She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

by J. D. Barker

  “I won’t.”

  “…they’re trying to hurt us. If anyone deserves—”

  “Jack, please. Stop. I won’t. I don’t care what that means for me, what happens. I won’t kill again. I need you to promise me, if I’m feverish, if I no longer have my wits, and I try to make you stop like I did with the lake, you must promise me you won’t—”

  “I’m not going to…”

  “—and if at any point it seems I might hurt you, you need to stop me. We may need rope or handcuffs, or maybe both. I don’t know how bad it will get. I’ve never let it go so far, but I won’t hurt you. You can’t let me.” Her voice dropped low. “These gloves cannot come off. If they do, if I reach for you, you need to shoot me, Jack. You need to kill me.”

  “That’s something I won’t do,” I told her. “No way.”

  She turned to her window and looked out over the barren landscape. “You’ll need to shoot me like a rabid dog, because at that point that is all I will be.”

  I twisted the wheel to the left, maneuvered the Mercedes into the opposite lane, and floored the accelerator. I stayed in the wrong lane long after we passed the semi. It wasn’t until a oncoming car approached us that I finally swerved back, the speedometer buried at that point.

  14

  Former detective Terrance Stack, just Terry now, went back to the living room window overlooking his front stoop and yard.

  The white van was still sitting there.

  He wasn’t exactly sure when it first arrived, but it had been out there for the better part of the day.

  Just sitting there.

  If anybody got out, he hadn’t seen them. Nobody got in, either. No movement at all.

  Just sitting there.

  15

  The sky had grown dark by the time we finally pulled into Carmel, California, the stillness in the night sky rivaled only by the silence between Stella and me. Not a single word had been uttered between the two of us in more than an hour. Every time I looked over at her, I found myself checking the color of her skin, searching for a tremble in one of her hands or arms, waiting for that sheen of sweat to return. Thankfully, none of those things happened, but a voice in the back of my head reminded me that they would, in time all those things would happen again. Time could only be borrowed. Stella continued to stare out the window, lost in her own thoughts, her gaze fixed on some far-off object. Several times, she returned to the book, but even the words of Charles Dickens proved unable to soothe her. She had closed the cover and returned to her window, to that distant nothingness that so captured her attention.

  Located on California’s Monterey Peninsula, the city of Carmel wasn’t large. The Welcome to Carmel! sign posted off CA-1 boasted a population of a little over three thousand residents.

  At the last gas stop, I had consulted a map and written down directions.

  CA-1 made way for Ocean Avenue. We followed it along the coast for about two miles before taking a series of side roads that brought us deeper inland. We found Windmore Road with little trouble and followed it around a series of winding bends in search of 803. Most of the houses were small two or three-bedroom Spanish bungalows with carefully manicured lawns and gardens. Colorful bougainvillea bushes edged sidewalks and driveways. Well-aged Monterey pines, cypresses, and live oaks soared overhead, creating a canopy over the road.

  “This is a beautiful street,” Stella said softly, the first to break the silence.

  “There it is,” I said. “Up on the right.”

  The house was humble—two bedrooms, maybe three. A brick bungalow with a gray asphalt shingle roof and neatly kept flower beds below the front windows. No car in the driveway, no lights on inside.

  “It doesn’t look like anybody is home.”

  “Or they prefer sitting in the dark,” Stella said.

  I pulled the Mercedes to a stop in front of the neatly manicured lawn and switched off the ignition. “Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll check it out.”

  Stella opened her door, got out, and started up the short sidewalk.

  “Or we both go,” I muttered, snapping off my seat belt and following after her.

  The temperature had dropped with the sun, the air taking on a crisp, cool feel. I thought about my jacket in the trunk of the Mercedes. I thought about the shotgun I had wrapped in that jacket.

  Stella was at the front door, peering into a side window. “I don’t see anything.”

  I knocked.

  No answer.

  I knocked again, louder this time.

  When there was still no answer, Stella reached for the doorknob. The front door wasn’t locked. She twisted the knob and gave it a gentle push. The door swung inward over the tile floor of a small foyer. “Hello?”

  Something about the way her single word echoed through the rooms told me the house was empty. Then I had a second thought. My mind conjured the image of Cammie Brotherton, dead in the bathroom or the kitchen or the bedroom of some horrible self-inflicted wound, her eyes blank, her lips permanently fixed in some grotesque smile.

  Welcome to my home!

  The house not empty at all, but a tomb.

  Stella stepped into the foyer, and I grabbed her shoulder.

  “We need the gun,” I said softly.

  She nodded and waited as I ran back to the car and retrieved the shotgun and my jacket from the trunk. I held the gun lengthwise against my body as I ran back, concealing it as best I could beneath the coat from the eyes of nosy neighbors.

  At the door, I stepped past Stella into the house, leveling the weapon.

  Between the moon and the streetlights, the interior slept in muted gloom. From the sparse furniture in the living room and adjoining kitchen, long, veiled shadows stretched across the floor.

  A small wooden dining table filled a breakfast nook in the back. Three of the chairs were pushed under. The fourth was lying on its back on the floor. The kitchen counters were bare. About half the cabinet doors stood open, drawers too. Most looked empty.

  In the living room, a battered old couch with threadbare cushions hugged the wall. It had a musty smell, unused, a place for dust to gather as life happened somewhere else. No television in the room, no other chairs or tables, no pictures on the walls.

  Beyond the living room was a narrow hallway, darker than the rest of the house, the light from outside pausing at the threshold, unwilling to go further.

  Stella followed close behind me as I stepped into the hallway, the barrel of the shotgun leading us.

  On our left, we found a small bedroom painted a cheery pink. A ruffled Disney princess blanket and pillow sat rumpled in a heap in the far corner. There was no furniture. Several empty hangers hung in the closet, no clothes.

  “Look,” Stella said quietly. A barbie doll watched us from a shelf at the top of the closet, one arm outstretched, the other at her side, her blond hair flayed about.

  I reached up and took it down. I expected it to be covered in dust, but it wasn’t. It hadn’t been up there long.

  Stella took the doll from me, and we returned to the hallway.

  The bedroom across the hall was a little larger than the first but just as empty. A couple scraps of discarded paper were on the floor. I knelt down and studied the carpet, looking for the telltale indents of a former bed, maybe a dresser, but found nothing. If someone had slept here, they did so without a bed.

  Stella was back in the hallway, her eyes fixed on the closed door at the end.

  It had to be a bathroom.

  My mind brought back the image of Cammie Brotherton’s lifeless body.

  So many things could go wrong in a bathroom.

  16

  Former detective Terrance Stack, just Terry now, kept his old service pistol under the center cushion of the green velour couch in his living room, the one he bought back in 1973. The couch was so uncomfortable, he didn’t have to worry about anyone sitting on the ratty mess and discovering the gun. Children weren’t a worry, either. The last child who set foot
in his house was now married with three kids of his own. He had no reason to store the gun out of reach and always felt there were many reasons to store the weapon within reach. At eighty-two years old, within reach became a theme in Stack’s life. He reached under the cushion and plucked out the gun.

  The magnum in hand, he went back to the window.

  The white van hadn’t moved.

  “What the hell are you up to,” he muttered aloud.

  Stack slid the gun into the front of his pants under his belt—he didn’t give a damn who saw it—and went out his front door and down the steps. He was halfway to the van when it started up and rolled down the street just fast enough to remain out of reach.

  17

  Stella remained still as I stepped past her, my grip tightening on the shotgun as I reached for the bathroom doorknob. I counted down from three, mouthing the words for my benefit as much as Stella’s, before twisting the handle and slamming the door open into the room.

  The walls of the small bathroom were pink tile. The toilet, sink, and bathtub were pink, too. Probably original to the house back in the sixties. Like the kitchen, the drawers and two doors of the vanity were open and empty. One drawer held several elastic hair ties and a half-empty tube of toothpaste. The shower curtain slid to the side, the room empty.

  I lowered the shotgun, pointing the barrel at the floor. “I can’t tell if someone left here in a hurry or never really moved in. I’ve squatted in abandoned houses before. They looked just like this. But this place feels like someone just left, like we just missed them.”

  When Stella didn’t answer me, I turned.

  She was no longer there.

  “Stella?”

  I went back down the hallway and found her in the kitchen again, peering into the refrigerator. “We have a package of hot dogs, half a bottle of Patron tequila, about a third of a loaf of bread, white, and three cans of Diet Coke. There is no mold on the bread. It looks fresh, and the hot dogs expire next week. Considering the power is on, I would have to assume they left quickly, and they left recently. In fact, I am absolutely certain they left yesterday.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  She closed the refrigerator and pointed to the calendar attached to the door with four Pizza Hut magnets. “Because all the days leading up to today are crossed out. I’m also fairly certain they like pizza—nobody has four magnets for the same store unless they are feeding some type of compulsion on a regular basis.”

  “Dunk said she moved around a lot. We must have just missed her.”

  Stella leaned back against the counter. “It was kind of her to leave us food. I’m famished.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  “She left for a reason. What if they’re coming?”

  “What if they’ve already been and gone? What if she’s coming back? I’ve been running for over four years, and I too have stayed in houses just like this. Everything I need can be found in my duffle. If I stayed in this house for a week, and I ran out for some reason, even just for an hour, that duffle would go with me. I’d leave this house as bare as it is right now. She might be coming back, and if we leave, we miss her entirely. For the first year after I left that house, I lived in constant fear. My life was ruled by ‘what ifs.’ Then I learned to trust my instincts, and my instincts are telling me this is a safe place, at least for one night. They’re probably still looking for us in Nevada.”

  “But they might come looking for Cammie Brotherton right here.”

  Stella placed a hand on her hip. “Didn’t we just discuss my thoughts on ‘what ifs?’ That sounds decidedly like a ‘what if.’”

  I could tell Stella wasn’t going to budge on this, and the truth was we had nowhere else to go. We could get in our ‘borrowed’ car, point it in some random direction, and just drive, but that seemed reckless, too. We needed to rest. The adrenaline had kept me moving all day and part of the night, but now that I stopped moving, I felt the drain weighing on me. I was in no condition to drive. We could get another hotel, but hotels created paper trails, even when you pay with cash, and we didn’t need a paper trail. Hotels also cost money, and while we had some, it wasn’t an infinite supply.

  “She did leave the front door unlocked,” I finally said.

  Stella smiled. “She did indeed. You catch on quick, my dear Pip.”

  “One night,” I relented.

  “One night,” Stella agreed, rummaging through the cabinets. “If you retrieve our bags from the car, I’ll see to dinner.”

  I did, but I left her the shotgun.

  18

  Stack pulled his favorite chair to the window overlooking his street about ten minutes after the van returned. He had been sitting there when the second van pulled up, the third too. Plain white panel vans. No markings or signage of any sort. He was fairly certain they were Chevys, but it was tough to tell from this angle. An hour earlier, he went back outside, this time holding the gun, and like before, the vans disappeared down the road before he could get close. He managed to read a partial tag on one, but didn’t call it in. What exactly would he report? Someone parking on his street? Three someones parked on his street? When he was a rookie, he fielded calls just like that and knew nobody took them seriously. Former detective or not, they’d see him as nothing but an old man wasting their time.

  Beside his favorite chair, he set up his favorite rickety metal tray table. Atop the table was the remains of an Iron City six-pack. He drank two so far, and when he finished the second one, he wasted no time reaching for a third. He popped the can free from the plastic ring, opened the top, and put away three solid swallows before setting the can down. Stack knew Fogel wouldn’t approve, but Fogel wasn’t here, and he damn well needed a beer. He tried calling her three times in the past few hours, but the calls didn’t go through. He figured she turned the phone off. When he tried to dial her again about twenty minutes ago, he realized his own phone line was dead.

  Stack had gone to the shitter once, but other than that, he kept eyes on the vans. Nobody got out. Nobody climbed in. If they were somehow responsible for the dead phone line, he hadn’t seen them do it. That didn’t mean they didn’t do it. It didn’t mean they did, either.

  He sat in his favorite chair with eyes on the vans as the overcast Pittsburgh sky made way for night. He watched the various streetlights come to life up and down his block. He watched a few of his neighbors come home from a day’s work and disappear into their own houses. He’d seen a few kids running around. Not many, though. Most in his neighborhood had grown and went off to live their own lives a long time ago.

  Stack watched the vans.

  When he finished the third beer, he reached for a fourth, knowing he should be thinking about eating something but not really all that hungry.

  19

  When I came back in toting Stella’s duffle bag, my backpack, both copies of Great Expectations, and the Penn State yearbook, she had our hot dogs boiling in a pot on the stove and several candles burning around the kitchen. The princess blanket we had found in the small bedroom had been neatly folded and placed on the kitchen island, the pillow on top. I set our bags on the floor and the books on the wooden table in the kitchen, then I righted the chair that had been lying on its back when we arrived.

  “I felt it best not to turn on any lights. The bedrooms and living room either face the road or the neighbors, so it’s best we avoid those rooms. The kitchen windows all look out over the backyard, which is fenced. If we stick to this part of the house, nobody should see us.” She stirred the hot dogs and nodded toward a closet on the far end of the kitchen. “I found a washer and dryer back there. I think we should take the opportunity to do our laundry while we’re here. Such conveniences aren’t always so handy.”

  I had a sudden urge to smell under my armpits, but I was classy enough not to do that while she was watching. I knew my clothes were rank. I hadn’t done proper laundry in weeks. Instead, I washed my clo
thes in hotel sinks and strung them around the room to dry.

  While I had “washed” everything when I arrived in Fallon, nothing would beat an actual machine washing.

  A box of latex gloves sat on the kitchen counter.

  “I found those under the sink,” Stella said. “I prefer my gloves, but latex will do, too. I find it’s good to have extras.”

  The bottle of tequila, two of the cans of Diet Coke, and two plastic cups half-filled with ice had been set on the kitchen table. The flickering candlelight on that bottle was nearly as enticing as Stella’s smile.

  Stella placed two slices of bread on paper plates, then fished out the hot dogs and dropped them on top. “Go ahead and mix our drinks, Jack. You look like a puppy eyeing a bone.”

  When you haven’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, things tend to taste a little better than they probably should. Even so, that might have been the tastiest hot dog I’ve ever eaten. Between the two of us, we ate the entire package, and I put away three slices of white bread after that. The tequila and Diet Coke, though, sat in front of me, barely touched. I had been staring at the bottle, I’m not sure how long, when Stella spoke.

  “You need it, don’t you?”

  I wouldn’t lie to her. “Usually.”

  “But not now?”

  I thought about it for a second. “I haven’t had a drink since the club last night. I found a bottle of Jim Beam in the glove box of the Mercedes, but it was empty. I nearly cracked it open so I could lick the glass, I wanted a drink so bad. But now…”

  I held my hand out, palm down. Steady, no shaking. “Weird. I feel like I want to drink, like I should be drinking, but I don’t really need a drink. Normally, I’d be shaking like a leaf when I’m this dry.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”

  “Maybe I would like to drink with a beautiful woman.” I raised the bottle and took a sip of the tequila, then set it back down. “Whether I need it or not.”