Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  Katherine was fourteen the first time that she really, truly thought that she was going to die. She knew that that was not an entirely unique experience. Everyone has one of those moments at some point -- a traffic accident that almost happens or an unknown illness that causes deep reflection will occur to most people during the course of their lives. It might not happen to most people when they are fourteen, but it isn’t out of bounds to stumble across something that makes one ponder the concept of mortality on a personal level.

  Katherine was, however, willing to hazard a guess that most people in the world didn’t first have that moment because they knew that someone was trying to kill them. She had. She hadn’t just thought that he was trying; she had been very sure that he was going to succeed. She wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that. It might be that someday it would be something she would look back on and analyze in order to be able to tell you what she was thinking, what she was feeling, and how the whole thing had affected her, but the day of was not a day on which any of that was going to happen. She couldn’t even get herself to cry when she really wanted to -- not because she was all that fond of crying, but because she felt like there was something wrong with her that tears hadn’t been a part of her aftermath.

  She could remember that she had been wiping at some tears that were pooling in her eyes when she had been hiding Seth, but she didn’t think that those had been for her. She thought they had been because she was worried that he wouldn’t stay where she put him. She thought they had been because she was worried that something would happen to him. She thought that they may have been because she was sorry that she was going to leave her dad (and she didn’t want her dad to ever have to live with being left again), but she didn’t think that any of the tears had been for her. She couldn’t remember thinking of anything but making sure that whatever happened happened away from Seth. She thought maybe she had been resigned, but that felt wrong. She shouldn’t have been resigned. She was only fourteen. There shouldn’t have been anything resigned about thinking that someone was trying to kill her.

  Maybe that had been the point of the weeks leading up to the event? Maybe he had intended for it to wear her down so that when the time came it would all be expected? She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that he was sane enough to have thought about it in those terms. She wasn’t sure that he was sane enough to have actually thought about much of anything. She wasn’t sure that it really mattered. She wasn’t dead. He hadn’t killed her. She could shake it off and walk away without worrying about the details. She hadn’t done that.

  It had started with the hang up phone calls, and she hadn’t thought anything of them. Everyone got hang ups from time to time when they answered the phone. Some people were either too embarrassed or too rude to bother to take the time to apologize when they realized that they had gotten a wrong number. She had noticed that she seemed to be getting more than normal, but that was only a vague realization in the back of her mind -- not something that she actively thought about. The night that she received five of them one after the other she had been annoyed, but she had assumed that someone was just being stupid and thought that they were being funny. She hadn’t even mentioned it to her dad. He had been focused on some problems at the plant at that point in time, and she had been leaving any unnecessary information that might cause him any additional stress out of their run down conversations when they were catching up on what they had been doing.

  She had also left out any mentions of them to her dad when the phone calls switched from the standard hang up to what she had always termed the heavy breathing type of call. Those were a lot rarer than the hang up calls, but they still weren’t something that Katherine had no experience with -- ignorant people with bizarre ideas of what was amusing were more commonplace than Katherine thought that they should be, and she had had a few issues with classmates from time to time. She bled into the background most of the time at school. She wasn’t overly popular, but she wasn’t generally a target of the picking that young adolescents always seem to do to each other. She was, however, the main photographer for the school paper (and had been recruited young to help with shots for the high school yearbook). Teenagers being what they are, there had been occasional hurt feelings when someone thought she had taken pictures that were less than flattering. There had been some angry words uttered in her direction as well as the one time that someone had broken into and trashed her locker. That someone would have gotten miffed and decided that they would channel their emotions into some prank calling was obnoxious and immature, but it certainly was not outside of the realm of reasonable possibility.

  There was no reason to chance her dad adding to his worries by getting upset over some petty adolescent angst. She shrugged it off and didn’t say anything. It wasn’t as though it was actually hurting her -- obnoxious and immature really just translated into mildly annoying in her world. It wasn’t like she couldn’t just hang up the phone. In fact, that’s what she did. She hung up the phone, she rolled her eyes even though she was the only one around to know that she was doing any eye rolling, and she didn’t bother to think much about it. Whoever thought they were playing around with her would get bored eventually -- along with adolescent angst usually came a fairly limited attention span.

  She was tempted on one occasion to fire off some smart aleck remarks -- the Wednesday evening that her dad was working late and finishing her homework kept getting interrupted by the phone that she kept answering just in case it happened to be her dad checking up on her. It was the first time that it had ever occurred to her that caller id might actually be worth the additional money on the phone bill except that that, of course, would require her to explain what was going on to her dad. She wasn’t going to do that; they couldn’t keep up the calling forever. It had to get too repetitiously boring sooner than later. That thought was enough for her to keep her mouth shut and just hang up the phone one more time each time.

  She figured any sort of reaction on her part would just prolong their (whoever they were, and she was almost certain that it had to be at least a couple of somebodies because surely one person on his/her own would have lost interest long before without an audience around egging him or her on) interest in her as potential entertainment. Her patience seemed to be rewarded as she only ended up having to repeat the process one more time before it stopped for that night.

  When she realized that she went the next two days without any of the strange phone calls of any kind, she noted that occurrence as something expected. She didn’t feel relieved or anything of the sort. It just registered in the back of her mind that the logical outcome had come to its conclusion -- what else was she supposed to think?

  It was the Saturday following when the phone next rang outside of expectations. It was midmorning, and she picked the phone up (out of habit) when she should have been walking out the door. Caleb started making a big show of tapping his foot in mock impatience and frowning down at his watch. She stuck her tongue out at him as soon as the word “hello” left her mouth in the direction of the receiver. It wasn’t like the other calls; this time there were words.

  “You hardly look like her,” the voice on the other end stated before going silent. Katherine stood there blinking in confusion as she registered three separate things -- she didn’t recognize the voice, the voice was male, and the voice belonged to an adult. One of those things was a sort of nonissue compared to the other two. Two of them were disturbingly unexpected. There was always the possibility that the series of calls were unrelated. This could be someone different. It could be someone who had legitimately gotten a wrong number. That thought lasted all of two seconds before the voice spoke again.

  “But that doesn’t matter, does it Katherine?” The caller hung up on her. She was a little shaken. It wasn’t a kid. It wasn’t someone from school. It wasn’t someone on the periphery of her life acting like an idiot. The
re was a stranger (an adult stranger) who had been messing with her for weeks. She shivered and stood frozen staring down at the phone in her hand until she jumped when a hand came down on her shoulder.

  She nearly smacked into Caleb’s jaw with the top of her head because he was standing so close to her. She couldn’t remember him moving closer. She had actually momentarily forgotten that her best friend was hovering by the door. She hung the phone up and tried to grab the strap of her backpack from where she had dropped it by her feet when she reached for the handset. Somehow, her fingers didn’t quite grab on as the strap slid through them. She tried again with better results.

  “Sorry,” she muttered not making eye contact with Caleb who was sort of hovering over her in a manner that she didn’t have to look at him in order to identify as his worry mode. If she had been thinking more clearly, then she would have realized that she wasn’t going to be able to bluff her way out of the moment -- Caleb in worry mode didn’t work like that. She wasn’t thinking clearly. Her mind was too occupied trying to process that all her time blowing off the situation had been based on a faulty premise. Her body was moving by default -- pick up backpack, walk toward door, begin plans with Caleb. The problem was that she couldn’t walk toward the door because she was being blocked.

  “What happened?”

  “Crank call,” the words tumbled out of her. Her brain didn’t even seem to have enough maneuvering room to put the effort into forming appropriate sentences. “Gonna be late.”

  “What kind of crank call?”

  “The crank kind,” she retorted finally snapping out of wherever it was that her wits had gone wandering.

  “Kady?” She hated it when Caleb used his worried look. It left other people’s puppy dog looks in the dust. Maybe it was just her, but she was pretty certain that her best friend had the market cornered on persuasive looks. She was just glad that he didn’t use them for evil (she had told him that on multiple occasions).

  “Can we just go, please?” Her wits may have come back, but her nerves were still frazzled. She hated that. She wasn’t the crumple under pressure type, but that shivery feeling at the back of her spine wouldn’t go away. It had finally dawned on her that each and every phone call from the hang up that she would consider the start to the one she had just fielded had all occurred when her dad wasn’t at home. Had that been a coincidence? Her dad was gone more than he was not. Had someone been watching? She wanted out of the house. She wanted out of the house immediately.

  It must have shown. She must have looked downright awful because Caleb nodded his head and started herding her toward the door.

  “You’re going to tell me.” It wasn’t a question. They crossed the threshold, and she turned to lock up behind them.

  “I’m going to tell you,” she agreed, but she didn’t specify when she would do the telling.

  It was one of the wonderful things about Caleb that he might use his worried, persuasive expression to skew things in his favor and have a tendency to go into worried/protective mode, but he also knew when not to keep pushing.

  She told him that afternoon -- after her thoughts had organized themselves so that she could present the whole thing as a series of facts instead of with her heart thumping like she was some sort of spooked baby rabbit.

  “He said your name?” It was the only point upon which Caleb requested additional clarification.

  She nodded her head in response. She felt better out in the open and fresh air with Caleb by her side. The trapped feeling that had crept up on her in the immediate aftermath of the phone call had receded, but there was something about repeating the fact that this was personal and directed specifically at her by a full grown adult male that she couldn’t identify that made it feel as though it was creeping back.

  Caleb, of course, thought that she should tell her dad. She wasn’t sure that she shouldn’t, but she also hated the nagging feeling that she was going to make him worry over something that didn’t require worrying. She couldn’t shake the nagging voice in the back of her head that kept trying to tell her that she was blowing it all out of proportion, but she also couldn’t shake the equally loud voice that was telling her that there was something deeply, deeply wrong.

  It just so happened that her dad wasn’t going to be back from his conference until two or three in the morning, so she had successfully gotten Caleb to concede that she would tell him when he got back. Why cause him distress (her dad always got distressed when he considered something a threat to his only child) when he was away and needed to drive at night? She didn’t want him distracted and getting into an accident. (She hadn’t been particularly pleased that he wasn’t waiting until morning to make the drive home in the first place, but he had insisted because he thought having been gone since Friday morning had been long enough for her to be nominally on her own.)

  She may have won the concession from Caleb, but she could tell that he wasn’t overly happy about it. He was hovering in her living room after walking her home instead of skedaddling home to get to his chores like he should be when the phone rang again.

  “You really don’t look like her,” the voice said as soon as she had answered. “Not that it matters. It’s the only way.”

  Caleb was grabbing the phone from her hand and making demands before he realized that there was only a dial tone to be heard. Katherine couldn’t quite get her thoughts together. Was it a coincidence? Had the man been calling all day or was he somewhere where he could know that she had just walked into the house?

  “You aren’t staying here until your dad gets back,” Caleb told her. “You’re coming home with me. Go pack a bag.”

  Katherine usually had a few choice words (most of them snarky in nature) when Caleb went into demanding mode, but it would have been a worthless token protest. She didn’t want to argue. She couldn’t explain it (beside the obvious), but there was something off about that voice that set her nerves off more than anything that she thought he could have said to her. She didn’t want to spend the night waiting for her dad to get home (sleeping, she knew, wouldn’t have happened). She wanted to go home with Caleb to the farm with its cozy feel and two adults to be in charge (she knew that she had never been this rattled before in her life).

  She wasn’t sure what Caleb had told his parents; they had had a small conference in the kitchen while she hovered with a bag clutched in her arms in the living room feeling out of place and awkward (which was bizarre because she had never felt out of place and awkward at the Twists’ even on her very first visit). She only knew the end result which was sleeping bags and a camp out of sorts on the living room floor. Caleb had appointed himself watchdog (she could tell even though he was going out of his way to make it not look like that was what he was doing).

  It wasn’t the most pleasant conversation that she and her dad had ever had the next morning, but they got through it. In one respect, she had been right -- there wasn’t much to be done. It was reported, but crank calls were just that -- crank calls. There wasn’t anything necessarily threatening about them. It was weird and creepy that someone kept calling and telling her that she “didn’t really look like” someone, but it was mostly considered an annoyance. Plus, she could tell that there was a little bit of teenage girl being a dramatic teenage girl attitude toward what she was saying from the officer that took her statement when her dad insisted that they go down to the station that day. Her contention that the voice was an adult male had been duly written down, but she could tell that much stock wasn’t being put into it. Could she really blame them? She had thought that it was some of her fellow high schoolers messing around at first as well.

  The phone calls still came after that -- not as frequently as the hang ups or breathing calls had, but they still came. They always conveyed the same message -- “you really don’t look like her.” Occasional additions in the form of “that doesn’t matter,” “it’s the only way,” and “I am sorry tha
t there isn’t any other way” once were made.

  She just kind of lived with it for the following couple of weeks. Then, it stopped. Her dad relaxed as they started the second week of silence, but Katherine didn’t. She kept remembering the short break before the actual talking began in the phone calls. This, however, wasn’t just a few days. It was two solid weeks. She began to feel a little bit of the tension slipping from her. He might have given up (on whatever it had been that he had been trying); something might have happened to him.

  That was the way that everything stood on the Friday night that she was working on cropping some pictures and doing some shading touch ups in the journalism/yearbook office at the school while Seth Reynolds slept on the sofa (that the office had managed to acquire via the expedience of offering that corner of the office as storage space for the drama club). She had spent every Friday night for just over a year looking after the eighteen month old (whose parents’ differing schedules overlapped for about four hours that day each week), and his parents were comfortable enough with her babysitting skills and responsibility level that they had given the okay for her to occasionally take him with her when she was behind and had things to finish up at the school.

  His dad (knowing that this was one of those days) would get to the school a little after ten to pick up his son and give her a ride home. There were no games or activities on this particular Friday night, and she knew from experience that the janitorial staff cleared out by about a quarter after eight on such occasions. Thus, she had every reason to believe that she was on her own when the intercom crackled to life.

  It wasn’t the best quality of sound on the equipment that Katherine had long suspected might have been installed in the building somewhere around the time that her father had been born, but it got the job done for the school’s purposes. It was definitely clear enough that she had no difficulty in recognizing the voice from her phone calls.

  She had pushed the lock and was sliding a desk in front of the flimsy door with its (seemingly at the moment) huge window in the top half in some responsive instinct before she even registered what the voice was actually saying. When her brain did catch up enough to process the words, there was nothing in them that was of a nature to help fight off a rising tide of panic. She was, however, still collected enough to realize that that was probably the point. He wanted her to panic. He had, perhaps, even been conditioning her to panic with the weeks of gradually stepped up phone calls. Panic didn’t make for good decision making which made it a valuable quality in someone that you were intending to make a victim. She might not have much in the way of control over the situation, but she still had control of herself.

  She pushed back against the swirling emotions that were being tipped off by the litany of possible ways for her to die that was being broadcast over the speaker on the wall and glanced at the still sleeping toddler that was curled up oblivious to the words. (She had often thought that she had reason to be grateful that her charge slept through noise of all kinds, but she had never been more grateful for it than in that moment.)

  She took quick stock of the situation and assessed her options. They were on the second floor, so the window didn’t provide her with much in the way of choices. She would have been tempted to explore the possibility if she didn’t have Seth to manage. That left the door as the only option for leaving the room. Trying to make a run for it with an eighteen month old on her hip didn’t seem like the best of decisions to make either.

  That left staying in place. She had no delusions that her shifting of the desk would do much in the way of buying her time, and the glass in the top of the door was going to work against her. She had a fleeting thought that the file cabinets would work better, but she knew that they were far too heavy for her to move them herself. The clock on the wall told her that there was a little over an hour before Mr. Reynolds would arrive. She knew that her meager attempts at barricading them in would not last for anywhere near that long when the owner of the voice decided to move from taunting to action.

  Besides, Mr. Reynolds arriving was no guarantee of things resolving themselves. He would be walking in blind and was just as likely to end up hurt (probably more so) than likely to successfully extract her and Seth from the situation. Staying in the room until the man came after her accomplished nothing in the long run except keeping Seth in the middle of danger with her.

  It was, after all, her that he was focused on (had been stalking and waiting to catch in a vulnerable position). That meant that there was a solid chance that Seth would be left alone if she could keep him out of the way. She couldn’t say that it was her best plan ever; she couldn’t even say that she liked it much, but Seth was her responsibility. She was going to do whatever she could to make sure that he got out safely.

  “It’s a pity there’s no pool here.” She momentarily let herself get distracted by the voice that continued its suggestions from the box on the wall. “Drowning would have made a lovely end, don’t you think? I’m afraid we’re going to have to choose one of the messier options. But don’t worry, Katherine, you won’t be the one doing the cleaning.” He started laughing then. If there had ever been any doubt that the person with whom she was dealing was unhinged, then it fled with that sound. A sane person didn’t sound like that -- of course, in her opinion, a sane person didn’t obsess over and stalk a fourteen year old girl either.

  “It’s such a hard decision. There are so many ways for you to go, but it doesn’t matter really, does it? What matters most is that you’re dead at the end. So, I suppose we’ll just see where the moment takes us. Let’s make it a surprise. Won’t that be fun? It will be like a present for you at the very end getting to discover what method we’ll use for you to go. I think it’s time now. Don’t worry about finding me, Katherine; I’ll come to get you.”

  The sound cut off with another crackly bust of static, but Katherine was already in motion. Seth might be seemingly impervious to sound, but he wasn’t so to motion and stirred as Katherine scooped him up and shifted him to the supply closet.

  “Ka?” He asked blinking up at her with sleep filled eyes.

  “Shh, baby,” she responded brushing her hand over his hair as she settled him on the make shift pallet made from a sofa cushion and his blanket on the floor. She felt herself tearing up and blinked them back as well as she could while she tried to keep the hitch in her throat from creeping into her voice. “It’s okay. Just go back to sleep.” She took the moment to make sure that he was resettling, and (despite the chance that it might disturb him again) she found herself leaning forward and giving him a kiss on the forehead.

  She closed the door and pulled the desk from the office door to in front of the closet to prevent him getting the door open and coming to look for her. She didn’t know where this was going to end, and she had to make sure that Seth didn’t see anything (and mostly that he didn’t end up in harm’s way).

  Someone would find him soon enough, and her only concern was that it not be the man that was looking for her. If she had anything to do with it, then there would be no reason for him to even enter that office. She was going to meet him. She was stuck, but Seth didn’t have to be. The level of control that she was exercising in the only option that seemed to be left to her was heading off the other emotions that somewhere in the back of her head she was thinking that she should be feeling.

  She should be scared, she should be angry, she should be a whole lot of things, but the only thing that she could focus on was that she needed to protect Seth. There was room for a little anger that she was in that position. There was room for a little fear because this was a death threat that she was walking out to meet. All of that was muffled and drowned out by the knowledge that she was in control of the where.

  She didn’t have control over anything else. She didn’t have control of the man who seemed to be going out of his way to try to torment her. She didn’t have control of what was going
to happen or how it was going to happen, but she did have control over where she was standing when it happened. That place was not going to be anywhere that put Seth in the same danger in which she found herself.

  That was the sole variable under her control in this situation, and she was going to make as sure as she could that it came out the way that she wanted it. She listened for a moment, but she did not hear any sounds of distress from Seth. He must have gone back to sleep. That was good. He could sleep through this, and they would find him later. He wouldn’t need to realize that anything was happening.

  She paused again at the door that (flimsy and insubstantial as it was) still provided some sense of division between her and what waited out in the hallway before reaching out her hand to undo the lock. What was waiting out there wasn’t going to stay out there for long; she needed to move. She did (half expecting to be jumped on when she pushed the door open). She wasn’t, and she stepped out into the dim night lighting of the hallway. She didn’t see anyone, but that meant very little. Her hand slid around and pushed the door closed behind her with an audible click.