by Ronald Malfi
“The police thought you might know of someone she’d been seeing, someone that would give them a lead.”
“I want to see the diary.”
“Your mother put it away.”
“I want to see it.”
“Were you in contact with her? Did you call her regularly? Or perhaps write letters back and forth? Maybe on the computers down at the library in town…”
Kelly shook her head. “No,” she said, “I hadn’t spoken to her. Not since I left this place.”
“But her diary—”
“I want to see it.”
He pressed his lips together until they turned white. Then he released a gust of pent-up breath. “You’ve eaten?”
“Not since this morning.”
“Have Glenda fix you something,” he said. “Then go upstairs and get some rest. The diary will be on the nightstand beside the bed.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Right.” And he examined her again, up and down, as if for the last time. He looked tired and somewhat withdrawn, like a field worker after a long day in the sun. Wordlessly, he moved past her and toward the doors. “I’m tired now.”
She watched him go. And realized he looked nothing like the melancholy figure in the Maccinetti painting after all.
The kitchen was dark and empty, Glenda having already gone off to bed. She wasn’t very hungry, not really, but opened the refrigerator and peered inside. The refrigerator light illuminated a tall figure standing stock-still against the far kitchen wall, staring at her.
She jumped back, startled. “Jesus Christ.”
It was Kildare, dressed commonplace in a pair of nondescript slacks and a freshly pressed Oxford. “Miss Kellow,” he said. His voice was like an iceberg—only the sharp point of his emotions on the surface, and everything else hidden beneath. “I startled you?”
“Goddamn you did,” she said, shutting the refrigerator. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Is there something I can get for you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “How long have you been here?”
“Ma’am?”
“How long have you been in this house? How did you meet my father?”
“You were just with him not five minutes ago,” Kildare said complacently. “Did you forget to ask him that yourself?”
She was being jumpy. She knew that, couldn’t help it. Her mind slipped back to the scene in the woods earlier that day, and the image of the injured dog limping through the underbrush…then her agonized collapse to the ground, the uncontrolled release of her bladder…
“It’s late,” Kildare said, his voice a thousand steel razors, and moved past her and into the hallway. “Goodnight, ma’am.”
She watched him walk until his form was eaten up by the shadows in the hallway.
Upstairs, she stood outside Becky’s closed door again, tried the knob. This time it was unlocked. She peeked her head in. The room was dark, the window beside the bed closed. In the silence, she could hear her sister’s labored breathing from across the room.
Sleep well, Little Baby Roundabout, she thought, closing the door and stepping back out into the hallway.
Something moved by the stairwell—she saw it out of the corner of her eye. A person, no doubt. Kildare? Had he followed her up? She went to the stairwell, peered down over the railing and saw nothing. It was as dark as a well.
Now we’re seeing things, too?
Damn it all, she should have called Josh before it got too late. Would he be asleep now? Should she even bother? All at once she felt very alone and near the point of both physical and mental collapse. Josh was someone she could talk to—not her mother or her father. Not Kildare.
There was a telephone in her bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the receiver, considered dialing his phone number.
I should have listened to you a month ago, Josh. I should have gone to see a doctor. But now I’m trapped here and I feel so incredibly unsettled and I don’t know what to do. And I think it might be too late. It’s just something I feel, like feeling the difference between hot and cold. I think it might be too late now, Josh, and I think I’m starting to lose it, starting to slip downhill. Fast.
She hung up the receiver. It was a last-ditch effort to display (if only to herself) some form of semblance, some degree of self-control. She didn’t need Josh, didn’t need anyone. She could deal with this on her own. God knows she’d been on her own before.
There was a small, leather-bound journal resting on the nightstand beside her bed. On the book’s cover was a note: At the request of your father, Miss Kellow—J.K. She shuddered, imagining that creep Kildare moving around inside her room. As if his presence alone was enough to contaminate what purity remained. And what purity had remained, anyway?
She grabbed the book and eased back on the bed, paused, then hopped up and went to her bedroom door. Locked it.
Settled back in bed, she flipped open the diary’s front cover and saw that someone—again, probably Kildare—had placed yellow Post-It notes on many of the pages, half peeking up from the top of the book. She flipped to the first note and scanned the page. It only took her two seconds to locate her name there, halfway down the page and written in the diligent, swooping cursive of a teenage girl. Shocked, she backed up and read the passage in its entirety:
I spoke with Kelly today about keeping the journal and she said it was a good idea. She said I should write everything down in it so I remember and won’t forget the way she forgot. But I still haven’t been able to write anything down, and I don’t think I ever will. I just don’t want to think about it. Kelly said when she was little she was scared a lot and when she got older she had to go away to get better. But she didn’t get better. She said to be careful and watch out for myself. I wish we talked more. I wish she tried to reach me too, but I know she’s moved away and lives a different life now. It’s okay. We all have different lives.
When she’d finished reading the passage, she went back and read it again. And again. And again. Frozen by disbelief, she actually had to touch the print, trace the imprint of the letter with one finger. Doing so didn’t make it any easier to comprehend. The police had been right—there she was, her name right there in the middle of the page…and she flipped to the next Post-It marker and found her name again…and the next marker and again. And all without an ounce of explanation. Was it possible Becky had merely filled some sort of empty void? Had the girl simply created an idealized version of her older sister in her head? Was poor Becky losing her mind, thinking that her—
But something was there, caught in the web of her thoughts. Like someone’s name you just couldn’t remember—something that was there but just out of reach. Like fingers, barely grazing the tips of someone else’s.
What? What the hell is it?
But she couldn’t grasp hold of it, and the next second it was gone.
Another passage: Spoke to Kelly about him today. She didn’t have much to say. She’s a good sister. But she’s so far away and it’s difficult to talk to her.
Who was “him”?
Kelly thought, She’s a good sister.
Sorry, kiddo, I let you down. Really. I’m going to take the fall on this one, just lay it all down on me. I don’t know what the hell happened to you out there in the woods that night, but just go right ahead and put the weight on me, as the song goes. Take a load off, Becky, and put the weight on me.
She wished she could take it back, take it all back. And not just the event that lead up to Becky’s unconscious, bedridden state, but the whole thing, the whole goddamn mess she’d made by running away and never looking back. Never looking back for Becky.
I’m sorry. I can only say that so much.
“Sorry,” she whispered. Her voice cracked, and she found she was very close to tears.
In the darkness of the night, DeVonn Rotley—shivering against the cold—glanced up at the light that was Kelly Kellow’s bedroom window. He stared at the
warm, glowing light for just a few moments before turning away and heading down the other side of the house toward the rear. He stopped here before a chain-link fence eight feet high and tipped with barbed wire. Behind the fence, a huddle of squat little doghouses stood in a line, as if at attention. The dogs were not out in the yard, agitated by the cold.
“Milky,” he half-whispered, peering into the darkness on the other side of the fence. He heard Milky or one of the other dogs wheeze from inside one of the doghouses. “Capri,” he called, “Dozer, Grizzle…”
Gordon Kellow owned the dogs, but Rotley trained them, named them. They were his dogs, really. It was his hand they ate out of, his face they lapped with their sloppy, flattened tongues.
There was a hose in the grass, attached to a well pump. He primed the pump and used the hose to refill the dogs’ water dishes. Again, he heard one or two of the dogs stir in the darkness. There were seven of them in all—Dobermans, all as black as the Devil’s asshole. Milky, Capri, Dozer, Grizzle, Humbert, Fenniwick, and Ophelia-Meringue. The cold air, now coupled with the splash of water spilling into the dogs’ plastic bowls, provoked the need to urinate in him. He finished off filling the bowls, tapped the hose out, and wound it back up against the well pump. Then he moved behind the pump, unzipped his fly, and relieved himself on a wedge of serviceberries.
He heard one of the dogs whimpering behind him. Without turning around, he called back, “You boys keep it down now. I don’t like the cold any more than you do.”
Finished, he shook himself off, zipped up his pants, and side-stepped the serviceberries. Heading back up to the house, he turned his head slightly toward the fenced-in community of Dobermans and said, “You good boys sleep well. We’ll all go running in the woods for a while tomorrow. You all just…”
His voice died in his throat. He froze in midstep, and it felt as though his heart had suddenly seized in his chest. Struggling to speak again, he managed a choked, “What are…” before he was silenced.
Moments later, and DeVonn Rotley was gone.
Chapter Eleven
Joshua Cavey got out of bed early, fixed himself some scrambled eggs, and ate them out on his fire escape while thinking, To hell with the cold weather. It’s too beautiful out here.
Traffic was moving sluggish this morning. Even this early, with the mist of a fleeting dawn still hanging in the air, impatient commuters were laying on their car horns. He could hear a group of children laughing somewhere behind his apartment building, and could also hear the steam engine-sound of a bus’s air-brakes the next street over.
He’d dreamt of Kelly last night. And though he only remembered fuzzy selections of the dream, he remembered enough to leave an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. Kelly…and an immense house that reached high into the night sky…the sound of barking dogs…a mysterious figure, maybe…
But he couldn’t really remember it. He rarely remembered his dreams. Except for a select few—dreaming of Sampers raising the gun, his eyes like chunks of granite, pulling the trigger, doing it over and over and over again. Those dreams had just been unsettling; the dream about Kelly seemed almost like some sort of premonition, something he should be watching for and worried about. Shoveling the last bit of egg into his mouth, he silently wished Kelly would call him as she’d promised. Surely she was all right—he was just being a big goon, really—but she had promised. Besides, was it a crime to want to put your mind at ease? He didn’t think so. Not yet, anyway.
After a short while the cold began to make his left shoulder throb, and he climbed back into his apartment.
There was no mistaking the absence of a feminine hand in the decoration of Joshua Cavey’s apartment. For the most part, the walls were completely barren with the exception of a large Andy Warhol print that hung on the wall opposite the windows. His furniture was functional and sufficient. An acoustic guitar stood on a stand in one blank, white corner while a fishbowl on a pedestal (the bowl, though filled with water, contained no fish—the pathetic things had died almost a year ago) stood in another.
His kitchen was of similar practicality. He owned only one pot, one pan, two plates, three glasses (all mismatched), and a handful of spotty silverware. The table in the center of the cramped kitchen boasted only a single chair. And to look inside his refrigerator was to look upon the shelves of a grocery store the day after a mean winter storm.
There were a few five-pound barbells on the floor of his bedroom, and he went to them now, sitting down on the edge of his bed. He grabbed one in his left hand, began working the weight up and down, up and down. This was no longer necessary—as part of his physical therapy following the shooting, he hadn’t needed to continue after what the doctors called a “complete recovery”—but he did it on occasion because it relaxed him. The arm and shoulder were still sore, but the weights did not cause a strain as they had when he’d first tried to lift them following a number of operations and an obscene selection of medication. Now, lifting the weights only gave him peace. On many occasions, he found they forced his mind to run blank and his body to completely relax. It was something akin to transcendental meditation.
But the barbells weren’t working this morning. He couldn’t stop thinking about Kelly.
And just what is it about her? his mind spoke up. Why should you even care so much about her, anyway? Are you falling in love with her? That would be bad.
Bad, he knew, because she did not feel the same way. He knew nothing of her past—like him, she chose to keep certain things to herself—but he knew there was something there, something she either didn’t fully remember or didn’t feel comfortable talking about. He never spoke to her about Sampers and about his injuries, mainly because he was afraid and embarrassed by them. So didn’t it make sense for her to withhold information about her own past for similar reasons? Perhaps an abusive boyfriend in her past, an old uncle who liked to touch her in places little girls should never be touched…
Now you’re just forcing yourself to think, his head yammered. Now you’re just insistent upon thinking about Kelly Rich, about keeping her picture inside your head. Are you doing this to yourself on purpose? Are you trying to drive yourself mad? She is practically a stranger to you; you had better friends at NYU who you don’t bother to keep in contact with. And now you’re sitting here worrying about her, hoping she calls, when she has every right in the world to do as she pleases, even if that means completely forgetting about you.
But the dream—something about her running through the woods in the dark, out of breath and frantic…and a dog chasing her…or something like that, something about a dog…
In that instant, he recalled what Dr. Mendes had told him about Nellie Worthridge, about one of the things she’d said to him: We almost killed that fucking dog. What that meant he didn’t know, but he surmised that he had dreamt about a dog because he had dogs on the brain (or, rather, had both Kelly and Nellie Worthridge on the brain, and his dream had simply incorporated recent details of both people—Kelly’s departure from the city, and Nellie’s comment about killing—or almost killing—a dog).
Strange how the brain operates, he thought.
Stranger still, the telephone rang just as he set the barbell down, and it was Carlos Mendes calling about Nellie Worthridge.
At the hospital, Josh met Mendes in the doctor’s office—an institutional-looking room with lemon yellow walls and a single window behind a small oak desk, the filthy tin shade drawn. It was early and Mendes, seated behind his desk and fingering a cup of coffee he hadn’t yet taken a single sip from, looked just as haggard as he had on their first meeting. Josh wondered if the doctor always looked that way, the way some people always seem to have bags under their eyes, tired or not. On the corner of Mendes’s desk was an old clock-radio, turned on but turned low. Its dial was stuck between two channels, and the result was the intermittent sounds of a radio talk show and a jazz station, occasionally interrupted by bursts of static.
“I’m going to
assume, since you are here now,” Mendes began, “that you care for Miss Worthridge?”
The question seemed oddly phrased. “I…well, of course I do. I wouldn’t want anything bad to come to her, if that’s what you mean. You know, if it’s something serious, I’d want to know about it.”
“Well, no,” Mendes said. “What I mean is that you are of no relation to this woman and have no obligations to her. You found her in her apartment and called the paramedics. Essentially, your job is done. If you want to walk, I wouldn’t say anything about it. Couldn’t say anything about it.”
For one brief, insane instant, Josh thought Mendes was going to hit him up for the cost of Nellie Worthridge’s medical treatment. He shook his head. “Dr. Mendes, I’m not following you here…”
“I just don’t want you to feel as though I’m wasting your time with anything I’ve got to say, anything pertaining to Miss Worthridge…”
“No,” Josh said, “you’re not wasting my time. In fact, I appreciate the call. Please, go ahead.”
Mendes lightly tapped the side of the coffee cup with a fingernail. “Nellie doesn’t play bridge,” he said matter-of-factly. “I asked her about that this morning—you know, opening her up with what she assumed was merely chitchat—and she said yes, she played bridge. I asked her the names of the women she played with and she gave them to me, first and last names. I asked where she played and she said their Wednesday night bridge game was always held in an apartment in the building next to hers. Just one building over. And I smiled and said something to the effect that it was good she was keeping active and she smiled too and said that it was fun and it kept her mind off other things. Like dying, she said. It kept her mind off dying.”
Josh just nodded. This was making no sense.
Mendes continued, “I looked up the names she’d given me and it turned out that one of the women, a Betty Shotts, does have an apartment in the building next door. I’d planned on phoning her to tell her of Miss Worthridge’s condition, and maybe find out a little about Nellie Worthridge myself, but when I called and mentioned Miss Worthridge’s name, this Betty Shotts had never heard of her. I asked if she was certain and she said of course, that she was old but she wasn’t that old. Then I asked if she played bridge on Wednesday nights and she admitted that she did—but no one named Nellie Worthridge ever played. No one in a wheelchair with no legs.”
