She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

by J. D. Barker

  “In May of ’79 we heard about Perla Beyham, how she drowned in her bathtub. I barely knew her, only from her participation with the Charter study. It sounded like an accident. They said she fell asleep. It happened. But again, I thought about the shot. Was it really an accident? When your mother and I heard Garret Dotts hung himself in 1980, we again thought about the shot. We decided to stop going to the Charter follow-up appointments, we stopped taking you. That’s when we noticed them watching us. People in white, white vehicles parked outside our apartment all the time. When we started looking for them, we realized they were everywhere, just like Richard said. I went to one last appointment, only me. I didn’t bring you or your mother, and while I was in that room, I stole everything you see here—your mother was home packing our lives into our SUV. We planned to run.”

  “But they caught up with you,” I said softly.

  “I figured you’d remember. Something that traumatic gets etched into your brain, it never leaves. I had to think fast, I still didn’t really know what we were up against. I left you with Jo, hoping they’d chase after me. And they did, but I eventually lost them. Elfrieda Leech, our guidance counselor, she had first told us about the study, said it was an easy way to make money. At the time, she had no idea what we were all getting into, but once that became clear, she helped me broker a deal—they leave you alone, and I don’t go public. I drop off the edge of the earth. You would stay with your Auntie Jo, and she would watch you for them, report back. Unlike Stella and David, you hadn’t shown any kind of special ability, nothing useful to them. They had no need for you, so they let you be.”

  I said, “They kept Stella in that house and locked David up.”

  My father whistled. “Those two were a completely different story. They locked David down tight once they figured out what he could do. He was the perfect little killing machine. At that point, the rest of the people involved in the study—Penelope Maudlin, Lester Woolford, Dewey Hobson, Cammie, Dalton over there, everyone ran, scattered. We think they used David to pick us off, one by one. That’s probably how they they got Perla to drown herself and Garret Dotts to hang himself. Not accidents or suicides at all, but suggestions by David, which they had no choice but to carry out, his ability in full use. He was young, probably didn’t understand what he was doing. Not in the beginning, anyway. But I think he grew to like it. Charter had what they wanted. They didn’t need us adults anymore to create more children for them. We became liabilities.”

  My eyes drifted across the room to Darby, still clutching her mother’s leg.

  Cammie said, “They don’t know about her. I was off their radar when she was born, and I plan to keep it that way.”

  “Can she do…something?” I asked.

  “Can you?” Cammie retorted.

  I was about to ask her who Darby’s father was when I spotted the worry in Preacher’s eyes. The answer was painfully obvious.

  My father looked up at the clock on the wall in the kitchen. “We’ve got forty minutes. Do we stay and fight or keep running?”

  “We leave here, where do we go?” Cammie said.

  I thought of Stella in the other room. She’d wither away and die if I didn’t find a way to help her soon. She’d die in that bed while the rest of us died out here, perched in windows and doors in some desperate last stand. Worse, if what my father said was true, they’d kill him, Hobson, Cammie, and Dalton, then drag Stella, me, and Cammie’s daughter away somewhere, lock us up like they did with David. Staying here, all the guns, that did nothing but buy us a little time.

  “We’ll get slaughtered if we stay here,” I said softly. “I need to use your phone,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “No calls,” Preacher said.

  My father nodded at the extension hanging on the wall in the kitchen. “Go ahead.”

  Preacher grumbled but did nothing to stop me as I crossed the room, picked up the line, and dialed.

  When I hung up five minutes later, my father glanced back at the clock, then forced his beaten body to stand. “They’re coming from the pass and the ferry. I’ve got another way off this island, but you all need to trust me.”

  Cammie and Preacher started to gather the weapons on the counter.

  My father said, “Cabinet above the refrigerator. There’s a leather duffle bag up there—grab it—we take the documents, nothing else. They’re our only real leverage.”

  “We need the guns,” Preacher insisted.

  My father shook his head. “Too much weight.”

  14

  “Pull your shit together, Fogel,” she muttered, surprised by the sound of her own voice. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the palms for hands, then wiped the snot from her nose on the sleeve of her jacket.

  Fogel stood up straight.

  She sucked in a deep breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth.

  Her eyes landed on the display of Trudeau’s MacBook, open on his desk.

  White text superimposed at the top left corner stated the current date and time, seconds ticking off. The bottom right simply said, CHARTER OBSERVATION TEAM 309 – SUBJECT “D” – LEVEL 2 SUB 3.

  The image was blank.

  Trudeau stared forward, the butt of the pen sticking out of his ear with surprisingly little blood. Several drops found their way to the white jacket of his suit.

  Fogel turned back to the Mac, pulling it closer.

  Trudeau had several programs open—spreadsheets, a web browser, e-mail. She brought up his e-mails first and scrolled through his inbox. 6,324 unread messages.

  Fogel was a stickler for a clean inbox, virtual or otherwise, and so many messages, so much clutter, made her twitchy. Brier never deleted his messages after reading them. His inbox had always been like this.

  Not really like this.

  Trudeau’s messages were all bold, unread. As if he didn’t check his e-mail.

  Fogel scrolled back through the messages, scanning the subjects.

  Lower your mortgage.

  Movie and showtimes.

  Advertisements for local car dealerships.

  Spam, all of it. She didn’t see a single personal or business-related message from a real person.

  Fogel clicked over to the Sent folder.

  The last sent message was dated 8/12/1993—nearly five years ago.

  The message was from Trudeau to 6491@charter.com with a cc to loliver@charter.com. The subject simply said, “We need to talk about Doctor Durgin. Possible problem with ‘D.’”

  Fogel clicked back over to the blank video feed:

  CHARTER OBSERVATION TEAM 309 – SUBJECT “D” – LEVEL 2 SUB 3.

  Subject “D.”

  Fogel opened Trudeau’s web browser. The last page he viewed was for TicketMaster.com—Patti LaBelle in Philly, 9/20/1993.

  She returned to his sent e-mails, nearly ten thousand of them, dating back to the mid-eighties. Fogel tried to remember when she first started using e-mail. Probably around that time with AOL.

  You’ve got mail.

  She still had nightmares about that voice.

  Fogel returned to the video feed:

  CHARTER OBSERVATION TEAM 309 – SUBJECT “D” – LEVEL 2 SUB 3.

  Someone could come into this office at any moment. She was pushing her luck. She had a decision to make, and it took her all of two seconds to make it.

  Fogel closed the top on the MacBook, unplugged the cable, and tucked the computer under her arm. Beneath the MacBook she found a faded yellow Post-it note with the number 392099 written in blocky handwriting. She scooped that up, too.

  She opened the office door slowly, just enough to peek out into the hallway.

  Fogel was alone.

  To her right was the door leading back to the lobby. On the far left end of the hallway was an elevator. She scrambled from Trudeau’s office to the elevator and hit the call button.

  Nothing happened.

  A keypad, identical to the one in the lobby, was built into the wa
ll beside the elevator controls.

  Fogel glanced at the Post-it note, keyed 392099 into the pad, then pressed the call button again. This time, the button lit up and she heard the whir of motors as the car approached. A bell dinged, and the doors slid open with a squeak. Inside, a couple of the light bulbs were out.

  She took one last look down the hallway, thought about the shitstorm of trouble she’d find herself in when she eventually got caught snooping around this place, then stepped inside the elevator.

  Fogel keyed in the code again and pressed the button marked 2-3.

  The doors squeaked shut.

  The elevator ascended.

  Fogel wasn’t sure what she expected to find when the doors opened. Maybe a burley security guard (or three), a wide-eyed lab rat or research assistant, possibly a janitor. The doors opened on none of those things.

  The doors opened on another white hallway, the walls covered in the crimson stains of dried blood and nearly a dozen bodies lying on the floor.

  Fogel pressed against the back wall of the elevator and froze long enough for the doors to close. Before they could seal completely, she stepped forward and placed her hand between them, tripping the sensor, causing the doors to reverse.

  Fogel stepped slowly into the hallway, with Trudeau’s MacBook held tightly at her chest like a makeshift shield against whatever happened here.

  From the state of the bodies, she knew it had happened a long time ago. Several years, at least. She thought about the last e-mail Trudeau sent, dated 8/12/1993.

  The first two bodies she encountered, just outside the elevator, appeared to be a man and a woman. Both were dressed entirely in white, the material stained in various shades of yellow and brown and the bodies themselves nothing more than dried out husks, years into decomposition. Mummy-like. The nails and hair long, dried lips folded back in sadistic grins, empty eye sockets watching her. The head of the woman had nearly been severed by a metal clipboard wielded by the man beside her. Her hand was still at his abdomen, where it appeared she stabbed him with a pair of scissors.

  Across from them, the body of a woman (Fogel could only tell because she wore a white skirt) had a ruler embedded in her eye, both her hands still grasping the opposite end.

  Not trying to get the ruler out but twisting it in deep, Fogel’s mind whispered.

  With the other bodies, Fogel found more of the same. As she walked the length of the hallway, the dead were locked in some kind of macabre dance. Dead by their own hand or that of someone nearby. This wasn’t a place of business or research or learning. This place was a tomb. The air reeked of it.

  When she reached two doors, the first labeled SUBJECT “D” – OBSERVATION and the second labeled SUBJECT “D” – CONTAINMENT, she found the first to be ajar and the second locked. The code she found in Trudeau’s office didn’t work.

  Fogel nudged open the observation door and stepped inside.

  The bodies of two men were slumped over a control panel, both long dead. The one on the left looked like he had chewed through his own wrist. The man on the right had a pen sticking out from his eye socket and a stapler in his right hand. Judging by the remains of his skull, he had bashed his own head in.

  While this scene was disturbing, it was eclipsed by what Fogel saw on the other side of the large observation window. The body of a woman sat in a chair at the center of what looked like a sterile hotel room. She faced the window with a notepad on her lap. Her mouth was stuffed full of pages from that notepad, the remains of her cheeks bloated like a chipmunk. She still held a balled up sheet of paper in her left hand. Several more were on the floor surrounding her feet. Embroidered in the woman’s white lab coat above her right breast was the name DR. DURGIN, handwritten with a black marker on the opposite side were the words, WILL SHRINK FOR FOOD.

  What the fuck happened here?

  A clipboard between the two men in the observation room held about a half-inch worth of pages. The topmost simply said, Charter Observation Log. Someone wrote 309 beside that along with the date, 8/12/1993. The remainder of the page was blank.

  Shelves filled with video tapes lined the wall on the left of the room along with a monitor (blank) and a VCR. Fogel studied the machine for a moment—powered on, a tape inside—she pressed the rewind button. The whir of tiny motors filled the room as the tape spun back to the beginning.

  15

  “Stack? Wake up, buddy, it’s me.”

  Former detective Terrance Stack, just Terry now, heard the words, but they sounded as if someone whispered them during a hurricane from the opposite end of a storm drain.

  “Terry—you gotta wake up. We don’t have much time.”

  This time, the words came from much closer, damn near on top of him.

  Stack’s eyes fluttered and opened. First he saw nothing more than a white blur, but with each blink, things got a little clearer. Muck, tears, and dried who-knows-what fell away from his heavy lids, and the room slowly came into focus. He tried to reach up and wipe his eyes, but his hands wouldn’t move. Neither would his arms.

  Stack’s head was turned to the side, looking down. When his vision cleared, he found himself looking at the top of the card table in his spare bedroom. When he managed to raise his head and look up, he found himself facing Faustino Brier. His former partner sat in the chair opposite him wearing a gray rumpled suit, white dress shirt, and blue striped tie—an outfit Stack had seen him in probably two dozen times.

  “Brier?” The word escaped his throat and found its way out past his dry chapped lips, feeling like sandpaper.

  Faustino Brier raised a glass of water and brought it to Stack’s lips. “Drink this. You’ve been out for a while.”

  Stack drank. He slurped down the water.

  Brier took the glass away for a moment. “Not too fast, you want it to stay down.”

  Stack nodded.

  Brier let him drink more.

  When the glass was empty, Brier set it back down on the table. A smile edged the corners of his mouth.

  Stack stared at him, at least a minute, then: “You’re dead.”

  Brier only smiled. He leaned back in the chair the way he always liked—the front legs off the ground, balancing precariously on only the back. Stack always told him he’d catch a bad chair one day, one that would break apart under him, and he’d look like a fucking fool when he landed on his ass, but Brier sat like that anyway.

  “Am I dead?”

  Stack couldn’t move his legs. They held tight against the base of his chair. Even moving his head was a chore. He felt no pain, though, and that was good. That was real good.

  Brier leaned forward in the chair. “I’m not gonna lie, buddy. It was your heart. A couple too many beers, people running around your house, your crazy trip up the steps…You pushed just a little too hard and blew a gasket. You knew it was coming, though, right? Not much of anything holds up after eighty-two years of constant beating and abuse. Frankly, I’m surprised you got as many miles out of that body as you did. The only thing holding you together was beer, Denny’s takeout, and beef jerky.”

  “Not much beer, not at the end anyway.”

  “Enough.”

  “When?”

  “When did you die? It’s been about a day and a half,” Brier said.

  Stack looked around the spare bedroom—the walls covered in twenty years’ worth of evidence, all the boxes lining the floor, the smudged up windows and thick dust in the corners. “This is it? No white light? No pearly gates? And my old partner as an escort? Is that why you’re here? To take me to the other side?”

  Brier shook his head. “I’m here to run the case with you.”

  “Why? You know this case inside and out.”

  “I want to hear it from you, one last time.” He waved a hand. “Old times’ sake, and all.”

  Stack licked at his lips, still dry. His eyes went to the glass of water on the table. He had drained it a few minutes ago—the glass was full again. “That’s a neat trick.”<
br />
  “Want more?”

  Stack nodded.

  Brier lifted the glass and held it to Stack’s mouth. When it was gone, he set it back on the table. “Better?”

  Stack nodded again. “Where should I start?”

  “Wherever you’d like.”

  “Maybe I should start when you died.”

  “When was that exactly?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Not really.”

  Stack told him. He explained how Brier had followed the man in the black GTO back to the house at 62 Milburn while Fogel tailed the Thatch kid. How someone took him out with a head shot. “Ballistics confirmed a .45 caliber. The shot came from a Sig Sauer P220. They found the gun. Someone tossed it into the bushes. No usable prints.”

  “But you think it was the guy in the GTO?”

  Stack shrugged. “Probably. Although, they found tracks for a Chevy behind both your car and the GTO. Possibly a third party. It could have been them, too. No way to be sure without more information.”

  Brier kicked the lid off one of the boxes sitting beside the table, the one for the Dormont house. He reached inside and took out the letter from Richard Nettleton. “This is from the girl’s father, right?”

  “Yeah. The Thatch kid had it, remember? You gave me a copy.”

  Brier seemed to think about this. “Things are a little fuzzy.” He dropped the letter back in the box. “Tell me about the Thatch kid. Where is he now?”

  “Dunno. Fogel lost him in Nevada. She’s trying to pick up the trail again. He’s with the girl, though. We know that much.”

  “Where do you think they’re heading next?”

  “Can’t say.” Stack looked around the room. “Who were those people in the white vans? What did they do after…”

  “After you died?”

  Stack nodded.

  “You killed one of them, you know that, right?”

  “Shot him through the floor.”

  Brier’s lips went tight. “Yeah, right through the floor.”