Don't Turn Around

by Hunter Morgan

  “I’m real sorry if I scared you, Miss McDaniel. I didn’t mean to.” Gaitlin looked back to the officer, who was now leaning back in his springy chair, tucking his hands behind his head.

  “Is it okay if I go now, sir? I told my girlfriend I’d be home as soon as I stopped by to see Willy.”

  The hospital employee looked to Casey. “You have anything else, Miss McDaniel?”

  She glanced at him. At Gaitlin. They were both looking at her as if she was the one with the problem. Truthfully, there was nothing else to say. She thought maybe she’d seen his car in the rearview mirror of her own car yesterday? He had come to the hospital where she worked to see a friend? Neither were crimes.

  But Casey knew how Gaitlin had looked at her that day in the parking lot. Again, upstairs in her office. He was angry with her. Resentful.

  “Miss McDaniel?”

  “Just stay away from me, Mr. Gaitlin,” Casey warned under her breath as she turned to go. “I’m not the kind of woman you want to mess with.”

  Chapter 8

  “Another letter for me?” Maury had to hide his delight. It was never a good idea for men like Maury to draw attention to themselves, not in the outside world, not in prison. It was one of the keys to remaining undetected. Had Maury stuck to that rule, he wouldn’t have been here for the last year. The drug bust had been a mistake; he’d been off his game. But at least it hadn’t been a fatal mistake.

  “Got your name on it,” Tatter grumbled. “I’m assuming it’s yours.”

  It was the fifth letter he had received, and with each one, Maury became more excited. More…pumped.

  The letters were so shrewdly run-of-the-mill. Chatty. The sender signed her name Danni with an i and she always made hearts instead of dots over her i’s.

  Only she was a he.

  Despite the name and the attempt at female handwriting, Maury knew from the very first letter that his new friend was a man, not a woman. This person was an admirer, but not one of the romantic types. “Danni” wanted something from Maury, but it wasn’t sex. He hadn’t yet come out and said so, but Maury suspected it was something much more intimate than sex.

  It was that thought that thrilled him the most.

  Seated on his bunk, Maury carefully pried the two staples out of the envelope. A guard in the prison mail room always slit the envelopes across the top, shook them to search for contraband, and then sealed them back up with a stapler.

  Danni’s letters were getting more interesting. Each one building on the previous. Maury had a feeling something was about to break. He had a feeling that Danni, who had been testing the waters, would speak his mind soon. Maybe today.

  “Don’t let me down,” Maury whispered under his breath. Somehow he knew Danni wouldn’t.

  The letter was carefully folded into thirds and Maury suspected, by the soft lines of the folds, that it had not been inspected by anyone inside the prison facility. Guards in the mail room weren’t supposed to read the inmates’ correspondence, but they were supposed to check for contraband: photos, drugs, and the like. No one had even bothered to open Maury’s actual letter, he suspected, because he had been receiving mail from the same “woman” for weeks, the same innocuous letters.

  Some women had a thing for men in prison. Everyone knew it. Prisoners. Guards. Administrators. Some women got off on the idea that the man they so-called loved had committed a crime. The bigger the crime, the more obsessed women were. It was not uncommon, Maury had once learned on a TV news program, for women to pursue incarcerated murderers. Death row inmates. Even serial murderers who murdered women.

  The weaker sex. A mystery, for sure.

  Maury lay back on his bunk, lifted his knees, and smoothed the folds of the paper. He read through the letter once quickly, but was left unsatisfied. There was nothing here. No secret message.

  But there was no woman named Danni. He was sure of it.

  Maury stared at the words on the lined paper for a moment, then let his eyes go out of focus. He sensed Danni was trying to tell him something, something beyond the trivial chatter about her boring job and a neighbor’s cat getting into her trash cans.

  Suddenly, letters, then words began to take shape on the page.

  How clever. How fuckingly, unbelievably clever.

  Heart racing, Maury retrieved a pen from under his pillow and circled letters in a familiar pattern. When connected, the letters became words. A different letter from that which the untrained eye could read began to emerge.

  I have admired you for a long time. I know your work, your real work, and you are my hero. I wish that I could be more like you. I hope that we can be good friends. I hope that I can learn from you.

  Astounded, Maury read the note twice more to be sure he had made no mistakes in the translation. He had not. He knew he had not because the stranger, this new admirer, was using Maury’s own secret code.

  Something woke Casey in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t Linda’s voice in her dreams. It wasn’t her father or the dog whining to go out. It was a feeling that woke her. A bad feeling.

  Eyes wide open, Casey gripped the blanket with both hands as she took deep, shaky breaths. Mandy had just asked her about her anxiety and Casey had told her it wasn’t an issue. Casey had been telling the truth. She hadn’t had any anxiety attacks, but it had only been a half-truth. The anxiety was here again, somehow lurking just beyond her consciousness, in a place where she could sense it but not really see it. Feel it. It was almost as if it was taunting her.

  But Casey would not give in to it. Not ever again.

  She listened to the house. She heard nothing but familiar sounds; the whoosh of warm air blowing through the heating vents and the low hum of the fan Ed had left on again in his bathroom.

  She breathed a little easier, forcing herself to relax. Nothing was wrong. She was fine. Her father was fine. The house was quiet.

  Her fingers loosened from the blanket. Lincoln was right. She was too jumpy. He was just telling her at lunch yesterday at the hospital—he’d run in for a quick bowl of Sarge’s chili—that she needed to relax a little. Enjoy life more. “I am enjoying life, damn it,” she had told him. They had both laughed.

  Although she and Lincoln now talked every day, she had not told him about Linda’s case. Or about Gaitlin. About him following her. About the incident at the hospital. It sounded paranoid, even to her. She didn’t want Lincoln to think she was more uptight than he already thought she was.

  Now positive that there were no unusual sounds in the house, Casey got out of bed, headed for the bathroom down the hall. As she crossed the room, however, she felt drawn to the window. The pull was so strong, it almost seemed magnetic. After walking across the cool hardwood floor, she parted the heavy drapes and leaned forward to look out over the Cape Cod’s roofline. There was a car parked along the street positioned just right between two street lamps so that it remained in a shadow.

  That was odd. Her neighborhood was quiet in the middle of the night. No one on her street worked a nightshift. None of them were the late-night-partying type.

  Casey watched the car for a moment, squinting. Her heart rate increased. Was the car light blue?

  She couldn’t be sure. Without her contacts, she could hardly tell it was a car.

  She darted to her nightstand, grabbed her glasses, and pushed them onto her nose. She considered turning on the light but quickly nixed that idea. If someone was watching her, if it was Gaitlin, she wouldn’t want him to know she was on to him.

  Casey was back at the window in less than thirty seconds, but by the time she pulled back the drapes again, the car was pulling away.

  Casey let the drapes fall and leaned back against the window covering her mouth with her hand. Maybe the car hadn’t been blue. Maybe it had been white.

  It had looked so familiar.

  Beginning to shake, she wrapped her arms around her waist. Old emotions, old terrors began to wash over her in thick, suffocating wav
es. She always read about people feeling as if they were drowning in water when they began to suffer anxiety attacks, but it had never been water she had felt she was drowning in. It had always been something thick. Like oil. Suffocating her, dragging her down.

  The car had looked similar to Charlie’s but it had looked just like Billy Bosley’s.

  Which, of course, was ridiculous because he and the car had gone to a watery grave eighteen years ago.

  Angel read the price tag off each object and rang it up on the cash register before adding it to the bag.

  The lady bought a Redskins football, a NASCAR car model that included all the pieces and the glue, a used South Park DVD, and a “grab bag” of candy that Angel made up herself in the back. Her sister ordered big bags of candy wholesale, and then they would divide it and put it into brown paper lunch sacks and staple them shut. Most of it was crappy, cheap candy. Sticky taffy. Tasteless sour balls. But they always threw in a pack of snack-sized Skittles or Nerds, or a little toy, just to keep customers coming back.

  “That’ll be twenty-three fifty.” Angel ripped the receipt off the top of the cash register. “Your kid’s birthday?”

  “Yeah. He’s gonna be ten,” the proud mother said, digging into her purse for the money.

  Ten, Angel thought. There was no way she was going to let Buddy watch shows like South Park when he turned ten. She was going to raise Buddy right. Raise him better than her mom had raised her and Amber.

  As Angel accepted the crumpled one-dollar bills from the customer’s hand, someone beat on the bongos near the doorway. “Hey,” Angel called, not looking up, “read the sign. No playin’ the bongos.”

  “You rather I played you?”

  Angel looked up to see James, Charlie’s brother. She groaned to herself. James was the last person on earth she wanted to see today. Any day the rest of her life. James was only a year younger than Charlie, but he had none of Charlie’s charm and he was twice the trouble.

  “Sorry, but all I got left is change,” the customer said, giving Angel the last five dollars in quarters, dimes, and nickels.

  “That’s okay.” Angel dumped the coins into the cash register drawer without counting. Women like this one never tried to cheat her out of fifty cents. Not poor working women. It was the ones with the expensive purses and jeans you had to watch. Angel handed her the plastic bag of toys and candy. “Have a nice day. I hope your boy has a good birthday.”

  James slapped the bongos.

  Angel watched the customer walk out the door, which wasn’t so much a door as a gate. Amber rented the space at the flea market in a big warehouse. The good thing was, the rent was cheap; the bad thing was, you had to open and close the same hours as everyone else, because there weren’t any walls to the booths, just chain-link fence, so there was no way to secure your own store. Everyone walked out at the same time every night, and one old watchman was left to keep an eye on everything.

  James rapped his knuckles on the bongos again.

  “I said knock it off.” Angel walked around the counter. “Get out of here.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I told you before, I don’t want you hangin’ around here. Amber said if you stole anything else, she was callin’ the cops on you and she was firin’ me. I can’t lose my job. I got a boy to feed.”

  James pushed his long, thinning hair out of his eyes. He looked so much like Charlie that some people believed they were twins. But Angel thought James looked a lot meaner. It was something about the way his eyes slanted at the corners.

  “Come on, Angel,” James said in a sweet voice, trying to put his arm around her. “Come on, sugar pie. Tell the truth. You’re glad to see me. You miss me comin’ around.”

  Angel stepped out of his reach, grabbing the bongos. She put them back on the shelf where they belonged. “What do you want, asshole? I don’t have any money.”

  “Aww, come on, sweet lips. How can you act like this?”

  “And you can’t borrow my car again. I gotta have my car to get home when Amber gets back. I gotta pick Buddy up at the babysitter’s. She’s got a date tonight. She says I’m late again, she’s leavin’ him on the step.”

  “Just an hour,” he begged. He picked up a little rubber hammer thingy and hit a xylophone.

  The kiddy instrument made a ping.

  “Take your truck.” She snatched the hammer out of his hand.

  “Fuel pump’s gone up in it.”

  “Again? You lie. The last time you said that, it was workin’ just fine. You just wanted to use up my gas instead of your own.”

  Following her down a narrow aisle, James picked up a pink feather boa from the costume area and wrapped it around his neck. He looked stupid in a flannel shirt and pink boa. “I can’t believe you’re bein’ so mean to me. Why you bein’ so mean to me, Angel baby?”

  When she turned to look at him, she saw that he had taken a rubber mask from a whole bin of them and pulled it over his face. It was Freddy Krueger. A cheap copy of the good ones you saw in costume stores and on TV. They had sold a lot of them in the last week for Halloween.

  “I’m not kiddin’. Get out of here, James.” She turned her back to him and began arranging a stack of coloring books. “I’m not loanin’ you my car.”

  “Sure you are.” He came up behind her, putting his hands on her hips. He thrust his crotch against her butt. “Otherwise, big brother and I will have to have a little talk. A little talk about what you and me were doin’ when he was in jail.”

  She spun around in his arms and yanked the mask off his face. “You wouldn’t do that,” she said, fighting tears. “Me and him were barely goin’ out when he got arrested.”

  James thrust his face into Angel’s. He had bad breath. She’d known it was a mistake to sleep with him. Her mother had always said if you climb into bed with filth, you climb out filthy. It was just that she had been so lonely and James had been nice to her. Kinda. “You can’t tell him,” she said. “He moved into my place. He’s my old man now and I’m his old lady.”

  James held out his hand.

  Angel looked away, her eyes filling with tears. She hated feeling like this. Like she was trapped. But she loved Charlie. And he loved her. She couldn’t let James screw that up. What would she have then? She’d be all alone again and she hated being alone. “You better be back in an hour,” she warned, thrusting her hand into her pocket for her keys. “You’re late and I swear to God I’ll take my car back and then I’ll chase you down in it and run your sorry ass over.”

  He took the keys and walked away with a smirk on his face and the pink boa still around his neck. “Thanks.”

  “You better not be stickin’ up a liquor store or somethin’ stupid like that in my car!” she hollered after him.

  He gave her the finger.

  “Dad, don’t pout.” Casey hit her signal before decelerating to turn into Jayne’s neighborhood. “You’ve always liked seeing kids get dressed up for Halloween. Remember the kids who used to come to the door at the house in Baltimore? Neighborhood kids. Kids of your colleagues. You would give them toys instead of candy. Neat toys like little abacuses and calculators.”

  Ed sat stiffly on the passenger side, his arms crossed over his chest. He wore a leather and sheepskin hat with the earflaps snapped on top. Once upon a time he had been handsome in the hat; now, it sat askew, looking a little silly.

  Casey reached out and straightened the hat. “Hey, Dad, do you remember…” She gripped the steering wheel. “Do you remember what kind of car Billy Bosley drove?”

  “Billy Bosley?” He slowly turned his head to look at her. It was obvious he had no idea who she was talking about.

  Casey looked at the road again. How could she have been so stupid as to have brought up Billy Bosley? Now what should she say?

  “Billy Bosley,” he repeated. “I had him in Shakespeare, The Comedies, fall semester.”

  She was fascinated that her father could remember Billy Bosl
ey had taken a Shakespeare class from him almost two decades ago, and that that was what stood out in her father’s mind. Maybe the medication was working. His doctor said it could be weeks, even months before they saw any change.

  “A LeSabre,” Ed said suddenly. He grabbed her arm, startling her. Her father never voluntarily touched anyone but Frazier.

  “He drove a white Buick LeSabre.”

  Casey pulled into Jayne’s driveway. Joaquin’s car was there, but Jayne’s van wasn’t. She was obviously running late. Nothing new there.

  “I think you’re right, Dad. It was a white LeSabre.”

  “A white LeSabre,” Ed said, obviously pleased with himself. He unbuckled his seat belt and opened the car door. “Nice car for a young man that age. Got a B in the class, I think. He—” Her father slammed the door and his voice was lost to her.

  For a second Casey just sat there. She remembered the feel of the upholstery of the car. She remembered the smell of Billy in it.

  Ed cut in front of the car and started down the driveway. Casey waited until he passed her door to open it. “Dad, this way. You’re going to walk around and go trick-or-treating with Jayne and the kids.” She grabbed his arm and gently turned him, then led him back up the driveway toward the house.

  “Are you going?” he asked.

  “I was thinking I’d run over to my friend’s house and say hi while you’re with Jayne.”

  “Billy?” He shuffled beside her. “Nice young man. Biology major.”

  He can remember Billy Bosley’s college major, but he can’t always remember to put on underwear. “With Lincoln, Dad. You remember Lincoln? He likes to watch The Weather Channel too.”

  Ed stopped at the front door. “I should go home. Frazier is at home.”

  She reached around him and rang the doorbell, then opened the door. “Come on, Dad. You stay a while, see your grandchildren in their Halloween costumes, and then Jayne will take you home.”