The Stonefly Series, Book 1

by Scott J. Holliday

  Tranquility washed over Jake's body. He pulled his hands apart and worked them open and closed to revive them from numbness. He rubbed his temples. The wind died and the woods became still. Jake produced his cell phone and opened the mapping app. He marked the spot with GPS and typed:

  BXC 183.

  He put his phone away and looked upriver. The sun's final rays sparkled over the trickling flow. Gray stones crested the surface to create dry, algae-rimmed pads where dragonflies stopped to rest. Some of the boy's liberated cattail spores were still caught up on the banks. Dover Psychiatric stood in the distance, peeking from between the trees like a child clinging to its mother's dress. At a distance the place seemed quiet, which was not often the case while Jake was there.

  On the day he was admitted, twelve-year-old Jacob got a fire-hose drink of the madness behind the psych ward walls. As he was so young they'd allowed him one police-supervised day at home after his sentencing. It was the only day Jake could recall his mother taking time off work. They'd barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers on the back deck for dinner, just the two of them. The dogs came out burnt and the burgers raw, but they were shared with his mother and undoubtedly the best meal young Jacob had ever eaten.

  The next morning they drove out to Wixom, ate a forgettable chicken-fried steak at a diner called The Iron Skillet, and then Elizabeth Duke and a Detroit police detective named Dan MacDonald walked the pre-teen Jacob past the two razor-wire fences of Dover Psychiatric, leading him into Hell by the hand.

  The place smelled of urine and disinfectant. Back then Jake could still hear, but what he heard that day made him wish he couldn't. As they stood at the registration desk there came the echo of something banging from down the hall. He imagined a head against a wall. A voice screamed an elongated, "No!" Underneath that was a woman's lilting voice, repeating, "I'm a little teapot, short and stout. I'm a little teapot, short and stout." She never made it to the next line that day, nor any day during the six years Jake spent in that place. He imagined Teapot's headstone would one day read, 'Here is my handle, here is my spout. R.I.P.'

  After registration, Detective MacDonald departed and the orderlies, dressed in all white, walked Elizabeth Duke and son through Dover's day room. The patients in the day room were suited in orange, pajama-like coveralls, and they were all moving. Not moving around the room, per se, but just moving—legs twitching, arms wriggling, heads lolling—like the floor was electrified. Elizabeth squeezed Jake's hand so hard it hurt, but he didn't cry out from the pain. There was already enough wailing in the room, already enough crazy.

  One patient with male pattern baldness and a shiny dome sat with his eyes wide open, pointing and repeating, "Wow, wow, wow," like he was witnessing fascinating events only he could see. A scrawny white kid—whom Jake would later discover to be Motown—was the source of the banging sound. Yes, it was a head, albeit inside a helmet. Motown repeatedly clacked it against the iron bars covering a half-open plexiglass window. One of his long sleeves was rolled up and his arm was thrust between the bars and under the window frame, elbow deep so that his forearm hung outside. Teapot walked circles around the day room perimeter, chanting, "I'm a little teapot, short and stout." The man screaming, "No!" was not seen. His voice came from down a hallway marked 'Adult Wing.'

  The orderlies walked Jake and his mother down the hallway marked 'Pediatric Wing.'

  Jake's room was empty save for the bed and a dresser. The walls and dresser were painted royal blue, as was the steel frame of his bed. All the corners were rounded off. He sat down on the mattress edge and pushed himself up so his feet were dangling. The comforter had a scratchy cardboard feel.

  Elizabeth released her son's hand. "I'll see you next weekend."

  Young Jake grabbed his mother's hand again. He pulled her close. "Don't leave me here."

  She gripped his wrist and forcefully removed his hand from hers. Through clenched teeth, she repeated, "I'll see you next weekend."

  Jake ran back to the day room after his mother left the pediatric wing. He perched on a windowsill to watch the parking lot from behind the bars and through the plexiglass. Elizabeth walked down the sidewalk and waited at the first electric gate with her back rod straight, her shoulders cocked back in an effort toward dignity. The gate buzzed and slid open. She went through and then waited at the second electric gate. Jake hoped the gate might not buzz and that his mother might turn around. He hoped she might run back in and hug him, or at least kiss him goodbye.

  Behind him were the noises.

  "Wow, wow, wow."

  "I'm a little teapot, short and stout."

  "No!"

  The gate buzzed. She went through and got into her car, sat behind the steering wheel.

  "Wow, wow, wow."

  "I'm a little teapot, short and stout."

  "No!"

  Jake closed his eyes.

  "Wow, wow, wow."

  "I'm a little teapot, short and stout."

  "No!"

  Tears pushed through the seams between Jake's eyelids.

  "Wow, wow, wow."

  "I'm a little teapot, short and stout."

  "No!"

  When he opened his eyes his mother's car was gone.

  "Wow, wow, wow."

  "I'm a little teapot, short and stout."

  "No!"

  Now, as dusk turned over to twilight, Dover's watchtower lights snapped alive, jolting Jake out of his reverie. Moths scattered from the recently dormant bulbs and circled back to the glow. The lights of the day room snapped on, too. Jake noted a silhouette in one of the windows. Motown's window. His old friend's familiar shape was there, plus a dot of fire—the cherry of a filterless cigarette—inside the black circle of his shadowed head. Undoubtedly his arm was hanging out between the bars, fishing the outside world.

  Jake stepped off the dock, back into the river.

  4

  The sky had gone full dark while Jake traveled downriver from the dock to the boat launch where he'd left his truck. Moonlight skinned the crushed concrete, the yellow parking blocks, and the sand at the riverbank. The trees of the surrounding forest were reduced to a black mass with the occasional white birch cutting through. Jake's horizon glowed in the distance. It defied darkness, existing on its own light, and it was closing in.

  Always closing in.

  He hopped into his truck and threw his phone on the passenger seat. It landed next to a carton of filterless Camel cigarettes and a copy of Patrick Dewitt's western-themed novel, The Sisters Brothers. Jake turned the key and watched the dashboard indicators.

  Starting and driving a vehicle was a matter of experience and feel for the deaf. Jake had learned to detect the engine humming through his butt, essentially flying by the seat of his pants. He'd heard the term comes from a time when airplanes were still a new technology and had fewer gauges. At that time, flying with low visibility, like through fog or clouds, required pilots to navigate the plane by instinct and feel. It seemed the detection of vibration and gravity shifts in the sky, just like life's most valuable lessons, were akin to a kick in the ass.

  Jake took the twisting two-track road from the riverbank until it connected with asphalt and forked—left for Dover, right to leave the preservation area. He hooked a left, drove a half mile, and pulled into the psych ward parking lot.

  Dover itself was the newer of two buildings at the site, rebuilt from a fire that took down the original building some fifty years ago. At the far end of the parking lot the watchtower lights revealed the second building—a crumbling French Provincial home that had served as the hospital's staff quarters during the heydays of mental health therapy. Back then a doctor's skill set ranged from straightjacket tightening to ice pick lobotomy. Word had it the building had been condemned in the nineteen-eighties. The porch was tilted and the front door was boarded up. On the roof there were conical spires with busted out windows that looked like open-mouth screams.

  Visiting hours at Dover ended at 8:00 p.m., which meant Jake had f
ifteen minutes before they'd boot him. He snatched up his phone, the carton of cigarettes, the novel, and got out of the truck. He jogged up to the first electric fence where there was an intercom button. Jake pressed it and said, "It's me, Jake." He smiled into the surveillance camera aiming down at him from a bracket perch.

  After a moment the gate slid to the left and Jake walked through, recalling the buzzing sound from the days when he could hear it. He covered the ten feet to the next gate and again showed his smiling face to another surveillance camera. The second gate opened; the buzzing once again silent to Jake's broken ears. He pushed open the building's front doors and walked into the familiar scents of piss and disinfectant.

  He was greeted by Clancy Ferguson, the fifty-eight-year-old nighttime security guard at Dover and proud to say he had been so since the day he graduated high school.

  "What's crackin', Clancy?" Jake said.

  "Only all my old bones," Clancy replied.

  Jake placed his watch, keys, cell phone, the cigarettes, and the novel in a plastic basket on the conveyor belt this side of the metal detector. He walked beneath the detector's archway, eyeballing the overhead light. When it turned green he looked at the security guard.

  "You're good to go," Clancy said, sifting casually through the carton of cigarettes he'd torn open. He checked the clock over Jake's head. "Only got fourteen minutes, though."

  "Plenty of time," Jake said.

  Clancy riffled the pages of the novel, nodded approvingly, dropped the book into the basket. He handed the basket to Jake, who gathered his things, pocketed his keys and phone, and stuffed the novel into the back pocket of his jeans.

  Clancy moved past him and around the empty registration desk toward the back of the building, all the while spinning a set of brass keys around his index finger, his lips pursed like he was whistling. Jake recalled Clancy always used to whistle Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.

  He spun the clipboard around and printed his name on the registration sheet, added time of arrival, left the appointment time blank, and filled in 'E. Jenkins' as the patient he intended to visit. He scribbled his signature and set down the pen.

  In the back of the registration station, underneath the counter, there was black box on a low shelf. Now that he owned one himself, Jake was familiar with handgun safes. This was a GunVault edition, four-finger combination dial. While he was at Dover a rumor had been spread that there was a gun beneath the registration desk, though no one on the inside could verify if it was true. Motown had been obsessed with the gun, always scheming for a way to get it.

  Nurse Kerry was fixing her hair as she entered the registration station from the employee doorway. Every time Jake laid eyes on her he recalled the forehead kiss she'd given him when he was twelve, just days after he arrived at Dover. Sometimes he could still feel that kiss there, tickling his skin and sending a shiver straight down. That same night he'd had his first wet dream. She collected his sheets the next morning while he hung his head in the corner of the room, mortified. She told him to quit being a sour puss and go have breakfast.

  Nurse Kerry was in her mid-forties now, but still had the curves to make Jake feel flush. She looked down at the registration clipboard and then back up at Jake. "Lord knows why you still come to visit this man."

  "I'm doing well," Jake said. "How are you?"

  She smiled. Lipstick on her teeth. "You look tired."

  "I am."

  "He'll be happy to see you," she said. "We talked about you in group therapy this morning. You boys and your antics. We get a laugh."

  "How's he doing?"

  Nurse Kerry went deadpan. "Every day's a struggle with Early Jenkins, Jacob. You know that."

  Clancy Ferguson came back, still spinning his keys. "He's ready."

  Clancy led Jake into the visitor's room, which was a pass-through cage connecting the registration area to the day room. As they went, Clancy recited the rules Jake had heard countless times as a patient and read countless times from the man's lips in the years since then.

  "You can pass him approved items, but nothing else. No pencils, no pens, or anything sharp or with a hard edge. You can-"

  Jake turned his eyes away from Clancy, which was effectively the same as a hearing person sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, "I can't hear you. La, la, la, la, la."

  Motown was inside the cage. He sat at a steel table with his wrists manacled to an iron eyelet riveted to the concrete floor. The table and its two opposing benches were bolted to the concrete. Motown could reach halfway across the table at most. His head was down and he was staring at his hands, one of which was holding a lit cigarette pinched between two fingers, tendrils of smoke curling upward. The pinkie on his other hand was extended out and curled like a hook. He no longer wore a helmet, having earned his way out of it for good behavior some years back. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing scars on his skin—suicide slices on each wrist, plus the jumbles of words and letters he'd carved into himself in the years before he arrived at Dover. The words trailed up beneath the folds of his orange coveralls and, Jake knew, over his shoulders and chest.

  Jake sat down across from his old friend, who refused to look up at him. He reached out and hooked a pinkie around Motown's extended finger. Their fingers locked together to form a promise, and then Motown lifted his head. "One of these days I won't swear, you know that?"

  "I know," Jake said.

  Motown crushed his cigarette in a metal ashtray screwed to the tabletop. He flicked the butt onto the floor. "So then, what's up?"

  Jake slid the carton of Camels over.

  Motown pulled the smokes close to his chest. "You're a lifesaver, Rage. Got something to read?"

  Jake removed the novel from his back pocket and slid it across.

  Motown examined the cover, flipped it over to scan the back. "Any good?"

  Jake nodded.

  Motown glanced down at Jake's trembling hands. "Uh oh. Which day?"

  Jake tucked his hands into his armpits. "First."

  "Jesus. You gotta rob a bank?"

  "No."

  "Beat up another pimp?"

  "No."

  Motown cocked his head. His eyes moved back and forth over Jake's expression. He blinked once, twice, and then his eyes widened. "Oh, shit. You gotta kill someone?"

  "I'm going to change the wish." He tapped his forearm, indicating the third line of his poem. "Make amends."

  "Dude," Motown said, "we knew this was gonna happen someday."

  "It's not. I'm going to change it."

  "Who is it?"

  "Some kid. He wished someone would off his old man."

  "You got a bead on the old man?"

  "I know where he lives, got his license plate."

  Motown pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. "That's a good start. How you gonna do him? Butcher knife and a Captain Kirk mask?"

  Jake looked off.

  Motown waved to get his attention. He was smirking. "Seriously. You gotta get that wish changed, pronto. Don't end up back in here."

  "Never."

  "I will beat you without mercy."

  Jake scoffed.

  Motown sat back. He plucked a pack of cigarettes out of the new carton, peeled it open, and shook out a smoke. He lit the end with an electric coil lighter, took a drag, and then dropped the lighter back into his chest pocket. Through an exhale of smoke, he said, "You gonna visit your mom?"

  Jake nodded.

  "Tell her I said hi."

  "She'll be delighted."

  Motown smirked again, but his amusement soon faded. He sat forward in his chair. "You know they tried black out my window?"

  "What? Why?"

  "They said it would be good for me," Motown said, making air quotes. "A way to make me concentrate on..." He looked off, dragged his fingers through his hair. "...something else."

  "What do they know?"

  "Not shit."

  "So what happened?"

  Motown hung his head and looked u
p at Jake from beneath his brow. "I made a promise."

  "What kind of promise?"

  "That I'd get more involved in game night."

  Jake smiled. "Oh, man."

  "Yeah, oh man. It's total bullshit."

  "But you get to keep Cecilia?"

  Motown closed his eyes in relief. "Yes."

  Cecilia. Motown's name for the middle branch of the Tobacco River that flowed past Dover Psychiatric on the southern side, the same river from which Jake had been unable to pull a trout all morning and afternoon.

  "It's a small price to pay, huh?" Jake said. "Just like with the helmet."

  "She won't sing to me if I can't see her," Motown said.

  "So you play a few games of Connect Four with Teapot," Jake said. "Then you're back at your window for your sweet nothings. It makes them feel good. Makes them feel like they're making progress with you."

  "Making progress, my ass. You hear from those genies again?"

  "They prefer djinn, and no, I haven't heard from them in months."

  "Whatever. Maybe they can help you figure a way out of this murder thing."

  "Yeah," Jake said. "Maybe."

  5

  The sign in front of the bar was an old Schlitz backlit with 'EDDIE'S' slotted in black movie theater lettering on the line designed for individualization. Going back and forth to Dover, Jake had driven by the place dozens of times. He never had the desire to go in until now. To go straight home tonight was just... just not yet.

  Jake stepped inside the bar. The place smelled yeasty and greasy. Stale. It was a scent you could feel cascading over you, clinging to you. The bar was empty of patrons unless you counted the old German Shepherd lounging under an electronic dartboard against the back wall. The dog lifted its head at Jake's entry, eyed him for a moment, and then dropped its jaw back between his paws, flapping its lips in with what appeared to be a sigh.

  Jake pulled up a bar stool and sat down.