The First Time I Fell

by Joanne Macgregor

  She turns to face him. “You want me to belong to you,” she corrects him, lifting a pale hand to gently stroke the stubble on his jaw. “But I can’t. I can’t belong to anyone, you know that.”

  He leans his face into her hand, but his expression is unhappy, angry even. “You’ve never tried!”

  “I’ve never tried flying to the moon, either, but I still know it can’t happen.” She kisses him on the lips. “I’m going for a ride now. And if I get mugged for this beautiful bling, it will be entirely your fault for being so generous!”

  With a giggle, she twirls out of the room and is gone.

  The man, alone now, snaps the velvet box closed and hurls it at the mirror.

  The scene faded. I realized I was panting and made myself take a deep breath as I doubled down, trying to see more. But all I got was a shimmering vista of trees — rows upon rows of them, with short, twisted trunks and thin, silvery leaves — bathed in golden sunshine. The image wavered and then disappeared.

  I opened my eyes, suddenly aware that they were watering. My fingers were prickling with an electric tingle.

  “Are you– are you crying?” Ryan asked.

  I wiped my eyes. “No, just leaking.”

  “Did you get anything?”

  “Yes. A man, Carl — Laini’s boyfriend, I think? — gave her this. He wanted to marry her; she wasn’t interested. And she was a cyclist.”

  Ryan drew back his head in surprise.

  “And then that part ended, and I saw lots of trees.” I considered for a moment. “I think they were olive trees.”

  “You saw olive trees?”

  Registering his mystified expression, I said, “I’m not an expert, okay? I can’t direct this. I just get what comes to me.”

  “Sure. Anything else?”

  I slid the necklace back into its bag and returned it to the desk, shaking my head slowly. “Not really.”

  But there had been. Along with the images I’d seen, I’d experienced sensations that weren’t easy to identify. A constricting heaviness in the first scene and a more open, light feeling when I’d seen the olive groves. I rubbed my hands together. The pins and needles had faded, but a faint awareness, a sensation like I had eyes in my fingertips, lingered.

  Ryan and I sat in uneasy silence for a while. I didn’t know what to make of my visions, and he clearly didn’t know what to make of me.

  Eventually, I cleared my throat. “So, what about the bone Lizzie found? Anything more on that?”

  “It’s human.”

  “I already knew that much from the news.”

  “It’s old.”

  I gave him the look that deserved. “Do you have an identity on the victim yet?”

  “I guess I can tell you that much, because it’ll be released to the press. We found a medic-alert bracelet at the scene. It belonged to one Jacob Wertheimer, who went missing in 2009. So it’s likely that’s who our vic is, although we’ll only be sure when the ME’s office confirms the dental records.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.” I didn’t need to be psychic to know that he was holding back; his face was a study in suspiciously careful blankness. “Oh, c’mon, Ryan, this is like pulling teeth. Tell me! Please. Pretty please? Pretty please with a — what was it, a Heineken? — on top,” I begged.

  He looked pleasantly surprised that I’d remembered his favorite brand, but instead of answering me, he stood up, stepped over to the glass partition which looked out onto the hallway, and stood for a long minute with his back to me. Weighing his options? I kept quiet.

  Turning to face me, Ryan asked, “When you touched that bone, did you see anything specific?”

  “No. I just had an oppressive, dark feeling. Why?”

  “Remember that old serial killer case I told you about?”

  I did. Back in December, Ryan had told me about a serial killer who’d been operating in New England around the time of Colby’s death in 2007. Although they’d been murdered in a variety of different ways and dumped in different spots, all the victims had been young gay men.

  “You’re not saying this is one of his victims?” I asked, amazed.

  “Looks like it.”

  “How do they know?” When he looked reluctant to answer, I said, “I won’t tell anyone, Ryan, I promise. I pinky-promise!”

  I reached out and linked a baby finger with one of his as I spoke. Did he feel the same little zing of contact that I did?

  “You literally have me wrapped around your little finger.” He gave my pinkie a squeeze and then released it. “According to the FBI, the killer left an item behind with every victim.”

  “Don’t serial killers usually take something from their victims?”

  Trophies, that’s what they were called. Many serial killers liked to keep reminders of each of their kills in macabre collections — a lock of the victim’s hair, something from their wallet, a piece cut from their body — to help them remember the victim and recapture the pleasure of the kill.

  Ryan nodded. “This guy is different. He thinks he’s special. He wants us to know it’s him. Signing his work like it’s a piece of art or something,” he said, his voice thick with disgust. “Of course, he might have taken trophies, too, no way to know that. Anyway, the fact that he left something of his own behind at each body dump scene was kept from the media back then to prevent copycats, and so the FBI would know something that only the killer knew. That would help them definitively identify him if they ever caught him.”

  “That’s how they knew Colby wasn’t one of his victims? They didn’t find the thing with his body?”

  An image of Colby’s body — white and waxen, lying behind the yellow barrier of police tape at Plover Pond — flashed through my mind, a momentary memory of horror.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, dropping back into his chair.

  “And this corpse up at the quarry — they found one of the things with it?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “What was it? Can I touch it?”

  I felt a strong pull to find out more about that murder, even as my body recoiled at the thought of going anywhere near that oppressive sense of fear and evil again.

  Ryan blew out an amused breath. “I don’t have it. I don’t even know what it is, yet. The FBI has jurisdiction on this.”

  I tried to recall what I knew of the serial killer case. Something didn’t add up.

  “You told me those murders stopped the year after Colby died, so in 2008. But if this guy, Jacob Whatshisname, only went missing in 2009, that means —”

  “— that he went on killing after we thought he’d stopped, yeah. It means maybe he just got better at disposing of the corpses. It means we may still find more victims hidden out there,” Ryan said grimly.

  “So, you think the killer picked up this young man somewhere nearby, then took, or forced, him to the quarry and killed him? Or maybe killed him somewhere else and just dumped his body there?”

  “Could be. But the last time he was actually seen was on campus at UVM in Burlington, so for all we know that’s where he was taken. Maybe he was even killed there. Nine years on, there’s obviously no evidence of whether he walked up to that quarry or was dragged or carried.”

  “Do you think the killer planned to drop the body in the pit but got tired and hid it in the brush?” I asked.

  “Could be,” he said again.

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I think it was a pretty specific place to dump a body, right beside that big boulder.”

  “It would have made finding and accessing the body again easy?”

  “That’s my theory. He wanted to visit it again. And maybe he did.”

  Killers frequently did visit the corpses of their victims again. I knew this from a guest lecture on homicide in our recent psychopathology unit. The visiting expert had explained that killers enjoy a special intimacy with their victims. They often prefer the non-threatening, non-judging compliance of the dead —
posing and sometimes mutilating the bodies, or playing with them like a child would with a rag doll. A small percentage of such perpetrators return to have sex with the corpse — necrophilia being the ultimate in control and degradation of the victim — or to masturbate to fantasies of what they did while reliving the high of the kill.

  The expert had told us that Ted Bundy, who often returned to his victims to dress their bodies and sometimes even paint their nails before photographing and having sex with them, had once explained to an interviewer, "When you work hard to do something right, you don't want to forget it.”

  “Then again,” Ryan continued, “the perp may just have dumped it there in a shallow grave because it was a good spot well off the path, so it wouldn’t be discovered immediately. That would give him time to be well away from the Pitchford area by the time it was found, if it ever was. And in the meantime, the elements, insects and animals preying on the corpse would destroy most of the forensic evidence. If he’d dumped it in the quarry, it would have been found sooner by kids going there to the swimming hole.”

  Fall leaves, their vivid scarlet and amber hues fading to brown, drift down. A breeze blows them up against the base of the boulder.

  “He did it in fall. Around the end of fall,” I said, speaking slowly. “Am I right?”

  Ryan looked startled. “He went missing in November. Did you– did you just get a vision?”

  Had I? I couldn’t be sure.

  I shrugged. It was difficult trying to distinguish glimpses of something that had once happened and that I was tuning into in some psychic way, from intuitive hunches, or from even just picturing the scene and having my imagination fill in details. I’d always done that.

  Didn’t everybody?

  – 12 –

  After the visions I’d had at the cop shop, I was feeling tired and sluggish, and not at all in the mood for lunch with my mother, especially since she’d insisted we meet at Dillon’s Country Store and Café.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ll be persona totally non grata there, Mom,” I’d complained.

  I didn’t look forward to coming face-to-face with Judy Dillon, since I’d been partly responsible for bringing legal troubles to her family a few months back.

  My mother pooh-poohed my concern with an airy hand. “Judy should be grateful for what you did. Besides, you can’t avoid her forever, so you may as well get it over with. As your father would say, ‘Eat the toad!’”

  “Frog,” I’d muttered, knowing that although she was wrong on the wording of one of Dad’s favorite expressions, she wasn’t wrong about getting the inevitable over with.

  Parking in Main Street, I noticed that the Sweet and Smoky Syrup Emporium was closed, with an explanatory notice stuck on the front door and a black ribbon tied around the door handle. Again, I felt the compulsion to learn more about Laini Carter, to speak to the people she’d worked with, to find out more about her life and her death. Especially her death.

  A big man clutching a marmalade cat to his chest sat on the bench outside Dillon’s, asking the patrons on their way in to buy him lunch.

  “Hey, Lyle,” I said.

  He studied me for a few moments while his cat stared off to the left side of me.

  “You’re back,” he said in his low rumble of a voice. His cat narrowed its eyes and hissed at me.

  “Can I buy you a sandwich?”

  “I like hot beef on rye. Toasted. No pickles.”

  “I remember,” I said, pulling the door open.

  “No pickles!” he called after me.

  Inside, Dillon’s was warm to the point of being stifling. I hung my coat on the hook at the door and joined my mother at a table in the center of the restaurant. While she chattered away about inanities, I rubbed at my temples, where a dull headache throbbed. I needed coffee — where was the waitress already? Glancing over my mother’s shoulder, I saw a pretty woman with long strawberry-blond hair striding toward us, a look of fury on her face.

  Uh-oh.

  Judy Dillon marched up to our table and stood, hands on hips, glaring down at me. Her mouth opened and closed a few times as she seemingly struggled to find words. I suspected if we weren’t in her place of business, she’d have given me a serious piece of her mind — and maybe even the back of her hand — but she needed to be polite in front of her other customers. Was that why Mom had chosen this restaurant? Sometimes, my mother was cannier than I tended to give her credit for.

  Judy’s gaze traveled from my new boots up to my old sweater, while a succession of emotions chased across her face — outrage, dislike and finally, resignation.

  “So,” she finally said, “you’re back, are you?”

  “I am.”

  She gave a hmmph of displeasure. “Are your eyes stuck like that, then?”

  “I guess.”

  “You could get contact lenses, you know? Wear a brown one over your blue eye, and then they’d match.”

  “I could.” I kept my answers brief and neutral, minimizing the risk of saying something that would give Judy an excuse to lay into me, because she still looked like she was itching to.

  “May we order?” Mom asked.

  “I’m not a waitress here anymore,” Judy said. “I’m the manager.”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  Judy sniffed. “But I guess I can give your order to the kitchen.”

  “I’ll have the scrambled egg and smoked salmon popover,” Mom said.

  “I’ll have …” I scanned the menu, then tossed it back onto the enameled top of the table. “Could you just bring me an Irish coffee? Extra, extra hot.”

  “Daytime drinking?” Judy said, smirking at this evidence of my moral slackness.

  “Make it a double,” I said, defiantly.

  “It’s your liver, I guess.” Taking the menus, she sashayed back to the kitchen.

  “Extra hot! And no sugar,” I called out after her. My mismatched eyes weren’t the only consequence of my death that remained. I still had Colby’s dislike of anything too sweet.

  “Why aren’t you eating?” my mother asked me.

  “I'm not hungry.”

  My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a tragedy-sized lump of serpentine.

  “I hope you’re not coming down with the flu.”

  Sore head, fatigue, no appetite — it felt a lot like the flu. But the beings that affected me weren’t microbial.

  As though she could read my mind, Mom said, “Any more messages from the beyond?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Nothing funny happening when you’re alone at home? No more signs or visions?” She looked as eager as a kid on Christmas morning.

  I didn’t like lying to her, but right then I had neither the inclination nor the energy to get into what I’d experienced at the police station, so I threw in a distraction.

  “My television changes channels by itself.”

  She clapped her hands together and clasped them against her chest. “That’s a sign, Garnet, a definite sign! The electrics always go wackadoodle when there’s heightened paranormal activity in the vicinity. The spirits love to play static and to change stations on the radio.”

  “It was the TV.”

  “Same difference. It’s their way of trying to communicate. Oh!” she gasped. “You know what you need?”

  A genetic test to confirm that I was in fact her biological daughter despite us having so little in common?

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me,” I said.

  “An EVP recorder!”

  “A what, now?”

  “An electronic voice phenomenon recorder. It’s a special kind of tape recorder that captures sounds the human ear doesn’t — like spirit voices. Ghost hunters use them all the time.”

  I snorted. “You mean those gadgets the Winchester brothers run around with on Supernatural?”

  “No, that’s an EMF meter — it measures the electromagnetic frequency given off by paranormal beings.”

  I rolled my eyes.

>   “EVP recorders are channels of communication between us and the discarnate,” she said solemnly.

  “Discarnate? Is that even a word?”

  “The best kind are Panasonic DR60 recorders. They came out in the 1980s and were supposed to be the latest, greatest and up-to-datest dictation recorders because they used a chip not a cassette tape. But then customers started returning them in droves because when they played back their recordings, there were these very peculiar sounds on the sections when no one was speaking!” She looked at me as if expecting an amazed reaction to this tidbit of history. When I gave her a bewildered look, she continued, “They thought the recorders were faulty, you see. But really the machines were extra good, so they were picking up paranormal communications! If you listen very carefully to the recordings, you can hear what the spirits are saying.”

  That sounded like auditory pareidolia — the tendency to incorrectly perceive meaningful sounds where there’s just random noise. But I could also think of a bunch of other reasons for the “peculiar sounds.” Static, background or white noise would be the most likely explanations, but the recorders might surely also be picking up faint radio signals, interference from other nearby electrical equipment, or even the internal operating noise of the device itself. And, of course, the “spirit voices” could simply be deliberate hoaxes by fraudsters.

  “They go for a fortune these days,” Mom continued. “My friend Bettina says people sell them for a fortune on eBay and Greg’s List.”

  “Craig’s.”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “Craigslist.”

  “That’s the one! Bettina says they go for $1500 and more —”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Which just goes to show how valuable they are.”

  “Just goes to show how gullible people are, more like.”

  Judy arrived with our drinks. “One cappuccino and one Irish coffee, extra hot, no sugar, with a double shot of whiskey.” She said the last few words loudly enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear.

  A thin man at a nearby table turned around to look at us, then returned to reading his newspaper.