” I said. “I’ll call her or write a note—”
“The grocery store. What happened?”
I took a deep breath. I told him I saw the girl in the store and she reminded me very much of someone I once knew. When I told Detective Reece that she reminded me of my college girlfriend, his eyebrows rose again, even higher than when he’d seen the beer cans. I said I had just wanted to talk to the girl, to ask if she might be related to Marissa’s family, but when I had approached her she took off, dropping her groceries on the floor at my feet.
Reece took this all in, and when I was finished, he asked, “Did she say anything to you?”
“She said, ‘What is it?’”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. She acted like I was Attila the Hun. She ran off. Maybe she’s had a bad experience with a man before and is skittish out in public. I don’t know.”
“Who did you think this girl was related to? Your ex-girlfriend?”
“My girlfriend from college. I guess technically she was my ex-girlfriend. She broke up with me right before . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I held the image of the girl in my mind, and I could see Marissa’s face there as well, the two of them as vivid as anything. A piercing stab of nostalgia traversed my chest, hitting every major organ and even some minor ones. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Before what?” Reece asked.
“Before she died,” I said. “She died in a house fire one night when we were twenty. Right here near Eastland’s campus. She and her three roommates were killed. But right before the fire, a couple of days before, I guess, she broke up with me.”
“She broke your heart,” Reece said. It wasn’t a question. He must have read something on my face or in my voice. I knew I couldn’t hide my feelings for Marissa, then or any other time.
“She did,” I said. “Completely.”
“And what was her family’s name?” Reece asked. “The ex-girlfriend, or girlfriend. Whoever she was. What was her family’s name, and where did they live?”
“Her name was Marissa Minor. Her family lived in Hanford, Ohio. It’s about an hour from here.”
“I know it.” Reece wrote something down in a little notebook he had pulled from his jacket pocket. His fingers were stubby, the nails bitten. “And you thought maybe this girl in the grocery store was related to your ex-girlfriend, and so you wanted to talk to her. Instead, you spooked her.”
“It all sounds far-fetched and ridiculous, I know. At least, you’re making it sound that way.”
“I’m not making it sound any way. It sounds the way it sounds.”
“Look, Detective, I have to get to work. I had a shitty, embarrassing night last night. And I’m sorry if I bothered that girl in the store. If you just give me her name or something, I’ll apologize. I know you’ve checked my record. You did six weeks ago. And you know I’ve never been arrested and never hurt anybody. I’d just like to make this go away, if I can.”
“And you think an apology will make it go away?” Reece asked.
“It seems like the gentlemanly thing to do,” I said. “I apologized to Gina when she called you.”
Reece put away his notebook. He looked around the apartment again, his eyes passing over the clutter, the beer cans, even the impassive officers who still stood by the door. One of their radios crackled, but the officer ignored it. He pressed a button, silencing the sound.
“You can’t apologize to this girl,” Reece said. “This girl from the grocery store.”
“What do you want me to do, then?” I asked. “You can’t charge me with anything. It’s not a crime to talk to someone in a store.”
“You can’t apologize to her because she’s dead. She was found dead in a motel out on Highway Six sometime last night.”
I studied Reece’s face after he had delivered those words. I looked for some sign that he was joking, that he was trying to scare me by saying something so patently ridiculous and absurd. But he wasn’t joking. The news hit me like a blast of cold air. My body tensed, locked up. I felt a pain at the base of my skull and realized I was clenching my teeth as tight as I could.
That girl, that beautiful young girl, couldn’t just be gone, the sudden extinguishing of a light.
“What happened to her?” I asked. The question sounded dumb to my own ears, insufficient to the gravity of the situation. But there was nothing else I wanted to know. What happened?
Reece continued to study me, as though I were a specimen in his lab. He reached up and rubbed his chin, his thumb and forefinger easing over the freshly shaved skin. He seemed to have decided something.
“She was murdered,” he said. “Most likely strangled, although we’ll wait to hear from the medical examiner’s office for the official word.”
Then I felt cold inside, as though the bitter wind that had first buffeted me had been internalized. I shivered, my torso shaking involuntarily.
“Murdered?” I said, sounding dumb again.
Reece nodded. “Are you sure you don’t know this girl? I mean, outside of chatting her up in the grocery store.”
“I don’t know her,” I said. “I never saw her before yesterday. Never.” But then some things started to come together in my mind. I was telling the truth—I had never seen the girl before. And when I had spoken to her, I hadn’t said my name or identified myself in any way. So if I didn’t know who she was, how had the police ended up at my apartment—
“You didn’t know her,” Reece said. “But she seemed to know you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why are you here?”
“This young woman you talked to in the grocery store, we examined her body when we found her. In her pocket she had a slip of paper with your name and address written on it.”
