by Lissa Pelzer
She heard the car drive away again and saw its headlights pass the opaque window of the side door. Was that him leaving or simply someone else arriving, a taxi? She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. Now was the time to stay still. He wouldn’t know she was here unless she gave herself away. She had to just be patient and ready to crush his skull with this wrench if he stepped one foot inside this place.
Some time passed, maybe two minutes of listening to every tiny noise in the large, vacant space, when one of the semi trucks started up. She jumped down, but looking up again, saw the headlights pulling out of the line. She saw the advertising billboard across the street light up and then fade. The truck had swung out into the road. Its taillights flared and dimmed, and then it was gone.
Valerie wasn’t too knocked about to get what was happening, that the trucker had assumed she was dead, realized she wasn’t and just decided to run. Her eyes darted around in her head. What had he said his name was, Red? No matter. As long as he was gone and not coming back. But he had gone left, not right. You couldn’t get to the highway from down there. Then she remembered, he’d asked about that girl who got hit.
She had to call Bryan. She was pretty damn sure that girl was his case, the J.K he mumbled about after his fourth beer. But would he be cool seeing her like this? There was only one way to find out. Valerie crawled over to the office door and pulled herself up against the wood. There was a phone in there. She could break the glass and call him from there. And she lifted the wrench and it landed hard against the window.
An alarm went off. The deafening shrill shook the walls and overhead lights burst on throughout the building. Valerie dropped the wrench and sprinted towards the side door. She pushed through and was out in the night and across the street when she saw a small group of men coming over from the truck stop.
This was bad.
Soon the entire town would know, she’d been jumped by a trucker. And that would start the gossip mills turning again. Didn’t girls like Valerie ever learn? The darkness got darker for a moment. She watched the guys coming towards the lights, saw them peering in gingerly, probably unsure, but they were in a number that made their fear not feel real.
But she was afraid, still afraid and didn’t want to be seen. Valerie touched her cheek and felt that it had swollen, that it wasn’t quite where it had been a few hours before. She felt down her face towards her neck until she realized in horror that a band of thick tape was still around her neck. She pulled at it, but nothing happened, just a few bits from the plastic bag came away. Holy fuck! A new kind of panic grabbed at her. She was out here in a ditch, miles from the bar, about ten miles from home, she had a broken face and a duct tape necklace.
Now she heard a siren and saw the red and blue in the distance. The cops were coming to see what was up. She crouched down and watched the cruiser pull in and saw Officer Randal, good old Officer Randal from the high-school program, pulling up and getting out.
Valerie watched through the branches. Officer Randal was looking in over the top of the door. He had his hand on his hip ready to unholster his gun, but the other guys, the truckers around him, didn’t seem too concerned. They watched and talked. They lit up cigarettes and moved their weight from one leg to the other. All men, she noticed. That’s how it was. Something happened and it was all guys on the scene when all Valerie needed a woman.
Then another car pulled up and another guy got out fast, except after she moved a branch from her view she saw, this was no guy, but a woman. The woman went and stood with the guys, crossed her arms over her chest and leaned her head in to hear the conversation. The woman was nodding, mirroring their body language. She was weird but at least she was female.
Valerie waited until the attention was on Officer Randall going around the side door and made her move. She sprinted from the hedge and across the street to where the woman’s car was parked and crouched down beside it. Valerie tried the far side back door and felt the beautiful sensation of the handle giving. She opened it slowly. She got in.
Now all she had to do was wait and pray this woman didn’t freak out when she saw her. She lay there looking up at the fabric of the ceiling and the rubber lining until there was the sound of voices coming towards her. The crowd was dispersing. The driver’s side door opened, but the woman didn’t get in straight away. Valerie could see her torso and her shoulders against the side window. The voices died down and the woman stepped back and looked down at her face through the glass.
Valerie held up her hands and made a sign like she was praying and the woman looked at her, she really looked at her. It was a kind of acceptance. Now for the first time, Valerie felt like she could cry.
Davis
She got in the car, started the engine and pulled out into the road.
‘You want to tell me want’s going on?’ she asked the bloodied girl lying across her back seat.
The voice was muffled. The girl had started to cry. Davis knew she had to just get it out of her system. She didn’t say anything more.
When the girl did speak, her first words were a thank you.
Davis tilted the rear view mirror to see her face and the girl turned away. But she’d seen enough of her from outside the car, a head full of brown curls and a face that looked like someone had taken offense to it. When she first saw her, for the briefest of moments, the girl had been Carol Ann Baker. That was what happened when you were in too deep, fixated, obsessed, you saw things, you made connections that just weren’t true.
‘You need to go to the hospital,’ Davis said.
‘No hospital.’
‘So, I’m going to drive us back to my motel - the Sleep Cozy – and we can discuss it there. Is that okay?’
The girl didn’t answer.
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
Davis pulled up outside her room. She went in her trunk and took the box of her medical notes, insurance papers and charts out and balanced it on the rim. The guy in reception had been eyeballing her, but now he looked away.
‘Now’s a good time to move,’ she said, and like lightning, the girl did.
Davis closed the trunk, closed the motel room door and got back in to straighten the car out. The last thing she needed was the owner coming over to tell her to move.
When she opened the motel door, the room was clear and the bathroom door was closed.
‘I’m back in,’ she called out.
‘Can I use your shower?’ the small voice asked.
Davis stepped towards the bathroom door. ‘Don’t…’ she said. ‘I know you want to. I know you need to shower like your life depends on it, but if you can wait a minute…’ Davis put her hand up to the door. She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to say, we need to get to the hospital so they can swab you for semen. But she didn’t need to.
‘He didn’t rape me,’ the girl said, ‘and I know who he is.’
‘You still might want to be able to prove it was him who... did whatever it was he did to you.’
There was a pause. Davis leaned her head in.
‘If his DNA is on my hands, it won’t matter. People saw me talking to him already.’
Davis stepped back from the door. Girls these days were shrewd, a lot more so than she’d been at their age. She thought of Rane, of the stories he’d told her. The things she had believed.
‘Go ahead and take your shower,’ she said and went and sat on the edge of the bed.
Her next instinct was to ask if she could call the girl’s mother, to tell her she was okay, but she held her tongue. Davis thought instead of her own girls, of Jade who was always so bold, who could spin a story out of nothing and Alice who could unpick them just as quickly. One time, Jade had signed up to a high school camping trip but gone off to spend the weekend at a boyfriend’s house instead. And Davis had only found out because she tripped over and broke her wrist while there.
‘You lied to me!’ Davis had said when she saw her.
‘No, the trip was canceled, but you
were working. I didn’t have time to see you, to ask if I could go to Jason’s instead.’
Davis had called the school thinking it was a lie, but the secretary had confirmed the story. It fell to Alice to tell her that Jade had canceled her involvement herself, knowing the reduced numbers meant the whole trip would be called off.
‘Just like her father!’ she had said. The words had sprung from her mouth. ‘Just like her damn father!’
The bathroom door opened and Davis got to her feet. The girl stood there wrapped in two towels, one around her body and one over her shoulders. The tape was gone, but her face was bruised and split. It was a sight Davis had seen before. The girl needed to see a doctor.
‘Can I sit there?’ she asked, pointing to the end of the bed.
Davis extended her hand and the girl sat.
‘You work at Patchy’s,’ Davis said.
The girl squinted up at her. ‘You were in with Bryan the other night.’
‘So what happened?’
The girl shook her head. ‘You won’t believe me.’
‘Try me.’
‘I don’t think I have the strength.’
‘You want a soda? I can go over to reception…’
‘A coffee will do just as much good.’
Davis made her a coffee and the girl held the half sized cup up in front of her face and gave her a summary of the event.
‘He wrapped tape around my neck and he was waiting for me to die. So I faked it. I went down on the floor and faked it. I pierced the bag with my nail.’ She stuck her finger in her mouth like she was trying to make herself sick.
Davis saw her long pale nails and remembered her drilling them on the bar top. She had thought them unpractical for a bartender but now reevaluated her judgment.
‘I lay there for a while and waited. When he came over, I was going to kick him in the nuts. I was going to go to my car, to my glove box…’ she paused and looked Davis over. ‘I keep a gun in there.’
Davis nodded. She wanted her to keep talking.
‘But he didn’t get out. He drove away. I got up and I ran into the workshop. The rest you know.’
‘We should call the police,’ Davis said quietly.
The girl shook her head. ‘No way.’
Davis didn’t need it spelled out for her. She’d had this conversation with a hundred girls over the years, girls who had been beaten by their pimps, their boyfriends, and their fathers. Nine out of ten times, it was not a discussion she won.
Davis played her trump. ‘And what about the next girl he picks on? She might not be as strong or as smart as you and she might be younger.’
She was nodding. ‘I have the feeling I know exactly who he will go for next, but I know who to call to make sure it doesn’t happen.’
Davis lowered herself onto the other bed. ‘He told you who the next victim would be?’
‘Not in so many words. But I know who she is and I need to get ahold of Bryan right away to let him know.’
And two minutes later, they were back in the car and heading west towards where Bryan lived.
Bryan
When he checked his emails that morning, there was no reply from Cassandra’s agent. He hadn’t expected an immediate response, but as everything he was thinking was reliant on some sort of new information, the inaction had driven him to distraction.
He’d gone online and started searching randomly for anything he thought could have something to do with Janine Kenny. He looked up locations on a map, like the store opposite Flamingo Park, and clicked on the photo view. He half expected to see her captured somewhere by the eye in the sky, but he knew really that the chances of that were less than nil. So he wasn’t surprised when all he saw was blondes in bikinis.
Bryan drummed his fingers on his laptop.
He remembered the film festival Lauren had mentioned, where Cassandra had supposedly met Terence McCoy. Where was it, a couple of hundred miles away in Ohio? If Janine had ever seen Cassandra Stephenson in person, wasn’t it conceivable that she could have seen her over in Ohio?
So he did a search for the festival and found out it was called Filmarama. There was a discussion thread open on one site, mostly people posting about lost phones and designer jackets, but it seemed like an okay place to post about a missing friend too.
‘Anyone here know a girl by the name of Janine Kenny? Around eighteen or nineteen, short black hair?’
He clicked post and checked he had an email notification set up and carried on searching. He began scrolling through the image search results, a vast vault of photos uploaded by wanna-be photographers and the narcissistic. There was one photo of a street scene, a crowd of around three hundred people looking up at bright lights, and Bryan clicked on it.
For a moment he thought he had seen her, right at the back there was a girl with short black hair and he leaned in, but it was not Janine. He was tired. He was just seeing things. His suspicions were confirmed when he looked at the girl next to her and thought she kind of looked like Janine too, except she was blonde. Then he scanned the faces further back along the tree line.
‘What the...?’ He clickity-clicked on the image to zoom in. There, leaning against a tree was a woman who looked pretty much identical to the one he’d met in Patchy’s the other night. What was her name...Susan?
His computer pinged. That was quick. Bryan opened the message.
‘Do you think that’s funny?’
He read it through a second time before typing again. ‘No. Not trying to be funny, just wondering if anyone there knows her.’
This time the message was instantaneous.
‘Just leave it alone. If you know what’s best for everyone. Don’t go there!’
Bryan typed back. ‘Seriously, do you know her?’
‘Do you???’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ Bryan’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. If this person did know her, he didn’t want to scare him or her off. But if they were just trolling him...
‘Yes.’ He wrote back. ‘I know her. Are you a friend of hers? Can we talk?’
Bryan waited a moment, but his computer didn’t ping. Maybe the kid was typing. Maybe they had been told to turn the light off and go to sleep. He closed the browser and went back to the crowd photo. He looked again. He must be going crazy. That woman looked like Susan, but those two girls also both looked like Janine. Seriously, morph them together as one person and you had Janine Kenny.
‘Both of them!’ he said out loud to confirm the idiocy of the idea and then he closed his laptop and got up to go to bed.
At the kitchen sink, he swilled the dregs of the beer bottles down the drain and filled a clean glass with water. While he was doing it, a car pulled up on the street outside. He watched it for a moment as he drank the water, letting a thin dribble escape his bottom lip and trickle down his shirt. It was going in the wash now, anyway.
But then two women got out of the car. One of them was that woman, Susan. Bryan half choked on the water in his mouth and put the glass down sharply. The other one, he was pretty sure was Valerie from Patchy’s, but something had happened to her. She’d looked different.
‘Come in,’ Bryan said as they came up the steps.
The two women stepped inside like they’d come to confess to running over his cat, but now under the overhead light, Bryan could see Valerie had been beaten up and seriously too.
‘What the hell?’
He expected Valerie to speak, but it was Susan who did.
‘We have something important to tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s regarding a girl who Valerie believes you may know. Someone on your books, professionally.’
‘JK?’ Bryan asked. The thought raced through his mind that somehow Susan knew her.
Susan turned to Valerie. ‘You want to tell him what you know?’
Valerie didn’t look like she did.
‘Well, one of you please say something, for heaven’s sake.’
Valerie came forward. ‘I met a gu
y tonight,’ she said, ‘And I think he was looking for her, the girl with amnesia.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Just a trucker who was at Patchy’s. Goes by the name of Red.’
Bryan saw a flicker of disbelief cross Susan’s face. Was this news to her too?
‘And what – this guy said he was looking for her? What did he say? Is he an uncle or something?’ He went over to his folder. ‘This is good. I need to find him, maybe he can help put some pieces of her past together.’
‘No… Bryan, look at my damn face. I gave the guy a ride and he tried to kill me. What do you think he’s going to do when he finds your girl?’
Bryan crossed to the phone hanging up on the wall.
‘Wait!’ Valerie said. ’Who are you calling?’
‘Who do you think? The cops.’
‘I can’t tell them what happened to me. Just so you know.’
Bryan paused for half a second. He knew the deal. She’d get fired first and cast out second. That might not seem a big deal, but this town was small, there weren’t that many jobs, and for that same reason, not many cops who would think she was a totally innocent party either.
‘Then I’m calling the center and telling them to lock down.’
He got one of the night staff on the phone and made up a story about a relative possibly trying to make contact.
‘Check the doors and make sure someone is awake other than you. Leave the outside motion lights on just as a deterrent, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
He hung up and turned back to the women. ‘Okay, I have to get down there. Valerie, are you coming with me?’
‘Valerie needs to get to a hospital,’ Susan said.