The Gift of Illusion: A Thriller

by Richard Brown

  She stopped yelling for a moment and just stared in bewilderment at her daughter. For a brief second, she could see right through her, as though Lori had disappeared.

  When she blinked her eyes, her daughter returned.

  7

  Lori couldn’t feel her mother pulling her to the car, or her legs dragging loosely upon the ground. She could see everything around her, the grass at her feet, the cars at the light, the rainbow in the sky, but felt as though she were just a visitor in someone else’s body.

  8

  Carol opened the passenger door for Lori and then headed around to start the car. The time for yelling was over. Her normally perfect little girl’s recent actions had her at a loss for words. She turned into the driveway and parked the car, leaving just enough room so James could squeeze by into the garage. She didn’t have to tell her daughter to go to her room, Lori went on her own.

  Carol walked down to the mailbox at the corner of the driveway and shuffled through an array of junk mail and bills. When finished, she closed the mailbox and headed inside the house. She placed the mail on the kitchen counter and walked over to the phone on the wall. She dialed the number to the used car lot where her husband, James, was working. The clock on the microwave said it was almost 5:00 p.m.

  “Economy Cars. Don speaking.”

  “Hi, Don. Is my husband around?”

  “I’ll go check. Hold on.”

  Fifteen seconds later.

  “Ugh, Carol, he’s with a customer right now. Is it an emergency?”

  “Not really. But can you tell him to call me when he gets a chance?”

  “I sure can.”

  “Okay, thanks Don.”

  An hour passed before the phone finally rang.

  “When do you think you’re gonna get home?” she asked, disgusted. “I need to get dinner ready.”

  “I know,” James said. “But it’s really busy right now and we’re kind of short on help tonight.”

  “What do you mean short on help?”

  “I mean it’s just me and two other salesmen working the lot, and one of them is new. I’m in the middle of training him right now.”

  “Are you telling me that idiot Frank didn’t schedule a full load for the sale?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the line.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  “Well…”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s Lori. She’s been acting up. I don’t know what her problem is.”

  “What did she do?”

  “I’ll explain when you get home.”

  “I’ll try and get out of here as fast as I can. But I can’t promise anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then I’ll see you when I get home.”

  Carol hung up the phone and walked into the living room. She glanced up the stairs at Lori’s bedroom and wondered what could be going on with her daughter. What happened to the polite girl who made good grades in school, the girl who couldn’t go to sleep at night without being tucked in first?

  9

  James Ackerman arrived home from work over two hours after his conversation with his wife. Carol sat on the living room sofa reading a new rousing romance novel when he emerged from the front door.

  “Sorry, honey, but you know how these things go,” he said, hurrying into the kitchen.

  Carol kept her face buried in the thin paperback and acted like she hadn’t noticed her husband’s sudden arrival.

  “I guess I’m a little late for dinner, huh?” He waited for a response from his wife. Hearing none, he headed into the living room. “Honey.”

  “A little,” Carol said, not shifting her eyes from the romance. “Actually, there was no dinner.”

  “What do you mean? Didn’t you cook tonight?”

  Carol finally set the book down and looked up at her husband leaning one arm against the crook of the kitchen doorway.

  “What’s the point? My husband wasn’t around to eat and my daughter decided to go without food tonight.”

  “Okay, what’s wrong with Lori?”

  Carol left the sofa and walked toward James. “I don’t know. But she’s been acting pretty strange lately.”

  “Does this have something to do with school?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Well, let’s see. For starters, I had to drive her to school today.”

  James walked back into the kitchen and opened up the refrigerator.

  “Why? What’s wrong with the bus?” he asked, pouring a glass of iced tea.

  “Nothing as far as I know. This morning she purposely took forever getting ready so that she would miss the bus.”

  James squinted as he sucked back some very sweet tea.

  “She's having problems with her friends.”

  “Really?”

  “That's what she said. She cried, James. She got down on her knees and cried. She begged me not to make her go.”

  James shrugged his shoulders and stepped out of the kitchen. “Well, she’s cried before when she didn’t get her way.”

  “I’ve never seen her cry like this. Something’s wrong with her."

  James sat down on the couch. “I'll have a talk with her tomorrow."

  “Well, there's something else," Carol continued. "On the way home I caught her at the corner of Fairway at the park.”

  “She was at the park by herself? Where was Mrs. Mills?”

  “I don’t think Lori ever went next door. I haven’t talked to Brenda yet about it either. But the fact that she was at the park by herself isn’t what’s worrying me. It’s the way she acted when I found her. She never said a word, even though it felt like she wanted to. Do you understand?”

  James shook his head. "No."

  “You should have seen her. Her face was pale white. Her eyes were so glossy you would have thought they’d turned to glass. At one point, I stopped yelling and just stared at her. And she just stared back, with her mouth open, like she didn’t remember who I was.”

  10

  Carol lay in bed with her eyes open. She turned and looked over at the illuminated alarm clock sitting on the nightstand.

  It was almost midnight.

  For at least an hour, she tried to clear her thoughts, tried not to worry about her daughter. But right as she would fall asleep, a horrible vision would pop into her head—visions of disease, some even of death. Afterward, her heart would race, her lungs would tighten, and her eyes would be open again.

  Fifteen minutes had passed before Carol finally decided to close her eyes again, and that’s when she heard the footsteps in the hallway.

  She sat up in bed and listened.

  The footsteps moved closer.

  The hallway light now shined from underneath the door.

  Carol looked over at James sleeping soundly beside her and wondered whether to wake him, but before she could finish pondering, the bedroom door cracked open and her daughter emerged in the light.

  “Lori,” Carol whispered. “What are you still doing up? You should be in bed.”

  “I can’t get to sleep,” Lori said softly.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Can you come tuck me in?”

  “Oh, sure, honey,” she said, swinging her legs off the bed. It had been weeks since she had last tucked her daughter in. She missed it.

  James woke, rolled over, and asked: “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Lori was already lying in her bed when her mother entered the room. Carol walked over to the bed and grabbed the sheets to pull over her daughter.

  “I’m glad you decided to talk to me,” she said. “I was getting worried about you.”

  “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m fine.”

  “That’s g
ood to hear. Would you like a kiss, too?”

  Lori nodded.

  Carol smiled and leaned over to kiss her daughter.

  11

  Not seconds after her mother left the room, Lori started to feel different.

  Every nerve in her body tingled in an uncontrollable dance. Her hands shook incessantly like branches on a tree with the coming of a violent storm. She could feel her heart pounding inside her chest. The room became piping hot and within a matter of seconds sweat gleamed atop her body.

  She jumped out of bed and opened a window. The sixty-five degree temperature outside did little to cool her and her skin acted as a repellent to the wind. She collapsed back on the bed and gasped for air. Her bed sheets became saturated with sweat as the room temperature continued to rise. Her whole body shook, every muscle vibrating back and forth like an anarchic guitar string.

  Heat rushed to the surface of her body.

  Skin blistered, popped.

  Her bladder released some of the building pressure and a puddle of urine soiled the white sheets between her thighs.

  She could no longer hear the breeze rustling through the curtains. All she could hear was her heart pounding faster and faster and louder and louder inside her chest.

  Until the darkness overwhelmed her, and silence everlasting

  Chapter Two

  1

  Elmwood Police Department.

  “Winters,” called Police Chief Donald Stevens from across the building.

  Isaac grabbed a cup of coffee and made his way to the other end of the precinct. Stevens sat down behind his desk as Isaac arrived at the doorway.

  “Take a seat,” said the husky black man with a thick, boisterous mustache.

  Isaac sat down in a red leather chair at the other end of the desk and watched the chief gnaw at the eraser end of a pencil, scanning a manila folder.

  Stevens slid the folder across the desk. “I have something I want you to see.”

  Inside the folder were a half a dozen black and white photographs. Isaac perused the photos and then looked up at his superior. “Okay. What's the deal?”

  “The deal?” the chief repeated. “Doesn’t this look strange to you?”

  Isaac flipped through the photos again. He couldn’t tell if anything was strange or not, most of the photos were almost entirely blackened and seemed a touch out of focus.

  Stevens slid another photo across the desk. It was of a young girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old. A school photo. "This is Lori Ackerman. In those photos is what's left of her."

  “That black smudge is a little girl?”

  "Yes."

  "She burned to death. That's horrible."

  “Notice the outside edges of the bed are still in pretty good shape and almost nothing else in the room was even mildly damaged.”

  Isaac couldn’t believe his eyes. If Stevens was correct, all that remained of the little girl was just ashes on a bed. How does the famous nursery rhyme go again: ashes, ashes, we all fall down?

  “Is that a foot draping off the bed?”

  Stevens leaned over the desk and glanced at the bottom of the present photo. “Yes,” he said, then reclined back in his chair.

  Isaac rubbed at the two-day stubble on his chin and shook his head with an uncommon case of disbelief.

  “Let me ask you something.”

  “Shoot,” said Isaac.

  “What kind of fire could do something like this?” The chief raised his eyebrows with a half excited, half suspicious look on his face.

  Isaac didn’t answer. He had no idea.

  “A controlled one, perhaps?”

  Isaac finally looked up from the photos. “No accident, huh?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Stevens said, scratching at the roof of his forehead. “All I know is what I see in those photos. And it looks pretty damn hard to believe.”

  “Well, yeah,” Isaac said, trying not to seem too surprised, if there were such a feeling. After twenty years in law enforcement and numerous investigations little surprised him anymore. This morning, however, these strange photos, reminded him of the old days. Days better left forgotten.

  “So far any reasonable source from which the fire could’ve evolved hasn’t been found, and I find that even harder to believe.”

  Isaac set the photographs down on the desk and took a small sip of coffee.

  “Who’s covering the investigation?”

  Stevens smiled, his black mustache widened. “You are,” he said, pointing his finger across the desk.

  Isaac sighed. This was not what he wanted. Today he had planned a busy schedule of sitting around and pretending he was on vacation, like usual.

  “Take the folder with you. I want you to start right away, you know, while the dust is still fresh.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, the parents are staying at the Goodnight motel off Fairway. Do what you do best. You never know.”

  As Isaac was leaving the office, Stevens yelled, “Oh, and take Simmons with you.”

  2

  Isaac didn’t care much for the idea of toting all two hundred and fifty sweating pounds of Daniel Simmons around with him, while being constantly bombarded with every goddamn obnoxious question Simmons could think to ask. He had no idea how Simmons became a detective, but he hadn’t been one for long. One day, like the pesky itch at the bottom of your foot that only comes after you’ve put on your shoe, the fat man just appeared. At first nobody questioned Simmons’s ability as an investigator, it was only after they worked with him a couple of times that something started to smell fishy, and it wasn’t just the white undershirt slapped over his back.

  Daniel Simmons was forty-two years old, only four years younger than Isaac, and yet seemed to have no experience in the field. He knew nothing of how to search for clues or properly contain evidence, which was mighty peculiar since he carried the same badge as the most decorated men on the force.

  All of this was a big deal to most, but Isaac really didn’t care. Big deal if Simmons didn’t know the first damn thing about being a detective. Ever since Linda’s death, Isaac cared less and less about doing the noble work, about being the world's shit pickeruper. The only problem Isaac had with Simmons was the excessive diarrhea from his mouth.

  “So what are we doing?” Simmons asked from the passenger seat of the black Dodge Charger.

  “We’re going to 2420 Maria Avenue.”

  Simmons wiped a hand down his dark brown mustache then glanced over at Isaac. A puzzled grin rose on his face. “Well, I know, but—”

  “Look, I know what you mean. And I don’t know exactly what we’re doing either. I’m in the dark as much as you. I guess we’ll both find out when we get there. Did you see the photographs?”

  “Photographs?” Simmons repeated with the half assed, puzzled grin on his face. The grin was a Simmons trademark, one hundred percent his own.

  “You didn’t see them?” Isaac asked again, glancing over at Simmons.

  The heavy man still wore the ridiculous Muppet grin.

  “No. I guess I’m a little more in the dark.”

  “Well, you can’t tell much from the photos anyway.”

  “I'd still like to see them.”

  What made the photos horrifying was not what you saw, but what you didn’t see, and in this case, what you didn’t see was the young girl’s body. The ash leftover of eleven-year-old Lori Ackerman rested inside a large hole where the fire had burned through the mattress. A space about six inches around the bed appeared untouched, still white, and other than the half melted lampshade from the nightstand, everything else looked fine, at least in the photographs.

  “They’re in the back seat in the folder.”

  Simmons reached back and snagged the folder between his middle and index finger. Then he removed the six black and white photographs and sorted through them.

  “Damn,” he said almost immediately. “Is that a foot?”

  “Yeah, that’s a foot.” Isaac di
dn’t even have to look. Yes, he remembered a foot, just one. The right foot he had thought.

  He watched Simmons flip through and examine each of the photos. He wondered if the look of disbelief on Simmons’s face was the same look he had given Chief Stevens back at the precinct.

  “What happened?”

  “A fire happened.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. About midnight, I think. Those photos were taken very early this morning.”

  “Who was it? In the photos, I mean,” said Simmons, sliding the photos back into the folder.

  “An eleven-year-old girl.”

  “Really?” said Simmons, genuinely surprised. He tossed the folder into the back seat. “A little girl? That’s horrible.”

  "That's what I said."

  “Did anyone else get hurt or killed?”

  “No, just the girl as far as I know.”

  “How did the fire start?”

  “Don’t know. That’s what we’re supposed to find out. Stevens thinks the parents may have had something to do with it. Or so he led on.”

  “Why would someone do that to their child?”

  “I don’t know. But it seems to happen more and more."

  Isaac turned left on Fairway Boulevard. Both detectives sat quietly for a moment and watched a fire truck scream by with sirens blazing on the opposite side of the road.

  How ironic.

  “Have you talked to the parents yet?”

  “No,” said Isaac. “But they were notified that we would like to speak with them.”

  “Are they staying at the house?”

  “They’re not allowed. I believe they’re staying at a motel not too far from here. Later we’ll stroll on down there and say hello.”

  Isaac pulled the black Charger up to the Ackerman house on the side of Maria Avenue behind a row of police cars. Hordes of local television news vans were parked on the opposite side of the street. “I guess they found a story,” he said, glancing over at the reporters.