by Jeff Vrolyks
Chapter Six
On the drive back to Norrah’s we decided we really would begin reading the bible tonight, to honor our end of the bargain. To make it more lively, we’d do it together. Neither of us were eager to separate from the other, so it worked out well. And we already had a couple margaritas in our system, so it was the foundation for a fun evening. We both had work in the morning, but that seemed like years away. The night was young, and we were enjoying our new relationship status. Dating, that’s what we were. Maybe not boyfriend and girlfriend, but something just short of that. If she was confronted by a good looking man and asked out on a date, I believe she’d have turned him down with the reason being that she was seeing someone, sorry. I’d have said the same thing. We were in the throes of a monogamous relationship; is there anything more blissful than that? A new commitment with a new partner? Would we be with the other for the rest of our lives? Marriage? Kids? Joint 401k plans and family health plans? The sky’s the limit, the possibilities endless and marvelous to daydream over. My spirits couldn’t get any higher, despite the missing twenty-three turned found twenty-three.
We arrived at her house. There was no police presence there, excluding myself. A news personality—a rather famous one—met us at her driveway to request an interview with Norrah. She said not this time and walked past him. He was whining about people needing to understand things and blah-blah-blah as we went inside; the same old song and dance, a stale tune. She’d begin interviewing soon enough.
She locked the door behind us. Our minds would be preoccupied at her home, so I offered to take her to my cabin instead. I had some wine there, and would love to turn them into empty bottles with her. She liked the idea. She changed into something more casual upstairs as I waited in the living room. On a whim I decided to venture downstairs. The hatch was open, so I went down without a second thought. Norrah asked from well above if she should bring clothes for tomorrow, and giggled. I said sure loud enough to reach her. She asked if I was in the basement: I said yeah.
It looked pretty much the same down here. Exactly the same, actually. A few cups had changed positions, but that was from when the kids reappeared and took them up as if it had only been seconds instead of calendar days between sips. Having been twenty-four hours removed from the scene of yesterday, I absorbed what I saw more studiously. All the damned plastic cups. Really, those were the only sign that there was ever a party here, if you discount the banner and festoons. That and a couple empty bottles of gin and vodka; one bottle not empty, and Tom Collins mix. I went inside the bathroom, saw a Trojan wrapper in the trash can atop a mound of wadded up tissue. Curiously there was a rubber beside it, still rolled up in a perfect circle. Maybe the lewd couple had second thoughts between opening the rubber and unraveling it, like “If I’m not mistaken, I seem to recall warm wet membranes feeling better than cold dry latex.” “Indeed, Conrad. I do believe you’re on to something!” I remembered seeing the couple come out of the crapper having just had sex, sex that spanned seven days. I wondered if when he reappeared after a fortnight stint in oblivion, if his erection was still hard. If he was inside her at the time, would he return with a water-logged weenie, much like swimming for prolonged periods turns your digits into prunes? That’s some long sex! I turned the bathroom light off and re-entered the apartment giggling.
How did I not see it before? Against the back wall was the fireplace, a stone mantle and hearth. On the footing of the hearth was a hat. It was short and wide brimmed, black. I stepped to it and saw that there were horns on it, small ones, devil horns. I picked it up and saw that there was a mask behind it. I looked around the room and saw no other masks. Ostensibly the partiers took their disguises home with them last night. But not this reveler. Someone had left a hat behind, and a mask. It was porcelain, not some cheap deal bought at a discount-shop. It was heavy and thick, white and cold to the touch. It looked like the visage of a corpse, white and expressionless. It was of a man. A little color on the cheeks, but mostly just stark white. I discarded the hat and examined the mask. There was no stick attached to it for its owner to press it against his or her face. So that would mean it was one of those deals that was secured to the head by an elastic band. But there was no band, no string or slots for a string or anything of the sort. It was as though it were the face of a man-sized porcelain doll, its face surgically removed from the nose to forehead, eyes cut out, edges rounded smooth. How peculiar that it didn’t have a strap or stick. How did the masquerader keep it to their face? I wondered if this belonged to number twenty-five. I didn’t really wonder it, but I pretended that I didn’t know the affirmative answer to this self-posed question. It was the mask of number twenty-five. I knew it like I knew there was a good reason why Aaron wanted us to read the bible, and it had nothing to do with our salvation. Not that I knew the reason, I only knew there was one. The mask in my hands held the answers to every portentous question both asked and unasked, its wearer the key to the riddle, but it hadn’t the avenue to share its secrets. He who wore it was responsible for Lake Arrowhead becoming a household name; he was responsible for the parents of two dozen youths worrying sick for six nights and seven days. He who wore it was responsible for the first gray hair of Norrah’s thirty young years sprouting just above her left temple. Maybe by me touching it I was contaminating evidence. My prints would ruin the existing ones. That was doubtful, because detectives had already combed the place for clues a week ago. They’d have already seen this thing and the hat. That left me to wonder: why were they still here? Wouldn’t they have been placed in containers and tagged as evidence? They left them behind, really? I guess they may have deemed them irrelevant, as I might have done if I didn’t know better. I only knew better because of what Aaron had told me. So I cut the detectives some slack and merely considered them lazy instead of stupid and lazy.
I had only touched the mask at the sides: maybe there were still prints on it. The odds of the mask having gone untouched since its owner last touched it seemed unlikely, but there could still be a partial print somewhere on it. Maybe the database would turn up a match not a police officer or myself. There wouldn’t be prints on the hat, as it was fabric (unless the horns had prints; doubtful). I set the mask down where I had found it, and made a mental note to have a detective come take it, check it for prints. Unless Aaron counseled against it for some unknown reason, such as he already knew the identity of the man who had worn it.
“What are you doing down here?” Norrah asked from the top step, startling me. She jaunted down the steps.
“Ready to go?” I asked.
“Yeah. Someone’s mask, huh?”
“Yep. And hat. Do you look painfully beautiful wearing anything and everything? And probably nothing?” She wore contoured black cotton pants and a USC sweatshirt, her hair still down, makeup touched up.
“You bet’cha.”
“I look pretty hot naked, myself, and under only one condition: the lights have to be off.”
“Luckily they make light switches, then.”
“Yes, that invention is responsible for me getting laid.”
“You’re silly,” she said and giggled.
“Silly like a fox. Let’s get out of here.”
We went upstairs. I asked how long she planned on evading the journalists. They were salivating for an interview, and we both knew they wouldn’t leave until they had their fill.
“Soon, I think. It just seems kind of pointless, don’t you think? I can’t answer any of their questions, so why bother? If I knew more, maybe I’d be more apt to give them their damned ratings.”
“Yeah, well hopefully those answers will come soon enough, with the help of Aaron.”
She stopped at the answering machine to check messages. Unsurprisingly she had a gang of them, thirty-four messages. How many of them would be media begging for the first exclusive interview? Probably all of them. I said that to Norrah and she disagreed, bet that at least a few of them were from family, worried for her.
She admitted to having avoided them for the most part. She had called her mom once, shortly after the nightmare began, but cut the conversation short when she burst into tears.
She pressed play and the first message was an NBC executive, using his name and title to get her attention. What got her attention more was his offer of a quarter-million dollars for an exclusive, stipulated on it being her first interview. I was pie-eyed, as was she.
“Babe, you should seriously consider that,” I said and swallowed dryly.
“Now I’m babe? I’m a phone call away from being a quarter-millionaire and suddenly I’m babe?” She grinned wryly at me.
I laughed. “What can I say? You look a lot hotter when you’re about to become rich.”
She laughed and said I’d better be kidding, but knew I was.
“But if you’re going to give an interview,” I reasoned, “why not do one that pays?”
“It would leak that I did it for money, and people would form lousy opinions of me.”
“Lousier than the ones already formed? A lot of folks think you had something to do with them disappearing, as stupid as that sounds. Your continued silence projects guilt.”
“Screw those people then. I don’t know, I’ll consider it. I have to admit the idea of coming into that kind of money is a warm one. I could quit my job and focus on finishing my degree.”
“Heck yeah. Now we’re talking.”
The next several messages were other producers, executives, celebrities of the news world, a few people who looked her number up in the White Pages. One message was from her mother, who worried for her daughter and implored her to pick up the phone. Norrah said that she must have given up leaving unreturned messages on her cellphone.
“You shouldn’t avoid your family,” I said.
“I spoke to her. I know what she’ll say and I don’t want to hear it. Coincidentally she’d say there would be people willing to pay me handsomely for an interview, so I’d be foolish to turn them down. She doesn’t care so much about my mental state, assumes all is fine now that the kids are back.”
“Not close with your parents, huh?”
“Eh, not so much lately. They’re awfully selfish. I’ve been in contact with Grandma, though. She’s the best. She worries for me.”
The messages continued to play. She erased them one after the other, but didn’t delete the one offering her a ton of cash.
Norrah was just saying that she wasn’t going to listen to the rest, that it would take an hour, when a message began playing that stole her attention. It was a girl calling herself Brittney Hayes, a name familiar to me. I suppose all twenty-three missing kids’ names would sound familiar to me, as I’ve heard them mentioned more than once.
“Hi, Norrah. My name is Brittney Hayes. I found your number in Yellow Book. I hope you don’t mind me calling. Maybe you’ll remember me, I wore the red dress on Valentine’s Day, with the black cat mask. You let me in through the front door. Anyway, I’ll understand if you don’t want to call me back, but I was hoping we could get together to talk. I’ll buy you lunch or something. My number is…”
“What do you suppose she wants?” I asked Norrah.
“Probably the same thing everyone wants: answers. Answers I don’t have. She was lovely, I remember her. Pretty dress, cute mask, charming girl. Maybe I’ll take her up on the offer. I’d like to ask her questions, too.”