Ashes to Ashes (7 page)

He shook it anyway.

“What is this?”

He didn't understand the reason at the time,
but Ashe knew he had to take the container with him. He believed it
to be important. It didn't fit. In that room, the empty
lipstick-like container did not belong. It was odd. It was an
anomaly, which was why he tucked it into his pants pocket anyway.
He wondered why Crime Scene had left it behind. But he honestly
didn’t fully understand why he was taking the object himself,
because it would most likely as purposeless to the crime as the
shiny trophies it had been sitting by.

Getting up from the chair, Ashe took a couple
steps backward and his calves connected with the frame of Scott’s
bed. It caught him off guard and he almost stumbled onto the
mattress. Bracing his legs, he managed to regain his footing. The
already disturbed mattress shifted even further. The psychologist
turned around to right and noticed something peeking out from
between the mattress and the box springs.

A maroon notebook. A journal. It was worn and
heavily handled.

Grabbing the notebook, Ashe cradled it in his
hands and began to flip through the first few pages.
And then
the next tooth fell to the floor...I couldn't stop floating over
the brown house...I don't know what the blue lady wanted but it
wasn't good.
To an outsider or random observer, the notebook
would be gibberish or random images. Reading it over, he knew it to
be a dream journal.

During an early undergrad psychology class,
Ashe had learned about dream journals and their possible uses
during treatment or therapy sessions. Dreams have long been thought
to be important, and sometimes mysterious. He agreed with some of
that statement. Dreams were important but not all dreams. Freud, in
his day, had highly exaggerated the importance of dreams as a
whole, stating that dreams were a symbolic language used by the
subconscious and were important to understanding underlying urges
and impulses. Most dreams, Ashe believed, were merely remnants of
the day's thoughts and events. Unimportant. However, reoccurring
dreams could give clues to inner turmoil or troubles that the
subconscious was trying to solve. Keeping a dream journal could be
helpful to identifying and recording the clues.

And it could be interesting at the same
time.

For most of his life, Ashe had kept a dream
journal. And he had passed along the habit to his son at an early
age. As a young boy, Scott had suffered from minor night terrors,
which caused him to wake screaming in the middle of the night. The
feelings and visions of whatever was scaring him faded quickly,
leaving behind nothing but mist. Because of the quickness of the
fading, Ashe began to run into Scott's room at the sound of
screaming, with a notebook and pen, to try and record what his son
had been seeing and feeling.

There had been a boy in Scott's class named
Malcolm who bullied him day in and out, and Scott had been afraid
of the boy, enough so that the fear crept into his dreams, scarring
him even in his sleep. Ashe was able to figure it out through the
broken emotions and visions of his son's fading nightmares.

Scott had thought the dream journal
was...neat. And, possibly thinking that the space had the power of
magical concealment, he had always hid the journal underneath his
mattress.

Holding the journal in his hands, Ashe wanted
to believe there was answers it. Just like with the night terrors,
the dream journal would provide him the broken pieces in which to
rebuild the whole puzzle. Getting inside of Scott’s psyche would be
an important step, even if it was only the initial step in a long,
treacherous hike.

He had been in the apartment long enough,
Ashe realized.

Turning to leave, he noticed one more thing
that stopped him cold. The bedroom door had been open and he had
missed it on the way in, but on the inside of the door were two
large sliding locks. They appeared to be thick, sturdy, and
expensive. And together they could possibly stop an angry bull from
charging into the room.

Why? What or who was Scott trying to keep
out?

Taking a long look at the locks, Ashe gripped
the journal firmly and left the bedroom and the apartment. He
paused in the hallway. The door to another apartment sat directly
across from Scott’s. For a few seconds he stared at the doorway.
Oscar had said the neighbor from across the hall had been the one
to call in the shooting. He put his body in front of the door and
decided to knock.

Eventually, after knocking several times, a
tired looking, dark skinned young woman answered. She looked to be
around Scott’s age. She chose to keep the door’s chain latched,
providing a barrier between Ashe and herself, understandably
so.

“I’m sorry to wake you, ma’am,” Ashe began,
“but I work for the Youngstown Police Department and I was
wondering if I could ask you some questions about what happened in
the apartment across the hall. I would only need a couple minutes
of your time. I know you probably have to rest up for class in the
morning. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“I’ve already talked to the police,” the
woman replied. “And you don’t look like a cop, either.”

“I’m not a cop, I’m a consultant,” Ashe told
her. He suddenly wished that he still had his laminated badge. “I
was sent with some follow-up questions. I’m sorry that it had to be
late. But time is crucial. My I get your name, please?”

“No you may not,
consultant
,” the
young lady remarked. “And you can ask me all the follow-up
questions that you want…tomorrow…during the day. But bring a real
cop with you…if you want me to answer anything. Goodnight.” She
then aggressively slammed the door.

Ash thought about knocking on other doors, to
try to find any witnesses to Scott’s bolt from the building, but
decided to go home instead. He was spent. And no one would talk to
him anyway. He did not have a badge or even his consultant
laminate.

He groaned and rubbed his tired eyes. A
seemingly normal day had turned rabid and bit him in the ass.

Chapter 6

Feeling along the wall in the dark, it took
him several seconds to locate the light switch. Flipping it, his
kitchen exploded around him. Pain shot across the surface of his
eyes. Giving his pupils a moment to adjust, Ashe waddled toward the
sliver fridge, heading for either a beer or some water to wash down
a pain pill. For the second time that evening he found himself
arriving at home, stressed and on the verge of a migraine.

He would take anything that would kill the
tension building in his head...short of a bullet to the brain. It
was tempting but that would relieve a little more than just the
tension. Like gray matter. The thought brought back images of
Owen's blood soaked bed.

“Where the fuck are you, Scott?” He asked the
house. But the building didn’t have a voice to answer. It was
hollow and lifeless. The emptiness of his home had never bothered
him as much as it did at that moment. Over the years it had become
his sanctuary, his fortress of solitude, so much that he had
forgotten what it had been like once upon a time. He remembered a
time in the past when the walls were filled with life and love. But
no more. It had become nothing but a tomb, a tomb that his mind
pretended was his home.

Home.

The house was a place for him to rest and to
sleep, but it had not been a home in many, many years. He could
burn it down, Ashe told himself. He could watch it disintegrate and
return to the Earth. He would never be able to do it, however,
because the memories of his wife might burn with it. And where
would he be without the ghost of his Susanne? Where would he be
without the specter of his lost love and the mixture of pleasure
and anguish that haunted him during the days of his life? Happy?
Possibly. But happiness is overrated, or at least that is what he
often told himself.

For a brief instant he pictured Katherine and
the red of her shiny hair. He instantly forced her image away. He
didn’t deserve the normalcy of a second date with a good looking
and interesting woman.

Pausing at the island, Ashe dropped the dream
journal down on the smooth and reflective surface. Fishing in his
pocket, he found the black and gold container. Putting it on top of
the notebook, he glared at it. Unexpectedly, he snatched the
container back up and opened it. Empty. As he had figured.

“What did you hold?” he asked the container,
as if it would speak.

Closing the container, he put it back on the
journal and turned away.

Opening the fridge, he ducked his head
inside. Grabbing a bottle from a shelf, he pulled a red bottle
opener from a nearby drawer. Violently, he amputated the top of the
bottle. Ashe moaned lowly as the cold flow of the Sam Adams entered
his throat. Sometimes it was like drinking gold...but better. He
swallowed hard before taking another pleasurable gulp. Using his
heel to bump the fridge door closed, he flicked the beer cap toward
the garbage can. It hit the outer rim of the can and bounced upward
and onto the counter top. He walked over to the counter to properly
dispose of the cap when he noticed that his answering machine once
again had two messages instead of one.

Reluctantly, he pressed the PLAY button.

Katherine's voice sprung to life. “Ashe?
Usually I take a man storming out on a first date as rejection. But
I will forgive
you
...for bailing on me in the middle of a
meal. It wasn't even the middle of the meal. It was...pre-meal.
There is a first time for everything. And it was the first time, I
hope you know. I am a damned sexy piece of red head and men usually
wait until the next morning and sneak away. Just kidding. I am not
a whore. I swear.” She giggled. “I hope your old friend was dying
or something. Or at least believed they were.” Another cute giggle.
“Anyway. I forgive you...once. And once only...by damned. You said
that you would call me and I will hold you to it. Or...something of
that nature. I am not going to stalk you or anything. I'm not in
your closet...I swear it. This is a nice jacket, though.” An even
cuter giggle. “Call me. In case you don’t have it my number
is…Bye.”

Ashe stopped the machine before it continued
onto the next message.

Finishing the beer, he dumped the bottle into
the garbage can and flipped the light back off. He paused to once
again take in the silence of his house, his self-assembled tomb.
Some people spoke about a death rattle, the noise made by the
person and their body around the time of dying. But the actual
point of death, true death, does not have a distinct sound. There
is only silence, nothingness. That was death. Life being replaced
by nothing.

Chapter 7

Scott was shivering and shaking, sitting on
the top of a cold bench in Lincoln Park. It was well into the night
and the sky had become clear, void of any clouds. Because there
were no clouds to hold it down, any heat that the day had
accumulated had risen into the clear sky and away from the ground.
It was April but it felt like winter had snuck back around. He
wished that he had grabbed a thicker coat, one with a hood to cover
his iced over ears.

He knew it was late but refused to turn on
his phone to see for sure. It might have been 3 a.m. give or take
an hour. He felt fatigue setting into his stomach, creeping into
his bones, mingled with the cold that already held residence. He
had been in the park for what might have been over an hour, but he
wasn’t sure. He would soon be moving on. Hopefully the search had
died down some, but he didn’t get his hopes up.

Keeping his head down, Scott sat on the top
of the bench with his feet hanging off the edge. He tried his best
not to attract any of the vagabonds of the homeless village. There
were many dirty and tired figures around him, lying in tattered
tents, sitting on the dirt or grass, or standing near flaming metal
drums, where anything burnable was being used for heat. Some had on
less clothing than Scott himself was lucky enough to have. How
could they must be. He couldn’t imagine living life always cold. He
felt bad for them…for their daily struggle. The lost and forgotten
would do whatever they could to be close to comfortable warmth, he
noticed. He tried not to show it, but he was watching them. Many
were drunk or high, numbed to the cold. Scott could smell alcohol
and weed and had seen a few needles being passed around.

Lincoln Park might have once been a
beautiful, green piece of land, consistently populated during a
sunny afternoon by parents and their children. The children might
have swung or climbed the jungle-gym or dug in the shallow sandpit
while their parents sat on the wooden benches, conversing or
reading. But those days were long gone. The swing set had become
swing less. The jungle-gym was slowly crumbling, its wood
disappearing back into the dirt. And the sandpit was nothing but
mud. The sunny afternoons were no more.

Luckily for Scott, he only intended the park
to be a pit stop, a moment to get off the streets and hide. He
hadn't quit made it out of Youngstown, because he had to halt and
gather his nervous, bouncing thoughts. The cops were out in full
force, spotlighting dark alleys and crevasses, looking for a hole
that Scott might be hiding in. If he didn't know the town and
hadn’t managed a head start, he might have been picked up hours
ago. But he had to pause his running. His legs were tired, his
thoughts were scattered, and he wasn't sure what to do next.

What was his next move?

For the moment, Scott felt safe, at least
safe from the police. They wouldn't walk into Lincoln Park after
dark without back-up and shotguns unless they had a death wish.
Which a lot of police officers seemed to possess, Scott admitted.
He had known several of them that didn’t come across as being too
bright when it came to danger, as if they lacked the instinct to
keep themselves alive.