Poe (12 page)

She visibly flinches, like I’ve cut her.

A sudden corrupt rage rushes through my body—icy and yet strangely victorious.
Daniel’s
the complication.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Her jaw clenches. “Is that what you think?”

“What am I supposed to think?”

Lisa swallows. I cross my arms over my chest so she can’t see them shaking.

“We’re not doing this,” she finally says. “I will call you later, and then we’ll talk. But not now.”

I don’t know who I’m more pissed at—Lisa for refusing to talk, or me for unlocking the door and opening it. “Fine,” I say. “It’s your funeral.”

White-faced, Lisa slides her bag angrily over her shoulder, brushes by me with palpable fury, and clatters down the stairs.

“Tell your boyfriend I say hi,” I call after her.

There’s a
whoosh
as the entry door opens, I feel a draft of cool air, then
slam
—the door rattles shut.

And what I’m left with is the hollow realization that it’s not my slumlord or this Daniel who’s an asshole.

It’s me.

My apartment, which has always been stale and empty, now feels completely lifeless, like a bad motel room with no maid service. The shards of broken glass on the floor glitter in the dimming light, catching the few rays of the setting sun. They’re pretty, like the icy sparkle of a fresh layer of snow.
Snow
. For a heart-jolting moment suddenly I’m not standing in my shitty apartment surrounded by broken glass—I’m in my neat childhood bedroom, and my mother stands next to me, an arm on my shoulder. It’s winter and there was a storm the night before, so they’ve canceled school. She opens the window and points to the fairy-tale snow glistening in the morning sun. “Angel tears” she calls it. Her laugh is deep and throaty, and a cold breeze pushes through, which makes me shiver in my flannel baseball pajamas. Then she reaches out and pulls an icicle from the roof, gives it to me to taste; it’s slick, like a giant ice cube. In it I can see our warped reflections.

Fuck
, not now.

I reel with a visceral, choking wave of grief and drop to my knees, very much alone in my shitty apartment, and press my hands to the floor like a prayer. Distantly I register the glass cutting into my palms, and I sob. I sob in a way that’s like vomiting—an overpowering, stomach-twisting, and wrenching pain. Tears stream down my face;
snot runs like a current from my nose. God I miss her, God I miss her,
God I miss you
.

Time passes.

Finally I manage to sit up, back on my heels, and rub my sleeve across my nose. I’m several degrees past spent, but it’s an empty, holy kind of exhaustion. I pick up one of the frames that are facedown on the floor, smearing blood on the glass in the process.

I took the picture at the end of summer; the mornings were just starting to be cool in that crisp, near-autumn kind of way. I’d been entertaining the delusion that I could make a few extra bucks from the paper if I shot photos too, so I’d taken to keeping a cheap camera in the car. At the crosswalk on the corner of Main and Ocean, an old woman was crossing the street slowly, holding up traffic. Not news exactly, but something about it interested me. She wore a plastic scarf over her head because it had been lightly raining earlier; her pink coat translated into a light gray on the black-and-white print.

The photo is now torn straight through the middle, neatly halving the woman in two.

But what’s interesting, compelling, is that the tear is
underneath
the remaining glass in the frame.

Which is not physically possible.

I pick up the other photo, this one taken a few weeks later at the same crosswalk. A heavyset woman wearing a reflective jacket and blowing a whistle supervises elementary school children crossing the street. I thought it made for a nice contrast, New Goshen’s past and New Goshen’s future, but when I showed them to Mac and proposed I get paid, he burst into hysterical laughter before promptly throwing me out of his office.

This picture too is ripped neatly in half in exactly the same way.

I sit down on the couch, holding the photo at arm’s length. There’s something familiar about the heavyset woman… What? I close my eyes, picturing her face in my head. And then it hits
me—her permed and frizzy hair, her eyes, which I last saw staring lifelessly in the morgue, and her gray, bloody corpse splayed out like a medieval victim of torture. What was it the doctor with the iPod said?

I can’t quite remember—something strange and disturbing.

My guilt prescriptions are still on the bamboo coffee table where I left them, so I pop a couple of Ambien, washing them down with a half-empty bottle of water that I find lying on the floor.

And then I remember the envelope. If it’s
not
an eviction notice from my slumlord, then what is it?

I pull it out from my jeans pocket and rip off the end. Inside is a small white sheet of notepaper with just two small words written in tight, angry print.

race  you

Well that makes no fucking sense.

The Ambien begins to creep through my veins; it’s a welcome, sagging fuzziness that tugs at reality. And just as my eyelids start to droop I remember what she said, the doctor in scrubs, as she peered into the abdomen of the corpse: “Check out the spleen. It looks like something
was
eating it.”

But then everything, blissfully, fades to black.

CHAPTER SEVEN: RACE YOU

I
’m standing in a snowy wood. It’s morning, the sun is coming up in the east, and I’m not cold, even though I’m only wearing a pair of plaid flannel pajama bottoms that my mother gave me years ago.

A feeling buzzes through me, powerful and strong. I reach up for a tree limb and break it off easily. Interesting. Then I crush it in my fist, turning it into fine powder that gives off the clean scent of freshly cut pine.

In the distance a sleigh bell jingles, and there’s laughter, bright and tinkling, familiar. My
mother
. I race up the small hill—I’m amazingly fast; the trees pass by in a blur—but when I reach the top of the rise, I’m faced with another, steeper hill. Sharp rocks protrude from the even, untouched layer of snow, but no problem, my feet sink deep, reaching frozen ground, and I use the earth to launch myself up the hill faster, with long, powerful strides. But at the top I find a small mountain is now in front of me.

Again the familiar laughter, and another voice now, deeper. My father’s. They’re close, so close; I want to call out but strangely have lost my voice—what I’ve gained in physical strength I’ve lost in my ability to speak.

Then I see the thin punk-rock musician from Lisa’s photos standing with preternatural stillness by a thin, barren tree. He stares at me with wild, roaming eyes. His face is ashy pale, and in his bony right hand he grips a long knife that glints in the hazy morning light. His
thin white T-shirt is covered with bright blood, and after his eyes register mine, he grins.

“Race you,” he says.

He plunges into the dark wood, and as my heart thuds frantically against my chest, a feeling of complete and utter panic rising through me, I run after him. But he’s faster, stronger—he’s over the hill and halfway up the next just as I get to the top, my chest heaving. If only I could call out a warning; if I wasn’t a mute, my parents might have a chance. When I reach a flat clearing, I can’t tell which way to turn—the trees are spinning, and my lungs burn with cold. Then I see marks left in the snow, an inhuman distance between each footprint. I want to collapse, sleep, let the drifting snow cover me, but maybe there’s time, so I stumble through the clearing and back into the woods, where the trail leads.

I reach the summit of the next hill, spent. And there, in the distance, I see him in silhouette standing on a jutting crag near the peak of the next mountain. He’s watching someone below, with a visibly coiled energy, like a lion about to pounce. He turns to me with a jeering grimace, opens his mouth, and lets out an indescribable sound, like the roar of a massive waterfall. The ground begins to shake as he leaps off the edge.

A bloodcurdling scream echoes through the canyon walls. My mother.

Too late, too late, but still I try to force my aching legs to move—they’re sluggish, frozen, and I’m overcome with an empty feeling of powerlessness and desperation. Not enough—
I’m not enough
—and then I see the snow on the mountain peak start to shiver. A crack forms, and then a thundering chunk drops off. An avalanche. I don’t even bother to move—there’s no point—and the torrent of snow hits me with the force of a Mack truck, knocking me into a current of rushing powder. Once again I’m rolled around; once again I can’t tell which way is up or down; once again I’m drowning. Dying is becoming a familiar experience.

Finally all is still and dark, like a cocoon, like a womb. My heart still beats, but I’m choking on snow, buried alive.

A sound. Digging. The snow in front of my face gets lighter, brighter, and I can see movement of some kind, accompanied by a deep, guttural growl. A hand reaches down to me, grips me tightly by the wrist, and lifts me with supernatural strength to the surface, where I gasp for breath and shake with wet cold.

It’s the woman from the water.

Her skin is so pale it has a bluish hue, and her hair is wet. It clings to her high forehead in damp clumps. She wears a thin cotton shift that’s drenched too, as if she just crawled out of the well. She cradles me in her icy arms, staring at me with glittering, ice-blue eyes, then brushes snow from my face, leans down as if to kiss me but stops short.

“Dimitri, he is coming,” she whispers. Her accent is foreign but familiar, and I don’t just hear her speak—I see blue words drip from her lips, like vapor.

And then she smiles at me, but it’s a cold smile, calculating. She reaches into the snow and conjures an icicle, holding it in front of my face. But I don’t see my reflection, or hers. Instead I see a warped symbol. It is oddly familiar but also strange.

“
You must be ready
.”

The symbol—it’s the symbol on my father’s ring. I want to ask her what it means, but just then she places the tip of the icicle on my forehead, and it burns, spreading to a searing, sharp pain that crushes me from within—white hot, blinding.

I wake up. Turn on the light. There is a small dusting of snow on the floor, already starting to melt. And at the edge, a woman’s delicate footprint, leading from my apartment, out the door.

CHAPTER EIGHT: MYSTERY #5

I
have watched enough cheesy detective television shows in my young life to know that when one is presented with an inexplicable mystery, the first order of business (after procuring good donuts and coffee—check) is to create a wall of clues with photos of suspects and article clippings, preferably in an artistic yet seemingly random fashion. This collage is essential to the solution, because it is the ground from which the
aha!
moment comes—a moment which usually occurs fifteen minutes before the hour is up. The lead detective suddenly gasps and goes to grab his coat and keys without explaining the details to his black or female partner.

So, three donuts under the belt and halfway through my second cup of coffee, I grab my obituary journalist notebook and start to make notes.

#1–Who is Daniel? Do I need to be jealous
?

#2–Dead fat woman in morgue. Identify
.

#3–What’s up with the symbol on my father’s ring
?

#4–How is Aspinwall connected with any or all of the above
?

#5–POE

I don’t have a name for the ghostly woman in my dream, and I feel vaguely superstitious that committing too much of my thoughts about her to paper will somehow conjure her, make her real. So I
decide to use a code word, Poe, for mystery #5, in honor of the author of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Seems appropriate.

Sadly, the best place to start my research is in the dusty basement archive at the
Devonshire Eagle
, where they still use microfiche to catalog articles. This means I probably can’t escape a visit with Mac to see what new assignments are on the horizon, which means my hospital vacation is over, which gives me a sad ache somewhere in the lower quadrant of my stomach. But there are things to do, people to see, dead people to write about—they wait for no one, the dead and dying.