by Laurel Dewey
This was getting too chummy for Jane. “I don’t need to eat.”
“You look hungry. How ’bout a hot dog?”
Hank was the second person that day who thought she looked hungry. She looked at him and noticed how relaxed he was with her. She couldn’t recall anyone ever being this laid back with her. Most men were either afraid of Jane Perry or disliked her intensely. But there was no fear coming from Hank—just a genuine smile with a hint of innocent, mischievous charm behind his eyes. “Sure. Gimme a dog walking and drag it through the garden.”
Hank chuckled. “How about if I make that dog sit?” he yelled to a waitress behind the bar. “Can I get a hot dog for here with everything on it?”
Jane was impressed that Hank understood her streetspeak, but she wasn’t about to let her guard down. The bartender delivered the two tonic and limes. “You don’t have to teetotal on my account.”
“Who says I am?” He clicked his glass against hers. “Cheers.”
Jane took at sip and looked hard at Hank’s face. It had a sunwashed, weathered look but there was also an eternal youthfulness present—even though whispers of grey hair mingled happily with the brown. Charming. Yes, that’s the word Jane bet a lot of women used to describe Hank Ross. He was easy on the eyes, too. He didn’t have that threatening vibe that Jane tended to attract. But as she looked closer, there was something else. “You’re sober.”
“Yes ma’am. Been a friend of Bill’s for ten years.”
Jane was stunned. “Doesn’t owning a bar go against the whole AA credo?”
“Probably.” He took a swig of his tonic. “But I never was one for following the rules of the game. And I never let sobriety get in the way of a good time!”
Jane took a look around. “What is all this anyway?”
“An insurance policy.” Jane looked perplexed once again. “Based on the stats, I should have been dead five years ago. At least that’s what they told me.”
“Who?”
“My cop buddies.”
Jane put down her tonic. “You’re an ex-cop?”
“Yep. Back in Michigan. And as you know, the rule is after you retire, you usually last about five years before something goes haywire and you croak. So, I cut out at forty, cashed out my pension, got sober and then tried to figure out what to do with my life. When I hit forty-five, I figured it was all gravy after that, but that nothing was guaranteed. So, for five years, I’ve been celebrating my half-birthday just in case something happens in the second half of my trip around the sun.” He motioned to a large sign over the bar. It read: DON’T BE AFRAID THAT YOUR LIFE WILL END. BE AFRAID THAT IT WILL NEVER BEGIN—GRACE HANSEN. “Why do you think I hung that up there?”
Jane lingered on the sign. It had been almost twenty-four hours since she’d gotten the grim report from her doctor. She was thirty-seven and those fifteen words up there on the wall gripped her heart. For the most part, she’d been holding her breath much of her life, either waiting for the worst or wondering when the other shoe was going to drop. She’d never had the luxury of sustained peace. Then again, if someone handed her a plateful of peace, she wasn’t sure she’d even know what to do with it. It’d be like giving a dog a credit card and telling him to splurge. If there were a sign on Jane’s wall, it would be her manta: LIFE IS A STRUGGLE AND THEN YOU DIE. Jane looked a little closer at Hank. He sure as hell didn’t look or act like a typical fifty-year-old. There was a genuine charisma that she assumed he used to his advantage to lure the ladies to his lair. But to his credit, he did seem to be living up to that sign up on the wall.
“How long have you been sober?” he suddenly asked.
Jane wasn’t ready for that question. She came to do a short interview and get back to the B&B. “Fifteen months,” she said reluctantly.
“Congratulations,” he said with sincerity, clinking his glass against hers. “I know…it’s not easy. In college, the only fraternity I joined was Tappa Keg A Day.” Jane started to smile but quickly reined it in. “You know when I hit bottom? When I decided it was necessary to put a bottle opener on the keychain for my car keys.” Jane looked skeptical. “No, I’m dead serious. That was my come-to-Jesus moment. What about you?” She turned away. “I don’t know. I had a few come to Jesus moments when I saw Him waving to me as I was leaving the gates of Hell.” She shifted in her seat.
“Sorry,” he said, backing off. “I don’t mean to make your jaw clench.”
“Excuse me?”
He put his finger to his jaw. “Your jaw. When you said ‘the gates of Hell,’ your left jaw tightened. And you shifted in your seat. Classic posture of avoidance.” Jane wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of another body language pro. “Hey, you can’t take the cop outta me.” The waitress delivered Jane’s hot dog. He quickly changed the subject. “So, you’re obviously here about Jake.” Hank’s lighthearted attitude shadowed with a look of disquiet.
“That’s right.”
“Five days gone,” he said. Underneath those words was the tacit awareness that the odds weren’t in the kid’s favor. Jane nodded and took a bite of food. “He’s a good kid…a real good kid. You know how in AA they tell you to get real and be honest with yourself? That’s what Jake had been doing for about eighteen months.” Jane recalled that Mollie commented on the same thing. “It was as if he was on some sort of personal quest.”
“You think in that quest he hooked up with the wrong person online?” She took a hearty bite out of the dog.
“I’d say the odds are against that. Jake wasn’t a normal kid in the sense that he spent hours online.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I talked to the kid. He read books, loved to draw, but mostly he loved to talk and share his ideas. I think he was hungry for someone to listen to him. God knows his parents don’t give a shit.”
“Why’s that?” Jane took another good bite of the hot dog, realizing how good it tasted and how hungry she was. She found herself feeling more comfortable with Hank. Maybe it was the fact that he was an ex-cop and knew the drill. Maybe it was because he served a helluva good hot dog. Maybe it was the ease in which he picked up on what she was talking about. Whatever it was, she was a bit more relaxed. The wall was still up but there were a few cracks in the mortar.
“Haven’t a clue. I think his dad’s a prick. And his mom… Carol is fine if you like women who can’t think for themselves.”
Jane asked what kind of work Jake did at the place, realizing that at fifteen, it was dicey to hire the kid at a sport’s bar. Hank assured her his responsibilities involved cleaning tables, sweeping up after hours and working in the kitchen helping the prep cook. He admitted that the kid sometimes stuck around until midnight but that was because he didn’t want to go home. Jane raised an eyebrow. “Hey,” Hank said, holding up his hand, “I wasn’t happy about it. He was off the clock at nine o’clock and then he’d just hang out. Usually, he’d go in the back and read. He loved philosophy books…lots of esoteric stuff. I’d offer to drive him home and he’d turn me down every time. He flat out said that he didn’t want to go home and sometimes asked if he could crash at my place. I have a small, three-bedroom cottage on the back of this property. But I wasn’t about to get myself involved in his drama. I like Jake, but I’m not his daddy. Instead of going home, he’d walk around town at night…said he could think more clearly.”
So far, Hank’s story was meshing with Mollie’s. “Did you ever see any signs?”
“Suicidal signs?” Jane nodded. “You know as well as I do that sometimes the signs aren’t that obvious. Or the rest of us don’t see them.”
Jane’s eyes drifted down to the bar. “Yeah.” An unexpected catch caught in her throat. “I hear you.”
“He wasn’t displaying the usual ones—giving away possessions, physical appearance shifting…”
“He broke up with Mollie. And his grandmother has terminal cancer.”
“I’ve never heard him mention his grandmother. As for his r
elationship with Mollie, they were a tight couple. But the way I heard it from Jake, Mollie’s dad is the one who told her to break up with him.”
“What’d the preacher have against him?” she asked, finishing off the dog.
“I don’t know. Aaron’s pretty progressive. He’s not your typical sunshine Christian. It actually surprised me when I heard that.”
Jane ran her fingers through her hair. She suddenly realized how dead tired she was. “Why hang yourself?” Jane was tempted to reveal the disturbing animated drawing of the old man hanging himself but she held it back. “He could slit his wrists, take some pills. Hell, for that matter, he could have jumped in the river. If the fall didn’t kill him, the water temp would have.”
Hank put his hand over Jane’s. It was a gesture she wasn’t prepared for. “I wish I could give you more insight. The more I go over the way Jake was acting over the last couple months…I realize that, yeah, something was off.”
Jane slid her hand out from under Hank’s and took a sip of her drink. “Off?”
Hank tried to put his thoughts into words. “About six weeks ago one Friday night, it was just Jake and me here about midnight. I was counting the receipts and he was sweeping the same spot in the floor that he’d been going over for half an hour. He looked up and asked me if I believed in curses. I said, like what…voodoo curses? And he said, no, family curses. He wanted to know if I thought it was possible for a family to be infected…that’s the word he used, by the way…infected, with a curse. He wondered if it was possible that the curse made them do things and even become people who they didn’t want to be but they had no choice. I think he got the idea from one of his esoteric books.” Hank shook his head. “It was pretty wild.”
Jane considered the information. She heard the doctor’s voice from earlier that morning ring in her head. You can’t ignore your blood. For a moment, she felt outside herself. “It follows you…”
“How’s that?” Hank leaned closer.
Jane came back in her body. “I don’t know…so Jake felt infected. With what?”
“No idea. But I do know that you look worn-out.”
Jane wondered if Hank was planning to offer her a soft place to fall in his crash pad. She quickly short-circuited the conversation. “Does Jake have a locker here?”
Hank led her to a back room down a short hallway off the restrooms. A comical sign was nailed above the door that read: Hippies: Use Back Entrance. Inside the room, a bank of lockers stood on one side, none with locks. He motioned to the one Jake used and she opened it. Inside, Jane found a bag of hairnets for when he worked in the kitchen, three neatly folded aprons and two white cloth hats—all with The Rabbit Hole’s name on them. She stared at the contents and ran her hand across the stack of aprons. One of the pockets crinkled when she touched it. Jane pulled a slip of paper from the pocket. It was a folded page from the linen, gold-embossed letterhead pad of Bailey’s she’d found in Jake’s room earlier that day. On it was written 1401 Imperial in what Jane had to assume was Bailey Van Gorden’s printing. “You know this address?” Jane asked, showing Hank the paper.
“No street named Imperial around here.”
Jane tucked the piece of paper in her jacket pocket just as a woman’s voice yelled out his name. He leaned out the door and called to her. She appeared in the doorway and gave a happy greeting to Jane.
“Annie Mack,” Hank introduced, “this is Detective Jane Perry from Denver. She’s here about Jake.”
Annie shook Jane’s hand and said a few words of small talk. She looked to be about twenty-five with brown hair and twinkling brown eyes of innocent youth. “Hank,” she said turning to him with an air of excitement, “they’re bringing your half-birthday cake out.”
“Jane, you gotta have some cake,” he insisted.
“I’ll pass.” She wanted to focus and eating half-birthday cake would compromise her concentration. At least, that’s what she told herself as she patched up the cracks of mortar in her invisible wall.
Hank looked a little disappointed. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
He and Annie walked down the hallway, she with her hand around his shoulder the whole way. Jane figured their relationship was more than friends as their connection was comfortable and almost familial in nature. But there was something else she noted coming more from Hank toward Annie. Jane noticed it when Annie walked into the room. Hank’s eyes softened and his gestures were tendered. There was something of substance between them. A twenty-five year age difference doesn’t slow him down, she figured. Jane would have stayed in that room another half hour just to soak up the vibe and see if she’d missed anything important but she wanted to get out of Dodge before Hank returned with cake. She heard the hundred-plus revelers singing, “Happy Half-Birthday” as the door swung shut behind her.
When Jane returned to the B&B, she found Weyler sitting in the parlor with Aaron and Sara. They’d obviously fixed him a meal as he still had a cloth napkin draped across his suit trousers. He excused himself and met Jane at the foot of the stairs.
“I thought maybe you’d skipped town,” he said confidentially. “Why’d it take you four hours to check out a town the size of a postage stamp?”
“Just driving, Boss.” She started up the stairs when Weyler held her back.
“How’d you get all that mud on you if you were just driving?”
There was no way she was telling him she met Jordan Copeland face-to-face. It wasn’t exactly police protocol to question a possible suspect on his own property without prior knowledge of the police chief in charge. Since she was already walking a thin line with Bo Lowry, she didn’t want to complicate her life or embarrass Weyler. So, she lied. “I had to take a piss in the woods and I lost my balance.”
The answer seemed to embarrass Weyler and cease further questioning. He nodded and returned to the parlor. Jane started up the stairs again when she heard a door open and close downstairs.
Mollie appeared in the doorway on the way to her bedroom when she spotted Jane. The girl stopped, observed Jane’s appearance. She shook her head and whispered just loud enough for Jane to hear. “You look like a bohmerkeh,” she declared before disappearing behind her bedroom door.
Upstairs in her room, Jane tossed her mud-caked shirt on top of the one from earlier that day in a corner of her bedroom. She slipped into her Ron Paul for President—2008 nightshirt and proceeded to carefully hang each of the physical clues that Weyler received from Bo on the clothesline. By the time she was done, she had a perfect visual in front of her. The clues were in order of their receipt, including the transcript of the two ominous phone messages. Jane wrote where each clue arrived on a sticky pad and affixed a note on each clue. She recovered the linen note page that she found in Jake’s locker and hung it at the far right of the clothesline. Next to that, she placed the bright green page where Bo had Bailey Van Gorden write Jake’s full name: JACKSON JAKOB VAN GORDEN. She recalled the red starred website in Jake’s notebook, mysecretrevelations.com, and jotted it down on a piece of paper before pinning that clue on the far right side of the line.
Crawling on top of the large king-size bed with the gossamer canopy, Jane rearranged the pillows so she could sit up straight and view the clues better. Her eyes drifted to the table to the right with the lonely pack that held the waiting cigarette. God, that would taste incredible right now, she thought. There was something about the marriage of nicotine and contemplative ruminating that was a powerful union. The nicotine slowed down the mind. The action of drawing the cigarette to her mouth, inhaling the smoke and slowly blowing it out while observing or reading created an almost Zen rhythm that allowed for focus and revelations. Jane repositioned the pillows several times in an attempt to find comfort, but all she could think of was that damn cigarette across the room—teasing her, torturing her and loving every minute of it.
She closed her eyes, desperately grabbing at anything in her consciousness to help. The soft scent of gardenias began to blossom
along the edges of her mind. Jane could feel herself drifting outside of her body, but she forced herself back. Without thinking about it, she pressed the first and second finger on her right hand together and brought her hand to her mouth. In it was an invisible cigarette. As her fingers touched her lips, she sucked in the air, held it and then released it. The movement, repeated several times with her eyes closed, seemed to calm Jane as the gardenias drifted into the ether. She opened her eyes and regarded the clues with new vision.
The first was the book, You Can’t Go Home Again along with the sympathy card and envelope with the odd BAWY written on the outside. This was left in the Van Gorden’s mailbox.
The second clue was the message on Bo’s voicemail. Vi’s transcript included all the pauses and sounds on the tape in brackets. Jane moved closer to the end of the bed and read the words. [Distorted voice] Do you know what it’s like to feel as if you’re two seconds from your last breath? Do you? It feels just like this…[Scratchy sound on phone, followed by the whining and begging of young male child in the background. Continues for 10 seconds and then stops. Scratchy sound and the distorted voice speaks again.] He pounds on the window and you do nothing. [Abrupt end.]
Jane viewed the third clue. It was the full-color figure cut out of from a magazine of an eight-or-nine-year-old boy wearing a vintage red baseball cap. Jane peered closer at the figure that was glued to the page to infer the impression that the child was being dragged by his arm. The other arm—artificially extended and highly exaggerated with a pen drawing—looked like the flat of the boy’s palm was pressed against a surface. Letters cut out from various magazines spelled the sentence: THOU SHALT NOT STEAL INNOCENCE! below the drawing. The accompanying envelope had the same obscure BAWY written across it. In the upper right corner was a lone, uncancelled, twenty-five-cent stamp with an old Packard on it.
The fourth clue hanging on the clothesline was another transcript courtesy of Vi of the second phone message from the kidnapper. It read: [Sound of young boy crying in background. Scratchy sound on phone followed by distorted voice] He cried like a baby and will never be a real man. [Abrupt end.]