He gazed at the stores on either side of the vet clinic. Across the street, a strip mall contained the arcade, a pet store, and other several other businesses. To his right was a pawnshop. He glanced away from the pawnshop and then looked back. A small dark surveillance camera hung from the eaves.
The man behind the counter perked up when Max walked through the door. “Looking for a gently used television? Had a beauty come in just this morning?” The man patted the tv sitting on the counter.
“No, thanks. I’m wondering if I could see your video camera footage. I saw the camera outside.”
The man nodded. “Oh, sure, yeah. You with the police? I suspected they might be comin’ round to retrieve my tapes. Not enough people use video cameras, if you ask me. I watch the tapes just for entertainment. You wouldn’t think they’d be all that interesting, but I’ve seen some oddities on here, let me tell you. I’ve had half a mind to call the National Enquirer after a few of the things I’ve seen on the late-night footage."
The man stood and shuffled into the back room.
Max heard him talking to himself, counting back the days.
“Lucky, you came by,” the man said offering Max the VHS tape. I tape over them every couple of weeks. Though in all truth, I probably would have set this one aside. I didn’t watch it myself. I don’t have a stomach for such things.”
Max took the tape, the plastic cool and flimsy in his fingers. He didn’t want to think what the video contained.
* * *
He ignored the tape for two hours. It sat on his kitchen table, black and ugly, and inviting him to see its secrets.
Finally, he shoved it into his VCR and rewound the tape to the beginning.
He pushed play. It started taping at midnight on the day Kim died. He fast-forwarded until seven a.m. when he saw cars pull into the parking lot at the vet clinic. He watched Kim climb out of Linda’s car. The woman picked her up at Ellie’s House every morning for work. They held cups of Styrofoam coffees in their hands. Kim laughed at something Linda said as they disappeared into the building.
He fast forwarded again, stopping each time a car pulled into the lot, but he didn’t catch another glimpse of Kim until ten-thirty.
She walked away from the building, her purse clutched in her right hand. He watched her hurry to the curb and out of sight of the camera.
“Damn,” he muttered, hitting pause.
She appeared to be walking in a straight line, which would take her across Sycamore Road. Max imagined the stores that lay directly across the street from Safe Haven Vet Clinic.
He hit play and watched the screen. After nearly twenty minutes, he saw Kim jog across the parking lot back toward the clinic. The image was too grainy to make out her face, and yet he saw the bounce in her step. She had learned something and wanted to tell him. She must have made the urgent call to his school just after that encounter.
He let the tape play and ignored the twisting in his stomach. What if he had called her back? Would it have changed everything? Would she still be alive?
“What did you find out, Kim?” he asked the empty room.
He watched the minutes tick by on the screen. The lot emptied and filled again. People hauled their pets from backseats on leashes or in cages. He saw a man with a cat, whose claws were sunk firmly into his shoulder, climb from the backseat of a station wagon.
Kim stepped from the building, and Max held his breath as she gently drew the cat away from the man, running her hands along its bristly back as she carried it inside.
If he’d never gone to her apartment that day, she’d still be alive. If he’d never busted in the door, insisted she get on his bike, and acted like some knight in shining armor jackass, she’d still be alive.
He wanted to argue with himself and insist that no, she wouldn’t. Denny would have killed her that day or maybe the next day, but he didn’t think Denny would have.
Denny wasn’t the type of man that killed the person he had in his control. He killed when he lost her.
He killed her when he realized she wouldn’t be coming back.
“How did he find you?” he asked, watching the screen.
The clock on the screen blinked six-fifteen when the rusted pickup truck pulled into the parking lot.
It wasn’t a truck Max had seen, and yet his heart plummeted into his stomach the moment it pulled into the lot.
Denny sat behind the wheel. Max couldn’t see him. The sun cast a glare across the windshield, but he felt him there, rage bubbling up as he watched the clinic. He had parked lopsided, one wheel on the curb. The engine idling.
Had Kim sensed him too?
Denny stepped from the truck. His arms were large at his sides. They didn’t hang limp, but appeared taut, as if he’d flexed every muscle in his large body as he strode across the parking lot. He marched with purpose, like a military tank, impenetrable, as it lumbered toward enemy territory.
Several minutes lapsed, and Max realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out in a rush of agony just as Kim fled from the building. The spring in her step had vanished. She looked shrunken, her shoulders bowed forward, her hands in front of her as if she were blindly searching for something to grab or somewhere to hide.
Denny followed on her heels. His mouth opened wide, and Max knew he’d yelled her name, screamed it maybe. His tone must have alarmed her.
She’d stopped and turned. Denny’s arm lifted from his body, something dark clutched in his outstretched hand.
Seconds, no, not even seconds, passed.
Max grabbed a pillow from the couch and squeezed, his knuckles turning white as the blast of the bullet knocked her backward off her feet.
Behind Denny, a man in a white coat burst from the vet clinic, Dr. Patterson, two seconds too late. He barreled into Denny who outweighed him by a hundred pounds, at least. Denny went down.
The dark thing in Denny’s hand skidded across the pavement, and another person from the clinic, Linda, ran into the parking lot. She picked up the gun and held it, pointing it at Denny, who lay on the pavement with his hands in the air.
Dr. Patterson stood and ran to Kim. He knelt beside her, hands fumbling to her neck, and then her wrists.
There was no sound on the videotape, so Max couldn’t hear the sirens, but the first patrol car arrived within minutes.
Lights flashing, it jumped the curb, coming to rest in the grassy median between the road and the parking lot.
An officer stepped out with his gun drawn.
Max watched his head rotate from side to side as he took in the horrific scene.
More police cars arrived, and onlookers started to edge into the parking lot.
Max couldn’t draw his eyes away from Kim.
On the pavement beneath her, he saw the expanding darkness as her blood, her life, flowed into the cracked cement.
No one had attempted first aid.
She’d died instantly.
That was something, at least, he thought, though it brought him no comfort as he watched the men in uniform slowly flood the scene. Two officers draped a sheet over her body.
They dragged Denny, the fight back in him, to a squad car. He looked like a wild ape thrashing and kicking at them. It took four men to haul him to the patrol car and force him inside.
Max dropped the pillow and slid off the couch onto his knees.
He didn’t know when he’d begun to cry, but he felt the rawness of his cheeks as the tears, warm and salty, poured into the creases of his mouth. Tears dripped onto the carpet. They soaked the collar of his shirt.
He fell forward onto his hands and knees and allowed a desperate groan to rip free of his body. The groan faded to a whimper, and the energy drained down, dissipating into the fibers of carpet as he pressed his forehead into the floor.
35
The strip mall across the street from Safe Haven contained four businesses, and Max studied each from his car: Roscommon Bank and Loan; a women’s clothing store called Katie’s;
Furry Friends Pet Food and Supply, which had litters of kittens for sale in metal pens along the front window once a month; and finally, Paulie Goldman’s arcade, aptly named Quarters, which everyone referred to simply as Paulie’s.
Max had lost more than a few allowances at Paulie’s, whiling away hours in the summer much to his parents’ distaste. Max and his friends often wandered out at dusk, bleary-eyed and with the green glow of the arcade screens showing behind their eyes.
Max’s mother had insisted he looked a shade paler every time he stumbled out of the dark interior. It seemed as if he and his friends had paid more than just quarters when they slipped into the arcade, their pockets full and jangling, only to emerge hours later broke and withered.
Max didn’t have a clue where Kim had gone that final day, but he had to find out. The need burned in him as if he were an addict and the only drug that would satisfy his unquenchable compulsion was that bit of information.
He started with the bank. When he pushed through the door, a blast of cold artificial air swirled up around him, scented with potpourri and a comingling of the perfumes and colognes that had already passed through the brightly lit bank that morning. The woman behind the counter looked vaguely familiar.
He read her nametag as he stepped up to the hard edge of the gleaming Formica counter.
“Hi, Mr. Wolfenstein. How are you?” she asked.
He smiled, still searching and then he remembered. She was the mother of Gary Phillips. Gary had moved on to high school the year before.
“Mrs. Phillips,” he said, tilting his head. “I’m okay. I hate to bother you-”
She waved a dismissive hand, gold rings gleaming on her thick fingers. “Nonsense. I haven’t had a patron in an hour. And I love to see a friendly face.”
Max nodded, wondering if she’d find it so friendly after he started asking questions about the woman who’d been murdered.
“Were you here when the woman across the street was-“
He didn’t have to finish. She’d already begun a dramatic bobbing of her head. She clasped her hands at her chest and then shifted to an equally dramatic shaking of her head from side to side.
“It was just terrible. Horrifying! I saw the whole thing right through the glass there. Mr. Davis put that spray frost on the bottom, so I didn’t see everything, but enough. I doubt I’ll sleep well for another month.”
Max tried not to reveal his own horror at the images he’d seen on the video. The horror wanted to appear there on his stiff face, a gruesome scowl that might never leave once he allowed it to slip into place.
Don’t make that face, his mother used to say when he pouted. ‘Your face will freeze like that and you’ll spend the rest of your life looking like a whipped puppy.’
He remained impassive, though he felt the corners of his mouth tugging down to match Mrs. Phillips own look of dismay.
“Did the woman, Kim, come in?”
Mrs. Phillips bit the side of her cheek and then picked up a pen, pressing it against her lips, a shade of girlish pink that seemed more suitable for teenagers than a grown woman.
“No, I don’t think so. We had a busy morning. Typical weekday. Karen worked as well, but she was covering the window. I don’t remember seeing Kim. She didn’t have an account with us, I don’t think.” Mrs. Phillips lowered her voice and leaned forward. “She was a battered wife. Apparently, her husband killed her.”
Max nodded. Usually he found the small-town judge, jury, and executioner gossip daunting and even shameful, but instead he nodded.
“The chair would be too good for him,” he mumbled.
Mrs. Phillip's eyes popped wide, but Max had already turned away. “Thank you,” he called over his shoulder, as he pushed back into the warm day. He didn’t dare turn to look her in the eye.
He moved along to Furry Friends, though he doubted Kim could have gleaned any groundbreaking news from the owner’s son, a pimple-faced twenty-something who spent his days perched on a metal stool getting lost in his latest fantasy comic.
Max visited the store frequently to buy food for Frankenstein. Each time, Max found the boy slouched over the counter, eyes bulging as he flipped furiously through the pages of a comic book. The kid rarely bothered with a hello or a goodbye. He merely took the money and thrust Max’s cash back into his hands, as if even ten seconds away from the story was ten seconds too long.
It surprised Max not to find the boy behind the counter. Instead, his father stood there, a large jovial man who also bred and trained German shepherds.
Max had gone to school with the man’s oldest daughter. She’d moved to California just after high school, and as far as Max knew, never looked back.
“If it isn’t Max Wolfenstein.” The man beamed. “How are you, Son?”
Max smiled, again forcing his mouth to tilt up at the edges and the emptiness inside to retreat down again.
“I’m good, Jeremy. How are you?”
“Oh good, good. Got a new group of pups wearing me out, but I can’t complain.”
“I haven’t seen you in here in a while. Usually your son-”
Jeremy’s face darkened.
“Not exactly an ambitious young man, that one. Apparently, my wife and I lost some of our heavy hand with the second one because we can barely get him to the store, let alone convince him to talk to the customers when they come in.” He chuckled and wiped a hand through his thinning hair. “He’s healthy. I try to be grateful for the little things, you know?”
Max nodded.
He thought of Kim, cold and hard on a morgue table somewhere, waiting for the sharp blade of a scalpel to expose her secrets to a stranger’s eyes. What he wouldn’t give to say the words she’s healthy.
“Everything okay, Max?”
Max looked up to find Jeremy’s brows knitted together.
“Yeah, sorry. I drifted there. Jeremy, were you here yesterday when the woman was killed across the street?"
Jeremy frowned and shook his head.
“To tell you the truth, that’s why Ben’s at home. He saw the whole thing. He’s pretty shaken up.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Do you know if he talked to Kim?”
“Kim?” Jeremy blinked at him.
“The woman who died?”
“My God, Max, did you know her?”
Know her. The words rolled around in Max’s mind, a heavy metal ball clunking against delicate things. He thought of her red-gold hair falling over her pale shoulder, her eyes big and bright as she sipped her coffee and watched the sunrise. Did you know someone who’d come in and out of your life in mere days? Could he make such a presumption?
Max nodded, unable to commit to more, unwilling perhaps.
“My condolences, Max. What an absolute shame. Dr. Patterson is one of my oldest friends. They just loved her over at Safe Haven. The man is just shaken to his core by the whole thing.”
“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Max agreed.
Max had begun to back away. His legs hit something flimsy. A stack of cat food samples as tall as Max himself topped over backward. They thudded to the floor, the hard little pellets inside the boxes crunching against one another.
Max turned and dropped to his knees.
“Shit, I’m sorry, Jeremy.” He fumbled with the boxes and tried to stack one on top of the other only to watch them fall a second time.
He felt Jeremy’s hand on his shoulder.
“I’ve got this, Max. It’s a hobby of mine. My wife thinks I should have been an architect.” He chuckled. He offered his hand and helped Max stand up. “This gives me something to do today, anyhow.”
“Thanks, Jeremy. I’m just trying to gather some information about Kim’s last day. Did Ben mention if she stopped in at all?”
Jeremey shook his head. “I’m sure she didn’t. He said he’d never met her, but saw her walking the dogs a few times across the way. He thought she looked really nice.”
“Yeah,” Max sighed, heading for the door. “She was.”
He hit another dead end at Katie’s Clothing Store. The woman who owned it had worked the day before and had never seen Kim.
As he pushed into the arcade, the onslaught of beeps, clinking coins, and the strange gravely voices announcing Game Over assailed him.
The dim interior appeared hazy. The neon signs and yellow flashbulbs of the pinball machines cast him from the bright world of day into a sort of backroom reality, as if he were getting a peek behind the curtain into another dimension.
For a moment, he stood transfixed by a yellow Pac-Man eating his way across the screen of the machine directly in front of him. The player, a girl of eleven or twelve, leaned close to the screen, her ponytail swinging as she rocked the controls from side to side.
As his eyes adjusted and the first intensity wore away, he propelled his legs onward. He wound deeper into the arcade, all the way to the back where Paulie sat behind a glass case filled with a scattering of cheap toys the kids could exchange for the tickets they won on Skee-Ball or other games.
Paulie leaned back in a wooden chair, tipped on its hind legs in that dangerous way parents loved to scold their kids about. His feet were stacked on the counter’s edge, his legs crossed at the ankles, and he read from a comic book with a dark figure in a mask running from a building with a bloom of red smoke billowing in the distance.
He didn’t look up, and Max wondered if the overwhelming sights and sounds of the arcade had desensitized him. He would likely struggle with deafness as he aged, maybe even go blind.
It was a depressing thought, a very adult thought, and Max frowned only to find his reflection in the mirror above Paulie’s head frowning back at him. He suddenly looked old. Not older, but old, as if the mirror were a funhouse mirror and the trick glass had aged him thirty years.
“Hey, Paulie,” Max said.
To Max’s surprise, the man’s head shot up instantly. With unnatural grace, he pulled his feet in, tipped his chair down, and stood, flopping the comic book on the seat behind him.
Rag Doll Bones: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 21