by S. B. Caves
Francine cursed and dug her nails into the steering wheel. She’d only spotted a couple of people on the streets so far, and they were both men. Shit, for all she knew, Lena could already be in someone’s car on her way out of town.
It was possible that in her anxiety she would head to a more populated part of town, somewhere busy. The huge chipped statue for Johnny’s Donuts loomed through the fog, a couple of cars parked in front of it. It was a twenty-four-hour joint, a place for truckers to stop off and get a fix to prevent them from falling asleep at the wheel between deliveries. With it being the only establishment open along the strip, Francine drove towards it. She parked up, got out and rushed through the automatic doors. ‘Excuse me,’ she said breathlessly to the plump supervisor at the counter, ‘but has anyone seen a girl running around near here?’
‘A girl?’ the supervisor asked, her stomach bulging in her stripy green and white shirt. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s a friend of mine … about eighteen years old, blonde, skinny. You seen anyone like that?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ the supervisor said. ‘You can ask them.’ She pointed at the two men eating their doughnuts at separate tables.
‘Sorry to bother you guys, but either of you seen a girl, about this tall, with straight blonde hair?’ Francine called to them.
The men shook their heads.
‘What’s she done?’ one of them asked.
‘She hasn’t done anything wrong. She was staying with me, and—’ A cacophony from outside stole the rest of her sentence: the screeching of tyres, the angry honking of horns, yells and a scream.
Francine hurried out, her head whipping around, trying to locate the source of the drama. Another screech of tyres on tarmac, another frantic scream, someone yelling, ‘Call the fucking cops!’ It was coming from the other side of Johnny’s Donuts. Francine ran down the street and turned the corner. Cars clogged the main road, gathering beneath a bridge. She dashed across the busy street and headed toward the commotion. At least five people were talking on their phones, but the awkward arrangement of the vehicles made it difficult to discern what had happened. She heard someone yell, ‘Has anyone got through to an ambulance?’ then someone else return, ‘What’s the name of this street?’
‘What’s going on?’ Francine yelled, still out of range. She saw diamonds of broken glass glittering in the parked cars’ headlights. And there was blood, dark red and syrupy, splashed around the tarmac. A few people were crouching over something. As she neared, she saw that the hood of a Ford was crunched in and crinkled, the windscreen completely shattered. Another car, turned diagonally in the road with black skid marks trailing from its tyres, had a deployed airbag but no other visible damage.
Two women were trying to calm a tall man who was leaning against the Ford with his hands over his mouth. He was shaking violently. His face was streaked with blood and embedded with tiny glass chips. The two women didn’t seem all that bothered by the cuts, but instead concentrated their efforts on soothing him.
On the other side of the cars, a man stumbled away from the herd and quietly fainted.
The hairs on Francine’s arms bristled, her skin breaking out in goose flesh. Her insides felt cold and slippery as she observed the surreal scene before her, trying to make sense of the confusion. She felt completely dislocated; a tourist in someone else’s nightmare.
‘Squeeze my hand if you can hear me. Can you hear me, sweetheart?’
‘Ambulance is on its way.’
‘That’s it. You’re doing really well.’
Francine reached the cars and peered through the bodies that were huddled on the floor. The stink of burnt rubber and the coppery tang of blood made her nostrils flare. She caught a glimpse of the wreckage; a bloody hand being held by a woman in a yellow rain slicker. She tilted her head, her thighs quivering as she continued to walk forward. She saw a shoe sitting by the kerb – a white sneaker with Velcro straps, collecting rain five feet away from the cars.
Her eyes locked on to a piece of bone protruding through faded green sweatpants. It took a few seconds for her mind to calibrate the image and understand that what she was seeing was a shin bone that had broken free of the skin and pierced the fabric. The huddle of Samaritans all seemed to be talking at once, offering support, reinforcing hope. One of them said, ‘It’s not that bad. The ambulance is going to be here any second. It’s not that bad. They’ll have you fixed up in no time, okay? It’s not that bad.’ But it was that bad, because even Francine could tell they were speaking to a dead girl.
Lena’s mouth hung agape and a perfect halo of blood encircled her shattered skull. In death, her eyes were straight, staring up at the starless sky. Her skin was ashen, as though the colour had been tipped out of the hole in her head, but an expression of total calm had settled on her face.
The frantic ambulance siren distracted Francine and she took the opportunity to step away. She didn’t need to see any more. The image of the girl’s broken body was embossed in her brain and she would not soon forget it. She staggered, walking drunkenly away from the horror, and used one of the cars to steady herself.
‘It’s fucked up, isn’t it?’ said a middle-aged woman with curly brown hair, squinting through cigarette smoke. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. You want a cigarette?’
‘No thanks,’ Francine said, turning her back on Lena. Blue light bathed the streets as the ambulance arrived. ‘You see it?’
‘Oh yeah,’ the woman said, her mouth pulling down at the corners. ‘I was behind the car she hit. It could’ve been me.’
‘What happened?’
The woman pointed her cigarette towards the bridge. ‘She jumped. All I saw was her slam down onto that car there. Boom.’ She gestured to the man with the glass in his face, who was now sitting with his back against the car tyre. ‘She could’ve killed him. If she’d hit the roof instead of the hood, she would’ve crashed straight through, maybe crushed his skull. I don’t know what they’re doing still talking to her. She’s a ghost.’
* * *
The police arrived shortly after the ambulance and were bullish with their investigation. An officer approached Francine with a notepad, but she shook her head. ‘I didn’t see anything,’ she said before the cop got started. ‘I came after.’ The cop nodded and moved on to the smoking woman, who was more than happy to reel off her version of events.
‘God be with her, that’s what I say,’ the smoker said. ‘Look how fuckin’ high up that bridge is.’
Francine thought briefly about giving up what little information she had concerning Lena. But that would invite more questions. Plus it would take her half the night to go through the whole story from the last few days, and by the time she was done with that, she herself might be the one under suspicion. She didn’t think they could put her in jail for anything – she was, in her frazzled mind, quite sure that she had done nothing wrong by offering Lena a place to stay. Yet trying to explain why the girl had suddenly taken off in the middle of the night and leapt off a bridge onto the oncoming traffic was something Francine didn’t think she’d be able to do.
As naturally as she could, she slipped away from the crowd and started towards the parking lot. Once she was behind the wheel of her car, she realised that she couldn’t stop her hands and legs from trembling. She gripped the wheel tightly until her forearms throbbed, clenching her teeth against the surge of emotion that threatened to overpower her. The sight of Lena lying there, crumpled and broken, was just about the saddest, most distressing thing she’d ever seen. It would be harrowing enough to see anyone like that, let alone someone she’d come to know, albeit briefly. Lena had been just a child, maybe one of Autumn’s only friends. She’d gone out of her way to seek Francine out, putting herself at what she believed to be genuine risk, all to help Autumn.
Francine screamed and thumped the wheel with both hands.
When her throat gave out and her rage was all but depleted, she turned the key in the
ignition. She tried not to think about Lena’s doll eyes staring up at the sky, but the resistance only gave the image more weight, animating the scene in her imagination. She pictured Lena bumbling aimlessly along the side of the road, tripping over her own feet, the traffic whizzing by, blowing her hair in her mouth. She imagined Lena clambering over the edge of the bridge and perhaps waiting there a second to admire the view below.
The fall, for however long it lasted, must’ve felt like freedom.
10
She typed various search combinations into Google but couldn’t find anything that directly related to Lena. How can there be nothing on the internet about this? she thought. Her bones were sticking out of her fucking clothes. Even if they couldn’t identify her, there would still be some kind of report about an anonymous woman plunging onto the traffic, wouldn’t there? But not if they were trying to keep this whole thing quiet. Not if they knew exactly who Lena was and were trying to keep her existence a myth.
This led Francine to a new search. She typed in Lena missing, and then remembered that that hadn’t been her real name. What was it – Cheryl, Charlene, something like that? She sat hunched over the keyboard in thought until the name bobbed to the surface of her memory. She expanded her search to Cherry child kidnapped. She skimmed the first page and found an archived article from 2005, printed in the Hillsboro Scribe.
The newspaper had used a school photo of Lena to accompany the article. She seemed so different to the young woman that Francine had met. She wore thick glasses that magnified her cross-eyes and was smiling cheekily. She looked happy. Christ, Francine couldn’t imagine how different she had been as a child, so quick to smile, to laugh. And now she was dead, with no family to mourn her.
I’ll mourn you, she thought, her grip tightening around the mouse. Gazing at the photo through the fingerprint-smeared screen, she felt herself welling up again.
That was enough. She was content in knowing that the girl had actually been abducted and hadn’t just escaped from some care facility as Will had suggested. Why was she even considering the notion that Lena had been lying when she knew in her gut that it had been the truth all along? Just being cautious, she supposed, and that was a damn good thing. It let her know that she hadn’t lost her mind just yet; there was still part of her that considered things such as consequences. And there would be plenty of those for what she had planned. Still, it was important to cross-reference everything. If there was ever a time in her life when she needed to be meticulous, it was now.
She began by trying different strings of words in Google in an attempt to find Glenn Schilling’s address. To her utter amazement, there were pages and pages of articles about his various homes, including a mansion in Oakridge and a seafront apartment in Little Peace, a small seaside town with a population of approximately six thousand. She was dismayed to discover that nobody had an exact address, although in the image search there were plenty of photos.
Forbes had run a piece on his Oakridge mansion, detailing the genius of the architecture. He’d apparently built the house from the dirt up, the completion of which had taken almost nine years. Francine assumed the $23 million home would have more than some old geezer manning the electric gate. But then again, maybe not. Didn’t this article just ooze arrogance? Mr Untouchable, Mr Showtime, The House That Laughter Built.
She’d made a note of everything relevant to her cause, including the approximate location of both homes and the address of Beachwood Studios, where Saturday Night Splendour was broadcast live every weekend.
Glenn Schilling was due a visit. But there was somewhere else she needed to go first.
11
The gun sat in the glove box. Francine couldn’t quite recall why she had bought it. It was years ago, when she’d first moved into Morning House and had gotten into the habit of picking up peculiar items that she was sure she would need. During that six- or seven-month period, when in hindsight she could safely say she’d lost her mind, when she was drinking like a goddam fish and couldn’t tell which way was up, she had bought the gun and got it registered at the local police station.
Thinking about it now, she’d probably bought it to blow her brains out. Instead, she’d tried her hand down at the shooting range. The first few times she went, she was absolutely useless with the thing. She’d squeeze the trigger with her eyes tightly closed, frightened of the muzzle flash. She’d feel the gun buck wildly in her hands, the recoil climbing her forearms and nesting in her shoulders. After an hour at the range she would be completely drained, her arms and neck aching, but her muscles soon adapted to the stress of those sessions. In a couple of weeks she was even able to hit the paper target a couple of times per clip, though she was no Clint Eastwood.
* * *
She parked on the far side of the lot and strolled over to Barnes & Noble. The queue outside the bookstore extended past Starbucks and continued on down the sidewalk. She had expected a trove of dowdy middle-aged single women, the type who bought into all that positive-thinking bullshit, but was surprised when she saw college kids and men in their thirties. She walked to the front of the queue. Nobody gave any sign that they recognised her, and why would they? The only picture of her in his stupid book was a grainy black-and-white photo about an inch tall. She’d had to sign off on the photo and any reference to her name, and was rewarded with a five-thousand-dollar cheque by the publisher. Now, according to the sticker on the new edition, there were over a million copies in print, which she thought might entitle her to a salary review.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the woman at the front of the queue, who had her eyebrow and lower lip pierced. Francine knocked on the glass door, harder and harder, until the spotty young bookseller opened it a crack.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes,’ Francine began. ‘I need you to get a message to Mr Wright.’
‘The signing is going to begin in about ten minutes,’ the boy said. ‘If you join the queue, we’ll start letting everyone in soon enough.’
‘I know.’ She wedged her foot in the door. ‘If you could pass on a message to him, I’m sure he’ll want to see me.’
‘What is it?’ the boy huffed.
‘Tell him Frankie is outside and needs a really quick word.’ Frankie. It sounded as foreign to her now as Francine had sounded to her back then. Only Will called her Frankie, up until the divorce at least.
* * *
After making love one night, in the drowsy moments before sleep, he had admitted that when they’d first met, he’d thought that was her real name. ‘I had no clue it was Francine,’ he said, lying on his side with his head propped in his hand. ‘You leaned in and said, “I’m Frankie.”’
‘Oh don’t be stupid. Nobody has ever called me Frankie in my life.’
‘You did. Maybe you’d had too much eggnog, I don’t know.’
She swatted his arm. ‘You were the drunk one. Jesus Christ, you spent about an hour telling me why you thought George Harrison was so cool, why the Beatles were so cool, all because that one goddam song came on. Loser.’
She had been working as an accounting assistant at Dusseldorf International Furniture for less than a year when she met Will at the company Christmas party. He was in press relations: ‘You know, making sure our brand identity reaches as wide an audience as possible. I’m telling you, six, seven, maximum eight years’ time, everyone is going to be eating dinner at a Dusseldorf table. IKEA is so out.’
That night they decided to share a cab, except halfway into the journey he grabbed her and kissed her and they ended back at his apartment.
Ten months later, in Fall, they had Autumn.
* * *
The bookseller reappeared and unlocked the door. ‘All right, come in,’ he said, holding it open.
Francine followed the boy through the store and up a flight of stairs. Will sat at a table with his memoir stacked in neat piles and two full-length posters adorning stands on either side of him.
‘What are you doing her
e?’ he asked, his expression stony.
‘I saw your tour schedule on your website. Thought I’d come and give you some moral support,’ she said drily. ‘I’m not trying to embarrass you,’ she added, hoping that the admission would put him at ease. Apparently it didn’t. ‘I came here instead of turning up on your doorstep. I thought that would be better.’
‘Better for what?’
Francine looked over at another bookseller, who was blatantly eavesdropping. Realising she’d been caught, the girl busied herself away from the table. ‘I’m not trying to mess your little thing up here. I know you’re working, so I don’t want to be trouble.’
‘Well you are trouble, Francine. Especially the way you’ve been behaving lately.’ He stood up, towering a full six inches taller than her. ‘It’s unacceptable.’
‘I’m not trying to be a pest.’ She held her hands up.
‘Then will you tell me what it is you want so I can get on with my work?’
‘I want to talk to you after your signing. Just me and you for an hour. There’s a coffee shop right next door we could—’
‘Absolutely not. No way.’
‘What?’
Frown lines carved through his forehead as he scowled. In a low, harsh voice he said, ‘I’m not going to sit around in some public place with you so the paparazzi can turn up and snap photos of us together. They’ve been ringing my phone off the hook because the ten years is coming up, and this is exactly the kind of thing they want.’
‘Paparazzi?’ She almost laughed. ‘All right, fine. I’ll follow you somewhere quiet.’
‘Francine, listen to me,: it is not going to happen. Whatever crazy thing you have cooked up in your head now, I don’t want to be involved, I’m not interested, and that is the end of it.’
The nape of Francine’s neck warmed as though sunburned. ‘No, that’s not the end of it, you son of a bitch. I’m not going to be sent away like some lost dog. You will listen to what I have to say or—’
