Draw Me In

by Regina Cole

  She reached for me, but I staggered backward, turning before she could see my face and gloat in her victory over me. I wasn’t giving in, no matter how loudly my heart was breaking. “Listen, pack up your shit and get out of here. I won’t call the cops on you now, but if you ever”—I whirled, glaring down directly into her wide eyes—“ever step foot in my shop again, I’ll let them drag you to prison so fast you won’t see it coming. You get me?”

  “Neill.” She was sobbing now. I didn’t give a damn. “Please, what did I do?”

  I looked at her, wishing I could feel the disgust I should. But dammit, I still loved her. Not for long. I’d squash that feeling like a fucking bug. “Get out of my shop. I never want to see you again.”

  I turned on my heel and walked out the front door. It wasn’t until I stopped alongside my bike and reached for the keys in my pocket that I realized I was still holding that damn apology letter.

  Staring at the crumpled envelope, Hailey’s name written in my best script along the front, I started to tremble. I sat on my bike just to keep from falling.

  What had I done to deserve this hell twice in one lifetime?

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Hailey

  I stared after Neill, rooted to the spot. I couldn’t breathe or blink, and I was sure my heart had completely stilled in my chest.

  Time didn’t exist; neither did oxygen. For the space of however long it was, I didn’t exist.

  Then Neill’s bike drove past the front of the shop, tires squealing and smoking, and I leaped into action. I ran toward the front door, throwing it open and staring down the street after him. I yelled his name, but he never looked back.

  And then he was gone.

  Tears burned my cheeks as I walked into the shop, my heart thudding against my rib cage so hard that it hurt. Everything hurt. I gulped back my sobs as I tried to make sense of this unbelievable situation. Why had he said those awful things? God, it had been a simple misunderstanding, hadn’t it? What had I done to make him hate me so much?

  Moving past the counter, I stopped. With a hand clapped over my mouth, I took in the devastation.

  My desk had splintered on one side and was tipped over with piles of papers and a damaged monitor lying atop it. In front of that, my bag lay on the floor in front of the small cubby I tucked it into every day. The front of the bag was open, as I usually left it, and my books had fallen out. But there was something else there. The envelope Dr. Fields had given me before I left school. It had ripped open when my calculus text had caught the flap, and several bags containing pills were spilling from it, a handful of brown ones spread out like shrapnel from an explosion. A syringe stuck halfway out of the envelope, its capped end pointing right at me.

  “No,” I whispered as the horror of what had happened dawned on me. “Oh God, Neill, how could you believe that was me?”

  The evidence, I had to admit, was damning. I knelt by the envelope, hoping it was a simple mistake. No way.

  “He thought it was mine,” I said aloud, just to wrap my brain around it. “He thought I was an addict.”

  The back door opened then, and I ran around the corner, hoping it was Neill and I could explain. It wasn’t. Karl pulled his keys from the door and smiled at me. “Hey, Hailey, you’re in early today.”

  My tears returned and I ran for him. “Karl,” I gasped, throwing myself against his broad form. “Karl, everything is so wrong.”

  His strong, inked arms wrapped around me, and he patted my back gently. If he was shocked at my actions, he did a good job of hiding it. “Hey, what’s wrong? This isn’t like you.”

  For several minutes I couldn’t talk, just cried. He didn’t say a word, just held me until the storm of emotion had subsided. When I could finally breathe again, I took him to the front of the shop and explained. Karl knelt by the mess on the floor, a blank expression on his face.

  “ . . . so when he saw it, he thought I had been doing drugs all this time behind his back,” I finished through my tears. I wrapped my arms around my middle, hard, trying to keep from being sick. “And I don’t know what to do.”

  Karl stood, his hands on his hips as he turned to face me. “I don’t mean to worry you, but you’ve got bigger problems right now than Neill.”

  “What do you mean?” I rubbed at my raw cheeks. “He thinks I’m a freaking drug addict. How could things be worse than that?”

  Karl came over to me, holding my shoulders in his huge hands. “If these aren’t yours, then someone planted them on you. Where did that envelope come from?”

  The air sucked right out of the room. Karl’s words penetrated the fog of misery in my brain. I stared up at him in shock. “Dr. Fields . . . My old adviser gave it to me. We need to call the cops right now.”

  Karl picked the phone up from the pile of wreckage that used to be my desk and dialed. He kept one hand on my arm, and I was grateful for that. It kept me in the moment. Otherwise I might be tempted to try to wake up from this terrible, awful dream.

  “I need to get some cops over here,” Karl said into the phone, his deep voice low and calm. “One of my employees just found out someone planted pills on her. Yeah. No, we’re closed, but I’ll be at the front to let them in.”

  As Karl answered their questions, I kept staring at that pile of hateful pills on the floor. It wasn’t even mine, and it had still ruined my life.

  The afternoon seemed to take forever. Once the cops got there, I answered about a thousand questions. Then they took me to the station, and I answered the same questions a thousand more times. Karl was always there, on the other side of a plate-glass window sometimes, but never far enough away that I felt alone. Even in the gray, cold, and frightening police station, that big Nordic-looking wrestler wasn’t ever far away. That thought almost made me laugh, despite the darkness of the situation. He knew me least of all, but he was sticking to my side more than the guy I loved.

  Neill hadn’t trusted me. He’d left me alone to deal with this.

  Life could be such a bitch.

  “Hey,” Karl said when I came out of the third office in the last four hours. He handed me a white foam cup full of coffee. “How’d it go?”

  “Same as the last few times.” I wrapped both hands around the cup and took a large sip, glad when the hot liquid burned my throat. It meant I could still feel. “They’re just covering all the bases.”

  Karl led me to a long bank of black plastic chairs, and we sat down together. I took another long drink of coffee, wondering why I was so cold. Though the AC was running, the place was stuffy. All the glass windows had metal mesh inside them, making me feel penned in. The speckled floor was cracked and aged. At the other end of the hall, a custodian was running an ancient-looking floor buffer. I closed my eyes, trying to find some kind of calm. The scent of industrial cleaner mingled with the aroma of strong, cheap coffee, and I wrinkled my nose in defeat. If not for Karl, I probably would have gone crazy this afternoon. I leaned a little closer to him.

  “I tried to call Neill a few times—” Karl started.

  I shook my head. “Don’t. Thanks anyway. But he doesn’t need to know.” I stared straight ahead, looking through the wire-mesh window at the parking lot. Sunshine reflected off the windshield of a police cruiser as it went by. “If he thinks those pills were mine, then he doesn’t know a damn thing about me. So let him go on hating me for no good reason.”

  Karl frowned but dropped it.

  A few minutes later, footsteps drew my attention. It was the first female detective who’d interviewed me . . . Detective Harper, I thought. She was the first one who looked like she actually believed my story about the envelope Dr. Fields had given me. For that reason alone, I liked her the best of anyone I’d spoken to all day. Except for Karl.

  “Hailey? Would you mind coming with me?” she said.

  I sighed and handed Karl my half-full cup. “Sorry. Guess it’s time for round four.” I started to follow Detective Harper, but the older woman shook her hea
d in a friendly way.

  “Your friend can come with you. No more questions, we’ve just got some information for you. It’s about Dr. Mark Fields.”

  My heart sped up a bit, but with Karl right behind me as a huge force of comfort, I followed Detective Harper into her office. It was small and unbelievably brown. Brown desk, brown shelves, brown carpeting that looked thin in places, brown chairs. With Karl in the tiny room, it felt too small. That was okay with me. I wasn’t afraid. When the wooden door closed behind us, and we’d all been seated, Detective Harper spoke.

  “We questioned Dr. Fields, and based on what we discovered we then obtained a warrant to search his home this afternoon,” Detective Harper said, lacing her fingers together atop the lone folder on her desk. Her hands were neat, small, with carefully shaped nails painted a neutral pink. “I know this has been a really hard day for you, Hailey, but I need you to be strong, because it’s about to get a lot harder.”

  Karl put a hand on my back as I leaned forward. “Why?”

  Detective Harper opened the file and pushed a pile of pictures my way. “He’s apparently been thinking about you a lot, Hailey. He’s been taken into custody and is awaiting psychiatric evaluation.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered against my hand as I looked down at the photos spread across Detective Harper’s desk. They were all pictures of Dr. Fields’s home, but I never could have imagined what it looked like inside. “Oh my God.”

  It was too awful to be true, but apparently it was. He’d been stalking me, obsessed with me all this time. There were pictures of me, drawings of mine, my name scrawled on his walls in red paint. My trembling hand clapped over my mouth, and I shoved the folder away. I didn’t want to see any more.

  “In reading through his emails, we think we’ve pieced together his plan. It appears that he gave you the envelope in order to get you kicked out of school. He was sure that you’d claim he gave you the drugs, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I’m not sure if you know this, but the president of Leesville College is Michelle Fields Grant, Dr. Fields’s older sister. She’s being investigated now, too. According to the emails, Dr. Fields was blackmailing her. If the college shareholders had discovered her gambling debts, she would have lost her job. In order to keep that a secret, she agreed to have you expelled, and then he would have been able to abduct you without notice. Since your family situation is unstable, he presumed no one would miss you.”

  Numbness took me over as Detective Harper continued. Her words washed over me like rain, but I was stuck beneath the umbrella of shock. Nothing could touch me until the woman brought up the issue I’d been dreading.

  “You probably shouldn’t be alone for a while. Is there someone you can stay with? I can understand if you don’t want to go back to school, but we need you to stay in Leesville for the time being. He’s in custody, but you may be needed for further questioning.”

  I looked down into my lap. “There’s nobody in town. I can go back to my dorm.”

  “Are you sure?” Detective Harper said, her brows drawing together in sympathetic concern. “It’s up to you, but—”

  “She can stay with me,” Karl interrupted. “I’ll take care of her.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered to the big guy by my side. He squeezed my hand.

  Everyone had betrayed me. My dad, my mom, and the man I’d given my heart to. Neill’s was the most painful betrayal of all. Thank God for Karl. Without him, I’d be totally alone. And he wasn’t much more than a stranger who felt sorry for me.

  As soon as this mess was over, I’d get the hell out of Leesville and never look back.

  Neill

  I rode like I could outrun the demons on my back. But no matter how many curves I took at much too high a speed, no matter how many roads I opened up my engine on, they were always there, hanging on my shoulders and laughing with evil glee at how my life had fallen apart.

  Again.

  As the light grew long across the fields, I slowed and pulled into a small rest area. From there I could watch the sun fall to the horizon as it set the sky on fire. I stared into it, not caring that it made my eyes water. Vibrant oranges, reds, pinks, and purples muddled together, spreading out from the white-hot sun at their center.

  The knot in my chest grew harder as the sun fell lower, halfway hidden by the horizon. A breeze stirred, blowing my hair across my forehead and cheek. It tickled, but I didn’t move it, only watched the play of colors in front of me, a palette I could never hope to match.

  The sunset had been something that drew us together, Hailey and me. Where had we gone wrong? How could I not have seen that history was repeating itself? Had she been that good at hiding it? Gretchen never was. I’d just looked the other way, certain that at some point I could get through to her, that she’d change.

  But it never happened.

  I looked down at the helmet in my hands, not surprised to see the small splashes my tears had made on the dark plastic. Had I been just as blind where Hailey was concerned? Should I have seen the signs and run long before now?

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said to myself as I pulled the helmet on and revved the engine of my bike. “It’s over.”

  With the headlight on, I pulled out onto the road, going much slower. The knot in my chest had cooled, less a burning rage and more a cold numbness that spread through my limbs and threatened to shut me down completely.

  I embraced it.

  Hours later, only because the gas tank was running on empty, I returned to Leesville. I thought about wandering back by the shop but decided against it. Poor Karl. He’d have shown up to an empty store, a wrecked front desk, and no clue what had happened to either me or Hailey.

  “Shit,” I said without venom as I turned in at the gas station closest to my house. Karl was probably worried out of his mind. He’d always straddled that strange line between father and friend for me. The father mode had probably kicked into high gear at this point. I owed my partner at least a phone call, I reasoned as I finished pumping the gas and returned the handle to its cradle. But it could wait until I got home.

  When I rolled the bike into my driveway, it was past the shop’s closing time. I walked slowly through the watery light spilling from the edge of the shed and into my house, ready for the hurt that would slam into me as soon as I hit the door.

  I wasn’t yet ready. The pain nearly blew me back, the cold knot in my gut flaring to life at the sight of the home where I’d spent so much time with Hailey. The table where we’d had meals, shared coffee. The counter that I’d set her on, kissing her senseless. The bedroom down the hall where we’d shared so much more.

  “Fuck,” I said as I dropped my helmet. “Dammit, Hailey.”

  Shaking my head, I crossed to the fridge and yanked it open. Beer in hand, I dropped in the nearest chair at the table, which just happened to be the one Hailey usually sat in. A hissing sound, the sharp scent of hops, and I took a deep draft before pulling my phone from the pouch in my bag.

  “Six missed calls?” I took another drink as I unlocked the screen and scrolled through. “All Karl’s cellphone.”

  I sighed and drained the can. No use putting off the inevitable. With the quick press of a button, I connected the call.

  Karl answered in only half a ring. “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Nice to hear your voice, too, man,” I said as I spun the beer’s pop-top. “I’ve been doing a bike tour of the country. Too pretty to stay inside today.”

  I could almost hear the big man shaking his head. “I’ll kick your ass for that later, but right now you need to turn the news on.”

  “What, you finally strangled Roger?” I stood and pulled open the fridge, hunting for another beer. “I doubt you’ll be convicted, the guy’s a pain in the a—”

  “Now, Neill. The TV. Channel Six.”

  “All right.” The fridge door fell shut, and I headed into the living room. I grabbed the remote from the coffee table and pressed the power button. “It’s on.
”

  “Six.”

  I fell back onto the couch, legs spread out in front of me as I flipped through the channels. “What is your problem, dude? I’ve got it on, and now it’s on . . . Channel . . . Six . . . ”

  The remote clattered to the table as I sat forward and read the headline. Leesville College Student Victim of Drug Plant, Professor’s Obsession. The pretty anchor, her bright pink suit setting off her warm brown skin, was in the middle of the story, and the mug shot of the man in the corner was disturbingly familiar.

  “ . . . today. Officials took the young woman’s testimony and were able to obtain a search warrant for the home of Dr. Mark Fields, licensed psychiatrist and professor of psychology at Leesville College. Authorities found large amounts of prescription drugs and other paraphernalia, as well as what’s being described as a ‘shrine’ to the student. Pictures, handwriting samples, even a few locks of the student’s hair were all seized from the premises as evidence.”

  The station’s logo flashed, and then a recorded interview with the chief of the Leesville Police Department played. “It was really disturbing,” said the bald man, standing in front of an unassuming brick house in what looked like the Bryant neighborhood, a subdivision in the nicer part of Leesville. “It almost looked like he’d built an altar to this young woman. There were even pictures of her sleeping, taken from the window outside her dorm room. He is in custody and will be evaluated by psychiatric staff to see if he’s competent to stand trial.”

  The picture changed back to the pink-clad anchorwoman. The man’s photo was in the corner, with “Dr. Mark Fields” beneath it. I stared, willing my stunned brain to process it. Where had I seen that guy before?

  “The student found the drugs and called the police this afternoon. They believe that the suspect intended to get the student expelled from school, although his motive isn’t clear at this time. Officials at Leesville College could not be reached for comment.”

  As the news cycle continued, I realized I was still clutching the phone to my ear. “Karl?”