Damage

by Mark Feggeler

  "Try to stay out of trouble," the deputy said, and drove away north on Gorney Street, disappearing over the crest of the first hill a few blocks up.

  Once the car was out of sight, Ray walked around the building instead of inside it. To the left was a narrow dirt path winding through overgrown brambles and tall grass to a gap in the chain link fence that separated the Citizen-Gazette's parking lot from that of the Greasy Spoon, the closest thing to a diner in Tramway County. A variety of signs, decals, flyers, ads and a tiny open/closed sign took up much of the wall of windows lining the front of the diner. Through the few unobscured gaps, Ray could see two waitresses, one wiping down tables and the other gathering sugar shakers into a bin, busy prepping for the lunch crowd.

  He pulled at the swinging glass door, also covered in propaganda, and the heavy lingering odors of bacon grease and eggs welcomed him on a wave of hot air escaping the restaurant. He took in a deep breath and could feel his stomach immediately rumble at the possibility of finally getting something to eat. Before he had the chance to take in his surroundings, a deep and friendly voice beckoned to him from somewhere off in the far corner of the restaurant. It was Walter Gannon, senior reporter at the Citizen-Gazette.

  "Sit with me!" Walter called.

  The cracked imitation leather of the bench seat caught and tugged at Ray's jeans as he tried to slide into the booth. Walter was bent over a half-eaten plate of the Double Down, a hefty menu item consisting of two eggs any style, two sausage links, two slices of bacon, two slices of toast, and a double portion of grits in a bowl.

  A short waitress with spiked blonde hair and a sprawling tattoo on her left calf brought Ray a glass of water and a set of silverware wrapped in a paper napkin. Beads of sweat held tight to her forehead.

  "Hey darling," she said. "What can I get for you?"

  Ray didn't need to read the menu. He knew it by heart. Even so, he flipped through the breakfast options, unable to make a decision.

  "Can I order from the lunch menu, Sheila?" he asked.

  The waitress smirked at him like he was a naughty boy and said he could. Ray ordered a chili cheeseburger with a side of coleslaw, an order of onion rings, and a Diet Coke. Walter asked for a bottle of hot sauce before Sheila headed off to the kitchen. He dumped a spoonful of grits on his toast and took a bite.

  "Is Becky pissed at me?" Ray asked.

  "Pretty much," said Walter dismissively between bites. "She's been worse, though."

  Ray slumped back in his seat and watched the lemon pulp settle slowly through the ice to the bottom of his glass. He picked at the last splinter of glass in his palm. It was barely a sliver and didn't hurt, not really, but it kept catching on his clothing. Looking down at his pants he realized for the first time they were stained with blood, as was the front of his jacket. Probably none of it was his. Sheila returned with Ray's soda.

  "Sorry it's so hot in here, guys," she said when she saw Ray taking off his jacket. "Our heat pump quit last night and that kitchen gets this whole place hotter than hell on a Friday night. What'd you get all over yourself?"

  It took Ray a few seconds to realize she had directed her question at him. She stood there, lip curled on one side, looking down at his chest. A quick scan of his shirt revealed a large smear of blood about the size of his fist just below the shirt pocket.

  "Oh, that's blood," he answered.

  "Nuh uh," Sheila said, her nose drawing up to complete the Elvis impersonation. Even Walter's attention was drawn away from the scrambled eggs he was generously dousing with hot sauce. Sheila leaned in for a closer look. "How'd you get so much blood on you?"

  "Is that from Evan Wallace?" Walter asked. As though sensing he appeared more interested than he intended, Walter sat back and returned to his eggs. "I'd have thought his blood would be bluer than that."

  "Evan Wallace?" Sheila said. "What happened to Evan Wallace?"

  Before Ray could formulate the best way to begin the story of the morning's adventure, Walter scooped it.

  "Somebody shot him," Walter said.

  "No way! Is that what all the noise was about this morning? I had to drop my son off to Momma, so I was running late and I heard all them sirens passing by. Were they all going out to Wilkston Creek?"

  Her question caught Ray by surprise. Many people either knew, or knew of, the Wallaces, but Sheila was one of the last people he expected to know their home address.

  "How do you know where they live?" Ray asked.

  "My Josie babysat their little girl Emma a few times," she said. Sheila grabbed a chair and pulled it under her to sit at the end of the table. "Their second baby, Anna, came along short after they finished building that big, beautiful house. Josie never got to watch the baby cause her momma quit her job to stay home with her girls after that."

  "How old are their daughters now?" Walter asked.

  "Oh, let's see. I guess Emma's about five by now, and the little one probably just turned two." Sheila smacked Ray's arm with the back of her hand. "Okay, you! Tell me what happened to Mr. Wallace?"

  This time Ray got the drop on Walter, thanks to the heaping spoonful of grits he had just ladled into his mouth. He described his morning to them, leaving out the bit about Sheriff Redmond confiscating the camera. Walter finished his meal. Sheila gawked at Ray in disbelief.

  "So that must be Mrs. Wallace's blood on you," she said.

  "Hers and some of mine," Ray said, holding up his hands to show her the dozen or so cuts and scrapes from the broken glass. "She's still alive, though. At least, I think she is. She managed to hang on until the ambulance got there."

  "Sheila!" the other waitress yelled, startling them all. "Ain't you watching your order?"

  "Oh, shit," Sheila hissed. She hustled away to the kitchen, but not before telling Ray not to go anywhere.

  Her sudden disappearance, combined with Walter's resentment toward Ray for having commandeered the conversation with such a tantalizing tale, dropped them into a silence stirred only by the rotating of the ceiling fan above them. Ray closed his eyes for a moment to enjoy the lovely calmness. Recollections of the morning he had just described jostled uneasily around in his head. There was Evan Wallace, stiff as a piece of firewood on the hearth, all his blood drained out of him like a deer ready for the taxidermist. And his wife, Correen, visions of her broken and bloodied at the base of her luxurious home, like a cardinal that fell from its nest, mixing with visions of her vivacious and striking in her simple red dress at the groundbreaking less than twenty-four hours earlier. He wondered if she were still clinging to life at the hospital, assuming she had even survived the ride there. He could see her propped up in bed, tubes and wires sustaining her and monitoring her condition.

  The distant sound of a man's voice cut through the fogginess of his thoughts. He tried to ignore it, to keep his attention on the patient before him, but the voice persisted. Then his chin sprang up from his chest and his eyes popped open.

  "Huh?" Ray mumbled.

  "I told you wake up, Sleeping Beauty," Walter said. "Your food's here."

  Ray rubbed his eyes and checked his phone. At most, he had dozed for a few minutes. He examined the chili cheeseburger and onion rings before him. Maybe because he was over-hungry, or the remembrance of the morning's details had turned his stomach, he found himself no longer interested in eating. He picked at one of the onion rings and ate it slowly just to see if his appetite might return once a little sustenance entered his system. He looked around. Two new tables of customers had Sheila momentarily distracted. The wind appeared to be picking up outside. Pine trees in the municipal park across the road swayed from side to side, pushed along by the breeze kicked up by passing eighteen wheelers.

  "You think there's any way I can avoid Becky today?" Ray asked.

  Walter wiped egg yolk off his plate with his final bite of toast. "Man up and quit being such a pussy. The quicker you get it over with, the better it is for all of us, especially today."

  "What makes today differe
nt from any other?"

  "Because she and Charlie aren't talking to each other again," Walter said. "They must have had some big blowout over the weekend. She showed up an hour early and in a piss poor mood this morning, then you dicking around with that story didn't help matters."

  "I did the best I could given the circumstances," Ray said defensively.

  "It sucked and you know it," Walter admonished. "She barely had time to fix your typos, so it went to press pretty much the way you sent it in."

  "It did suck," Ray admitted and rubbed his temples. "That's not the worst of it. Redmond confiscated the new camera. Kept saying it was evidence from the scene of the crime."

  "You lost the camera?" Walter's eyes widened and his face lit up. He broke into a loud, prolonged guffaw that drew the attention of the seven other people in the Greasy Spoon. He laughed until tears welled in his eyes. "You are so screwed!"

  Monday, Part VIII

  Walking through the Greasy Spoon parking lot to the sidewalk, then immediately right and through the Citizen-Gazette parking lot, Ray felt naked without the camera strap tugging at his neck. Instead, he carried a plastic container filled with the cheeseburger and onion rings he hadn't eaten. He paused at the door, took a deep breath, and entered.

  The sales department was empty except for Melissa, the classified ads secretary, who thankfully was busy on the phone. The receptionist's desk directly ahead of him had a hand-written make shift tent card propped on it that read "Be right back, Tammy." Every desk in the editorial department also sat empty, and the three ladies in production were so busy working on the Wednesday circular they didn't even notice Ray. The heavy aroma of his uneaten lunch mingled with those of newsprint, ink, and developing chemicals. A back note of cigarettes could be detected, thanks to the fifty years the staff was allowed to smoke in the building before state laws banned it.

  To his left, the door to Becky's office hung open. The lights were off, but he knew she would be in there, preparing for the department-head meeting the Citizen-Gazette held every Monday afternoon. Sure enough, he found her hunched over the previous week's expense reports from the editorial staff, entering them into a computer spreadsheet while failing to keep several long curls from repeatedly falling in her face. Ray sat on a beat up leather love seat directly in front of her and waited for her to finish. He could tell by her lack of civility he was not in for an easy encounter. With a final dramatic click at the keyboard, Becky slumped back in her chair and stared at the screen.

  "What happened to you today?" she asked.

  The trace of disappointment in her voice was worse than any amount anger she could throw his way. Becky waited just long enough for Ray to wonder if she were finished talking. He opened his mouth, but she cut him off before a sound came out.

  "I was expecting, at the very least, a brief article on the Lonesome Pines groundbreaking and a bunch of pictures to choose from for the cover," she explained. "Instead, I don't hear from you until late into the morning. Then you tell me you've got this incredible story about the Wallace family, but instead of giving me that, you give me this?"

  She shoved the day's newspaper toward him on her desk. From where he sat, he could see his byline positioned just above the fold. He picked it up. The ink was still moist enough to immediately smudge on his fingertips. The headline read "Tragedy for Local Business Leader" and the article filled the bottom right corner of the cover. The treatment of the story he submitted matched Ray's opinion of its quality. Two pictures, one an old headshot of Evan Wallace, the other a wide shot of the house that clearly showed the crumpled bushes where he had found Correen Wallace, were tucked inside the article. To his horror, he could make out what looked like her arm poking out from under the bushes.

  "I couldn't even run the groundbreaking," Becky complained. "First of all, you never bothered to write anything for it, and then the only picture I have from the entire event is of some couple walking away from the camera holding hands. That's great if we want to start printing greeting cards, but it doesn't help me much when I'm trying to put together a Monday edition."

  "Becky, I'm sorry," Ray said. He was in a deep hole and needed to start digging. "For starters, I thought I'd be done with Billy by seven. I would've had plenty of time to finish up Lonesome Pines if I hadn't got caught up in all that mess at the Wallace's."

  "And the pictures?" she asked. She held up a laser-printed copy of the only groundbreaking photo he had emailed across. "What is this supposed to accomplish?"

  "Actually," Ray said sheepishly. "That's the Wallaces as they were leaving the ceremony. It's probably the last picture ever taken of Evan Wallace alive."

  Becky studied the printout, then sighed heavily. "I wish you had said something," she whined. "How the hell was I supposed to know that was them? Shit, that would have been perfect."

  They sat in silence for a moment, Becky staring at the photo, Ray wondering how long he would have to sit there apologizing. The aroma rising from the warm container in his lap didn't help his attitude. He knew he needed to eat something, but he couldn't stomach the thought of eating grisly meat smothered with cafeteria quality chili and grease-soaked onion rings.

  "What is that?" Becky asked, pointing at the container.

  Ray had an idea. "It's a peace offering," he said, holding it up for her approval like a priest lifts a collection plate to the heavens. "Chili cheeseburger and rings from next door."

  She leaned forward for a better look. Ray popped the lid open. "It's too early for lunch," she said.

  "Just barely," he said.

  He could feel the tension lifting as one of the many knots in his stomach began to untie itself. She shot him a comically quizzical look.

  "You're lucky I'm hungry," she said and reached over to take the container from him. "Anyway, I wasn't talking about the food. I was asking what that stuff is all over your clothes."

  Ray explained the events of the morning, taking care to arrange them to infer there had been no spare time for making phone calls or writing articles. He went light on the gorier details in deference to Becky's appetite. She picked large bits of raw onion from the chili as she listened.

  "You lost the new camera?!" she blustered when he got to that part of his tale.

  "I didn't lose it," he said. "Redmond confiscated it. What was I supposed to do?"

  "Call me!" she barked. "He had absolutely no right to take it from you, especially since you were chaperoned the entire time by one of his own deputies. The only way he could justify it is if he thought you lifted it from their house. That's what I would have told him, and that's what you should have told him. For Christ's sake, Ray, you've got to use some common sense once in a while."

  Ray held his tongue and seethed in his seat. If the imitation leather under him could have registered the temperature of his thoughts, it would have melted. That knot in his stomach was retying itself.

  "Shit," she grumbled.

  "Do you want me to call Redmond and get it back?"

  Becky glared at him.

  "No, I'll do it," she said. "You write this up properly, like you should have done this morning. Get an update on the wife's condition, call your detective friend, or your cousin, or somebody, and get a quote on the investigation. And when you're done with that you can give me a piece I can use about Lonesome Pines before the groundbreaking is ancient history. I'll run it tomorrow, assuming I can get the camera back in time."

  Monday, Part IX

  Life at a small-town newsroom is fairly predictable.

  Each day begins quietly before sun up. A reporter, typically the one who stayed out latest the night before to cover a meeting that ran into the wee hours, shows up to begin structuring what he or she hopes will be a variety of stories on different topics discussed at that meeting. By seven o'clock, several other people wander in from the production, distribution, and advertising departments. The office is buzzing like a proper hive within another thirty minutes. As eight-thirty draws near, the ladies in advert
ising are working with production on the placement of last-minute advertisements, the odors of ink and chemicals overtake the building as the press cranks out the interior pages of the day's edition, and the editorial department changes from focused determination at the keyboards to a gab session. A reporter, typically the same one who arrived early with a slew of notes to type up, might be frantically clicking away to finish one last article before deadline.

  To be sitting at his desk at midday trying to write an article without a looming deadline proved fruitless. When one is accustomed to the application of pressure to perform, the absence of it causes a creative vacuum. Ray could have sat there for hours, rewriting the same sentences over and over until his fingers were more numb than his brain, but those hours wouldn't result in half the quality of storytelling as twenty minutes under the weight of the clock.

  Exasperated, Ray shoved the keyboard away, knocking his phone off the desk in the process. Only when replacing it did he notice the faint message light flashing. He dialed in to retrieve a message the system told him was left short after six o'clock that morning. He recognized the residential telephone number. It was his own.

  "Ray?"

  He wasn't sure how a person could slur a name with no consonants, but Jake had given it his best college try.

  "Where are you, mother fucker! I want breakfast, bitch."

  The noise of bowls, plates, cups and other sundry kitchen cabinet contents falling to the floor spiked in his ear. It didn't sound as if anything had shattered, probably helped by the fact most of Ray's kitchenware was plastic. Ray was already thinking of the best way to apologize to his neighbors for the early morning racket caused by his drunken, drug-addled friend. He hoped this time Jake had gone straight for his place, not like last time when he had banged on poor old Mr. Moore's door for fifteen minutes before realizing he had the wrong apartment. Ray spent an hour that day making excuses for Jake and trying to talk Mr. Moore out of filing a complaint with the police.