The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  His eyes were closed, and sunken, as if in death, his skin sallow and dry, his bony chest rising and falling, but he was breathing on his own, according to the nurse, a large black guy with a shaved head and a gold ring in his left ear and a barbed wire tattoo running right around his neck.

  “He’s lucky to be alive,” said the nurse, in a low whispery rumble. “Nobody here can figure out how he made it. How many days and nights, lying there...no water. He shouldn’t be alive at all.”

  “Can he hear?”

  The guy nodded, his face solemn.

  “He’s awake. The shrinks have been at him, but he’s wrapped pretty tight. You want to talk to him, I figure.”

  “If he can handle it,” said Jack.

  The nurse looked at them both, cynicism flickering across his face.

  “You’d talk to him anyway,” he said, but there was no malice in it. And it was true. They were cops, not priests. They said nothing.

  “Yeah. He can handle it, I think. He looks like a geek but he has to be tough as a hickory stick not to be dead. He’s not too far down. Docs have him on Valium, on account of he is seriously fucking blue.”

  “How much does he know?” asked Pandora.

  “He knows his wife and little girl are dead because he was there when it happened. He doesn’t know about the other two, the teenagers. But he’s a smart guy and he can see that they’re not here at his bedside praying for him. Mind if I ask...?”

  “If I can answer it I will,” said Jack.

  “I heard the older kid got shot. But how’d the younger one buy it?”

  Jack told him.

  “And you were right there?”

  “Yeah. We were.”

  The guy was quiet for a while.

  “My name is Darnell Holt. I was a medic in Iraq. I know shit happens. Don’t cart it around with you.”

  “Who were you with?” asked Pandora.

  “421st of the 44th.”

  “Out of Fort Bragg, right? I knew some of your guys.”

  “You were there?”

  “Corpsman.”

  “Isn’t that ‘corpse-man’ now?”

  “That was the last president.”

  “Good point. Let’s go see the guy.”

  * * *

  Walker heard them coming in the door. He opened his eyes but didn’t turn to look at them. He kept his eyes on the ceiling. He opened his mouth, closed it, and Darnell Holt took a glass of water and dipped a sponge into it and wet the man’s lips. Walker closed his eyes again, kept them closed.

  “My guess...you’re cops?”

  His voice was as thin as spring ice.

  “Good morning, Mr. Walker. Yes, we are. My name is Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol. With me is Sergeant Pandora Jansson, also of the FHP.”

  “That you, Darnell?”

  Darnell stepped up, came within the man’s sight line, put a gentle hand on Walker’s bony shoulder.

  “I’m here. You up to talking, Jerry Jeff?”

  A pause while Walker worked on breathing.

  “No. But I’m gonna do it anyway.”

  He turned to look at Redding and Jansson, took them in.

  “What’re you two, from the Vikings Unit?”

  The tone was brave but his voice trembled.

  “We’re from the Florida Highway Patrol Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place then. The crap Darnell is feeding me qualifies as criminal.”

  “You’re on a saline drip.”

  “You could put some vodka in it.”

  Darnell stepped away.

  “Mind if I stay in the room?” he asked.

  Jack and Pandora looked at each other. Jack shrugged. Pandora said, “You’re gonna have to keep it to yourself, Darnell.”

  He nodded, made the zipper move across his lips. Jack nodded to Pandora—she gave him a brief “why me” glare and then came to stand by Walker’s bed.

  “Okay, Mr. Walker—”

  “You’re gonna break my heart, you might as well call me by my first name.”

  “Okay...Jerry...”

  “It’s okay. They’re both dead, aren’t they? Otherwise they’d be here.”

  Pandora said nothing, but she put her hand on his arm. He closed his eyes for a time. Then opened them again.

  “Did that...thing...do it?”

  “In effect,” said Pandora. “There was a car chase, your Suburban—we had a notice to watch for it since some of your relatives up in Florissant were worried about not hearing from you.”

  “Aunt Melanie. They told me. She calls every fricking day.”

  “So there was a watch, a BOLO, and Sergeant Redding—Jack—spotted the truck southbound A1A on the far side of St. Augustine. There was a chase, Jack and his partner ran them down, but the woman escaped. Got into the wetlands near the Intracoastal. Our guys pursued her, and Jack’s partner, Julie Karras, stayed to help Rebecca and Karen. They were still in the truck, cuffed to the floor.”

  “Cuffed? Why?”

  “That’s still not clear. Trooper Karras got them out of the truck...and things went sideways. Rebecca attacked Karras with a steel baton—”

  “Jesus. Why?”

  “No idea. But it was pretty aggressive, and Karras had to defend herself... Rebecca was shot three times. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Mr. Walker—Jerry.”

  “Was it...was it quick?”

  “Yes. It was. Instant.”

  A silence.

  “Rebecca...my own child...helped that thing put us in the storeroom. That day. The woman—she was calling herself Diana Bowman—man I shoulda checked her out—was that really her name?”

  “No. The real Diana Bowman disappeared while on a boating trip off the Keys. The woman she was with apparently took over her identity, drained her accounts over a few months, and then she disappeared. Turned up at Amelia Island.”

  “So she...whoever she is...she does this all the time? Like some kind of parasite?”

  “Yes, that’s what it looks like. How did she manage to overcome you and your wife in the first place?”

  “Easy. She had a gun and we didn’t, but what kills me was Rebecca was the one who tied us up. Tied Alyssa, tied Marilyn... Marilyn was crying, begging her not to do it...but Rebecca was...ice-cold. As if she had been taken by a demon...it wasn’t Rebecca at all... That Bowman woman changed her...changed them both in such a short time... We watched it happening, tried to put an end to it, but we never thought the girls would turn that way... The woman said that once they were gone they’d call the condo office and tell them where we were... I didn’t believe that...and they never did. The hours, days—I could see Marilyn’s watch—it glowed in the dark...for a while anyway... I stared at it...tried to get free...”

  He stopped and Darnell gave him some water.

  “I must have passed out... I remember waking up and I could still hear them breathing...then I was gone again...and when I woke up...there was this silence...and I could tell... There was a pretty strong smell...you know? And I figured I was in hell.”

  Here he paused, and closed his eyes.

  After a moment, he said, “I prayed, you know? In the beginning. Prayed to Jesus, prayed to Jesus, who is my personal savior, prayed for him to come and save my wife and my little girl who I could hear dying right next to me hour after hour. Do either of you believe?”

  Jack, who had until last Christmas, said nothing. Pandora, who tried to but couldn’t manage it, said so. Walker took it in, closed his eyes.

  “Well, my new position is the hell with Jesus and all his friends and family. My family died in a black hole praying with all they had and in the end there was no help coming from anywhere. What happened to Karen?”

  Pandora
was going to answer but Jack put a hand on her arm. “She was in Protective Custody, in a secure wing of a hospital in Jacksonville. She had an asthma attack, she asked for her inhaler and the nurse gave it to her. She went into arrest, the crash cart people did everything they could...”

  Jack could feel Darnell and Pandora listening to his version of the events. They said nothing. Walker was quiet for so long they thought he might have fallen asleep. And then he spoke.

  “Are they...trying to figure out what happened?”

  “They are. They think her puffer may have been poisoned, but that’s not clear yet. I’m so sorry about all of this, Mr. Walker.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Go find that...woman...and kill her. She’s purely evil and she needs to be dead.”

  “We do have a couple of questions, if you think you are up to it.”

  “Anything is better than lying here remembering. What do you need?”

  “Did you have a lot of contact with her?”

  “No. She was all about the girls. We hardly ever saw them, once they ran into her. She was up to our place once or twice before they left.”

  He seemed to recall something.

  “Yeah, there was one thing. She was real interested in what I did for a living. She asked me a lot of questions about the way we did things, about the relics and jewels, the human remains. How we researched them, sorted them out. She wanted to know if we cataloged all the names in each crypt.”

  “And did you?”

  “We tried...the records are incomplete...and as you know, they just sort of keep pushing the bodies in the front until the remains farthest back fall through a gap between the shelf and the wall. They drop into a caveau, like an open pit beneath the tomb. Where they get all jumbled up.”

  The cops took that in and both of them quietly decided to go for cremation when their time came.

  “Anyway, the caveau, that’s where we look for significant remains, if we’re trying to determine race or cultural connections. There are names on some of the shelves. I had a list, but it was incomplete. Bowman looked at it—I thought she was just curious—but she scanned it pretty carefully, now that I think of it. And she asked me if I had come across a crypt with the name Dorsey on it.”

  “Dorsey?”

  “Dorsey, I think. Started with a D anyway.”

  Jack made a note of that name—Dorsey—and let Pandora handle the talk.

  “And had you come across that name? Dorsey?”

  “It wasn’t on my list, I know that.”

  “And the relics, the jewelry, you had some of these items with you, on Amelia, right?”

  “Yes. We’re helping relocate some cemeteries in the New Orleans area, part of a flood control project.”

  Again, a pause, and he seemed to go inside himself, remembering.

  “You know, now that I think of it, that was when she got interested in the names, once she heard that the material was from New Orleans. You know, after Katrina. That’s when she got real focused. Like it piqued her interest, the New Orleans connection. I had a box full of things taken from a crypt in New Orleans—rings and pendants, some scattered human bones—”

  “Lockets?” asked Pandora.

  “Yeah, a few of those.”

  “Were you aware that she took that material with her?”

  A pause.

  “No. I wasn’t. Nobody told me. Jeez, that’s not good. Those things are a trust, we have family members depending on us—”

  “We’ve recovered them, Mr. Walker,” said Jack. “She left them in your truck when she ran.”

  “All of them?”

  “If you have an inventory record, we can check. But there was a lot recovered. A full duffel bag.”

  That seemed to calm him down.

  Pandora took up the questions.

  “Did you ever ask her why she was so interested in your work?”

  “Yes. I did. She could turn on the charm when she wanted to, and this was early on. We hadn’t started to worry about the effect she was having on the girls yet. She told me she dealt in antiquities, estate pieces, that kind of thing. She had a special interest in lockets. But only from a certain time frame.”

  “She tell you what that was?”

  “Not directly. But from her questions, I figured she was talking about the years just before World War I...”

  His voice trailed off and Darnell stepped in.

  “You okay to go on, Jerry?”

  “I’m... I want to help. But my mind isn’t... It’s all fogged up.”

  Darnell gave Jack and Pandora a sideways look.

  “Yeah, look...we can pick this up later, Mr. Walker,” said Jack. “You’ve been a big help.”

  Walker lifted a hand, said “Not yet. I got to know, where are the girls now?”

  “They’re at Immaculate Heart, in Jacksonville. You’re thinking about...”

  “Funerals,” said Walker. “Yeah. I have to recover... I have an entire family to bury.”

  Pandora put a hand on his shoulder.

  “We can’t tell you how terrible this thing is. We all feel angry and sick about it. We can only promise that we’ll find her.”

  “I’ve seen her up close, Sergeant Jansson. You be careful if you get close. She’s not...like anyone I’ve even seen before. There’s something strange about her. She knew a lot about the past, New Orleans in the teens and twenties, St. Augustine in the fifties...knew it like she’d actually been there.”

  “We’ve heard some of that,” said Jack, not wanting to say from whom, and when. “She ever talk about her childhood, that kind of thing?”

  “No...well, maybe. Only one thing she said, actually something she asked me, and it seemed to be a personal thing, not just about antiques and estate pieces.”

  “What was that?” asked Pandora.

  “She had this thing about lockets, but like I said, only from a certain period. She asked me if I’d ever seen a small gold locket with something engraved on it. She was very specific. About the engraving. She had it memorized. I could tell.”

  “Do you remember what she said? Exactly?”

  Walker went inward for a time, remembering.

  “Yeah. I do. She said it was a little gold locket, oval, the kind with two spaces for pictures inside it. There was an inscription, an engraving, on one face, the letters R and B sort of entwined the way engravers do it. It’s called a signet and it usually has three letters, the first initial, the second and, in the middle, the last name letter. And on the other side, also engraved, the words To Bea from Will Xmas 1909. She was pretty specific about it. She also said something weird... She said that it would have some dents in it, as if someone might have been teething on it.”

  In the back of Jack’s mind, another ripple in the memory pool, a flash of gold this time. Pandora could feel him pulling back, going away for a moment, and she glanced at him, taking note.

  “And had you ever seen that particular locket, Mr. Walker?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. I mean, in those years, before the Great War, lockets were all the craze. It started during the Civil War, and then Queen Victoria was wearing a locket with Prince Albert’s image in it, as a mourning thing, so that made them really popular. Soldiers gave them to wives, or mothers, if they were going off to fight.”

  “So, there’d be a lot of them around?” said Jack, coming back. Walker nodded, fading.

  “Hundreds of thousands.”

  “But she was after this specific one?”

  Again a weak smile. His eyes closing.

  A pause. They thought he had gone to sleep, and began to step away, but he spoke again.

  “She was...the way she talked about it...she was on fire to find it. It was...”

  “Important,” said Jack.

  “No. Not importan
t. It was...it was vital. She hungered for that particular locket. It meant something to her...something personal... It was like she was...hunting it.”

  He seemed to pause, gather his energy.

  “I think, when she told me about that locket, it was the one true thing I ever saw in her, that need. It was almost human. Then, I also think that because she told me about it, she knew she had to kill me. She had shown me too much. I had to die.”

  Walker subsided, went slack, and he was far down in deep sleep a moment later. Darnell checked his monitors, tweaked his saline, put a gentle hand on the man’s chest for a moment, and then he walked them out.

  “Any of that help?” asked Darnell.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “It did. Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. I think he is. He’s got some liver and kidney damage because of the prolonged dehydration, and of course he’s pretty screwed up psychologically. But like I said, tough as hickory.”

  “Time will help, maybe?” said Pandora. Darnell looked at her, a wry smile.

  “Time? Maybe. Maybe not. My opinion, he’ll never be the same again. Nobody is. You lose your family, all of them, just like that? You’re totally fucked up. Forever. That’s just the way it is.”

  Pandora couldn’t help glancing at Jack, but his face was a rock wall. They said goodbye and thanks to Darnell, gave him their cards and asked him to contact them if Walker had something else to give them. He said he would, and they left and all the way down in the elevator Darnell’s words were running around in Jack’s head.

  You lose your family, all of them, just like that? You’re totally fucked up. Forever. That’s just the way it is.

  * * *

  When they reached the parking lot and their slate-gray cruiser, Pandora stopped Jack as he went around to get in behind the wheel.

  “Nope. Gimme the keys.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not driving.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “What Darnell said to us, that’s been in your head ever since. You’re totally fucked up. Maybe not forever. But you’re sure as hell fucked up right now, and you shouldn’t be driving.”