Messages, a Psychological Thriller

  “Night, Lacey!” the art director calls as she walks by his office.

  “Night, Mark!” she calls and waves. She still feels a little shy around him. Around all the daytime people, really. But she supposes she’ll grow accustomed to it after a while.

  She is already accustomed to the extra money.

  She walks across the parking lot to her Mazda, pulling her coat around herself against the wind. This winter has been brutally cold and snowy, making her feel closed in. It is only February, but she feels like this winter has been the equivalent of two winters, maybe even three.

  There is a furtive, scuffing noise from behind her, and her hand tightens on her keys as her heart leaps. She turns abruptly, a breathy scream issuing from her throat, arms flung out, and nearly knocks into a lady she vaguely recognizes from the customer service department.

  The woman is bundled into a long, black coat with a scarf tied around her gray curls. She steps back with a startled, “Oh!” and stumbles, tripping over her own boots, unaccustomed to the bulky tread.

  “I’m so sorry!” Lacey says and reaches to steady the woman. “I just…I heard something behind me, and I just…”

  The woman gives her an odd look, then nods, and hurries past. Lacey stands, watching her go. Five cars away, now six, the woman glances quickly over her shoulder. Then she huddles herself even deeper into her coat and cuts between the rows of cars and out of sight.

  Lacey takes a deep breath, trying to calm the nervous butterflies in her stomach. The parking lot seems gloomy, malevolent, and tears gather at her lower lids. She opens her car and slides onto the cold seat, hitting the door locks. She keys the car to life but knows it will be at least ten minutes before the little four-cylinder engine generates any kind of real heat–anything even remotely comforting.

  Her finger strays to the door lock button again, and the muffled click-click makes her feel a little better. She shivers and tilts her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes. She’s not sure if the shivering is entirely from the cold.

  With unthinking precision, her fingers knowing exactly where to go, she hits the door lock a third time. Click-click.

  Locked, she thinks. It’s okay, they’re locked.

  Henry wants her to see someone–a therapist or at the very least to talk to her family doctor. Arch had been seeing his high school guidance counselor until he graduated, and that counselor had given him the name of a good therapist where he’d be attending college, but Arch had told her that he just wanted to put everything behind him.

  The worst for him had been the guilt, however irrational, at giving James the ‘code’ that had gotten the Simonellis killed. But he’d come around to the reality that James’ sickness would have led him there anyway. Would have led him somewhere, anyway, and Arch had had no control over any of it.

  Lacey doesn’t think she suffers from guilt. But she could do without the panic and the attacks of nerves. The crying jags and the nightmares. Soon she will see a therapist, she assures Henry, soon. She’s going to get around to it. But actually, she thinks it is getting better on its own. She dreams less and less of James. Or really, of Riddel.

  And she thinks she knows how she could put it all to rest once and for all.

  She wants to go see him.

  She knows Henry would never agree, would probably get pretty angry, in fact.

  They lived together now, renting a place in a halfway decent town (no security gates, but Lacey can live with that–she’d never been overly fond of the gates in the first place) and between her raise and his, they were even putting some money aside every month for their wedding.

  They’d gotten engaged in the fall. Henry had given her a very small diamond that his mom had helped him pick out. He’d financed it himself, even though his mom had offered to help him with that, too. But he decided he’d rather do it on his own. That it was time to do it on his own.

  He was still working at Mack’s, but Mack had given him the title of manager and given over the day-to-day running of the shop so he could spend more time at home. Henry and Lacey got together with Mack and his wife, Bonnie, at least once a month, most often at Mack and Bonnie’s place. Bonnie and Lacey could talk forever, comparing notes on spices and seasonings, and they went into raptures over Jersey tomatoes.

  Henry had developed a close relationship with Mack, often asking him for advice. Mack had told Henry unselfconsciously about his own rough past. The trouble he’d gotten into as a kid, and the dangerous path he’d been on. But Bonnie had changed all that, Mack said. They’d met when they were both nineteen, and she’d shown him a different way of life, a calmer, happier way of being.

  And that was what Mack felt he could help pass on to Henry. Especially now that Henry had Lacey.

  Lacey thinks she and Henry fit together very well. Their relationship is a calm one. It’s not that they don’t have expectations of each other; it was just more that the expectations are reasonable ones. They don’t judge. They are coasting smoothly.

  The only thing Henry really gets angry about is the nightmares. He gets frustrated that she won’t admit the problem might be beyond her. Even that, Lacey can’t blame him for.

  She checks the time on her radio and texts Henry that she is going out with a group from work and could he please feed LuLu. He texts back ‘ok call me if u need a ride later’, and she smiles at her phone. She pictures him at the apartment, watching television with LuLu curled comfortably in his lap, or maybe he’d be doing his physical therapy.

  His shoulder had healed well, but the damage to the muscles had not been one hundred percent repairable through surgery. He had to work at it every day. The funny thing was, once he’d weaned himself off the painkillers, he’d weaned himself off everything. He rarely even had a beer now. And on top of that, he’d gotten his friend Mark to straighten out, too, taking him to the gym and having him over for the healthy meals Lacey prepared.

  Henry had even had a few civil conversations with his stepdad. It made his mom happier than anything to have Henry and Lacey at the house for dinner any time Arch was home from college. She loved having everyone together.

  Lacey closes her phone and turns on the heat to its highest setting, letting it warm her. Eventually, the shaking subsides. She turns to the passenger seat and pulls the GoogleMaps printout from her bag. The destination on the page is Pine Hollows Psychiatric Hospital. It is about forty-five minutes away, and she should get there with enough time to visit. If she can bring herself to do so.

  The funny thing about Pine Hollows, well, two funny things: it is not too far past Jersey Jerry’s and secondly…James’ mother is still there. The police (the real ones) had looked into it when they looked into James’ past. They’d found that everything he’d penned concerning his childhood had been true. Every horrible word. She’d cried after Sergeant Reardon had told her, but she’d cried in private. She didn’t want Henry to get the wrong idea. Certainly, he had no tears for James.

  Lacey pulls from the parking lot and heads south, trying not to think about her destination.

  Chapter 37

  Arch flops onto his other side in the narrow bed. It is only late afternoon, but he’d begun to nod over his books, and he thinks he might be able to catch a quick nap. He wasn’t sleeping very well at night.

  He’d told Henry and Lacey that he was okay, that he was over it, and it was true, he was…during the times he was awake. But when he slept, it was a different story. His mind tortured him with surreal images of the Simonellis dead in their garage as a glowing orb twirled above them, casting warm light down onto their corpses. Sometimes in these nightmares, they’d wake from the light and their bodies would begin to shuffle weakly like half-dead rodents on glue traps. Mr. Simonelli would try to turn over, and his head would pull the rest of the way off, the meat at his neck stretching and then breaking like semi-hard taffy. Mrs. Simonelli would begin to hump forward, face shoved into the concrete, leaving a trail of blood and urine, one slipper still o
n, the other forgotten by the stairs. Arch wakes from these dreams in a shivering sweat.

  Arch knows what James thought he had found in the Simonellis’ garage. There had never been a trial where the information had come out; Lacey had told him. She told him what the object actually was and also what she had read in the ‘report’ that James had written as Riddel. The spinning and glowing ‘object’ had turned out to be only a child’s toy. An old tin top that had lost its color long, long ago.

  Eventually, Arch had discussed the top with Bill and Amy, the Simonellis’ children, who he’d met at the funeral. Bill had the vaguest idea about what it might have been, and he’d called his aunt, William’s sister, and when he had asked her about an old toy, an old top, she’d begun to cry. She was three years William’s senior, and she remembered it well. That it had been William’s favorite toy given to him by their mother, who’d died so young. She hadn’t known he’d kept it all this time.

  Arch hadn’t been able to face Bill and Amy after finding out the part he’d played in their parents’ murder. The police had gotten in touch with them to tell them of the resolution on the case, and Amy had tried to call Archer; she’d been worried about him, but Arch hadn’t called her back. He’d ignored Bill’s phone calls, too.

  Three months later, right before he was supposed to start at Rutgers, he’d seen activity at the Simonellis’ house. Bill and Amy and other family members are loading everything from the house into their cars and a rental truck. Arch watches from his back porch until he can get up enough nerve, then he throws on a jacket and hops the fence between their houses. Even as he does so, the last time he’d hopped this fence comes back to him, draining his courage. He’d gotten about halfway to the Simonellis back patio when he begins to shake, and he bends over, hands on his knees, head swimming, sure that he is going to puke.

  “Archer?” a voice calls out, and then a hand descends on his arm, the fingers going around his bicep, steadying him. “Come in, come in the house…let me get you a ginger ale.” Amy helps him stand straight, keeping her hand around his arm, and leads him to the Simonellis’ back patio and into the kitchen.

  Bill looks up from where he is cleaning out a cupboard. “Arch!” he calls, a smile spreading across his face. Seeing the smile, Arch feels a deepening pit in his stomach–that smile will disappear soon enough, he thinks, once they know what I’ve done.

  Bill stands and stretches and holds his hand out to Arch, but Arch lowers his head. Bill hesitates, then pulls out the chair next to him and sits with a groan.

  “Man, I hate packing. It’s the worst. Mom and Dad have so much stuff,” Bill says and draws a hand across the top of his head. Amy puts a glass of golden, bubbling ginger ale at Arch’s elbow and then she pulls out a chair, too. She pats Arch on the back and then sits back in her chair, surveying the kitchen.

  “They lived here a long time,” she says, her voice becoming teary.

  “Okay, Amy, that’s enough,” Bill says, his voice kind but firm. “Mom wouldn’t want you crying your eyes out in her kitchen.”

  Amy nods and laughs, running a tissue under her nose. Then she turns to Archer. “We’ve been worried about you, sweetheart,” she says, putting a hand on Arch’s wrist.

  Arch feels tears in his own eyes and rubs the heels of his hands against them, grinding until they sting. Dull orange and yellow burst through the darkness as he rubs savagely, then he sits back, dropping his hands to his lap, and looks at Amy.

  “I’m so…I’m so sorry,” he says. Then he says the worst of what has been tearing him up. “It was my fault. What I said to that guy…it’s what sent him here…Mr. and Mrs. S would be okay if I hadn’t…if I hadn’t told that guy about them…I told him that Mr. S knew everybody in the neighborhood, even pointed out the house, and…” Arch lowers his head into his hands. He’s not sure what to expect, wouldn’t be surprised if Bill kicked him out, but he had to tell them. He had to get it all out in the open.

  “Archer,” Bill says.

  Arch keeps his head down, hands covering his eyes like a small child. He can’t look up. He’s too afraid of what he’ll see in Bill’s face, in Amy’s.

  “Arch, look at me,” Bill says, his voice stern.

  Here it comes, Arch thinks, then he sits back and lets his arms hang limp at his sides. He is ready for whatever Bill is going to dish out. He’s ready for it. He deserves it, no matter what the guidance counselor said.

  But Bill doesn’t say anything for a long time. Arch is aware of another person, a younger person, probably one of their kids or a niece or nephew, pausing to glance into the kitchen and then moving on.

  Finally, marshalling his courage and putting aside his dread, he lifts his head to meet Bill’s gaze.

  Bill’s face is still and calm, but not angry. He’s sad, Arch thinks, about his parents. Once he gets his shit together, he’s gonna ask me to leave. But Arch is glad that at the very least, it seems that Bill isn’t going to shout at him, pick him up and bounce him out the back door, furious that Archer has caused them this misery. Arch waits, resigned for what will come next.

  “You have to know,” Bill says, looking at Arch intently, “that we…our family…don’t hold you responsible for any of it. What happened to Mom and Dad, what happened to you and that guy’s girl and Henry…it’s no one’s fault but that guy…James. And from what the police told us, I guess he’s not even a hundred percent to blame, not with what he had going on…” Bill drifts off, and Arch watches as emotions war in his face: disgust, sadness, and finally, calm acceptance. Arch watches the calm acceptance change Bill’s features; it is almost like he is a glass, a vessel being drained of poison and filled with cooling liquid. Arch studies Bill without realizing that he is doing so. He studies so that maybe he can get that same calm acceptance to flow through himself someday. Someday soon.

  “When we heard what happened, you being kidnapped and Henry getting shot, we were worried about you, Arch. Mom and Dad loved you, you know? They would have been so…so devastated if anything had happened to you. And a few weeks later, when everything got sorted out and explained…such a…ridiculous…chain of events! We didn’t know what to think. You weren’t calling us back and…” Bill drifts off again, looking past Arch out the back patio doors.

  “Yeah, I…I’m really sorry about that,” Arch says, his voice low and breaking, “but I just thought, if you knew that it was what I had said, that it was my fault–”

  Bill’s hand descends on the table with a crack, and Arch jumps in his seat. In his peripheral vision, he sees Amy jump, too.

  “No!” Bill says, his voice loud but not angry. “It’s not your fault, Arch, none of it. Listen, this is what Dad taught us.” Bill leans forward and puts his hand around the back of Arch’s neck, pulling him forward. “There is a danger in not taking responsibility, in blaming everything on everyone else, because you’ll never live any kind of life if you live it that way. Taking responsibility for your actions is good, it puts you in control of your life. But now listen, because this is the more important part.” Bill pulls Arch closer, and now they are practically nose to nose. “You also cannot take responsibility for the things you can’t possibly control. Because you’ll immobilize yourself with that. You understand me?”

  Arch nods and leans his forehead against Bill’s and closes his eyes. Bill’s hand tightens on the back of his neck, warm and strong, and Arch feels a weight lift from him. Amy’s hand grabs his, and she squeezes his fingers, and he feels that cooling liquid filling him, forcing out the poison.

  That was five months ago, back in the summer. He’d spent the rest of that day helping the Simonelli clan clean out the house and then left with promises of keeping in touch and to do well in college.

  He had kept in touch, especially with Bill, whom he’d called about the toy top Lacey described to him. And he was doing well, despite the nightmares.

  But today feels different. He’d been on a hair trigger since he’d gotten out of bed, exhausted from b
roken rest. He’d been nervous and jumpy, his stomach upset and his muscles tense, almost aching. He hadn’t been able to concentrate in class, partly because the long President’s Day weekend coming up made everyone antsy.

  Arch turns over onto his back, sighing. He drapes an arm across his eyes, but the claustrophobic sensation it gives him causes him to drop his arm to his side. Now he stares at the ceiling. The room is half dark, half light: wintertime gloomy.

  Someone pounds on his door, three quick booms that make his heart race.

  “Arch! You in there?”

  “Arch?”

  Heart still racing, teeth clenched, Arch lies rigid, not answering. He recognizes the voice; it’s Pete from three doors down. Sometimes they went for pizza together. But Arch can’t bring himself to answer.

  His face goes from hot to cold, and he realizes he is covered in a layer of sweat, and then he starts shaking. A wave of rage courses through him, dimming his vision and tightening his fists. He likes Pete, but if Pete had persisted on banging on his door, Arch might have…done something. To stop him.

  This is how it’s been, ever since…ever since James. Ever since being kidnapped.

  The anger thrums through him, and James’ face appears in his mind. James hitting his mom with the gun, pushing him into the trunk, holding the gun on him, shooting Henry…the anger turns to rage, helpless and frustrated.

  He wishes he had done something more. Helped his mom, jumped in front of the bullet meant for Henry, been the one to drive them out of there…anything, anything! But he’d just been a victim.

  The word makes him feel sick. Miserable with shame.

  He tries to conjure an image of how James would look now. Officer Reardon had told Henry the extent of James’ injuries, and Henry had told Arch. Lacey had never wanted to know.