Messages, a Psychological Thriller

by Chris Dougherty

  Riddels’ hand, clutching and releasing, clutching and releasing. “You just what? Tell me, James. I want to know how you knew. How you knew where to look. How you knew Simonelli was involved.”

  “I can show you my notes. I’ve been getting these…messages…for a year now,” he glances at Riddel, trying to gauge the emotion on his face. “It started at work, really; I started to notice certain patterns in the numbers. They matched up with certain phrases, and when I put the numbers in order, the phrases just jumped out. I thought maybe they were involved–my company, I mean–but now I’m not sure. Because the messages started appearing…everywhere.” He feels the itch in his mind deepen and widen, a chasm of need. He feels hot, remembering, recalling that sense of discovery. He turns and looks at Riddel, eyes bright, features pulled taut.

  “The messages were in everything,” James continues, “but hidden, buried beneath everyday things. But once I started to see the patterns, it was like a world beneath the world. And I realized I was being led. To the object. But I didn’t know what the object was until I actually saw it. I didn’t know what, exactly, I was looking for. Just that I had to find it.”

  Riddel is staring at him intently; every ounce of his attention is focused on everything James is saying. His hand on James’ shoulder has stilled. Now it is just a warm weight. Holding him in place. James feels his shoulder thrum against Riddel’s heavy hand.

  Riddel is nodding. “Yes. It’s you. Okay, that makes sense.” He turns and digs a small notebook from his pocket. “Give me more information so I can dig deeper. Like I said, I may need to get the FBI involved. Maybe the CIA, depending on what that object does.”

  “What it does,” James says. His voice is flat. He hasn’t even thought about the reason for the object. The chasm of itch crackles, and James puts three fingers to his temple.

  “Yeah, you know, like, is it a weapon? Is it some kind of spying device? Is it…now, don’t laugh, James, but have you considered that it could be from outer space? Some kind of alien technology?”

  James shakes his head, not in negation just in bewilderment. “No, I hadn’t thought…of any of those things. What information do you need?”

  “Give me the name of your old company, your bosses there. Where you worked before that. Your parents’ names. Where you grew up. Friends’ names.” He has a tiny pen poised over the pad, making his fingers look incongruously large and gnarly knuckled.

  “My parents’ names?” James asks. His voice has gone flat.

  Riddel looks at him, head tilting questioningly. “Well, yeah, that and the other things I said.”

  James reaches for the steering wheel and wraps his hands around it at ten and two. He stares straight ahead.

  “Margaret. Margaret James.”

  “Your mother’s name is Margaret James?” Riddel asks, pen hesitating over the pad. “James is her last name?”

  James nods, jaw clenched.

  “Is that your last name, too?”

  James nods again. His body is tight, nearly thrumming with tension.

  “Your name is James James?” Riddel rests the pad on his knee. His voice is gentle.

  James shakes his head.

  “James, what’s your first name?”

  James opens his mouth, and a soft ‘buh’ puffs out. He puts his lips together and ‘buh’ again. Then Riddel’s hand is back on his shoulder. Massaging. Encouraging. “Tell me, James. Tell me your name.”

  A violent pulse runs through James’ body, and then he settles.

  “Baby Boy. Baby Boy James. That’s my name.”

  Chapter 24

  Lacey stares down at the dead phone in her hand. She shivers, not sure if it is because of the cold air at her back or the tone of James’ final comment before he disconnected.

  “…you might be forced to change your mind about that.” What the hell was he talking about? How had things gone bad so quickly? Or had she been missing the signs all along? Just like before. Just like, it seems, she is doomed to do forever.

  “You’re all set,” Henry says.

  She turns to smile at him, but the smile is slow to appear and disappears after one small quirk of her lips. She glances again at her phone. She shakes her head and runs her thumb over the numbers. Should she call him back? He had sounded so…

  “It seems like I keep asking this, but,” Henry says, “are you okay?”

  Lacey looks at Henry and nods, dropping her phone in her purse.

  “It’s just been such a…crazy day, I guess. A crazy week, really.” She sighs and tilts her head back, closing her eyes. She puts one hand to her forehead, as though shading her eyes, but it is dim in the garage, almost dark. Her lips tighten, and her chin quivers slightly, almost imperceptibly. Henry sees one tear slide slowly down her temple toward her ear. He feels a panicky, protective rush of feeling. This isn’t like when his mom cries. This isn’t ugly wailing and sobbing and screaming. Lacey’s tears look like fatigue, defeat. He has an overwhelming desire to pull her to him, surround her in the protective circle of his arms. But she’s too…she might get mad. Start screaming at him. Who knows? So he takes a step back, instead, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Was it bad news?” he asks, voice neutral.

  She opens her eyes without removing her hand, and now it looks like she is trying to see him over a distance. She is even squinting a bit, confused.

  “The phone call,” Henry says, nodding toward her purse. “Was it bad news?”

  She lowers her hand and then clasps both hands together in her lap, staring at them. “I think so, yes. I was leaving my boyfriend today. I have a bag packed in the car. Things have been getting really bad, in the last few days especially, but even before then, really.”

  “Bad how?” Henry’s voice is deeper, leveled with concern. He takes a cautious step forward and then sits in the red plastic chair across from hers.

  “Nothing violent…I mean, not toward me, it’s just always been more…” Lacey trails off, thinking, trying to find a way to explain. But how do you ever explain your feelings? It never ends up sounding right. “He makes me feel badly about myself, about how I do things. He’s always…I don’t know…trying to change me, rearrange me somehow. I know that doesn’t sound all that bad, but…” She glances at Henry and shakes her head. She’s not making any sense, but amazingly, she sees recognition in his eyes. Understanding.

  “He makes you feel like you’re doing it all wrong,” Henry says.

  She nods, grateful that he understands, and she wonders about him. She takes in the defiant motorcycle jacket, the carefully held, almost wary expression that has been on his face since she’d met him at the funeral.

  “But in the last few days, it’s not even that, it’s worse. He came home Monday morning with a huge gash in his forehead, there was blood everywhere.” She blanches a little, remembering. “But he acted as though it were nothing. He wouldn’t even really acknowledge it. I thought he’d been in a car accident, it looked that bad. I had wanted to call an ambulance.”

  Henry, who’s seen his share of brutal injuries, sits quietly, listening. Her voice amplifies the shock she felt that morning as she recalls the scene, relating it back to him, her manner becoming almost child-like in her recalled horror.

  “And when I got home that night, and I saw that his Impala was parked where it’s always parked, like he hadn’t gone anywhere that day…and my first thought was that he was dead inside the apartment. I’d fucked up by not calling the ambulance because he told me not to and he had died…I didn’t even stay home from work that day because I knew he didn’t want me to. And I realized that’s the point it’s gotten to. That I always do what he says.” Fresh tears leak slowly down her cheeks.

  A brief tickle of memory whispered through Henry’s mind when she began her story…something about the car, the type…but now she is crying, and it distracts him from the vague idea that he had missed something.

  “Then he wasn’t there when I got up on Tuesd
ay–I work nights–but there was this weird note. It just made me feel so…it was so damn deranged, the way it was written…I felt like I was high, you know? Like, it made sense, but I couldn’t get the sense of it.” She checks with Henry again, and he nods, a slight smile on his face. He knows what high feels like. She smiles, too, ruefully, and then sobers.

  “But that night when I got home from work, he was asleep again. But he was having crazy nightmares…yelling stuff and striking out. It scared me. And Wednesday morning, he was gone again. And I sat down to eat, and I was reading the paper. And I saw the article about the Simonellis, and I started to read it, just because it’s the next town over, you know? And I know it sounds crazy, really crazy, but I started to get this idea…that…” Lacey stops talking and runs her hands nervously over her hair, smoothing her already smooth ponytail.

  Henry leans forward and takes her hands in his. “Started to get the idea that…?”

  “That James was involved. That he had…been involved in the Simonellis’ deaths. But it sounds so ridiculous, especially when I say it out loud!” Lacey’s eyes have gone wide, and she pulls back slightly. Henry keeps her hands in his and won’t let her pull too far back, won’t let her back away from what she is saying.

  “Did he know them?” he asks.

  Lacey shakes her head. “Not that I know of. I’ve been living with James for three years, and I would swear he’s never mentioned them. We’re not…we don’t have a lot of friends or anything. We don’t do a lot of socializing.” Even as she says it, she realizes it’s more than that; it’s so much more than not being social. They don’t have only a handful of friends or just a few, they don’t even have just one or two couples that they hang out with…they have no one.

  No friends at all.

  Lacey looks up in shock, wondering how she let everything slide so far. Of course, she’d left all her old friends behind when she’d moved here with Michael when she’d been nineteen. But she’d made a few friends at her various jobs, or in adjacent apartments. Lacey was by nature a social girl. Now she looks back at the past year, the past eighteen months…had they gone out with anyone besides each other? It doesn’t seem possible, but the truth is, they hadn’t. Movies, concerts, dinners–they’d done all those things, but always just the two of them.

  She tries to remember the last time she’d talked to any of the fledgling friends she’d made. It has been a while…two months? Three? More? Switching to a night shift position had reduced most of her friendships to the occasional phone call, but there were still weekends, holidays. She could have made plans. She could have gone out with them, even if James wouldn’t go. And that, she realizes, is why she has let her relationships dwindle. Because James had refused–slowly, but steadily–to have anything to do with anyone. Anyone but her.

  “What? What’s wrong,” Henry asks, gripping her hands tighter.

  “Nothing, I just…I just realized something. That I don’t talk to my friends anymore.” She feels a bit breathless, almost faint. Then her stomach growls.

  Henry stands and pulls Lacey up with him. “Let’s get something to eat. We can talk more at the diner. You mind driving?”

  She laughs. It’s shaky and faint, but still a laugh. “No, I don’t mind. Thanks for fixing my car, by the way.” They are standing face to face, holding hands, and she notices he is only a few inches taller than her. And he’s so skinny, so whippet-thin; she might actually weigh more than him. She smiles at him. and a smile begins to emerge on his lips, but then he steps back, dropping her hands.

  “Yeah. No problem.” His head is down, and he shuffles his feet. “I have to ask you to pay for the battery. Sorry about that, but…”

  Lacey blushes. “Gosh, no, that’s all right! Of course I’ll pay. I can’t thank you enough for doing the work.” She pulls her purse around in front of her and fishes her wallet out. “Is a credit card okay? You guys take Visa?” She has pulled her only credit card from the inside pocket, and she extends it to Henry. He grabs the wrist of the hand holding the wallet and turns her opened wallet toward himself, leaning close to it.

  “Hey!” Lacey says, alarm raising her voice.

  He glances up at her. “Who’s this?” he asks, pointing at the picture of Lacey and James in the first clear pocket.

  “That’s me,” Lacey says, and then, feeling stupid, “oh, and James, too. I mean…that’s me and James.”

  Henry looks at her, his brows drawing together and mouth opening slightly. His lips move as if he is about to say something, but then he tugs Lacey by the wrist to the area of the cash register. The very last of the daylight melts into the shop through the big plate glass window. Henry bends over the picture again, then slowly stands up straight and drops her hand with the wallet.

  “What the hell?” he says, almost under his breath. He is looking down, thoughtful, but then looks up at Lacey.

  “I saw him. The day…the morning…the Simonellis were killed.”

  Lacey shakes her head. “You saw him? What do you mean? Where?”

  “At my house. He was riding by…real shady like. I noticed because it was so early and…” he doesn’t want to tell her that he also noticed because he recognized the surveying quality of the guy’s movements. The way he seemed to be casing everything. “I was dropping my mom’s Taurus off to her, but I was at the curb in it, waiting for a friend who was coming to pick me up…” He closes his eyes, casting his mind back. Seeing the lights behind him, in the rearview, the slow crawl of them along the road next to him. “Does he drive an Impala? A gray one?”

  Lacey nods slowly, but she is more confused than upset. “That’s wild. What a weird coincidence.”

  “Lacey, you don’t get what I’m saying,” he says. “I live behind the Simonelli’s.”

  Lacey sits picking at her BLT club. She has eaten one-quarter of the sandwich and is now fishing the bacon from the remainder. She savors each crisp, salty piece, even as she turns Henry’s information over in her mind.

  She would have thought that hearing what Henry had to say would have convinced her that James had…something…to do with what happened to the Simonellis. But now she finds that even with his corroborating–and disturbing–addition, she feels actually less inclined to believe. There must be some other explanation.

  She shifts, drawing her legs up under her. The booth seat is comfortably worn vinyl with a shiny, laminate table. The entire diner sparkles with chrome edging. Lacey has never been here before, didn’t know about it–it is a tiny diner in the heart of Essex.

  Henry sits across from her, half his French dip and most of his fries are gone. Lacey glances at his thin frame and wonders where he puts it.

  The waitress comes by and asks if they need anything else. Her tone is cool, and she looks past them out the window as she takes Lacey’s glass for a refill.

  “She’s kind of miserable,” Lacey says, pulling the last layer of her sandwich apart, hunting more bacon.

  Henry glances absently at their waitress. She’s probably about as old as Henry’s mom–and she is stout without being fat. Her uniform looks like something straight out of the fifties, and her hair is big enough to match.

  “She doesn’t like me,” Henry says, neutrally.

  Lacey glances at the waitress and then back to Henry, frowning.

  “Why?”

  Henry fidgets with his fries, picking one up and dredging it through the ketchup but then putting it back down. He takes a deep breath and looks at Lacey.

  “’Cause I’m not a good guy. You should probably know that right up front.”

  Lacey shrugs and smiles cautiously. “You seem nice.”

  Henry feels the need to tell her yes, yes, I am nice! Everyone is wrong about me! They’ve got it all wrong! But something even stronger makes him want to tell her the truth. To be as honest with her as he can.

  “Well, I’m not. I was a bad kid. I did bad things.”

  Lacey doesn’t say anything, but she is looking at him cautiously
, and Henry hates that what he is going to say next will make that caution turn to out and out warning lights flashing at a million watts.

  “I’ve been to jail for robbing houses.”

  Lacey blinks, and her hands stop picking at the sandwich. She folds her fingers together and clasps her hands on the table. “Recently?” she asks.

  Henry sits back. “No, not recently. It was juvie. We were fifteen, sixteen. We broke into people’s houses when they weren’t there, and we’d steal their booze. Money too, if we could find it.” Somehow, the money is more shameful than the alcohol, and Henry feels his face grow warm, but he continues. “Me and a friend of mine, we were just…dumbasses, you know? We’d knock down mailboxes. Throw things through people’s windows. Key cars.” He looks toward the waitress. “Come to places like this and generally act like assholes. Dick around with the waitresses and not leave tips. Stupid shit like that.” He shakes his head, disgusted. Disgusted with himself. It sounds so bad when you say the shit straight out like this.

  “Did you ever hurt anyone?”

  Arch flashes through his mind, baby Arch, crying. Henry had knocked him down, one of the many times…but Henry can’t tell Lacey that. Maybe someday, but not this day.

  “You mean, like, mug somebody or something? No. We never did anything like that. I used to get in fights a lot in school. But that’s mutual combat, right?” He tries a small smile, but her face is sober. Here we go, he thinks, she’s out of here.

  “Why?” she asks.

  He sits up straighter. “Why what?”

  “Why did you get in fights at school so much?”

  Henry feels confused, like she has missed the first things he said. Or she is ignoring them.

  “I guess…I guess people just pissed me off,” he says and tries another smile.

  “What were you so pissed about?”

  Without thinking, Henry says, “My stepdad, mostly. He was a dick.”

  She is looking at him again, her eyes a clear green. He sees no pity, but there is compassion. He feels his throat tighten, and he swallows convulsively.