by Rod Kackley
She slid into the front bench seat, over the duct-tape covered holes, to get behind the big steering wheel, pulled the door shut with both hands, and took a breath, trying to stop her hands from shaking.
The ugly khaki uniform pants that Janice hated were soaking wet two seconds later when a plastic bag went over her head, and a hairy arm was thrown around her neck, pulling the front of her throat into her spine.
She sucked the plastic into her mouth and inhaled it into her nose as the last of the air that Janice needed for the existence that she felt was one of pure misery came to an end.
If Janice stopped wrestling with the arm that was around her neck, if she sucked more of the plastic into her mouth and inhaled more into her nose cutting off all of her airways, Janice knew she would die.
As often as she dreamed of suicide and waking up in a new life, the afterlife, and walking through the trees of St. Isidore Park to the welcoming white light of Heaven, Janice had never had to make this decision, or rather she had never made it.
Now she could. Janice had the power to live or die. It was up to her. She could go out easy or hard. That was up to her, too.
Janice thought about Fred's, the Reading Room, and her online business. She remembered friends, family, and customers at both of her jobs.
There was life, and there was death. She could decide.
She chose death, relaxed and waited for the white light.
For once in her life, Janice felt she had made the correct decision.
Janice could see the white light through her eyelids. Is this is what I had been hoping for, she thought.
The slap across the face from behind that brought blood to her mouth, and stars behind her eyelids were like a bullet that a soldier never hears, the one that gets him. Janice didn’t see the slap or even really feel it.
She just felt the aftermath. The feeling of her teeth being driven into her cheek, some of them loosening, her ears ringing and her head throbbing.
“Why did you unfriend me, you fucking bitch?”
One more slap from the other side. More blood. Now Janice was crying, and her nose was running. She scrunched her eyes closed not wanting to see whatever, or whoever was inflicting this kind of pain.
A belt wrapped around her throat and pulled tight from behind released the fighting instinct from Janice's DNA. One thought rang clear in her mind.
Janice, for all her problems, even the spider veins running up her legs and the moronic idiots she had to deal with every day at Fred's and The Reading Room, did not want to die.
She might not want to live, but she did not want to die.
Janice managed to put her fingertips to her throat and fight against the leather belt that was trying to throttle the air out of it. She struggled, fought, and resisted. But in the end, Janice knew there was no chance to win. She would not be victorious, and the worst of it was, she was not going to be able to hurt whoever it was who was hurting her.
"You don't get a safe word, bitch. I am the one who decides when this is going to end."
Those were the last words she was to hear before the white light glowed brightly.
If Janice had been able to hold on to one last thread of consciousness, she would have heard the voice from behind her mumble,
"Maybe this one won’t fuck up."
Seven
Joy was feeling good. Joy was feeling damn good. She was sitting at her “thinking place,” the bench in the park across from the Chronicle building that had been where she used to use her imagination to escape from St. Isidore.
This time, Joy was imagining all of the great things she and her intern, Amanda, were going to accomplish on what she was sure would be the Chronicle’s “Story of the Year.”
As others walked by shivering, Joy stayed on the bench, closed her eyes and saw an audience rising, applauding, smiling and cheering as she and Amanda strode to the stage of the annual Chronicle convention to accept their plaques and their first-prize checks of $1,000 a piece.
Amanda would walk up first. Joy would be second, pausing to look back at the crowd, smile, and wave, inspiring the standing ovation, which would include, of course, Esther Shapiro.
Amanda would step back and make way for her mentor to go to the microphone and accept their awards.
Joy imagined she and Esther had become great friends, and a tear slide down from her dark eyes, rolling her round cheek, as she imagined the look of gratitude beaming from the people at Esther’s table.
Esther and her family were cheering, Joy could see them so clearly in her mind’s eye. She had not only broken the biggest story of the year and saved the Chronicle from sliding into abject mediocrity, but Joy had also forged a new definition of the relationship of news websites and their print masters.
Oh, yes, Joy thought. And she knew it was just the beginning.
She snapped out of her daydream, drew a great breath, wiped the tears from her face, slung her backpack over her shoulder and strode across the park to the Chronicle.
It was time to go to work.
The day had started inauspiciously enough. Joy had locked herself out of the apartment. But this time rather than banging her fist and or head on the door and then beating herself up while she slunk to Russ’ office to ask for the master key, Joy had laughed with herself.
She marched to the manager’s office. Joy would have been skipping it if hadn’t been for the snow and ice that the rock salt thrown on the sidewalk had failed to melt.
She threw open Russ’s office door, almost whispering, “Now, I have an office too.”
The site of male anal cleavage welcomed Joy. The “Russ Crack” is how her fellow female apartment complex dwellers referred to what they had all seen while he was fixing whatever needed repair.
“Good morning,” Joy said, loud and quick enough that Russ jumped off his knees and banged the top of his head on the drawer in the credenza behind his desk that must have gotten stuck again.
“You need a master key, don’t you?” Russ said when he had finished using the name of the Lord in vain. Joy smiled when she saw the beginning of a smirk curling his lower lip.
“Yes, I do,” said Joy as she threw herself into the stuffed chair opposite Russ’s desk. “Why should I break with tradition?”
Russ’ demeanor was that of a killer who has just realized the .45 caliber slug he was hoping to use to end the life of his adversary had jammed. Or maybe it was the look of despair of one who knows his last hope for joy in a tragically empty life had just vanished.
Or perhaps it was the look Russ must have felt every night he closed his laptop and realized the girls he had spent three hours drooling over would never, ever even notice he existed in real life.
In reality, it had been a terrible night for Russ. His favorite internet night site never went live. Damn. Third night in a row that had happened.
“And you’re happy about that?” he asked Joy.
“What difference does it make? Once we get that master key, open my door, I grab my keys, and I am off to my office.”
“Office? I thought you had a desk.”
“Oh yes, Russ, yesterday you would have been correct. But today, you are not. Now, chop, chop,” Joy said clapping her hands together, “let's hike up those jeans and open that door.”
Her encounter with Russ had been a highlight of her life. And Joy was sure, as she walked the last few feet to the Chronicle building without even noticing the ice crystals biting into her face, the day was only going to get better.
There was one difference between everyone who worked in the Chronicle building and Joy, that morning. But she hardly noticed that everyone else was pushing the “up” button on the elevators, while Joy was pushing the “down” button.
Yes, they have put me in the basement, Joy was forced to admit to herself. But with her new attitude, Joy was able to think of it as “X-Files chic” rather than “bargain basement cheap.”
Joy could even imagine bumping into Dana Scully and Fox Mu
lder as they were walking down the hall. Both would be waving hello as she stepped off the elevator and took a deep breath of musty, basement smell.
Fox and Dana were not there. The hallway not only had the aroma of every cigarette smoked in what passed for an employee lounge, but Joy could also smell the mold in the walls.
But she was not going to let that get to her. A week ago, Joy would have moped, but not this day.
Instead, she turned to her right as she heard a "ding" and watched the second elevator open. It wasn't Fox or Dana. Amanda walked out. As happy as Joy was to begin the day, Amanda was utterly ebullient. She was bubbling like a two-year-old who was drinking the soap she was supposed to be blowing out of the little ring thing in her hand.
It was like Amanda's dream of being a slightly paid intern had finally come true. Well, if that was her dream, Joy thought, I guess it has.
Joy did flinch when Amanda held out her arm and linked it with Joy’s. But she relented to the advance of her protege, and they nearly skipped down the basement hall for their first full day of searching for the answers to St. Isidore’s disappearing teenagers.
However, Joy did look over at Amanda a little warily before she got totally into the mood and thought, “If she starts whistling, I will have to hurt her.”
Eight
“Okay, Chief,” Amanda said, “where do we start?”
Joy’s eyebrows, which she always regretted not having styled when she looked in the bathroom mirror, nearly came together in the center of her face, as she winced in pain.
Chief? Has she been watching the old black-and-white Superman TV shows on Hulu or Netflix or something?
Joy took a breath and turned to face her smiling intern who was as eager as any beaver to start gnawing down a forest.
Joy did feel a little, well not threatened, but challenged by her intern.
Amanda was close to four inches taller, much thinner, and much prettier than Joy, And much blonder, too.
But Joy knew that self-esteem thing had hurt her in the past, so she refused to buckle to her fears.
“We are going to begin by doing research,” Joy said, dropping her heels back to the ground after realizing she was nearly standing on her toes to match Amanda's height.
“I need you to come up with a list that includes the name of every St. Isidore teenage girl, and boys too, I guess, who have ever gone missing.”
Amanda’s face fell.
“Hey, we have to do the research,” Joy said putting her hands on Amanda’s shoulders and easing her lithe, cheerleader body into a chair at one of the two metal desks Chronicle central casting had delivered the day before from another big empty room in the basement.
“We have computers,” Joy said, pointing at the one in front of Amanda and the old Apple egg-shaped computer on her desk. “We have the internet. We are connected to the world.”
Amanda swallowed. This might not be as much fun as it seemed to be in her favorite old movies. Where was Rosalind Russell, or Katherine Hepburn? Where was a fast-talking hot reporter like John Garfield, or even a romantic John Cusack?
Instead, she was going to spend the day in a wet, musty, dank and dark basement with a female hobbit.
“Okay. Sure,” Amanda said as cheerily as one who is used to sweeping aside disappointment, rather than the blonde who always gets her way.
“Excellent,” said Joy, “And we don’t even need the whole, wide, wonderful world to start. We can begin with the Chronicle morgue files.”
Amanda grabbed one of the yellow legal pads sitting on her desk and started taking notes.
“Go back twenty years. That’s 1990 or so. Look for missing girls, and the boys, too,” Joy said. “Pull down the stories.”
“Then what?”
“Then do the next ten years, and finally the most recent cases.”
“And then?”
“Then, we start reading, looking for common threads, and the dots.”
“The dots?”
“Yeah, and then we connect the dots.”
“Like detectives?”
“Like investigative reporters.”
Amanda tried to look as convinced as she could, but the doubt was dripping out of her eyes, as she took a breath, grabbed her legal pad, and logged on to the Chronicle’s website.
She used her employee code to get into the morgue and went to work.
Joy sat back at her computer and smiled.
She logged on and keyed in a report to Esther, letting her know that she and Amanda were beginning at the beginning, just like she said they would.
After about half an hour, Joy decided to let Amanda work on one ten-year period, and she took the next.
Amanda was the first to find one of the stories that they were looking for.
“Oh my God,” said Amanda. “This is about a girl who was found hanging by the neck from one of the trees in St.Isidore Park.”
Amanda stuck out her tongue and put a hand to her throat, pretending to throw up as she turned sideways to Joy.
“She was naked,” Amanda whispered.
Joy chewed on the eraser end of one of the #2 pencils she had requested from Esther when she failed to think of anything else to ask for.
She took a minute to think, which again Joy listed as an improvement in her personal style.
To Amanda's credit, she didn't even blink when Joy leaned back in her rolling office chair and nearly tipped over.
“We need to go back another ten years,” Joy said. “No, wait, go back to the 1970s.”
They split the decade in half and went to work like a couple of Sherlock Holmes searching for the first clues to lead them to a killer, which is exactly what they were.
Joy struck pay dirt first. She found the story of a young cop, somebody named John Sheldon, who was out walking his dog when he found two dead girls in the trees.
“Both naked, both hanging by the neck,” Joy read from the story to Amanda who was taking notes.
“Were they raped?” Amanda asked quietly, afraid the answer was too obvious.
“Doesn’t say in this story. We need to keep looking.”
Now Amanda was getting into the mission as much as Joy. Not only were they doing real newspaper work, but they were also doing a murder investigation.
And even more important to Amanda, they were trying to find someone who had hurt women.
Amanda couldn't keep her enthusiasm a secret. She bubbled all over Joy as they walked to the elevator.
“This could be a serial murder investigation,” Joy said before they got into the shaking box that passed for an elevator.
A few minutes later, Joy sat beside Amanda on her favorite bench in the park. Neither woman was shivering. Neither noticed the cold.
Amanda and Joy started talking about the research they were doing, talking shop, like a couple of equals on a mission.
Finally, Joy knew it had to happen, Amanda started talking about boyfriends. Joy hated this point in conversations with other women because she had so little to add.
Joy couldn't commiserate with the romantic ups and downs that others would cry and laugh over. Compared to them, it was like Joy was stuck on a roller coaster car that wouldn't move while the others were on a Ferris wheel that would rise to a level Joy could only imagine when she was home alone at night.
So, Joy was only half-listening. She had heard these stories so many times why should she bother to pay attention.
Fortunately, the half of her brain that was still on the bench with Amanda didn't entirely miss the conversation.
"What?"
"My girlfriend," Amanda said with an ease Joy couldn't imagine. "She left two nights ago. Now I am alone."
They sat silently together for a time on the bench.
Joy decided it was time to go back to work.
This time, it was Joy who took Amanda's arm as they walked across the street and up the icy concrete steps to get inside the Chronicle building.
Amanda pushed the "down" button on
the panel in the lobby.
Joy pushed the basement button inside the elevator they shared.
“Hold the door, please.”
Amanda put her hand out to stop the door.
It was Esther.
Oh fuck, Joy thought. The good times are over already. She held her breath and gripped Amanda's hand which seemed to be shivering.
Together, they waited for the axe to fall.
But, Esther only pushed the door back to its open position.
Her face was blotchy red. She was short of breath.
Amanda and Joy loosened their thick, woolen scarfs, unbutton their coats, and waited.
Esther looked at Joy, at Amanda, and then back at Joy. She was holding a crumpled, wet piece of paper. She flattened it out against the elevator wall so that Amanda and Joy could read the three words at the top of the 8 1/2 X 11 inch sheet of standing office paper.
“Janice is missing,” Joy read aloud as Amanda’s hand gripped her upper arm.
The three woman swallowed and looked at each other to continue the conversation.
Finally, Esther said, “I think we have a new one.”
Nine
She closed her eyes against the dark. But finally, the woman had to open them. She never wanted to do it, but she did it every day. She woke up. Opening her eyes only let in the dark. Her eyes blinked open.
But the young blonde-haired woman closed her eyelids as fast and hard as she could, then covered them with her filthy hands that were streaked with the dirt and mud she was sitting in.
The mud, the dirt, and her dried blood; as bad as it was, it was the right part of her new existence.
Covering her eyes in the dark might seem like just what one would not do, but for the naked woman who never imagined life could be this ugly, it was the only way to block the reality that had become her life. Chained to a wall, trying to melt into the cinder blocks, blocking the dark and letting her mind slip into the past and then into fantasy.
It was better than her new reality.