by Vivian Barz
Eric spent a good portion of the morning decluttering the place in head-scratching awe. What is it, he wondered, that compels the elderly to fill every square inch of space with knickknacks, as if each bit of junk they amass will add another year to their dwindling lives? By the time he finished clearing, he had six full boxes of useless crap to store out in the garage. He’d have to worry about how he was going to explain the cottage’s bareness to Doris later.
Upon returning from the garage, Eric flopped down on the sofa and put his feet up on the armrest. He knew lounging was dangerous because he could already sense depression creeping over him like a vampire’s shadow. In the past, he’d found that the best way to combat this feeling was to keep moving, as if misery were a barnacle that couldn’t latch on to him if he didn’t sit still for too long.
Regardless, he lacked the enthusiasm to move.
Soon Eric was confronted with a silence denser than any he’d ever experienced, quietness so profound that it practically made his ears ring. He’d been so preoccupied with all the tasks that had followed since discovering The Affair—finding a new job and moving cross-country, mainly—that he now understood that it was tedious distractions that had probably kept him from falling off the deep end completely. Now that he was as settled as he was going to be in his brand-new life, for the first time in weeks he was asking himself: What am I supposed to do now?
Eric’s network of associates back in Philly hadn’t been enormous, and it had been lessened significantly by the loss of his two so-called best friends, that charming wife-stealing
(asshole)
brother of his and his delightful cheating
(bitch)
ex-wife.
It wasn’t that Eric was antisocial—he liked socializing. But sometimes, especially during those uneasy weeks that had immediately followed The Affair, making small talk was draining when he already had invisible friends chattering at him from within his own head.
Eric had also turned inside himself a great deal during his final days in Philly, avoiding contact with friends and colleagues, and part of his reason for this was that he hadn’t wanted to face the awful chore of expounding on his separation from Maggie and his abrupt plans to relocate to California. Although those dearest to him were decent enough not to pry into his personal affairs when it was so patently clear that he did not wish to discuss them, Eric found it equally depressing that they should know to avoid the subject altogether. Somehow, it was almost worse that they said nothing.
The funny thing was that now that Eric seemed to be doing all right out West—all right in the sense that he’d finally managed to slog through an entire day without breaking into sobs, the voices in his skull quieting back down to their usual unobtrusive murmurs—he had nobody to talk to locally.
Eric shifted his position on the sofa so that he was at least sitting up, though this did nothing to improve his mood, which was swiftly plummeting.
Going into the move, he’d known, of course, that he didn’t know a soul in California. But now that he was there, the reality was truly hitting him: He had zero friends in Perrick. Not a one . He was not even acquainted with a single person in town—his landlady even lived in a different area, Sebastopol, wherever that was. This meant that when he finally did decide to go out, nobody in the neighborhood would recognize his face. No coffee shop barista, no gas station attendant, no checker at the local grocery store, no friendly clerk at the record shop to set aside a piece of vinyl that he might like.
If for some reason he died
(overdose, hanging, slit wrists, rooftop leap, oven nap, toaster bubble bath, gunshot to the temple)
his body could lie there for weeks before being discovered.
There had been countless times in Eric’s life when he’d suffered such severe loneliness that he’d felt nearly smothered by it, but he imagined now that his current state was a strong contender for the worst. I would give just about anything to go back to my life three years ago , he thought with some astonishment. Yes, I would happily sacrifice five years off my future for just one good year of the past.
He leaned back on the sofa and allowed his eyes to fall closed.
Eric’s mind, as it tended to do when he was idle, drifted to his failed marriage. On the bright side, at least they hadn’t gotten a dog. Matt, a colleague of his back in Philly, and his ex-wife, Diane, had shared an English bulldog named Daffodil during their matrimony. (No cheating there, only a loss of passion between two high school sweethearts who’d gotten married far too young and had grown to abhor every little thing about each other as the years marched on.) Eric remembered the time a red-eyed Matt had come barging into his office, having just gotten off the phone with Diane. The odd thing was that Eric hadn’t even known Matt that well, but hey, sometimes a man has things he needs to get off his chest, and the nearest ear will do.
Matt needed to vent. “I told her,” he’d said with a grim smile that was as sad as it was menacing, “you can take the house, you can take the car, you can take the boat; you can even take what pennies I have left in savings. But if you try to take Daffodil, I will kill you.” Matt had said this like he was joking, but Eric still wondered if there wasn’t some truth behind the statement.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Shortly after the conversation, Daffodil choked to death on bones from a rotisserie-chicken carcass she’d pilfered from a neighbor’s garbage. A couple of weeks after that, Matt’s car veered off the road and into a river with Matt strapped behind the wheel. The death was ruled accidental, but whenever Eric thought of his colleague’s ghastly smile that day in his office, he wondered if the car might have stayed on the road if Daffodil had stayed out of the trash.
“Okay, no more dwelling on the past,” Eric told the room, hands slapping down on his knees resolutely. “Gotta get out there sometime. Might as well be now.” He snapped up the grocery list he’d placed on the coffee table and headed toward the garage.
As Eric pulled his car out onto the street, he realized what a nice Saturday it was outside. It would be such a shame, he thought, to waste it fighting crowds. After a quick internet search on his phone, he decided that a day at the beach would be a better use of his time.
CHAPTER 5
Susan let out a long breath and made a face as she parked her cruiser.
Emerald Meadows Assisted Living was about as awful as anyone could envisage for a state-funded nursing home. The building’s exterior was a single-story slab of jail-like blandness, a silent reiteration to would-be escapees abandoned by loved ones that there was no use in putting up a fuss. They were going to stay put whether they liked it or not.
Susan gulped down the remainder of the coffee in her hefty metal tumbler, which had gone as chilly as the autumn air outside. It was far too early for such a depressing task. She crammed the last hunk of cranberry scone in her mouth, immediately choking on its sawdusty sweetness, and was regretful that she no longer had coffee left to wash it down. She picked each crumb of pastry off her shirt using a thumb and forefinger, then folded the scone’s wrapper into several neat little squares, crumpled it, and tossed it aside. She made a move to exit the vehicle but picked up her phone instead.
Stalling.
Two rings and then a jovial voice: “Medical Examiner Salvador Martinez.”
“Hi, Sal, it’s Susan Marlan over at Perrick PD.”
A chuckle. “If it isn’t my favorite ass kicker! How goes it?”
Susan grinned, laughed a little herself. Even on her toughest days, the man always found a way to lift her mood, like conversational Prozac. “It goes.”
“Heard about that meth head you chased off the roof.”
Susan frowned. “You did? Who told you about that?”
“Take a guess.”
“Marcus.”
“Ding! Give the girl a prize,” Salvador said. “Though I can’t believe he held out on me for as long as he did, the blabbermouth. Such a great story.”
“That’s Marcus. He
’s chatty, all right, but you gotta love him.”
“You do,” Sal agreed. “Marcus said that you were really pissed off, but not because you’d almost broken your ankle running after the guy.”
Susan knew what was coming next. The arrest had been the source of her teasing at the station for the past two weeks.
“He said that you cuffed him, all out of breath, and yelled, ‘Thanks, asshole! Now Delany’s is closed!’ Is that true?”
“Not entirely,” Susan corrected. “I think I called him shitbird .”
Sal laughed as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “You must really love those Delany’s cupcakes.”
“Guilty as charged. And I would’ve gotten a couple double-fudge ones that day, but then that idiot had to go and make me chase him.”
“I don’t know how you stay so thin, Suze. If I ate the way you do, I’d have a gut the size of Texas. Oh, wait—too late!”
Sal chortled, and Susan joined in. She thought the extra weight—Sal was pushing three hundred on a thin day—added to his jovialness, like Santa Claus. If Santa Claus dissected dead bodies for a living.
“Must be all those meth heads you’re chasing across roofs, huh?”
“Don’t say that too loud. Don’t want anyone trying to do me any favors,” she joked.
“My lips are sealed. Anyway, what can I do you for?”
“I’ve got a question about the body I found with the R&G guys last night.” Susan couldn’t bring herself to say child just yet.
“Overalls Boy,” Sal said. “That’s what we’ve been calling him over here. We still have no ID. I doubt we ever will, though. No prints or dental records to speak of.”
“Okay, Overalls Boy. That body was old, right—I know that’s pretty obvious—but I’m wondering if you might have some kind of date of when he was murdered?”
“Based on his clothes and decomp, our approximation is the 1960s.”
“Well, that’s weird.”
“Not really. Gerald would have been a teenager back then, but that’s still old enough to kidnap and murder a small child. Some pedophiles start young, as I’m sure you know, doing the work you do.”
“How sure are you about that date?”
If Sal was irritated by her questioning his work, he didn’t let on. “Well, I can’t give you an exact date to the day, but I’m confident saying that the boy died sometime during the sixties. Why, is there a specific crime you thought he was linked to from a different time?”
“It’s not that,” Susan said. “I was there when they found him, Sal. He couldn’t have been more than two or three feet deep in the ground, right next to the telephone pole. I checked: the pole was replaced in 2012 because of rot issues, so that means—”
“The body must have been moved within the last few years, or else they would’ve found it when the pole was put in.”
“Exactly. The body that you’re telling me is decades old.” Susan paused. “Here’s another thing: the R&G guys had disturbed the surrounding soil before they found the body, so they couldn’t be positive, but a couple of them swore that the dirt near the grave had recently been excavated, and not by the auto accident that had occurred.”
Sal went quiet while he thought. “Weird. Though that would make sense, given the state of the body.”
“Meaning?”
“The decomp is bad, but not as bad as what you’d expect for a body so old. It’s very plausible that he’d been kept someplace else and then moved. Actually, that theory would make the most sense.”
“Okay, so if what the R&G guys said is true, isn’t it strange that Gerald would dig up the body of a victim and then rebury it on the edge of the property immediately after getting out of prison for an unrelated crime? He must have realized that it would increase his chances of getting caught.”
“Maybe he wants to get caught,” Sal said. “Maybe it’s a cry for help? You know, some ‘I can’t stop myself, and I don’t think I ever will’ kind of thing.”
“I don’t think Gerald’s that noble,” Susan said dryly. “Also, if he wants to get caught so badly, why has he vanished?”
“Hmm, good point. But I think we can assume the guy isn’t playing with a full deck. He’s a psycho, but not all psychos are mad geniuses like Ted Bundy.”
Susan snorted. “You got that right.”
“Maybe he’s just a plain old idiot,” Sal said. “I’ve been reading a lot of true-crime books lately—you’d think I’d get enough doom and gloom here at the morgue, but apparently not—and it’s amazing how stupid some of these guys are. How careless. They’ll get away with murder for years but then make some dumb mistake that leads to their undoing. Like, they’ll park their car in a red zone with a dead body in the trunk, and then the police’ll tow it. Or they’ll flood half the neighborhood trying to dig a homemade swimming pool in their backyard, and then a plumber sent by the county will find a bunch of skeletons on the property.”
“I think I heard about the swimming pool guy. Nashville, right?”
“Close. Memphis,” Sal said. “I just read a story last night about a guy named Rick Mott who murdered his mother and then gave his girlfriend his mother’s necklace the very next day . It was a cheap gold thing with a huge leaf pendant everyone in town knew that the mother wore. There was even a tiny speck of blood found in the clasp from where Rick bashed his mother’s head in. I mean, what was he thinking?”
“That is pretty stupid,” Susan agreed. She’d certainly seen her fair share of moron criminals on the job. Shoplifters who’d attempted to carry electronics out of the store under their sweatshirts, bellies unnaturally squared. A meth manufacturer who’d burned off half his face while smoking a cigarette next to highly explosive chemicals. Then there was the one genius who’d committed a hit-and-run. At a dairy. Drunk as a skunk, he’d driven off the road and through the dairy’s gate, where he proceeded to sideswipe a cow. When he fled the scene, he neglected to notice one very critical detail, which was that the license plate had been ripped from his car when he’d rammed the gate. It had been left behind next to tire tracks and one very pissed-off cow.
“I heard something interesting from one of the techs here. He’s a little longer in the tooth than the rest of us, so he knows a lot of town secrets.”
“Oh yeah?” Susan said. “Juicy gossip?”
She didn’t make a habit of taking town gossip at face value, particularly since she’d been the target of outrageous speculation herself. Apparently, she was a lesbian. In a place as small as Perrick, unmarried women past the age of thirty were often thought to be. With no current romantic life to speak of but still one year shy of thirty, she didn’t quite fit the bill, but exceptions were made. It didn’t help matters that she was a cop. On the flip side, she’d also heard that she’d once had an illicit affair with a married man. That one happened to be true. It had occurred many years ago, when Susan was still young and naive enough to consume the lies her slick city beau had fed her—that soon he’d end his unhappy marriage and leave his gold-digging wife, who’d never really loved him anyway (they were leading separate lives, he’d said, and were practically already divorced); he just needed a little more time to sort out finances, a little more time. Eventually, Susan wised up, got tired of waiting, and saw through the BS. It was a smart move on her part: it was almost eight years later, and Paul was still married to the same woman.
Sal said, “Word on the street is that Gerald’s dad, Wayne, was, you know, creepy toward kids.”
Susan thought out loud: “I wonder if any police reports were ever filed.”
“Small town in the sixties? I wouldn’t bet money on it.”
“Do you think it’s possible that Wayne helped Gerald murder Overalls Boy? Here’s a better question: Do you think it was Wayne who got Gerald started ?”
“I honestly don’t know. We can’t find any forensic evidence to substantiate or disprove the theory—you aren’t the first to bring this up, believe me. But it would make s
ense, though, wouldn’t it, given how Gerald turned out?”
Yes , Susan agreed with a shudder, it would.
She picked up her file on Gerald Nichol and studied his photo. He looked like the classic caricature of a pedophile: thick comb-over haircut, Coke-bottle glasses, the squinty eyes of a weasel. She wondered if Wayne looked the same, if dashing predator features ran in the family.
The inside of Emerald Meadows was no better than the outside, dank and reeking of industrial cleaning solvent and peed-in diapers. Bluish fluorescent lighting underscored barren spaces, magnifying cracks on walls and skin, sickly flaws emerging where none had existed previously. Susan felt as if she’d aged fifty years since she’d stepped into the lobby.
She flashed her badge at the bored-looking teenager manning the check-in. The girl blinked at Susan’s credentials, slack jawed and disinterested, as if police visits were a regular thing at the nursing home—though, Susan thought, in a place like this, maybe they were.
The girl picked up a yellowed desk phone and punched in a series of numbers, her gaze glued to the muted television overhead. Susan craned over the divider to see what was so interesting, frowning as she saw that it was an infomercial for vinyl siding that played through a wobbly static haze. Susan waited as the girl murmured a quick conversation into the phone and then hung up.
“Gracie will take you back.” The girl took her eyes off the television long enough to roll them at Susan. “I mean Nurse Hoguin ,” she corrected with a snort, as if using formal job titles was akin to putting on airs. “You can have a seat, if you want.”
Susan eyed the worn plaid sofa behind her, picturing the years of incontinence and God knew what else that had been absorbed within the lumpy cushions. “I’ll wait over here,” she said, moving toward the edge of a long hallway.
