Journey Into Darkness

by S. J. Harris

  I tried to sleep, couldn’t do it. That note terrified me. Someone knew why I’d come to Hallows Cove, knew where I was staying, and was trying to scare me off.

  If the person who’d written the note had wanted me dead, I would have been dead already, I told myself. Murderers don’t usually give you much warning. Still, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to sleep in that room again.

  Before the sun rose, before the diesel rigs behind the motel fired up and headed down the highway, before most of the world began the drudgery of another work day, I packed my things and checked out of The Parkside. A good detective always knows when to get the hell out of Dodge, Blake had told me. I wasn’t ready to abandon my investigation, couldn’t do that, but I could put some distance between myself and whoever had threatened me. I drove thirty miles east, to St. Augustine, found a Holiday Inn on the beach.

  I still couldn’t sleep.

  Who could have written that nasty-gram? The only people in the world who knew about my mission were Blake Wales and Bill Driscoll. Blake was way out in San Diego, and he wouldn’t have done something like that anyway, even if he thought it was for my own good. I’d been with Bill all day, right up to the time I found the note, so it surely wasn’t him. The only person I could think of was Lori Barbera. She knew my name, my car. She could have seen my Mustang at The Parkside while I was out with Bill. It would have been easy to get my room number.

  Shortly after 9AM my cell phone rang.

  “Kimberly, now I know this is the week you went to New York. I wrote it down this time.”

  “I changed my assignment, Mom. I’m in Florida.”

  She seemed confused, but I told her everything was okay. I didn’t go into detail about why I had made the switch.

  Soon after saying goodbye to Mom, the phone rang again. It was Bill.

  “You’re up awfully early, aren’t you?” I said. “I thought you’d sleep late, since you have to work tonight.”

  “I came by the motel to do a favor for Aunt Julie. She wanted me to run a deposit to the bank for her. The manager’s on vacation this week. I went up and knocked on your door. Where are you?”

  “St. Augustine.” I told him about the note.

  “You think it was Lori?”

  “I’m almost sure of it. How could it have been anyone else?”

  “You’re still coming to Kessler’s to have lunch with me tonight, aren’t you?”

  “Definitely. Do you think we can get into Lori Barbera’s office?”

  “We can try.”

  “I’ll bring food. What would you like?”

  “Surprise me,” Bill said. “Hey, Aunt Julie wants you to come over for dinner some night. You up for that?”

  “Sure. Especially if she makes more of that fried chicken.”

  “She’ll fix something good. She’s a good cook. You’ll like it, now that you’re a regular carnivore like the rest of us.”

  “Don’t rub it in,” I said.

  “See you tonight.”

  I plugged in my laptop and looked up testing laboratories. The closest were in Jacksonville. I called several, finally finding one willing to cross-match cells from the flecks of fingernail polish with hairs from Darla’s brush. Two-thousand dollars. Half now and half when the results came in. It was more than I’d intended to spend, but I supposed the truth was worth it.

  I drove from St. Augustine to the area of Jacksonville called Mandarin. I followed the directions the receptionist had given me and soon arrived at a small, simple, yellow brick building with a small, simple, blue and white sign that read MICROMODE. I fished through my goody bag, found the specimens still sealed tightly in zip-lock bags, and took them inside.

  A young technician named Kinsey Randall took the specimens, labeled them, dropped them into a larger MICROMODE bag and labeled it. She handed me a clipboard with a contract attached, instructed me to have a seat in the lobby while she put the fingernail flecks under a microscope to see if there were any cells that could be isolated.

  The lobby reminded me of a doctor’s waiting area. I sat in one of the padded seats and read the contract. A few minutes later Kinsey Randall came out from the lab.

  “The hair will be easy, but those chips of paint will take some time. That’s why it’s two-thousand. Our standard price, say, for a paternity test, is nine-hundred dollars. But most labs wouldn’t even touch what you brought in. If MICROMODE goes to court as an expert witness, it’s an additional two-thousand. I’m sure you read that in the contract.”

  If they had to go to court as an expert witness, then the D.A.’s office could spring for it. I had done my good deed.

  “We should have your results by next Monday,” Kinsey said.

  I wrote her a check.

  ***

  On the way back to St. Augustine I stopped and purchased a folding lounge chair, two beach towels, a radio the size of a deck of cards, some SPF 15 and aloe after-sun lotions.

  I parked on the beach, set my chair up and tuned the radio to classic rock. Glossy low-tide breakers lapped the sandy white coastline. Gulls shrieked overhead. I sipped iced coffee from a Styrofoam cup, its aroma mingling with the cocoa butter on my skin. The sun was high in the sky, and I was exhausted from lack of sleep. The sea breeze caressed me, all of me.

  I opened A Farewell To Arms and read a chapter. With Henry and Catherine (the nurse named Catherine made the story all the more personal for me) safe in Switzerland, it seemed that Papa Hemingway was finally going to give us a happy ending.

  My cell phone rang and I thought about whizzing it into the sea, like on one of those beer commercials. I picked up. It was bad news. News I’d been expecting but still wasn’t ready to hear.

  14

  Greta Wales had dangled from this precarious, fraying thread we call life for sixty-four years. She died on her birthday. 23,360 sunrises and, I suppose, all she wanted was one more. That’s all any of us wants.

  Greta’s final microscopic fiber snapped early Tuesday morning, June 21, with Blake holding her hand and the Hospice nurse who had kept her suffering to a minimum close by.

  Blake told me that when Greta had first been diagnosed, she had vowed to beat the cancer. In the end, she was the one beaten. Whipped. But Blake said she went with a smile on her face. He felt her final heartbeat pulsate through her emaciated hand. And then she was gone. Gently gone.

  I walked down the beach, trying to decide whether or not to fly home for Greta’s funeral.

  “Weren’t you at Lyon’s Den the other night?”

  The voice from behind startled me. I turned and saw that guitar player, Sonya Shafer’s boyfriend, standing there holding a surfboard. His blonde hair was tied back in a pony tail, and he wore a shell necklace and Billabong trunks. Water beaded on his chest.

  “Hi,” I said. “Yeah, I was there for a little while. What was your name?”

  “Peter Daniels. You’re Kim Isabella Journey.”

  “Good memory. Is the band playing tonight?”

  “Yep. We play Tuesday through Saturday.”

  We walked near the water, the foamy ripples bathing our bare feet. Peter looked young. Early twenties. Sonya was probably my age or a little older.

  “How long have you been seeing Sonya?” I asked.

  “We had our first date three months ago today. March twenty-first. The band started playing at Lyon’s Den back in late February, and I was attracted to Sonya right away. It took me a few weeks to talk her into going out with me, though.”

  “Because of the age difference?”

  “Maybe that was part of it. But she had just gone through a bad break-up. That was the main reason. She wasn’t ready to start dating again.”

  “Is her ex-boyfriend still around?”

  “I’ve never met the guy. Apparently he got physical with her the day they broke up. It was November eighth last year. Sonya’s thirtieth birthday.”

  “Some birthday,” I said.

  “Yeah. The guy ended up spending the night incar
cerated. Sonya has a restraining order against him. He isn’t allowed to come near her home or work.”

  Peter picked up a sand dollar and sailed it into the ocean.

  “Are you guys the permanent house band at Lyon’s Den now?” I asked.

  “We’re a traveling band. We usually play one or two week engagements. Ross Kramer, our agent up in Indy, got us booked down here for six months. We usually don’t stay in one place that long.”

  “You guys from Indianapolis?”

  “That’s where our agent lives. We’re from Quincy, Illinois.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Ever hear of Hannibal, Missouri?”

  Images of homemade rafts, straw hats and corncob pipes filled my mind. “You mean, as in, Huck Finn’s home town? That’s a real place?”

  Peter laughed. “Very real. Quincy, Illinois is right across the river from Hannibal. Quincy’s not big, but we have the most nightclubs per capita of any city in the U.S.”

  “Seems like there’d be plenty of work there for a band.”

  “You can stay booked on weekends, but to really make a living as a musician you have to hit the road.”

  We walked all the way to the pier and then turned back.

  “You gave that sand dollar a pretty good fling,” I said. “So when are we going to get together for that game of Frisbee golf.”

  “We’ll have to do that.”

  When we got back to my car, I gave Peter my cell phone number. “Can you tell Sonya to give me a call? I need to talk to her about something.”

  “Sure,” he said. He carried his surfboard down the beach toward his Camaro.

  “Better get her something for that three-month anniversary,” I shouted.

  He gave me a thumbs-up.

  I gathered my things and went up to my room at the Holiday Inn.

  After my shower I examined my naked body in the dresser mirror. Despite my precautions with lotion, I had gotten a pretty nice sunburn on my nose and shoulders and the outline of my bathing suit showed all the way around. My hair had blonder highlights and my eyes were gas-flame blue against the redness of my cheeks. I slathered on some aloe after-sun and climbed into bed. I set the alarm clock for midnight. Before I fell asleep, my cell phone rang.

  “This is Sonya Shafer. Peter told me he saw you at the beach and that you wanted to talk to me.”

  Peter must have called her from St. Augustine. I knew he hadn’t had time to drive all the way back yet.

  “Thanks for calling,” I said. “Do you remember a man named Brian Cooper?”

  “No. Wait a minute. Maybe. Was he the guy driving the truck that hit Steve?”

  “Yes. I met him in a bar. I told him I’d give you his number and--”

  “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business?”

  She hung up on me. A few seconds later my phone rang again.

  “I’m sorry,” Sonya said. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that...Oh, crap. I’m at work, Kim, and I thought I was going to have a few minutes. But ten construction guys just walked in and they look mighty thirsty. I’ll have to call you back.”

  “Are you working tomorrow night?” I thought I might drive down there and try the food, since I didn’t get a chance the first time.

  “I get off at four tomorrow. I was planning on going shopping. Want to come along?”

  “Sounds good. I could use a few things myself.” A new dress and shoes for Greta’s funeral. “What time?”

  “Meet me at Lyon’s Den at four. We’ll go from there.”

  ***

  Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf. Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, tra-la-la-la-la.

  The alarm clock woke me from my Jenny dream. What a stupid tune for the ice cream man to play, I thought.

  Before I dressed, I noticed my sunburn had gotten worse. I rubbed in some more aloe.

  I couldn’t find my purse, the monogrammed clutch I carry. Must have left it in Bill’s car last night. I keep my wallet and everything in the car, but I felt naked going out without my purse. Mom gave it to me for my twenty-seventh birthday. I made a mental note to check Bill’s Cadillac.

  I stopped at Ferrell’s Diner and bought chicken salad sandwiches and bags of Fritos on my way to Kessler’s. At 1:30 A.M., I pulled up to the electric gate and pushed the big red button. The buzzer, loud and rude in the dead of night, probably infiltrated a five-mile radius. The gate lurched into motion, and Bill walked out wearing a long white lab coat. He motioned for me to drive inside.

  “We’re not quite ready to knock off for lunch yet,” Bill said. “Follow me and I’ll show you where I work.”

  We mounted the steps to the loading dock, walked through a warehouse area flanked by tall steel racks and neatly stacked pallets of supplies. Bill opened a thick, insulated door, showed me the walk-in freezer. Stacks of cardboard boxes marked 4-D, FIVE KILOS, KESSLER’S, HALLOWS COVE, FLORIDA lined the walls.

  “The four D’s stand for Dead, Dying, Diseased or Down,” Bill said. “The meat in those boxes is from animals that, for one reason or another, weren’t fit for human consumption. A lot of it is sold to the greyhound industry, and some of it goes to higher-priced commercial pet foods.”

  Such as GIANT-PUP, I thought.

  After the freezer he showed me the foreman’s office, a steel and glass structure situated in a corner of the area where the 4-D meat was processed. A portrait of the foreman’s family hung on one wall, along with a mounted Big Mouth bass whose glassy gray eye appeared to be keeping watch. A Krispy Kreme box with two chocolates and a partially-eaten jelly lay open on the desk. Purple goo oozed from the jelly doughnut, and a lone fly was having its fill.

  “Care for a doughnut?” Bill asked, laughing.

  “Yeah, right.”

  We walked the yellow-lined perimeter of 4-D and into an area marked EMISSION CONTROL. Bill gave me a set of goggles and a dust mask, opened a solid steel door and led me through a corridor, a hundred feet or so, to another steel door marked BASE. A flashing red light and a biohazard sign blazed an unsubtle omen.

  Bill handed me a pair of rubber gloves from a recessed dispenser beside the door. He punched a code into the electric lock.

  “One, two, three,” he said. “Some code, huh? It’s just some safety bullshit someone at OSHA with too many college degrees and too little to do thought up.”

  He opened the door. The stench hit me like a ton of rotten, shitty bricks. I followed Bill straight into the bowels of Hell.

  15

  Mounds of heads and hooves, eyeballs and brains, esophagi and spinal cords were pushed by a little bulldozer, a “Bobcat,” into a stainless steel pit the size of a small bedroom. The gruesome mix funneled into a giant grinder and the sounds of bones popping, skulls giving way and disintegrating under the auger’s pressure, the sloshing sounds of intestines and their contents, rose over the dozer’s engine. The Bobcat driver looked like some sort of perverted bad guy from a cowboy movie. A sweat-soaked bandana wrapped over his dust mask provided an extra filter from the thick, rancid funk. Walking into BASE was like being immersed in a mammoth pot of beef stew that had been left in the sun for a few weeks. I struggled for breath. My heart fluttered and bounced around like a wild bird trapped in a cage of inadequate dimensions. Acid rose in the back of my throat.

  Bill pulled his mask down for a minute. “You get used to it after awhile.”

  I doubted it. “I’m just going to walk back to the foreman’s office, if you don’t mind. I think I can find my way back there.”

  “I’ll come and get you when we’re done,” Bill said. “Shouldn’t be more than half an hour.”

  “Oh, I think I left my purse in your car last night. Can I look?”

  Bill tossed his keys to me. On my way out I slipped on what was probably a piece of rotten lung.

  I found my purse on the back seat of his Cadillac. The car was a mess, and I decided to do Bill a favor and tidy up a bit. On the passenger
-side floorboard, in front, I found two empty Marlboro packs, some gum wrappers and several pieces of junk mail. Bill had doodled on one of the envelopes, five-pointed stars and three-dimensional boxes. Each of the boxes had the letters S.O.S. written on the inside, and it occurred to me that perhaps Bill had never gotten over the trauma of his childhood, that the loss of his parents and the abuse he suffered from his uncle had left him feeling trapped and alone. Was S.O.S., suspended in an ice cube, a cry for help?

  I discarded the trash from the floorboard, all but the envelope with the doodles. I kept it as a reminder. Bill was helping me a great deal, and I wanted to return the favor. I wanted to be a good friend, somehow help melt that cage of ice.

  I walked back to the foreman’s office, closed up the Krispy Kreme box and deposited it in the trash can beside the desk. Bill came along shortly and escorted me to the employee lounge, where he bought us sodas from a vending machine. He introduced me to his coworker, Jake Gordon.

  “Friends call me Gordo,” he said.

  Gordo, tall and lanky, hair gray and mostly gone on top, had a kind and gentle quality and I imagined him with grandkids on his knees.

  Bill suggested we take our lunch to the loading dock. On the way outside, he showed me the finished product, what became of the animal remains I’d seen earlier in BASE. He led me through a maze of pipes and tanks, cookers and drainers, dryers and presses, and finally to the protein meal storage hoppers.

  “Some of the raw material we process in BASE goes to 4-D and is frozen,” Bill said. “The rest of it ends up here.”

  The protein meal, the finished product, resembled the grainy dust at the bottom of a jar of peanuts. It smelled like dry dog food. Bill explained that some of it was, in fact, sold to dog food companies, but that much of it went out as livestock feed.

  “Where it ends up depends on the raw material we start with. We can’t feed cows back to cows, for example, because of the risk of bovine spongiform encephalitis, BSE, mad cow disease. They’re really strict about that.”

  We went out to the loading dock and sat at a wooden picnic table. I didn’t have much of an appetite after touring the plant, so I gave bill both the chicken salad sandwiches. I munched on Fritos and drank my Pepsi.