She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

by J. D. Barker

  “You are not a charity to me, Jack.”

  “No? Then what am I?”

  She lowered her legs back down into the water and smiled mischievously. “Are you sure you can’t swim?”

  “There are at least three instructors at that summer camp I mentioned who would gladly write you a letter that says I have no business setting foot off dry land.”

  “That’s too bad.” Her left hand disappeared beneath the water and came back with her bra. She tossed it across the pool, and it landed with a splash a few inches from my face. I watched in awe as she reached back beneath the water, removed her panties, and threw those toward me, too. With a giggle, she dove beneath the surface.

  The water was impossibly black.

  My gaze remained fixed on the place where Stella had been, on the quieting ripple, the circles spreading and growing until the first of which reached me and pushed past, her bra and panties bobbing in the wake beyond my reach. I couldn’t see anything beneath the surface of the water, and all had gone silent as the seconds grew to a minute.

  Stella broke the water a few feet away, between the deep end and where I stood. She tilted her head back into the water, clearing the hair from her face.

  I opened my mouth to say something, and she raised a finger to her lips.

  I couldn’t help but look at the figures in white standing at the pool house. They hadn’t moved, nor had the ones in the woods. All their eyes were on us, greedy and silent. I thought about the gun Oliver carried under her coat all those years ago and studied the coats of the two near the pool house; it was impossible to tell if they concealed weapons as she had, but my gut told me they did, for reasons I had yet to understand.

  Stella drew closer, only inches from me now, somehow that vanilla scent still present and lofting around her. To breathe it was intoxicating, a siren’s song. Images danced in her dark eyes, and I wanted to understand the thoughts behind those eyes, I wanted to hear more of her voice, that smooth, melodic voice, upon the summer night air.

  I wanted to touch her.

  I wanted to reach across the mere inches of water that separated us and pull her to me, pull her body against mine. The outline of her breasts were barely visible in the dark water, and when I found myself staring, I forced my eyes back to hers.

  “I know you find me attractive, Jack. It’s okay to look, I know you want to. I don’t mind. I want you to look,” she said in the softest of whispers.

  I reached for her, a tentative hand, hoping she wouldn’t notice how bad I was shaking. As my fingers drew close, though, Stella drifted back, drifted a few inches back into the deeper water where I could not follow.

  “That’s just mean,” I said, stepping forward, the waterline now halfway up my chin.

  “Why, Pip, I don’t believe you’ve earned the right to a touch. Not yet.”

  “How about a kiss? Let me kiss you.” This might have been the boldest request I ever made. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more—anything I ever wanted more. “I have thought about you every day since we were eight years old. From that first moment I ever saw you…you were a part of me—you are a part of me, a part I didn’t even realize was missing until that day, but one I feel whenever I’m not with you. There’s a hole in my heart when you aren’t near me. I don’t want to know that feeling, not anymore. Never again.”

  These words poured out before I could stop them, and as soon as I finished, I wished I could take them back. I sounded like the young hormone-driven boy I was. This wasn’t hormones, though. This was something else, something much more, and I wanted her to know that, as awkward as trying to verbalize it might be.

  Stella’s eyes remained fixed on me, her lips slightly apart. Oh, how I wanted those lips.

  “Say something, please.”

  She didn’t. She only watched me.

  Beneath the surface of the water, her legs swayed gently back and forth, a simple movement that somehow managed to keep her afloat.

  Stella raised her hand from the water, glistening drops falling from her fingertips and down the length of her arm. She reached for my cheek, her fingers outstretched, and I wanted her so desperately to touch me at that point. I ached all over for her touch. She didn’t, though. Her fingers hovered less than an inch from my skin, and when I tilted my head toward those fingers, she moved away, keeping that little distance between us.

  A tear formed at the corner of her left eye. It ran the length of her beautiful face and fell into the waters of the pool. “I can’t,” she said in a voice so soft at first I wasn’t sure she spoke at all.

  “Why?”

  “I just—You should go.”

  “Stella, no. I—”

  “Out of the pool, both of you,” Oliver said from behind me. I turned to find the woman standing at the edge of the pool, her eyes fixed on the girl in front of me, a white robe in her hand. I didn’t hear her walk up. For all I knew, she may have been there the entire time, watching us like the others. “Stella. It’s time.”

  Stella drew in a breath and drifted soundlessly away from me, further back toward the deep end of the pool, beyond my reach. I remained still, standing there, unable to move. Her eyes remained on me for a moment as she floated backward. She turned and swam the remaining distance to the far wall. She grabbed the edge and held a hand out to the man dressed in white standing near the pool house door. “Help me out.”

  The man said nothing.

  He shifted his weight and seemed to shrink back toward the building at his back, his eyes locked on Stella’s outstretched hand. “Help me out of the pool,” Stella repeated.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  Stella reached for the woman standing beside him. “You, then.”

  The woman shook her head and took a step back.

  Stella eyed them both, then placed both hands on the edge of the pool and pulled herself out, standing there naked, before us all.

  I heard Oliver round the side of the pool, but I didn’t see her. My eyes were locked on Stella, on the water dripping from her long, dark hair, down her bare back and legs, and pooling at her feet. Oliver pushed past the two sentries at the pool house and wrapped the robe around Stella’s shoulders, cinching it at the front. “Enough of this,” Oliver said to her. “You’re needed at the house.”

  Stella didn’t move, though. She stood, statue-like, facing the two in white. A murmur rose from the sentries standing among the trees surrounding the pool. Oliver hushed them all with a single glance, then turned back to Stella. “Now.”

  Oliver started back around the pool toward the house, scooping up Stella’s gloves as she went. Stella fell in line behind her, the thin robe clinging to her frame. Her eyes met mine for the briefest of seconds as she passed—the tears were gone, the warmth was gone, her eyes were dark, as if the girl from only moments earlier somehow retreated deep inside.

  Oliver nodded toward me. “Get him out of the water. Burn those horrid clothes of his and give him something to wear, then bring him to us. I want him to watch.”

  11

  The license plate turned out to be a bust. Faustino knew he wrote the number down correctly, but when he keyed it into the DMV, the plate came back as “UNKT” or “Unknown Tag.” He was still staring at the computer screen when Fogel entered the office and dropped the folder for the ’78 murder on the desk between them.

  “How’s Stack holding up?”

  She dropped into the chair across from him. “You didn’t say anything about a missing kid.”

  “It’s just a theory. We’ve got lots of theories. Stack’s theory happens to involve a missing kid.”

  “And yours doesn’t?”

  “I can see why he’d lean that way, and I want to agree with him, but I’ve learned half of being a good cop is keeping an open mind. The second your brain wraps around a specific theory, you tend to block out all other possibilities. If your theory is wrong, and you’re no longer willing to accept other theories, you’ve got zero shot at solving the ca
se,” he explained. “Stack closed all the other doors. I kept them open. That’s where we differ.”

  Fogel flipped open the folder and pulled out the photographs of the victims, laying them out side by side on the desk. “How do you explain the differences here? Why do these three match all the others on your Wall of Weird, while the man and woman found downstairs appear to be regular homicide victims?”

  Faustino looked at the photographs—the man in the library and the woman on the stairs. “I agree with Stack on that part of his theory. I think the three men we found upstairs are responsible for killing these two. Stack and I have always butted heads on what came next, though. We could never agree on who killed the three perps.”

  “You don’t think it was his mysterious ‘fourth perp?’”

  Faustino said nothing for a second, his thumb flicking the edge of one of the photographs. “I don’t think there was a fourth at all.”

  “Then what killed them?”

  “I think whatever they found in that room killed them,” Faustino said. “And whatever it was, they were the unfortunate souls who let it out.”

  12

  Stella and Ms. Oliver disappeared down the cobblestone path, and I remained frozen in the water, both unwilling and unable to move. For the first time, I realized how quiet the world had gotten. Not a sound from a single living thing. The sentries at the pool house watched them leave, too, as did the ones in the woods, but none moved.

  “Out of the water,” the male sentry at the pool house finally said, breaking the silence.

  Whether he intended me to see it or not, the barrel of a rifle slipped out from under the right side of his coat, then disappeared again within the folds. The woman beside him kept her gaze fixed on the cobblestone path at my back.

  I turned, found the steps behind me, and climbed out of the pool. I walked around the edge toward them both, shivering as the night air found my wet skin.

  “You’ll find everything you need in there,” the man said, nodding toward the pool house behind him. “You’ve got one minute.”

  The pool house was a little larger than our living room, about the size of a small hotel room. A queen-size bed filled one wall. A dresser, a small desk, and a single chair lined the others. A door at the back opened into a bathroom. The bare walls were painted a muted white, and the floors were some kind of dark hardwood. Heavy drapes covered all the windows. I pulled a thick, white towel from a shelf near the door and dried off. Atop the bed, I found a white button-down shirt, khaki pants, socks, underwear, and a pair of black loafers, all new, still tagged and in the packaging, all in my size.

  “Let’s go,” the man said outside the door.

  I quickly dressed, then stepped back outside.

  “This way,” he said, and I followed with the woman behind me, my eyes drifting over Stella’s damp footprints on the cobblestone, glistening under the twinkling lights.

  Although lamps burned inside the house, dark shadows pushed the light aside from all corners like living, breathing creatures defending what was rightfully theirs. The man led me back through the central corridor from earlier, then turned left down another hallway. Paintings covered the walls, landscapes of places I had never been—forests and deserts, lakes and oceans, the large redwood trees and fields of grass. They were all signed by Stella, and I couldn’t help but think of my own drawings, all those sketches of her—my obsession. And these other places, these far-off places, were hers.

  We turned left at the end of another hallway, then came to a staircase of stone. Light from the hallway spilled over, and a dim bulb burned at the very bottom, leaving the space between in deep grays.

  The man started down the steps, and when I hesitated at the top, I felt a nudge at my back from the female sentry. “Go.”

  The temperature seemed to drop with each step, and by the time we reached the bottom, I was shivering again. At the base of the stairs stood a small alcove, no more than eight feet square with walls made of stacked limestone. A hallway branched off both to the left and the right. We went down the right and came upon a small room with a large, steel door at the back. Beside the door was a wooden table with a small television sitting on top, the wires attached to some kind of junction box and trailing off into the stone wall.

  I heard footsteps behind us and turned to find Stella coming down the hallway, still in the thin white robe, her feet bare, her hands back in gloves, with Ms. Oliver keeping pace behind her. When Stella saw me, she slowed, then stopped, her eyes locking with mine. “I don’t want him here,” she said to Oliver.

  “This isn’t your call,” Oliver said.

  “You can’t make me.”

  “I can, and I will if I must. Do you really want to test me?”

  Stella’s eyes dropped to the floor, then back to me. Large and sad. “I don’t want him to see,” she said softly. “Not him.”

  “That is precisely why he needs to be here. You’ve lost focus,” Oliver said. She nodded toward the man in white beside me. “Open the door.”

  The man reached to the large steel door, took hold of the handle, and pulled it open. The door must have been three inches thick and opened with the slow heaviness of a bank vault, the weight grinding on ancient hinges.

  Behind the door, in the center of the room, was a metal folding chair. Sitting in the folding chair was a man in a black tee-shirt, leather jacket, and dark jeans, his face lost beneath a white hood. Several gold chains dangled from his neck. Hanging from the thickest was a gold dagger. His feet were bound to the base of the chair, and his hands were tied behind him. At the sound of the door opening, he faced in our general direction, but I couldn’t tell if he could actually see us through the hood. “Let me the fuck out of here!” he shouted.

  He shifted his weight back and forth, and the chair bounced under him, the legs scratching at the stone. “I’ll kill every one of you motherfuckers!”

  “Now, Stella,” Oliver said.

  “No.”

  “Now. Or it will be your boyfriend instead.”

  I forced myself to look away from the man in the room and turned back to Stella. Her gloved hands gripped the fabric of her robe tightly, kneading the material with an anxiety that was only matched by the mix of anger and fear on her face. She glared at Oliver, and at that moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Stella were to reach up and strangle the woman with those gloved hands.

  Oliver stood her ground, though, unflinching. “Go.”

  Stella drew in a deep breath, nodded, and stepped into the small room.

  The man in white closed the heavy door behind her, twisting the lock into place.

  I didn’t know what was to come, couldn’t possibly know, but I wanted to put an end to it. Whatever was about to happen.

  Ms. Oliver crossed the room and switched on the small television on the table. There was an audible pop as the screen came to life and filled with an image of the room behind the door, the man in the chair, and Stella standing before him, removing her gloves.

  Stella removed first her right glove, then her left, dropping them both on the floor beside her bare feet. She glanced up at the camera in the top corner of the room, then turned to the man in the chair. She reached for his hood and plucked it off.

  He was in his late twenties, maybe early thirties. His hair was closely cropped. Black or dark brown. A nasty bruise covered the left side of his face, dried blood seeping from a wound above his eye. His head spun quickly from side to side, taking in his surroundings before landing on Stella. “Who the hell are you?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  He kicked at the restraints on his feet, but they held fast. “Get me the hell out of here.”

  Stella shook her head.

  “Let me out before they come back, and I won’t hurt you, you have my word. Untie me.”

  She shook her head again.

  His face darkened, and he tugged at his arms, restrained behind his back. “You fucking bitch! Untie me now!”

&
nbsp; Stella glanced up at the camera again.

  He followed her gaze, and his eyes narrowed as he met the lens. “Whoever you are, you have no idea who you’re fucking with! My people will burn this place to the ground. You’re all dead, every last one of you. Let me go, and it’s not too late to work something out.”

  He turned back to Stella. “Do you know who I am? What I can do to you?”

  “I know exactly who you are, Mr. Visconti. Why do you think you’re here?”

  Hearing his name seemed to unsettle him. He stopped pulling at his bonds. His eyes narrowed. “Are you one of my girls? Did Cortez put you up to this?”

  “Your girls?”

  “One of my whores.”

  “No. I’m not one of your girls.”

  “You should be—a bangin’ body like that. You’d make a fortune. I’d put you up someplace nice, like that new hotel down by the convention center, the Starington, I think it’s called. My girls get nothing but the best. Did I interrupt bath time or something? Why you wearing a robe?” He turned back to the camera. “Is this some kind of birthday present, Cortez? Pretend to kidnap me, tie me to a chair in some basement dungeon, then send in a whore to light up my birthday candle? You’ve done some crazy shit, but this takes the cake! That fucker nailed me good. Whore or not, when I’m done in here, you’ve got a beatdown coming. I can’t let something like that slide. How would that look?”

  Looking back at Stella. “If you’re not one of my girls, where did Cortez find you? Coslow’s crew? How about you take off that robe—let me see what I’m working with. You put on a good show for me, maybe I’ll buy out your contract.”

  Stella circled the chair, slow, casual steps. “You have a lot of girls, working for you? Your whores?”

  “They come and go, but I like to keep it between thirty and fifty. Most come in from South America or Europe, though, barely speak a lick of English. A girl who looks like you who can hold a conversation, too…a girl who knows how to carry herself.” He blew out a whistle. “Whoever you’re working for, they’re wasting your time. Let me set you up.”