Crumbly’s was the twenty-four-hour doughnut and coffee shop unapologetically located right next to the police station. I wouldn’t mind an excuse to stop there myself.
“Got it. I’ll be back after a bit.”
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I walked the few short blocks over to the police station. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a car; I did. A trusty little Subaru that forged regular escapes for me through the mountains to the east or across the spectacular deserts of Utah to the west. In town, though, I much preferred to take to my feet. It kept me from the claustrophobia that was always slithering just under my skin. I woke up in a box, locked words away in a box, came home to a box at night―I didn’t want to take another box to get from one to another. Ironic now, but at the time being continually surrounded by walls was more than I could bear. I spent too much of my time locked up as it was … locked up in my own head. The percussion of my feet on the ground, the taste of the air, these convinced me that I could run away if I wanted.
Of course, I didn’t want. Not really. Or I would have. Right?
Like Ada.
I saw the map in my mind. It’s an odd comfort to me, now, to pull it up again behind my eyes before I fall asleep and imagine the headlights flashing by as travelers wind their way from one corner to another. South, to Albuquerque, to Mexico. West through Nevada and out to the California coast. East, to Denver, across the desolation of Kansas and into the possibilities of New England or the South. North, across the Tetons and into Canada. Maybe all the way to the North Pole. Why not?
But Ada might not have intended a true flight at all. She could have meant to stay in town, holed up at a friend’s house, a gerbil caught on the wheel, no more free than I for all her grandiosity and desire.
I tried to take a mean sort of pleasure in the idea, but I couldn’t. The only thing worse than Ada leaving would have been Ada not leaving all the way.
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Bonnie Mac was on the phone at the office manager’s desk when I pushed into the police station. Her full name was Bonnie Mackenzie, but everyone had called her Bonnie Mac for as long as I could recall. One of the town’s few black residents, Bonnie Mac was the face of the police department. A chief and two officers made up the entire force, so she was usually the one person manning the station. She took reports, handled paperwork, did whatever sort of investigating she could manage with just a phone and a computer, followed up with victims, and generally ran the town for the salary of office manager. This truth did not escape the town council, but they were wise enough to give Bonnie Mac a wide berth and stay out of her way.
She waved me to a seat. About five minutes later, she’d wrapped up her phone call and summoned me up. I’d tried to listen in for any interesting tidbits, but Bonnie Mac was too sharp for that, keeping her normally booming voice just low enough that I couldn’t make out a word.
“What can I do for you, Jeff?”
I leaned on the counter.
“I heard a rumor I was hoping you could clear up for me.”
Bonnie Mac raised her perfectly painted eyebrows and crossed her arms beneath her buxom bosom. “Heard a rumor or you’re starting one?”
“Now, Bonnie, you know The Herald is no gossip mag.”
“I love you to bits, Jeff, but as far as I’m concerned, all you news people are the same. Take a tiny piece of truth and twist it ’til nobody can recognize it, then print it and get rich.”
I snorted. “Do I look rich to you?”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Even figures of speech are supposed to mean something.”
I wasn’t worried about riling Bonnie Mac up. Skirmishes like this were our entire means of communication. Besides, for all her protesting, Bonnie Mac enjoyed her position as purveyor of information even more than I did.
She huffed. “It means all those talking heads on TV are about to drive me crazy. So what’s this rumor, Jeff? Aliens taking over the town? Is the president worried that the chief’s got him under surveillance, too?”
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“Nothing quite that spectacular. But I hear some dogs in town got their throats slit last night.”
Bonnie Mac grimaced. “That, I hate to tell you, is true. Can you believe it? What sort of monster does such a thing?”
Almost word-for-word the same as Dayla’s response. Funny that most of the world is at war with itself when original thought is all but an impossibility.
I shrugged. “You tell me.”
She shook her head vigorously. “Not me. I can’t begin to imagine that kind of cruelty. Chief Joe’s pissed, I can tell you that.”
“So no leads?”
“Ha! As if I’d tell you. But no. Nothing yet. When we got the first call, we were thinking ex-husband or would-be burglar or some such. But three dogs at three houses, with no attempted break-ins? It’s just plain old meanness. When they do catch the guy, I hope they slit his throat. I’d let them do it right here in front of my desk.”
I couldn’t help laughing in spite of Bonnie Mac’s indignation. “You know you can’t abide a mess, Bonnie Mac.”
“Hmph. It’d be worth it in this case. What I really can’t abide is a man being cruel to a critter. There’s just no reason for it.”
I conceded the point. Bonnie Mac gave me the addresses of the incidents. That would make a nice little graphic, I mused … a map with little red dots to mark the locations.
I hesitated as I turned to leave.
“Bonnie Mac, did you happen to see a homeless guy hanging around 2nd and Main, maybe headed toward the highway?”
Pursing her lips, Bonnie Mac looked at me consideringly before replying. “No, I did not, Jeff. We don’t generally have much of that sort around here. Not besides Old Man Whithers, and he’s harmless. Do you think this guy might be connected to the dead dogs?”
I laughed as if startled. “Oh, no. He was only a kid. I talked to him for a minute, and he didn’t strike me as a vicious sort. I was just wondering if he found a ride and made it out of town.”
“Hmm. Well, I’ll mention it to Chief Joe just in case. You never know. And drugs these days …”
I thought of Dayla and her ’shroom theory.
“True. Drugs these days. Take care, Bonnie Mac. Don’t be giving away my scoops to Fox News when they come sniffing around.”
“As if!”
The smells of hot grease and sugar enveloped me as I walked next door to Crumbly’s. I abandoned self-restraint without much of a fight and ordered a dozen doughnuts and a box of fritters. My reporters might drop by, I half-heartedly justified the purchase to myself.
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I decided to take the long way back to the office, just to see if Brett was on a nearby street corner somewhere. I quickly regretted my decision. There was no way to juggle the coffee mug I’d brought from the office, two paper sacks, and munch on a doughnut at the same time. And I really, really wanted one of those doughnuts.
Thirteen down: five letters, canine skin disease; French verb meaning “eat”
I thought I might have caught a glimpse of someone scruffy and disreputable-looking down one of the side streets, but by this time I was too hungry to take another detour. Dayla looked up as I came through the office door.
“Apple fritters, as requested.” I set the sack down on her desk.
“I was about to send out a search party,” Dayla laughed. “Not for you. For the doughnuts. Ooh! Six apple fritters? I take it you expect me to share?”
“I will if you will.” Opening the other sack, I displayed the dozen sprinkled and iced confections.
“Deal. But I better make a fresh pot to go along with all these.”
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“I have no argument against that.”
The smile hurt my cheeks, the effort of maintaining a functional façade, much less a genial one, wearing on me. I chewed and chewed the maple bacon doughnut I had just bitten into, suddenly convinced that swallowing was impossible.
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“Caribou.”
“What?”
“Wild reindeer are called caribou.”
Dayla narrowed her eyes in my direction. “You need brain food, son. Those doughnuts aren’t going to tide you over.”
“Sorry, Dayla. Just thinking out loud.”
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I swung by the drive-in again on my way home. The teenage girl behind the counter raised her eyebrows as I repeated my order from the night before.
“I didn’t eat it last night. I gave it away to a homeless guy I met on my way home.”
I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to explain my dietary choices to a high school student. It was equally likely that I would have eaten fast food two nights in a row just because I wanted to.
“Oh, yeah. I saw that guy. With the funny sign.”
“Funny sign?”
“Didn’t you see it?”
“It was dark by the time I came across him. What did it say?”
“Aliens abducted my dog. Need money for ransom.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “That is funny,” I conceded.
“I know, right?” She placed the milkshake on the counter, handed me my change and receipt. “I gave him a couple of dollars just because I thought it was pretty original.”
“Abducted his dog, huh? I don’t guess you heard what happened to those dogs last night, did you?”
She nodded vigorously, ponytail bobbing. “Oh, yeah. It was all over school today. Horrible, huh? I figure it was a serial killer.”
I kept a straight face. “Serial killer?”
“Sure. You watch those shows, don’t you? Serial killers like to kill animals. And they wet the bed. Or did when they were kids. I think.”
I nodded soberly, accepting the grease-laden sack she handed me.
“Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, eyes lighting up. “You don’t think the homeless guy did it, do you? Some kind of weird fixation on dogs he has?”
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I shook my head. “Naw. I figure he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pure coincidence. He was just a kid looking for a ride out of town.”
She seemed unconvinced. “Well, I hope they catch whoever did it soon. Somebody who would be mean to a dog would do anything.”
I smiled. “Good night, then. Stay safe.”
“You too!”
The door chimed merrily as I exited the restaurant.
There was no sign of Brett on my walk home. Either he’d made it out of town or moved to a better corner. I thought about the girl in the restaurant, whether she had a ride home or would have to walk down these sidewalks in the dark. I imagined her eyes straining anxiously in the dark, searching for some throat-slitter prowling down the same sidewalks, hunting for dogs docile enough or friendly enough to let him close.
I bet she’d call her mom for a ride.
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I couldn’t summon up any unease myself, just a general acknowledgement that I probably should. However, I was glad I didn’t have any pets to concern myself with.
I did lock the front door behind me when I got home, but that was sheer force of habit rather than any lingering fears about the burger girl’s lurking serial killer. Then I did my best to keep my mind locked away, too. I turned on the television, opened up my laptop, set my phone on the arm of the chair, poured a stiff handle of bourbon into my milkshake, took off my pants, and settled onto the couch.
I hated the rabbit-run my brain couldn’t seem to escape, racing back and forth from my last morning with Ada to our last evening, as if somehow events might be altered by sheer repetition of their enactment. Maybe it was pointless to try and fill my mind with anything else, but I was going to give it a solid try.
I emailed my reporters with the next week’s stories. Sometimes they came up with their own leads, but most of The Herald’s columns were filled with the same stuff from week to week. Homeowner association meetings, library meetings, school board meetings, one-hundred-year-old birthdays, golden anniversaries, interview features with local artists or gardeners or grocery store owners. The high school principal had sent me a list of scholarship awards, so I farmed those interviews out to Jack. He loved kids. In fact, he’d taught English before retiring ten years ago. Delores got the spring gardening story, which was mostly a free plug for the local hardware store and the two greenhouses operating on the edge of town. Sami liked to handle the review side―books and movies, the occasional theater production up in Grand Junction―so I let her do her own thing there. Once in a while a local author would send me a copy of his or her book, and I’d give it to Sami to read. We didn’t get a lot of those, though.
I shamelessly own that I keep the most interesting stories for myself. There has to be some sort of benefit to what I do, after all. Maybe that’s part of why Ada left. Perhaps she couldn’t cover the contempt anymore for a man who had made peace long ago with never becoming more than a pale imitation of alive.
Okay. So I’d made it about ten minutes without bringing her up. Not exactly a win.
More bourbon, I decided. That’ll help.
Of course, it didn’t.
I leaned against the counter, clutching the glass bottle, and stared grimly at the car keys hanging by the front door. The old metal gleamed dully, and I imagined that they swung a little. Taunting me. Tempting me.
People talk all the time about alcohol numbing the effects of reality. They refer to it as a sedative, as a painkiller, as some sort of swaddling that protects you from all the sharp edges for a while. But none of that is true. Alcohol doesn’t ease pain at all. If anything, it heightens it, makes it inescapable. It allows you to mourn all the griefs you keep locked away in your sober moments.
So there is no need to dwell on what the rest of my evening looked like. Suffice it to say it wasn’t pretty.
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Thursday. As close to a Saturday as I get. When the sun forced its way in through my shuttered window, I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head. I slept for two more hours, that strange semi-waking sleep full of fever dreams that promise the possibility of never returning to the waking world.
Fever dreams
Can only haunt you
Till the fever breaks
--Dashboard Confessional
But of course, the fever broke. I lay there a long time, staring at the ceiling. It felt like the night Ada left, when I’d been too empty to do anything but stare at the wall. My skin was oily, sweaty as if I hadn’t showered before bed. My hair was plastered to my forehead.
The ceiling was dingy. Tiny dusty strands of cobwebs swung futilely, their inhabitants long fled. I felt trapped in my own body. I strained my ears, certain that I could hear the sound of every pore, every cell closing, shutting me in this husk like a forgotten dried kernel of corn. My limbs were impossibly heavy. I tried lifting my arms, but they were pinned down, weighted by some invisible force that I couldn’t summon the will to oppose.
The elation, the spent fury that had propelled me through the last hours of the evening had fled. I could picture myself standing under the steaming hot water of the shower, scrubbing at my skin, my hair, but it was more of a movie reel than a memory. I knew that I was naked under the sheets, but I couldn’t feel the co
tton against my skin. Horror pressed against me, sudden and hot, and then as quickly receded into apathy.
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I slept again.
* * *
The next time I woke, I threw back the sheet and stood up as if my paralysis had been all in my head. The empty feeling was gone, but my skin was still hot and sticky. I showered again and took the time to clean the bathroom while I was in there, scrubbing the walls and floors with bleach and pouring a decent amount down the drain. Delores’ real job was as a realtor, and she’d told me from long experience that bleach was the best remedy for smelly drains.
I decided I wasn’t going to go to the office today. I’d been a good little grownup since Ada left. I’d shown up to work, taken care of my responsibilities, maintained a veneer of sanity. What work I needed to do, I could do from home. I wasn’t in the mood for one of Andy’s visits or even just the level of civility required to walk down the street.
Besides, I had a few things to take care of that probably shouldn’t wait any longer.
* * *
That afternoon, I completed a couple of stories for the front page of the Sunday edition. Culled some statistics from websites here and there, a couple of quotes from Bonnie Mac, the basic outline of the facts, and ta-da.
Yes, the bar was set pretty low for local weekly rags that regularly featured advice from Henry Vonn down at the American Legion and photos of the latest litter of puppies on the Dawson’s farm. But hey. Write drunk, edit sober.
Fully within my skill set.
Young, Backman, Cameron, Moriarty …
I always took Sundays off. Sort of. I mean, as an editor, even of The Herald, some part of your brain is always looking for the next story, the next angle, the next interview. If Ada had been there, I’d have waited for her to get off the breakfast shift and go for a drive. A hike. A picnic. Something fresh and clean and far from our responsibilities here.
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