Liquid fear f-1

by Scott Nicholson

  “Did you see the way they looked at me?”

  “Who?” Wendy was used to people staring at Anita. Besides being beautiful, her friend often evoked a feeling of vague recognition, as if the viewer had seen her somewhere before but couldn’t place the face. Some did but couldn’t admit it in polite company.

  “The cops,” Anita said. “They know.”

  “You told me you quit drugs when you left LA. You’ve never been paranoid before.”

  “Just like the trials. Freak out, and then forget.”

  “You didn’t take more of that stuff your dead psychiatrist gave you, did you?”

  “Right after you left. I couldn’t wait till noon.”

  “Damn. I told you to consult your doctor before you took more.”

  “I needed it. Those monsters in their holes-”

  “Listen-”

  “I have to go now. They’re coming. Like they came for Susan.”

  “Nita?” Her query fell into the white noise of a dead connection.

  Susan. Who is Susan? And why is that name scaring me?

  She wondered if she should call the police or 911. Given Anita’s persecuted state of mind, the sudden arrival of uniforms might drive her to-what? Wendy didn’t know.

  Her friend, though flamboyant and prone to deep depression, had never suffered from irrational complexes. Anita lived only two miles from campus, but with college-town traffic, it might take half an hour to reach her apartment.

  I shouldn’t have left her, but she seemed fine.

  Wendy tried the phone line again but gave up after seven rings. She was about to try again when she sensed movement in the office doorway behind her.

  Her chair squeaked as she turned, the grating noise causing her to grimace. The door seemed far away, the office walls appearing to stretch from her and tilt at steep angles.

  The sudden onset of vertigo disturbed her. She wondered if she was catching the flu, or if the Long-Haul Breakfast was making a contaminated run. Her head had been aching and mildly stuffy all morning, but she had no fever.

  The morning’s events had been stressful, but she considered herself adaptable and able to handle the unexpected. She was bracing for an attempt to stand when a shadow fell over the door.

  “Wendy?” It was Chase Hanson, a student who wore his hair in a 1950s duck and favored checkered shirts. Mediocre talent, but like many aspiring artists, he thought attitude and style far outweighed the need for craft. “Got a sec?”

  She swallowed and closed her eyes, hoping he wouldn’t notice her unease. She motioned to a chair in the corner. “Sure.”

  Chase closed the door behind him, and the room felt impossibly cramped, like a mausoleum vault.

  Like the factory.

  He turned and gave her a smile, but his teeth descended in vulpine proportions. The look on her face must have startled him, because the boyish grin froze.

  “I thought…” He looked past her to Madonna of Egypt, one of Wendy’s surrealist creations, an oval-faced, hollow-eyed female swathed in filthy bandages like a mummy. “About yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” Wendy gripped the arms of the chair, hoping the solidity of the oak would reaffirm her corporeality. Her pulse beat a steady path across her temples and her ears rang with a high-pitched whine.

  Chase waved his hand at the desk. “What happened.”

  Not trusting herself to stand and face him, she sagged into the chair, which was now as unaccountably soft as a stack of pillows. She nodded, barely hearing him, focused on the three spots of cadmium-yellow paint that adorned his left boot.

  “I know you could get in big trouble for something like that,” he continued. “Probably even lose your job.”

  The implications of his words finally broke through the sensory gauze. She attempted to sit upright but failed. “What are you talking about?” she said thickly.

  He grinned again, but this time the expression was lewd instead of gregarious. “Ah, I get it. It never happened, right?”

  “Chase-”

  He fell into a mockery of an old advertisement for laundry detergent. “Ancient Chinese secret, huh?”

  “That was lame in seventh grade. What’s wrong with you?”

  The real question was what was wrong with her, but she wasn’t willing to ask that one. The potential answers were too disturbing.

  “Hey, don’t go getting all upset,” he said. “Although you’re sexy when you’re all scrunched up.”

  Chase’s tone had changed from cautious to cocky, an “Aw shucks” charm he donned as if it were a thrift-shop beret. If only the walls weren’t leaning in opposite directions, she would stand and usher him out the door. As it was, she scarcely trusted her lips, because she wasn’t sure they would move at her command. She tried anyway.

  “You’re making me uncomfortable,” she said, though in truth she had been uncomfortable before he had even entered the office. Now the floor was a jiggly magic carpet of Jell-O.

  “I know, sweetie,” he said. “I’ve been getting hot and bothered myself. You know what they say about guys my age.”

  Chase must have picked up a crossed signal somewhere, and she searched her memory for some suggestive classroom joke or double entendre she might have dispensed. She was cautious around her students for the very reasons Chase had suggested: she could get in big trouble and maybe even lose her job.

  “Whatever you think is going on, you’re the only one,” she managed.

  A print of Munch’s The Scream, taped to the wall behind the student’s head, seemed to ripple, and she could swear she heard the desperate ululation arising from that rounded O of a mouth. Or maybe the sound was coming from her mouth.

  Chase put a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said. “Wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.”

  “What’s the right idea?” she said, feeling angry and foolish over her own helplessness.

  “That you want this,” he said. “Just like last time.”

  He reached his painting hand toward her, black flecks under his fingernails, the skin smelling faintly of linseed oil and turpentine. Instead of drawing away, she found herself leaning closer to let the rough fingers graze her cheek. He stroked the soft skin beneath her cheek. It tickled but she was unable to laugh.

  “See there, babe?” he said. “You haven’t forgotten after all.”

  He stooped so their faces were at the same level and she stared into his glacial blue eyes. His puckered lips glided toward hers, and something about the movement was familiar and disturbing.

  To her horror, she felt her own mouth part in welcome and the wet cement of her arms set with a weighty permanence against her chair.

  Then their lips met and her body broke free of its trance. As she jerked her head away, the unwelcome kiss cut a slick trail across her cheek.

  She exploded from the chair, throwing her shoulder into his chest and knocking him off balance, the anger clearing her head.

  The icy eyes grew narrow and colder, and Chase’s swollen lover’s lips shifted into a sneer. He hovered over her as she retreated into the corner. “Hey, what’s your problem?”

  “If you leave right now, I won’t file a complaint.”

  “Didn’t bother you any yesterday,” he said. “You practically jumped my bones, remember?”

  The trouble was, she didn’t remember, and he spoke with such conviction that the student judicial affairs committee would be as likely to take his side as hers.

  “You’re mistaken,” she said, hating herself for going on the defensive.

  “Hell with it,” he said. “You’re just a yellow cock-tease. So you want a one-off, that’s fine. Slam, bam, fuck you, ma’am.”

  Her lungs were marbled sculpture, but she managed to force air past her vocal cords. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Man, I’m lucky you didn’t yell ‘Rape.’ Glad I used a rubber. You’re probably boning every guy in the department.”

  “You’ll drop the class,”
she said, with a surprising modicum of calm. “I’ll approve the paperwork.”

  “Damn right,” he said. “I’ll take it under Wingate. Her tits are so withered she doesn’t go around shaking them in her students’ faces.”

  He retreated and fumbled with the door handle, and it was only then she realized he had locked it upon entering. What exactly had happened the last time he had locked her office door?

  Alone, heart pounding, she held her head for a full minute, eyeing the telephone. It looked fat and liquid, the handset like a swollen grub. Should she call an ambulance? Would she be able to punch the numbers?

  Some of the disorientation left her, the geometry of the room falling more or less into right angles. Her respiration and pulse rate were only slightly above normal.

  Anxiety attack.

  That would explain a lot, except for Chase’s behavior. He had moved with a practiced confidence. Like he’d done it before. Here.

  Could she have done the things he’d suggested?

  No. Don’t give it an inch.

  She didn’t want to think about it. She would call Anita instead of the hospital.

  First, she would fill out the form that would drop Chase Hanson from the class. His painted canvases would soon be gone from the studio, the garish Rothko imitations consigned to a dusty dorm closet until the artist needed them to impress some eager coed. Somebody else to slam bam.

  The rage helped clear her head as she opened the drawer. Lying on top of the shuffled stacks of memos were paper clips, pastel crayons, a solar-powered calculator, and a dull linoleum knife.

  And a ripped square of foil that had once housed a condom.

  Unconsciously, her thighs squeezed together. She lifted the empty wrapper and rubbed a thumb along the serrated edge.

  Not ours. Please let it not be ours.

  Behind it, in the shadows of the drawer, was a plastic pill bottle.

  Burnt orange, for prescription medicine.

  The label bore script as if from a pharmacy but contained no drug store or medical logo. The bold text in the center of the label wasn’t the sort prescribed by a physician: “W. Leng. Take one every 4 hrs. or else.”

  Glancing at the open door, she twisted the cap free. The pills resembled tiny green breath mints. She poured them on the desk. One rolled past the telephone and arced to the floor, where it bounced off the dirty tiles. Wendy retrieved it and then counted them.

  Eight. The bottle was large enough to contain at least fifty of the green pills.

  And they looked disturbingly familiar.

  Oh my God. How many of these have I taken?

  She nudged the pills onto a sheet of paper, funneled them back into the vial, and tucked the container in her pocket. Chase Hanson’s paperwork could wait. Right now, she wanted a look at Anita’s Halcyon prescription, because she had a feeling those pills were also green.

  Every four hours.

  Wendy wondered when she’d last taken her prescribed dose, and what would happen when she failed to take the next.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Roland reached the West Virginia mountains in early afternoon.

  Whatever the pill was, it hadn’t impaired his driving. In fact, it had helped clear his head, and Cincinnati seemed years away. Sure, it had been crazy taking the pill, but the orange bottle seemed like the only reliable and honest thing in his life.

  The radio offered no reports of a murderer on the loose, but he had no way to tell whether the body had been discovered or simply that murder was no longer major news.

  Despite the rental-car receipts being made out to “David Underwood,” Roland veered off the interstate in Kentucky and stuck to the back roads, crossing the Big Coal River and entering the mountains. His brother, Steve, a dentist in Fort Lauderdale, kept a log cabin there as a summer getaway and had shared a key with Roland.

  “We all need to hide out now and then,” Steve had said, flashing a six-figure smile. Roland figured Steve was talking about entertaining mistresses and fishing for trout, not evading capture for murder.

  But it wasn’t murder, he reasoned, as he eased past a goat farm on the outskirts of Logan, heading up the gravel road that led into a dark hollow of the type praised in old Appalachian folk ballads.

  Or, it may have been murder, but it wasn’t mine.

  He thought of all the cop shows he’d seen. Most of them were built on the simple words “It wasn’t me.” If you believed the fairy tales, nobody ever did it, especially the good guy.

  And despite a blackout, despite blood on his hands, despite a pile of evidence that would make any prosecuting attorney salivate, Roland still believed he was one of the good guys. At least until proven guilty.

  And I’m not David Underwood. Only Roland can feel this shitty and scared.

  The gravel road gave way to twin muddy ruts, and Roland wondered how Steve navigated the driveway in his BMW. The neighboring goat farmer, whom Steve said took pride in monitoring the row of mailboxes for signs of vandalism and theft, had no doubt observed the unfamiliar vehicle passing by.

  The Ford Escort was not exactly the wheels of choice for a deer hunter or fisherman, and there was a slim chance the farmer would jot down the license-plate numbers just in case. Nosy neighbors could be just as much a blessing as a curse, but Roland figured he’d be safe as long as he didn’t poach any goats.

  The key fit the lock, which was comforting. Further proof that he indeed was Roland who had a brother named Steve who owned a cabin near Logan. It may as well have been a jail cell, however, because Roland was imposing his own sentence.

  Although his plan was to think the problem through, inaction would be seen as the resignation of a guilty man. The DA would have a field day retracing his movements in court.

  Stale, musty air, with a wet-fur accent, wafted from the cabin’s interior as the door opened. Steve rarely visited it, and Roland hadn’t been there since a business stopover two years before.

  The cabin was stocked with the usual rodent-proof fare: canned beans, a rusted tin of coffee, and powdered milk on the shelves; sherbet, ice cubes, and a graying, cellophane-wrapped hunk of mystery meat in the freezer; and a half-bottle of flat ginger ale and a crusted mustard jar in the refrigerator.

  The cabin had no telephone, even though cellular reception was spotty in the mountains. “Part of getting away from it all,” Steve had said.

  Roland was afraid to even switch his phone on, much less make a call, fearing the signal would somehow be traceable. He didn’t know if the police had ways of tracking phone locations using global-positioning satellite data, or whether the rental car contained such technology.

  All he knew was that someone had planted links to the pills, the murder, and the car, and if one person could connect the dots, then so could the cops.

  A distant dog brayed, a lonely sound that reminded Roland that he had no one to trust. Steve, the younger, overachieving brother, was almost his polar opposite, too slick to take on serious problems. Their father was dead, hammered by a coronary thrombosis, and Mom was living in that fragile state of denial that afforded no room for adversity.

  The close friendships of his early twenties had given way to the forced camaraderie of coworkers and business clients, all his old buddies poured down the drain with the contents of that last half-bottle of whiskey. Only one person would have shared this dark burden, even at risk of being charged as an accomplice to murder.

  No, he couldn’t think of Wendy. That was over, a marriage killed by his selfishness. One of the sayings in his twelve-step program was that drunks didn’t have relationships, they took hostages. And Wendy had paid her ransom with dignity and two years of counseling.

  Roland checked the bedroom, wondering if he should air out the blankets. Even in March, the mountain air was humid. As he sat on the bed, he realized how exhausted he was. The adrenaline that had fueled him during that morning’s discovery and subsequent flight had receded, though his thoughts still raced down the same avenues of the p
ast few hours.

  Had he killed someone? What had happened during the missing chunk of memory? And who was David Underwood?

  He pulled the pill bottle from his pocket, a solid link to what had happened in Cincinnati. It had been over four hours, but damned if he was taking any more pills.

  It was only after he’d stretched out on the bed that he realized he had no course of action. Too wired to doze, he stared at the ceiling. Harry Grimes would be expecting a sales report this afternoon.

  He was supposed to be in Kentucky tomorrow, visiting a few tire dealerships to present a new style of rubberized signage, complete with tread marks. Now the wheels were bare, the road reaching a dead end, no exits.

  Actually, that wasn’t true.

  One detour remained.

  Steve, like many weekend hosts, stocked an array of cocktail staples. Though alcoholism stemmed from a genetic predisposition in many cases, Steve managed fine as an occasional imbiber. The very existence of a liquor cabinet was proof enough that his brother had dodged the affliction. Roland had never owned more than one bottle at a time, and he never slept until that bottle was empty.

  Sweat arose in his armpits, his palms, and along the line of his scalp. He was convinced that the murderous blackout had not been caused by drinking, but now that the insidious whisper filled his head, it would not stop its siren song until he crashed on the rocks. Two years of sobriety, and what had he gained?

  And it wasn’t like this was his fault. After all, he didn’t kill the woman. David Underwood did, and Roland wasn’t David, was he?

  She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  And because of her, Roland’s world had been tipped off its axis.

  Clearly, she was the one to blame.

  He sat up. One of the ground rules of recovery was to maintain daily contact with your sponsor. Especially when the monkey climbed on your back and dug in its dirty claws.

  No cell phone signal. Roland couldn’t call.