Walter had no memory of their short walk through the house, and now, somehow, they were standing in the kitchen.
It was a nice kitchen. It was situated in one corner of the large house, and wide windows to the black outdoors wrapped along the two outer walls, above a marble countertop that spanned the same space, intersected by a few dark-wood cabinets. Walter couldn’t stop himself from thinking how lovely it all could be in the morning . . . a Sunday morning . . . the sun rising above the forest in the backyard . . . warm natural light filtering in through the autumn leaves . . . the smell and the splattering and popping sound of a loving partner frying some eggs over a skillet . . . Again, why had he allowed things to get so muddled in his mind? This was all he wanted; all he needed . . .
Immediately next to Walter was an island countertop in the middle of the room, around which were three tall chairs.
Walter finally processed Melisa’s words and took a seat.
“You have some kind of luck, getting so deeply mixed up in all this,” she spoke softly as she filled a kettle. The way she said it, Walter felt she could’ve swapped “luck” for something synonymous with “karma” and it would’ve come out about the same.
“Yeah . . . yeah.”
Melisa went about the kitchen for a while without talking. She was visibly on-edge. Walter completely understood why, but he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t try very hard to think of any comforting words, truth-be-told, not before he allowed himself to recede back into his active mind, back to where he had been before: His friends had been right about him.
It wasn’t simply an irreversible personality trait that had carried him into such a mental hole. No, it was a lack of mental strength and a set of unfortunate circumstances that had conspired against him—nothing that couldn’t have been avoided or that was impossible to overcome. Walter tried to tell himself, now, that even if he hadn’t gone through his very recent ordeal with Timothy, he still would’ve found a way, before long, to move his mind from such ugly surroundings.
Hadn’t his choice to walk farther upstream instead of home been indicative of an approaching tidal shift?
That didn’t really matter, though. What was done was done, and now that his outlook had been jarred loose, the old cliché came vaguely to mind, putting to words the overall sense that had come over Walter: life really is what you make it.
Walter was gravitating to a simple and clean place of mind. Somewhere far from where he had been before, understandably. He was latching onto and embracing the most basic, instinctual human draws, and attempting to shift out of sight of all the muddled aspects of our infinite world that had tormented him before.
Walter Boyd, sitting in the Corey’s silent kitchen, ignoring Melisa shuffling anxiously about, was realigning his mind to make a simple, happy life for himself.
Trouble was, Timothy Glass was still alive, and he had already realigned his mind to make life a completely rotten thing.
Chapter 11 – Housekeeping
Cut out of the dense surrounding forest, Timothy Glass’s property had a long, narrow front yard leading up to the medium-sized house. A slight gravel driveway ran through it, and both sides of the driveway were currently being threatened by overgrown, neglected lanes of grass and brambles.
As they rounded onto this long driveway, the house and its surroundings were assaulted by the flat white and the pulsing multicolored lights of the three police cruisers.
When he saw it, Officer Tom Corey’s true reaction was mixed, despite his outward frustration, “Fuck.”
“What?” asked Braylen, alarmed.
“His car is gone.”
“Oh. Oh no,” his reaction, too, betrayed a certain level of cautious relief: maybe Timothy had already fled, and there would be no further confrontation that night?
It sure seemed likely. Likely enough that, before disembarking, Officer Corey put in a call for all patrol cars to be on the lookout for what he remembered to be a red Honda four-door of some kind, instructing dispatch to look up the registration and get the exact model and plate numbers circulating ASAP.
Then Tom Corey called for Officers Eugene and Lerra to draw their weapons and get a spotlight on the house’s front door. Tom Corey pulled the loudspeaker out of his cruiser and took up position behind the crook of his door, putting a hand to his holstered gun.
As Eugene swung the spotlight onto Timothy’s front door, Tom Corey spoke into the loudspeaker, “Timothy Glass, you are under arrest for attempted murder. Come out with your hands up.”
• • •
Walter sipped the last of the tea that Melisa had made. It had been herbal tea, and the smell and aroma—subtle things that, before recently, he had had little mind for—evoked subliminal images of green summer hillsides. Walter decided, now, that he should drink more tea in his life. The thought excited him far more, certainly, than you’d expect someone who’d just had such a close brush with death could be excited by such a thing.
Melisa and Walter had not communicated much in the past twenty minutes. Their minds could not have been set further apart, for two individuals in such a unique situation. Melisa was caught up in the uncertain, treacherous present, while Walter was silently changing his world, leaving little room to fret over Braylen and Tom Corey and the rest.
All that changed when the phone rang.
It had been so silent in the kitchen that the moderate ringing could’ve been likened to the blaring of an alarm in a sleeping firehouse. Both Walter and Melisa jumped no less than one inch, and Walter had dug himself so deep into the under-workings of his mind that he was unable to recognize that familiar, repetitive, jarring tone before Melisa, racing across the room, grabbed the small black receiver off the wall and said, her voice breaking, “Hello?”
Walter heard nothing that was said, but he did see some tension in Melisa’s face slacken.
“But wait—everyone’s okay?”
A silent gap—a tense one, now that the present was reasserting itself in Walter’s head.
“He’s not . . . ?”
“Okay, okay, here he is . . .” Melisa, some of the tension possibly substituted for annoyance now, held the phone out for Walter. “Tom wants to ask you something.”
Walter frowned and got up. He accepted the phone and put it to his ear, “Hello?”
“Walter,” Tom Corey’s digitally reduced voice came back urgently, “we need to know, as far as you could see, did Timothy Glass have more of his Blue Stew in the sauna’s basement than—what do we have?—eight liquid-capsules?”
Walter’s head was still not entirely with it, and the lack of clear context was too much to overcome, “Huh? What’s going on?”
“Timothy has fled,” Officer Corey spoke fast. “We are trying to determine how dangerous a fugitive he is. We’ve only found a small container of eight unlabeled blue capsules down here; we want to know if you can say for sure that there was more.”
“Yeah, yeah,” responded Walter. “I didn’t even see those capsules—but there were maybe ten sealed vials of the stuff on the middle table . . . did you find those?”
“Fuck. No. He took them. I knew it—everything’s torn up down here. Shit. Okay, I have to report this immediately. Hopefully I can convince the Staties and the Feds of the severity of all this without having to get all this blue shit tested first . . .” Tom Corey seemed to lose himself in a thought for a second. “Okay, thanks Walter. Tell Melisa I’ll be home soon.”
Before Walter could say anything, he heard a beep, followed by disconnected silence. He handed the phone back to Melisa.
“He says he’ll be back soon . . .”
“So . . . what was that all about?”
Walter paused; the gravity of the implication was falling on him.
“He got away,” his voice was subdued. “Timothy Glass is on the loose . . . with ten full vials of . . . it . . .”
• • •
Tom Corey pulled up in his cruiser fifteen minutes later.
&n
bsp; Melisa had been waiting in the entranceway ever since his call, while Walter had taken to loitering in the adjacent dining room, unsure how to handle her agitated mood. Both of them watched as he disembarked and moved briskly down the stone walkway. He was holding something.
Walter heard Melisa open the door. Tom Corey’s gruff voice accosted her immediately, “You have not dressed this whole time?”
Walter couldn’t see, but he imagined an affronted look preceded Melisa’s staggered response, “God . . . I was so worried . . . I didn’t think . . . I had far more important things on my mind!”
“Look at you; I’m sure Walter enjoyed the show.”
“Tom, what is wrong?” Her tone—rightly so, Walter felt—had gone from defensive to accusatory.
Officer Corey didn’t respond.
Walter stiffened as he heard him approaching the dining room.
Their eyes met, and if Tom Corey’s hard shell of a face could’ve conveyed a subtle emotion like embarrassment, Walter guessed that he would’ve seen some now.
“Walter,” he nodded curtly and began unbuttoning his uniform jacket.
“Tom.”
Tom Corey set what he’d been holding down on the table, near Walter, and pulled off his jacket. It was dim in the large room, but Walter was pretty sure he saw a dark stain along one of his sleeves.
“Melisa, can you get a pot going, please? . . . Tripped in the fucking woods and got mud all over myself. Gotta change, then head out again.”
Melisa followed Tom Corey as he continued through the house.
“Where are you going now?” she asked in a low, begrudging voice.
Walter listened as they moved out of sight into the kitchen, “To Rutland, to their lab. I don’t think those fucking morons are gonna take this seriously until they can see and test that blue shit for themselves.”
“Wait. Is that what you brought in with you? On our dining room table?”
“Yes.”
“Lord . . . is it safe, Tom?”
“They’re a bunch of pills, Melisa. It’s not a damn airborne virus!”
Their testy voices faded into the depths of the large house.
Walter tuned them out entirely. His gaze fell hard on the object Tom Corey had set on the table. He approached it.
It was a cup-sized plastic container, with a top like those on a Pringles can.
Walter’s mind—the best it can be put—was in a very in-between state. He really could’ve used a Closed for Renovations sign on his forehead, so the world would know to leave him alone for a while. Walter had no such sign on his forehead, however, and some ill-functioning part of his brain now made him reach for the container and pull off the lid.
Inside he saw exactly what had been described to him over the phone: a handful of unlabeled capsules, like the liquid or gel capsules you can find on the shelves in any drugstore. Yet, for Walter, that distinct shade of baby-blue was unmistakable. The color would pervade his mind for the remainder of his life.
Well, not exactly what was described to him, he realized. No, he counted nine, not eight of the blue pills . . .
Never knowing why, he reached into the container and took out one pill and held it up for a closer look.
Walter was struck by the truth that this horrible chemical compound might be indirectly responsible for realigning his own mental chemicals. If his relocated outlook on life held firm, he would have Blue Stew to thank for changing his life.
• • •
Around the time he heard the kettle start to whine in the kitchen, Walter, sitting alone in the dining room, heard heavy footsteps that could only belong to Tom Corey.
Officer Corey had donned a fresh police outfit.
“Shit, I’m sorry, I forgot: your friend Nigel reported you missing over a half-hour ago.” He was holding the phone receiver. “Give him a call.”
He slid the phone across the table, and Walter, his movements slow and stiff, fumbled the phone and nearly dropped it.
“Call him quick. I can drop you off there on my way into the city. I’m gonna fill my thermos, use the toilet, and head out.”
“Oh, okay,” said Walter, looking at the illuminated digits on the phone. He started pressing the numbers as Tom Corey disappeared again.
Nigel and Walter’s conversation was monumentally incoherent.
Nigel, tired and distraught, for his part got by with just one word, “what,” delivered with varying degrees of incredulity, intermittently cutting into Walter’s pitiful attempts at recapping a staggering, unbelievable story.
Walter had just finished telling of how Timothy Glass was now on the run from the law with a large stock of his evil compound.
“What?” Nigel was tired of the word—but there was no other word.
Tom Corey came back into the room as this point.
“Let’s go.”
“I’m gonna get a ride back to your place with Officer Corey now. I’ll explain everything better.”
“. . . Okay.”
Tom Corey grabbed the container of Blue Stew with his free hand, a coffee thermos in the other.
Walter hung up, stood up, touched his pocket, and then followed Tom Corey out of the door.
• • •
Try as he might, Walter proved himself incapable of keeping his promise: he did not explain things better when he got to Nigel’s place. He settled for a quantity-over-quality approach, and skimmed over everything probably five times all-told. This was enough—with Walter’s frustrating, incompetent habit of including or omitting key story elements with each new iteration—for Nigel and Jamie to more or less work out the whole wild picture.
No one made it to bed before three in the morning, and even then no one was asleep until an hour before sunrise.
When Walter finally slept, however, he slept like a cinderblock. He didn’t hear when the phone rang around nine, which Nigel only answered on what would’ve been the final ring. The caller was Kall Chansky, wondering if Nigel knew why Walter hadn’t come into work that morning. Nigel told Kall that Walter was with him and that he wouldn’t be coming in that day. He stopped far short of explaining why, saying only, “It’ll be all over the news soon enough, Kall.”
“What? Is Walter okay? Is he in trouble?”
“He’s okay and he’s not in trouble. It’ll be on the news.”
• • •
It wasn’t until just before three in the afternoon that Walter’s eyes fluttered open.
He was ambushed by light; he had to squint. A high sun was coming down through the window above the couch, warming his face. He sat up, and the sun’s rays revealed a wave of dust that his movement on the couch had projected into the air. This made Walter smile, without reason.
The happy, simple outlook on life that he had been shaping last night seemed to have largely cemented during his long, deep sleep.
He got to his feet and teetered through the empty living room, towards the dining room.
In the kitchen he found Nigel and Jamie tapping on their smart phones, sitting at opposite ends of the table. Another beam of afternoon sunlight was coming down from a skylight up in the high, slanted ceiling, reflecting attractively off on the table’s glossy finish.
“Ever stop to think how great the sun is?” Walter asked.
Apparently the couple hadn’t heard him approach, as both of them flinched at his first word.
“Um, good . . . afternoon,” Nigel said, looking up, then back down at his phone. “Trying to connect to the newsfeeds. Officer Corey called an hour ago to give us a heads-up: word has gotten out—the local stations are already on the scene.”
Walter pulled out a chair next to Nigel. He patted him on the back before sitting heavily, grinning.
Nigel looked at him, curious. “Someone’s chipper this afternoon. Happy to be alive?”
Walter shrugged, “Something like that. Hard to explain.”
“You should be. Hey, the man you told us about—Braylen—he called. Wanted to know how you
were doing.”
“That was nice of him. Has anyone talked to Henry yet?”
“Yeah; called him when I first got up, actually. Didn’t want to risk him learning through some overblown newscast. He’s gonna come over after work.”
Walter laughed, “Work. Yes. Exactly how late am I?”
Nigel shook his head, smiling, “Well, it’s about three. But I talked to Kall, too. He knows you’re not coming in.”
“You would make an excellent personal assistant, buddy.”
“Um, thanks.”
Jamie, who had set down her phone and had been observing Walter with interest ever since he’d joined them, now stood up.
“Are you hungry, Walter?”
“Actually, very,” Walter said, only now identifying the semi-pleasant aching at the top of his stomach as hunger.
“Would you guys be happy if I tossed a large tray of nachos into the oven?”
“Yes,” said Walter with powerful emphasis. Nigel laughed.
“How about coffee?”
Walter’s eyes brightened, “Actually . . . do you have any tea?”
• • •
Between the gooey, cheesy, crunchy nachos, the strawberry tea, and his newfound fixation with sunlight cultivated while lounging in such an open, sunny dining area, that afternoon was one of the better ones Walter could remember.
With his houseguest no longer sleeping in there, Nigel frequently went off to the living room to check for any breaking news updates on the local stations. If there had been any, he missed all of them. Unsurprisingly, however, it was the leading story on the News at Five, and Nigel came back to relay their dramatic telling of the “sketchy details” surrounding a “major, terrible, twist in the Night of Horrors,” and how they had a picture of Timothy up the whole time with the caption in bold red: “Extremely Dangerous.”
His pointed choice not to check the news with Nigel hadn’t been enough of a hint, so after this first recap, Walter told Nigel flatly that he didn’t want to hear how the media was having a ball with all this, and that he only cared to know if there were any developments relating to the capture of Timothy Glass.
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