“All right.”
“And just in case we miss you in the morning, how can we best reach you once you’re back on your way?”
Frank gave Donahue his cell number and mailing address. The whole thing was a nuisance and possible intrusion he didn’t need, but at least he didn’t get the impression that he was under suspicion. He said his good-byes to Donahue, then turned and walked back to the motel.
* * *
Frank let out a long, weary breath as he locked the motel room door behind him. This trip had been more than he’d bargained for in far too many ways. He never dreamed he’d be anxious to return to his mundane life, but mundane was starting to look pretty good about now.
He glanced around the room to decide if there was anything he could do now to save some time in the morning. His bag remained on the table, still packed from when he’d attempted to check out earlier that day. He shrugged and took off his coat. Then he went over to the bed and took off his shoes and socks.
And there he sat.
It was late enough to turn in for the night and get the rest he needed to set out in the morning. But the cops could dredge up the stranger and show up at his door anytime during the night to have another chat. Frank didn’t think he could manage to fall asleep while anticipating a knock that might or might not come.
He sighed, stood, and went over to his bag. He’d been partway through a riveting new paperback when the news came about Roger. He’d just chucked it into his bag when he packed, but hadn’t so much as thought about it since. Hoping for some distraction, he dug it out and returned to the bed with it.
Frank propped up the pillows behind him and opened the book. Several pages went by before he realized he was just moving his eyes across the print without absorbing the words. He groaned and tossed the book onto the nightstand. He grabbed the remote, flicked on the TV and stared at it to try to kill time.
The TV lulled him into a dull trance, neither asleep nor fully awake, so he had no clue how long he’d been like that when a knock startled him back into the here and now. He went to the door and peeked out the little hole. The two cops from earlier stood there in the glare of the outside light.
He opened the door. “May I help you?” How else does one answer the door to cops in the middle of the night under these circumstances?
“Sorry to disturb you at this late hour, Mr. Foster, but we’ve found the body and need you to take a look.” Officer Donahue held a notepad and pen in one hand. His silent partner stood beside him, pale and poker-faced.
Seeing Roger in his satin-lined casket had put more than enough death on display for Frank. He felt no desire to look at some wet corpse in the middle of the night. “Officer, honestly, I didn’t see his face. The light was so bad, he was just a shadow. I didn’t get any detail.”
“Sir, I understand that, and this likely won’t yield any useful information, but we need to follow the formalities. You were the last one to see him alive, right before the…incident. This shouldn’t take long, and we’ll let you be on your way.”
Frank’s shoulders slumped when he realized the futility of arguing with Officer Donahue. “All right, give me a moment, please.” He went back over to the bed to put his shoes back on, then grabbed his coat and keys.
It was only a couple of blocks to the scene, so he walked back with the cops. Whatever additional vehicles or equipment had been brought in were gone, leaving only the cops’ car and the coroner’s wagon, its rear doors open and waiting.
The corpse had already been placed on a gurney and zipped into a black body bag. Too much death. Frank shivered as he stepped toward it.
Donahue nodded toward his partner, who went over to the other side of the gurney. He unzipped the bag, taking care to hold the edges together, then gave Frank a questioning look. Frank nodded. The cop then opened the bag to reveal most of the body, which remained clothed.
Not wishing to be assaulted with a view of the entire corpse at once, Frank averted his eyes after signaling the cop to go ahead and open the bag. He limited his initial glance to the lower half of the body while he worked up the nerve to view the deceased’s face. Wet, dark pants and a long dark coat—he’d seen enough to presume it was the same person. After all, how many people dressed in dark clothing had jumped over that rail tonight?
Feeling the cops’ eyes pressing him to view the entire body, Frank willed himself to glance at the torso and face and get it over with. Only then would they let him go back to his room, back to his normal life.
Frank gasped when he saw the face. Almost as quickly, he felt self-conscious and hoped his shock wasn’t too evident to the cops who stood staring at him.
“Recognize him?” Donahue idly scribbled on his notepad.
“No…no, I don’t.”
Donahue aimed his pen at the corpse. “You mean, it’s not who you saw earlier?”
“No. Yes. Well, as far as I know. He’s dressed the same and all. Best I can tell.” Despite the chilling mist, Frank felt sweat begin to trickle from his armpits.
Donahue gave another one of his telepathic nods to his partner, who zipped up the bag and went over to the driver’s side of the coroner’s wagon to tell him the body could be loaded up and whisked away.
“All right. I think that’s about all we need you for. We have your contact information if anything else comes up. Thank you, Mr. Foster. You’re free to go.”
“You’re welcome.” Frank nearly choked on the words, his mouth had gone so dry. He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and strode quickly back toward his room.
He locked the door and nearly collapsed against it. He tore off his coat and flung it onto the nearby chair. Frank felt as if he were strangling, unable to get enough air. He fled to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face and try to make sense of what he’d seen.
He hoped the cops had taken his reaction as nothing more than a layperson’s shock at seeing a dead person. He didn’t need them realizing that he’d recognized the corpse, because it would only lead to questions he didn’t want to have to answer. He just wanted to get back home, put this whole trip behind him and pretend none of it had happened.
The man had clearly jumped. He did not fall; this was no accident. Even in the poor light, that much was certain. Unfortunately.
Frank wondered if his own actions earlier that day had driven Cromwell to suicide.
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER
Frank rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He sat, gripped by writer’s block, in his office in the middle of the afternoon. He wondered if the block was really on his end or if it was because there just wasn’t anything interesting in his town to write about. Didn’t matter. He needed to supply words to the machine, and this afternoon, it just wasn’t happening for him.
He reached over to his computer and clicked on the search engine. Maybe if he flipped through some unrelated stuff on the Internet, his brain would relax and something would come to him. It sometimes helped to change his focus for a little while, then return to the writing task at hand.
His fingers sat poised on the keyboard as he pondered just what to idly search on.
Douglas Cromwell.
He’d tried to put Cromwell—both the man and the town—out of his mind since returning from Roger’s funeral. His world was so far removed from Cromwell that on most days this wasn’t too difficult a task. But every so often, his mind did return to the scene, and he would wonder what ever happened. Surely nothing had surfaced of his little visit with Cromwell on the afternoon of his suicide, else he had no doubt Officer Donahue would have rung him up.
Of course he didn’t overtly do anything to cause Cromwell to choose suicide, and he hadn’t had any such intention in the first place. But…would he have done it if he hadn’t paid him that visit that day—and asked those questions? The possibility haunted him when he allowed himself to recall the events.
A link to a story on Cromwell caught Frank’s eye. It was from a few weeks after his death. He clicked on it and read.
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DOUGLAS CROMWELL’S DEATH AN APPARENT SUICIDE
Douglas Cromwell was found dead in Cromwell Bay’s harbor last week. The coroner has confirmed death by drowning. The police have determined that the drowning was intentional. They base this conclusion on a witness’s firsthand account of Cromwell climbing over the protective railing, as well as on the contents of a suicide note later found at his residence.
Cromwell’s note addresses a controversy that has rocked our town for years. In it he confesses that he deliberately disabled the exits in his mill during work hours. While he denies any involvement in setting the deadly fire that destroyed the mill and killed all the workers present at the time, he admits if he hadn’t tampered with the exits, the workers could have escaped.
Cromwell decided he could no longer live with that guilt, and indicated in the note his intent to take his own life later that night.
Frank snatched his hands off the keyboard as if it were white-hot. Cromwell had lived with that knowledge for years and years without any evidence that it bothered him in the slightest. He only decided to end his life after Frank’s clumsy attempt to confront him on it and get a story.
He put his trembling hands to his face and closed his eyes. If only he’d minded his own business and headed home that day. Whether Cromwell deserved such an end wasn’t for him to judge, let alone cause. Now he’d have to live with the memory of that pale, waterlogged death mask for the rest of his life—a small taste of what Cromwell had been living with.
* * *
“Stay in back, Beau.” Eileen gave the Boxer a gentle shove to persuade him to stay put. She sat in the driver’s seat of her car, lingering in the motel parking lot a little while longer.
Saying good-bye.
She gazed at the building, taking it all in, left to right. Imprinting it in her mind—because it wouldn’t be here much longer. And neither would she.
After Cromwell’s suicide—and the reasons he gave for it in his note—became public, the town had again erupted into a controversy about the man and what he had or had not done. The residents couldn’t agree on how much to blame him for the deaths of his workers.
On the one hand, he did create the unsafe conditions that prevented their escape. But on the other hand, how was he to know a huge fire like that would break out when it did? The mill had a perfect safety record ever since it began operations. Gossip raged over who might have set the fire, if it was indeed set, and not just a pure, hideous accident. At least no one now believed he’d set the fire. There would be no reason for him not to admit that in his suicide note, were it true.
The townsfolk agreed on one thing: the men shouldn’t have died that way, and they needed to be memorialized. A group of them started raising money and approached Eileen with an offer to buy her property. They planned to raze the old motel and install a memorial park.
Eileen glanced at her hands, roughened from cleaning bathrooms day after day. Who was she to turn down the money? She’d profited from the motel in the little over a year she’d been operating it. But Eileen knew her luck ran hot and cold, and knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. So she’d bid them up a little, then accepted the offer. The money would be enough to give her time to figure out what she’d do next.
She started the car. “C’mon, Beau, which way should we go now, boy?”
Eileen drove slowly along the length of the motel one last time before leaving. As she drew near to #8, Beau unleashed a gut-wrenching howl, flung himself against the far side of the backseat and cowered. “All right, all right, we’re going now.” She glanced at the room, then blinked. For just an instant, she thought she saw the glow of flames through the curtain.
About the Author
Lisa von Biela worked in Information Technology for 25 years, then dropped out to attend the University of Minnesota Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 2009. She now practices law in Seattle, Washington.
Lisa began writing short, dark fiction just after the turn of the century. Her first publication appeared in The Edge in 2002. She went on to publish a number of short works in various small-press venues, including Gothic.net, Twilight Times, Dark Animus, AfterburnSF, and more. Then she decided to try her hand at writing a novel. The result was her debut technothriller, The Genesis Code, and its follow-up, The Janus Legacy, both published by DarkFuse. Ash and Bone is her first novella.
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