West had been following a comment thread for several days now, and he couldn’t help but chuckle when he read Beach’s latest entry,
[–]Shadowcab73 2 points 21 minutes ago
My sister thinks I’m the next LHO. Yeah, I laughed too. I’m probably going to get down-voted to shit for this, but I feel like March 10th was one big grassy knoll. Look at my history. No one can say I have been a supporter of such theories as those surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. God knows, in my position, I could not consider myself to be fit for purpose or sufficiently patriotic if I fostered such beliefs. In light of this, it pains me to say that my current treatment at the hands of the authorities is unbecoming, and furthermore, I believe that their behavior is highly suggestive of the possibility that, in the absence of a true suspect in the case of the assassination of President Tiernan, the powers that be are trying to scapegoat me. If anything happens to me, you read it here first - I would never knowingly participate in any act that would endanger the lives of any other human, let alone a member of the presidency under which I have served as a dedicated and loyal member of staff.
West logged in and replied to Beach’s post,
I would like to offer my assistance, and I can only hope that you are not too stubborn to accept it. I’m well versed in the circumstances surrounding your case.
West sat staring at the message, wondering if he should say more. Eventually, his finger tapped the save button on screen, and he felt immediately dissatisfied with his decision. He should do more. He knew he should try to call the Beach’s house again at least. Looking at the time stamp on Beach’s comment, it was obvious that his daughter had been lying to him on the phone. She sounded young. West was impressed. The girl obviously had a natural talent for subterfuge, but he was pretty sure he could figure out a way past the masterful call screening.
Left alone, Charlene had sat in the dark of her living room. She watched the dust motes, swirling and spinning their merry dance through the few graying slats of light which punctuated the darkness. She would pucker her lips, blowing into the stream, and she would imagine that the billowing dust was really plumes of smoke, blown by her dead mother, or father, always there, just out of sight. She wasn’t religious, but she spoke to them sometimes. Funny that you could carry a person wholesale in your head, she thought. It was never really them, but then, who was? You never knew but as much of a person as they knew of themselves, or at least that’s what her Daddy had said. Well, he was too young to know. Hadn’t broken forty when his heart gave out. She watched her mother blow a mote ring into the light.
There were too many thoughts, and every time she made to move one of her limbs, her brain was completely shut down by the overload. Could she feel it? Her stomach would rumble, or else she would get a twinge of pain in one of her joints, and she’d be momentarily convinced that it must be the little creature, but then the feeling would subside and her thoughts would swing wildly back to her youth, back to the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
Gradually though, something had changed in her. It was as specific as that; she knew it wasn’t a process of rationalization, because she didn’t know where to begin with her thoughts. Something in her changed. It wasn’t a spasm, a pain, or an uncomfortable movement; it was a paradigm shift brought on without the effort of deep introverted thought. In a moment, clarity broke through the din, and it occurred to her that she had nothing to lose in the scenario she was faced with. She went about most of her days doing whatever she could to avoid pain or discomfort. She didn’t have anything, even something trivial which she looked forward to on a day to day basis. She had no relatives, or anyone she cared about even enough to mention them in a letter, let alone a will. A year ago she had spoken to a weaselly looking man from a small firm of lawyers, and she had managed to figure out that if she left her worldly possessions to anyone, she would be doing them a disservice.
By the time Charlene had realized the sense of relief brought on by relinquishing the burden of worry, she was already on her feet.
Now there was only hunger. She had spent the past hour spring cleaning, experiencing no breathlessness or pain, which she had to admit, felt pretty damned good at her age. When the hunger hit, it almost stopped her dead in her tracks. She went to the kitchenette and started to fix herself a ham sandwich, then thought better of it and ate the ham on its own, putting the bread back in the cupboard.
She threw away the packaging from the ham and as she was bending over, she noticed a jar of chunky peanut butter on the counter. She undid the lid ravenously, and taking a spoon from the top drawer beside the sink, she plunged it deep into the jar, scooping out a good desert spoon full of peanut butter. She didn’t usually eat peanut butter; her care worker brought her a jar every week when she visited, and Charlene hadn’t had the heart to tell the girl she didn’t like it. Now, she savored the taste and the texture as the convex bowl of the spoon rested against the roof of her mouth.
She washed the spoon and dried it on her blouse before returning it to the drawer, and then she walked back to the den and turned on the television. She flicked through several channels all displaying depressing news of the riots and unrest around the world. She finally found a station which was playing an exercise video created by a now deceased celebrity fitness instructor. Charlene was curious. It had been a few years since she’d been able to exercise, although until her seventy-fifth birthday she had kept up a daily routine of jumping jacks and stretches. She started to mimic the motions of the on-screen instructor, reaching her right hand down her thigh towards her knee, then her left hand to her left knee. She reached up towards the ceiling fan and arched her back, and she almost fell over, excruciating pain coursing through her external and internal abdominal oblique muscles. She didn’t know the names of the muscles in her lower back, so she collapsed into her armchair cursing her aching back as a whole.
She lunged forward in the chair, feeling something move in her stomach, then again, in her back. She reached her arm behind her and she could feel a small lump there, moving. She would have been scared, she would have screamed in fear were it not for the fact that she felt the pain in her back start to subside almost immediately. She bit her lip, patted the little lump in her back and sat back carefully, hoping she wouldn’t squash it. It felt not entirely unlike she was sitting on a massage chair. The late great instructor urged her to ‘work those muscles,’ and Charlene Osterman directed her thoughts somewhat guiltily towards the lump in her back, muttering softly, “Yes, go on, work ‘em.”
West refreshed the browser window on his tablet and saw that there was still no response to his message to shadowcab73. He picked up the phone and paced the floor, mentally preparing himself for Stephanie Beach, determined that she would not best him again. Having routed the call through several voice over I.P. services, he heard the ring tone and managed to confine his amusement to a smile when he heard the girl’s well-rehearsed welcome message, “This is the Beach residence, Stephanie speaking, how may I help you?”
“Hi Stephanie, I’m so glad I got through to the right person.” West affected the most amiable tone of voice he could muster, “My name’s Tony Statham and I’m delighted to inform you that you’ve won a very special prize from Manermanam Games.” West offered a silent prayer, wishing that the child would try and repeat the company name, but there was nothing but the sound of slightly nasal breathing, then faint whisper before Stephanie Beach finally responded excitedly, “I have?”
West winced a little, disarmed by the sound of Stephanie’s unassuming excitement, but he continued, “You have. You’ve been selected as the lucky winner of our on-line supermarket sweep.” West listened calmly to Stephanie’s gleeful exclamation, her hurried repetition of the news, presumably to her father. West hoped that this wouldn’t blow his window of opportunity, but then he heard her excited breath on the other end of the line, and took his cue to talk again, “I just need to talk to your father for
a couple of minutes so we can give him all the details you’ll need to claim your prize.”
West leaned against the wall and smiled inwardly, listening to the muffled pops and clicks as Stephanie handed the phone to her father, “David Beach speaking, and listen bud, before you even begin your spiel, let me tell you, I’ve had it up to here with guys like you calling at the most inappropriate times, preying on people’s good nature,”
“Mr Beach, it’s important that you don’t hang up the phone.”
“Oh sure it is, we’ve won another fantastic grand prize that I never signed up for huh? You should be ashamed of yourself, getting a little girl’s hopes up like that. What do I have to do this time? Come down to the Motel 6 and listen to you wax lyrical about a set of miracle knives?”
West closed his eyes and he sighed, David’s tirade still brewing in his ear. He thought he perceived a momentary lull, and was about to start talking when Beach kicked off again, “Oh, please say it’s a time share in the middle of some uninhabitable hell hole, I was just saying how much I needed one of those. Honest to God man, you’re all I fucking need today, you know that? I’m at my whit’s end with shits, and backstabbing…” The sound became muffled, “Honestly Han, I’m just sick of it … I left the room…” West could hear a woman’s voice on the other end of the line, calm, patient, then David’s response, “Okay, I’m sorry, I’ll take it out back.”
Again, West tried to seize this opportunity, “Mr Beach, I really must speak to you, it’s about…”
“Screw you buddy. You guys just don’t know when to let the fuck up do you? You don’t know when the button’s been pushed do you? Well you pushed it man. Is that what you were waiting to hear? You pushed the button and it’s not going to be un-pushed. You want to talk to me? Man up and come to the fucking house if my daughter’s won this grand prize, okay? Just pick up your sorry ass and make the effort instead of butting in to my evening, prick.”
The line went dead.
West slumped into the comfort of his leather sofa and lay back. It wasn’t as if he had any real time invested in David Beach, but the FBI were putting all of their eggs into that basket case. He got up from the sofa and sat at the desk, glaring at the dejected phone, wishing it all manner of ill will. He shook his head in disgust, allowing his eyes to drift to the screen of his tablet. He knew David Beach wasn’t being held for questioning and he also knew that things weren’t likely to change by the morning. Even over an encrypted line, what had he expected to accomplish in the course of a single phone call? Beach was right … He just needed to get up off his ass, and make the effort.
It took David a while to calm down. He paced the flagstones of the back yard, not walking as far as the screen door to the den, because he didn’t want Hannah or Stephanie to see him so worked up. Eventually, he stepped back into the kitchen and made himself a coffee, sipping slowly, breathing meditatively.
Stephanie pouted, and then growled when David explained that she hadn’t really won a competition. She wasn’t convinced by his explanation that there was no such thing as a ‘free lunch,’ even after he had elaborated on this, offering up that the free lunch was a metaphor. After some coaxing, she had eventually curled up beside Hannah on the couch, and had started to read aloud from Les Misérables, much to Hannah’s dismay. Hannah was impressed, perhaps even a little jealous that Stephanie’s interest in the book hadn’t waned, but as she was studying for her masters in history, she struggled to contain her desire to complain about the lack of historicity. She was surprised when she heard Stephanie read aloud the singular thought that she herself repeated ad infinitum.
“’She must be a big girl now; she is seven years old; she is quite a young lady; I call her Cosette, but her name is really Euphrasie …’”
Yes, Hannah thought to herself, she is seven years old, don’t be such a bitch.
David stretched out on the floor of the den and stared blankly at the screen of his laptop. The sound of the air conditioner was enough to distract him from the dulcet tones of his daughter’s reading, but there was still too much noise in his head to really pay attention to any of the websites he visited. After clicking idly through a few tech and entertainment sites, David finally succumbed to the inevitable and logged on to reddit. He read the most recent messages several times over, and the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all he could hear was his heart pounding in his chest.
[–]ThaneOfTheVoid 1 point 2 hours ago
I would like to offer my assistance, and I can only hope that you are not too stubborn to accept it. I’m well versed in the circumstances surrounding your case.
Edit: By the way, your phone manner is dreadful.
Charlene woke up slumped over in her armchair, breathing in through her teeth ruefully, anticipating the pain in her lower back, and across the arch of her shoulders. The pain didn’t come. She felt relaxed and refreshed, which was unusual. Hesitantly at first, she pressed her hands into the arms of the chair, pushing her weight forward, then she stood up and stretched, reaching her hands up over her head. No discomfort. “Son of a bitch,” she whispered, licking her lips, running her fingertips down the base of the spine as she arched her back.
She walked to the bathroom and turned on both taps at the sink below the vanity unit. She bent her head over the ceramic sink, and cupped both of her hands under the pooling water, splashing a little on her face. She blinked a couple of times, splashed again, then she stood up and looked at herself in the mirrored door of the vanity.
Her eyes were still foggy with sleep, so she bent over again, repeating the exercise of splashing her eyes, but this time she took care to rub her eyes gently with the warm water, running the pads of her fingers along her eyelids. She stood once more and looked at her reflection. She squinted and leaned closer to the mirror. She looked at the tube of toothpaste which lay next to the cold water tap on the sink and she read the ingredients. “Son of a bitch!” she declared, dropping the toothpaste tube into the sink.
She lifted her eyes to her reflection and smiled, but the corners of her mouth fell, nose wrinkled in bemusement as she examined her face more closely. There were lines there, sure enough, where there had been lines for many years; creases at the edges of her eyes which ran down towards her cheeks, and more creases by the edges of her mouth, little tributaries running their course toward her chin; however, all of these lines seemed to have softened by degrees. Something more than this though, which sent shivers down her spine; it wasn’t really her face, not the face she’d grown accustomed to, nor the face she’d grown up with. She was looking at her mother, and as she exhaled and the mirror steamed with her breath, the illusion was complete.
She wiped the condensation from the mirror with her forearm and leaned in, examining her eyes closely. The irises were not hers, not her own near-mahogany brown eyes. Now she saw her mother’s eyes; green with flecks of brown; staring at her, blinking with her, looking to the sides suspiciously. The particular slant of her eyelids, the depth of the crease over her eyes and the arch of her eyebrows was wrong. Everything was beautiful; yes, her mother had been beautiful, but everything was so completely wrong. Her nose; the arch more pronounced, her nostrils thinner, the creases of her cheeks bore deeper grooves from a life more full of laughter. All wrong. Then, by degrees, as she stared at her lips, Cupid’s bow arched as it was notched with her tongue, and there, the bow grew deeper, her lips filling out. Her lips, not her mother’s. The arch of her nose rippled, and she could hear it as much as she could see the change, like water dislodging from her ear, the crackling sound of the cartilage moving. The irises of her eyes began to be shot through with dark beams, each one filling out the strands of green, blue, and gray; subtle flecks all now lost in dark lakes of umber. Her eyes. No, not the eyes she’d grown accustomed to, settled for, bemoaned, but accepted. These were the eyes she’d grown up with. The crow’s feet, gone; carrion of age given flight by this fearsome transformation. Laugh lines no more, for the woman who stared back
at her meant business.
“Well now, there’s a thing!” She watched the young girl’s mouth, forgetting herself, admiring her bloom of youth. Then she looked away, lured by the siren’s call from the living room. Another long dead fitness instructor beckoned for her to join.
CHAPTER FIVE
DC
West booked a 9pm flight from La Guardia to Ronald Reagan Washington National, traveling under the name of Anthony Statham. He traveled light, carrying only a small case containing his forged credentials, and he arrived at check-in with enough time to relax while enjoying an hour of meandering, and people watching at the departure gate. The flight wasn’t fully booked so he was able to enjoy the short journey with the luxury of two seats to himself.
In Washington, West took a taxi from the airport into downtown D.C. and asked the driver to drop him at the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania. The Willard wasn’t close to David Beach’s home, but it was a short walk from a private parking deck which housed one of West’s cars. He checked into the hotel, made his way to his room, lay on the bed, and closed his eyes, allowing the past to flood his mind.
At five in the morning, West checked out, walked the two blocks to 14th Street NW, and keyed into the parking garage. West had made a habit of keeping a couple of car to hand in most major cities. Licensing, taxes, tag renewals, roadworthy tests and other such administrative headaches had made this particular habit almost impossible until he had found a small company based out of Iowa who were happy to take care of those intricacies on his behalf. It was a vulnerability of sorts, but it was a minor consideration for the luxury it afforded him.
Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams Page 6