Come and Get Me

by August Norman

  “You know we did.”

  “And?”

  “And that girl loved Angela Chapman the way I loved my wife.”

  Caitlin held back the next question—if he ever got jealous when his wife went out with another lover.

  The server returned and asked if they needed refills. The good-looking detective waited on Caitlin’s answer. She’d spent most of the day with the man, and part of her guessed she could spend the night with him as well, but the other part was deep in a tunnel.

  “Better call it a night.”

  * * *

  After Greenwood left, Caitlin went to the bar to do something stupid. She’d walked the same paths, seen the same sights, but hadn’t yet lived in Angela Chapman’s moment. Her order didn’t shock the bartender, but he stayed to watch her drink the Three Wisemen. One shot of Jack, one shot of Johnnie, one shot of Jim.

  Goodbye, balance; hello, night air.

  Mary’s guesthouse was a mile southeast. Caitlin turned north on Walnut, threw her arms up. “Drunk woman walking, Bloomington, all by herself.”

  No one yelled back. She checked her phone: 1:08 AM. Slightly earlier than Chapman the night she went missing but in the same tree-lined neighborhood. New office buildings and townhouses filled the gaps in Caitlin’s memory. A few vehicles passed from behind. An off-duty taxi, a city bus, a single Harley Davidson. She felt good but noticed the distance between streetlights had increased. Like the night before, dark patches of green trees, no big deal with buddies at your side, now appeared sinister.

  She checked a map on her phone. Only half a mile before a return to decent lighting and the path toward the last place Angela Chapman was seen alive.

  She picked up her pace, saw a railroad bridge looming in the darkness. A single streetlight near the rusted steel beams of the wide overpass didn’t do anything but blind Caitlin to what lay in wait. She passed under the lonely cone of light, waited for her eyes to adjust. The three shots of bravery now felt like a punch in the stomach. She felt her heart rate increase. Beyond the overpass, another streetlight waited three hundred feet away. She broke into a jog. Twenty feet from the bridge, her jog turned into a sprint.

  “I got this,” she said.

  Her shoes hitting the sidewalk echoed under the bridge, but nothing would touch her. She threw her arms up, yelled again. “Drunk woman running, Bloomington, all by herself!”

  She passed under the overpass, didn’t slow down. The night air hit her eyes and tears leaked at the corners, but she pounded on until the next streetlight welcomed her back to safety. She leaned over, let her breaths deepen. Her heart stopped punching her. She straightened up, started walking north.

  A horn blared from behind. She turned, saw a blue sedan veer far into the left lane toward her spot on the sidewalk.

  “Hey lady,” a voice yelled, “show us your tits.”

  A beer bottle smashed against the concrete four feet away, and the car jerked back into the right lane, drove past. Inside the car, five college kids, all women, laughing their asses off.

  Caitlin grabbed her phone, ordered a ride, and watched the dot on the map move until a car pulled up to take her home.

  CHAPTER

  23

  CAITLIN FOUND SCOTT Canton’s office on the sixth floor of the Ballentine building. Lit by morning sunshine, the man sat behind a computer monitor next to a two-foot-tall statue of a smiling Buddha.

  She knocked on the open door. “Who’s tunneling now?”

  He stood with a smile and straightened his rumpled cardigan. “How long were you standing there?”

  She claimed the chair near his desk. “You looked deep in thought. Need me to sit quietly?”

  “The phrase will reveal itself in time. I am merely the vessel.”

  “Bull. The computer’s the vessel, you’re the captain.”

  “Still, I’m on a sightseeing trip. Lock us up and I’ll show you a trick.”

  “Why, Professor,” she said, reaching back to lock the door. “You’re not allowed to say things like that to students anymore.”

  “Sit down, smart ass.”

  He opened the window, then sat back at his desk and rubbed the Buddha. A drawer in the tummy slid open. He pulled out a plastic bag full of joints and put one between his lips, then pushed the statue’s bald head. Buddha spit fire.

  “Is that—”

  “A fire-breathing Buddha?” Scott took a puff from the lit jay. “You know it. Now let’s talk about your troubles, Caitlin.”

  She brushed her hair back, glanced out the window. “What troubles?”

  He smiled politely, handed over the joint. “I have a horrible talent. I can tell the difference between people who like to get high and people who need to get high. I fear you fall into the latter. Plus, you’re wearing the same clothes as the last time I saw you.”

  Caitlin took a hit and mulled over the offer. She wasn’t ready to talk to Mary, but she needed to do something, if only to be able to walk the campus at night. Canton was a neutral party with free weed. She let a few words escape with the smoke. “I might be having panic attacks.”

  Scott’s eyebrows went up. “Might be?”

  Caitlin closed her eyes, then shook her head yes. “I am.”

  “Good.”

  She opened her eyes again, saw him nodding. “Good?”

  “Your body’s way of telling you you’re under attack. How does he come after you?”

  “He?”

  “Sorry, that’s my thing.” Scott turned toward his bookcase, searching. “When I came back from Nam, I did all the wrong you could imagine. I drank, I drugged, I fought, I thugged. Lost the love of a good woman and most of my family, ended up spending two years on the street. All the while, he kept coming back, and I ran like hell, until I found an outlet.”

  He turned back, book in hand.

  “What you can’t tell from my speech, but I assure you would be clear on a page, my he is spelled with a capital h.”

  “As in God?”

  “Oh no.” He handed her a dust-jacketed hardcover of the book she’d studied in college—Up River: A Collection of Poems by Scott Canton. “Try the back.”

  She flipped the book over and met two Cantons. The first, a black and white image of a smiling high school student in a dress shirt and tie. The second, a color shot of Scott with a severe Jim Kelly-Enter the Dragon afro, a goatee, and a bright yellow turtleneck, not even a hint of a smile.

  He sat back in his chair. “How many years do you guess passed between the photos?”

  Caitlin felt the answer was ten. “Eight?”

  “Four. That first shot was my senior class photo. My girlfriend took the second a day after bailing me out of jail for breaking a man’s jaw.”

  “Which scared you—the older?”

  “No.” He tapped on the high school student. “This grinning idiot haunted my every move. I couldn’t make peace with the disparity, do you follow? Who I was versus who he thought I was supposed to be. Yes, there were flashbacks. Yes, I saw terrible things, did terrible things, but he was the one staring me in the face when I got home—the he that was never going to be me again.”

  Caitlin set the book on the desk. “Pronouns are the worst.”

  “Mine was. Talk about yours. Your assault happened twenty years ago. Were you having these attacks back in Los Angeles?”

  Caitlin shifted in her chair, looked out the window, saw a squirrel zip across a branch. Pretty high up, no sign of fear.

  “Caitlin?”

  She kept her eyes on the squirrel but answered. “Not until last month, when Mary called.”

  “About this trip?”

  The squirrel leapt away, out of sight. Caitlin turned back to reality. “She mentioned the diploma, and I was drunk enough to say yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “I threw up that night. I figured bad roach-coach carnitas, I got what I deserved, but it happened again the next day. Then I had a dream. Mary and I were studying for a test in a bar a
nd ran out of beer, so I went for refills. At the bar I saw a face. His face.”

  “The man who attacked you?”

  “Yes.” She exhaled, looked down at her hands. “I tried the old wake-up tricks, but nothing worked. Once again, Troy Woods raped me.”

  Scott dabbed at the corner of his eye. “I can’t imagine, Caitlin.”

  She tried a smile. “Don’t try—it’s not fun.”

  “So after the dream?”

  “I agreed to come back to Bloomington.”

  “Then the real attacks started?”

  Caitlin let her head drop to her hands. “Yep.”

  Scott leaned down to her level. “Any chance you’ve heard of cognitive behavioral therapy?”

  She looked up. “Did we just go from friends talking to friends playing doctor?”

  He laughed. “I do have a PhD, but I’m no psychiatrist.”

  “That would be nice. Got time for one more degree?”

  “I am a psychologist, Caitlin. Slightly out of the game, I’ll admit. I had a fairly good practice through the late eighties. Lucky me, I found teaching in ninety-one and didn’t look back until the wars started. Now I make myself available for those in need, and there are plenty. You might be one of them.”

  A buzzing broke the moment.

  She handed the joint back to Scott, then dropped a hand to her bag. “Yeah, probably.”

  His eyes followed her reach for her phone. “Did I just lose you?”

  “No.” She noticed a text message from Mike Roman: Check your email. “I haven’t spent much time talking about all of this.”

  “I can tell. You should make the time.”

  “Looks like I’ve got some news about Chapman.”

  “Okay, I can feel the shift. You need to run free.” He slid the bag of weed her way. “But think of this as a remedy, not a cure.”

  He walked to the door, turned the knob. “One last unsolicited thought, Caitlin. Bloomington has become a trigger for you, something that returns you to the helplessness you felt with your attacker. There are ways to recondition you to accept and grow from the events in your life, no matter how awful. Any time you want to grow, you give me a call. Even out of office hours.”

  She took a breath, found a shaky smile on the other side. “Thanks again, Scott. I will be back.”

  She walked to the elevator, unsure whether she was more excited to be out of the room or to check Roman’s message. The subject line had promise: Michelson tied to growhouse, probably still active.

  CHAPTER

  24

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Caitlin rang Lakshmi’s buzzer. Lakshmi opened the door, mouthed the words I’m so sorry, pointed Caitlin to the couch, and continued an existing phone conversation. “You know how much I owe you, Jessica. This will really help with my project …”

  Photos of Chapman, clippings, and red marker scribblings covered the walls. The smell of burnt popcorn filled the room, and an inkjet printer spit out pages like the press under the Times building. Lakshmi grabbed two pages from the expanding stack, walked them and a bowl of popcorn to Caitlin, then ended her phone call on her way back to the kitchen.

  “Caitlin,” she said over the sound of a refrigerator door opening, “I am so sorry for how things ended last night. I know I should have told you about the restraining order.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “I got your texts.”

  There’d been three that morning.

  A drawer opened and shut. “Sorry about that too, but I believe a proper apology is done in person, preferably with alcohol.” Lakshmi reappeared with two topless domestics. “Fancy a beer?”

  “Hold that thought.” Caitlin fixated on the heading of the pages in front of her: Initial draft, not for public release. “What am I looking at?”

  Lakshmi set one of the bottles on the coffee table between them and hovered, holding the other. “The executive summary of a campus-wide sexual abuse study that won’t publish until the fall. Listen to this.” She took the top page.

  “ ‘Seventeen percent of the undergraduate women participating reported being the victims of attempted or completed nonconsensual sexual penetration while at college, while twenty-nine percent reported experiencing some type of nonconsensual sexual contact.’ ”

  She drank from her beer, kept going. “ ‘Additionally, thirty-five percent of undergraduate female participants and a similar percentage of graduate students reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment.’ ”

  She handed Caitlin the paper, pointed to a paragraph. “You have to read this part; it makes me too angry.”

  Caitlin read to herself.

  Perhaps most distressing, however, was the revelation that among those participants who did not report an experience of the most serious type of sexual misconduct—nonconsensual attempted or completed sexual penetration—45 percent of the undergraduate women and 29 percent of the women graduate students indicated that they didn’t feel the incident was “serious enough” to disclose.

  Caitlin reached for the other beer, took a sip. “It’s a really great pull, Lakshmi. Awful, but congratulations.”

  “Maybe it will help with your story.”

  “Maybe.”

  Lakshmi joined her on the couch, her hands folded in her lap. “I know I should have told you about the restraining order straight away, but I didn’t want to risk losing you.”

  Caitlin inched away from Lakshmi. “Losing me?”

  Lakshmi noticed, leaned back. “Not losing you—that sounds crazy. But maybe crazy’s right.” She pointed to the wall behind her. “Look at this place. I was almost gone. You being in town, listening to me, talking with me—you’ve helped me remember the bigger picture. I didn’t want to give you any reason to doubt me. Now I see how wrong that was. I should be telling you everything.” She put her beer down. “There’s something everyone probably knows, but I have to say it. I love Angela, Caitlin, and not as a friend.” Her eyes looked close to tears. “We used to joke about it all the time, but I never actually said it out loud. I’m a lesbian.” She smiled. “My God, I totally just came out to you. I’m the worst.”

  Caitlin laughed. “Did you really just come out, like this is the moment?”

  “I’m the worst,” Lakshmi repeated. “I haven’t told my father, never said it to Angela. I mean, she knew, obviously.”

  “Meaning you had sex?”

  Lakshmi’s eyes brightened. “Yes. I’m sure the police guessed. That’s why they treated me like a suspect for so long. Most of the time, when a woman’s murdered, the spouse is the one who did it, right?”

  “And Angela?” Was she a lesbian? Caitlin almost said, then remembered both Doris and Lakshmi’s need to keep Angela in the present tense. “Did she identify as a lesbian at the time?”

  Lakshmi blushed. “Well, she knew the buttons to push.”

  “But did she feel the same way about you?”

  “When we were drunk or high, we were the only two people on Earth. But when she’d sober up, she’d joke about it, like she was going through a phase.”

  “And Kieran?”

  “Kieran, other guys. She threw herself at them.”

  “Like she had something to prove?”

  Lakshmi shrugged. “Maybe she’s gay, maybe just playing. I don’t know, but there’s one more thing.” She took another sip of beer. “The night she disappeared, we got in a fight. It was meant to be our night, a date. We had some drinks, got high, and I told her.”

  “That you loved her?”

  Lakshmi nodded.

  “And what did she say?”

  “It was awful. She just said, ‘No.’ ”

  “No to what? That you loved her?”

  “That’s what I asked. She stood up and said we should do shots. I got upset.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I followed her to the kitchen and said I wanted to know what she thought. She turned to me, vodka in hand, and said she didn’t have time to dyke out with me because she’
d made other plans.”

  “With Amireau and Michelson?”

  “Yes, those knobs.”

  “That was it? End of discussion?”

  “No,” Lakshmi said. “She told me I was being dramatic, that she was too high to process, and that I should go with them to the bars and we’d talk about it later. Well, I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting across from Kieran all night, wondering if Angela would choose me or him. I told her to sod off.” Lakshmi wiped a tear from her eye. “And she did. I sent the girl I loved to her death,” she said, choking on the words, “because she hurt my feelings.”

  Whatever dam protected Lakshmi’s reservoir of tears broke under two years of pressure. She leaned into Caitlin and sobbed.

  Caitlin looked down at the mass of black hair shaking against her shoulder and tried to imagine two years of not being able to grieve for a missing lover. She put her arm around Lakshmi and squeezed her tight. Two years, knowing the people responsible for her lover’s death were walking around free. Two years of anxiety, fueled by the innocent actions of one night.

  “I’ve got you,” she said, patting the girl’s back.

  Lakshmi nestled in closer, still crying, each sob pulsing against Caitlin’s chest. “We’re gonna find her,” Caitlin started again, her own voice now fighting back tears, “and show the bastard that hurt you he’s not untouchable.”

  Caitlin closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “That hurt her,” she corrected herself, semi-aware that her comforting words might have referred to a different bastard, a different girl, and a different time.

  Kieran Michelson or Troy Woods? Angela Chapman or Caitie Bergman?

  She wiped a tear away, then pulled Lakshmi’s hair back. If there were words that could end their pain, she didn’t have them.

  What would Scott Canton say?

  Caitlin cleared her throat and reached for her bag. “Want to get high?”

  * * *

  Lakshmi picked through the last of the popcorn kernels. “This pot is great.”