Harvey Bennett Mysteries Box Set 3

by Nick Thacker

  “Well, what is it you need, dear?” Alexis asked. “I’m sure I can help with it.”

  You’re not a professionally trained psychologist, Ben thought. And I highly doubt you’ve had experience with trauma-induced anxiety.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll just wait.”

  Alexis huffed and shrugged, but thankfully turned to leave. He saw her dart back into her bedroom, no doubt looking for another place to insert herself.

  Their time here had been strained, to say the least. To Ben, his cabin was his place of solitude. It was a retreat. Somewhere he could hide. The past week had been a blur — getting the wedding planned, the logistics taken care of, and the invites out to the small group of attendees.

  Ben’s parents were dead, but Julie’s had immediately flown out to Anchorage and driven to the cabin when they’d heard the wedding was happening. Both retired, Alexis a high-school teacher and Warren a regional pilot, they’d dropped everything to be there for their daughter and her soon-to-be-husband.

  They were nice enough, too. Warren was placid and docile, easy to be around, and he enjoyed sampling Ben’s growing whiskey and rum collection. Alexis was pleasant, but Ben wasn’t sure she knew how to relax. She was either cleaning, folding clothes — he was amazed at how many outfits one woman needed for a week-long trip — or cooking. The cooking part he liked, but altogether it made him feel like he wasn’t working hard enough. He and Julie couldn’t sit down in the evening to talk without Alexis butting in and asking about something or other.

  But Julie was happy. She had a great relationship with her parents, and no matter how strange it was to be in the close presence of another couple like this, he wanted a relationship with them as well. They were nice, kind people, and Ben felt like he’d been given another chance to have an adult relationship with his parents through them.

  He walked back through the kitchen and dining room into the bedroom. There were clothes everywhere, Julie’s of course. What she would wear before the wedding, what she would wear during the wedding — she hated the idea of a huge, flowing white dress — and what she would wear after. Still, Ben didn’t understand why he was seeing at least seven different dresses on the bed.

  He flopped onto the chair and opened the laptop on the desk. Mindlessly clicking through websites and news updates, finding nothing of intrigue, he was about to close it again when he heard a knock on the door.

  “Hey, brother,” Reggie’s voice said. “How you doing?”

  Ben smiled. “Which hand did you use to knock?”

  Reggie looked confused for a brief moment then laughed. “It hurts a bit, but not in the way you’d expect.” He held up his prosthetic arm for examination. The wound had nearly healed, but there was still some serious physical therapy and training he was undergoing to get used the new prosthetic.

  He’d lost his arm in Peru, just over a month ago. Thanks to a full-time doctor and nurse paid for by the CSO, his recovery had been quick and mostly worry-free, and Ben knew he was excited to start working with the more advanced prosthetics.

  He walked to the bed and roughly slid the dresses to the side, then sat on the edge of the bed and turned to Ben.

  “Anyway,” Ben said, “I’m fine. It’s… hard.”

  “Yeah, Alexis can be a handful, huh? Last night she cornered me and Sarah and asked us about when we were going to have kids. Kids. Who asks that?”

  Ben laughed. “No, that’s fine. I mean, you’re right. That’s hard. But I’m talking about Julie. How do I know she’s ready?”

  Reggie grinned. “I think you mean, how do you know you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready,” Ben said. “Never been more ready.”

  “Than what’s the problem? You can only know yourself. Can’t worry about her, my man.”

  “But… I do worry about her.”

  Reggie paused, then stepped into the room. “Ah, I see. Well, I guess you just have to trust that she’s telling you the truth.”

  “Of course I trust her.”

  “Than you have to trust yourself to know there’s nothing more you can do. Ben — look. I’ve been there. I know how you’re feeling right now. It’s… weird. Trying to balance it all and make a good impression and juggle your feelings with what you think she’s feeling… let me just give you some advice: you will never truly know what she’s feeling.”

  Ben cocked an eyebrow.

  “I’m serious. I mean, you’ll know her better than anyone — better than her parents. But you’ll never really know exactly what she’s feeling at any given time.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because. Women are…” he stopped. “Ben, how many emotions can you name? Off the top fo your head?”

  “Uh, anger. Happiness. Joy — is that happiness? Yeah. Okay, confusion? Is that an emotion?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “So you named like three-and-a-half emotions. Julie might be angry about something, but chances are she’s actually ambivalent, or pissed, or perturbed, or annoyed, or —”

  “Got it.”

  “So you’re wondering if she’s confused, or scared, or trying to figure herself out with this… memory stuff.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Yeah, she is. One-hundred percent, man. Of course she’s trying to figure it out. But that doesn’t at all mean she’s not ready. You’re talking about getting married, man. You’ve been talking about it, for like years now. You know she’s ready. But that doesn’t mean she’s not feeling all sorts of weird stuff.”

  “Gotcha. So you’re saying that she’s ready, but she’s just feeling all those things women feel, and that’s normal?”

  “Ben,” Reggie said. “You’re a smart guy. Real sharp. But sometimes you can be a bit one-speed, you know?”

  “Uh…”

  “No, I’m not saying those are things ‘women’ feel. I’m saying they’re things all of us feel. We — dudes — just aren’t used to processing them all. So we make it their problem instead.”

  Reggie stood up before Ben could answer, walked to Ben’s chair, and started fixing his tie. “Come on, man, don’t you know how to tie one of these? You’re such a barbarian.”

  3

  Julie

  Julie was frantic. She’d long ago taken off the smartwatch, after the third time it told her that her heart rate was elevated and that it would ‘be helpful to take a minute to breathe.’

  Take a minute to breathe, my —

  “Jelly!”

  She whipped her head around, even more frantic, until she remembered that her mother and father were here, too. It was weird, having them stay in the same house — a house she shared with the man she was about to marry.

  “Jelly, you in here?” Her mom’s head popped around the corner, looking into the lounge. “Why are you hiding in here?” she asked.

  “I’m not hiding, Mom,” Julie said. “This is the only room that has a full-length mirror.

  “Oh,” her mother said, not even trying to hide her concern. “Are — are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Doing my hair. Want to help?”

  Alexis Richardson’s eyes lit up like Julie had just told her she was her most favorite person on the planet. “I would do anything, Jelly. What do you need?”

  “Wine. Lots of it. Just… grab whatever you can carry, and a glass — two glasses, sorry — and bring it here.”

  “Oh,” Alexis said again, this time downtrodden. She sulked away, and Julie heard her flats smacking against the floor of the add-on wing’s hallway.

  She shook her head. Why does she have to be so there all the time? Julie knew she was overreacting, but her mother always seemed to have everything together — everything figured out, in its place, ready. She never stopped. She wondered how her father put up with it.

  And where’s Ben?

  She had less than an hour, and she hadn’t even put on her dress. She wanted to get her hair just right — it was the only
characteristic of herself she felt any vanity toward, and it was important that it looked exactly the way she’d pictured it. The trouble was, she hadn’t really pictured anything more than “perfect.” What was perfect? What does that even mean?

  She felt scared suddenly, as if she needed someone to just tell her to sit down and relax, and that they — whoever they were — would just start messing with her hair until they thought it was perfect.

  But she had no one, at least not in that way. Her maid of honor would be Dr. Sarah Lindgren, the woman whom she had come to know very well over the last months, and a woman she now trusted with her life. But trusting someone with her life was far different from spending that life together.

  Her grade school friends and college acquaintances were all gone, spread around the world as they’d moved into their adult lives. None of them had been particularly close with her, but it was as much her fault as theirs. She’d spent her school years focused on mathematics and computer science, turning her brilliance and intelligence into experience with programming and data systems. That had turned into a career working for the Biological Threat Research division of the CDC, then into a new career at the newly formed CSO.

  Her job was… vague. She was part of a team that worked to solve mysteries, find hidden treasures, and generally work between the gaps in the system. Things that were too off-limits for their own government yet too large to tackle by local law enforcement were the sort of missions the CSO took on.

  Julie fumbled with a quiff of hair near the back of her head before deciding it was pointless. I’ll just watch a YouTube video later or something, she thought. She stood up, turned to leave, and was met at the door by her mother, holding two bottles of wine — a red and a white — and two glasses.

  Julie started to cry. Her mother walked into the room, took her hand, and sat her down again in front of the mirror. She poured two glasses of red wine, tall enough that the glasses nearly spilled as she carried them, and handed one to Julie. She then put hers down, turned Julie’s head to face the mirror, and began working on her hair.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Julie whispered.

  Her mother smiled, a sweet, knowing thing. “Did you know that I almost didn’t marry your father?”

  Julie’s eyes grew and she took a long, deep sip of wine.

  “It’s true.”

  “I thought — I thought he was the ‘only one.’ You always said that.”

  “Oh, he was — and is — the only one for me. That’s never changed. But when I was getting ready for my wedding, months out, he was constantly asking if I was okay. So sweet, so kind. Just… always making sure I was okay.”

  “That’s… why you almost called it off?”

  “Well, I don’t think I ever would have called it off, but I struggled with it, sure. I mean, how was I supposed to know that he was the right one for me?”

  “Yeah, but you just knew, right?”

  “I knew, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any doubts.”

  “I’m not doubting anything about Ben, Mom.”

  “I am not saying you are,” Alexis said. “What I am saying is that I see so much of myself in you.”

  “And so much of Dad in Ben?”

  “No, not at all. I’m saying that I know you — I know how you are, and how stubborn you can be.”

  Julie rolled her eyes. Not a great pep talk, Mom.

  “But that’s a good thing. And you’ve found a man who respects that, and understands that. He knows that you want to make your own decisions. He knows that you need a voice, and he gives you that.”

  “He… yeah, he does,” Julie said. “That’s exactly how he is.”

  “Well, then there’s no reason to doubt anything. You two will be fine.”

  She smiled again, and Julie took another sip. She caught a glance at her hair in the mirror as she did. A French braid fell from one side on the top of her head to the other, a diagonal design that fell just behind her left shoulder.

  She swallowed, choking up. She reached up and grabbed Alexis’ hand. “Mom, it’s perfect.”

  4

  Cisco

  Cisco Cabrera stepped down from the back of the huge truck and was immediately shuffled into a line. His mouth and neck hurt from the gag they’d tied around his head, but he felt nothing in the way of his own pain. Instead, he felt for the others — his mother and father, and his young sister with her baby. He wanted to do something, but these men, the white men wearing all black uniforms, were powerful.

  They had come into the village at night, when everyone was sleeping. They were a small, close-knit community, many of whom had been in the same village all their lives, going back generations. They fished, grew corn and yucca, and the village had a reasonably profitable enterprise turning some of their product into beer and distillates.

  They had no defenses of any kind, and by the time Cisco realized what was happening it was too late. His was the last home the men had entered, and they had quickly tied and gagged all of his family, including his two-year old niece. No one fought back — what would be the point?

  After a two-hour journey, they were pulled off the truck and were now walking through a large doorway. It stood on the side of a mountain, the gaping maw of the door disappearing into black nothingness. It was into this hole where they were led.

  At the end of a long, wide tunnel, more men appeared and pulled them apart. Cisco and his father were led one direction, his mother and sister with her child another. Into a room, dark and damp. The air smelled of earth, the same soil he had tilled every year for just about all of his thirty-three years.

  A man came up to him. Taller than Cisco, wearing the black uniform. “Nombre?” he barked.

  Cisco told him his name.

  “Años?

  He told him. Asked where they were, and what they were going to do with them. The man ignored him, or didn’t understand, and wrote down Cisco’s name on a piece of paper and then moved to Cisco’s father and started again.

  It took half an hour to question all of the men in the room, and then they were taken into another room, three at a time. Cisco was the last man of a set of three into this room, so he was split up from his father. He was weighed on a scale, his chest and torso measured, then asked a rapid set of questions. He tried to answer as many as he could, but he didn’t understand a few. They didn’t seem to care.

  When they were done in this room, they were once again split — three doorways, one for each of them. Cisco stepped through his and found a bed and chair, and some medical instruments on a tray in a small built-in cabinet. A single, dim bulb hung from the ceiling. He walked over and sat in the chair. His hands were still tied, so it was uncomfortable. He tried to move around, to keep focused, but found that he was exhausted. He hadn’t eaten in hours, nor had he had any water. He sat back down.

  He was unsure how long he waited in the small room. Five minutes or five hours. Time had stood still in here. He wanted to know how his father was doing, and what they had done with his mother and sister. Were they taking care of his niece. He felt cold, but didn’t shiver; he knew it was from within, not the temperature of the room.

  Finally the door opened. Cisco shot to his feet, both scared and excited that something was happening. A man walked in, wearing a white coat, followed by two more black-clad men. The white coated man looked at Cisco, examining him from the opposite side of the room, and said something under his breath to the other men. These two men stepped forward, grabbed Cisco’s arms, and pushed him down onto the bed.

  He tried fighting back — knowing it was in vain, but no longer hoping there would be a positive outcome for all this trouble. They hardly worked to keep him pinned, holding his already-bound arms down on the bed. He kicked his legs, but there was no one near enough for him to contact.

  The man in white stepped forward and held up a long, sharp needle. Liquid squirted from the end of it. Cisco had always hated needles. He’d had shots as a boy, only once, in the big city nearb
y, but hardly anyone in his village thought modern medicine a necessity, and his parents dropped the issue after he complained incessantly for weeks.

  The man — a doctor, he guessed — plunged the needle into Cisco’s arm. He felt the cold steel, the pulsating warmth of the liquid, the empty void of feeling as it coursed through him. It was moving, replacing him. He felt raw, as if devoid of any emotion, then… nothing.

  He could still see the three men, but there was no attachment or detachment related to them. They were apparitions. Wraiths. Floating above his head.

  They were no longer holding his arms, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t move them even if they weren’t still tied behind his back. He watched them leave, thinking nothing of it. Or thinking of it in a acknowledgement sort of way but not with any purpose. They were gone, he was alone.

  He didn’t think to leave — didn’t want to. He didn’t want to do anything. But he was alive. Was that good? Was the shot supposed to kill him?

  No. Why would they go through all that trouble?

  And then, as if stopping his own thoughts in mid-sentence, he realized he didn’t care. He was totally complacent, totally apathetic.

  He lay his head back down on the bed, hard and flat and no pillow to rest it on. He closed his eyes, but he didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want to do anything.

  He looked up at the ceiling, the tiny gray squares staring back down at him.

  He stayed this way until they came for him the next day.

  5

  Ben

  Archibald Quinones, a Jesuit priest, administered the wedding. The setting was idyllic: the cabin’s front ‘yard’ had been converted into a beautiful, picturesque wedding venue, by way of white folding chairs, ribbons, and what must have been a metric ton of flowers.

  The trees lined the area just beyond where Archie stood beneath the lattice, where Ben had waited for Julie to walk down the aisle arm in arm with her father.