The Four Before Me

by E H Night

  Detective Darrow unbuckled his seatbelt and reached over the center console. He wrestled the metal can out of Alice’s hands and sprayed her with it in return.

  Whipped cream went all over her hair, face, and clothes, and she immediately started wiping away at the mess.

  “What the hell, Blake? Oh, you’re in trouble now!” she yelped, excitedly.

  He slid back into his seat and held the can out of her reach. She leaned over and tried to grab it from him. Detective Darrow stared up at her smiling face, and admired how beautiful she looked, even though she was completely disheveled and sticky. He let her succeed in grabbing the whipped cream. As soon as it was in her hands, his fingers cupped her tangled mane, and he pulled her face into his. Their lips met for several minutes.

  Alice sat back into her seat, breathing heavily. “I really need to get back. Tiffany’s really going to be worried if I’m gone much longer. I told her I’d only be a few minutes.”

  “Yeah, sure. Uh —”

  “Uh what?” she asked, curious.

  “How are you going to explain this?” He held up the empty can.

  She smiled and shook her head. “I guess I’ll just say that I dropped it. Apparently it wasn’t so important after all.”

  “Told you so,” he said, still wearing that shit-eating grin.

  He pulled back onto the street, and drove in the direction of Tiffany’s house. Sweat and humidity had produced a thin layer of steam across all of the windows and windshield, but he was able to see through a small bare patch in front of the steering wheel. It slowly cleared as he reached the house.

  “Thanks for dropping me off, and —” Alice paused to think of the words. “— and for spending some time with me. We’ll have to meet up again soon.”

  Detective Darrow cut the engine. “Let me walk you to the door, at least.”

  “Oh wow, such a gentleman,” she said with a mixture of sarcasm and amusement. “I think I’d actually like that.”

  They stepped up onto Tiffany’s porch, and he leaned in for a quick kiss.

  “Sorry, I just had to steal one more before saying goodbye,” he said, while peering his head over to the window next to the door. The blinds had been opened completely. “I don’t know how your friend would react if she knew you were late because of me, so I’d better get out of h —” he froze, and his eyes widened.

  Alice turned to see what had startled him.

  Through the window, a large puddle of blood was visible. It coated the floor like a glossy red wax. Red hand prints and other smudges were all over the walls.

  Detective Darrow barged through the door and ran inside. Even without his gun, he was fearless and ready to fight.

  Alice stayed close behind him, keeping watch from behind as they followed a long trail of blood to the bedroom. It looked as if someone had been dragged all the way there. Drops and tiny crimson beads littered the path, along with more smudges and hand prints. It became apparent that the person hadn’t actually been dragged at all. They’d pulled themselves into the room.

  At the end of the trail, Tiffany rested. Her body was face-down, but her flame-colored hair identified her on its own. She still wore the same outfit as before, but her shirt was pulled up and wrapped tightly around her neck.

  Detective Darrow rolled her over, and she gurgled. He loosened the shirt, allowing her airway to have some room to breathe, but it was already too late. She looked over at Alice with fear in her eyes, but her pupils became less and less wild until all of the fire had drained out of her.

  Alice fell to the floor and sobbed. She held Tiffany’s hand, and pleaded to her lifeless body.

  ◆

  During the following night, nightmares disturbed what little sleep Alice had been able to get. She had tossed and turned in between unpleasant visions and exaggerated details of Tiffany’s murder. Her mind had made up its own ideas of what had really happened, and it played them back to her like a film that she’d never agreed upon seeing.

  Once the dreams of Tiffany had passed, Alice was greeted with one final story-line. She fell into a deeper sleep and saw Sarah. A deep tangible sadness was upon her face, and the air around her smelled damp and mossy. Alice shivered from under the covers, with both of her eyes still closed.

  Sarah’s hand guided her to the basement door, and down the stairs.

  Alice stared at her for directions, but Sarah was growing more and more upset, until tears started to stream down both of her cheeks. She was silent, but her pain could still be heard regardless. She froze at the bottom of the steps and pointed to the cardboard box in the corner of the room.

  Alice walked over to it, glancing back one time to make sure that she was following the instructions properly. She squatted to the floor and opened the box. Sarah walked up to her side, and waited while she sifted through the photographs on top.

  Suddenly, Sarah’s hand raised again, and she pointed to a family photo.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Alice asked. She looked at the picture again, and saw Sarah, Betty, Roger, and Will staring up at her with happy faces. She didn’t remember seeing this photo when she’d gone through the stack before. Her fingers ran across the names that had been handwritten on the back, and then she turned to Sarah again.

  No one was there.

  Chapter 16

  “Every Breath You Take”

  It was one of those hot summer mornings where the sun beamed down upon the earth as if it had been looking to set the entire thing ablaze. Clouds were nowhere in sight, and the bright natural light illuminated every piece of exposed land, leaving very few places behind that were able to keep any shadowy secrets in tact. Alice pulled into the salon’s parking lot and cut her engine. She wore her hair up and out of her face, with little effort put into the styling. Sunglasses rested across the top of her head, helping to pull her bangs out of her swollen eyes. Her hands hovered over the steering wheel as she tried to decide on whether or not to stay in the car and drive back home, or to go inside and face the world with responsibility.

  She wasn’t even entirely sure of which option was the most admirable, or why that even mattered. She wasn’t sure if anything mattered at all anymore, in fact. Life felt so fragile all of a sudden, and almost even pointless. While she had no desire to die, herself, everything she’d once enjoyed had been tainted with gloom.

  She lit a cigarette and held it loosely between her poorly painted lips. Smoking wasn’t typically a vice of her own, but she’d grabbed the pack from Tiffany’s kitchen counter when she was helping to clean up the mess that had been left behind. She hadn’t felt as if she were allowed to take anything of value, so all she had taken was the single box of smokey sentiment. Alice brought a lighter up to the tip, and lit it quickly. She took a few long puffs and leaned back a little in her seat.

  “I can do this,” she thought. “I can’t just keep sitting around.”

  She lifted a foot into her seat and brought the knee toward her chest. Her arm perched itself on top of her leg like a clumsy bird, and she continued smoking. All of the courage that she had mustered while getting ready had started to dissipate. She batted at the keys that were dangling from the ignition, and she considered the options over and over again. Her eyes scanned the dashboard, but they hadn’t really been searching for anything specific. They stopped moving the moment that they reached Sarah’s yellow bow. Alice had thrown it up there a while back, and had completely forgotten about it.

  “Maybe this will make me look a little more put together,” she thought as she removed the sunglasses from her hair, replacing them with the new accessory.

  She checked the time on her thin golden watch, and realized that she was already a few minutes late. The cars in the parking lot should have been enough indication of that, but she hadn’t really noticed them when she was pulling in. She slid her leg back down to the floor and smashed the butt of her cigarette into the car’s barely-used ashtray. Her thoughts wandered off to the kiss that she’d share
d with Detective Darrow, and she felt a little more at ease. Even though it had been very unexpected, she’d felt genuinely happy in that moment with him. How sad it was that such a moment had to be ruined by an almost indescribable tragedy. With everything that had been going on since she and Detective Darrow discovered Tiffany murdered in her own home, she hadn’t even taken the time to dissect the entire romantic encounter that they had shared together. To be completely honest, she hadn’t even really thought back on it at all until that very moment in her car. She wondered if the kiss had crossed his mind, or if it had slipped away and been buried underneath the stress of the accumulating bodies.

  Alice reached into her purse and pulled out her lipstick. In a desperate attempt to look a little less shaken and worn, she rubbed the smudged color from her lips onto her wrist, and reapplied it with more precision. She felt some mixed feelings for beautifying herself while she was still mourning. It felt shameful to be vain when her friend’s lips had turned pale and blue at the hands of death’s makeup artist, but she didn’t want people to think she looked haggard.

  A single fluffy cloud formed out of nowhere in the sky above, partially blanketing the sun. It was pale and milky, and it cooled the blazing yellow star like a big scoop of vanilla ice-cream. Alice stared out from the windows of her car, and looked all around at the various buildings nearby. There were tiny shops with markings all across the buildings where the bricks had once displayed the different lettering of the many businesses before.

  Nothing lasted in Wintersburg — not even the people, apparently. For a town that was so known for being trapped in time, for being something like a capsule that was hidden far away from malls, hotels, and fancy restaurants, many of its things seemed so fleeting.

  Alice sighed and pulled her key out the ignition. It chimed as it smashed into the others on her keychain, and she shoved them all deep into her purse. Her arm reached out to her side, and she opened the car door, turning her body slowly just in case her mind were to change. Her thoughts wandered to the group of girls who stood together like a group of geese, waiting for their school bus. They giggled together and helped each other with their hair, swapping their accessories out for new ones. The sight of them took her back to her younger years, where she had often found herself wishing for friends like that. She wasn’t ever entirely alone, but she’d lacked the closeness that many girls her age had found among one another. Those sleepover nights, where friends would eat junkfood without any fear of weight gain, gossiping about which boy was the cutest, and prank calling all of the neighbors and teachers — these were the things she regretted missing out on, and these were the things she had just started to find in Tiffany.

  The loss of Tiffany had cut Alice almost as deeply as her grandmother’s had. It only cut her in a different place. Losing her grandmother felt a lot like losing her childhood. Losing Tiffany felt more like getting that childhood back, and then waking to realize that it had all just been a dream.

  And now, she was alone again.

  Her mind stopped wandering, and she stood up, closing the car’s door behind her. Her feet carried her to the entrance of the salon, and she opened the heavy door. The bell sang to her like a voice out of tune, before it stopped as quickly as it had started. She straightened her posture and tried to look up with a dignified chin. If she could fake the confidence for long enough, she would be able to push through how intensely uncomfortable everything was, at least, in theory. Everything had been going smoothly until she reached her station. It was almost as if the moment that her combs hit the counter, the gossip started.

  “I just can’t believe it,” a voice whispered in a harsh tone. “How many girls have to die before someone responsible in this town does something about it? I swear, these cops are completely incompetent.”

  “I know. There’s no excuse anymore. They should at least have a suspect by now. There’s barely a thousand people in this place, and we’re losing more and more of them while those boys sit in their office, eating pizza and watching TV. It’s all on our dime, too!”

  Alice tried to ignore the whispering, but the voices grew louder and more confident as she stood there, quietly and quickly setting up her supplies for the day.

  “That redhead didn’t even look like the others, so they can’t blame it on someone having a type anymore,” a third voice chimed in. “They need to go back and take more prints, if you ask me.”

  Alice thought it was kind of amusing that the strongest opinions tended to come from the people who knew the least about the subject at hand. It was as if they were trying to fill in the blanks by speaking louder and producing as many words as possible to stuff into the large void between their ears.

  The more words that they said, the more information the people felt like they knew. And the angrier that they seemed, the more likely it was that the others would listen to what they had to say. Even Alice knew that having a hive-mind was a dangerous and damaging thing, especially when the hive didn’t know what it was working toward, or even what it was fighting against.

  She tried not to let the women phase her with their ridicule. Sure, she agreed that the cops could have been doing a little more to solve the case, but their resources were limited, and the county sheriff and his deputies had only just started their investigation. A group of people could only do so much in such a short amount of time, and they could do even less when forensics and murder were involved. Finding a serial killer wasn’t a task as simple as writing someone a speeding ticket.

  “The cops are doing all that they can, I’m sure,” Edna’s voice broke through the crowd. Her silver hair shined like freshly polished silver. Her personality sparkled just as brightly among the room full of dowdy jean muumuu dresses, and overly powdered faces. She wore high-waisted pleated slacks, and a daring sharp shouldered blouse, making her look like she could have been Madonna’s fairy godmother. Only, instead of a magic wand, she waved a half-lit cigarette in the air as she walked onto the main floor, entering the room like it was her stage. Her plum colored lipstick stained the orange filter more and more each time she inhaled its smoke, as if she had been using it as a makeup blotting tool. Her short pointed toed shoes clomped on the floor with authority, and she swayed her hips to match their confident sound.

  “Are you doing alright, Alice?” she asked, with her free hand placed onto her thin hip.

  Alice nodded and replied, “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Good. Now, you let me know if anyone’s yapping starts to bother you. I’m not in the mood to be messed with today, and I won’t be putting up with anyone messing with you either. It takes real discipline to show up to work after witnessing such a thing. Don’t let anyone suggest anything otherwise.”

  Edna spoke with sass and attitude, making sure her voice was heard across the salon. She spoke as if she had heard the women speaking behind Alice’s back. And she had, actually. She heard them talking right before Alice had walked in for her shift. The clients had already been spouting out their theories. One of them had even gone as far as to mention how strange of a coincidence it was for Alice to have been gone for the perfect amount of time during Tiffany’s brutal attack. “How convenient,” the horrid old woman had said with suspicion in her tone.

  Edna was beyond just sitting back and letting the women enjoy their makeshift therapy sessions anymore. Gossip was fairly harmless on its own, but rumors could quickly turn into suggestions, and suggestions were capable of turning into something as equal as facts in the eyes of squawking bitter women. With nothing else to occupy their time, judgment had become their hobby, but Edna wasn’t going to allow Alice to stand trial that day. The sins that the women spoke of were someone else’s, and she wasn’t going to entertain the thought of standing by to allow a crucifixion to take place in her salon — at least not Alice’s, anyway.

  “Thank you,” Alice said quietly, but with great appreciation. “I’m just trying to push through it all and keep going like nothing happened right now.”

/>   “And that’s all you need to do,” Edna replied, nodding approvingly.

  ◆

  Alice made it through the rest of her shift without hearing hardly a peep from anyone else. The few words that she had been able to hear were still lingering around in her mind though, as she drove back in the direction of her house.

  Tiffany’s mailbox soon came into view, and Alice tried not to stare or think about the letters that her friend would never be able to read, and the stacks of solicitations that were already beginning to pile up. The mailman must have not been told to stop delivering to her address, because the letters still arrived each day, waiting for Tiffany’s parents to find them. It annoyed Alice that even in death, a person was unable to escape an ever-growing hoard of junk mail. Why anyone would want to sell snake oil to a dead person was beyond her imagination.