Psychosis_When a Dream Turns Deadly

by Roger Bray

  She stopped and placed the suitcase down, extending the handle again and waited a moment while Nicholas looked at her.

  He smiled, but she could see the sadness in his eyes. He took her hand and squeezed it. Hazel almost pulled her hand away but decided that would be rude and mean. Nicholas had never been anything other than kind to her and she had no reason to think he would change now.

  “Please don’t apologize again, Hazel, there’s been enough of that, we are adults, and both came into this for whatever reason, as adults. We could have walked away at any time and I recognize that. The truth is, I was falling in love with you and hoped we had a future.”

  He shook his head and smiled as she tried to apologize again.

  “No. It’s not to be and I’m pretty cut up about that but, in the end you’re your own person and can do what you like. You’re going back to Alex and I hope that you find whatever you need from him. If I see either of you in the street I’ll be polite, but I don’t think that I can be your friend, not the way I’m feeling at the moment. You’ve broken my heart, Hazel, I’m a rational man but inside I’m raging at the unfairness of this, of not having you. I can’t have you and I want you and it’s burning me up so please, leave my house before I change my mind.”

  “Change your mind about what?”

  He smiled a smile that had no humor in it at all.

  “Letting you leave.”

  “Letting me …”

  “Please go.” he turned and walked toward the kitchen.

  For the first time Hazel felt scared as she quickly wheeled her case out of the front door—she didn’t even try to pick it up as she went down the front steps. The case bounced down each step behind her, wobbling to the left and the right. She grabbed the vanity bag that was in danger of falling off and fumbled the key fob in her hand to unlock the Volvo. Beep, flash and she opened the tailgate and threw the vanity bag in followed by the suitcase, she slammed the back down and turned, half expecting to see Nicholas standing behind her. The lights were still on and the front door was still open but there was no sign of him and she suspected he had returned to his whiskey bottle. She hoped that he would soon stagger to his bedroom and sleep his anger off.

  Chapter Eight

  As Hazel pulled up outside her house, nearly two hours had passed since she had last spoken to Alex. A busy two hours she laughed; she had made a big start in repairing her marriage, broken up with her boyfriend, driven out to Fern Ridge Lake and back, and here she was sitting outside her house again.

  Alex’s black Mustang was still parked in the driveway, so she parked where she had before. Mostly hidden from view from her house but in a circular patch of street lighting. “They needed to get the garage sorted out,” she thought vaguely; it was big, a double and a half but full of junk and furniture left over from various times in their past.

  Usually, well at least before she had left him, Alex would have parked the Mustang almost up to the garage door to give her room to park behind him. Since she had left he had got into the habit of parking further back toward the road, so he could step out of the car and onto the path leading to the front door. It was more convenient for him but now his car took up more of the driveway preventing her from parking without hanging into the road. Maybe that could be their other new beginning, a clear garage so they could both park their cars in there.

  Home.

  What she had always considered as home even when she was at the Fern Ridge Lake house with Nicholas. There, she always felt like a visitor, no matter how welcoming Nicolas had been. Here, she felt safe and where she belonged. For a moment, she felt the tinge of fear and uncertainty that she had felt on the way to see Nicholas, but she shook off the moment, she was home, where she wanted to be and she didn’t want the new start to be tinged with irrational fears. Yeah, Nicholas had been a little weird at the end there, about “letting her leave...” but he hadn’t done anything, he hadn’t chased her out to the car or taken off after her, though her sense of alarm had kept her eyes more on the rear-view mirror than the road ahead on the way back to Eugene. But there were no headlights approaching from the rear, no swerving E-class driven by an enraged and drunken Nicholas. In fact, there were no cars at all until she had got back onto Highway 99 and back among the lights of Eugene.

  Her fears were unfounded, and she laughed at herself for being stupid. She gathered up her dead cell phone and pulled the keys from the ignition, glancing into the back seat, she reached over and grabbed the edge of one of the sleeves of her jacket. Pulling it forward and toward her as she opened the door so as she stood she could pull the coat out with her and put it on straightaway, enjoying its warmth after the moment of cold air and put the phone and her keys into one of the pockets.

  She almost ignored her luggage in the back of the car wanting to get into the house and to Alex as fast as she could and almost decided to leave it until the morning. She had clothes in the house—she didn’t have to worry about it. That thought, had she followed through with it, would have been enough to save her.

  A half turn, she beeped the central locking, and she took a step toward the house before thinking, toothbrush. She might have enough clothes, but she couldn’t sleep without brushing her teeth, a rule drummed into her by her mother.

  I’ll only need to grab the vanity, she thought as she went to the trunk.

  She unlocked the car again and lifted the tail gate and the internal light came on but even with its dim puddle of yellow light she couldn’t quite see the vanity that she had thrown in, in her rush to leave Nicholas’s house. Peering into the luggage space she realized that during the drive back, the bigger suitcase had pushed the smaller bag up against the back of the rear seats and it was quite a stretch for her to reach it. The bigger bag was in the way as well and she had to pull it right out to be able to reach the handle of the vanity bag.

  “So, I’ll get them both anyway, then shall I?” she thought sarcastically.

  She placed the big suitcase down on the road next to her and reached in, almost lying full stretch to reach the vanity, she finally got her fingers around one of the handles and pulled it toward her.

  As she straightened, she smelled something acrid and chemical-like and her first thought was that the bottle of nail polish remover in her vanity case had somehow been broken, probably when she hurled the bigger case in on top of it.

  She was reaching up to pull down the tail gate thinking that a broken five-dollar bottle of nail polish remover was a small price to pay when she was roughly dragged back. The smell increased as a large cloth was forced over her face, blocking her eyes as well as her nose and mouth.

  Panicking and not realizing what was happening to her she breathed deeply ready to scream but was unable to finish the breath as the chemical taste rushed down her mouth and up her nose. In her moment of panic, she only succeeded in sucking the ether fumes more deeply into her lungs.

  Her last thought was of Nicholas and wondered how he had managed to get back to Eugene before her without overtaking her or without her seeing him.

  Chapter Nine

  “He’s away,” Steve said, ending the call on his cell as he stepped into Alice’s house from the front porch.

  “Damn, for how long?”

  “At least two weeks he thinks, maybe more, his mother-in-law is sick, terminal apparently and he’s with his wife over in Duluth while she looks after her.”

  Alice sighed, “Ah well, it can’t be helped, he has more important things to worry about at the moment.”

  “She’s in some hospice, the mother, and he and his wife are staying at a motel nearby. He said that he’d be going back over there in an hour or so and when he does, he’ll send us a copy of the statement that he gave to the police.”

  “He has a copy?”

  “The hard copy is at home, but he is a bit retentive with paper work and scans in stuff that he thinks is important enough to warrant it, apparently he thought this did and he has a copy on his laptop, back at th
e motel so he’ll email us a copy. I gave him your address, I hope that’s OK?”

  They went back out onto the porch while they waited for Ron Balfour’s email to arrive.

  “Will it make a difference?” she asked.

  “The statement?”

  She nodded.

  “I have no idea, until I read it, maybe on its own, no, maybe yes or we find an ambiguity that warrants talking to him some more. He did say to ring him again if we needed anything else. He was happy to talk and seems genuinely concerned for Alex, and more than happy to do anything that he can do to help.”

  “Ron’s a nice guy, his wife, Audrey, is lovely as well. They believe in Alex’s innocence and wanted to go up to OSP to see him, but he refused them access.”

  “Why?”

  “Embarrassment and not wanting to put them out driving up there. To be honest, I’m not sure why but Alex doesn’t want any visitors, maybe he’s scared of their pity.”

  “So, they haven’t been up to see him at all?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Good!” Steve looked happy at the news.

  “Good? Why is that good?”

  “Because Ron gave a statement based on his memories and thoughts of that night. His memories which won’t have been influenced by any conversation he might have had with Alex. I’m sure that if he had been to the prison, they would have spoken about it.”

  “Oh, OK. I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “The DA didn’t use his statement for some reason and I want to find out why. If there’s something there, it needs to be as clean and far removed from Alex as possible, so the DA has no reason to question it.”

  “Is there something in all of this? Are we making any sort of progress?”

  Steve laughed, “Nothing that I would try to take back to court yet, but we are nibbling away at the edges of it. There are a few anomalies and a few things that weren’t brought up at trial. Nothing massive yet but enough to warrant keeping going.”

  The email came through after lunch and Alice printed the attached statement out, willing herself not to read. She lined up the five pages and stapled through the top left corner before handing them to Steve. He quickly glanced at the document before, infuriatingly to her, he went out onto the porch to read them in silence.

  And again, and again.

  He read the statement through four times before sitting at the dining room table where he grabbed a couple of highlighters and started marking different parts in different colors. Not satisfied, he grabbed a third color and read the statement through a sixth and seventh time before he sat back and sighed.

  Alice could hardly contain herself, “Well?” she asked a lot louder than she had intended.

  Steve smiled, “Nibbling away.”

  He looked at the statement and up to Alice, tapping his front teeth with the highlighter before he stood and picked up his cell.

  “I need to check something with Ron before I can make sense of this.”

  He quickly brought up his call log and redialed the last number, Ron must have been expecting the call because he answered almost immediately.

  Steve walked out onto the porch as he spoke, and all Alice heard as the screen door closed behind him was, “Ron, why didn’t the DA want to use your statement?”

  Ten minutes later he was back.

  “Drug use.”

  “Drug use? Ron Balfour? I can’t see that at all.”

  Steve laughed, “He’s a bit of a straight shooter Ron?” he asked.

  “As straight as they come, I would say, that’s why I can’t believe drug use.”

  “Or as he put it,” Steve said, “…a severe case of stupid.”

  “You’re not making a lot of sense.”

  “His wife is a nurse?”

  “Audrey? Yes, over at the University Medical Center.”

  “Apparently she ripped him a new one after this.”

  “Why, what happened?”

  “Apparently, that day she was working an evening shift and Ron had come home a bit early as he was feeling unwell, a cold.”

  “Alex said that he was suffering from a cold, that’s why he remembered him at all.”

  “Yes, he did. So, Ron is home early and feeling like crap. He doesn’t eat anything and doses himself up with half a bottle of whiskey over a few hours, and decides to go to bed, but he’s still feeling sickly, so he drinks, in his words, half a bottle of Benadryl.”

  “On top of the whiskey, without eating anything?”

  Steve nods, smiling, “Now you’re getting it. He had a reaction from the two mixed together and admitted to the investigators that, during the time his statement covers, he was under this influence and was a bit woozy and ‘out of it’. The DA read the statement, and decided his credibility could be called into question too easily so didn’t use it.”

  “Can we use it?”

  Steve thought for a moment before answering.

  “The DA could challenge it for the same reason he decided not to use it.”

  “Because he had taken the Benadryl on top of the whiskey, his statement couldn’t be trusted?”

  “Yes but …”

  Alice waited a moment before raising her eyebrows in question.

  “If Ron’s statement had been accepted, and taken at face value, I doubt that your brother would have been charged.”

  “What? Why not? How?”

  “Because Ron’s statement says that Hazel, or at least Hazel’s car, left the scene and returned, and that there was a third party or two present at the same time."

  “How?”

  Steve consulted the statement in his hand and went over to a white board that they had set up in the corner of the dining room, taking a cleaning block, he rubbed down the area and started writing a timeline across the board.

  “According to Ron,” he said as he wrote, “he saw Hazel’s Volvo parked on the road, where Alex said it was parked, this was at about a quarter past nine, he wrote, that evening.”

  “This was about an hour after he had drunk the Benadryl, so was feeling quite dizzy. But he is adamant he saw the Volvo, and according to what we know, that observation is correct.”

  Steve continued to write on the white board, bracketing ten to ten-thirty on the timeline.

  “Ron lies down but can’t sleep because his whole world is spinning around and he’s starting to feel quite sick.”

  “How do we get the time?”

  “Audrey was on an afternoon and evening shift and would usually get home around ten-thirty, she wasn’t home when Ron got up again and went into the toilet and was violently sick, he grabs a drink of water and goes out onto the porch to get some fresh air to try to clear his head. He went out onto the side porch which is the closest to the corner and where the Volvo was parked. He has a clear view of where Hazel’s car should have been, and it was gone.”

  “There’s still nothing new here,” Alice protested, “we know the car was there, and then we know that it had gone. Alex put the time when he saw Hazel, if it was her driving, so at least her car drove off at about twenty-five past nine, so that fits in with what Ron said. The car was there at the correct time, and then it was gone.”

  “But, then it came back.”

  “What? That hasn’t been mentioned before.”

  “No, it hasn’t. And that’s the point. This is the first mention of that.”

  “And Ron saw it?”

  “Yep, Audrey came home, and Ron got up again, he was staggering a bit and she read him the riot act for mixing the whiskey and the Benadryl. When she was happy he wasn’t going to die on her, she made him some tea to try to settle his stomach and had gone to bed. Ron stayed up and drank the tea then goes to the spare room to try to sleep so as not to disturb her. He sleeps fitfully and sometime later he is still feeling ill.

  “He can’t sleep, and he doesn’t want to take anything else, so he gets up and makes another cup of tea and goes outside onto the porch again. It’s a cold night,
and he hopes the cold will help him feel better, his dog comes with him and is wandering the back yard. Ron is standing on the side porch sucking in the cold air when he sees Hazel’s car parked more or less where it had been earlier.

  “He’s sure?”

  Steve nodded, “Although he was still feeling sick, the dizziness from earlier had pretty much gone and the effect of his cocktail had worn off, so yes, he’s sure.

  “What time was this?”

  “According to the clock in Ron’s kitchen it was a quarter to one in the morning.”

  “And that’s it? That’s great. We didn’t know that the car came back.”

  “No, we didn’t. Nobody who has been spoken to has mentioned it at all, but there’s more. Ron is starting to feel a bit better, the wooziness has definitely gone but he still can’t sleep, too restless, so he decides to watch a DVD. His dog, who was happy to stay outside, starts barking, which is unusual, so Ron goes out to check. And the dog is still barking at someone or something in the night. It’s still dark so he can’t see anything, the dog is still going off though staring into the night and barking at whatever had spooked him. There’s nothing in the yard, nobody around, but Ron said he did hear something.”

  “What?”

  “A bicycle.”

  “A bicycle?”

  “Yes, you know that whirring, clicking noise a bike sometimes makes when you freewheel it. That’s how he described it.”

  “But he didn’t see anything?”

  “Not as far as the bicycle was concerned, but he did notice that Hazel’s car had gone.”

  “Again?”

  Steve nodded, “More than likely, it was down at the rail yards where it was found by the cops.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Something, nothing, it’s hard to tell. But there’s one more thing.”

  Alice waited.

  “The first time Ron saw the Volvo, he said there was another car parked further up from it. A car he didn’t recognize as having seen in the area before, but one he remembers.”