Seven Shoes

by Mark Davis

  “He is experienced … highly intelligent and manipulative … both intuitive and technically able. Perhaps a scientist or technician of some sort. Middle-aged, at least … I think.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, about the age, not about the gender. Freyja could be a woman. Men who like to kill do so outright. She toys with people like a cat torturing a mouse.”

  “Anything more?”

  “A very dark heart … such anger … such malice … to manipulate people so … to make them parade for her, to fall and die in her circus … to take so much delight from tricking people.”

  “Elizabeth, I want you to listen to me and let what I say sink into your very bones. You are stronger than Freyja. You are smarter than Freyja. She may think she is hunting you, but you are smarter than she is. She is not hunting you. You are hunting her.”

  He let Elizabeth rest a moment and commanded her to relax, to release any anxiety or fear. George led her upward through ascending levels of consciousness. She followed him like a diver rising from the darkness into the lighter, shallower waters, until she opened her eyes, drew a deep breath and found herself once again in the little office.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like catching this bitch and putting her away.”

  “Excellent.”

  George poured her some more coffee.

  “She made me completely lose my shit you know,” Elizabeth said.

  “It can happen,” George said. “It happened to me once. The divorce wasn’t the only thing that was distracting me when you helped me get my tenure.”

  He handed her the cup.

  “I never told you about this, but I had to take a brief medical leave.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “I was analyzing a psychopath sentenced to life in Atascadero who liked to do terrible things to little girls. He somehow intuited, from cold reading I suppose, that I had daughters. He kept needling me with questions, talking about outside friends who were … like him … about how he could escape Atascadero and join with them at any time. With every question I put to him, he came back with an insinuation about all the fun he and his friends were going to have with my daughters. I lost it. The guards had to pull me off him. In a panic, I sent my ex-wife tickets to take the girls to Europe and then I had a breakdown. Not for long, but seriously enough that I had to be medicated.”

  George losing control of himself, it was hard for Elizabeth to imagine. Strange, too, that even after all these years, and after sharing so much of her own life with George, Elizabeth had never met his daughters or knew much about them. She made a mental note to ask more about them at an appropriate time.

  “Freyja said she would give me some kind of homework assignment,” Elizabeth said.

  “That is troubling. You cannot allow yourself to serve her. You must reverse the relationship and promote your dominance. Will you carry out her ‘assignment’?”

  “If it brings me closer.”

  TWENTY

  Ingrid’s eyes were gummy, red-rimmed, her greasy roostertail higher than usual. Elizabeth shook the rain off her umbrella and leaned it against a window in the stone entryway.

  “So how does she know so much?” Elizabeth asked.

  A second day of rain, coming down in heavy sheets.

  “Freyja is just a very talented hacker, that is all,” Ingrid said. “Anyone with the right skills could know what she knows. Imagine what I can learn about you from examining your searches … about your health, from your queries for remedies and medical questions … about your sexuality, from what you look at and who you flirt with … about your finances, your transactions.”

  “But Freyja knows more than that.”

  “She also sees,” Ingrid said.

  “She said she had more eyes than a spider.”

  “She reverses our smartphones, the fisheye lens in our laptops, and records all that,” Ingrid said.

  “Why do you think she records?”

  “Most of life is boring. No one would have the time to watch it all. She’s reviewing all her material from PIGers on fast-forward for anything that looks interesting.”

  “Which is why you gave us the burners. But is there more?”

  Ingrid sunk teeth into her lower lip, causing her rings to protrude.

  “Yes, I believe so. It is my guess she is hacking into CCTV systems in hotels, on streets, everywhere we go. She is probably in the police system, though we are always looking for that.”

  “So we’re open secrets to her?”

  Ingrid’s smile was cocked and wicked.

  “I do not mind being an open secret. If she wants to watch, let her get her rocks off on me. I only do what I want and I don’t care who watches and how they judge. That is the only way to live.”

  Elizabeth smiled at the young woman’s brio, then wondered if there had been a smartphone or laptop in Lars’ boathouse. If so, there was a recording of her and Lars as well.

  ___________

  The little tile with Daryl Parnell’s face came to life. He smiled shyly, rubbed his lantern jaw. He had a good head of hair, not much gray, and a friendly face with deep laugh lines around the eyes.

  “Welcome to my story, if you can dignify it as a story.”

  His voice was masculine, deep, a cultured Southern accent.

  “I grew up in these parts, went to the Virginia Military Institute, quarterbacked for two seasons, BA in English literature, Phi Beta Kappa, then served for twenty-seven years in the U.S. Army, stint in Special, before retiring as a colonel in Signals with service in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, all the cluster fucks of our young century, forgive my language if you’re a lady.

  “Married a great gal, Emily, three wonderful children, two boys, Sam and Richard, and our precious girl, Stacie. We had kids late. I guess I had half-expected to get killed overseas and by the time they assigned me to a cushy desk job in Fort Benning, we were finally a family. A very happy family.

  “My father died on the day I retired from the service. So I sold his farm, spoke to a lot of smart money people about a good cash business I could get into, and after months of study decided to buy a restaurant from an old couple ready to take it easy.

  “The Cloverdale, they call it. A fixture in the Glenwood Park neighborhood of Atlanta, an old neon sign out front that is a registered historic item, twelve feet long with distinctive lettering in six colors and chrome accents. Twelve booths inside, a giant S-shaped counter with more chrome and twenty-four swivel chairs. Twelve tables in the back. What’s so special about all that? A lot. The Cloverdale is known for gourmet versions of diner fare, hanger steaks with flash-fried potatoes, blackened redfish with soy ginger and a side of risotto, fried chicken with collard greens covered in Mornay sauce.

  “Best of all, when we bought the Cloverdale, we inherited all the cooks, the head cooks being three African-American brothers from the Old Fourth Ward who really ran the place. I learned to stay out of their hair and let them hire and fire and run the rest of the help ragged.

  “It was a good business, the cash business I had hoped to acquire. I didn’t have to worry if Emmie and I had picked the wrong location, or the wrong cooks, or the wrong menu. By buying into a long-standing enterprise, we had a loyal clientele of blue-collars, hipsters and techies. The Cloverdale kept the family busy. Kept us together.”

  ___________

  “You gonna serve that plate or slobber over it?”

  Darius Scott hung his face over the counter, his hair net almost touching the warming lamps. He gazed at Daryl with his customary scowl, as if the owner of the restaurant were a busboy in need of firing. But Daryl didn’t mind. He appreciated that Darius wanted everything done right. And he didn’t mind playing the subservient role. Restaurant help was notoriously unreliable. On this day, one of the waitresses had called in sick. Tomorrow, it could be anybody. An owner had to be ready at a moment’s notice to be a cook, a waiter, a busboy
or a cashier.

  He was grateful for Darius and his two brothers.

  “Twenty-three, right?” Daryl said.

  “That’s what it says.” Darius turned back to a large griddle on which a dozen slices of bacon popped and trembled on the hot surface. Darius cracked another egg.

  “Darius riding you, hon,” Emmie said under her breath, turning from the counter where she had just poured coffee for a line of customers.

  Daryl shook his head and smiled. At 49, Emmie had become a little matronly, but she was still quick on her feet and had that sarcastic, sideways look he loved. Daryl could still see the Auburn cheerleader Emmie had once been and would always be to him.

  He delivered the plates to 23, a typical young Atlanta couple. The man had a long, pointed beard, hair shaved to white scalp on the sides and a mop of pomaded hair. Tats in colored ink ran up and down the length of one arm. His girlfriend was also well tattooed and sported a nose ring.

  Daryl looked around at the clientele and saw young men who could have been Civil War generals, if generals had ever worn shorts with T-shirts. This one could be Jubal Early. That one, Stonewall Jackson. And look, here comes old Nathan Bedford Forrest through the door with an ear gauge.

  Not a good look, at least not in his book. But Daryl didn’t care. He was grateful to have a steady clientele, hipsters who flocked to the Cloverdale because it was both retro and chic, old-style but with gourmet coffee and asiago instead of cheddar.

  Daryl topped off their coffee and caught a glimpse of activity across the street. Four men huddled around the unfurled scroll of a blueprint. Behind them was the Atlanta Bankhead, a decaying office building that had once been the most glamourous building in Atlanta in the Twenties.

  “Suzie, any idea what they’re up to over there?”

  The cashier was another relic of the Cloverdale, long past her prime, but she made up for it in what she knew about the business and the neighborhood.

  “I don’t know, Mister Parnell. Maybe they finally sold it?”

  “Could be. Whatever comes next over there, it should be good for business.”

  “Should be.”

  “Hi Dad.” It was Sam, at 14 his youngest son, homework done and ready to put in a few hours as a dishwasher.

  “Richard has got a head start on you,” Daryl said. “By a good half-hour.”

  Richard had come into work without so much as a glance at his father or mother. He had been a freshman at the University of Delaware while Daryl was finishing up his last tour with a career-capping ticket punch at Benning. With the family in Atlanta now, Daryl and Emmie insisted Richard transfer to be closer to them and to take advantage of in-state tuition at the University of Georgia.

  It was a great school, they told him. All Richard had to do was leave his friends, his fraternity and a girl named Bernadette. For weeks now, all his son talked about was Burnie-this and Burnie-that. They were texting like crazy throughout the day, their conversation saddened by the fatal knowledge that their interest in each other was doomed to wane and die. Now Richard was in the back, letting the dishes clatter and the steel cutlery clang.

  Sam was his own piece of work. He had his heart set on making the high school basketball team as a forward, only to be the last one cut from the try-outs. He was sullen, too, but in a different way, grieving over the death of a dream.

  Stacie, their 13-year-old, kept in touch with Mom with the occasional text. She was excused from work, too immature to be of much use. Her time was better spent on Skype with her math tutor.

  ___________

  Sunday was the family day for rest and worship because the Scott brothers managed the day in exchange for a management fee. All the orders for the next week were made on Thursdays and deliveries wouldn’t come until Monday. The books were updated every Friday.

  But Sunday was a day to sleep in, go to the 11 o’clock service, then … whatever. Go to the shooting range, see a movie, just sit at home and read in the sun room. But only after church.

  Daryl was raised a Presbyterian. He preferred the old hymns, a dry exegesis from the pastor on the meaning of a given passage and the deep reverberance of the organ that a worshipper felt in one’s chest as if God were humming. But Emmie and the kids favored the neighboring mega-church, an aircraft carrier with its own coffee bar, a basketball court, several dozen meeting rooms and a large amphitheater with multimedia displays and contemporary music.

  A millennial pastor with Ambrose Burnside mutton chops was usually present on Sunday mornings to give an impassioned and intelligent talk on the need for faith in a culture distracted by vices and too many entertainments. During the sermon, Stacie kept sneaking a peek at her phone. Richard stared ahead glumly. Sam fidgeted, doodled on the church program, and seemed to intermittently pay attention to what was being said.

  Afterwards, they would stop at the church coffee bar, a small counter selling beverages from the world’s most popular coffee chain, and ordered coffees all around. Emmie let Stacie have a latte.

  “I wonder …” Daryl said.

  “Wonder what?” Emmie asked.

  “Wonder what they’re doing with the Bankhead?”

  “You know what they’re doing,” she said. “Some hedge fund is gonna gut it, make it modern and rent it out for $200 a square foot.”

  “More bidness for the Cloverdale,” Daryl said. He did that from time to time, slip into his grandpappy’s backwoods accent to amuse her.

  “More bidness, sir, and we might have to raise the prices on our menus.”

  “More bidness, ma’am, and the landlord will raise our rent.”

  “Kill joy,” Emma said. “Party pooper.”

  Stacie sipped her latte, Sam played with his phone, Richard stared down the hallway at the ghost of Bernadette. And Daryl Parnell kissed his wife in the middle of church, smack on the lips.

  ___________

  Somebody must have pulled the food alarm on Tuesday afternoon. The front door was clotted with patrons. A line formed. Suzie got that thin-smiled, worried look when seating got sparse and customers became tense about waiting times.

  “Did you remember to get the waters for nineteen?” Daryl asked Sam. His son froze, look stricken, and quick-walked to the counter to pour some ice waters.

  One of the Cloverdale’s best waiters, an older Hispanic man who went by Gus, had called in sick that morning. Gus was never sick, so you knew it was real. Daryl had no choice but to press both of his sons into service, Sam as a busboy, Richard as a waiter taking the place of Gus.

  “How’s your section?” he asked Richard.

  “Behind but catching up.”

  Richard looked like he could use some help, but it was all Daryl could do to keep the counter running.

  “Please do that son.”

  Across the street a knot of construction foremen and architects were using a can to spray-paint X-marks on the sidewalk in front of the Bankhead. This should be good news, but Daryl’s gut told him otherwise. And he trusted his gut. It had kept him alive in wadis, forests and alleys around the world.

  An elderly man at the counter wanted more ketchup and jam for his biscuits. His wife nibbled at her omelet while hoping that no one noticed the tiny Yorkie in her purse that snapped when she offered it bits of sausage. Daryl didn’t usually tolerate health code violations, but things were too busy today to make a scene.

  He turned to see Cyrus, one of the Scott brothers, staring at him sullenly over the kitchen line, a rack of new meals under the heat lamps. Daryl bolted to the station, pulled the tickets and delivered the food. He came back and filled some more orders for Richard’s station, told Sam where to refill coffees and sodas, and topped off everyone’s drinks at the counter.

  Daryl checked the coffee machine, pleased to find a fresh-brewed pot. He looked his station up and down, scanned the whole restaurant, and decided that this was a good window for a bathroom break. As he was coming out of the employees’ bathroom i
n the back, still rubbing moisture off his hands, Emma waved him down.

  “I can’t reach the olives.”

  “Use the stool.”

  Emma licked her lips.

  “I’m feelin’ a little unsteady, hon.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just got dizzy, is all.”

  He followed his wife around the hallway behind the kitchen and the dishwasher, past the mandatory OSHA and state labor postings, the time clock, and their tiny office. Down one end of the hall was the cold storage room. Down the other end were two small rooms, little more than closets, where every square inch had been thought-through and maximized to the fullest. In the dry goods room were neat stacks of paper bags and plastic bowls, receipt paper and 25 percent cotton, glossy laser-print paper for the menus. In the storage room were the cans, ordered and stacked by food groups, vegetables, condiments, meats, garnishes.

  The stepstool was already in place.

  “Right there,” Emma pointed to a spot on the top shelf.

  “Okay,” Daryl said, straining, trying to be quick. No matter how fast you were on a bathroom break, patrons quickly became impatient whenever their waiter disappeared from sight. There would already be new drink orders and at least one impatient patron waiting to pay a bill.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Daryl heard the sound of a soft collapse, as if a sack of Idaho russets had tipped over. He looked down.

  Emma was on the floor, sprawled out on her side, arms and legs moving in jigs and jerks, head lolling, eyes rolled up white, a rim of foam on her lips.

  ___________

  “I think you had best come forward,” Ingrid said on the phone.

  Elizabeth clicked Daryl Parnell to a stop in mid-sentence and went to the office’s reception area. A young woman in a bike helmet and elastic bike-wear stood in the middle of the room, thin and still as a crane. Ingrid stood off to the side, hands on her hips, eyes locked on an envelope in the messenger’s hands.