Empty Shell

by Ashley Fontainne

  “You know who it is, don’t you?” Craig confirmed, managing to control the excitement in his voice.

  “Sí.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was late to work Saturday. Missed the bus. I run down the street and go to back. No want to be seen in front. Cameras in back no work. Went to closet on my floor to get cart. We leave them there for that.”

  “You mean there is a cleaning cart left in the storage closets on each floor?”

  “Sí.”

  “You said ‘we’. I assume that means that the entire staff knows they are there and use them instead of going down and signing in, so your boss won’t know you’re late?”

  “Sí.”

  He marveled at her sudden command of the English language. The little dance with Jalel earlier must have been a test to see if he would agree to her terms. He nodded for her to continue.

  “I listen to music,” she said, motioning to her ears, indicating ear buds. “I no hear anything. I moved cart and was in closet getting mop. Then door shut. I open and see him on floor. He fell over cart.”

  “What did he look like?” Craig prodded, fighting the urge to take notes.

  “He wear jeans, shirt and hat. Uh and, oh, no word. Um, peluca.” Ms. Gonzales raised her hands over her head and grabbed a handful of her hair. “Peluca.”

  “Wig? He was wearing a wig under the hat?” Craig’s mouth was dry.

  “Sí…wig. No his hair. He on top of cart and hat and uh, wig, fell off. Blood on shirt and jeans. I stay inside closet when I see blood.”

  “Did you see his face?” Craig queried, forcing his voice to remain calm.

  “He get up and put hat on with wig. He in big hurry but I see his face. I not know what he doing, but I no ask. I wait until he leave.”

  “So you saw him and recognized him. Didn’t you think it was odd that a man, covered in blood, was running down the stairwell? And once you realized you knew who he was, why didn’t you tell the police when we arrived?”

  “I not know about girl! I no think about man in stairs, I just go to work. See lots of things at hotel. Not my business. I hear before I leave to go home. When I hear, I run home. No police.”

  He tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. If he said what he was really thinking it would scare the timid woman away before he got the name. He wanted to let the story flow from her, but at the same time, he was chomping at the bit for her to spit out the name. “You were afraid to go to the police since you aren’t legal, correct?”

  “Sí.”

  “As I said earlier, Ms. Gonzales, I don’t care about your legal status. Please, continue.”

  “I cry on way home. She a nice girl. I watch her grow up. Señor Rowland love her. I remember man on stairs. All the blood. I know he kill her. I told my husband what I saw and who killed her. We not know if he saw me and I not go back to work. We left house and stay in motel. Manny go work in Texas to send me money so I can go, too. No work at hotel, no clean houses. Just hide—with this.”

  He watched as Ms. Gonzales reached inside her purse and produced a small package wrapped in a brown paper sack. Her hands shook as she unfolded the paper and exposed a toothbrush inside a clear, plastic baggie. She slid the bag across the wooden table to him. “Manny made me go get the next day. I clean his house on Sunday mornings. He not there—he always at gym. I not want to go inside. Manny yelled at me, said one last time. He wait in car and I went inside. Told me to get it. Said it would keep me safe from man. Make him afraid of me if he found me. I not understand why, but Manny told me to trust him.”

  He felt like he’d just won the lottery. The DNA of the man Ms. Gonzales saw with blood on him was now in his hands. He moved with calculated ease and made sure not to touch the baggie as he wrapped the paper back around it, struggling to maintain his composure. Between the intense afternoon heat and his nerves on edge while he waited for Ms. Gonzales to finish her story, he was about to explode. He needed to get Lee the toothbrush as quickly as possible. He also needed a name, and it was time to stop pussyfooting around with Ms. Gonzales.

  “You recognized the man in the stairwell as the one who’s house you clean, right?”

  Ms. Gonzales lit up another cigar and nodded in agreement. Her fear from earlier had diminished a little. Craig sensed she felt relieved to get this off her chest. “I need his name, Ms. Gonzales.”

  She hesitated, holding on to the last edges of her safety net. She blew out a huge plume of smoke and spoke the name.

  He couldn’t stop the string of expletives that rolled off his tongue when she did. His worst fears in this case were confirmed: Melody was in danger.

  He didn’t waste time with idle chitchat. He thanked Ms. Gonzales and Jalel, then ran across the baseball field to his Jeep. Grit and gravel spewed from behind his tires when he gunned the engine. Hitting the freeway, he floored it, his anger level off the charts. He tried telling himself to calm down and not jump to conclusions until Lee confirmed the DNA, but the acidic burn in his stomach told him he had the father of Serena’s child and her killer. He’d been right under their noses the entire time, watching and listening, playing the part of concerned friend with enough gusto to win an Oscar.

  He knew he was breaking every single piece of evidence collection and protocol standards possible, and he didn’t care. He was also well aware that he was risking not only his career, but Lee’s as well, and again, he didn’t care. He pushed away the thought, replacing it with concerns for Melody’s safety.

  Thankful that the traffic was sparse, he sent a text to Lee:

  Gym. Now. Got some new moves to show you

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel while he sped toward downtown and waited for a response. In less than two minutes, he was rewarded.

  On my way. Good moves?

  His cynical laughter filled the inside of his Jeep as he typed:

  Unbelievable

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE, WEDNESDAY LATE AFTERNOON

  I found it odd that when I had been inside my mom’s quiet house, scrounging through closets and drawers to find the proper attire for her to be clothed in forever, I hadn’t shed a tear. Nor did I cry when I dropped off the yellow sundress with her favorite white, floppy, wide-brimmed hat and matching shoes at the funeral parlor. I also grabbed the picture from her dresser of the two of us on my wedding day. The funeral director looked at me with pity when I handed him the items. Though he didn’t say anything, I’m sure he understood the sentiment. I doubted I was the first person who’d brought in treasured trinkets to put in the casket that no one else, except me, would see or know were inside. At her house, I felt her presence. Her smell—her warmth—enveloped me. It brought me comfort and made me smile. And I somehow felt proud that I picked out the perfect outfit for my southern belle mother to rest in.

  Leaving the parking lot of the funeral home, I expected the tears to race down my face, but they didn’t come then, either. I wasn’t exactly numb, but I felt a part of my mind overtake my pain, squashing it down into a tiny little box to be opened another day. Sheer anger controlled me now.

  I cranked up the music and clenched the steering wheel as I handled the Camaro through the curvy roads of Highway 35 toward Sheridan. The trees whizzed by in a blur of green. The tires hugged the road and the engine roared beneath me. I pushed the car and my driving skills to the limit as I careened down the empty, two-lane highway. As the car ate the pavement in front of me, I let my senses control my thoughts and embraced the sheer enjoyment of the moment.

  Twenty minutes later, my fingers cramped and knuckles bone white, I pulled over at Gas-n-Go to fill up the tank. The drive helped me clear my head and forced me to concentrate on nothing but the road. I’d discovered in my youth there was freedom behind the wheel, and never strayed from that mentality as I grew up. Every vehicle I’d ever owned had been a sports car of some sort. When the road and I became one, I was no longer the broken woman mourning t
he loss of her loved ones. I hadn’t thought about all the things the detective told me or felt that strong sense of foreboding that I had inside my kitchen earlier.

  Now, all I felt was bubbling anger. Raw, red anger. No more waiting around like a little mouse, timidly peeking out from its little hole to see if it was safe to scurry across the floor. A sense of duty and power raced through me. It was time to find Guy Powell. I didn’t have a plan of action other than surprise. He wouldn’t be expecting to come face to face with me or answer my blunt questions. My haphazard plan was to catch him off guard and get him to slip up and say something incriminating in front of me. If that didn’t work, at least he would be on edge, knowing I was on to him. One thing I had learned from working in a legal office is that criminals, no matter how smart they were, always screwed up somewhere. Especially if they knew they were under scrutiny.

  I pushed the gentle voice begging me to turn around and go home from my mind. No longer would I listen to the side of me who always followed the rules. That boring individual who planned ahead for months for everything from birthday celebrations to Christmas—all for what? For this? Doomed to spend the remainder of her years wandering through the valley of life alone? No way. The woman who wore practical clothes to work and thick, cotton sweats to bed had died in the hospital along with her mother yesterday.

  Time for the side I previously only let out behind the wheel to emerge. To hell with tact or grace, it was time for the dark, dangerous thrill seeker who didn’t take no for an answer—or shit from anyone—to take control. Meemaw wasn’t whispering in my head anymore because she didn’t need to. I clung to the anger and wielded it like a club. While I drove, the fight inside my mind became epic. Ultimately, I decided that God gave me both sides—the dark and the light—and sometimes to defeat evil, you must embrace it.

  I paid for my gas and hit the road again. I was less than two miles from Tray’s Trinkets, which was the only hardware store in Sheridan. I debated calling my friend Carol at the county clerk’s office and asking her to look Guy up and see if he was still in jail, but changed my mind before I dialed. I didn’t want to involve anyone else nor risk the chance of anyone blabbing that I’d been inquiring about him. The less others knew about what I was doing, the better.

  Since I had no idea what Guy looked like nor whether he was even at work, I decided to do a bit of snooping. I reached behind my front seat and grabbed my old baseball cap, yanked my hair through the back, kept my sunglasses on and stepped out into the heat. Sweat pooled fast under the brim of my hat as I walked, possibly due to the relentless sunshine. Or the fact that I was riding a high from adrenaline and fear. Maybe all of it.

  The small store looked like it had been there since the Civil War. The wood, décor, and smells all combined to make my stomach do a flip when I opened the door and stepped inside. It took a few seconds for my eyes to recover from the blazing sun. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice a customer had walked in and I stood at the front entrance undisturbed, scoping the place out.

  The inside of the building was dark enough that I removed my sunglasses to see. I scanned the aisles, all six of them, for an employee. At the end of the fifth aisle, I saw an older man with snow white hair and a slight build mopping the floor. I approached slowly, not sure if it was Guy or not. Kendal had said he was a heavy drug user and I’d seen what years of drug abuse did to the human body. Some of Roger’s clients had been heavy abusers. A forty-year-old woman came to mind, who had looked all of seventy when she attempted to hire Roger to represent her after her mobile meth lab blew up and caused a five car pileup on the freeway. She’d left in a huff after hearing his fees.

  My pace was slow, my tennis shoes silent on the ancient linoleum floor. I studied the build of the man, my heart pounding faster as I got closer. He wasn’t much taller than I was and had a slender yet muscular build, but his movements were slow, halting. He didn’t have the fluidity of movement of a younger man. I didn’t realize how intently I’d been studying him until I felt my stomach drop when he yelled, “You done stackin’ those drill bits, boy?”

  “Hold on to your horses, old man. I’ll be done in a sec.”

  “Don’t you back talk me, boy! You get out here and finish this here moppin’. I’m goin’ for a smoke.”

  “Oh sure, leave all the work to me now. If you think just ’cause you bailed me outta jail means I’m now ya─”

  “One more word outta that nasty mouth of yours, Guy, and I’m gonna fire ya. Sure ’nough as a tick sucks blood on a deer. Don’t care none if you’s kin or not.”

  Before the old man turned around and saw me, I shifted directions and darted over to the empty aisle next to him. I grabbed the closest thing in front of me—two rolls of duct tape—then followed the narrow aisle toward the back of the store. I stopped in front of the thick curtain separating the front and back. It took a few seconds to spot him in the storage area piled from floor to ceiling with junk.

  “Can I heep ya?”

  I spun around and found myself face to face with the old man. He smiled, gracing me with his toothless mouth and rank breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched for signs that Guy heard us and was relieved to see that he hadn’t moved from his task of stacking boxes.

  “Oh, uh, yes. I was wondering. Do you have any more of this?” I asked, holding up the tape. “I didn’t see any more on the shelf and uh, well, I’m painting and…”

  His crooked grin expanded as he yelled over my shoulder, “Guy? We got any more of this here tape?”

  Guy turned around and walked toward us and my heart and breathing stopped as my mouth went dry. Curly, dark brown hair peppered with flecks of gray poked out from under his dirty baseball cap. A Chicago Cubs baseball cap. Though his face was full of more wrinkles than Jack’s, Guy had the same chiseled cheeks, a similar profile. The same slight swagger to his gait.

  A thousand thoughts raced through me all at once. It was one thing to plan scenarios out in your mind, but quite another when you faced them in reality. My body began to shake as the enormity of being within inches of the monster who ruined my life took over. Images rushed through my mind. Jack sitting in jail. His casket and gravestone. Serena’s destroyed face. My mother on the bathroom floor. All rational thought disappeared from my head. The sounds and smells around me vanished, and like a horse with blinders, all I saw and felt was him.

  There was a blank stare on his face as he stood in front of me and looked at the tape in my hands, pointing with his dirty fingers to the aisle I’d just come from. His mouth moved but I didn’t hear any sounds. My eyes were frozen on his as I watched his nonchalant stare turn to recognition and a wry smile tug at his cracked lips. I saw his lips mouth my name, but the only sound in my head was the rush of blood as fury overtook me.

  My limbs were on autopilot and I watched in slight awe as my right arm shot out, the heavy roll of tape firmly clenched in my fingers, and connected with the ugly, bulbous nose on Guy’s face. Though I didn’t hear the impact of my fist and the tape as they smashed into his head, I felt the shock wave of the bones in my fingers break, yet felt no pain. The sensation of glee at watching Guy’s nose explode raced up my arm and through my chest. Spittle and blood spewed from Guy’s mouth and nose as he staggered backward and lost his footing on the slippery floor.

  The old man next to me stood rooted to his spot, his thin mouth hanging open as he stared from Guy’s body on the floor back to me. My chest heaved from the adrenaline rush and finally, the sound of the blood in my ears was gone, replaced by the string of curse words that Guy shouted from the floor. He was trying to stand up but his equilibrium was skewed. I took a step closer to him, then turned my attention back to the old man.

  “That was for my mother and trust me, he has this coming.”

  Before he could respond or Guy could move out of the way, I raised my foot and brought it down with every ounce of strength in me right between Guy’s legs. His bloodied hands left his crushed nose
and cupped his family jewels when I drew my foot back.

  “That one was for my husband. The final blow will be for me, and will be delivered by the police when they arrest your sorry ass for killing Serena.”

  Guy couldn’t utter a word and I wondered, as I threw the duct tape down beside him and turned to walk out of the store, if he’d even heard me. He was rolling around on the filthy floor, his mouth frozen in the silent scream of agony at his balls being busted. The old man didn’t offer any comfort. He didn’t come after me, either. His eyes betrayed his amusement at seeing his kin in such agony. I graced him with a wicked wink and walked out of the store.

  By the time I made it to my car and clambered inside, my legs were shaking so much that to an onlooker I probably seemed drunk. I started the engine and held my sweaty face in front of the cold air streaming out of the vents, never taking my eyes off the front door. I wanted to see if Guy was going to come after me, which I fully expected to happen once he caught his breath. There were only two vehicles in the parking lot, both of them beat up trucks that looked like they were held together with rust and spit. If he wanted to chase me, I’d blow his doors off.

  At last my legs stopped quaking and my heart rate returned to normal. I felt a strange mixture of emotions. Exuberance at releasing my pent up anger on the man who ruined my life, and disgust at my enjoyment of causing another person pain. The high had been intense as I stood over his body and unleashed my rage. But now that the intoxication was wearing off, the crash was overwhelming. My hand was throbbing and already swelling. I realized that for a few seconds, had I had the means to it, I could have killed him. The thought made me dizzy and I barely had time to jerk the door open before my disgust spewed out of me and all over the hot pavement.