Suicide Blondes

by T. Blake Braddy

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “It’s true. Doesn’t make what eventually happen any less horrific—it actually kind of makes it worse—but Everett spent some time in a hospital to...heal from his injuries.”

  “Why does no one ever mention it?”

  He shrugs. “Ask a closer friend. I do know he fell into these dark, cavernous depressions. It was one of the reasons he fell for that fucked-up scheme, I guess. No matter how many times he was burned by shitty people in life, he always wanted to believe in, I don’t know, the goodness of humanity.”

  “Oh.”

  I don’t have much to say, because what can you say to that?

  “I don’t mean to come off as harsh or bitter,” he says. “Personally, I blame Madeline St. Clair for everything bad that happens.”

  “I haven’t been home long enough to make up my mind about her.”

  It’s the first time I’ve seen true emotion from him. “Nothing to make up. She’s the closest thing to a demon as I’ve seen in my life.”

  I see an opening, and I take it, though I’m sure it will ruin this perfectly genteel conversation.

  “Except for maybe the person sending Audrey threatening text messages.”

  The words are out before I can catch them, but by the time I say them. I’m glad they’re there. Jenkins doesn’t seem surprised, either. His face betrays nothing, even if I can sense this is the first time he’s heard about it.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

  I’m a little shocked by this admission. “She hasn’t told you about them?”

  “She doesn’t tell me anything,” he says, as politely as he can, but it still comes off a little sharp. “I mean, nothing that she wants has anything to do with me. I guess the same is true with the things she fears.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, as sincerely as I can without sounding pitying.

  “People drift apart,” he replies. “I suppose the writing’s been on the wall for some time, only Audrey hasn’t looked up long enough to see it.”

  “But about the text messages—”

  He holds up one hand. “If Audrey has something going on, it’s probably of her own doing, or else she’s playing it to the crowd to ensure she gets maximum attention for it.”

  I can’t disagree with him, but something about his response rings hollow. “I guess you’re right,” I reply. “I haven’t been home long enough to make up my mind about her, either.”

  “Aud’s got a good heart—she just doesn’t know when to let go of old grievances.”

  I let that sink in, and I take a step back to acknowledge the end of the conversation.

  “Thanks for talking,” I say, and he winks in return. “Want to head back in?”

  He waves me off. “I think I’m going to catch up on my fresh air. Thanks, though.”

  ***

  I leave the party a little early, much to the host’s chagrin.

  “But we never see one another,” she slurs drunkenly, insisting that I stay for one more hour, but I can’t quite pull the trigger. I’m afraid I’ll say something bitchy, or—worse—she’ll say something off-color and offensive.

  It’s obviously better off this way, and even Audrey will see that in the morning. When she’s sober. For now, though, she’s a little clingy and a lot weepy. I’ve got to cut the cord before it permanently attaches, and I have to spend endless hours listening to Audrey’s boo-hoo stories, which are a living embodiment of the phrase first world problems.

  On the way out, I run into Gillian, who stumbles in with a boyish early twentysomething in a leather jacket and super tight jeans. He looks like he’s barely out of puberty, but he’s handsome. Dark hair, dark eyes. Strong brow.

  They both smell like weed.

  I mean, it’s obvious he’s in a band. He—whoever he is—is always in a band. Gillian’s dad works as a PR rep for a few big-name country acts, and so she attracts what we used to call Broadway Barnacles—no-name musicians using any means necessary to get a big break. This poor guy thinks he’s being clever and manipulative, when he is clearly the one being used. His whole schtick is played out, and he doesn’t have the slightest clue.

  I can only smile as he introduces himself, Andrew something. He pretends not to care about me or who I am, but his voice breaks when he tells me he knows me.

  “Where’d you find that one?” I ask, as soon as the dude is out of earshot. He’s gone to get them both a drink.

  “Belmont,” she says, looking slightly guilty.”He plays guitar at—”

  And then she goes into the particulars of his gig. He’s a musician, working a very famous honky tonk on Saturday evenings, but he has a demo he’s shopping around.

  “And I guess I’m the foot in the door,” she says.

  “I was wondering what that smell was,” I reply, and Gillian actually laughs. A short, little bark, but still.

  “That’s the pot,” she replies, “but he got it...so same thing, I guess?”

  I lean in, searching conspiratorially for gossip.

  “Whatever happened to whats-his-name?”

  “We never talked”—she pauses—“you followed that on FaceBook, didn’t you?”

  I don’t respond, but I can’t control the slight upturn at the corners of my mouth.

  “Stalker,” she says, smiling, even if I can see the sadness beneath.

  When the guitar guy returns, he’s got a beer for himself and a drink for Gillian. He thinks he’s cool, but as they saunter away, Gil turns and winks at me once before disappearing into the crowd.

  I wish her the absolute best with this asshole.

  I take a slow, cigarette-fueled ride back to my rental house, blasting some song from a guy named Jason about Elephants along the way. I’ve got the windows down, and the frigid breeze has me within spitting distance of sober by the time I wheel into the neighborhood.

  I stop a few houses down from mine and kill the engine.

  I have a bad feeling.

  In my head, I can see—

  (the pistol)

  (shocking nakedness)

  —him. I can see him, Timothy Allred blended conspicuously with the visage of Everett Coughlin. Somehow, they have become intertwined in my head.

  The person just over my shoulder in the park.

  Stumbling down the road on uneven legs, I stop at the mailbox and peer through some bushes into the house windows.

  And then I see it.

  The overhead light on in the living room.

  My stomach does a series of violent toe touches inside my body.

  I didn’t leave it on. I’m OCD about turning every single light off and checking the oven twice before stepping outside.

  But it is one hundred percent casting dull, yellow light through the house.

  I gasp at what I see next.

  A silhouette drifts across the living room, slinking into the back bedroom.

  My bedroom. Or at least the one I’ve temporarily rented.

  I take an instinctive step back, clutching at my mouth to keep the scream from working free of my throat.

  Someone is in the house. Someone moving with a purpose. Someone waiting for me.

  The stranger is moving quickly, bouncing from room-to-room as if searching for something in particular.

  It occurs to me that this might not be the same person as the stalker from the park.

  I step forward, kneeling behind the car in the driveway. I can see inside the house clearly now, and if I can just get close enough for a picture, I will be able to turn the photographic evidence in to the police.

  I’m no private eye. There is no way I’m going to investigate anything on my own, let alone a situation in which someone is rummaging through my stuff.

  It is the worst possible case of déjà vu, and I’ve got it bad. One person breaks into your house and starts rifling through your junk, it’s a wash. Two? There’s obviously something wrong with you.

  I retrie
ve my phone from my back pocket and turn it on, pressing the screen against my chest to keep the glow from alerting the intruder.

  The camera acts as an acceptable periscope so I can avoid raising my head into plain view. I reposition the phone once I see this person, and I’m just about to get a good look, when it happens.

  The figure stops.

  It’s like something out of a horror movie. I should probably drop the phone, but I freeze up. I can’t do anything.

  The figure turns and looks in my direction. It’s like they are looking directly at me, and my blood turns to freon. I snap a photo and pull my hand down. My heart is thudding out a symphony orchestra as I press myself against the car’s rear bumper.

  I wait there, eyes closed, and hope I don’t hear the sound of the front door opening. I’ve got nowhere to go. All I can do is be still. Be still and wait.

  I half expect this person to come rushing out of the house, to drag me screaming back inside and violate me in one way or another. Violence. Rape. Probably some combination of both.

  For a minute, nothing happens. I breathe. I sweat. I stare down the driveway at the corner and wonder how long it would take me to get from one end to the other.

  In the back of my mind, though, there’s a but.

  But what if he happens to see me?

  But what if the cops can’t identify him?

  But what if this isn’t the end of it?

  When I finally peer around the side of the car, the shadow figure has disappeared. All I see is an empty, unassuming room. A bare light bulb above the piano. And then, without warning, the light flickers off, leaving the whole house in hushed, vertiginous darkness.

  The kind of darkness where anything can happen.

  Someone is gaslighting me.

  I rise from a squatting position. I let my eyes adjust, enough to make out the raw edges of things around me, before I spin and dart for the rental car parked along the road.

  My legs feel rubbery from the cigarettes and the wine. Tonight is not the night I will be run down and caught by a serial killer from central casting.

  Keys in hand, I fumble for the fob and manage to hit the button just as I reach the driver’s side door. A bubble of anger and frustration makes its way to the surface. I scream—once—loud enough to wake the neighbors.

  A few miles down the road, I decide where I’m going and head there as quickly as I can, looking in the rear view mirror with such great frequency it makes me dizzy.

  10

  I leave the car running when I arrive at Madeline St. Clair’s residence.

  It’s too grand to be called a house.

  Staggering up to the front door, I plan an impassioned speech to give to Madeline. I don’t quite know why I’ve come here, but it’s the first place that occurred to me when I was in the car.

  So here I am.

  It’s well after bedtime for most people, so I shouldn’t be shocked if no one answers, but as I wait there, the interminable time between the doorbell ring and the door opening, I get overwhelmed by anxiety.

  It becomes clear to me—I must speak with Madeline. It is not optional.

  She needs to hear how she made me feel when she ducked out on me all those years ago. How she used me. How she used everyone. There is nothing new about this, and Madeline copped to it only a few nights ago, but suddenly it seems so important.

  Maybe I need to say it, to verbalize my frustrations, to finally let go.

  But my speech dissolves the moment the front door opens.

  Colton Ambrose turns out to be a tall, imposing figure, and nothing about him is inviting. He has the cool stare of an owl checking its prey, and when his eyes settle on me, I feel the need to scream and run.

  He stinks of scotch, and despite the late hour, he’s still in a collared shirt and tie.

  “I need to see Madeline,” I plead.

  It’s obvious I sound drunk, but I’m already in this, so I can’t just turn and go home. He is back home, or she. Someone has invaded my space, and one of my friends knows something. I figure that, since she came crying to me only nights before, Madeline must have an inside track on what’s going on.

  Plus, I hope she’s willing to give in and tell me the secret she backed off of before.

  Maybe it’s the same thing. Perhaps she is being followed by some insane stalker.

  But Colton Ambrose is having none of it.

  “You’re drunk—go home,” he says.

  He makes a gesture to close the door, but I stuff one wedge into the doorframe and stop that from happening.

  “Please. It’s important.”

  “What it is,” he says, “is after midnight. Now, you can extricate yourself from my front door and go back to your car, you fucking murderer, or I can call the cops. It’s really just that simple.”

  I weigh the options and decide to call his bluff.

  “Where is she?” I demand. “Is she here? Why won’t she come down to the door?”

  “Because this,” he says, waving one hand up and down, “is about your problems, not about hers. If she comes down here, you’ll only drag her into...whatever is going on with you. I don’t want that, she doesn’t want that, and if I’m being honest, neither do you.”

  This is not going how I imagined it would go, and I’m desperately trying to think of things to say to keep the door open, but my mind lands on a single point, and because I cannot let it go, I just have to dive headlong into addressing it.

  “She’s not here, is she?”

  His eyes remain fixed on me, but they’ve changed. Shifted, somehow. He’s not the predator of before, though he wants me to think of him that way.

  “She’s upstairs, in bed. She’s drunk, like she always is. I’m working, and she’s living off the money I make. Being able to get bombed in the afternoon and pass out before dinner is one of the delicious privileges of being married to me, I guess.”

  And then he slams the door in my face.

  Liar, I think, as soon as I’m in the car.

  She’s not upstairs in the bedroom, nor is she anywhere on the premises.

  The lights in the house are all on. Reminds me of the time my mom left with a suitcase and promised never to come home. Dad kept the house wide open, as if she didn’t remember the address.

  One question remains.

  Why would he want to protect her?

  Because it’s what people around here do, I think. It’s a way of closing the ranks. If he admits her absence, it opens a whole new folder of problems, of questions. And that’s the last thing he wants.

  Or maybe there’s something a little more sinister to it. Maybe he knows what’s going on and submits to his wife’s Machiavellian schemes because he is afraid of the alternative.

  Better to have her on his side than scheming against him.

  Huh, I think. Mutually-assured destruction—what all great marriages are built on.

  I pull away, wondering what to do next. It’s not that I have nowhere else to go, I just don’t have anywhere else I want to go.

  I turn off the air and roll down the windows, letting the wind pull at my arm, stretched out the window to resist the breeze. It was how I drove when resistance was all I cared about. And this feeling, it takes me away from my own anxiety.

  I’m drunk enough I shouldn’t be driving, but it feels good, and I’m in the moment, so I allow my path to be dictated by feeling, rather than logic.

  I could go to the police. I could, yes, but I would receive the same treatment I did back in high school. A bunch of officers giving me side-eye, wondering what I’d done to put myself in this position. That, or else they’d secretly relish the irony of my situation.

  The mere suggestion of their skepticism deters me.

  It occurs to me I’ll need to go to the police at some point.

  Just not tonight.

  Tonight, I’ve got places not to be, and people not to see.

  So, eventually, I end up with my mother. Sitting next to her bed, wai
ting for the deathwatch beetle to cease its interminable ticking. Not anticipating it, really, but waiting it out, guessing when it would happen, so the real grief could begin.

  It’s so quiet in hospital rooms, like death is holding its breath.

  I arrange the chairs so I can sit in one while propping my feet in the other. I’m not going back to the rental, and I’m probably not going to sleep, so it behooves me to find at least a little comfort in this godforsaken place.

  My eyes never quite leave the door, but eventually I can steal glances at my mom without thinking an ax murderer might burst in at any moment. She looks peaceful. The lines of her face denote calm, and she snores quietly as the light frames her face with its industrial pall. I pray to God she makes it through this. I don’t quite have the vocabulary for it—who knows when I prayed last—but the act itself seems to carry some weight, and I don’t have much else to do but worry over the possibility that I’ll be attacked in the night.

  After I’m convinced I’ve said my peace with the Lord, I sneak my phone out of my pocket and surreptitiously flip through the pictures I’d snapped.

  All I got was a few blurry images of the front of the house. I peer at them, trying to make heads or tails of the screen, but there is nothing to help me identify the intruder. I might as well have taken them while doing jumping jacks, for how blurry they are.

  A voice, clear and crisp as a new recording, cuts through the darkness.

  “Mary Ellen, sweetheart, what are you doing here at this hour?”

  “Nothing, Mom,” I say, looking up. “Just decided to come see about my best girl.”

  “Don’t mind me,” she says, smiling. “I hate to be a bad hostess, but I’m in the middle of a wonderful sleep, and I believe I’m going to get back to that.”

  “You do that,” I reply. The corners of her mouth turn up in a second, more genuine smile, and not too long afterward, she’s actually snoring again.

  I continue checking the images on my phone. I’m not convinced I’ll be able to establish the intruder’s identity, but if I can at least discount some people, knock them from the ranks, perhaps it will make the whole process go a little bit easier.