Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  Staley’s boiling point reached, he stands and shouts into Leonard’s face, frightening him, “If she is dead, are you going to be happy that your last act as a parent was to kick her out because she didn’t want to go to your school? Because she disagreed with you? Do you really want your daughter to die hating you, you stupid, selfish son-of-a-bitch?”

  Leonard, who’d been about to stand in response, posturing like a tough guy, though short and flabby, and having only ever been in one fight since elementary school, instead began studying his shoes. Perhaps the words had struck him dumb, or perhaps he realized that the one other fight he’d had since grade four had landed him in the dusty lot behind Baja Red’s Cantina, and that he had shat himself during.

  “You raised a beautiful, intelligent, independent little girl, and then turned your back on her for being just fucking like you, Leonard!

  “You’re pathetic!”

  Connie, steps between the two, giving Carron a look of understanding with a hint of thankfulness. But the gratitude is buried far beneath her fear and worry. She walks Carron to the door, meanwhile Leonard is sitting on the couch in shock, hearing Carron’s words ring in his ear, rupturing his feigned stoicism. He begins to weep, but his crocodile tears only serve to further Carron’s disdain and anger towards him.

  There is precious little Carron can offer in the way of comfort to his little sister. He lets her know he will not rest until they find Evie, and that he will reach out to Jarrod: he will track her down, and he will bring her home safe. He apologizes for the shouting, which she dismisses and says she was glad someone had the gall to tell Leonard off.

  “She gave me this. I didn’t want to show it to you in front of him, because he was already fuming, but here is the name and number of her boyfriend, Freddie. That’s who she was going to see. Leonard hates him. Calls him a communist because he has dreadlocks and smokes pot; I’m not even sure he knows what a communist is; he just likes to belittle anyone not like him or his cronies. I don’t know; he’s so hard to stomach sometimes. But I liked the boy, Freddie. I met him once. He seemed like a fun kid. A bit of a troublemaker; a bad boy. Sometimes I wish I had had the courage to take more risks when I was her age.”

  “Why are you with him, Connie? He’s always been an asshole.”

  “That’s just it, Carron. He’s the same as he’s always been and he is still here for me. He still loves me and he still takes care of me. I can’t fault him because I’ve changed.”

  Connie had married Leonard while Carron was still in trouble, while he was dealing dope and living back and forth between here and Mexico. He had not met Leonard before the wedding. This was when Mr. and Mrs. Staley were still alive, and they had insisted that he be there for the wedding, to which he had shown up smashed drunk and offended the Chamberses—Leonard’s overly pretentious family—and his own family early on in the evening.

  Connie and Leonard had barely known one another when she got pregnant with Evalyn. As well as being pretentious, the Chambers’ were conservative; hence, the commie talk at all family functions. And it wasn’t seen as proper to abandon a young woman, heavy with child, so he had proposed swiftly and dutifully, and they were wed before the birth. This was the only thing Carron had respected about the man in all of his encounters; Leonard had stood by Connie and had taken care of his children.

  “That doesn’t mean you have to put up with—”

  “Carron, just bring my baby home,” she says, turning away.

  “I love you, sis.” He gets back in the sedan.

  While driving to meet and question Jarrod, he makes a call to Jeff Parker, gives him Freddie’s info and says to check him out. Staley asks him if the bloodwork has come back yet, and tells him to hurry it along. He hangs up angry and arrives at Jarrod’s apartment.

  When the door opens, he recognizes the kid. He’s the friendly neighbor who was chatty and helpful when Carron bought and delivered a few pieces of furniture for Evie. The boy looks haggard, his face pale and eyes reddened. Carron assumes the redness is more from worry than from the odor of marijuana curling out into the chilly December morning. He recognizes Staley as well, and is only slightly alarmed when Staley introduces himself as “Detective Staley.” His dismay is dampened due to his gratitude; he is thankful to have police help. He had been aggravated and disappointed by the response given to him by the 911 operator and then again, by the follow-up call he’d received from the Coconino County Sherriff’s office.

  Carron can feel the genuine concern in his voice and see the pain in his eyes. He believes the boy when he tells the story of the barely avoided collision: the brake checking and cigarette flicking. He even lets out a chuckle, which draws a glare from Jarrod.

  “She’s always loved giving people shit where she could. I guess she gets that from me,” he adds, knowing that the girl hadn’t gotten anything worth mentioning from him and drawing a weak smile from Jarrod, whose only concern is finding the girl he is smitten with and for whom he feels oddly responsible.

  If not for him, the police wouldn’t have any link to the man in the Acura.

  The car, he only knew the make and color, is no doubt the same belonging to Dennis Foster, a name and a man he has become tired of hearing and thinking of. He delivers the same promise of hope, the same he’d given his sister and her hypocrite husband, the same promise he was saying over and again, more to steel himself against the inevitability of losing her than because he truly believed it, to the young man before leaving the apartment complex where his niece should be. He places another call to Larry Whesker’s office, and records another useless voicemail. He visits the apartment building on 44 Monroe, again, and for the third time turns up without Foster. He goes back to the station and digs up as much about Dennis Foster as he can, which isn’t much. There is no public record of Dennis Foster before his first job in finance. The records are sealed. His boss says he resigned two days after the incident with Jiménez. His credit cards haven’t been used. His bank account has been drained, as well, so Foster is living on cash.

  But where? He hasn’t registered at any local area hotels, here or in Coconino County. He is relying on Jeff Parker to confirm what he already knows, what he suspected from the moment he laid eyes on that sick son of a bitch, which is that Dennis is a man to study. A man hiding something, even if it’s just a sick pile of desires and notions.

  All of his digging leads him to the same place, 1994. Foster was a ghost until 1994 and he has no way of finding him in 2013. He is getting nowhere fast, and he knows from his time in the FBI that there is a very small window in a kidnapping. He also knows that if he is to deliver on his promise, and ever see little Heavy Evie again, he will have to employ some of his abandoned methods. He cannot get a search warrant until the blood work comes back with a DNA match, and time is something no longer on his side.

  For the first time since Leopold Lutz, the case that nearly ruined his career, Carron decides the rules no longer apply.

  Wallowing in It

  A crisp beam of light slices through the slender crack between the cellar doors, and markedly progresses toward Evie’s bruised and swollen face. Though yesterday the light had landed on the far side of the room and the pegboarded workbench, it now flows in from the Easterly sun and cascades across her ill-adjusted eyes. Evie Chambers snaps from her haze of exhaustion and emerges into the morning full of life and fervor. She is no longer chilled and disoriented from the drugs, but in their absence is filled with an intense hunger burning in the pit of her stomach. She, her father had always said, is filled with piss and vinegar, and today she awakens feeling as though she must presently embody this moniker.

  Had the woman in the gown been real, or was she just an illusion, a phantom of her delusional mind? Real or hallucinated, the gypsy woman hadn’t returned to free her any more than she had explained her presence in the cellar.

  With renewed strength, Evie begins to struggle against her bindings. Pistoning her fist up and down, testing the tensil
e strength of the tape on her right wrist, focusing her energy and fury on this single binding, rather than struggling bodily against the bands of tape adhering her feet, waist, and neck.

  The smell of piss, from her saturated panties and the cot, which has been serving as a collecting plate, fills the room. She had done her best to hold it, struggling against the pain building in her bladder before the man had slipped her whatever it had been. She must’ve evacuated when she was under the influence, or sometime while she was sleeping it off, because she doesn’t remember any warmth pooling beneath her, and is now left in a cold, malodorous station.

  She swallows her pride, smelling the putrid mess and turns her shame of embarrassment into fury to fight.

  Her wrist is bound so tightly, with so many layers of tape, that she isn’t making any progress. The only thing she has accomplished is to tear loose a few fine arm hairs and to aggravate her wrist to the point of soreness.

  The unmistakable sound of a screen door slamming into place rattles through the narrow gap in the doors and down to her ears. Her vacated fear returns. At first, she is silent, and perfectly still, but when no other sounds accompany the slamming, she jerks and screams against the tape and twists her slender arms. She torques the band against the aluminum pole until the bones of her wrists feel as though they are about to snap. She works the arm vigorously back and forth in this fashion now, straining against her fear. She feels and hears the little ping-clicking as a bit more of the tape pops off the metallic pole, its purchase lessening in millimeter increments, but not giving up silently.

  Ping, ping, ping.

  She thinks back to a childhood dream. She is seven or eight, and is climbing in her father’s garage, higher and higher, up the wall-mounted shelving. She is having such a good time climbing that she loses track of the distance. When she reaches the top of the garage, she reaches out to feel the corrugated metal roof. It is cold and hard, and smooth under her tiny fingertips. She can feel the vibration of the rain beats drumming outside, landing in an unpredictable chaotic symphony on the roof. She traces the ridges that were pressed into the sheet metal by a press somewhere in the Midwest, by a union worker who never misses a day. She has no fear of falling, but instead is raptured by joy at her feat accomplished. She reaches further and further, ever more daring than she was a second ago. She finally reaches the apex of her truncated frame and her fingers are secured only by their tips, to the post, which holds the shelves in place.

  In her periphery, she sees a leaf skitter across the pavement, and it catches her attention. She looks down and she is mortified. From this vantage, she seems to be two stories up, at least, and the ground is receding from her in tunnel vision, giving her vertigo. Just then, her tiny fingers lose purchase on the wooden plank she has entrusted, and she falls quickly toward the pavement.

  The feeling welling up in her core, in her loins, is the feeling she had when riding in the car with her papaw, and he would speed up before taking the vehicle over a sharp drop. That uncertain and unstoppable fear of free-fall. That feeling that catches you just before you fall asleep, jarring you awake in terror. The first part of a rollercoaster, the missed step when you walk off the patio, the feeling in your gut that you can never quite prepare for.

  When she feels this feeling again, her fear overwhelms her and she cringes against the imminent impact with the unforgiving cement floor. Eyes closed, bracing for oblivion, she holds her breath.

  Then nothing.

  She pensively opens just one eye, the left, slowly. The ground is arrested from its ascent to meet her and she is hovering in place over the oil-slicked spot, which should have claimed her breath when she landed flat-backed onto the ground. She is floating and the feeling in her guts is still tingling. She is suddenly no longer afraid. Her ability to defy gravity abates with her fear and she falls the last three feet to the floor. Once grounded she had awakened and was thrilled to tell her mom that she could fly as long as she was really scared.

  Connie had spent the entire morning telling her that it was just a dream and that she should most definitely not try to jump off the roof to scare herself into flight. Evie never did take the dream challenge, and eventually she had the dream again, and again, but even at an early age, she always knew the message of the dream. The lesson she learned was that her fear emboldened her with powers she otherwise could never wield.

  She never wanted to be scared enough to fly, but today she thinks she finally is.

  She cranes her head down when she hears the elasticity-sounding gasp for air that the tape makes when it is removed from its adhesive bond. She can see a tiny little diamond of the dusty dank floor through the gap she has created between her wrist and the tubing. Her heart jumps, realizing she has made progress and that, perhaps, her fear has given her the power to overcome the pain and frustration mounting from her struggles to be free. In her efforts, and her daydreaming, she has failed to notice the sounds made by footfalls in gravel, and only dimly recognizes the jingles of the latch opening on the cellar doors. However, when the morning light pours in and reveals the ferocious businessman descending the stairs, she is able to refocus her attentions quickly.

  Captive

  Sunshine catches Dennis’s eyes at just the precise angle to penetrate his eyelids and end his dreams. It’s the same dream he has had since he was a young boy. He is on a rooftop, on top of an old mansion, huge, and there is a group of people with him. They are all on the run from some kind of killer maniac, and everyone is scared. The thunderstorm is giving the entire world a strobe-light effect and causing confusion, when suddenly the lightning cracks open the darkness and reveals Dennis tossing a man off the roof of the building. It is in this moment, and not even a glimmer before, that he realizes that he is the killer they were all running from the entire time. There is no time wasted in trying to figure out how he can be both the killer and running from the killer and not know, instead he embraces the task and searches over his shoulders to find that no one else in the group has seen him throwing the man from the roof.

  More important than the abrupt ending to his dream is that he is suddenly aware he hasn’t been back to check on the girl, who he so dearly wanted to spend some time with. He needs to get rid of Libby, regardless of the enticing prospect she’s put forth for their evening. He silently dons his jeans and work boots, which he had opted for in lieu of the more conspicuous suit last night, which remained puddled near the bed. After buttoning up the casual shirt, popping the steel rivets into the pearl snaps one by one, he heads for the main house to give one last sweep, looking for his mother.

  Jiménez is there to greet him when he opens the door.

  “She’s not here,” he says, referring to Dennis’s mother.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to see for myself.”

  “Whatever, but you need to be more worried about the bitch downstairs. You’re trying pretty hard to fuck this one up aren’t you?”

  “I’ve got a plan, so just stay out of my way you dirty spic. Besides, if you would have just let me kill her last night—”

  Jiménez interrupts his words with laughter.

  “So far, you haven’t been following anything I would call a plan. You’re going about this all wrong. You’re just shootin’ from the hip. Do you want to go to prison? Hell, even if you do, do you want to go before you get a chance to make these bitches pay? Before you really get to live?”

  Dennis responds only with an aggravated stare, and marches up the stairs to his mother’s room. The house is empty except for Jiménez. He is relieved that his scan doesn’t turn up his mother, but he is also pensive and thinks something is up.

  Where has she been? he wonders, knowing that had she have been here to hear his and Libby’s arrival last night he would have been thoroughly berated and asked to leave, not even permitted to sleep in the guest house; not even afforded the hospitality she’d have given a dog. She wouldn’t have been satisfied by his retreat to the guesthouse, and would h
ave insisted he drive away, giving no never mind to his condition or excuses.

  In his mother’s bathroom, in the medicine cabinet, he finds prescription bottles—loads of them—along with some illegally obtained pills. Skimming the labels, he picks out a couple orange containers with chemical compounds that sound familiar.

  He looks over to Jiménez and says, “The ‘Date Rape Drug’ is such a perfect name for this wonderful little chemical.”

  Dennis grabs a tepid carafe of water from the kitchen counter, drops a couple pills from the bottle labeled “Rohypnol” into the clear glass jug, and swirls the water around dissolving the capsule and the fine powder within. There are a few protein and granola bars also on the counter, remnants from his drive up, so he pockets one. He furtively heads for the door when Jiménez tells him that the jug is light, so he adds a pill from the other prescription bottle, as well, before heading to the cellar.

  A jolt of fear like electricity surges through Dennis’s spine and lands in his backside when his eyes land on the soda can lain on his workbench.

  When did this get here, he questions himself, unsure if he is just being paranoid.

  The girl is studying him through beautiful greenish grey eyes. Her red hair sticking to her forehead, beaded with sweat from her obvious struggles. The tape around her mouth is loosened and folded over at the top, as if someone has tugged at it. She seems so beautiful and innocent, he just wants to ravage her again, this time while she is awake, so he can consume her fear and feel her thighs tightening in an attempt to reject him.

  Setting the carafe down on the small makeshift table next to the cot, he sits on the aluminum cot-rail next to her. Her eyes dart back and forth between his cold stare and water, in a demanding manner. He pulls out the pearl-handled straight razor from his back pocket, admiring its smooth polished edges and the subtle weight in his palm. This is the personal setting befitting for the blade’s debut. The initials carved into the handle are worn smooth, HMD. He traces the smoothed back edge of the razor in a line along her jaw, the terror in her eyes becoming anger, and in fact, something more powerful.