by N. M. Brown
‘Important?’ Vicki’s voice cracked with emotion. ‘Like giving masculine jawlines to CEOs and pouting mouths to bored, rich housewives?’
‘Well, those jawlines and mouths paid for your education, or lack thereof.’
‘Come on,’ her father said as he held up a calming hand. ‘Let’s all just…’
‘Let’s what?’ her mother had screeched. ‘Pretend that after sixteen years in the education system, our daughter will have a decent career outside of some grubby little internet café.’
‘What more do you want? I did my best at school, even if it wasn't up to your standards. Even after school each day, I accompanied you to your golf club and shooting range, to pursue your interests rather than my own. All the other kids would be at the mall or playing video games, whilst I watched my mother develop her swing or shoot at deer shaped targets.’
‘At least those experiences involved some type of skill. Would I have been a better parent if I’d abandoned you in some cheap mall?’
‘Okay, I'm done here,’ Vicki had said, as she pushed her almost full plate away and stood up.
‘Well, I’ll put it in the oven and you can have some later,’ her father had murmured, ‘when the dust settles.’
Vicki had shaken her head. ‘I mean, I’m done living here. I’ll speak to the campus accommodation officer in the morning.’
‘Well, perhaps that’s best,’ her mother had said flatly and turned her attention to cutting her own pasta into perfectly digestible pieces.
As a direct consequence of the final fight with her mother, Vicki had made the move to the campus accommodation at the start of her final year. It was there she found herself sharing a small student apartment with Laurie Ann Taylor. Laurie’s first flatmate, a seemingly quiet girl from Iowa, had fallen pregnant and dropped out of college at the end of the fifth semester. This unforeseen event left Laurie at risk of eviction from the Mitre Court Halls of residence. In desperation, Laurie had handwritten thirty-six posters and placed them all conspicuously around the campus.
While Vicki had been waiting for a bus on the afternoon following the fight with her mother, she had spotted a sign tacked to a nearby door, which read:
Female roommate needed. N/S Compulsive cleaner preferred.
No slackers or psychos, please.
The poster had featured with a row of tear-off phone numbers along the bottom edge. Vicki had ripped one off, neatly folded it in half, and slotted it into the card holder of her wallet.
Following a JavaScript lecture the following afternoon, Vicki had called the number from a public telephone outside the Behavioural Sciences building. She was both pleased and apprehensive about being invited to view the apartment that afternoon.
As she stepped into the hallway of Mitre Court Hall, Vicki had found herself in a stark vestibule with a row of square post boxes on one wall, and mounted telephones on the other. Directly ahead of her was a formidable looking glass security door.
Vicki had wandered over to the telephone, picked up the handset and dialled flat eighty-eight.
‘Hi,’ a cheery voice had answered, ‘come right up.’
As Vicki replaced the phone, the security door had buzzed angrily. She pushed through it and took the shuddering elevator to the eighth floor.
When the steel door slid open, Vicki had stepped into a long, dimly lit corridor. The air was tinged with a student residency combination of antiseptic and fried garlic.
As she wandered along the dingy hallway, a door up ahead opened and Laurie had popped her head out.
‘Hey, come on in,’ Laurie beamed at her.
The friendly and untroubled smile was not an expression Vicki was used to seeing, so she immediately felt herself relax.
Moving into Mitre Court with Laurie was the best decision Vicki had ever made. Spending a year in the company of someone who was so chilled, soothed Vicki’s numerous anxieties. Whenever she felt stressed or overwhelmed, Laurie would insist that they head to the beach. She would then gather towels and paperbacks, insisting that they let any drama melt away beneath the heat of the sun.
After a day of leisure, once they were suitably relaxed, Laurie would lead Vicki home to sit on the floor, eat takeout pizza and formulate a simple plan of action for whatever was concerning her. Compared to Vicki – who had grown up in a luxurious cocoon which had left her paralysed with uncertainty and doubts, Laurie’s own bleak upbringing had left her optimistic and proactive. She seemed to possess a knack for breaking any problem into manageable pieces.
As a result of this personal support, Vicki spent the final year of college gaining better results than she ever had previously. She secured a decent degree and felt certain she would finally get the parental approval which had previously eluded her. She was wrong.
On the first Friday after graduation, her parents had taken her out for dinner at a local Thai restaurant. The trip had been arranged by her father who fanatically believed Thai food was the healthiest stuff on the planet. This was mainly due to the fact that for his fiftieth birthday he had attended some Holistic Dentistry retreat in woods outside San Francisco. He was away for little over a week, during which time he made no contact with home. When he had finally returned, Stephen Reiner had taken to wearing an ornate copper bracelet on his wrist, and would regularly bore anyone with his theory, “It’s not a theory,” he would say, that cumin was the new aspirin.
After they had ordered the food – yellow curry, Pad Thai and fried tofu – her mother had smiled in a disarming manner, before reaching appropriately for Vicki’s hand.
‘Your father and I are getting a divorce,’ she had said in a deliberately calm manner.
‘A what?’ Vicki had felt like she’d been punched.
‘It’ll be fine, honey.’ Her father smiled softly. ‘We've been planning it for years.’
Vicki’s mother shot him a bitter look.
‘What?’ He shrugged casually. ‘We agreed to tell her, so let’s be honest about the whole thing.’
‘We haven’t been happy for some time,’ her mother said, returning her attention to her daughter.
As they were speaking, Vicki was given the distinct impression the people sitting with her were pretending to be her parents. As it had transpired, that feeling was not too far from the truth.
Over the course of an uneaten lunch, it was revealed that her parents had decided to divorce while their daughter was still in high school. They had also decided this shift in family stability would possibly have a detrimental effect on her education. After some discussion, they had taken the mature decision to remain together, if only superficially, until Vicki had graduated from college. The irony was they had taken this bizarre decision in the interest of their child, leaving her unable to criticise their madness without appearing ungrateful. Their decision, however, had left Vicki utterly adrift.
As the fragmented family had left the restaurant that day, Vicki felt all sense of reality melt away. The sun was too bright in the sky above the parking lot. Everything she had known as familiar now seemed untrustworthy and impermanent.
In the months that followed, Vicki had remained in the Oceanside beach house while her mother and father had hastily relocated to the security of their birthplaces in Vegas and San Francisco, respectively. Her parents had mutually agreed they would not sell the beach house on the basis that both parties would share equal access to it. Two weeks after the arrangement was signed, Vicki’s mother had the locks changed.
Despite having a nice home in a beautiful part of the country, Vicki felt nothing – not sad or suicidal – just nothing. It was not even the reality of divorce that floored her; it was the simple fact her parents were equally conspicuous in their absence – as if after years of over-involvement in Vicki’s life, they had identified graduation as their cut-off point. They had freed themselves from the complication of being parents. Sometimes, Vicki thought perhaps each was assuming the other would take on the burden of the main parent. At darker times, she
believed she was too dissimilar to both parents to be a worthwhile investment of time or energy.
Her parents, sensing they had somehow contributed to this, took predictably polarised courses of action. Her mother had sent her several packets of mood lifting pills in long white boxes, while her father paid for a cognitive therapist (possibly even the same one he had used to cope with his mock marriage).
Neither of these methods had made any real impact on Vicki, who grew increasingly detached from the world. She remained living entirely in the beach house, and generated a meagre income from simple web design and providing online technical support to several businesses. This allowed her to work from home, meaning that maintaining her appearance or mood was not a necessity. Some days, she would lie curled on the balcony, watching the waves for hours, growing lost in the sparkle of the sun shaping and reshaping reality in infinitely changing patterns. The pattern seemed as temporal and shifting as her sense of her past.
In their final support session, the therapist had very calmly suggested it would be helpful for Vicki to reconnect with old friends. The idea was not an attractive prospect. Like most people experiencing depression, Vicki felt she had nothing to offer any friend – old or otherwise. She was, in essence, a ghost; disconnected from the bright world around her, and haunting a beach house devoid of the life it had once known.
But this evening she had sat and stared at the phone until she couldn't stand it any longer. So she had made contact with Laurie and invited her down to Oceanside. Of course, she had assumed Laurie would have no recollection of her former roommate, or if she did, she might have no interest in travelling for five hours to visit her. She was wrong on both counts. Her friend had sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her, and said she would arrange to get a bus ticket in no time.
During the night, the last thing she had heard from Laurie came in the form of a text message, which arrived just as Vicki was drifting off to sleep. The undulating melody of the cell phone drew her back from the edge of darkness. Her scrambling hand reached for the slim phone in the darkness. Finding the device, she held it aloft in her arm, squinting her eyes against the fierce glow like a lighthouse in the night.
Hi V. bkd amzngly cheap tickt on a Route King bus. Due in2 terminl at apprximtly 4.30pm. C u thn. xxx
Vicki had smiled to herself when she read the message, and slipped easily into her dreams.
The sun was high in the sky as Vicki eventually reached Victorville Avenue. She pulled off the freeway and parked in the lot behind the bus terminal. Despite the fact that she had arrived in Escondido twenty minutes early, she was now – as always – late.
As she hurried through the terminal doors, Vicki could see the silver bus pulling in to stand number twelve. Negotiating her way through the crowd, she kept her eyes eagerly on the bus doors. She was perhaps ten metres away from the vehicle when the bus slowed to a final stop. A smile was already starting to form on Vicki’s face in anticipation of seeing her friend.
However, Laurie did not exit the vehicle. The bus came to a brief stop – pausing just long enough for an elderly man to step down to the hot sidewalk. Almost as soon as the man cleared the bottom step, the pneumatic door hissed shut and the bus began reversing.
Vicki hurried along the terminal, moving parallel with the vehicle while craning her neck to see if her friend had simply fallen asleep. Unfortunately, the tinted windows of the bus were too dark to give up their secrets. She called out Laurie’s name, but her words were drowned out by the roar of the engine.
Within seconds, the Route King bus had rumbled across the oil-stained lot and moved out into the busy stream of traffic. Vicki anxiously opened her handbag, took out her cell phone, and called Laurie’s number. Holding the phone to her ear, she glanced anxiously from side to side. Within a couple of seconds, the phone rang. From somewhere nearby, she heard the sound of “Smoke on the Water” playing in a looped ringtone. It was the same ringtone her friend had used five years earlier.
Vicki turned around, expecting to see her friend grinning at her. Instead, she found herself looking at a strange-eyed young man, who vanished into the crowd. She still held the phone hopefully to her head, but the line died.
Chapter Five
Oceanside Police Station was housed in an attractive sandstone building. The entrance, hidden between large peach coloured arches, looked more like the façade of a Mediterranean restaurant than the strategic centre of policing in the San Diego area. However, the cream interior, housing numerous wooden desks and grey metal cabinets, was a busy and effective centre of law enforcement.
As he filled up the plain cardboard carton with various items from the bottom drawer of his desk, Detective Leighton Jones found an old photograph. He smiled at the image of a young officer with a gleam in his eyes, as he leaned, arms folded, against a cruiser.
For a moment the detective smiled wistfully, before slowly letting the picture fall to his side as he gazed straight ahead at some different time.
Leighton was still two days away from official retirement, but already felt as if he was fading into obscurity. It was not actually an entirely uncomfortable feeling. After a decade of pursuing murder cases, he was happy to accept the chief’s offer, and slip into normality. Chief Gretsch considered Leighton as a problem – they had often crossed swords in the past, and he clearly didn’t fit with a promotion-hungry new generation of unquestioning officers. Being almost sixty-years-old meant Leighton was neither malleable to fit in, nor young enough to justify a further transfer. Therefore, for the previous two weeks, Leighton had been physically present in the building but was no longer assigned to any investigations. In some ways, it did make sense. No case would be left unsolved when he left, but it also made Leighton feel like a ghost as work in the department carried on around him.
Ever since his retirement became common knowledge, his few friendlier colleagues tried their best to tease him with a mixture of humour and affection. Each morning, he would find an item left on his desk. The first had been a brochure for some coastal retirement home. Rather than simply consigning it to the waste paper basket beneath his desk, Leighton put his feet up and read the brochure from cover to cover with a wry smile on his face. Each subsequent day brought more “gifts” to his desk – most of them acquired from the lost property storage room. So far, he had found a walking stick, incontinence underwear, two sets of dentures, and several blister packs of Viagra. He had also been given some more appreciated gifts, including half a dozen bottles of dark rum.
For a man who had spent so much of his life working for the Oceanside Police Department, Leighton’s job of gradually clearing out his desk and two steel filing cabinets had been depressingly simple. Much of the debris of his career had already been consigned to the trash when the station had moved from a rather serious brick building on Mission Avenue to its new home back in 1999. That transition had been almost as psychologically difficult as his retirement. He had spent most of his career driving to and from that building. For at least six weeks after the relocation, whenever Leighton got a late night emergency call, he would find himself instinctively driving to the dark and desolate building before realising his mistake and turning the car around.
It was 6.15 pm. Leighton packed a few more items in the box before placing his car keys on top of it. Hugging it to his body, he made his way through the building to the car park.
He passed through the report writing area, which was essentially a long rectangular room lined with small wooden booths. Each had its own black swivel chair and laptop computer. However, technology had not quite delivered the promised revolution and Leighton was secretly pleased by the numerous shelves above the booths which were stacked with a variety of report forms and paper documents.
‘Good night, Danny,’ Leighton said to a young bearded detective, who had a phone cradled to his ear and was typing into a computer. In response to this, Danny twisted around in the chair and nodded and smiled back at the older detective.
&n
bsp; As he walked towards the exit, Leighton tilted his head into the dispatch room where two female workers were moving their attention between their notepads and a wall of display screens.
‘Hey, ladies, thanks for the gift, though you really shouldn’t have.’
‘You’re welcome, Leighton,’ said Laura, one of the dispatch officers, without looking around from the screens featuring maps and live feeds from car cameras.
The other female, Wendy, glanced around for a second and gave the detective a warm smile.
‘You all set for the big night out, Jonesy?’ she asked with a wink. ‘Maybe if the chief has forgiven you for upstaging him all those years ago with that Black Mountain Ranch thing, he’ll hire you a stripper as a parting gift.’
‘I’ll be happy as long as the chief isn’t going to be the stripper.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Laura said cheerfully.
‘Not on duty, of course.’ Leighton wagged his finger mockingly.
‘Well, you can have one for me tonight,’ Wendy grinned.
‘The only drink I’ll be having is cocoa.’
‘Ah, old age does not come alone, L. J.’
‘Never a truer word,’ Leighton said with a wave. ‘You girls have a quiet night. Remember, if you can’t be good, get a decent lawyer.’
All three of them laughed and then Leighton departed, leaving the dispatchers to the busy night ahead.
Leighton had no intention of showing up for his farewell bash. His venue of choice had been an unpretentious bar named Red Rooster over on the Boulevard. Leighton had spent a number of his younger years working in the area as part of the Traffic Division. As a fresh-faced officer with nothing but his TV for company, he had finished many shifts there, consumed his fair share of burgers, and sampled most of the tap beers.
