Morrison was silent, tapping on his phone.
“You doing that texting thing with Taylor? None of that hanky-panky shit during work.”
“No, Boss.” Morrison didn’t raise his eyes from the screen.
Petrosky turned onto the main road and watched the gothic church give way to a similar building that now belonged in equal parts to a legal practice and a bank. They passed a lot full of weed-ridden gravel. Then a gas station. Then a fast food joint. Only eight more restaurants to go and they’d be at the precinct. He stopped at a red light.
“Baby boy found dead on October twenty-third four blocks from Lawrence’s apartment,” Morrison said.
“Lots of babies are found dead, Morrison. But we’ll follow up.”
“He was wrapped in a duck blanket, according to the news reports. They ran a picture of the blanket instead of a dead kid.”
Petrosky squinted at the grainy image Morrison held out to him. He could barely make out a tattered blanket covered with yellow and orange ducks, graying with filth.
Petrosky turned back to the road. “Looks like we need to haul Keil back in for questioning.”
“He gave us an awful lot of information for someone trying to hide the fact that he left his girlfriend’s kid to die three years ago,” Morrison said.
“True. But not all killers are smart.” Petrosky tried to picture Keil in the mausoleum, dopey eyes staring at the wall as he painted words in blood: A boat beneath a sunny sky, Lingering onward dreamily …
Petrosky shook his head. “If she was the one who left the kid, daddy might be pissed at her. So far, Keil’s the last one to see her alive and he might know more than he thinks he does.”
Above them, the light turned green and Petrosky hit the gas. “There’s a burger joint up here on the left. We can get it to go, hit the precinct to look up that poem, and head back to Keil’s place.”
“You want soup and salad?” Morrison looked up. “I know a place with awesome vegetarian chili.”
“Unless it has dead cow in it, I don’t want it.”
Nothing but the pitter patter of sludge on the windshield. Petrosky glanced over.
Morrison stared at his phone, brows knit together in a mask of concentration. Probably a California thing, worrying about poor, abused cows. Maybe. Petrosky craned his neck to see the screen.
Morrison lowered the phone and Petrosky straightened and stared out the windshield.
“We don’t need to stop at the precinct. I’ve got it.”
“Got what? You sending PETA after me?”
“The poem. It’s from Through the Looking Glass. Circa eighteen-seventy-one.”
Petrosky raised an eyebrow. “Rare?”
“An original copy? Maybe. And our guy might have one if he’s that into it. But the poems are available anywhere as evidenced by me pulling it up in two minutes on the web. I read it at some point in school, probably undergrad. One of those what’s-the-meaning-of-all-this-shit kinda thing. I think I read it younger, too.”
“Younger?”
“It’s the prequel to Alice in Wonderland.”
In Petrosky’s mind, the gory letters on the wall morphed into a children’s book, pages fleshy and oozing. “We’ll hit the libraries tomorrow, make some calls, and see what we can come up with.”
“Crazed professor?”
“Doubt it, but they might know something about the literature angle that we’re not thinking about, even with your fancy-ass English degree.”
Morrison didn’t take the bait. “The words at the Lawrence scene are only the first few lines. The poem has seven verses, Boss. That worries me.”
“It should, Morrison.” The rain relentlessly hammered the car, as if the clouds were attacking. Petrosky pressed harder on the gas.
Six more. That worried him too.
The clock glowed five minutes until quitting time. Robert Fredricks popped his knuckles and studied the three-dimensional quarter panel blueprints on his computer screen. The design wouldn’t win him any awards, but it was what his lead had asked for. And the job was a prime gig even if his asshole boss found something wrong with this design the way he had last time.
The call had come unexpectedly: “Can you come to Michigan?” Robert didn’t remember signing in with the head hunters at Harwick Technical, but he assumed he must have. Even if it had been a paperwork mistake, he’d figured it was about time for his luck to change. He had packed up his basement apartment of meager belongings and taken a bus that same week. He wasn’t in the main building on the lake, but it had only been a couple years. You never knew what might happen tomorrow.
At precisely five thirty, he stood and threaded his way through the array of cubicles, down the elevator, and to the parking lot. His Nissan stuck out in the sea of Chryslers. The taupe and black granite building behind him cast a long shadow over the lot.
“Hey!” Thomas Norton waved his hands, a cheerleader above the rows of cars. Thomas had a cubicle in the same department, across the aisle from Robert. When Robert had started at Harwick Tech, Thomas had been the first person in the room to say hello, loping over on stocky legs with his mop of sandy hair shellacked to his head like a helmet. Thomas hadn’t stopped talking since, though that wasn’t what bothered Robert. It was Thomas’s eyes, big and brown and all-knowing, the kind that seemed to peer into your soul. Robert hated that feeling, even the merest hint that someone could guess his most private thoughts. But, if Thomas had even the faintest idea what went on in Robert’s head he wouldn’t be smiling as he approached. And the women—shit, if they knew what Robert was thinking they’d run screaming into the night.
“Yo, Jimmy! We still on for drinks later?”
Idiot. Robert smiled. “You bet.”
Thomas grinned like a fifteen-year-old girl with a cock in her ass. “I’ll have a seat waiting.”
Robert climbed into his car. Jimmy. Ugh. He hated the name, but it was necessary now that he could no longer use his own. The world was not a friendly place for ex-cons. Not that it had been particularly friendly before his arrest. He gritted his teeth and pulled from the lot.
He had always been bad. There had always been a filthy wrongness lurking within him, despicable and abhorrent, waiting to be exposed. He could remember the exact moment he discovered the truth of it.
He had been adopted into a pious family in southern Mississippi where the air was so thick in the summer it was like breathing underwater. Their old plantation house was surrounded by gnarled oaks— “hanging trees” his father called them, because of the slaves who had once strangled to death in the boughs. As a child, he often watched the wind rustling the branches with rapt attention, squinting until he swore he could see the bodies swinging. Even walking to the bus stop, something ominous always tainted the air, a wisp of energy not yet departed from the place, a tingling on his back whose origins he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Especially under those trees.
Sometimes he could feel the weight of the whole place bearing down on him, concentrated in the glare from his father’s eyes. They were the eyes of a prophet, an angel even, at least if you asked the women of their congregation.
His father was not those things.
Despite his unknown heritage, Robert possessed those same eyes. He also had thick black hair and a finely boned face with a jaw wide enough to be attractive, or so he had assumed from the way the girls at school watched him. He wondered if they knew fornication was a surefire path to Hell. Desire was a manifestation of the Devil, his father would say, a ploy for the souls of the weak-minded.
Then it had happened to him, an unfamiliar tingling in his thighs as he watched his sixth grade teacher write Shakespearean verses on the blackboard.
But there’s no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust.
Since then, his lust had never been sated, each libidinous thou
ght weaving into a frenzied net set to wrench him kicking and screaming into the ring of fire. As a child his fingernails had gouged into his hardened flesh at these thoughts, bringing him pleasure and pain and pleasure again. Even then, he’d dared hope he might be normal someday. But then he’d been caught, hand on his body, palm still working, and his father had entered the room solemn-faced and carrying a willow switch.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” his father had said over and over again, a mantra to excuse the suffering he would inflict.
When his father yanked him from the bed and slung him to the hardwood floor, Robert knew there would be no absolution, particularly when the first blow from his father’s fist landed hard against his spine. When his father ripped his shirt from his body and he heard the singing rod as it whipped through the air, he knew he was a dirty, rotten sinner. And when the willow slashed deep into the delicate skin of his back, over and over again, he cried out, because in his core, he knew God would have no mercy on someone like him.
He was bad. Disgusting. Unlovable. Unforgivable. There was no hope.
And without hope, there was no longer any point in fighting his carnality. Then oh, how it had grown. Like a beast in his belly, filling him, consuming him, eating him alive.
A car horn blared, startling him back to the present. Robert’s erection was turning his pants into a prison.
Someday he’d find The One. She’d forgive him his thoughts, his actions, his deviousness. She’d understand his lust and appease his demons. She would save him from himself.
The light was green. The horn honked again. Robert waited for yellow and gunned it just as the light turned red, clearing the intersection amidst the bleats of horns belonging to other angry motorists.
He glanced in his rearview mirror and adjusted his zipper. Heat spread through his lower body.
He had to find the girl.
Saturday, October 10th
The sun warmed my face and turned lake water ripples into a carpet of glitter thrown by an unruly child. The outdoor end-of-summer picnic at Harwick Technical was a vast improvement on the conference rooms we’d turned to last year when the picnic had been rained out.
Noelle sat alone with a plate of food at a table overlooking the lake. Closer to the building, children giggled on inflatable bounce houses. Their parents talked amongst themselves, feigning calm, but poised like meerkats ready to leap at the slightest indication of danger, or, more likely, hair pulling and unauthorized spitting.
I took my plate to where Noelle was sitting and claimed a spot across from her. Ribs, potatoes and corn, the best picnic food money could buy. At least I assumed that was true; I was certainly not a picnic connoisseur. If such a thing existed, that would be my new occupational goal. It would have been better than typing up employee files between bouts of crushing people’s dreams.
“You don’t have to look so pissed to be here,” Noelle said. “I mean, you need to get out of the house sometimes, right? Explore the world. Get away from Ja—”
“I’m not pissed. Just hanging out.” I took a bite of corn on the cob, feeling a little pissed. “Besides, Jake was busy today. He went over to his mom’s house.” A corn kernel escaped my lips and landed on the table. I wiped it away, pretending it was Jake’s mother, the real reason I had told Jake this party was mandatory. At least he hadn’t wanted to come; having Jake around would have made me feel extra horrible when my boss’s presence turned me into a blubbering imbecile. I scanned the field for Mr. Harwick, but that sinewy mass of handsome was nowhere to be seen. Bummer.
“Gotcha. Well, see? You wouldn’t have been doing anything anyway.” Noelle speared a piece of chicken. “Can I ask you a question?”
I shrugged. “Shoot.”
“Why do you put up with that guy? He sits around all day, visiting with his mom and who knows who else, while you work to—”
“I love Jake for things besides money.”
Noelle cocked her head. “What, like his cooking? Didn’t he once cut the tops off the broccoli and serve only the bottoms?”
I winced. “He tried.”
“I guess you must love him for his brains.”
The corn rolled around in my stomach. “Everyone deserves a chance, right? And he’s there for me when I need him.”
Noelle snorted. “Like a faithful lap dog, only way more expensive.”
“Faithfulness is important.” My ears warmed. “Besides, it’s his other attributes that keep me coming back.” I winked and hoped it didn’t look forced.
Noelle glanced across the field and back at me. “He must have a golden dick, then, for all the shit you put up with.”
“Nothing golden now, but believe me, we tried. That sparkly paint was way too itchy.”
“Jesus, Hannah.”
“Jesus would never do the things I make Jake do to me.” My ears cooled. The corn settled. I set the half-eaten cob on the plate and grabbed my fork.
“You’re probably right about that. Plus he always had all those apostles following him around.”
“He has a long staff though,” I said. I smiled, and this time I meant it.
“So I hear.” Noelle stared past me and straightened her shoulders, her boobs torpedoing toward someone at my back.
“Good afternoon, ladies.”
I startled and dropped a forkful of potatoes at Mr. Harwick’s voice. Nice going, Hannah.
He stepped around to the head of the table, his eyes deep blue oceans flecked with a lighter shade of gray. His aquiline nose cut through the middle of his face above lips that were just shy of pouty, now twitching up in amusement. The blue suit he wore was immaculate, right down to the silver cufflinks and navy-striped tie. Did he ever wrinkle? Each element of him registered, but separately like the flickered images from an old silent movie.
“Afternoon,” I said. Noelle said it at exactly the same time, ensuring that we sounded like wannabe twins, or maybe synchronized talkers. Synchronized talking, an Olympic sport like synchronized swimming, only way lamer. If that was a thing, I had another job aspiration. But I couldn’t think about potential jobs or anything else when Mr. Harwick’s eyes were staring into mine and making my world disappear, which was probably totally unhealthy but I didn’t care. Such was the nature of fantasy men, right? I waited for him to walk away like he always did. He had probably heard that little crack in my voice. Shit, maybe he knew about my weirdness.
But he was still there, staring at me with that amused expression. God, were his eyes always like that? They were sin-sational. Was that a word? I wondered if I could dive into them and swim around for a while. And if he’d notice me taking a dip in his eyeballs. And how Jake would feel about that.
Maybe Jake can come too!
That’s what she said.
Christ. Stop it, Hannah.
“Enjoying the party?” he asked. His eyes twinkled and I wanted to touch them. But eye poking would surely hurt him and make me look flat-out crazy.
“Very much. It’s pretty nice of you to feed the whole place,” Noelle said.
He turned to her, and the hold he had on me disappeared. I fought the urge to slump under the table and hide.
“I appreciate the things all of you do,” he said. “Might as well show my appreciation with coleslaw and chicken.” He looked back at me and rubber bands wrapped around my chest, like that rubber-bands-around-a-watermelon trick where you add more and more until it blows up. If I exploded, it wouldn’t be as hilarious as the watermelon thing. But it might make it to America’s Best Home Movies or whatever that show was called.
Noelle nodded. “Yeah, the chicken is pretty good.”
And there were those eyes again.
“How are you enjoying it?” he asked me.
“Nothing fowl about it,” I said, and fire spread from my cheeks to my neck. Nice. Super classy.
Mr. Harwick laughed. My heart somehow managed to speed up and slow down at the same time.
Noelle cocked an eyebrow at me and shook her head. She cut into a potato with a plastic knife.
“I even got real butter, because with butter there is little margarine for error.” Mr. Harwick winked at me.
I was a fish gasping for air; I couldn’t close my mouth.
“Have fun ladies.” Mr. Harwick turned in the direction of the building.
And there he goes.
“He’s fucking delicious,” Noelle whispered. “Weird sense of humor, but delicious.” She was watching me closely, eyes darting from me to his receding back.
I’d like for you to stay, but I love to watch you leave. Damn, someone else had said that right? It wasn’t me. I would never think such a thing. I had a boyfriend, and I loved him.
I swallowed hard and nodded at Noelle.
When the event wound to a close, I skittered to the back of the parking lot, rubbernecking for signs of danger like an inquisitive—or extremely paranoid—giraffe. To my right, a woman with a baby on her hip unlocked her car. Beyond her the lot was gloriously empty.
Clear.
My Buick’s windshield was the only shiny element of the vehicle, the luster from its burgundy paint long ago stripped away by years of winter salt. I slipped the key into the ignition, pulled out of the lot, and headed for the freeway.
A few times a week I was a goddamn liar. Jake would throw a fit if he knew I still volunteered at the domestic violence shelter instead of working late like I kept insisting I was. I had been staying there when I met him, ruined and lost, stocking shelves at the drugstore where he worked. Maybe he wanted me to leave that part of my life behind as much as he wanted to leave behind the fact that he actually worked when we got together. And though I might have chosen a more creative name, I couldn’t let The Shelter go. They needed my help. Plus, it was hard to feel sorry for myself in the midst of so much suffering.
I clicked on the radio.
“—in other news, a local woman was found murdered in an Ash Park cemetery. Police have identified the woman as twenty-one-year-old Meredith Lawrence. If you have any information—”
[Ash Park 01.0] Famished Page 5
