Shadows in the Water

by Kory M. Shrum

  There was silence on the line.

  Then Chaz said. “So what did she say?”

  20

  Lou stepped into King’s apartment and found herself staring at two wet ass cheeks. Not the smooth sculpted muscle one could find in the Louvre, which she wandered sometimes. But dimpled and hairy flesh.

  As soon as she saw the naked man toweling his hair and whistling a tune to himself, Lou stepped right back into dark corner from where she’d entered the apartment, and disappeared again. This time, she emerged on the balcony outside the window and rapt a fist against the glass.

  “King?” she called through the cracks.

  “Just a minute!” She heard his muttered curse and the sound of bone knocking on something. He clipped his elbow on the sink maybe. Or his toe on the side of the toilet. He was too large for that bathroom. His knees must sit against his chest when he shits.

  Loud footsteps rumbled through the apartment, the glass windows trembling as he darted past the windows into the bedroom.

  “Hold on!” he called again as if she’d given him any indication to hurry. She leaned against the balcony and scanned the streets below. The man who’d been following King, and she was certain he was following King, was on the street corner. He sucked on a cigarette, the cherry burning orange with his inhalation. A large hat hid his face.

  She’d already pointed these men out to King. She wouldn’t do it again. Hell, maybe King would get himself killed and she could stop this charade. Her aunt would be sad, sure, but Lou would have fodder for any future attempts at rehabilitation. Because it went so well last time, she would say, and that’d be the end of it.

  The balcony door creaked open and King appeared, hair still dripping. “All right, come on in.”

  Lou squeezed past him into the apartment. He was in jeans but bare-chested. A gold chain hung in the nest of his chest hair, and his feet were bare. It was always strange to see men barefooted. And he had old man feet. Toenails gnarled and yellow. He pulled a white polo shirt down over his head.

  “Thanks for knocking,” he said with a tight smile. “You would’ve gotten more than you paid for if you hadn’t.”

  “No problem.” She let her gaze glide along the apartment’s interior and the brick façade of one wall. The steam had rolled out of the shower and now hung in the air reminding her of European bars where smoking was still allowed.

  Her hair began to curl at the nape of her neck and temples from the humidity. The smell of his musky shampoo or soap permeated the whole apartment. A male scent like cologne. The way it had smelled when her father had bathed.

  There was also something fried and meaty, perhaps chicken, that’d been microwaved within the last hour.

  King continued to ruffle his hair with the white towel. “Let me run a comb through this and we’ll check on Ashley DeWitt.”

  “If she’s alive.”

  “Yeah about that,” King said throwing the towel over one shoulder. “Explain how it works.”

  Lou arched an eyebrow. “Well, if the air is going in and out and she has a pulse—”

  “No, your, what did you call it? Compass? Has it ever led you to the wrong person?”

  “That’s why we’ll begin with, ‘Hello. Are you Ashley DeWitt?’”

  “You don’t want to talk about your compass, I take it?”

  The muscles in Lou’s back stiffened. “No.”

  She didn’t want to talk about waiting in darkness. How she could clear her mind and hear what was on the other side. Or car horns. Or church bells. She didn’t want to talk about the way she felt pulled, like her legs were in a great river, and all she had to do was let go and be swept away with its current to some unfathomable shore.

  Because the conversation would do two things. First, it would give King the very inaccurate belief that he had any right to her business. Aunt Lucy’s approval or not, she didn’t know this man. Lou had assessed that King was benign, mostly. But he was a man with mental issues and a gun. That wasn’t the kind of friend she needed. Secondly, such a conversation would inevitably lead to where she’d gone and hadn’t wanted to. La Loon, without question. But there’d been other times and places as well. And Lou didn’t like to think about her compass as an intelligence of its own. Doing so forced her to consider an uncomfortable truth: she wasn’t as in control of her ability as she wanted to be.

  As a child, this was apparent. Every slip was accidental and seemingly unprovoked.

  As an adult, she’d convinced herself she’d grown into it. She chose her locations and moved where she wanted.

  But she knew a lie when she heard it.

  “Do you close your eyes, click your heels and badda boom?” King asked. Obviously, he’d missed her subtle clues to drop it. “Do you need a picture or object or—”

  Her jaw tightened. “It’s not hocus-pocus.”

  He frowned. “I wasn’t trying to insult you. I’m curious. How do you navigate?”

  Her unease grew. There was something about having a question she’d asked herself said aloud to her.

  “If it’s some big secret,” King said, looking slightly hurt. “Then forget I asked.”

  You don’t owe him anything the cruel voice inside said. Tell him to mind his own damn business. “I don’t know what to tell you.” Her voice sounded cold even to herself. Never a good sign.

  King arched his brow. “You don’t know?”

  “Can you ride a bicycle without knowing how you can do it?”

  “Hogwash. Everyone can ride a bike. Not everyone can do what you do.”

  “Tell that to an amputee without arms and legs.”

  King shut his mouth.

  “You might understand there’s balance involved and the pedals have to be moving. Otherwise, it’s more practice and instinct than anything else. This is no different.” She felt stupid suddenly and that sent her itching to pull her gun. Fuck people and their questions. What did she look like? Their schoolmarm? If he didn’t understand why the sun was orange instead of some other color, why should she have to explain why she could do the impossible?

  She turned away from him.

  “But is it like—”

  “Ask Lucy how she slips,” she said. She’ll have more patience.

  “You call it slipping.”

  “Yeah,” she said, breath softer now.

  “Why?”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re like a five-year-old tonight. Why? Why? Why?”

  Lou considered slipping King to the top of the empire state building and then letting him drop. That would shut him up. She already felt hemmed in by Konstantine’s hunt. She didn’t need to feel hounded by someone’s curiosity on top of it.

  “Did you ever end up somewhere you didn’t want to go?” he asked, tugging at his shirt.

  Oh, look. He’d reached the question on his own anyway. “You know the answer.”

  “Your dad didn’t talk about your disappearance much, but I read the report.” King stopped in front of her, buttoning the top of his shirt. “That’s how I met Lucy.”

  Lou stopped imagining his demise. “You met her when I disappeared?”

  “About two days after you came back, Thorne—your father—asked me to hunt her down. I did.”

  Lou heard her father’s voice in her mind. She heard his sharp intake of breath as he lifted her and threw her into the pool before drawing the gunfire away from her. Asking her if she wanted to spend time with Lucy was only a courtesy. He’d already decided for her.

  King pointed at the glistening scar tissue encircling her upper arm, visibly protruding from the edge of her sleeveless black shirt. The scars were faded now. Time did that to every wound, no matter how bloody.

  She hoped.

  “What took a bite out of you?” he asked as he slipped on his boots.

  “I call him Jabbers. Or her. I haven’t tried to lift its skirt to verify gender.”

  King snorted. “You named the thing that took a bite out of you. What was it? A wolf? Did yo
u end up in the Michigan wilderness or something?”

  “No,” she said. She refrained from defending the wolves. Healthy wolves didn’t attack humans. That was a misconception. Her heart hitched, and she stepped toward the window.

  “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Yes, you did.” She didn’t turn around.

  He didn’t argue. Instead, he said, “The night isn’t getting any younger, and neither am I. Let’s go.”

  Lou searched the room for a deep pocket of shadow. In the corner stood a television armoire weighing no less than two hundred pounds. It was ancient and was probably in the apartment long before King ever showed up. Otherwise, she had no idea how anyone got it up here.

  A diagonal shadow stretched from the side of the dresser across the wall, thickest in the corner.

  “Turn off the lamp,” she said. And when King did, her hand was already on his arm, pulling him toward the armoire.

  She paused a moment beside the armoire and listened. Pressing her ear to the ground and listening, feeling the vibrations through her body like a snake.

  Silence. Absolute silence.

  “What’s wrong?” King asked.

  Instead of answering, she pulled him through the thin membrane with her.

  The first thing to catch Lou’s attention was the swelling cacophony of sound. Crickets rubbing their legs together and frogs belting songs from their bloated throats.

  The moon was full and bright, eerie light stretched across an overgrown field.

  Lou took a step forward, still holding King’s elbow, and her boots disturbed soft earth. A dirt floor. No. Dirt. They stepped from the doorway of a...what? Barn? A building of some kind. She closed her eyes counted to five and then opened them again, allowing her pupils to dilate and adjust to the light.

  Then she caught the smell. Soft hay. Earth. Animal piss.

  Horse stables.

  A paddock stood empty a few yards away. They’d entered from the corner of the dark barn, standing in an empty field. The dilapidated barn barely stood. Boards jutted in all directions like crooked teeth. The stalls were empty, their doors slung wide. Hungry black mouths hanging open, waiting to be filled. And an unlatched door swinging slightly in the breeze was like a tongue lolling in the mouth. Begging for its thirst to be quenched.

  “Where the hell is this?” King asked softly. He stepped away from her into the moonlight washing the land. A field stretched in all directions, interrupted only by trees as a border. “Have you ever been wrong?”

  “No,” Lou said, anger rising in her chest. “She’s here.”

  She closed her eyes and listened. A pull formed down her right arm, and she turned in that direction. Leaving her eyes closed, she followed the pull. She let it lead her. A sharper right and then a throbbing from her belly.

  Then the smell hit her.

  She opened her eyes. She stood in one of the stalls. Half of the stall was clotted with broken boards from the exterior wall having fallen in. The rest of the soft earth was covered in a mound of sweet hay. More white moonlight filtered through the broken boards, painting the hay silver.

  “Shit,” King said behind her.

  She swept her boot over the hay, pushing clumps to the left and right, inching closer and closer to the floor with each pass. Then her boot hit something hard. This time, it wasn’t only hay turned over by the swish of her foot. A white bone revealed itself, its glow preternatural in the moonlight.

  “So she didn’t end up in the bay. But why would they bring her here?” Lou asked, bile burned in her throat. But these bones had been picked clean. Given the teeth marked on the bone itself, Lou guessed animals did the job for the killers.

  “Where’s here?” King asked.

  “I don’t know.” Lou toed the bone with her foot. It’s the radius or the ulna, she thought. She had no desire to uncover the rest of Ashley DeWitt to confirm this, or even to lean in for a closer look.

  King left the barn, stepping back into the open night, raising his cell phone toward the sky. The bright blue screen blazed in the darkness.

  “You probably won’t get a signal out here,” she said.

  “Oklahoma,” he said. He lowered the phone and pressed a series of buttons. It clicked, the recognizable sound of a screenshot being snapped. He waved it at her. “So maybe they killed her on the boat, and instead of dumping her in the bay, they drove her north and dumped her here.”

  “Or they didn’t kill her on the boat,” Lou offered. “Maybe she ran to Oklahoma, and they caught up.” A darker thought surfaced. “Or they killed her on the boat but couldn’t dump her right away.”

  King shrugged. “If she ran, there must be someone here. In Oklahoma, I mean. Parents. Grandparents. A sibling. Someone worth running to. And maybe said person heard an interesting story in the hours before she was killed. We should find out and talk to them.”

  “Or they’re dead too,” Lou said, stepping out of the stable. “I wouldn’t have left the family alive if I thought she had talked.”

  King stared at her. “Any chance you can find Daminga’s body? We might find usable evidence.”

  Lou closed her eyes and strained. But the needle spun and spun. Nothing.

  “I think she’s in the bay.” And Lou couldn’t slip into the middle of ocean.

  A cold wind blew through the sagging building, and a chill ran up Lou’s spine. She didn’t like this place. She wasn’t sure what it was. Not the corpse. But something. And she knew better than to question it. Her instincts about places were never wrong.

  Lou reached out and grabbed King. One sidestep into an adjacent stable, one with its rear wall still intact, and then they were in his apartment again, standing in his bathroom. The toilet pressed against the back of Lou’s leg.

  “That was abrupt,” he said. He frowned at her. “We could have gotten pictures. Taken notes. I could have swept the barn for evidence. Tire tracks. Fibers. Anything.”

  “It wasn’t safe to stay there,” Lou said. “I need to go.”

  What she hadn’t said was, or run the risk of stranding you there.

  Standing in the darkness, she could feel her compass whirling. Had the barn been unsafe, or was it the pull of something greater that had triggered her?

  Threaded tendrils of nervousness tugged on her arms and legs, whispering into her dark heart there was another place she needed to be. Another place she had to go.

  She knew this feeling and recognized its meaning. And with understanding, the heartbeat in her chest began to thump unevenly, as if straining under the pressure of wanting to be in two places at once.

  “Yeah, okay. I can do the rest alone,” King said. He shifted his weight. “Hey, are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer him. She gave herself over to the current and was gone.

  21

  When Lou woke, something was wrong. The light streaming from the high windows was purple. The sun was dipping low behind the trees, its last eye open on the horizon. Under her pillow, her fingers curled around her gun and found the metal warm from the feathers incubating it throughout the day.

  She heard a noise again. A small sound jerked her upright, gun pointed.

  “Two for two.” Lucy placed a sandwich wrapped in glossy newsprint on the counter and stuck her hand into the brown paper bag again. She gave Lou a half-smile from the kitchen island as she peeled back the wrapper. “One of these days you’re going to blow my head off and save me the trouble of worrying about you.”

  “Stop creeping up on me.” Lou lowered the gun. The smell of red onions flooded the studio. Her stomach rumbled its response. When was the last time she’d eaten? She wasn’t sure. Sometimes when she was working, she’d forget to eat. The task distracted her. It was only when she worried her weak limbs or unclear head would cost her that she bothered to make time for the inconvenient task.

  The burger, she remembered. She’d eaten a burger at the vegan fast food place about twenty hours ago.

  “What are you doing here
?” Lou asked.

  “Can’t a loving aunt bring her niece a veggie loaf sandwich when she wants to? I got your favorite. Extra avocado, extra oil, and extra oregano. Come eat with me.”

  Lou thumbed the safety back on and disentangled her limbs from the bedding.

  “Don’t you get hot sleeping by the window?” Aunt Lucy asked. She nodded at a barstool by the island where she’d spread the sandwich on its wrapper.

  Lou slid onto it, placing her gun on the counter beside the wrapper. It clanked heavy against the granite surface. “It’s the best light in the apartment. I don’t have to worry about waking up in Bangkok.”

  Aunt Lucy popped open a bag of chips and dumped them onto the paper spread beneath Lou’s sandwich. BBQ. Her favorite. But Aunt Lucy was frowning. “Do you still slip in your sleep?”

  “No,” Lou said, stuffing three chips into her mouth at the same time. The oils began melting the moment they hit her tongue. The muscles in her back loosened. “Because I sleep by the window, in full daylight.”

  Her aunt plucked a chip off her spread and made a pensive sound. “I thought that was something you’d outgrow. I did.”

  “We’ve already established I’m different.”

  Lucy squeezed her elbow. “Different in the most charming ways, my love.”

  Lou arched an eyebrow.

  “What did you really come for?” Lou knew the food was her aunt’s way of disarming her. After all, if someone shows up with a pint of ice cream or a pan of tiramisu, it’s hard not to welcome them with open arms.

  Lucy put a chip into her mouth and said, “How is it going with Robert?”

  “Robert?” Lou laughed, charmed by her aunt’s growing blush. “I’ve been calling him King. Aren’t cops last-name-only?”

  Lucy gave a curt nod, conceding the point. “You’re right. Your father went by Thorne.”

  Her heart fluttered at the mention of her father. Somewhere in her stomach a snake coiled tighter. She could feel his scruffy cheeks against hers. The sound of his boots hitting the floor when he came home.