Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers

by JeanNicole Rivers

  “Gin and tonic with lime,” she said to the bartender in a voice so melodious it almost sang.

  “Nice place you chose,” her date joked, eyeing the smoky carcass of a shack that may have once been a nice bar.

  “Thank you.” Her inviting eyes beamed. “It’s not much, but I like it,” she went on.

  As it usually did with the salivating deviants that she met on raunchy dating Web sites, the date went by in a wanton wash of liquor, and after a couple of hours the pair burst into room 17 at the Star City Motel that sat only blocks from the Back Door. They moaned in arousing attempts to rip the clothes from one another as they clawed ferociously. With one zip, her dress hit the filthy shag carpeting, he pushed her down on the bed and the two invited each other with erotic glares before he pounced on her and they succumbed to a perverse passion that ended in the deep howling of both wretched animals. Their chests heaved up and down under a layer of carnal perspiration and they could see only the cunning outlines of the body of the other in the strip of light, hued by the red neon sign, that filtered through the gap between the scratchy drapes. She dismounted the man like an injured horse, no more good for racing and immediately he became part of her history.

  “Why don’t you stay awhile?” the old horse offered as she stepped into her black costume.

  Looking up, her eyes settled despondently on the stranger that was speaking to her.

  “I don’t even know you!” Her facial expression disintegrated to aggravated disgust. After shoving her underwear into her purse, she disappeared into the night.

  2

  The Towers apartments were usually dismal at this hour on Sunday nights, but tonight it was especially so. Regina despised the fact that the garage at her apartment building was so lightless. Also, she hated that she had not purchased a reserved parking space for the extra $100 per month, particularly on nights like tonight where the closest parking spot still left the elevator too far for her to feel completely comfortable. As she did every time she was forced to park too far from the elevator she resolved to spring for one of those coveted parking spaces when the leasing office opened in the morning. She heaved her duffle bag from the trunk and looked up to make sure that the security cameras were watching her as they were supposed to. She was relieved to see the red light of mechanical life beating a pulse. Her footsteps sounded bristly on the dirty cement. A car door slammed somewhere in the parking lot, she turned casually but saw no one and heard nothing more; the elevator was closer now. Regina looked into the lens of the upcoming camera.

  No red light.

  “Awesome,” she whispered sarcastically. Regina stopped and turned cautiously at the sound of quick-paced steps, but once she made herself silent, her immediate surroundings mimicked her silence. She shook her head, benignly attributing the footsteps to the auditory deceptions of an overworked nurse. Surely, her sense of hearing was deceiving her, but still her stride picked up incognizant speed. The elevator was deceptively close. Regina pressed the elevator button multiple times, staring into the thin black rift between the elevator doors, willing it to come faster.

  Hurry. Her inner voice summoned the dangling metal box as the pressure built against her abdomen walls. Now she was nervous; she had to pee.

  Again footsteps tapped on the ground and whispers echoed off the cement walls of the parking tomb. Regina was not hallucinating. She waited impatiently for the hanging carriage to come to her rescue. The young nurse scrutinized the level full of parked cars of all colors and sizes and she felt small, as if she were just a piece in an insignificant game.

  Ding

  The elevator sang announcing its, by Regina’s standards, tardy arrival. She slipped inside before the doors were fully open. Her finger pressed 18 over and over until the doors began to close with a leisure that seemed unfair. The scene of empty cars condensed from her view with every passing second, when one strong hand inserted itself swiftly between the almost-closed doors; Regina was startled by the hand and her own cry. She pressed her back hard against the far wall of the elevator, but the brawny hand did not belong to the monster that Regina pictured. The clean man of average height came into full sight. He was normal or at least he seemed so, the same way that Dahmer, Gacy, and Bundy must have appeared to numerous people who then dropped their guard only to have their foolish trust dashed brutally back into their own faces. Calming blue ocean eyes lurked behind his brown-rimmed eyeglasses. Despite the fact that it had not rained in Texas in weeks the man seemed wet.

  “Hey,” he greeted her as he shuffled clumsily into the elevator.

  “Hey,” reluctantly, she responded. Remembering the old adage of her college roommate who was adamant about campus safety, stranger danger, she would always say. The concept was completely new to Regina, a girl who came from a town where hardly anyone was a stranger, where even the strangers were not strangers due to the less than one degree of separation that was prevalent in towns like hers.

  In one hand he grappled with a black suitcase that he finally got to lay against one of the elevator walls, he pressed 25. Regina’s stomach flipped. On the twenty-fifth floor there was a gym, a place to play billiards and a self-serve coffee bar among a few other amenities that entertained the young professionals that paid a ridiculous premium for the superficial diversions, but there were no apartments on twenty-five. She squeezed her thighs tighter together to relieve some of the pressure that sat in her pelvis. One by one, the numbers on the panel flashed to life as they ascended past each floor into the purple sky. The stranger appeared almost as nervous as she; Regina could tell from her sporadic glimpses at the potential psychopath. She noticed that something sat at his side, moving and making short excited noises and she finally gave into a conspicuous investigative stare to find that he carried a tiny puppy. Subtly, the watching man held the puppy out an inch more for the expected adoration, a tactic, Regina had learned from countless television shows, to disarm the unsuspecting victim. A cold Regina turned her attention back to the numbers that seemed to light themselves sluggishly now. The stranger swept two of his fingers underneath his glasses to wipe moisture from his cheek. His depraved eyes swept over her body from head to toe with skillful precision and she swallowed hard.

  Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. She counted off the last three floors silently. Regina tightened her grip on the duffle bag strap that hung over her shoulder. Through the opening doors, relief tumbled into the steel box like an avalanche covering her completely. Moving out of the elevator, she felt safe until she heard the floundering behind her. Abruptly, he had decided to abandon the elevator. Regina turned to face the man in the desolate hallway; so close to her front door.

  “Hey,” he called with a bizarre lull. He was standing in the hallway with one foot keeping the double doors from closing. This time Regina did not respond she just eyed him carefully and rooted her feet into the carpet positioning herself for a fight.

  “Are you on television or something?” he asked, still drowning in the culpable perspiration.

  “No”

  “Oh, you look like an actress or something.” He moaned, trying hard to keep the conversation moving. Regina was not charmed, it was 10:15 p.m. and she was just returning home after a long shift in the ER, the last thing that she looked like was an actress, unless she was playing the bride of Frankenstein. The seconds felt like hours as they watched each other like two boxers trapped in the ring.

  “No” Regina confirmed.

  Deciding at once to be the decision maker, she took several steps back, then turned and began rapidly treading down the hall toward her doorway.

  As she came to the corner of the hall, she heard him yell again.

  “Hey!” His voice chased and her quick stride became a frenzied gallop that carried her to her door at the end of the hall. She had her keys in hand, but had trouble unlocking the door while still watching the corner, waiting to see the shadow of the stranger emerge and catapult toward her. Her eyes toggled back and forth from the far corne
r of the hallway to the silver doorknob until the pinnacle moment that she felt the lock release and the door glide open. Within seconds, she was slamming the door behind her, forcefully throwing the locks, then racing to the bathroom.

  Regina decided that first thing tomorrow she would talk to security about the strange man and then head straight to the leasing office for a parking space, but she knew herself and by tomorrow she would probably have reasoned that the parking space was just a waste of money and the stranger was just an awkward man doing a very bad job at coming on to her.

  Considering she was never home, her apartment was immaculate that night as it usually was. She poured a glass of wine then put a frozen meal in the microwave to heat. Regina plopped down on the couch and flipped on the TV, falling asleep before getting out of her scrubs or having her late night dinner. Regina woke up on the couch several times before deciding to make the exhausted journey down the hall and bury herself in her queen-sized bed.

  Two bulky, black plastic bags sat next to one another on the muddy forest ground. An array of voices filled the spaces between the trees in uneven, rhythmless tones, along with the sporadic feedback from two-way radios. Emerging seamlessly from the fog, Regina found herself running. Her feet pounded the pavement in a stable beating sequence alongside the sound of her pulsating heart thudding against her chest. Taking long elegant strides, she could feel every part of her body.

  Classical music began to fill the brisk fall air, dramatically drumming with its fantastic highs and lows to an orgasmic climax, invading every corner of her confused mind. More thuds fell rapidly on the highway behind her; someone was chasing her. Beats came faster and faster, from her heart and from two sets of hunting and hunted feet. Reducing her speed by even a second, to turn and look back was something she dared not do; there was no time. Just ahead at the edge of the forest, yellow-raincoat-draped police officers trailed in and out of the woods that sat east of the highway.

  Please turn around, please look up and see me, Regina thought, frantically trying to invade the thoughts of the focused police officers.

  Regina took particular note of the trees and the way they sat, she observed the details of the highway. A deer crossing sign sat just beyond the metal railway that guarded drivers from gliding off of the cement and into the creek and there was a single bullet-hole at the bottom left corner of the bright yellow warning that had been there since she was a child. Her heart dropped as the grisly realization set in that this was the highway that guided people into the town of Black Water.

  She was home.

  Regina opened her mouth to scream, but everything fell ominously quiet and she could force no hellish shriek from her vocal chords. Faster, she ran but her stamina threatened to abandon her completely. Despite the goal she was trying to reach or the monster she so desperately hoped to escape, she could only run so far and she could only run for so long. Regina threw her hands up like flags waving for the help that was flaunted in the band of officers just ahead of her. Again, she opened her mouth, wider this time, but the gaping hole of silence still gave no sound. Regina could only hear the heavy pounding, but it was no longer in her ears, it was in her head, like a headboard against a wall, it banged. The harder she ran toward the safety of the police gathering, the farther away they stretched before her until they were tiny points of color at the end of a gray stretch of lonely highway. There was no choice but to turn around, no choice but to face the force that hunted her down, for she could no longer outrun it and the journey was calling for an end. She halted, spun around, and a loud clap crashed down on her head, instantly collapsing her to the hard asphalt road like a house of cards elegantly toppled by the wind.

  The dream violently spit the girl back into reality with a sharp jolt that threw her promptly into an upright and defensive position. Chang, her pudgy, black cat who had been sleeping restfully at Regina’s feet screeched as he elongated his body in a lightning-fast spring from the bed and away from the unhinged girl whom he mistakenly thought he could trust. A twice-startled Regina threw herself away from the spooked animal, forcefully thrusting her head back into the wooden headboard. Regina clenched her pain-filled head with both hands, squinting at the platinum moonlight, which was the only soothing presence on a ghastly night such as this.

  Sleep would not find Regina twice in one evening. She contemplated getting out of bed to watch more television, but she was comfortable and a change of location seemed an unnecessary hassle. Regina tossed until she found the slightest bit of solace on her side and she lay there staring at the alarm clock by her bed. Emerald green numbers stared back at her, the only company she kept on an evening when the twisting in her stomach warned her that something on this peculiar night would surface, cold and bloated with secrets. The green lines on the clock flickered signaling the movement of time from one day into the next—midnight. Shrill ringing from the telephone exploded into the room. Regina shot up, jerking the phone to her ear before it could complete its first ring.

  “Hello?” Regina spoke in a cracked whisper. On the other end of the phone, she heard a delicate gasp, a few moments of silence and then a voice spoke to her.

  “Regina? Is that you?” the raspy voice croaked.

  “This is Regina, who is this?” Regina asked, pushing the covers from her bed, pulling her legs closer to her.

  “They found her, Regina…they found her.” The voice on the other end of the phone vomited the harsh news, causing her to remove the phone from her ear and frown at it like some alien artifact.

  Regina muffled a powerful sob before returning the phone to her ear.

  Almost six years had passed since Regina had heard the gravelly voice on the other end of the line, but there was as little need, now, to inquire about the identity of the person on the other end of the phone as there was to inquire about “who” had been found.

  Nikki Valentine was calling to tell her that Lola Rusher had been found.

  Years before when balmy summers seemed endless and unfettered laughter was traded over school cafeteria tables, Regina Dean, Nikki Valentine, Lola Rusher and Natalie Weston were best friends, soul mates, almost sisters until the day, eight years ago, when Lola Rusher vanished. The disappearance of Lola Rusher devastated her friends, their families, and the entire town of Black Water. One day she was there and the next day she was gone with such finality one could almost think she never existed. Some said that Lola ran away, but popular theory stated that one of the many shady truckers that made their course through the town on I-48 abducted her, but without a trace of evidence, they could never prove anything and soon Lola was just a beautiful memory. Lola Rusher walked out of the Black Water library one evening and nobody saw her again.

  “Her body was buried on the DeFrank estate,” Nikki told her.

  “WHAT?” Regina found herself almost yelling. On the other end of the line, Nikki replied with a deep exhale before continuing.

  “The Madsen kids were playing out in the woods, they got onto the DeFrank property where one of them saw the top of a garbage bag that was buried. They started digging. They thought they had found a treasure.”

  “What?” Regina repeated; no other word in the human language could express her complete disorientation.

  “So she was just stuffed into a garbage bag and buried on DeFrank’s land?” Regina asked.

  Nikki forced herself to breathe in an attempt to stop trembling enough to speak.

  “First, she was cut up and then buried,” Nikki revealed. Regina could feel herself beginning to hyperventilate at the gruesome thought of someone mutilating her friend.

  “No,” Regina moaned as her eyes began to glaze over with tears.

  “Her family is having a funeral. I feel like I’m going crazy. You have to come back, Regina…please, I’m begging you. Come back,” Nikki pleaded with the girl who was once her best friend, whom she now barely knew.

  Black Water was a distant, but intimate series of recollections for Regina. Lola had disappeared ei
ght years ago and Regina left Black Water two years later when she turned eighteen. All of the good times filled her memory, but once Lola disappeared, everything fell apart and all she wanted was out. With Lola gone, it felt as if the walls of Black Water were closing in on her; she found it more difficult to breathe there with every passing day. There was something in the air. As soon as she was able, she fled to college and never returned. Regina had not gone back even to visit her parents. In the past, her parents had visited her in Texas, but she would not go back to Black Water. Over the years, it was made clear that she had absolutely no intention of returning, but saying no now seemed like a farfetched option. The very thing that had sent her away was now calling her back and no excuse was feasible. She could tell Lola’s parents or herself nothing that would justify her absence.

  “OK. I’m coming.” She announced to herself as much to the woman on the other end of the phone. She had a hard time believing the words that she was sure had just tumbled out of her mouth. Her throat throbbed as she swallowed and her stomach was churning at the dreadful thought. Both girls rested comfortably in the momentary silence.

  “I’ll be there soon.” Regina confirmed the self-treasonous decision.

  “You promise, Regina?” Nikki pushed. She had to know that Regina would be there.

  “Yes. I’ll be there soon.” Regina’s words assuaged the unnerved woman and without another word between them, both women let their phones fall back to their cradles. Both aware that there was nothing more to be said, there would be no exchanges of common courtesies or traditional inquiries. The only thing between them was the distance that was no longer able to help Regina run away.

  Regina could feel the darkness in the room inching closer. Wandering through her small apartment, Regina flipped switches until every light bulb in the apartment glowed. The girl dropped into her couch and leaned back, exhaling deeply at the sight of the future that was plowing her way.