by Mark Lukens
“She moved,” I told myself as I parked back in front of the empty office again. I left the engine running for a moment, the air-conditioning blasting. My skin was suddenly hot and clammy; I could feel the armpits of my shirt getting wet already. I struggled to take a full breath in, and that sense of pressure on my chest was back. I was bordering on a panic attack.
I breathed in deeply, then let it out slowly. I had to do that a few times to get myself calmed down enough to function.
“She moved,” I whispered. “She moved her office. That’s all.”
I thought of the phone calls I’d made to her office in the last few days, scheduling an appointment with the receptionist—she hadn’t bothered to tell me that they had moved.
With shaking hands I got my cell phone and dialed Dr. Valentine’s phone number. I lifted it up to my ear and immediately heard the tone right before a recorded message told me that the phone number I had just dialed was no longer in service.
It felt like my world was tilting just slightly, like everything was about to slide to one side. I even put a hand out on the arm rest of my driver’s door like I was trying to steady myself. I dialed the number again and got the same message telling me that the number had been disconnected. I checked the number in my contact list.
“This can’t be right,” I said, shaking my head.
I checked for Dr. Valentine on the internet, looking to see if she had a website, looking to see if there was some kind of announcement that she had moved. But I got nothing except a Dr. Valentine in Miami and a Dr. Valentine in Jacksonville, neither one a psychiatrist and both were men.
Someone around here would know where she had gone to.
I got out of my truck and went into the dermatologist’s office. I felt the pressure pushing on my chest again, but I inhaled a breath and let it out slowly. There were three people waiting in the lobby, a couple and a woman by herself, all of them elderly. A TV was on in the corner, more dismal news, round-the-clock coverage of the possible terrorist attack in Milwaukee. But the patients waiting their turn to see the doctor didn’t seem too concerned with the TV, all of them browsing magazines.
A receptionist sat behind a glass window with a large space underneath where clipboards with forms could be passed back and forth. I walked up to the window.
“Can I help you?” the receptionist asked. She was young and smiling.
“Uh, actually, I was here to see Dr. Valentine next door.”
She frowned, like she had no idea what I was talking about.
“Yeah, I used to see Dr. Valentine,” I said. “But I guess her office moved.” I felt like I was bumbling my words. My face felt hot and I could feel more lines of sweat breaking out on my upper lip.
“I’m not familiar with a Dr. Valentine,” the receptionist said.
“Is there anyone else here who might know where she moved to?”
The receptionist’s expression of confusion was turning to concern, and I could see the beginning of fear in her eyes that she was dealing with a disturbed individual. “Uh, I could ask, but I don’t think so. I think the place next door has been empty for a while.”
I felt a stab of panic, but I did my best to push it down. “I was here, like, a month or two ago.” I realized how that sounded—not really a short time ago.
“Have you tried to call them?”
“Yes. I actually talked to the receptionist and set an appointment for this coming Tuesday, but she never told me they’d moved.”
I could see the question on her face: If your appointment is for Tuesday, then why are you here now?
This was about to spiral out of control. I could feel the people in the lobby staring at me.
“It’s okay,” I said, smiling. “Sorry. I just thought you might have known where she moved to.”
The receptionist smiled with relief now that she could tell I was going to be leaving.
I left. I didn’t need her calling the police. And I sure as hell didn’t need the dynamic detective duo showing up. There would be a lot of questions about who I was coming to see and why.
I stopped at the window to Dr. Valentine’s office. I cupped my hands beside my face and tried to peek in through the tinted window, but there were only closed blinds on the inside. I searched the glass for evidence of her name and phone number on the window, but there was nothing—it had been wiped clean. Same with the door. For one crazy moment, I thought about testing the door, pulling on it to make sure it was locked.
A moment later I entered the office next door, the one on the corner, the podiatrist. It was set up similar to the dermatologist’s office, but the window didn’t have glass in it and the lobby was a lot bigger. There was a TV on with the volume turned down low and subtitles crawling across the bottom, CNN or FOX or some local news channel. There were chairs, and small wood tables, and magazines. Carpet and fake plants.
I tried again with the receptionist, this one an older woman who didn’t look afraid of me when I asked about Dr. Valentine next door—she looked annoyed that I was wasting her time. She had nothing for me, either. She couldn’t remember who had been next door, but she knew nobody had been there for a while.
Thinking of the police being called if I pressed too hard, I backed off, thanking her before leaving the office.
I stepped outside, feeling that surreal sensation wash over me again, like I was trapped in a dream, like I was still sleeping and none of this was real.
But it was real.
How long had Dr. Valentine been gone? At least three weeks both receptionists seemed to think.
Three weeks. The same amount of time Kendra said Michelle had quit working at the nursing home. Could it be a coincidence? I didn’t think so.
I wasn’t ready to leave. I wanted to do something, but I wasn’t sure what to do. This wasn’t right. I decided to go around the corner to the back of the offices. Maybe I would find something back there. I didn’t know what, but maybe something.
There was a wide alleyway between the two buildings, nearly big enough to drive a car down. I walked close to the building and when I turned the corner, I froze. A man dressed in a pair of light-blue scrubs was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette. He looked nearly as surprised to see me as I did to see him.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Just taking a quick smoke break,” he said, smiling. He was young, maybe early twenties with short black hair and an olive complexion to his skin. He took a drag and exhaled, keeping his cigarette down low beside him like the smoke might bother me.
“I was just looking for something,” I said as I walked past, trying to return his smile, trying to act like it was normal for me to be snooping back here.
The guy didn’t really seem to care.
There were a few cars parked back here near the fence—employees’ vehicles. There was a large trash dumpster about halfway down. I checked the trash dumpster, opening up the heavy plastic lid and looking inside. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, maybe some kind of evidence that Dr. Valentine’s office had been here. But if she had moved three weeks ago, the trash would have been picked up quite a few times since she had left.
I turned and started walking back to the corner again.
The nurse was still smoking his cigarette, watching me as I approached.
What the hell—I might as well ask if he knew anything.
“I came here to see Dr. Valentine,” I said. I gestured at the metal back door to her offices. “I guess she moved, but she never told me. I had an appointment today. I tried the phone number, but it’s disconnected.”
The nurse shrugged and took another drag from his cigarette. “I remember her office. Yeah, she was just gone one day. The windows scraped clean.”
“You wouldn’t have any idea where she moved to, would you?”
“No. Not at all.”
“You think anyone else around here might know where she moved her office to? The doctor you work for?”
“I could ask,
but I don’t think she was really close to anyone around here. In fact, if I’m remembering correctly, she wasn’t here that much.”
“What do you mean, she wasn’t here?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Her offices were closed a lot. She didn’t seem to have that many patients. I figured she closed her doors because she didn’t have enough business.”
“I came to see her once every six weeks or so,” I said. I tried to remember if there were other people in the waiting room when I had come, but I couldn’t remember. I figured she scheduled her patients one at a time for reasons of discretion. “I’ve been coming to see her for two years now.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She was here for a while. I’ve only been working here for a year. But I never really saw anyone over there. Maybe a few people.”
That couldn’t be right, but I didn’t want to argue with him. I nodded at him as I walked past him back to the corner. “Thanks,” I told him.
He nodded back. “No problem. I wish I could help you more.”
I was back around the corner and then back in my truck a few moments later. It still felt like I was working my way through the thick air of a dream, everything slowing me down and dragging. I turned the key and started my truck. I drove away. I tried Dr. Valentine’s number two more times on the way back home, but all I got was the recording saying the phone number had been disconnected.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Stan came over around six o’clock. He was dressed in a Megadeth T-shirt, a pair of tan shorts, and sandals. He had a six-pack of beer with him and he was finishing up his cigarette as he walked up to my front door.
“So,” he said, “what’s going on?”
We were in the kitchen a moment later. I was drinking a cup of coffee and he cracked open one of his beers. I knew he was waiting for me to explain. It felt strangely like a repeat of the previous night.
“I woke up about four o’clock this morning,” I told him. “I was dressed in my pants and shoes again. I checked the footage on the cameras. I’d gotten up and gotten dressed, just like the footage you’d seen before. Then I left my bedroom. But now I could see where I had gone in the middle of the night.”
“Where?”
“Across the street.”
“You went across the street?”
I nodded. “From the front porch camera, I watched myself walk outside, then across the street to the house.”
“What did you do over there?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember. But I know I was over there for about forty-five minutes.”
Stan looked at me for just a second, a smile forming. “You went over to that house and checked it out, didn’t you?”
Again, I nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I just wanted to see why I was over there. I brought a flashlight with me, but I didn’t use it because I could see well enough with the moonlight. I went to the front door and checked to see if it was locked. It was. Then I went around to the side yard, to the gate that led to the back.” I didn’t bother telling Stan about the dream I’d had, the one where I had been choking Michelle to death. “I went into the back yard and checked a back door, the one that led to the storage area just off of the house. It was unlocked.”
“And you went inside.”
“Yeah.”
“Well? What did you see in there?”
“There’s all this graffiti in there. The usual kind of stuff. But there were also these long series of numbers written on the walls.”
“Series of numbers? What kind of numbers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you take a picture of them? Video?”
I shook my head no. “I didn’t take my phone with me. Just the flashlight.” I paused for just a second. “But there was something else inside that house.”
“What?”
“It’s weird. There was this . . . this mannequin, dressed in a wig and women’s clothes. Michelle’s clothes.”
Stan looked shocked, sitting up a little straighter. “Michelle’s clothes? How do you know?”
“Well, I can’t be positive about the coat and jeans, but the boots were definitely hers.”
Stan held off on his questions for a moment.
“But the strangest thing was that there was a rope tied around the mannequin’s neck. Like a noose. It was connected to the rafters in the ceiling.”
We were quiet for a moment. I wasn’t sure what Stan was thinking. I thought he might come up with some kind of excuse to leave. We’d been friends for years now, and I hoped he knew that I wasn’t some kind of psycho, but things were getting pretty strange pretty quickly.
“We need to go over there,” Stan said, standing up and then draining the rest of his bottle of beer down in a few swallows.
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”
“Why not? You were already over there before. Probably a few times now.”
“It’s still daylight out.”
Stan nodded. “Okay. We’ll wait until it gets dark and go over there.”
*
When it was almost dark, we went across the street to the abandoned house. Stan took the video camera I had bought with him and I took my flashlight. We left my house as the sun was setting behind the woods across the street. The world was already darkening with the night, the streetlamps on, mosquitos out and on the hunt. The air was thick and heavy with the day’s heat, the night barely cooling the air down. We hurried across the street, and once again I checked up and down the street, looking to see if there was a police sedan staking out my house.
But there were no cars.
Like last night, I entered the back yard through the gate. Stan was right behind me. He closed the gate, and we hurried over to the back door of the storage area. I went inside and Stan followed me in, turning the camera on.
“There’s nothing in here,” I told him, already walking to the door that led inside.
Stan stepped into the kitchen and filmed the walls, panning back and forth. “Whoa,” he whispered.
There was still the last bit of twilight to see by, but it was much darker in the house than it was outside. I turned on my flashlight, but kept my hand cupped over the front of it to cut down the light a little.
We went into the living room next.
The mannequin was still there. For a moment I thought it might be gone. For a moment I thought I might have imagined it. I hoped I had. But there it was, standing in the same spot with the rope tied around its neck, the other end tied around the exposed rafters.
“Holy shit,” Stan said in a low voice as he circled the mannequin, shooting film.
There were more series of numbers and graffiti on the living room walls, and Stan filmed all of that, panning slowly.
“What do you think all these numbers mean?” Stan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, but that was a lie because I was beginning to form a vague idea of what they could be.
I was getting nervous, wanting to leave, but Stan wanted to check out the bedrooms and the bathroom. There was nothing back there, no more numbers and only a little of the graffiti and some garbage and crushed beer cans and fast food bags. The place smelled faintly of urine, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the rodents or the kids who had partied here at some time in the past.
Finally, Stan was ready to go.
It was full dark when we got back outside. We hurried across the street back to my house. Back inside, I felt a little better.
After Stan downloaded the footage he’d just filmed onto my computer, he gave the video camera back to me. I went back to my bedroom and set it back in its spot on the dresser, plugging it back into the charger and turning it on, making sure that it faced my bed. I was definitely going to film myself again tonight.
When I went back into the kitchen, Stan was on his second beer, half of it gone already. I heated my cup of coffee back up in the microwave.
“You think you did that?” Stan asked. “Dres
sed a mannequin up like your wife?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said those were Michelle’s clothes. What makes you so sure of that? I mean, it looks like kids had some parties in that house. Maybe they took a mannequin in there, dressed it in women’s clothes. Hung a noose around its neck. Some kind of joke or sick ritual or something.”
I just shrugged, not really believing that some kids had brought a mannequin with them while sneaking beers and pot into an abandoned house.
“But you’re sure those are your wife’s clothes?” Stan asked.
“Like I said, I’m not positive about the coat and jeans. I mean, I remember a coat like that, but I can’t be sure. But I am sure about the boots.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I saw those same boots in her closet a few days ago. And now they’re over there in that house. On that mannequin.”
He just stared at me.
I knew I needed to explain. “A few days ago I was looking through Michelle’s stuff. Trying to find some kind of clue why she left. I found something stuffed down in one of her boots. Those pair of boots over there.”
“You found something?” he asked. “What?”
I hesitated.
“Zach,” he said and stood up, walking away and then back again. “I’m trying to help you and you’re holding shit back from me. What else are you still hiding?”
“I know. It’s just that . . . this is getting crazier and crazier.”
“You have to tell me everything,” Stan said. “If you want me to help you, then you need to tell me everything. I’m not going to tell anyone else. You can trust me. You know that.”
I nodded, sighing. “Look, I don’t want you to think I did anything to Michelle, because I didn’t. I loved her. I know I never would have hurt her.”
“I believe you.”
But did he? I wasn’t so sure. I wondered if Stan was more intrigued by this mystery than scared of me at that moment. And did I even believe myself? In the last few days I had just found out that I’d been sleepwalking for the last few nights, going across the street and possibly dressing a mannequin in my wife’s clothes and tying a noose around its neck.