Death Waits in the Dark

by Mark Edward Langley

  They stood. Arthur let her follow him to the front door and open it. Sniffling, she wiped her watery eyes, stood quickly on her toes, and kissed his mouth, slowly at first, but then with all the passion of their remembered years. Her breasts still seemed rich and full against his chest, and he could feel the lack of a bra beneath the T-shirt and the hardness of her nipples. Their lips lingered, then parted, and she patted his chest regretfully with both hands, remembering.

  “I shoulda married you,” she confided. “I know that now. But it’s too late for shouldas. Like many things in my life, my chance was in the past.”

  Arthur held her hands gently in his. She was still looking right into his eyes as if she were looking back through the decades to that day by the flowing wash and the tall grass, on the blanket where their passion had taken flight.

  “I will find out who did this,” Arthur said. “Know that.”

  “I know.” Margaret smiled softly. “I know. But it won’t change anything. It won’t bring my sons back.”

  Arthur softly kissed her forehead and left her at the front door watching him walk toward the Bronco. He could still see her as he climbed in and fired it up. As he reached for the open driver’s door, he paused. She stood in the doorway, the door closed just enough to leave her face, half of her T-shirted torso and one leg visible. He breathed a heavy sigh and pulled the truck’s door shut.

  There was that hollow sound again. Or could it be this time it was the sound of his heart echoing the regret of a path not taken? Perhaps he would never know that answer.

  The front door of the house closed. He pulled away thinking his next stop would be Kirtland Central High School. However, a glance at his dash clock revealed it was already after three in the afternoon, so the girls were probably on their respective buses heading home. He decided to hunt down the trailer across from the fence instead and hope that Jennifer Peshlakai was already home. He needed a chance to talk to the girls before the police did, if they hadn’t already.

  Margaret’s face, her pain, brought his thoughts back to Sergeant Derrick and what Sharon had mentioned about hooking up with his men somehow through an app. That seemed to be how sentient humans connected anymore. No one actually used their phones for calling someone. However, he’d never been involved in that kind of thing before. Ever since his tours he’d found the fictitious world of online life frivolous and shallow. But he did have all their numbers. Perhaps he could send them all a text saying that if they ever needed to talk to someone—at any time of the day or night—they could contact him? It would be a start.

  And today was not any different than back then. All these years later, he still felt responsible for them. Another lifetime ago, being anxious and uncertain got you killed. Today, it was memories. They were his men. And that was a duty that never faded.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “You mentioned in our preliminary phone conversation, Mrs. Nakai,” Janet Peterson began, “that you believe you suffer from a form of PTSD.” She paused. “Have you been diagnosed by your physician? Did he check for any medical conditions that may be causing your symptoms?”

  “No,” Sharon said.

  “Did he speak with you about any of the signs or symptoms or any of the life events that could possibly have led up to what you perceive to be PTSD?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then what leads you to believe that you suffer from it?”

  Sharon sat on one end of the comfortable couch with her legs close together inside her skirt, hands clasped loosely in her lap. She hadn’t gone to the television station as she had led Arthur to believe that morning. Instead, she had taken it off, driven to Four Corners Regional Airport in Farmington, and filed a flight plan for Santa Fe. She reasoned that flying would be faster than driving. By her calculations, it should only take around fifty minutes each way if she used the GPS of the Piper Saratoga, give or take the aid of a tailwind, instead of three hours if she drove. If she was to keep her trip to herself, this would be safest.

  The twenty-minute ride from the Santa Fe Airport to the small row of adobe-looking offices on Saint Francis Drive had been an easy one in her Lyft driver’s environmentally friendly hybrid sedan. During the drive, her mind had spent half the time keeping a watchful eye on the driver with the five o’clock shadow, the slicked backed hair, and tattooed forearms, and the other half spent wading through the river of swift-moving thoughts of how she could evade this meeting. Twice, Sharon had almost instructed the driver to turn the car around and head back to the airport, but she also knew this added to her anxiety and wouldn’t help her solve anything. She simply had to calm down before being delivered to the office of Janet Peterson a little before her ten a.m. session. A panic attack wasn’t going to do anybody any good, and that was a fact. So she took a deep breath and kept silent.

  Sharon picked up the glass of water the doctor had given her before beginning their session and took a few sips, lubricating her thoughts. “I guess because it all started with the loss of our son three years ago.” Sharon placed the glass on the coffee table on top of the round sandstone coaster with the Kokopelli graphic on it. “That was a very bleak time for us.”

  Janet Peterson nodded sympathetically, but said nothing. Sometimes it was better to let a patient elaborate only as much as they felt comfortable with. It helped them to build a safe place in which to share whatever had brought them to her door. She had always been in the habit of placing the eraser of her pencil on the bulb of her lower lip as she listened to her patients. Today was no different, except for the fact that she was using a silver-toned stylus with a chrome pocket clip and a black rubber ball tip. “Can you elaborate?”

  Sharon’s eyes shifted from Janet Peterson to the coffee table between them where a short pile of Psychology Today magazines had been fanned out like a blackjack deck on a Las Vegas gaming table. When her eyes settled back on Janet Peterson, she said, “I fell apart. I didn’t go to work. I didn’t even go outside. I didn’t want to do anything but stay in bed reliving the devastation.” Sharon swallowed uneasily and stared at her wedding ring, rubbed it with her left thumb. “That’s the only word I can use to describe it—devastation.”

  Janet Peterson crossed her legs and looked at Sharon over the tops of her black-rimmed designer readers. She held the silver stylus horizontally in the fingers of both hands between her tablet and chest. “I can imagine,” she said. “And yet you found strength within yourself to go on; you worked through the pain on your own. I admire that. There is a strong woman inside of you, inside all of us, but most of us never bring her into the light.” Janet Peterson thought for a moment, placed the stylus in her lap. “You reached deep inside yourself and found her and brought her to the surface.” She paused again. Tilted her head slightly. “Did your husband help you during this time of self-imposed incarceration, or did you lash out at him because you perceived him to be a part of the reason you lost your son?”

  Janet Peterson watched as Sharon stared at her hands in her lap and sensed there was residual guilt behind the stare.

  “I lashed out at him,” Sharon said. “I treated him … let’s just say if I were him, I would have left me.”

  Dr. Peterson nodded understandingly. “But he didn’t. And could you have also seen a strength in him that you had not seen before?”

  “Other men wouldn’t have given it a second thought, they’d have just left, but Arthur put up with all my attitudes, my roller-coaster rides of emotions, my derogatory statements and demeaning arguments.” She chuckled nervously. “I was a real bitch.”

  Janet Peterson, Sharon observed, was a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length dark hair wearing a dark-blue Hillary Clinton–style pantsuit, currently adjusting her readers as if she were evaluating a fine jewel while she glanced at the square screen of her watch with the pink and sand wristband.

  Sharon wondered again if she had made the right choice in therapist
s despite Janet’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, and other documentation hanging on her wall proclaiming her memberships in the ISSTD and the ISTSS organizations. After all, Sharon had simply picked out her name during an internet search for “PTSD therapists near me.” And after checking out the university online, she discovered it was listed as the top psychiatric graduate program in the nation. Sharon followed Dr. Peterson’s hand as it left her glasses and picked the stylus up in her lap and scribbled something on her tablet.

  “Mrs. Nakai, I know that what happened to you last year was extremely traumatic. And the fact that you survived with little physical damage doesn’t mean you haven’t suffered tremendous emotional damage. That, coupled with the loss of your child only a few years earlier, which, I can see, still weighs heavily on your mind, has created an atmosphere within you that struggles constantly with tremendous anxieties and depressions, and possibly manifests itself in fits of helplessness at times.”

  “What do you mean?” It was a moot question. Sharon knew full well the answer.

  Dr. Peterson uncrossed her legs and laid her tablet flat in her lap. “Do you ever visualize your attackers while you’re out? Say, out at a store, or in a restaurant, or just out in public in general? Do you think you see their faces then realize they are someone totally unrelated to your kidnapping? Oftentimes people who have experienced such traumatic events have instances where their mind reveals things from their subconscious. A visual ghost, if you will.”

  Sharon’s eyes looked up from under her brow. “Yes, I have. I can be anywhere and see them. Sometimes it seems as though they won’t let me alone, so I begin to panic and have to find somewhere to hide.” She swallowed. “Their chindi are so relentless. It feels like they’re following me from the grave.”

  “Chindi?”

  “In Navajo culture the people believe that the chindi is what a person leaves behind—a spirit or ghost—when he or she expels their final breath. It’s everything bad about that person that was not brought into harmony in life.”

  Dr. Peterson nodded and said, “I see.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Sharon said. “The chindi can be evil. You see, when someone dies these spirits will linger around their bodies and their possessions, so those of our culture will often destroy any possessions they had. Nothing is ever handed down to a relative. If someone dies in their home, that home is in some cases deserted and never used again. And we never mention that person’s name because traditional Navajos believe that the chindi would hear their name and come to whomever had spoken it. The chindi have even been known to cause sickness or death.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  Sharon paused, as if unsure of her answer. Then she said, “It’s what my ancestors believed. I was next to the body of his woman after Leonard Kanesewah killed her. I touched her. He made me wear her clothes. That’s why I can feel her all over me. Sometimes I can even feel her on my skin; I can taste her on my breath. Her chindi is the strongest, and that’s why I see her the most. I see him too, but not as often. So yes, it is what I believe.”

  “Sharon, there is nothing metaphysical about what you are feeling,” Dr. Peterson reassured her from her realm of science. “It is perfectly normal for someone to suffer with these ghosts after they have been through something as traumatic as you have. I want you to understand that it is very natural and there is a path we can take to lessen or even eliminate these occurrences.” A pregnant pause filled the room. “And there are also several medications—”

  “I’m not taking any drugs,” Sharon warned her emphatically.

  Dr. Peterson nodded and regrouped. “Have you told your husband you have decided to seek consultation?”

  Sharon hesitated, turning her gaze to the world outside Janet Peterson’s office windows. She watched the trees swaying in the breeze and the traffic that crisscrossed on Saint Francis Drive. She also noticed the similar-looking offices across the street staring back at her like a mirror image and the clouds that seemed to be floating across the sky at a snail’s pace as her watch’s hands seemed to move even slower. She returned her attention to Dr. Peterson.

  “No, I haven’t. I didn’t want to appear weak in his eyes, I guess.” She paused. “I’ve managed to keep my symptoms hidden from him since the kidnapping. He hasn’t seemed to notice my recent focus on work, and I try not to let him witness my moments of anxiety.” She sighed. “He’s seen and been through so much, having been a Marine and then served as part of Homeland Security. He’s just now started opening up to me about it all.” She paused again. “I didn’t want to worry him.” Sharon watched the dark hair of Janet Peterson remain still as she scribbled more hidden lines on her tablet with the stylus.

  “I think we should begin by revisiting the loss of your child; you seem to have some repressed memories and emotions still to deal with. From there we can begin to build a bridge from that event to the event that you faced last year, and finally to where you are today.” Janet Peterson looked at her and smiled encouragingly. “Does that sound all right to you?”

  Sharon stared blankly and blinked once. Noticeably. This is it, she thought. This is what I’ve come to face, but can I? Can I really relive every terrifying moment? She felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand up and her mouth turn dry. She reached out and again grabbed the water glass and drank half of the liquid from it. She felt the quenching relief of the water traveling down her throat, but quickly realized it had no effect on the dryness. She looked at Dr. Peterson and sat the glass back down on the Kokopelli coaster.

  “I lost a child,” she said. “Stillborn. What else is there to tell?”

  Janet Peterson looked somber and said, “A great deal more, I expect, Mrs. Nakai. A great deal. You see, over time we all have a way of pushing episodes of tragedy into a dark closet of our minds. It’s called repression. And the only way to deal with repression is to walk into that dark closet and drag it out into the light of understanding.”

  The remainder of the session went by at a staggeringly slow pace, at least in Sharon’s mind. She began by describing the events in the hospital and the stillbirth of their son. She then moved on to the days that turned quickly into two years before she began the slow crawl out of the cocoon she had wrapped herself in. Every thought that flooded back brought with it every emotion that she had experienced at the time. Sharon had taken the liberty of emptying a portion of the Kleenex box the doctor had placed next to the water glass on the coffee table. Throughout the recitation, her eyes kept following the room as it was spinning. She noticed the desk with its contemporary lamp that loomed above its only occupant, an open laptop. No pictures of family or vacations dwelled there, not even a photograph of a dog or cat. Sharon watched Dr. Peterson scribble again as she spoke, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the clock, a fact which did not escape Sharon’s reporter’s mind and she made note of it in her hard drive. Sharon was about to continue when Janet Peterson interrupted.

  “I’m afraid we’ve gone past our allotted time by a few minutes, Mrs. Nakai. My next patient will be waiting.” She checked the calendar on her tablet. “Let’s schedule our next session for the same time next Thursday. Would that work for you?”

  Sharon emptied the water glass before sitting it back on top of Kokopelli. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Janet Peterson looked again at her planner. “Then how about next Friday at one thirty?”

  Sharon shook her head. “I don’t think you understand me.” She stood and smoothed out her skirt then picked up her purse. “I’m done. This isn’t what I need. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  Janet Peterson stood and followed Sharon to the office door. “I certainly can’t force you to continue, Mrs. Nakai, but I must ask you to reconsider maintaining our sessions. You can hardly judge its effect by one visit. And I can see there are deeper
issues we need to delve into.”

  Sharon opened the door and said, “It’s just not for me,” and closed the door behind her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Arthur’s cell phone vibrated with a series of long buzzes, wrenching him away from his thoughts as he pulled away from Margaret’s house. He regrouped quickly when he saw Sharon’s name and photo. He put the phone on speaker and answered, “Chaco Pizza!”

  Sharon’s laughter on the other end of the phone made him smile. He could see her face in his mind’s eye as he began driving toward the trailer home of Jennifer Peshlakai. When she stopped laughing, she reported in. “The Desert Patriots have a compound northwest of Counselor. Jacob was out on location today, so I hit him up when he got back to the station.”

  “Does he think they could be involved in this?”

  “He wouldn’t put it past them, but he wasn’t going to speculate. However, he did say there was an unsubstantiated report that a Navajo man in his midfifties was beaten up at a gas station north of Counselor by some roughnecks from one of the oil companies last week, and no one has seen the alleged victim since the attack. And no one has shown up at a rez clinic or a hospital either.”

  “Someone has to be missing him?”

  “Of course someone is missing him. Just like there’s about a thousand parents still missing the five hundred and twelve girls and women that disappeared off the rez last year. Jacob said there was a missing persons report filed over in Nageezi about a man fitting the description who hasn’t come home after a few days,” Sharon said, “but the Nation Police don’t have any way to connect the two. It’s like he just vanished.”

  “No one just vanishes,” Arthur remarked, “unless they want to start a new life or they’re dead.”

  Sharon agreed, then added, “Jacob says the Patriots were hired by NMX as security around a year and a half ago to protect their oil and gas wells, man camps and the current fracking sites they have scattered over a good section of the 550 corridor because of all the resistance from the Water Protectors.”