The Hollower (6 page)

“Promise me, David Michael Kohlar. Promise me you’ll get it. Go to the house and get it.”

“Get what?”

“Promise me. Please.” Her eyelids closed, forcing the tears from the rims of her eyes down her cheeks. “In Max’s front closet. Please, you have to get it. You’ll know what it is when you see it.”

When Dave glanced back, the doctor made an impatient tap on the face of his watch.

Turning back to Sally, Dave ran a dry tongue over drier lips and said, “Okay. Okay, Sally. I’ll look, all right? If Gladys will let me, I’ll—”

“No!” Her eyes snapped open. “No! Gladys will never understand. You have to just go and get it. Please, Davey.”

Davey. When was the last time she’d called him that? When she was six years old? Seven? He frowned. “Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“On bones and stones?” It was something they used to say as children, but to Dave, it carried the weight it had back then. The ultimate swear. It sent a prickly twinge of inexplicable fear across his neck and shoulders.

“Bones and stones,” he mumbled.

Sally’s eyelids sank closed again. “Thanks, Davey.”

Dave left without looking at the doctor or at his sister, who was asleep before he even crossed the threshold.

Erik reached the corner of Main Street and Hokokam Avenue. He pulled the flaps of his jacket closer to his body, but he wasn’t really cold. The morning sun smoothed the rough edges of mid-autumn, pressing warmly against his back and shoulders as he headed away from the rec center. In spite of the communal atmosphere of N.A. meetings, particularly on Saturdays, a loneliness had swirled out of the air above as others spoke around him and it settled deep into his meat and bones. A heavy kind of feeling, it vaguely reminded him of the blurred days of his solitary past before he’d ever discovered cocaine. As he put more and more distance between the rec center and himself, the sensation got stronger. That was a bad sign.

Five years, eight months, nineteen days, and six hours clean and cocaine-free, Erik thought. Hell, if it came to splitting hairs, then twenty-nine minutes, too . . . but who was really counting?

He was.

His sponsor always said sobriety was a bitch, but better than addiction. He and the others at N.A. encouraged recovering addicts to focus solely on being sober one day at a time. Erik couldn’t imagine that anyone
didn’t
think about it all the time, or a lot of the time, at least. Sobriety certainly was a bitch, yessiree, and a whore at that, and he fought with her every day to keep her around. He fought with her because his life depended on it.

Erik turned left onto the long wooded road that bisected his street. The muscles in his legs burned from the pace he kept, but that felt good, at least—a grounded reality to focus on.

His thoughts, however, etched a scowl into his brow.

The first four months out of the Sober-Living Apartments by far had been the toughest. Just under a year since he’d last used cocaine at that point, but even with detox and rehab behind him, still a yearning to get high often crept into his thoughts.

The group advised—they never demanded, only suggested—that recovering addicts wait at least a year before becoming involved in romantic relationships. Sobriety—that bitch—was his new mistress, and a demanding one at that.

But he’d just gotten involved with Casey before rehab and he’d gotten better partly for her—yeah, yeah, for himself, of course, but for himself so he could be with her and make her happy. The whirlwind of pent-up attraction to her proved a high all its own, and she got caught up in it. She agreed to go out with him again.

There were crashes, too—ominous moods of jealousy or paranoia, tough to shake.

There were the phone calls, and the late nights out with her friends. She wanted to take things slow. She wanted to hold on to her freedom, she said. And most of the time that was okay. But sometimes it was downright fucking lonely. That was the jealousy.

Not nearly as bad as the paranoia, though.

At first, Erik thought his new girl might be trying to sabotage his recovery.
He
certainly wasn’t planting the bags of coke around the house, but he saw
them there all the same. The bags disappeared as his tentative, outstretched fingers brushed against them, providing his first indication that the girlfriend conspiracy theory had gaping holes in it. The shrink at the rec center thought Erik was experiencing some kind of concentrated form of wishful thinking. That, at least, was easier to swallow than the other options.

Like he was losing his mind.

Like he had no willpower.

Like deep down, he wanted the coke more than Casey.

Sometimes, out on the street, walking to or from the N.A. meetings at the rec center, he’d catch from the corner of his eye a face that wasn’t a face staring at him, always just far enough away from Erik that its features (
if it had any
) were unclear. It never spoke, but it
thought
things at him. Terrible, terrible things.

His shrink called that a manifestation of his guilt, the Jones personified. To make it go away, all Erik had to do was squeeze his eyes shut and count backward from ten or concentrate on the sensation of the floor beneath his feet. Refocused, he’d open his eyes and the figure would be gone.

Erik could buy that it was a figment of his imagination. He could believe that wholeheartedly with stubborn resolve, if that’s what it would take to make it go away. But the problem was, the figure didn’t go away. Not at first. It took sheer willful blindness to stop the hallucinations.

No
, Erik thought angrily,
that’s not true. It took one tiny little relapse, none before and none since. But after that one time
. . .

The hallucinations stopped after the night he’d
done some coke. He’d scored it from Jimmy Dumonte at the usual haunt around the corner from the Quick Check. Beneath a canopy of stars who’d turned their gaze the other way, amidst the shadows drawn like curtains across the wooded lot behind the local high school, he’d gotten good and high. And in his delirium, he’d seen the faceless figure one last time, standing above him, thinking down on him, urging him to get lost in the high and bleed into the shadows and never come back.

Except, it was the faceless Jones that hadn’t come back. It vacated the weird waypoint where Erik’s reality skewed, and with it left a great deal of pressure as well. Things with Casey fell back into place. He’d found a decent job in landscaping and masonry that kept him working hard and staying out of trouble. He hadn’t touched coke, nor wanted to, since.

But now he felt . . . different. Regressed. He suspected maybe he wasn’t quite okay enough with sobriety yet to have someone depend on him to be clean. At the meeting, the realization had hit him full force. In its wake, the old-time insecurities found their way back into his thoughts—like weeds, they kept sprouting up just when he thought he’d killed the last of them. And to be insecure, the way Erik saw it, was to be inadequate. Weak. A worthless good-fer-nothin’—

“Stop.” He said it out loud, soft under his breath.

But he’d felt it the other night, when the middle-of-the-night romp in bed had gone wrong. He’d felt inadequate. He still wanted to get high, and it must have sent out some signal somewhere before he’d even realized it, because the figure had come back. The Jones in a black hat was back.

Erik turned up his empty driveway and made it
practically onto the porch before he realized the front door stood slightly open beyond the screen. He cast a puzzled glance at the driveway.

Casey’s car wasn’t there. Too early for her to be home, anyway. Frowning, he opened the screen door. The creak of the hinge sounded magnified in the empty hall.

“Hello?” No answer. Peering into each room as he passed, he made his way down the hall to the kitchen.

“Casey? Baby, you home?” She’d left after him to go to work—maybe she’d forgotten to lock the door in a rush to get out this morning. Maybe she hadn’t closed the door all the way, and the wind had pushed it in.

Sure, maybe
, Erik thought,
but that isn’t like her. She doesn’t just
—

“Back here, Erik!” Casey’s voice carried through the open kitchen window from the backyard. So she
was
home, then. Erik crossed to the back door and swung it open. Casey sat on a patio bench, turned away from him, her head bent over something at the table. Strands of her hair hung in front of her face. Without looking up, she curled her fingers in a half wave.

Erik crossed the backyard toward her. “Hey, baby, what’re you doing home so early? And where’s your car? I didn’t—” He gestured toward the front of the house but stopped, his gaze falling on Casey’s head as she inhaled sharply.

“Casey? Whatcha doin’?” A crazy thought occurred to him.
Please let her be sniffing flowers or perfume or Crazy Glue for all I care, but not
. . .

“Coke,” she said lightly, snorting again. “Want some?”

Erik swallowed the thick, sandpapery lump in his throat. “Huh?”

She giggled.

“Casey, stop messing around, okay?”

Sniff
. “It’s only a little coke, Erik. Isn’t it bad enough that you’re a kill-buzz in bed? Do you have to take away all my fun?”

“What did you say?” Heat radiated across his face and threatened to force tears.

“I’m saying,” Casey replied in a voice not quite hers but several androgynous voices harmonizing at once, “that you’re a loser, Erik. A stupid loser good-fer-nothin’ son of a bitch.”

She looked up. Erik’s knees buckled where he stood as he stared at her face.

Her lack of face.

The honey-framed oval was a stark white contrast to the pale neck upon which it rested. Where Casey’s eyes and mouth had been were burnt holes stuffed with ashes, which blew away on some otherwise unfelt wind. Her nose, as well, was a crater of blackened fillings. Erik squeezed his eyes shut (
ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one
. . . ), hoping it was only a hallucination. But when he opened his eyes, the figure from the other night sat in Casey’s place, a black-gloved hand raised in a wave. It was close to him, closer than it had ever been, a mere arm’s length away, there but somehow not there, an alien image imposed on a natural, familiar landscape. Bile rose in Erik’s throat.

“Don’t you love me anymore, Erik?” Casey’s voice again, coming from that thing, Casey’s mannerisms so clearly recognizable in the way it crossed its legs and tilted its head. The fabric of its hat and clothes
looked cold—almost frosted, and utterly unreflective of the sun’s rays. Erik was somehow sure that one touch could cause frostbite. Maybe even death.

Erik’s voice failed in his throat. “Go away.”

A rumble deep in the meat of the blank visage pushed him involuntarily backward with a real, physical force of its own. Erik took it to be a laugh.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please go away.”

“Erik?” The screen door to the backyard slammed shut and Erik jumped, whirling around. Casey smiled at him and waved.

He didn’t wave back. For a moment, the world threatened to slip away beneath the growing kaleidoscopic patterns before his eyes. He took several deep breaths and looked down at his hands. They were shaking and he shoved them in his pockets. When he looked back at the bench, he saw it empty. The figure was gone.

Casey’s expression changed to one of concern when she saw his face. “Baby? Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Her hand, cool and smooth and dry, touched his cheek lightly. He flinched, and gave her a narrow-eyed once-over. She frowned.

“What’s wrong, Erik?” It sounded more to him like an accusation than a question.
Are you high, Erik? Are you messing around with that stuff again?

“Casey.” He searched her eyes for something familiar and undeniable to hold on to, but his vision blurred with tears. “Casey?”

“What? What’s wrong?”

He grabbed her hand suddenly and dragged her around to the front of the house. Her car was parked in the driveway. He touched the hood. Still warm.

“Erik, what happened?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I’m just glad you’re home.” He pulled her into a hug so tight she winced. “I love you, baby.”

“I love you, too, Erik. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I am now.”

Cheryl saw the Lakehaven police office as little more than a converted log cabin set a little ways off the main road. The white-walled interior of its reception area included a few important town notices hanging from corkboards, a framed picture of the department softball team, and a brass clock that ticked the minutes out with a lazy sound like air leaking from a tire. Even in the low hum of early morning under way, the place stood empty except for a handful of visitors crossing and uncrossing their legs along the pine benches. Cheryl approached the policeman at the front desk. After looking Cheryl up and down, he asked for her name and the type of crime she wished to report.

“Breaking and entering,” Cheryl said between deep breaths, “and maybe threatening behavior, too.”

The policeman raised an eyebrow at her. “Do you need medical attention?”

“No, no, nothing like that, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.

The man paused a moment, eyeing her in the space between her words, and then handed her a clipboard of papers to fill out. When Cheryl had written down as much as she could pick from her panic-jumbled thoughts, she handed the papers back to the policeman.

“Please take a seat,” he said, more as a command than a request. “A detective will see you in a few minutes.”

Ten said minutes later, the detective came out of the room behind the reception desk. She was the smallest woman Cheryl had ever seen, wiry, with a bony but not unpleasant face beneath a cloud of brown hair. She tilted her head to one side, nodded at Cheryl and asked, “You Cheryl Duffy?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Detective DeMarco.” The detective’s grip was strong for such slender little hands, and she gave Cheryl a quick, confident shake. “Ms. Duffy, please follow me.” They passed through a doorway into a brightly lit room that sharply contrasted with the waiting area. Cutting a swath through ringing phones, noisy detainees, and a few other cops scribbling away at notepads, she led Cheryl to a desk that dwarfed her size. Skyscraper stacks of papers and files created a miniature city of open cases on her desk. Cheryl’s eyes surfed over the high-rises of file folders, papers, and Post-its. A few coffee rings and pens were scattered among the paperwork. The black name plaque across the front of the desk by the phone read in solid white lettering
DET. ANITA DEMARCO
.