by M. Leighton
Before we walked into the living room, I introduced everyone around. “Mom, Dad, this is Detective Grayson. He’s with the Arville Police Department. He’s got some questions for us.”
I turned to Detective Grayson and said, “And these are my parents, Roger and Sharon Holloway.”
We took seats in the living room. The detective sat in Dad’s recliner and the three of us sat on the couch, a united front against him. He didn’t appear to be the least bit intimidated, though, casually leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.
He began by explaining that he was working Lisa’s case and that he’d interviewed her close friends, but wanted to get a sampling of those who were merely acquainted with her from school. I watched my parents’ reaction and they didn’t even bat an eye. They both eagerly expressed their willingness to help in any way they could in bringing her killer to justice.
Detective Grayson directed his first questions to me, asking how I knew Lisa and if I’d seen her Monday night. Then he asked where I was and, when I explained that I was home with my parents, they readily supported my claim. I thought he’d leave it at that, but he didn’t.
“So you two never met Lisa? She was never here to visit Mercy?”
They both answered negatively.
“Did you hear Mercy make mention of Lisa very often?” Detective Grayson asked.
“Actually,” my mom said. “I don’t think I ever heard Mercy mention her at all.”
“And how familiar are you with your daughter’s friends? With her social and extracurricular activities?”
I felt a pinch between my eyebrows as they drew together in a frown. I had to purposely relax those muscles so it would go away. I reminded myself that I had done nothing wrong and I should have nothing to fear.
“I’d say pretty familiar,” Mom answered. “Mercy’s a good kid. She’s never really gotten into trouble. She’s always obeyed her curfew and had respectable friends. In fact, since most of her friends went away to college, she hasn’t been out much at all. We were hoping she’d meet some new people at school.”
Now I was sounding like some sort of pathetic and reclusive pariah. Poor clueless Mercy. Thanks, Mom!
Detective Grayson just nodded and made notes in the folder he carried. “So you haven’t noticed anything odd in her behavior lately? Nothing worrisome?”
Still relaxed and nonchalant, both my parents answered negatively.
“Mercy’s a good kid,” my Dad reiterated.
“What is your route to school, Mercy?”
I explained how I walked to school and he noted something in his folder, nodding all the while. When I was finished, he closed the folder and slid the pen he’d been using into the inside pocket of his jacket. When he rose, we did, too.
“Mercy, would you mind taking me along the path you walk to school?”
At first, I was surprised that he would want to take me without my parents, but then I remembered that I’m an adult. He didn’t have to ask their permission because they have no say in it.
But I do, I thought rebelliously. For just a moment, I considered refusing him. But it was a fleeting notion. When it was gone, I quickly consented and went to grab my shoes. I could hear Detective Grayson’s low tones as he talked with my parents. I hurried as much as I could, not comfortable leaving him alone with them for any longer than was necessary.
I dashed back into the living room. “Are you ready Detective Grayson?” He nodded, thanked my parents, gave them his card and then we walked to the door. Once we were out in the street, way out of earshot, I breathed a sigh of relief and spoke.
“Thank you so much for doing that, Detective Grayson.”
“Not a problem,” he said, eyes on the road ahead.
We walked in silence all the way to the spot where I’d seen Lisa. I stopped on the sidewalk, several feet from it.
“Is this it? I thought you said it was in the grass.”
“It’s right over there,” I said, pointing to the exact location. I had no trouble remembering the precise spot because there was a large rock to the right of it.
Detective Grayson walked into the grass and looked around. Luckily it was still technically summer and the days were long. We were still in full daylight, though the sky was starting to develop that orangey glow that promised sunset was on its way.
“Right here?” He was pointing in the general vicinity that I had indicated. I nodded. “Why are you still standing there?”
“Sometimes I can see the murders every time I pass over the spot, sometimes not. I’m not willing to risk it.”
“You’re saying there’s a chance that you could have the entire vision again? In perfect clarity?”
“Yes, Detective Grayson, but—”
“Just call me Grayson,” he said sharply. “Look, I’m going to have to insist that you come over here then. If you can see it again, I need as much detail as you can give me.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but snapped it shut when I thought better of it. It was just one more viewing. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before. But regardless, as I stepped off the sidewalk and into the grass, a cold chill worked its way down my spine. I was getting ready to see the murder of a girl, a girl I’d sat behind in class only a few days ago. Though I’d been having visions almost all my life, this one was very different and it was scaring me. Turns out that seeing the victim alive put a totally different spin on things.
With each step I took closer to the site, my breathing got shallower and shallower. When my feet were nearly standing on the spot where Lisa had lain, I held my breath in preparation for the onslaught. But it never came. Air rushed out of my lungs in a whoosh of relief when I realized I wasn’t going to get the vision again.
“I don’t see anything.”
Disappointment was evident on Grayson’s face. “Alright, back up then. I don’t want you to contaminate the crime scene,” he said.
Crime scene? Taking several steps backward, I couldn’t help but be a little encouraged by his statement. It said that he believed me, which was a pretty big surprise to me.
“So tell me again what you saw. Don’t leave out anything.”
As I went through the murder again, Grayson made notes, asked questions and walked the perimeter of the scene. At one point I saw him squat down and focus on something, but I was too far away to see what it was. He stood abruptly and pulled his cell phone from his pocket and punched in some numbers. I heard his end of the conversation, which was to call in the crime scene to Dispatch so they could send in the troops.
Within a few minutes, a uniformed officer arrived in a marked car. He got out and approached Grayson. The officer handed him a plastic baggy and tweezers and Grayson bent to pick something up then deposited it in the bag. It was so small I couldn’t even make out what it was.
“Cordon off this area,” Grayson said, indicating a large area around where I’d last seen Lisa. “CSP is on the way. If they get here before I get back, tell them to wait. There are a couple of things I’m particularly interested in.”
With that, he tucked the bag in his pocket, turned toward me, put his hand under my elbow and steered me back the way we’d come.
When we were an acceptable distance away, I finally asked what I’d been dying to know. “What did you see?”
Grayson didn’t look up and he didn’t answer right away either. I’d begun to wonder if he’d even heard me when he finally said, “A red hair.”
“And that’s why you believe me?”
He looked over at me as we walked, his expression inscrutable. When he turned his head back to face straight ahead, he hesitantly admitted, “A red hair was found on the body. That alone would’ve made you appear a little less than nuts, but finding one here at the scene…” he trailed off, shrugging as if to say You do the math. “That either makes you credible,” he said, pausing. Then he looked back at me. “Or involved.”
He watched me intently and I could tell he was gauging my reaction
. I looked him right in the eye, honest and deadly serious.
“I had nothing to do with her death. I have an alibi, remember? I wouldn’t even be in this position if I hadn’t tried to do the right thing. I didn’t have to come and talk to you. In fact, I didn’t want to, but what choice did I have? Trust me, if I could get rid of this…this…thing that makes me see stuff, I would.”
Grayson said nothing, just looked ahead again. We walked in silence the rest of the way to my house. When we got there, he stopped at his blue unmarked Dodge Charger. A little chirp sounded when he hit the button to unlock the doors. “Do you still have my card?” he asked as I turned to walk on.
“Yes.”
“Call if you think of anything else, ok? Anything at all.”
“I will.”
He nodded and then opened the door and slid behind the wheel. I heard the engine roar to life as I closed the front door behind me.
My parents descended on me as soon as I slid my shoes off.
Mom fired first. “Where was she killed? Is it on the route you walk to school? Do they think you’re in danger?”
Then Dad chimed in. “Do they have any idea who did it? Is this a serial crime? Do we need to be concerned about getting you transferred to another school?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I said, carrying my shoes into the living room and plopping down in Dad’s recliner. “I can tell you right now that I don’t have the answer to most of those questions and the ones I do have are ‘no’,” I said, then adding as a casual afterthought, “Except the one about my school route.”
As I knew it would, that started a hail storm of questions, concerns, warnings and postulations.
“Look, maybe I can put your mind at ease, but you just can’t go telling people what I’m about to tell you. I mean, I doubt the police want everything they know to get out.”
“No offense, Mercy, but I doubt that young man told you everything he knows. The police usually play their cards pretty close to the chest,” Dad argued, ever the pragmatist. He’s pretty smart for a marketing executive. “And he seemed far too intelligent and competent to make sloppy mistakes like that.”
“That’s probably true, but still…”
“Alright, alright. We won’t say anything.”
“Ok. They think she was murdered in the woods on the edge of campus, and, yes, it’s the way that I walk to school. They don’t seem to think anybody else is in danger, though. Lisa was most likely intimately acquainted with whoever killed her. You know, a crime of passion and all that.”
“But do they think it’s a good idea for a young woman to be walking that path alone until they catch the person responsible?” Mom’s worried frown was firmly back in place.
“They say it’s fine, Mom. Really. Plus, it’s always broad daylight when I walk that route. I would never walk through the woods alone after dark, even if this hadn’t happened. That’s just stupid.”
They asked a few more questions. Some I couldn’t divulge the answers to (for obvious reasons) and some I just didn’t know the answers to. We talked for a little longer then I excused myself to my bedroom. I closed the door and flopped face down on the bed to go back over the events of the last week and run through Lisa’s murder one more time.
There was a tiny little tickle in the very back of my mind that was telling me I was missing something, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t put my finger on it. After nearly an hour of going around in circles, I took my frustrated self to the bathroom to get ready for bed. I felt like I hadn’t slept in days, suddenly exhausted for some reason.
That night, I drifted off to sleep with visions of long red hair and women in goatees swimming lazily through my head.
I felt like I’d just gone to sleep when the images in my dream flickered like a television broadcast with bad satellite reception. The sights from Lisa’s murder morphed into a motel room, and a really crappy one at that.
Faded curtains with orange and brown bubbles on them were drawn over a motel-style picture window that I was standing in front of. The only light in the room came from a single bare bulb that hung over a folding card table in the corner. The light was swinging back and forth gently, like a pendulum.
My point of view turned toward an old bed. The spread was piled in a heap at the foot and a girl was lying atop the soiled white sheets. She looked short and petite and she was wearing low-riding jeans and a red spaghetti-strap top. There was a black hood over her head, but I could see the tips of straight blonde hair peeking out from beneath it.
I approached her and she reacted, almost as if I’d spoken, but I couldn’t hear the words. It was like watching a movie that was muted; there was absolute silence but for a faint buzzing in my ears.
She began to thrash about as much as she could, considering that her wrists and ankles were bound with duct tape. She raised her hands to her head as if to pull off the hood and I saw a tattoo on the underside of her left forearm. It was three words, written in cursive, but I couldn’t make out what they said.
I reached toward her with my left hand. My arm was wrapped in plastic and my hand was gloved in latex. There was duct tape around the wrist. My fingers fisted and reached out to hit her on the side of the head. The hard knock effectively subdued her for the moment.
Her head lolled to one side and my right hand appeared. In it was a wickedly-curved knife. I bent over the girl and reached out with my left hand to touch her just below her collarbone. I tapped a finger on her very first rib then counted down to her fifth. My fingers dipped in the space between two ribs and moved a couple of inches to the right. I felt the beat of her heart banging wildly against my fingertip. And then I raised the knife and quickly inserted it to the hilt between the ribs. Blood oozed out from around the knife handle to saturate my fingers and then…
CHAPTER FIVE
I woke with a start. I was trembling. I felt both sublime pleasure and unspeakable terror all at once. My body was flooded with adrenaline and my heart was racing. I was panting as if I’d just run a marathon and my mouth was dry as desert sand.
I got up and went to the bathroom, splashing water on my burning cheeks. The dream was more than just a little disturbing. The subject matter itself was extremely bothersome, of course, but even more than that was the sensation that I was actively involved in the murder of the hooded girl. And, if it was possible to be worse than that, my body was reacting as if I’d enjoyed it. At least until I’d awakened. Now, it seemed that the initial flood of pleasure was subsiding into a queasy, sick feeling that I felt all over like the flu.
As I walked out of my bathroom, I glanced at the clock. It was already 5:15 and there was probably no reason to go back to bed. I’d never be able to go back to sleep. I was shaken. Very deeply shaken.
I left my bedroom and headed for the kitchen. Mom wasn’t up because it was the weekend so I started the coffee and went into the living room to wait for it to brew. I flung myself sideways into Dad’s recliner and got comfortable. I closed my eyes and inhaled, the soothing scent of coffee already permeating the air throughout the room.
I bolted upright in the chair when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I was a little disoriented at first. I felt like it had only been seconds since I’d sat down, but it was daylight and the living room was bright. Mom was leaning over me, looking down into my face. She was already dressed and made up and her frown was firmly back in place.
“When I saw that you were sleeping so soundly, I hated to wake you up, but I didn’t want to leave without telling you we were going either.”
“Church,” I said when my brain started functioning. “Sorry, Mom.”
She smiled her sweet, maternal smile that was usually reserved for me when I was sick. “You needed to rest. Why don’t you go on back to bed, try to get some more sleep. I’ll wake you up when we get back. We’ll bring lunch.”
I nodded, sliding from the recliner and stumbling back to my room where I fell into bed and, evidently, right back to sleep.
&nb
sp; A knock at my door woke me next. It was Mom.
“Mercy, you want some lunch?”
“You can come in,” I said.
The door opened slowly and Mom peeked inside. “Want some chicken? We got KFC?”
“Sounds good. Give me five minutes.”
She nodded and closed the door again to give me some privacy. I got up and used the bathroom then had some chicken with Mom and Dad. Lunch passed in a bit of a daze, much like the rest of the day did. I felt like my dream had drained all my energy away, leaving me feeling weak and lifeless.
By 8:30, I felt like a narcoleptic. I’d nodded off three different times while trying to finish the Cosmo I’d started on Saturday. Finally, I just gave up trying, turned my light off and went to sleep.