Better Left Buried

by Frisch, Belinda

  May as well have been a lifetime.

  She interrupted the coffee pot for the first cup and chugged it as soon as it cooled off, taking a second one to the sofa. The caffeine wasn’t enough to offset the pill. She turned up the television’s volume and flipped through the channels, developing something like road hypnosis. The shows changed, but she was too dazed to notice which ones they changed to. She just kept clicking, fighting the urge to close her eyes.

  “Help me”

  She wasn’t sure, at first, if she’d heard the words between changing channels or if she was imagining them.

  “Help me.”

  The second time, she was certain.

  She turned on the floor lamp and looked around, wondering if the man would show himself with Adam just down the hall.

  “Go away.” Her voice cracked, but the intonation was absolute.

  She wouldn’t be victimized, not again. She finished her coffee and went to the bathroom to wash her face.

  “I don’t know how to help you.” The statement was equal parts resignation and wanting to be left alone. She closed the door and turned on the water. The faucet was cold, not the usual cool of room-temperature metal, but frigid enough to freeze her skin. A breeze blew her hair and she brushed it away, setting her cell phone on a towel off to the side so it wouldn’t fall in the sink. She adjusted the water temperature and checked the stream with her hand, but it wouldn’t warm up. Even with zero cold added, it still felt like ice.

  She splashed a handful on her face and stared at her reflection in the mirror.

  Did she really look so bad?

  Why hadn’t Adam said anything?

  Dark circles surrounded her lifeless eyes as the drugs took their toll. She felt detached, numb, and everything tangible became fluid and wobbly. She washed her hands, soaking the gauze on her arm. The cold water mixed with the scabs to create the illusion of fresh blood. She peeled off the tape and gently cleaned the wounds. The antibacterial soap burned, but the pain was sobering. It took her mind off the whispers and drew her back from the drugged fog.

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true.

  She stared into the mirror and a sense of dread overcame her as she sank into the impossible depth of another world behind the glass.

  She’d seen the space before, the basement from her nightmares.

  Blood pooled at the bottom of the stairs and spattered the concrete walls. A single light illuminated the dark corner. A tall, bearded man with a feral look in his eyes turned to her.

  “Help me.”

  He moved toward her, head down and with ashen skin that could only mean one thing. The right side of his white t-shirt was stiff, crimson and brown from shoulder to waist. The smell of week-old rotted meat wafted off of him.

  “Help me.”

  Awake. Asleep. Drugged. Insane.

  No matter what her condition, there was no helping this man who was so clearly dead.

  She pounded the heels of her hands against the sides of her head and tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “You’re not there,” she said. “You’re not there!”

  She repeated it, over and over again.

  Light reflected off the metal barrel of a gun aimed dead center between her eyes. A steady string of bloody spit dripped from the man’s chin as he set a finger to the trigger and cocked the hammer.

  “Not there!”

  A shrill tone drew her back. Her screams were punctuated by the sensation of falling.

  The man disappeared as quickly as he came and the only thing reflected in the mirror was the black and white shower curtain behind her.

  Adam held her tight, rocking her back and forth, covering the top of her head with kisses. “I’ve got you, Harmony. I’ve got you.”

  She noticed her phone open on the floor next to her.

  A distant mechanical voice broke through her sobs. “Ms. Wolcott, hello?”

  She hadn’t remembered answering it.

  “Hello?” Adam had picked it up, keeping one arm around her as he tucked the phone between his shoulder and ear. He stroked her hair, rocking her as he spoke to the woman on the other end. The volume was turned up loud enough for Harmony to hear everything.

  “I need to speak with Harmony Wolcott please.” The voice belonged to an older woman and bore the authority and formality of impending bad news.

  “This is her boyfriend. Harmony’s not feeling well. Can I help you?”

  “This is Reston Memorial Hospital calling. We were given this number as the listed next of kin for Charity Wolcott.”

  Next of kin.

  Harmony lowered her head. The Xanax took the edge off the weight of the call she’d been expecting for as long as she could remember. “Ask if she’s alive.”

  Adam held her tighter. “Has something happened? Is Charity all right?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t release specifics over the phone, but I wonder if you might be able to come in and speak with one of our doctors.”

  “Ask if she’s alive,” Harmony said, this time with conviction.

  “Yes, she’s alive,” the woman answered, having obviously heard her, “but we need to speak with family as soon as possible.”

  “Absolutely. Yes,” Adam said. “We’ll be right there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Brea swept concealer under both of her eyes, the minimal coverage doing little to improve her appearance. She was exhausted and couldn’t get the man out of her head.

  Whatever Harmony had gotten into was now her problem as well.

  “You realize this is a one-time deal, right?” Joan said.

  “I know, Mom.”

  It hadn’t been too difficult to convince her mother to give her a day off after telling her she’d fought with Harmony. Brea had said she needed time for things to cool down between them and promised to work on her mid-term report if her mother would let her spend the day at the library. The excuse was the kind a parent could buy into.

  “I’ll pick you up at 1:00, okay?”

  Brea nodded. “That’s fine. I’ll be ready.” She reached through the front seats and picked up her backpack off the floor behind them. “Thanks.”

  “1:00, Brea,” Joan reminded, as if in the last two minutes Brea might have forgotten.

  “I got it.”

  The ramshackle, one-story town library had once been someone’s house. The floor plan had been opened up some, but not enough to change the claustrophobic maze-like feeling of too many rooms crowded into too small a building.

  The air smelled of paper, dust, and copy machine toner.

  Brea lifted her backpack strap onto her shoulder and headed toward the preoccupied sixty-something librarian.

  The library was empty, as far as she could tell, other than a middle-aged man pecking away at a keyboard and cursing the internet. He was unkempt and clearly unfamiliar with computers. There were classifieds open on the desk next to him so she figured he was looking for a job.

  “Excuse me.” She cleared her throat to get the librarian’s attention.

  The woman let out a yelp and held her hand over her heart. She tucked a scrap of paper between the pages of the romance novel she had been reading and closed the cover. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in.” She removed her thick glasses and folded the arms so that they hung level from the strap around her neck. Her eyes were the color of slate, gray like her hair, turtleneck, and skirt. She was literally monochromatic. “How can I help you?”

  “I need to find newspapers from 1996.” Brea had done as much searching as she could online, but quickly became frustrated by how little her sleepy town contributed to the electronic archives.

  “Those would be downstairs.” The woman smiled, her teeth the color of weak tea. “We don’t have microfiche, but we have bound copies. Come on. I’ll show you.” She stepped out from around the desk, limping on a built-up orthopedic shoe that made Brea feel guilty.

&nbs
p; “I’m sure I can find it. Really.”

  “Nonsense. The new hip needs some exercise.” The woman’s peg leg gait thumped louder every other step.

  Brea did her best to stay behind her, finding it hard to walk so slowly.

  The basement archives were what she expected. She’d been to the library dozens of times over the years, but never had reason to visit them. The librarian held the rickety banister with both hands as she led Brea down the narrow stairs to the low ceilinged room that smelled of moth balls and mildew.

  “Watch your head.”

  Brea ducked to miss the low crossbeam that would have otherwise knocked her out. It was a wonder the building passed code.

  A dehumidifier hummed in the corner, the sound of water running through it making Brea wish she’d gone to the bathroom before going down there.

  “Let me see,” the librarian said, scanning the bindings. “It looks like the papers from 1996 are from here down.”

  Brea looked at the long line of bound copies, folded and standing neatly against one another. “There are so many of them.”

  “Three hundred sixty five days in a year, dear. Is there anything else?”

  She had three hours to get through them all, or be lucky enough not to have to. “No, thank you.”

  The woman set her knotty hand on Brea’s shoulder. “It’d be appreciated if you could keep them all in neat order.”

  “Of course.” She’d have felt terrible, otherwise. She pulled out the first section of paper and started at January 1st.

  The overhead lighting was terrible and coupled with the mildew air she wasn’t sure she should be breathing, she quickly developed a headache. The chair was too hard and the table too small for the amount of papers she had to go through. She made do as best she could and searched, uncomfortably, for anything she could find about a local man named Tom.

  It would have been so much easier if she had more to go on.

  Front page news in Reston wasn’t like in other towns; the cement plant shutting down and the first opposed run for Mayor made headlines here. There were stories about a benefit for a boy with cancer who would have been her age, two, at the time and commentary about the rise in unemployment—a curse the town never quite recovered from. She couldn’t help thinking how funny it was to see ads for stores closed over a decade ago, some of which she knew she should remember but couldn’t. She searched for the line of demarcation where events became clear and realized she recalled very little from before she’d turned five.

  The phenomenon, she guessed, wasn’t all that uncommon.

  She yawned and stretched, tired from the search that had become as much about nostalgia as identifying anything to do with the mystery man. With an hour left and three-quarters of a year of volumes, she was beginning to lose hope. She tucked away the first couple of months, careful to keep them neat and in order, and grabbed the next stack.

  She hit pay dirt when she reached May 7, 1996. A brief headline in the local section told the story of a man called Tom who had mysteriously disappeared.

  “Gerald Thomas Shippee, known to his friends as ‘Tom’, was reported missing when he failed to show up for work on the Monday morning following a party at his home located at 6 Maple Avenue in Reston.”

  She recalled the repeated sixes and wondered if she misinterpreted the spirit board’s message, mistaking an address for the sign of the devil.

  “Police are investigating what they refer to as ‘unusual circumstances’, but no official statement has been made. Anyone with information regarding this case is asked to contact Jim Jenkins of the Reston Police.”

  Uncle Jim.

  All roads led back to the most secretive person she knew.

  She snapped a photo of the article with her camera phone and, noting the voicemail indicators, listened to her string of recent messages.

  Harmony had left several, each more frantic than the one before it, and the most recent, from a half an hour earlier, with her sobbing so hard she bordered on unintelligible.

  Brea’s heart broke and she hated herself for not answering.

  Charity was in serious condition at Reston Memorial Hospital and Harmony begged Brea to meet her there.

  It figured.

  Just when she’d clawed her way out of the quicksand with her mother and uncle, tragedy forced her to dive back in head first.

  Some things were worth the trouble.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A bespectacled man, five-nine and balding, named Dr. Stanley Blake greeted Harmony outside one of the holding rooms. Dr. Blake was a psychiatrist, but unlike Bennett, he didn’t wear the beat-down look of someone whose patients’ troubles had become his own. He clasped his hands behind his back and displayed the calm demeanor of someone delivering happier news.

  “I have to warn you, your mother’s heavily sedated. Don’t be alarmed if she doesn’t acknowledge you.”

  “She hasn’t acknowledged me in years.” Adam squeezed Harmony’s hand and flashed her a look that said “Stop it”. She couldn’t help herself. Bitterness had found its way through the cracks. “What happened?”

  “According to EMS, a neighbor reported an argument. Police responded to the disturbance and found her unconscious, surrounded by empty prescription bottles. They called the paramedics immediately. Fortunately, most of the pills hadn’t digested and we were able to pump them from her stomach.”

  “Yeah, fortunately.”

  “It’s our policy to keep her on a seventy-two hour hold and to keep visitation to a minimum. We don’t want her upset further while we’re waiting on an available bed.”

  Harmony’s experience with the seventy-two hour hold ended with an extended stay at Spring View. If the same happened to her mother, she’d be remanded to the Midtown Home by weeks’ end.

  “If she can’t have visitors, why did you want me down here? Why couldn’t the woman who called just tell me what happened over the phone?”

  Dr. Blake shifted his weight and shoved his hands in his pockets. “We have some questions about your mother’s physical condition. Concerns, really, and we were hoping you could help us out.”

  Harmony hadn’t noticed until Blake glanced over that a uniformed police officer was sitting in the lobby across the hall from them.

  “What’s going on?” Her chest tightened. “Why are the police here?”

  “It’s nothing to worry about.” She formulated an escape route even as Dr. Blake said it. “The officer is only here to take statements, if necessary. Your mother sustained a significant amount of trauma and her records indicate a history of potentially domestic-related injuries. We’re hoping you might be able to tell us something that will help us help her.”

  “If there is something, she’ll have to tell you herself. I don’t know anything.”

  “I think sometimes people are afraid, or think there isn’t help available—” He took the familiar yellow domestic abuse sheet from the bin on the Emergency Room wall and held it out to her.

  “No, thank you.” She could’ve recited the thing verbatim. “Can I please see my mother now?” She let go of Adam’s hand and took a step away from him. For as much as she’d confessed over the years, she still had so many secrets. He had heard too much already. She had no idea what her mother’s records detailed, or what, if anything, she might’ve said up to that point, but she didn’t need Dr. Blake opening up this particular line of questioning.

  “I’m going in to see her alone,” she said to Adam. “She wouldn’t want you to see her like this.”

  “I’ve seen her worse.”

  “Then I don’t want you to see her like this. It’s embarrassing. Please, go grab a cup of coffee or something from the cafeteria.”

  Adam reluctantly agreed, walking away with his head down.

  Dr. Blake, who’d been watching the exchange, pulled the curtain aside. “Fifteen minutes. She needs her rest.”

  Harmony walked through and waited for the drape to close behind her.

>   Things had gone from bad to worse.

  Her mother looked small in the bed, helpless and not meant for this world. The heap of white blankets swallowed her frail body. Thick leather restraints held her wrists and ankles to the railing.

  “Mom, can you hear me?” She rubbed her mother’s hand, examining the tape on the IV. “Mom?”

  Her eyes remained closed, the shiner under the left one having turned from deep purple to green. There was no indication, not even the flutter of her lids, to say that she could hear her. Harmony brushed the halo of dirty blond hair away from her mother’s face and stared at the vitals monitor she had no frame of reference for. What she knew was that there was a heartbeat, which was more than her mother would have wanted. As much as she tried not to think about it, she understood the inclination. With no one watching, Harmony let her pained tears fall for the hell of a life that, no matter what she did, no matter what her mother did, neither of them could escape from.

  “Harmony?” A small hand touched her shoulder. She’d have known the voice anywhere.

  “Thank God.” She wrapped her arms around Brea’s neck. “I can’t believe you came.”

  Brea was crying, too, and holding Harmony so tightly it was hard for her to breathe. “We’re best friends, right?”

  “You’re mother’s really going to be disappointed.” Harmony let out a half-sob, half-laugh and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “About yesterday morning. I shouldn’t have pushed—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay.” Maybe she was over-apologizing, but in that moment, having Brea there was the closest thing to comfort she’d felt in a while. “I know the whole thing sounds nuts and maybe I am—”

  “Stop. You’re not crazy.” Brea turned on her phone, called up a photograph, and handed it to her.

  The picture was grainy and the words were too small for Harmony to read. “What’s this?”

  “I went to the library. I went through the papers from ’96 and I found an article—”

  Charity’s heart monitor raced.

  Harmony pressed the call button for the nurse. “What did it say?”