Running from the Dead

by Mike Knowles

  “What does that mean?”

  Jones shook his head. “Nothing.” He reached for the coffee before Sheena tried a follow-up and found the glass easier to pick up. “It’s not as hot,” he said.

  She pissed in the vinegar and said, “You whined like a bitch about it yesterday, so I eased up on the milk a bit.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sheena put two hands on the counter and Jones saw the veins in her arms come alive. “Let me see that picture again.”

  Jones pulled out his phone and pulled up the image. He put the phone on the counter and Sheena picked it up. “Last night, I was lying in bed, thinking about that door.” She used two fingers to zoom in for a few seconds. Then she zoomed out and began scrolling through the other shots. “I couldn’t stop wondering about what other things I missed. How many other messages did I just paint over?”

  Jones thought about that. How many other tags were buried in shallow graves under layers of paint? The bones were still there waiting to be uncovered; the problem was, this was no ordinary archeological dig. Scraping away the layers would require something other than shovels and brushes—it would need to be something chemical. There was also the issue of the site; it was a door and Jones didn’t own it.

  He looked around. “The art on the walls is for sale?”

  Sheena glanced at the various paintings. “A local artist had an event here and the owner made a deal with him. We agreed to sell them if he agreed to leave them up on the walls. It was a good deal. They almost never sell and I like the way they look.”

  “What else is for sale here?”

  The change in Sheena’s posture told Jones that the question offended her.

  “Don’t be gross,” Jones said. “I want to buy the door.”

  “There is no way my boss is going to let you walk away with our door. We run a place that serves coffee and bran muffins—people need to be able to use the bathroom.”

  “I’d pay for a replacement.”

  Sheena snorted. “He won’t go for it. The door is vintage.”

  “Maybe I should talk to your boss.”

  “No offence, but you’re kind of a kook.” She held out two palms. “I think you’re on the level, but my boss isn’t going to see it that way. He will definitely think you’re a kook.”

  Jones saw a customer coming in and moved down the counter. He drank some of the coffee while Sheena made a London fog. By the time Sheena finished ringing up the woman and putting the cash in the till, Jones had a plan.

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  10

  At eleven, Sheena locked the door and turned off the lights.

  Jones put the money on the counter. “Is there an alarm you’re supposed to set?”

  Sheena pulled a beer from the fridge and used the edge of the granite countertop to pop off the cap. The movement was done without any attempt to show off, making it even cooler than it looked. She picked up the folded stack of twenties and pocketed it without counting it. “I forget to set it at least three times a week and no one has ever said a word about it.” She took a drink from the bottle and pointed the neck at Jones. “Did you get everything you need?”

  Jones opened the backpack and tilted it toward Sheena so she could see inside. She paused to drink before looking. “You sure it will work?”

  “Not as sure as the guy at the hardware store, but I’m confident.”

  “This shit won’t screw up the new coat of paint you promised to put on when you’re done, will it?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Sheena took another drink. “I didn’t hear it in your voice.”

  “What?”

  “Confidence. I can’t get fired over this.”

  “You won’t,” Jones said.

  “Won’t what? I want to hear it and this time I want to believe you.”

  “You won’t get fired over this.”

  Sheena drained what was left of the beer and put the bottle down hard on the counter. “Fuck it. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Jones diluted the mineral spirits in a tray and used a cloth to soak up the solution. Jones rubbed the cloth over the first quadrant of the door in slow rhythmic circles.

  “You need a hand?”

  Jones looked over his shoulder and saw Sheena biting her cheek.

  “Proud of yourself?”

  She laughed. The sound was loud and rough and had no trace of self-consciousness. Jones liked it. “A little.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “How’d you lose it anyway?”

  “High-fived too hard.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Army.”

  “They cut it off?”

  Jones looked at Sheena again and saw her staring at him. Usually when he said army, people stopped asking questions. “They just trimmed off what was left,” he said.

  Sheena let a few seconds go by before she said, “Why didn’t you get a prosthetic?”

  Jones didn’t look this time; he was too focused on the door. “Wasn’t for me.”

  “I think I would want one if I was in your shoes,” Sheena said.

  Cloudy tears travelled in cracks and gouges and sought community in the grooves of the woodwork. Jones used a dry cloth to wipe them away before starting again with the mineral spirits. He treated each quadrant of the door one at a time and examined the face of the door before he started again. On the third application, he began to see evidence of graffiti that had been painted over. Jones carefully rubbed at each dark smudge and slowly brought it closer to the surface. As far as he could tell, no one else had ever tried something like this, so he did his best to work slowly and carefully to avoid erasing what was hiding within the layers of paint.

  Sheena noticed his tentative wipes and came closer. “What is it?”

  Jones gave the door a final scrub and then stood back to reveal a donkey with an erection.

  “What does that even mean?” Sheena said.

  Jones thought about it and the best answer he could come up with was a shrug.

  “And why the fuck is that guy so good at drawing donkeys?”

  * * *

  It took two hours for Jones to work his way down to the original wood. Along the way, he uncovered pornography, crude jokes, lonely truths, and amateur philosophy. What he didn’t find was another message from the girl.

  Sheena had nodded off on the toilet. Jones looked at the woman who had been named after the punk rocker; sleep had quieted the fire inside her and relaxed her features. The person who had seemed so ready to argue the day before was dormant inside the small woman snoring on a public washroom fixture.

  Jones repositioned the drop cloth and moved the tray of diluted mineral spirits out of the way. He carefully stepped over Sheena’s feet and opened the cabinet under the sink where she had told him the paint was stored. The sink was not antique; someone had picked it up at a box-store and paired it with a reclaimed seventies vanity that had been sloppily painted a robin’s egg blue. Jones opened the cabinet doors and felt the hinge come loose from the door on the right. The door swung out and dipped eagerly forward like a loose tooth. In an effort to preserve the door, Jones kneeled and propped the door up with the toe of his boot while he reached inside to force the old screws back into their stripped holes. To be safe, he kept pressure on the open door with his toe and began to look through the vanity for the paint Sheena told him was inside. Jones found the paint on the left side behind three rolls of stacked toilet paper. On top of the stout can of paint was a stiff brush caked with hardened white paint. Jones knocked over the toilet paper lifting the can of paint out of the vanity and revealed another message inside the cupboard.

  For a good time, call 416-647-0100

  613-555-5897

  The message was written in red pen, and not by the girl. The h
andwriting was nowhere near as beautiful. But the thick lines crossing out the phone number and the digits supplied underneath, however, were written with the same dark eyeliner and artist’s skill as the message on the door.

  “Hello,” Jones said. The single word was quiet, but the acoustics of the room gave it a punch.

  Sheena stirred. “God, you should have brought a fan. I’ve got such a fucking headache from those fumes. Doesn’t your head hurt?”

  Jones had been nursing a pain inside his skull that had started to send its roots down into his shoulders, but he forgot about it when he saw the second message a few seconds before.

  Sheena looked at the exposed wood. “I’m guessing the door was a bust.”

  “It was,” Jones said. “Not this though.”

  Sheena stared at Jones with her mouth open for a second before she surged forward off the toilet seat. The force of the sudden movement shoved the seat sideways with the loud crack of a plastic screw breaking. She planted one foot on the ground and was halfway to Jones when her brain seemed to register the feeling in her legs. “Fuck, pins and needles.” Sheena changed course and walked a few circles around the room before she shoved Jones out of the way so that she could see what was inside the vanity.

  “Holy shit! Do you think she wrote it?”

  Jones regained his balance and pulled out his phone. He took a shot of the second message. “It was her,” he said.

  Sheena nodded. “She crossed the number out and wrote that new number in.” Her head snapped toward Jones a second behind the thought that had just exploded in her brain. “You don’t think she’s the good time, do you?”

  The revulsion on her face was unmistakeable. Sheena had formed her own version of the girl in her mind, and that image had been a human, not a commodity. The sudden evolution of her girl from a kid crying out for help to someone advertising the sale of her body, was painful to try to imagine.

  Jones had no answer for her, and he knew better than to speculate. He knew giving the girl dimensions was a mistake. Whatever container you designed in your mind would always be too small for the real thing, and it would end up hurting, like wrong-sized shoes.

  “Do you recognize the phone number?”

  The question was not the answer that she had been expecting, and it took Sheena a second to realize that she was not offended, but instead grateful for the chance to think about something else.

  She looked at the digits. “No. Why? Do you?”

  “No. I don’t recognize the area code either. It’s not local.”

  “Where’s six-one-three?”

  Jones shook his head. “Not sure.”

  Sheena stood up and pulled her phone from her back pocket. She began typing with nimble thumbs while she rotated her hips. “My back is killing me.” She turned sharply and kicked the fixture. “It was this goddamn toilet. Do you know what that means?” Sheena didn’t look up from the phone to see if Jones was listening; it didn’t matter. “It means I’m getting old.”

  “I didn’t know that was how it was determined.”

  “Well, now you do. You know what else you know?” She looked at Jones this time to make sure that she had his attention. She turned her phone and pointed it at Jones so that he could see the reverse lookup result. “You know that this number is for a place in Cartwright, Ontario.”

  11

  “I guess that rules out hooking,” Sheena said. She made a couple quick swipes with her finger and tilted the phone so that Jones could see the screen. Google Maps put Cartwright out past Kingston.

  Jones nodded. “It’s definitely not in the neighbourhood.”

  “No shit, and no one is going to drive that far to get laid.”

  Jones shrugged and Sheena caught it. “Easy, big guy.”

  Jones took a few more shots of the door and then looked through the rest of the cabinet for any other messages that might have been left in make-up before opening the can of paint.

  Jones managed to work the brush into something pliable that tested the paint; it was old, and a little thick, but it did the job. He had almost finished the first coat when Sheena said, “What do you think it means?”

  Jones had been thinking about it. “Not sure. She left it there.”

  Sheena’s voice got louder. “Are you trying to be a dick? I’m just asking what you think.”

  Jones didn’t take the bait. He dipped the brush and worked the paint into the inlay. He gestured to the vanity with his forearm. “I mean there. The first message we found was plainly visible on the door. The second message was plainly visible, but only if you knew where to look.”

  “So visible, and not visible.”

  “Sort of like her, I imagine,” Jones said.

  “That was kind of profound. But why leave a note at all? Why not just tell someone?”

  Jones dipped the brush and started back on the door. “Who would you tell?”

  Sheena crossed her arms and thought about it. “Is this where you tell me that it’s rough out there for girls because some of us don’t have anyone looking out for them? You can skip the mansplaining. I’m up to speed. I just don’t understand why she left a note inside a cupboard. It’s as good as talking to yourself.”

  The paint had a habit of collecting in the inlay, and Jones took a second to slowly drag the brush over the grooves before he said, “Yes.”

  Jones let Sheena work it out while he started to apply a second coat. “So she has no one because she’s alone, or possibly because she’s in danger. But she has something to say—something she wants to tell someone, so she leaves a message in eyeliner on the back of a door and inside a cupboard.”

  Jones dipped the brush into the can and carefully painted around the doorknob.

  “That might be the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

  Jones wasn’t sure if it was the saddest thing he had ever heard, but it was on the list.

  “Maybe.” The word was loud and full of promise. “Maybe this isn’t that at all. Maybe it’s all a prank by a kid with too much time and too much make-up on her hands.”

  Jones stopped painting and looked over his shoulder at Sheena.

  “This doesn’t feel like that.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said.

  Jones got almost all the second coat onto the door before Sheena spoke again.

  “Why do you think she put the second message under the sink? Why not put it on the door?”

  Jones crouched down so that he could paint the lower part of the door and he heard his knees complain. Jones slowly let a breath out of his nose before he said, “I think the door was the first message. I think she was killing time in here and the door caught her eye. I don’t think writing a message was anything she had planned. Graffiti isn’t her thing; if it was, she wouldn’t have used eyeliner. I think she read everything on the door. The confessions, the accusations, and the jokes and thought her message belonged there.”

  “What was her message?”

  Jones looked at her.

  “Confession, accusation, or joke?”

  “All of them.”

  Sheena narrowed her eyes. “He’s going to kill me, and I think I want him to.’ That’s what she wrote. There’s nothing funny there.”

  “Not anymore. I think she changed her mind after she wrote the original message.”

  “What original message? You said the door was the first one.”

  Jones took out his phone and brought the picture up. He passed the phone to Sheena and said, “Zoom in on the words.”

  Sheena put her index finger and thumb on the screen and moved them apart. She looked at the screen for a couple of seconds and then at Jones. “What am I supposed to see here?”

  “The end of the sentence.”

  “What, that blob?”

  “She didn’t use a period.”

 
; Sheena rolled her eyes. “It’s graffiti, not poetry.”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” Jones said.

  “But not anymore?”

  Jones shook his head. “She was considerate enough to write a comma, but not a period? That doesn’t make sense. I think she had a period at the end of the sentence.”

  Sheena looked closer at the screen.

  “Another O—too,” Jones said.

  Sheena inched closer and spoke the words. “He’s going to kill me, and I think I want him too.”

  “I think she made a joke at first, and then she thought about it. I think she saw something in that joke, something even darker, and she erased the last O and the period along with it.”

  Sheena zoomed in closer. It was pointless; Jones had already pushed the zoom function to its limits and come up with nothing.

  She gave him the phone back and picked up the pan of mineral spirits. She walked to the toilet and tilted the pan. “Let’s say you’re right—”

  “You’re not supposed to flush that,” Jones said.

  Sheena stared at Jones while she poured. “We’re not supposed to do a lot of things we’re doing tonight.” She went on. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say there was a second O and she erased it. Why did she put another message on the second door? Why hide that one?”

  “I think she came across the message in the cupboard the same way I did—by accident.”

  Sheena tossed the empty pan into the corner. “We’re always out of toilet paper. She could have opened the door looking for some TP.” Sheena leaned against the wall and crossed her arms. “So she opens the door, sees the tag on the door, and decides to do a bit of light editing.”

  “I think she found the message in the cupboard. It was a surprise waiting just for her. It made her think about something that wasn’t dark. Something good.”

  “Something in Cartwright.”

  “Something not here,” Jones said.

  “Are you going to call that number?”