Rules Are Rules

by MariaLisa deMora

  Three individual impressions.

  Three girls.

  “Chloe, Emily, Megan.” His voice wheezed now instead of shouting, and he lifted the phone.

  Looking for a way down. It wouldn’t make any sense to Diane until she saw the bluff, but it would give her an idea of where he might be when she made her way down the small path.

  Running along the edge of the cliff, he stumbled, tripping on hidden hazards in the form of brambles and twisting vines, heart pounding harder when he pulled up just short of falling over. Slower, but no less urgently, he scanned the area, looking for anything that would get him down to the disrupted trail and then to the edge of the water. Just ahead was a section where trees had taken root in the face of the cliff, erupting in a long line from cracks and fissures in the surface. He gauged mentally and decided it was worth the risk, his internal mapping placing the saplings about the right distance apart.

  Ass to the edge, he eased over, fingers grappling for a hold as his foot struck the first trunk and it bent alarmingly under his weight. He looked for the next and stepped off, landing hard on the slope, dirt and rocks rucking his shirt up as they attacked his flesh, drawing red maps of their own in his skin. “God,” he screamed and slapped his hand on the trunk as it flashed towards him. The crook of his elbow caught on a branch, and he swung in midair for a moment, then slammed back to the earth, air knocked out of his lungs in a giant whoosh.

  He didn’t give himself time to think before releasing and reaching for the next, finding this transition slightly easier, the shock at the violence of his movement down the cliff face fading as it happened again. And again. And again. Each grappling hold granted another ten feet towards the river, and as he got closer, he realized there wasn’t a shoreline underneath him, just an abrupt ending of the slope and a steep drop into the fast-moving water. The slip of land the girls were on was to the north by forty feet or so and might as well have been a mile to his mind.

  At the next sapling, he held longer, fear freezing him when the wood cracked under his hand, the snap and crash louder even than the river’s churn. He scrabbled with his feet, boots finding an edge of rock for an instant, then refinding it for longer, and longer until he was standing, broken tree limb in hand.

  Forty feet. Not even twenty yards. Barely ten.

  As he had with the tree ladder, he mentally mapped every leaping footfall it would take to get him within jumping distance of the shore littered with rocks and debris.

  He was closer now and could make out Chloe’s hair, her hand reaching towards the cliff. “I’m coming, honey. I’m nearly there. Hold on.”

  A shout of his name rang out from above, Diane’s voice sounding frantic. “Kevin?”

  “Chloe, baby, I’m coming.”

  He rocked back on one foot, then shoved hard against the rocks and took off. That leap took forever to land, but once he did, Kevin sprang forwards again, and again, boots finding a firm footing with each jump. The ground gave in a soggy squelch under his boots as he finally gained the tiny skirt of dirt where the girls lay. “Diane, I found them.”

  Chloe looked up at him, eyes unfocused. “Daddy?” High and tinny, her voice sounded like it came from a dozen years ago, back when she still believed in Santa and the Easter Bunny. “Daddy?”

  “I’m here, baby girl.” He fell to his knees beside her, and burning bile poured up his throat, searing his sinuses. She was broken, that was the only word for it, her head slumping to one side. Something white and red stuck up over her shoulder, and when he tried to brush it away, thinking it a rock, she shrieked, an answering scream coming from Diane overhead. “Oh God.” It was a bone protruding through the fabric of her hoodie. Everywhere he looked, she was bent in places that weren’t intended to be, and he absurdly latched onto an old joke told in his neighborhood about a man who’d once put out signs against walking on his yard: Violators would be folded, spindled, and mutilated. “Oh my God.”

  “Diane, call the police back. We need an ambulance, now. They need a chopper. Call them,” he shouted without looking away from Chloe, irrationally convinced if he weren’t there to watch her chest rise and fall, it wouldn’t rise again. She groaned softly, and he stroked her hair back from her face. Chloe’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, whites flashing flatly against the dim sunlight. He quickly glanced at the other girls and saw no movement, but he couldn’t risk not seeing his baby girl breathe. Chloe pulled in another gasp of air, and he looked to the brunette, Emily. She lay on her back, legs sprawled in a comma, a tree branch piercing her chest.

  Chloe gasped, and he focused on her until he had watched her chest fall and rise, fall and rise, the cycle taking long moments. The redhead was Megan, and her head was at an angle from her body, bent nearly double under her torso. No movement from either of the other girls.

  There was a congested-sounding gasp, followed by a deep rattle, and Chloe’s mouth opened and closed. The sound that escaped was that of a gigantic balloon being bled of air, slowly, the sound wet with liquid.

  His phone rang, and when he shouted his surprise, Chloe’s eyes opened wide in response. He answered and yelled into the phone, “Yes, yes. She’s alive, but only barely. Get an air ambulance here now.” He’d assumed it was Diane, hadn’t looked at the display, and was surprised when he heard his brother’s voice.

  “What the hell, Kevin? Who’s alive?”

  “Chloe. Chloe’s alive. She was lost, but I found her. I found her, Allen.” They were close, only a bare year between them, and Uncle Allen had been Chloe’s favorite person for forever and a day. “I have to talk to Diane.” He disconnected, then the display lit up with Diane’s image. “She’s alive. Get the ambulance here now. She’s alive, Di. She’s alive.”

  He looked back over at Chloe. Her eyes were fixed open and on him. “No.”

  Her chest was still.

  Weird days

  The tiny apartment’s walls were thin enough he could hear the couple next door arguing about their bills. Again. Every month, regular as clockwork, he could depend on them to lose their shit about having spent more money than they made.

  Seated on the middle cushion of his small couch, Kevin leaned back and rested, trying to relax, neck muscles complaining about either the position or the rigidity in which they’d been held. His head moved by jerks and starts, tendons creaking as they broke free from their previous positions. His jaw and throat ached, pain pounding in time with his heart.

  Hours passed as he stared at the walls, at the newspaper articles taking up most of the room. Clipped from various sources, some of the edges were curling, yellowed with age. They were interspersed with images, blurred photos of men layered over the top of intersections and junctions. He didn’t have strings to hold things together, but he didn’t really need them. The connections existed in his mind.

  Today marked three years since Chloe had died.

  Initially, the coroner ruled accidental deaths for the girls, judging they had tumbled over the edge of the cliff in the dimly lit dawn, and he’d been beset with the mourning of “why my daughter.” That had been the official finding, but the court of public opinion had whispered darker rumors. A suicide pact. A sudden argument among the trio, resulting in two murders and one self-inflicted death. Things neither he nor Diane believed, and he found himself defensively arguing against the cruel stories, losing his way under the swell of public demand for a more dramatic ending than what had happened.

  His “why my daughter” had turned into “not my daughter,” and his grief morphed into fury at the malice of townies who co-opted the death of three girls into a way to inject titillation into their own lives.

  Then five days after the worst day of his life, a day in which Kevin had fractured three ribs to get to where the girls lay, those injuries undiscovered until he’d collapsed trying to walk back to their car, a friend of Megan’s had come forward with screenshots of images the girls had uploaded to a temporary social media site. A platform where the pure int
ent was to have an expiration date on content.

  The first image showed all three girls smiling in weak sunlight, shadows thick along the ground, the heading proclaiming: Last morning camping w my BFFs. #ruffinit

  That had been uploaded by Megan, but the timeline of the three girls was interwoven on his wall, following a concrete linear path instead of broken by source. The next was Emily’s, a close mirror of the other image, but taken a few seconds later from a slightly different angle: Love deze grls. On to #senior year!

  Chloe’s was the final image uploaded to the service, another smiling closeup of their three faces, another slightly different angle, and the caption shouty in her over-the-top enthusiastic way: BEST. FRIENDS. EVER.

  He had about thirty copies of that image on his wall, butted up against a similar number of Emily’s. All had a different filter or sharpening process applied, some were blown up large, some cropped oddly, only the tops of the girls’ heads showing. He’d pasted images together to create a panoramic of the background behind them.

  In the shadows along the forest in Emily’s image, he’d circled one location in every image. The darkness was altered there, straight lines of the trees cast into relief as they were disrupted by something foreign.

  The same place showed in Chloe’s image, trees unique enough to be easily recognizable. In hers, there was a distinct shape in view, sun glinting off bright blond hair, shadows gathering under an overhanging brow, aquiline nose set in relief against the dull flesh tones of the face.

  A man, clear against the darkness of the trees. And he had been headed directly towards where the girls had sat on the bluff facing the sunrise. There would have been shining streams of light blinding their eyes, and the noise of the river had no doubt been deafeningly loud. Around six feet tall, blond hair, no facial hair, Germanic features, and no distinguishing marks, clothing, or accessories.

  Six months ago, the latest in a line of detectives who’d been assigned the case had asked Kevin what exactly he expected the police to do. “You want me to pull a miracle outta the air? I can’t. She’s dead, and I’m terribly sorry for your loss, but I can’t find a man based on three general nonspecific markers. I’m sorry. We have to focus on cases we can actually solve.” His tone hadn’t been angry, just frustrated, and Kevin suspected that had as much to do with the police’s inability to solve the deaths of three girls from their community as it had been with Kevin’s incessant demands for updates.

  The day of their deaths, things had moved fast, and events had been chaotic, hard to understand. Kevin had felt like he was slogging through iced molasses, Diane’s sobbing form in his arms an anchor. Over the first few hours, the news vans and reporters had descended on their little town with its permanent population of just less than a thousand. For days on end, residents couldn’t turn around without tripping over a cameraman, mic cords trailing from equipment, tethering the reporters as they looked for whatever sensational angle they could find.

  There hadn’t been one, not at first. Not until the images were discovered. Kevin had been walking out of the church towards the funeral home–provided sedan, holding hands with a sedated Diane, when a black microphone had been thrust into his face. “Can you tell us how you feel knowing your daughter was murdered?”

  The word had taken his legs from underneath him, cameras capturing how he’d toppled to the ground, knees first, arms outspread.

  That had been the beginning of the real nightmare.

  As the reality sank in that Chloe was gone, he and Diane prayed they’d come to grips with it somehow. Neither of them had any illusion that figuring out what their life would look like going forwards would be easy, but her death in a tragic accident cast no shadow of blame on anyone.

  Murder had changed the rules forever, bending and then breaking them into unrecognizable twists of reality.

  There should be a cost paid, and the father-soul inside him demanded his child’s life was worth everything. But as the days and weeks fled past, as detectives and deputies turned their melting gazes of sadness on him, as the talking heads on the newscasts moved on to the next most terrible thing—he’d slowly come to understand that all his wanting and needing, all his praying would benefit nothing.

  It had torn his heart from his body, fogged his mind with grief, and aged him in unexpected ways. The lack of closure had turned him into a raving lunatic who thought nothing of accosting the men charged with finding Chloe’s murderer as they had dinner with family, as they exited church on Sunday mornings, or as they attempted to work a newer case. He’d been arrested more than once for obstructing investigations, but as he’d tried to joke with the judge most recently, they couldn’t accuse him of giving up on Chloe’s case. That had been the wrong thing to say, and as his court-appointed lawyer covered her face with her hand, he’d just stood and held his wrists out.

  The years hadn’t been kind to Diane, either, wearing her away until what was left was a shell of herself. The last time he’d seen her had been on the edge of the forest, where she’d drifted thin and waiflike between the trees like a ghost, fingers trailing along the bark of the individual trunks. It was only right when something changed a person so profoundly that it be visible on the outside. A badge that allowed her to remain barricaded within those walls erected by sorrow and reinforced with fear.

  He’d been out there to measure and document, again. Kevin hadn’t talked to Diane that day; there was no need, really. They’d been best friends and lovers, parents of the most gorgeous and intelligent child they could have ever prayed for. Then in the space of a morning, everything had been torn away.

  His child, his relationship, his career—all casualties to the same violent act. His position as a research lab technician hadn’t survived, either. In a job that demanded attention and precision, most of his mind had been occupied with who had picked his little girl up and thrown her off a cliff as if she were no more than a stone being returned to the river. He’d lost himself in the unanswered questions plaguing him: who had been captured in those images, how much pain she’d felt, how much fear, terror, was she conscious through every second of her plunge towards an unforgiving earth, did she pass out, did she feel every scrape of stone against her body…

  In the end, his boss had been understanding, but once Kevin used up his bereavement, vacation, and sick days, the company’d had no choice. So his supervisor said, those words echoed by the HR department head. They felt badly for him, but rules were rules. Kevin hadn’t responded except to accept the box waiting on the floor near the door, using it to clean out his few personal items. The container never made it into his apartment, was still wedged into a corner of the car trunk, his entire career taking up less than a cubic foot of space.

  These days, he was rocking his role as a cashier at a gas station on the not-good side of town. He’d been held up again two weeks ago, and his coworker had not been able to look at him the same since. Kevin supposed standing in front of a trembling, drug-addled robber who had a gun leveled at him while shouting, “Do it. Do it, dammit,” didn’t lend itself to her having a good feeling about him.

  He’d dreamed about that bullet a dozen times.

  The idea that something so small could offer such profound relief was shocking. And surprisingly seductive.

  Kevin lifted his head at a muted sound in the hallway and leveled a glare towards the door. None of his neighbors had any sense of decorum or courtesy. Next would come the stomping footfalls as they made their maddened way back to their apartments, the thuds against the floor measuring their frustration with work and life. They’d cook midnight recipes that would blister the nose hair of any normal man, then have screaming arguments two hours later, the crashing of dishes against the walls testimony to their fury. Whatever he’d heard died away an instant later, and he sighed out a long breath.

  His eyes dipped closed as he lay his head back against the cushions. Minutes passed of the near silence that came with the wee hours of the morning. A sound came
again, different, this time from behind the curtains at his back, fabric covering the useless window painted shut long before his tenancy.

  If he had tried to characterize it, he would have put it down as an electronic hum, like standing too near a generating station. The kind of resonance that reverberated deep in his bones, causing the nerves and muscles of his feet and hands to short out and go numb.

  Silence rested uneasily throughout the building. He couldn’t even hear the drone of his own refrigerator. He was turning to face the window when it exploded, curtains and blinds rippling and crashing in the midst of the most brilliant light he had ever experienced, the radiance fractured into a spray of rainbows. The skin of his face tightened, grew taut as if with a sunburn. Eyes tearing wildly, he ducked his head behind the cushions of the couch and found the event had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  “What would you do?”

  A strained whisper tore through the room as thoughts of nuclear explosions raced through his mind, remnants of his parents’ recounting of the duck-and-cover training of their childhood. As fast as the heat had rolled into the room, it vanished, and he took a tentative, shaky breath before lifting his head.

  The curtains hung straight and still, the blinds in regimented rows behind. Across the room, the clippings weren’t even fluttering, edges uncrisped, which was impossible given the amount of heat that had been unleashed.

  “I’m going crazy.”

  He startled at the words, the sounds foreign to his ears, because he couldn’t remember the last time these rooms had heard speech. He dozed, his sleep broken with dreams of standing on the cliff’s edge and watching the man step out into the sunshine. It was a looped film in his mind, the instant happening over and over, locked in limbo.

  Nature’s call woke him a couple of hours later, still too long before work for him to get ready, so he tended to business and then lay on the couch, socked feet cocked up and resting on the arm. He buried his cheek against the back cushions and closed his eyes, hoping for another few moments of rest. The dream swept over him again, but this was different. The light was weaker, coming from a different angle, and instead of standing on the bluff, he was surrounded by trees. A man walked towards him on the path, face red from exertion or emotion, Kevin wasn’t sure. There was a resonating hum in the air, a vibration he felt in his bones, and it made his joints ache. It grew more intense, and the man suddenly began walking in reverse, feet lifting and moving back like an awkward crane.