Dead Spell (20 page)

Her mother was sitting on a chair across the desk from him and she had been crying. She had her hair pulled back in a French twist and wore a black pinstriped suit that looked more like she was interviewing for a job than dealing with a crisis. There was a small pile of used Kleenex wadded up in her lap that she was trying to hide with her folded hands.

“Brea, please have a seat.” Dr. Frankel motioned at the chair next to her mother.

Brea pulled it away before sitting.

Uncle Jim stretched his arm out and made himself wide enough to block the doorway. “Do you want me to stay?”

“No,” Joan said. “Thank you for bringing her in.”

“We’re going to have to deal with that other thing later, Jo.” Her uncle preferred Jo to Joan. It’s what he called her since they were kids.

“I know. We will.”

He put his hat on and closed the door behind him.

“Brea, your mother is very concerned,” Dr. Frankel said in a calm, steady voice. “Why don’t we start by talking about the fight?”

Brea slouched down in her chair, refusing to make eye contact. “Which one?”

Before Joan could yell, he held up his hand and she stayed quiet.

“The fight your uncle just picked you out of.”

“Do you really want to go there?” She looked at her mother, but she wouldn’t look back.

“Please.” Dr. Frankel picked up his pen.

“Do you know what
she
did?” Any cool Brea collected on the ride over was gone. “She made a deal to exchange a fast-tracked rezoning for keeping me away from my best friend. She used the guy’s son to take me out…”

“Whoa, hold it right there,” her mother said.

“Ms. Miller, please.”

“You asked about the fight. Jaxon, my pseudo-boyfriend, was driving his ex and her friends home. They started talking shit about Harmony and I lost it.”

“Harmony, Harmony, Harmony. When am I going to stop hearing that name?”

Brea let out a frustrated scream. “Did she tell you? My best friend killed herself and
she
didn’t even acknowledge it. Dr. Frankel, what would you say about a mother who doesn’t even console her daughter through something like that?”

“Brea, she made that choice…”

“You hated her. You hated Harmony and Charity and you never once told me why. I’m going to find out and you’re not going to stop me.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Joan’s eyes implored Dr. Frankel to stop it.

“Brea, please,” he interrupted, “with your mother’s permission, I’d like you to take a break out in the waiting room. There’s a water cooler and cups behind the...”

She was out the door before he finished.

* * * * *

Dr. Frankel straightened himself in his seat. “I think it’s best if we let her have a minute. She’s obviously very upset.”

Joan wept into a fresh tissue. “
She’s
upset?”

He handed her the box of Kleenex.

“What she said is a lie. I never once asked Mitchell to use Jaxon. I might have said that Jaxon was the kind of boy I’d like to see Brea with, but I didn’t offer anything in exchange for that. If Mitchell misinterpreted, well, it wasn’t my fault. I don’t deal in favors. I don’t know where she would have even heard a thing like that, unless…”

“Unless?”

“Dr. Frankel, Brea’s not very popular. She was only ever with that Harmony and maybe she’s a little out of Jaxon’s league.”

“Do you think he might have said something to cover that up?”

“It doesn’t seem like him, but maybe.”

“Can I ask you something, Joan? What does Brea remember about when she was two? When you brought her to me, initially? Does she know why?”

“Nothing, thankfully. She was too young.”

“And you never talked to her about it when she got older, never explained about Harmony?”

“That’s not the kind of discussion you have if you can avoid it.”

“I’d like to bring her back in and ask a few questions. See if she reacts.”

“She’s not an experiment, Dr. Frankel. I think we have enough problems already.”

Joan walked out to the waiting room and it was empty.

There was no one at the check-in desk and only a janitor walking around with a large plastic dumpster.

“Brea?” Joan approached the janitor. “Have you seen a brunette girl about 16, this tall?” She held her hand up to just about her height.

“No, ma’am,” he said and dumped a basket of trash.

“Brea?” She threw open the bathroom door. “Brea!”

“What’s going on? What’s the matter” Dr. Frankel came running.

“She’s gone again,” Joan said and got on the phone with Jim.

33
.

Brea stood on the lawn of 6 Maple debating whether or not to go in alone. In the daylight, the disheveled house looked almost more dangerous—its flaws visible, like traps. New development had sprung up around it; large houses in varying degrees of unfinished like the woman at the Deed’s Office said. A road had been roughed in and there were bulldozers and heavy equipment parked around the lot’s perimeter, probably threatening Charity to sell. A large sign announced the new development brought to you by Winslow Construction.

“Good luck with that.”

Brea walked through overgrown, patchy grass, the weeds, and creeping vines, up the cobblestone path to the rotting front door.

The slate blue paint was worn away to bare wood and there was broken window glass around the foundation. She righted the upside down 6 on the door frame and stuck a piece of dry twig in the top nail hole to hold it.

“So this was home, Tom?”

She pushed the door open and called in. “Hello? Is anyone here?” A couple of pigeons flew through a broken windows and she jumped.

“Hello?”

The living room floor sagged and was full of cracked boards that she would have never walked across the other night had she seen them. She moved around where it looked most supported and breathed only through her mouth as she cut through the filthy kitchen. There were recent McDonalds wrappers piled on the remnants of a dining room table and a couple of half-empty bottles of Coke.

“There has to be something here.”

The basement door was nailed shut long enough ago that the rain through the hole in the roof had rusted the heads. She tugged and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge and she went to find something to pry it with.

A door off the kitchen led to a garage where a cherry red 80’s IROC-Z Camaro sat half-covered. Brea opened the door and looked inside. It had gas and plates and she wondered who it was registered to. She kicked through the beer cans scattered across the cement floor and found a large red tool box in the corner.
Perfect.
She grabbed an old hammer from inside.

The basement door was closed solid. Whoever nailed it shut sunk the heads of the nails far enough in that she couldn’t catch them with the hammer’s claw.

She pried the edge of the jamb, pulling and tugging as hard as she could and a loosened board fell from the roof, hitting her hard in the head.

“Shit.”

“Brea, are you all right?” Adam hurried over to help her up.

“What are you doing here?” She hadn’t even heard him pull up or come in.

“Looking for you. Come on, we have to go.”

34
.

Joan sat on the living room couch. Her hands were shaking and she was cursing her laptop. “All I want to do is see the damned call log.” The cell phone website was down. “Did you check Maple Street like I asked you to? She knows about that house, Jim. I have no idea how.”

Jim was still on-duty so his walkie-talkie was busy with chatter and static. He was distracted, half-listening in case he had to respond to a call. “Of course I checked it. She wasn’t there, Jo, and I don’t have any jurisdiction over this. Wherever she is, she’s sixteen-years-old. I can’t go in and snatch her vigilante-style even if we do find her.”

“Don’t you think I know how old she is? That’s half the problem.” She pulled the combs out of her hair and it fell in messy red waves around her face. “I’m not asking you to be a cop, Jim. I’m asking you to be her uncle.”

“She slammed the enter button and let out a sigh. “Finally.” She picked Brea’s phone number from the drop down and looked at her most recent calls. Home, home, her number, and then a ton of a number she didn’t know. She sorted the numbers by frequency and the calls started when Harmony died. “Whose number is this?”

She dialed the number and the phone rang continuously without ever going to voicemail.

Joan refreshed the web page until the most recent call appeared. “The last call is from that number, Jim. I need to know whose it is.”

“Fine, but that’s where it ends.” He called the station and wrote down a name and address on a piece of junk mail Joan had sitting on the coffee table. “Adam Krier. Name ring a bell?”

“Not really, no. But, wait, isn’t that the guy from the station the night Brea got picked up with Harmony.”

“I think I knew this guy’s sister. She was killed a few years back out on Route 32. He lives on Washington Street in the Manor View Apartments, 12B.”

“What else did they say about him?”

“What else? Nothing else. It’s bad enough I did that.”

“Will you please just stop by there. Make something up. Knock on his door. See if she’s there.”

“No, Jo. No way. If he complains, it’s my ass. I don’t need that kind of heat at work.”

“Please, Jim. Something’s wrong with Brea and if I go over there—and I
will
go over there if you don’t—it’s only going to get worse. Don’t be intimidating; let your uniform do the talking. I’m just asking you to knock on the door.”

A female voice crackled over his radio. “Jim, are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Go ahead.”

“We got a 10-52 over at Manor View, two kids outside of building C. Neighbor called it in.”

“Looks like it’s your lucky day. I’ll check it out after this call, all right?”

“Call me as soon as you know something.”

“I will. Brea’s a good kid, Jo. She’s been through a lot.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “She’ll be fine. She’ll pull through this. She always does.”

Joan watched his cruiser take off from the window—lights and sirens—and started to cry.

35
.

Brea wrapped her wet hair up in a towel and put on one of Adam’s smaller tee shirts and a pair of cut off sweatpants he said was Harmony’s favorite. The shower relaxed some of her tension, but her head was pounding and she took a couple of ibuprofen, hoping to calm it down.