by Spencer Kope
He wants to feel the joy of the season, as he did when he was a boy. I’ve watched him in past years as he closed his eyes and let the music flow through him, allowing it to play with his soul. Ellis is the type who feels the ache of each chord, each word, embracing them with joy or melancholic quiet, depending on the song.
Such nostalgia cannot be manufactured or replicated; so, for Ellis, only the songs of Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, and Glenn Miller will do. There are others, of course, but those are a few of his favorites.
As I sink comfortably into the blanket with Heather’s head on my chest, I feel a gentle euphoria settle upon me. Ellis’s chesty baritone soon joins Frank Sinatra as he sings “White Christmas,” and I can’t help wondering if this is one of those rare moments when the seed of nostalgia is planted. Thirty years from now, will I listen to “White Christmas” and ache for this moment, remembering Heather in my arms, and the crisp winter air, and the sounds of my brother and Ellis goofing off in the kitchen?
I hope so. What is life but a long string of memories, and those steeped in nostalgia are the best of these.
As Ellis continues to sing, accentuating every word for Jens’s benefit, I notice a slight taint to the occasional word. Recognizing what my eccentric neighbor is doing, I say, “Leave it to Ellis,” and shake my head gently.
I glance at Heather under the hooded quilt, and she anticipates my words. “He’s singing with a British accent,” we say in unison. She starts to laugh and then covers her mouth and buries her face in my chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Biscuits Bar & Grill was the last place Melinda Gaines wanted to be on a Wednesday night, particularly with a busy workday ahead, but the evening turned out to be quite enjoyable. She hadn’t seen Trish and Alice in a month, and the desire to share time with them and catch up proved greater than her fear of the place.
Fear may be a strong word.
Alcohol was once Melinda’s favorite poison, her self-medication of choice, but she hasn’t touched the stuff in ages. In fact, the last time she had anything stronger than coffee was six months ago when she drank an entire bottle of room-temperature merlot and slit her wrists in a warm bath.
They say it doesn’t hurt when you do it that way, but that’s just not true.
It was Alice who saw the Facebook post; Alice who called the cops; Alice who knew all too well that Melinda had been struggling for years with the unimaginable mood swings brought on by bipolar disorder.
The bathtub incident wasn’t the first time she had tried to end it. Just two months earlier she’d swallowed enough pills to take down a bull elephant. It should have killed her, but her sister had one of her feelings, and stopped by Melinda’s apartment to find her passed out at the kitchen table with the empty prescription bottle at her side.
They pumped her stomach and she tried to live again … or she lived to try again; they both amounted to the same thing: a sharp blade and red water.
But that’s all behind her now.
* * *
“You sure you don’t want a ride home?” Trish asks, fumbling for her keys.
“It’s two blocks,” Melinda replies with a smile, flicking her wrist up the well-lit street for emphasis. “Besides, I can use the air.”
There’s a round of goodbyes and a round of hugs and a round of promises to get together again soon, and then Trish and Alice start across the parking lot. As Melinda turns to make her way home, she hears the chirp of a car door unlocking and the suddenly raucous laughter from Trish, who had a few drinks beyond her limit.
Thank God Alice is driving, Melinda thinks, and then smiles.
As the cheer of her friends diminishes behind her, Melinda tucks her head deeper into her coat, warding off the cold. And so she doesn’t immediately notice the man rounding the corner up ahead. If she had, she would have paid little notice. It was a well-lit street near a popular bar, and just minutes from home.
Like Melinda, the man’s eyes are to the ground as he moves briskly along the sidewalk, hustled on by the cold and the wind. As the distance between them dissolves, Melinda recognizes him from the bar—John or Jim, something with a J. Lowering her head and looking away quickly, she prays he doesn’t look up, but when they’re just ten feet apart he seems to realize someone else is there and pulls up short, stopping dead in his tracks.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “Melinda, right?”
“Yeah,” she replies hesitantly, glancing around at the deserted street.
When she doesn’t seem to remember his name, he says, “Jeff,” and puts a finger on his chest. Then he gives an exaggerated shrug, like it’s no big deal.
She nods, as if she knew that. “Are you going back to Biscuits?” she asks, trying to keep the encounter short but polite.
“Meeting a friend in an hour,” he replies, looking at his watch before realizing he’s not wearing one. “How about you?”
“Home,” she replies. “I’ve got work in the morning.”
“You’re not walking, are you? It’s freezing.”
“It’s not far,” Melinda replies, not wanting to divulge too much. While the man is somewhat handsome—maybe a seven on a scale from one to ten—he makes her uneasy. And the fact that she can’t explain this unease is even more troubling.
When he sat next to her at the bar earlier in the evening, she swore that he leaned in close on two occasions and … smelled her. When she turned to look at him after the first instance, he’d been staring down at his cell phone, so she dismissed it and blamed her imagination. Then it happened again—or she thought it happened again. When she turned and looked at him he was leaned over trying to get something out of his coat pocket, his wallet, she presumed, because he left shortly after.
Had he sniffed her?
Her gut told her yes.
Even so, she might have excused it as curiosity or even appreciation if she’d been wearing perfume or a scented body lotion, but she barely had on makeup. Her intent that evening was to catch up with old friends, not meet new ones, particularly the kind who would sniff at you like a dog.
Now here he was again.
“I’ve got time to kill,” he says. “Why don’t I make sure you get home safely?”
“No, that’s very nice of you, but I’ve walked it a hundred times.”
He looks at her a moment and in a low voice replies, “As you wish.”
It’s not so much what he says or how he says it that chills her, but rather the way he looks at her as he does so, as if he’s sniffing and smelling her all over again, only this time with his eyes. With a nod and a pinched smile, she moves past him, casting a wary look back a moment later, perhaps to make sure he doesn’t follow.
She quickens her pace.
Halfway up the next block—her block—she feels a sudden prick in her neck and reaches up with her hand. Almost instantly the world goes swimmingly woozy and she falls sideways, landing not on the frozen concrete, but against something soft that clutches her and seems to suspend her in midair. A face floats before her, or what seems like a face. There’s a blur of eyes and nostrils and teeth, but they seem set against the night, suspended in blackness.
It’s a puzzle how those teeth manage to stay suspended, and she thinks hard on it until a moment of clarity seeps through the fog and she almost laughs. Her last thought is one of chastisement as she realizes the eyes and teeth aren’t suspended in blackness, they’re peeking out from behind a black ski mask.
Funny, she thinks … and then the darkness takes her.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Thursday, December 18
As the town of Marysville looms before us, Jimmy yawns widely and says he needs coffee, a proclamation that’s neither surprising nor unexpected. It’s been at least twenty-five minutes since he announced with utter disgust that his travel mug was empty—as if it were the mug’s responsibility to keep itself full. Or worse, that the mug had poured itself out upon the floor just to spite him. Twenty-five minutes is an ab
horrent length of time for the caffeine-deprived.
“Has Jane talked to you about your coffee consumption?” I ask.
“I’m allowed one vice,” he replies. “Out of all the possible vices in the universe, I chose coffee. It could have been alcohol, cigarettes, women, drugs, food, shoes—”
“Shoes!” I laugh.
“The point is, I could have chosen something a lot worse than coffee, so in answer to your question, no, Jane has not talked to me. She’s perfectly fine with it.”
His earlier dose of caffeine is clearly wearing off, so I decide to leave it alone … for the better part of twenty seconds, but then I can’t help myself. “Shoes?” I say. “Is there rehab for that, or are you condemned to a life of back-alley sneaker deals?”
Jimmy doesn’t miss a beat: “It’s a twelve-step program.”
Before I can reply to the pun, he jerks the wheel to the right and shoots the black Ford Expedition across two lanes of traffic and down the off-ramp at exit 199. Turning left, we find two Starbucks within a half mile of each other. They’re like caffeine pimps staking out their own corners.
* * *
I order my usual: a twenty-ounce single decaf mocha with one-percent milk and no whip. Half the time I can count on a playful comment from the barista when I place my order: something like, Why bother? or Do you want some coffee with your coffee? or Here’s your cocoa. This time the caffeine dealer leaves me alone and I retreat to a round table in the corner, spreading the target files out before me.
Diane prepared profiles on our remaining subjects. They all live—or lived—in either Snohomish, King, or Pierce County, a stretch of land that accounts for the greater Everett-Seattle-Tacoma area. Efficient as always, Diane ordered them from north to south, making our work easier.
Our cover story is that we’re going to do some knock-and-talks, see if we can learn more about our subjects, maybe talk to some family members and see if we can get a toothbrush or comb—something that’ll yield DNA.
A good cover story is a constant but necessary burden. Diane—being Diane—is endlessly and relentlessly curious. And since she knows nothing about shine, Jimmy and I find ourselves constantly walking the razor’s edge between fact and fiction.
Like all our cover stories, this one tends to be mostly true. We’ll definitely be knocking on some doors and talking to some relatives, but only if I see shine that matches one of our victims.
“Who’s first on our list?” Jimmy asks, slipping into the chair opposite me and setting his hot coffee on the table. After situating himself, he reaches out and clutches the cup with both hands, as if it might fly away.
“Jennifer Holt,” I reply.
“What’s her story?”
“Juvenile runaway, busted for pot at fourteen, meth by sixteen, in and out of the system. Her favorite poison before she went missing seems to have been heroin, and by then she was both using and dealing. Snohomish County had a pretty good case against her, but then she ups and vanishes. It’s not surprising that they didn’t take it seriously when her grandmother reported her missing; probably figured she skipped the state to avoid arrest.”
“What were the charges?”
“They had probable cause to arrest her on three controlled buys, but when they couldn’t find her it went to warrant. It’s still in NCIC, but no one has come across her to make the arrest.”
“Well, she fits the victimology,” Jimmy observes.
“Pretty close,” I say, scanning the report. “Last known address was with Grandma on Fulton Street in Everett. That’s about ten minutes from here.”
Jimmy drags the report across the table and spends a minute reading it from beginning to end. “Same old story,” he says. “Dysfunctional or absent parents, no discipline, no supervision, lousy friends and worse acquaintances, drugs, and now death.” He pushes the folder away in disgust. “Remind me again why we’re killing ourselves to help people who couldn’t tell a good decision from a bad one if it slapped them in the face?”
“Because life is a vast wilderness where it’s easy to get lost,” I suggest with a humble smile.
“Yeah,” he snorts, “but it’s only a vast wilderness if you ignore the giant signs that say STAY ON PATH.” He flicks a wrist at me. “Aren’t you the one who always says we get what we deserve in life, good or bad?”
“No, that’s my mom.”
“Same difference,” Jimmy says, forcing a smile. He tips his head in my direction and waits for an argument but gets none. “Generally speaking,” he says after a long moment, “I agree with you—and your mom. There are exceptions, of course, as with everything, but for the most part our present circumstance is predicated on the decisions, actions, and inactions we took over the years leading up to this point.”
For a moment he sounds less like my mom and more like my high school counselor.
Leaning back, he places his hands on the table, one on each side of the coffee cup. “Suppose two boys grow up on the same block,” he says, “and upon entering high school, one begins cutting class to play Xbox and smoke dope while the other takes advanced placement classes. By graduation, one has moved on to harder drugs and dropped out of school, the other has already completed two years of community college because he enrolled in a Running Start program and spent the last half of high school taking college classes.
“As the years go by, one will complain about how unfair it is that the other lives in a nice house, drives a fancy car, and goes on vacation twice a year. It’ll be a conspiracy of the rich against the poor, the lucky versus the unlucky, the haves versus the have-nots. And neither of them is likely to step back and look at the diverging paths that led them to these very different places.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I say with a hint of skepticism. “These days it seems a lot of people have smoked a lot of dope and somehow still managed to get an education and a somewhat decent job. In Silicon Valley they’re microdosing mescaline because they claim it enhances their creativity.” I’m just playing devil’s advocate with Jimmy, having never tried drugs myself. I’ve got enough weirdness in my head without adding pharmaceuticals to the mix.
“So why do some end up going down a bad road and others don’t?” I ask.
Jimmy twists his mouth up and gives a one-shoulder shrug. “I’m not saying that cutting class and getting high is guaranteed to send your future into a death spiral,” he concedes, “but bad decisions are like compound interest: after a while it starts to add up.”
He takes a long pull from the coffee, letting the dark nectar placate his nerves as it works its way through his body. Setting the cup back down with a contented sigh, he shakes his head thoughtfully. “If people only realized the power they have to redirect their lives … it’s like the needle of a compass: It shows you exactly where you’re going, and at any time you can turn one way or another. If the needle remains fixed in the wrong direction, it’s not hard to guess at the general position of one’s life in five, ten, or even twenty years.”
“Provided you’re still alive,” I add.
“There’s that,” Jimmy concedes, raising his coffee cup as if to toast me before taking another drink.
“But the needle on the compass can change,” I say, and as the words escape me I find myself wondering if this is really true, or just another misguided hope.
“It can,” Jimmy replies slowly, “and does … but rarely.” He’s quiet for a moment, and then smiles. “Imagine what the world would be like if one day everyone woke up and took charge of their own destiny, if they took responsibility for their lives and their mistakes and set out on a different course.”
He sighs. “Wishful thinking, I suppose. Too many are willing to accept their circumstances, bleak as they are. Worse yet, they won’t give up their crutches, whether that’s heroin, alcohol, or the zombified stupor of mindless entertainment.”
I’m quiet for a moment. “I kind of like mindless entertainment.”
Jimmy just shrugs. “Everything in
moderation.”
“Except coffee,” I say.
“Except coffee.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jennifer Holt’s last known residence is on Fulton Street, which begins near the heart of the city and runs north into a dated residential area with tired homes and subdued alleys. A mile to the west lies Naval Station Everett, which is home to five guided-missile destroyers, several Coast Guard vessels, and, on occasion, an aircraft carrier.
When Jimmy pulls to the curb in front of the side-gabled bungalow, I note how the house seems to hunch over its foundation, like a beast too weak to rise. If I had to guess, I’d say it was built sometime shortly after World War II and was last updated in the seventies. The faded paint is likely lead-based, and the whole sorry heap is wrapped in asbestos siding.
Morning frost is still on the hibernating lawn, mixing its winter-white with the pale greens left over from summer. Weeds mingle with the grass, and there are bare patches of earth here and there where the tiny blades have perished, never to be reseeded. This semblance of a lawn butts up to a concrete sidewalk that’s as timeworn as the house.
I take all this in with a glance, and then slip my special glasses from my face, fold them, and place them in their case. When I look again, I behold a different world … and yet the same. It’s a world splashed in paint, as if Jackson Pollock had a go at it and didn’t know when to stop.
Thousands of unique shines lie on the street, the sidewalks, the lawns, and the porches of Fulton Street. Decades of comings and goings have stacked the colors one upon the other and condensed them into a rich kaleidoscope that reaches back through the decades to when the sidewalks were first poured, the porches first built, and the lawns first seeded.
As I glance about, I spot a familiar almond glow and the cracked texture of dried mud. It flows in a river of footprints up and down the sidewalk, in and out of the house, and around the yard in patterns that indicate both play and lawn mowing.