Psychosis_When a Dream Turns Deadly

by Roger Bray

  “You weren’t kidding, were you?”

  She shrugged, “Not at all, and this is only the trial documents and the first appeal, the other appeals are copies, but I have them if you need to look at them.”

  “Last night you said that the last appeal was probably Alex’s last chance. What makes you think that?”

  “That’s what his lawyer said; there’s nothing left to appeal.”

  “Were the appeals against the evidence?”

  “No, from what I understand, the procedure of the trial. From what Alex’s legal team have said everything that could be appealed about has been appealed and there’s nothing left now.”

  “Unless we can find some new evidence.”

  Alice nodded, “That’s what I think.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Alice.”

  She smiled up at him, “That’s all I can ask.”

  He nodded, “OK, why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me about your brother and … what was his wife’s name again?”

  “Hazel, her name was Hazel.”

  “OK, so why don’t you tell me about Alex and Hazel, from the beginning.”

  “There isn’t too much to the story to be honest. They met at school, they graduated together. They both went to college and gained a degree, Alex in computer science, like me, and Hazel in media and public relations. They met up again after college when they both came back to Eugene and hit it off from then.”

  “Did they work together, or did they keep their work lives separate?”

  “Yes and no. Once they were a couple, once things were definitely serious between them, Hazel did some work for us while Alex and I were building up our business together, which at the beginning was continuing the web designs and site management. We’d started this when we were still at school, with local businesses but we were doing some good work and it was going along well. I started college as Alex came back from college, so we decided to get the whole thing on a more businesslike footing and sort of count that as the real start to where we were going.”

  “Which was where? Where did you see the business going?”

  “Web design and site management, that was where we thought the real future was. Then smart phones came along, and we dabbled in some apps and that was successful enough and put us both through college. We could see where the apps were going and continued with that while keeping the web side growing as well.”

  “And that’s what you did?”

  “Absolutely, it grew quite quickly, quicker than we thought it would. By the time I came back from college, we were on a solid footing.”

  “Hazel helped in this, the business side?”

  Alice nodded, smiling.

  “Hazel was great, she was building her own business as well, but she kept us on track; she knew how to contact the media and get our app ideas and evaluation copies put out to the right people, she was great with that side of things. When we were putting in tenders for consultancy and web design jobs, she would put together the documents we needed and worked on the displays for the seminars and interviews with the companies. She had a real knack of knowing what to do and when to do it. As the business grew she took on more of the day-to-day work but also advertising and liaison with clients. She was extremely happy and easy to get on with, you know?”

  “Attractive?” Steve asked.

  Alice nodded and reaching into a box sitting on a chair next to her, she removed a glossy, eight by four photograph, and handed it to him.

  Steve looked admiringly at the picture and refrained from whistling, an attractive and slim woman indeed. Golden-brown eyes, which matched her name completely and long hair, a shade darker was lustrous, shiny, straight and perfectly parted in the center and fell down either side, framing her light olive-skinned face. Blemish free and perfectly proportioned, Hazel Reed was certainly attractive. Minimally made up, her natural beauty shone out of the picture and Steve could not help but wonder how a geek could marry a girl like this, until Alice handed him a second photograph.

  A geek he might have been, but Alex didn’t look at all like one. As Alice had described him, he looked athletic and broad. If Steve had been asked to allocate him into a military background, he would have picked a branch of the Special Forces such was the strength that Alex showed. He wasn’t overly muscled, but he nevertheless had the wiry look of a predator that was about to strike but, he had an open and honest face, and with his deep green eyes, that matched Alice’s, and his wide smile, he looked trustworthy and Steve recognized in him someone that he could easily be friends with.

  He placed the two photographs next to each other and could see the homecoming king and queen right there. The quintessentially perfect couple destined to be together as the king and queen of the high school, college, and local sports club. Everyone’s favorite couple to be seen with but also, he had no doubt, the subject of many envious and jealous looks as well.

  “Were they together at school?” he asked, and Alice shook her head.

  “They met as friends of friends, there were no fireworks or instant attractions or anything like that. They met, I think they liked each other and got to know one another as part of a group.”

  “Sports?”

  “What, he’s the jock, and she’s the head cheerleader?”

  He nodded. “Something like that.”

  “No, nothing at all like that. Alex wasn’t interested in sports. He played and was good at football but his heart wasn’t in it at all, he would rather spend his time pulling an old Apple or Amstrad down than be running around a football stadium.”

  “And Hazel?”

  “Again, no. She was tall and slim, willowy even, beautiful and graceful to a fault but she ran the school paper and would rather have been taking pictures of the cheerleaders than actually being one.”

  “Partners, girlfriends, boyfriends?”

  “I think that they both had, at some point a partner, but I don’t think with either of them that it was too serious. Alex, I know went off to college with no attachments and no girlfriend to worry about, I don’t know about Hazel, but I do know that when they came back, when they got together, they were both single and had been for a long time.”

  “Hazel is a good-looking girl, and your brother is a good-looking guy, I find it hard to believe that either of them were single for any length of time, that they didn’t have people chasing them.”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong they did, yes they did, a lot of them. I know Alex did and Hazel once told me of a particular guy who wouldn’t leave her alone. Alex used to laugh at some of the girls that were chasing him.”

  “He found it funny?”

  “Yes, he did, but he wasn’t laughing at them because that makes it sound like he’s pretentious and callous which he isn’t, not at all. It was more that he was laughing at some of the antics they would use to get him to notice them. And this was our conversation, not something he spread around.”

  “And he resisted their charms,” Steve smiled.

  “Oh, he had a couple of girlfriends, nothing too serious, but he was always charming and courteous, even when he was breaking up with them.”

  “And there was nobody that he was interested in that he couldn’t have?”

  Alice thought for a moment before shaking her head.

  “No one at all.”

  “So how did they get together, your brother and Hazel?”

  “A Christmas Eve party that they both went to the year after they came back from college. Of course, they knew each other from before going to college and found themselves next to each other at the party and started talking. It turns out that their experiences with the opposite sex were much the same but once they talked they realized how much they had in common. Similar likes and dislikes, tastes in music and movies, and, which is what I think they were both missing, the ability to talk to each other.”

  “Intellectually?”

  “Yes and no; to say it like that makes them sound a bit precocious and snob
by, and it wasn’t like that at all. They were both intelligent people for sure, but it was more of a wavelength sort of thing, they seemed to click. They could talk about lots of different things, Alex could go on about computers, and trust me he could go on and on, but Hazel could keep up with him, and most importantly, she understood what he was on about.”

  “She was a geek as well?”

  Alice hesitated before shaking her head.

  “No, no she wasn’t. She wasn’t absorbed in computing the way Alex and I were, but she understood the use of computing, its potential for business. She could cut through the geek speak and see a real world or business use for something that Alex might have been talking about.”

  “And her, what was Hazel’s thing?”

  “She could talk about business relationships, PR, and media and he could relate to that and discuss it. They each had their own thing that they were good at, but the other wasn’t overwhelmed or left behind.”

  “They hit it off and got together then …?”

  “But slowly, oh God, so slowly; it was like watching paint dry that relationship at the start. Oh, they spent lots of time together, talking about this, discussing that. Everyone that knew them could see that they should be together except them.”

  “A slow burn then?”

  Alice laughed, “Slow? Tectonic!”

  “But they got there in the end?”

  She nodded, “I don’t know exactly what happened, but suddenly the relationship took off; fireworks and everything. And they couldn’t leave each other alone after that.”

  Steve looked at the two photographs again, different pictures, taken at different times. There was nothing, nothing apparent that he could see anyway, to link the two people in these images and yet, looking at the pictures he could see it, somehow, he could see them together as a couple. Maybe it was what Alice had told him, but if he didn’t know they were a couple, had he been shown the pictures he would have suspected they were. They seemed right together.

  “How long were they together?”

  “About ten years, married for the last eight.”

  “And in that time, it was all going all right for them?”

  “They both worked in our business, Alex full-time, and Hazel as required and to keep things moving in the right direction. Hazel was growing her own business as well and was doing a lot of good work with that. They were both earning good money and bought a beautiful house a few blocks over from here.”

  Alice nodded her head toward downtown Eugene as she spoke.

  “We had an office and a workshop out the back, each of us had a workstation we used, Hazel had her own office as well when she was working on some campaign or something.”

  “A separate office?”

  “Yeah, why not? She said that she owed it to her clients to give them one-hundred percent of her time when she was on their clock, so she didn’t want to be distracted by our stuff. And she would have been because she couldn’t step into the workshop without getting involved, throwing ideas in, normally good ones, brainstorming concepts and designs, so the separate office was her way of exiling herself, for a short time anyway, to make sure that she could concentrate on her other work.”

  “What sort of other work did she do?” Steve wanted to know.

  Alice shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes a little.

  “All sorts of things, advertising campaigns, she did a lot of campaigns for local businesses, for some of them it was a fairly straightforward job, she might design a pamphlet or a flier or poster, for other businesses she designed and ran the whole campaign for as long as it took: a week, a month, over six months once for a big local dealership. She ran election campaigns as well, state, local, and national. Any sort of public relations or media type work, Hazel was great at it.”

  “And she was happy doing that in Eugene?”

  “She was asked once or twice to take a job in Salem with a state representative and I know of at least two offers she had to move to Washington to take over campaign offices there.”

  “And she refused?”

  Alice nodded, “Always, she never even blinked.”

  “And did she resent that?”

  “Resent what?”

  “Giving up jobs, I mean this was her career wasn’t it? Wasn’t she knocking back good jobs that could have made her name across the country to stay here and do what exactly?”

  “No.” Alice shook her head emphatically, “No it wasn’t like that, she didn’t give up taking the jobs, she didn’t sacrifice herself for Alex—she didn’t want to take the jobs. She was happy to have been asked, but she didn’t want to leave Eugene or Alex. Alex even suggested once that she take up one of the offers. He knew that she was good at what she did, and he said that he had no intention of standing in the way of anything she wanted to do. If she did, he reasoned then they could have kept the house here and he could have kept working, remotely, with and through me. Actually, moving anywhere, so long as it had a decent Internet connection would not have been a problem.”

  “But still she wasn’t interested?”

  “No, not at all, actually I think that it was the idea of being tied down to one thing that put her off more than anything else. She didn’t care about the money that was being offered, and it was generous; between her and Alex they were making more than enough for a comfortable life, what she craved was variety.”

  “What do you mean by that, by variety?”

  “She liked change, doing different things. She didn’t like routine.”

  “Do you mean in work, in her life, her sex life, in her choice of partners, what are you saying here, Alice?”

  “No, no, no!” Alice shook her hands at him, “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant in her work choices. She didn’t like the idea of working at the same thing every day, she wasn’t promiscuous or bisexual or experimental or anything like that. I meant in work, she loved the idea of new things and new challenges. She could give her all for a local tractor dealership, plan and run a campaign and once it was over she might get involved with some local political campaign. It was always new, different, and challenging. One job, one challenge and getting tied down to it would, I know, have bored her. In her life, she was a happy person, content, as far as sex was concerned, once she had committed herself to Alex then that was it, she was content in that as well.”

  “And him, Alex with Hazel?”

  “For sure, yes, absolutely; they were happy and content with each other. Well, that changed when … well, it changed.”

  “How did it change, when?”

  Alice looked across the table at him before massaging her temples with her forefingers and standing up. She walked to the kitchen bench and stood leaning back against the edge.

  “Steve, do you mind if we have a break from this,” she glanced up at the clock, it was after seven she realized, they had been at this for a while now.

  He looked up at the clock as well, “I’m sorry, time has gone by hasn’t it. I’ll come back tomorrow, or whenever you like.”

  “No, it’s not that. I’m getting hungry, I was thinking of ordering in. Chinese if you fancy it?” She rummaged about in a small pile of pamphlets stacked between the wall and a cast iron book holder. The bills and useful rubbish pile.

  He nodded his head and took the menu she was now offering to him. He chose his meal of an entrée and a Chicken Chow Yuk—Sweet and Sour Pork—Fried Rice combination and she rang through the order to a local takeaway shop which promised quick delivery. She got two beers out of the fridge opened them and offered one to him which he accepted.

  Steve took a drink from the bottle as he looked over the lip and contemplated the pile of legal documents in the middle of the table. Alice, standing with her back against the kitchen counter top as she drank watched Steve looking at the documents.

  He put his beer down and picked up the picture of Hazel and thought again what an attractive woman she was. He wondered if a career in Washington would have cha
nged her at all and decided that yes, it probably would have.

  There was a box of ancillary documents that didn’t fit into any category or another or had not been relevant to the trial or subsequent appeals. In no particular order there were tax records, phone records, a lot of business documents, and photographs. Steve idly rifled through them and picked out a photograph of Alex and Hazel. He was standing with a broad smile with her arms wrapped around his waist as she stood off to one side her head leaning on his shoulder. Next to Alex, Alice, jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt nicely showing off her figure, next to her an older man dressed in business looking slacks and an open necked shirt. Brian, Steve supposed noting the gap between them, no sign of affection or any real indication that they were a couple at all. Two people who were sort of together, sharing a moment in a photograph.

  They could have been coworkers, or vague acquaintances such was the distance between them, only physically an inch, maybe two, but in the picture, it said a great deal, as did the look on Alice’s pretty face.

  She looked resigned; Wood’s American Gothic without the humor, standing with her man, no pitchfork, modern clothes but this is her life, this is all there is. Her hair, blond and beautiful, long, well over her shoulders, parted in the middle but not straight like Hazel’s, her hair had a natural wave which gave it a slightly wild look but which suited her face and figure.

  Steve didn’t need the picture to tell him how attractive Alice was, she was standing right in front of him and he glanced up at her and smiled at her before looking back at the picture.

  The date stamp in the corner indicated the picture had been taken almost a year before Hazel’s disappearance and a little over two years before Alice and Brian, if indeed this was Brian, called it quits and went their separate ways. Nobody actually knew at that time what lay ahead of them but the look on Alice’s face seemed to predict the future, deep and sad, helpless and resigned.

  Steve felt a small wave of relief for her. Alice blamed the tension of Alex’s trial for the separation but going on this photo, it had already happened a long time before that. The gap showed that the separation was already physical, emotional, and real. In this photograph there was no sign of the beautiful woman who had smiled and laughed with him at the Granary. It was a small and sad parody.