Messages, a Psychological Thriller

  He looks at Mrs. Simonelli, again. Her expression in death as sweet as it was in life. Arch reaches out, tentatively, and touches his fingertips to her hands. Bill sighs behind him.

  He turns to Mr. Simonelli. They have an ascot around Mr. Simonelli’s neck although Arch had never seen him wear one in life. But he knows why it’s there. Probably better than anyone here, he knows why they have had to wrap that scarf around Mr. Simonelli’s neck.

  Arch’s eyes travel from the ascot to Mr. Simonelli’s face, and he shudders with relief, his tense muscles relaxing. It looks like Mr. Simonelli. Nothing of what his final minutes must have been like show in his face. He looks…composed. Arch reaches out, unthinking, and puts his fingers to Mr. Simonelli’s face and then to the hands folded on his chest.

  There is a tremor on his back from Bill’s hand as Bill begins to cry quietly behind him.

  Arch leans over and kisses Mr. Simonelli’s cheek. He never would have done that when Mr. Simonelli was alive, but now he wishes he had. Behind him, Bill’s quiet crying turns into sobs, and Amy steps forward to take him in her arms. Arch turns to Mrs. Simonelli and kisses her cheek, too. It is soft, unbelievably soft. More family is coming forward, hugging each other, turning and hugging other family members. Once again, Arch is passed from relative to relative, and he’s right, it is like being tossed by a wave at the shore, just as he had suspected. But it’s different from that at the same time, slow and gentle, warm and enveloping. Muffling.

  He thinks he’d like to be buffeted by these people forever. Then he wouldn’t have to think about what happened to the Simonellis’ anymore.

  Chapter 19

  After the service begins and Arch is seated within the Simonelli clan, the door at the back of Holy Eucharist opens, and Henry slips inside. He scans the crowd but has no real hope of seeing Arch or his mom–there are just too many people here. He looks to his right and sees a space against the wall behind the last row of pews. He’ll wait there until he spots Arch.

  He squeezes in between a middle-aged man in jeans, chambray shirt, and yellow work boots–probably a town worker–and a pretty blonde. She’s not really dressed for a funeral, either. She has on black leggings, ankle-high boots and a long green sweater-dress kind of thing with a soft gather just under her breasts. Henry thinks it’s called an umpire waist or something. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and her eyes are almost the same green as her dress.

  Henry wishes he were dressed a little better. He has on plain Ryder jeans, a black T-shirt and his leather motorcycle jacket. Fuck it, he thinks, nothing I can do about it now. He’s never been to a real funeral before, only seen them on TV and in the movies.

  He leans against the wall, shoulder to shoulder with the blonde. Better to rub shoulders with her than with the dude, he thinks. Once he settles, he feels her trembling, and he glances at her out of the corner of his eye. She is facing front, but he sees her eyes scan back and forth as though she is trying to find someone in the crowd. Her trembling is constant, and Henry looks down to the jacket she has folded over her arms, wondering why she doesn’t put it on if she’s so cold.

  The light scent of her perfume drifts over to him, and he breathes in slowly but deeply. She smells good. Henry looks at her again, at the swell of her breasts under the soft green knit, the curve of her hips, even the soft down on her forearms. Her arms are smooth but tense looking. No goose bumps, he thinks, huh. She isn’t shivering, he realizes, it’s more of a…his memory is jogged and he then all at once he recognizes the thrumming of her body–that is adrenalin, he thinks. Pure adrenalin. He knows because he’d shaken that way when he and dip-shit Mark had gone busting into houses. What the hell? he thinks.

  “Are you okay?” he asks her, quietly, so no one will be disturbed. Also, so no one will hear him talking to this girl and think he’s a loser, first, for hitting on someone so obviously out of his league, and second, for hitting on someone at a funeral.

  She looks at him, and her eyes are huge, but she is dry-eyed. She shakes her head no.

  “You’re not okay?” he asks and turns more toward her.

  “Huh? No, I mean, yes, I’m okay. I’m fine.” She shakes her head slightly.

  “Did you know them?” he asks, nodding toward the front of the church.

  She is scanning the crowd again. Her eyes shift from one pew to another. She glances at him and then away, drawing her arms up closer to her chest. “No.”

  Henry’s face colors slightly. Oooookay, he thinks, hell with you, girl. He turns to face front, crossing his arms.

  Lacey scans the crowd again, trying to go slowly, to look at each person individually. But she doesn’t have much time. She can’t be late to work–especially not on a Thursday night because she doesn’t work on Fridays. She’ll need her job more than ever now because she’s decided it will be better to rent in the hood like she used to do than to live with whatever James has become.

  There is one medium-sized suitcase in her trunk packed with her bare essentials. She doesn’t know if she’ll be able to go back for the rest of her things. She’ll stay in a hotel tonight.

  She is looking for James. But would he come here if…she shakes her head again, trying to clear it. Trying to think straight.

  When she had finally read the article about this couple, their brutal death, the approximate time, she’d immediately associated it with James’ injuries and the odd things he’d been doing since Monday. Of course she had. It had been extremely traumatic, and the fact that he hasn’t yet said how he was injured, the fact that he has become stranger than ever…she shakes her head again and shifts slightly, realizing that her eyes are skating too quickly over the pews. She’ll never recognize him if she doesn’t calm down.

  She takes a breath. And starts again.

  On that Monday after he got out of the shower, he had locked himself in his office until she left for work in the late afternoon. His answers through the door were brief, tense. She’d gone to work in a daze, almost nauseous with fear that he would somehow be dead by the time she got home…from a concussion or from blood loss. How much blood had he lost? It had to have been a substantial amount.

  When she got home that night at almost eleven, he was in bed. Asleep. Normally he didn’t go to bed until well after midnight. The bedroom was dark, but the light from the hallway was enough that she could see him huddled under the covers on his side of the bed, his back to her. She tiptoed to his side and settled gently on the edge of the bed.

  She held her breath, listening for his, watching his chest. He breathed slowly and evenly, showing no signs of distress, deeply asleep. As her eyes adjusted to the dark of the bedroom, she could begin to see his face and was relieved that the injuries didn’t look as bad as she remembered from that morning. There was a large bandage covering most of his forehead–he must have gone to the doctor. She told herself this, but didn’t believe it, not really. James wasn’t one to change his mind.

  His eye was still swollen, still purple. His hand was curled under his cheek as though he had fallen sleep trying to relieve some of the pain and pressure on that side of his face. Her heart contracted in sympathy, and she put a hand gently on his shoulder. She leaned over and kissed his un-injured cheek. Lightly, barely connecting. More for herself, she knew, than for his benefit. After all, he was asleep–didn’t even know she was here.

  She tiptoed back out the bedroom door and closed it behind her. She started down the hall to the kitchen for a glass of wine. It would help relax the last vestiges of worry from her overworked mind.

  She passed the office door but then stopped, thinking. She went back to it and put her hand on the doorknob. She opened the door halfway, enough to peek in and survey it from the safety of the hallway. Nothing out of place, of course. Nothing would ever dare be out of place in…then she saw that the bottom drawer of the file cabinet was open by about an inch. A thick line of darkness, darker than the rest of the office, ran across the top of the drawer.

  Lac
ey shivered lightly as she stood in the office doorway. She glanced back to the bedroom, swallowing. Then she pushed the door open farther and stepped into the office.

  She looked at the file cabinet and realized it must have been a trick her eyes played on her in the dark–the drawer was closed as firmly as it ever was. She shook her head and let out a small, breathy laugh. She’d really been psyching herself out all day today. Maybe she needed a Valium instead of wine. Better yet, with the wine.

  The next day, Tuesday, he was gone by the time she woke up. There was a folded-over note on the table on her side of the bed. James’ handwriting on the front: Laycee. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. He had misspelled her name. A small shiver had gone through her. I’m Lacey, she thought, not Laycee.

  She opened the note. It was four terse lines:

  Laycee,

  Stay out of the office.

  It’s personal in there.

  I, James

  She reread it. She knew it made sense of a sort, the message itself was perfectly clear, but it had an almost English as a second language feel. Or poetry. It seemed so oddly structured–the words not quite the right ones, but bent and forced into place anyway. And he had misspelled her name again. Deliberately. And what is with the ‘I’ in front of his name? If James was his middle name, she hadn’t known about it.

  On her way into the shower, she crumpled the note up and threw it in the trash. And she realized she was moving from sympathy for his injuries to anger–anger at his silence and high-handedness with her name, the office, their lives together. And she found there was a good portion of anger in there for herself, too. For letting it get like this. For not seeing.

  She hadn’t heard from him all day; her calls to his cell phone went unanswered, but he was in bed when she got home Tuesday night.

  She tiptoed in again, but didn’t go to his side of the bed. She stood quietly, arms folded, and considered her situation. She’d have to leave him, she was sure of that. Regardless of where she would have to move, regardless of what her parents said, she had to put an end to this…it was just unhealthy.

  James shifted violently on the bed, his arm punching out at nothing, and she took a step back but managed to hold in a gasp. He was murmuring, a slushy, confused-sounding stream of consonants and vowels. Lacey leaned over, straining to hear, but because his back was still to her, it was muffled, nonsensical.

  She tiptoed to his side, but stopped at the foot of the bed, looking down in amazement. A pair of pants lay crumpled on the floor, a T-shirt, one sock in an inside-out ball and another almost under the bed…all his. A runnel of cold wormed through her insides. He would never…ever…have let his clothes lay in a heap on the floor like that. This was a man who would make the bed before he got back into it when he’d come down with the flu and decided to stay home from work. Who’d laundered a vomit-tinged towel as soon as he’d wiped his mouth with it–and dried and folded it, all while in the grip of a hundred and three fever.

  Reflexively, she looked to the bed, at the huddled, anonymous form under the covers, and it raced through her mind that it wasn’t James lying there. Like some hideous, adult version of Goldilocks and the three bears, a rapist had found her bed to be just right.

  But of course it was James in the bed. The white bandage gave it away first, and then of course, his face, however badly swollen, was still recognizably his.

  He spoke again, a muttering that wound down to a grunt. She stepped closer still, straining to make out the words and finally, she could.

  “I’ll take it,” he murmured and then grunted, his arm striking out. “It’s mine, old man, mine to…” His arm made that snatching, grabbing motion again, coming very close to Lacey’s neck, and she stepped back sharply. His voice trailed off, becoming grunts and random vowels.

  Lacey decided she didn’t want to hear any more, and she backed out of the room, closing the door behind her. She slept that night on the couch, feeling almost as nervous and alone as she’d ever felt in her crappy apartment in the ’hood. It occurred to her that the gates of a gated community couldn’t always keep out the bad things–not if the bad things had been issued gate keys.

  So thinking, Lacey fell asleep, and her dreams were terror-filled romps with dragons and keeps, trolls and evil princes reciting incomprehensible poetry.

  On Wednesday morning, Lacey sat at the breakfast bar that separated kitchen and living room. James was out. She didn’t know where. He hadn’t spoken to her since Monday–she didn’t count his shitty note as communication.

  I think my camel’s back, she thought, has finally been broken.

  She set her laptop on the granite in front of her and scanned the headlines while she ate a cup of yogurt. She’d always liked reading at the breakfast bar, but be honest with yourself, she thought, where else can you set up your laptop? You’re not allowed to put it anywhere else, are you? She looked into her yogurt and swirled it with the spoon.

  She hadn’t been able use James’ office–hadn’t been allowed: that was the truth of it. She had tried early on, when she’d first moved in, but he was so structured. So strenuously neat. He’d come in while she was using his computer and fidget around behind her. If she had tilted the screen to see it better, as soon as he sat down he’d tilt it back into place and heave an enormous sigh. A blustery, irritated sigh. For the first six months or so, he’d tried to pretend that he was joking. That it was kind of an act. But she’d seen through that.

  She’d congratulated herself on recognizing the behavior so quickly but then wondered, what good does it do to know something and not act on it?

  He’d touch everything on the desk, a quick tap, as if to reassure himself it was there and in the right place. A tap for the pen cup (it held no pens; pens were lined up in the center drawer), a tap on the base of the lamp, a tap on the stapler and one for the tape dispenser, lined up side by side. She’d never seen him tape or staple anything. She was pretty sure the only reason he had them there was because they matched the pen cup.

  Then one day he’d come home with this laptop and told her it was a gift. An Apple MacBook. She’d loved it, of course, but then he had said, “This should keep you out of the office.” He said it in an ‘I’m joking’ tone of voice, but she’d been hurt. She knew it wasn’t a joke. It had taken a lot of the shiny off the new toy, that’s for sure, and she hadn’t touched it for several days.

  The worst part was his remorse. She knew that he was fully aware of just how messed up he was and she could tell…he hated it. He was like a drug addict, but his drug of choice was order, neatness; he loved it and loathed it at the same time.

  But now she decided there wasn’t anything she could do about it. It was too much. She just wanted out.

  She closed the laptop, putting it to sleep, and took her yogurt cup to the sink. She washed it out–with hot water–then put it in the recycling bucket under the sink.

  Then she pulled over the local paper, the county one. She wanted to look for apartments. It covered eight towns, including Voorhees, Cherry Hill, Essex and five others.

  She was in such a hurry to get to the classifieds that she ignored the front page, but now she saw the medium-sized headline on an inside page: BRUTAL SLAYING OF WELL-LIKED LOCALS, continued from page 1. She turned back to page one and realized why she’d missed it. The picture was big, even for a front page, but it was of a plain little Cape Cod-style house, so grainy with dots that it was easy to overlook the very far right where an EMT was rolling a stretcher out of frame. Cropped as it was, the EMT didn’t seem to play very much importance, as if the house itself were the story. This headline read: LOCAL COUPLE WELL-KNOWN, WELL-LIKED. At first, Lacey assumed the editor had made one hell of an error, not putting something about the ‘slaying’ in the front-page headline as he had in the inside one. It would have caught a lot more attention. But after skimming the first paragraph, she realized this news was a couple of days old but still big enough to warrant front-page coverage.

&n
bsp; She went back to the beginning of the article to read it more carefully. Essex was the next town over–that gave her the shivers.

  The second paragraph had briefly outlined the original details of the story. The bodies had been discovered by a neighborhood boy (poor kid! she thought) in their garage. The 911 call had come in at eleven minutes after two p.m. The man had been very brutally beaten to death with his own garden shovel. From the amount of blood, the police surmised that the assailant or assailants had lost blood, too. Possibly quite a bit. The article said that the attacker was most likely sporting a very bad head wound–there had been hair and skin found at the scene. They were working on typing the blood and tissue. The woman had died of blunt-force trauma. She had either tripped or been pushed down the shallow steps from the house to the garage. They hadn’t been dead for very long, and the paper intimated that the neighbor boy was probably lucky not to have entered during a crime in progress. There might have been three victims if he had.

  Then the article went on to talk about the Simonellis, their family and contributions to the town and community. Mr. Simonelli had been with the Township for forty-two years, working his way up through different departments until he’d retired from the Construction Planning and Zoning Department. Mrs. Simonelli had been a homemaker (Lacey found that touchingly old fashioned and thought of her own mother), and they had five children, eighteen grandchildren and a handful of great-grandkids. The article hadn’t named them all.