Forgotten

by Neven Carr

  Saul laughed.

  I used the next few minutes to reflect, about how much had happened between us, about just how little I knew him. “Do you realize we only met like two days ago, if that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel as if I’ve known you….”

  “Much longer? I guess in one way I already have.”

  He was referring to the whole Charles Smith thing. “No, you knew of me. Not the same.”

  He said nothing, and I wondered if there was something more. “It’s still unusual, don’t you think?”

  “Nothing about the last two days has been usual. We’ve spent just about every waking second together and have gone through some pretty intense times.”

  I took my time before asking my next question. “What do you think is happening between us?” It seemed inappropriate to ask, but I knew what I meant, and I had the peculiar feeling that Saul would too.

  He tightened his arm around me. “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “Does it make you feel uncomfortable?”

  “Extremely. And you?”

  “The same.”

  More quiet followed.

  “I don’t want any of this to interfere with my ability to help you, but I can’t see how it won’t,” Saul said.

  I watched him randomly scan the horizon. He was struggling with the thought - that much was apparent. “I have faith in you.” And I meant it.

  But he didn’t appear convinced. “Just before you arrived on the hill today, I’d decided to give up on trying to understand it all and instead just run with it, run with whatever I felt for you and take it from there, that was of course if you felt the same. It was amazing how easy it became after that decision.”

  I was a whole lot grateful for that decision.

  “Besides, you know what Annie would say. That we were old souls.”

  Old souls. In Annie’s unconventional slant of the world, I could hear her saying just that. Saul pulled me nearer and for a while, we were quiet, luxuriating in our closeness.

  Even with the knowledge that there was still so much ahead.

  Chapter 30

  Claudia

  December 28, 2010

  1:15 am

  “WAS SIMON THE reason you needed to escape, today?” Saul was studying my bare ring finger, wearing a heavy frown.

  I tucked my sand-coated legs to one side and began rubbing the whitish skin where the ring once occupied. I sensed my heart crack just a little. “It was time to put the poor man to rest.”

  “I get the feeling it’s more complicated than that.”

  I sighed deeply and nodded. I then went on to explain everything from the whole, strange Simon episode to my lost, painful hours battling my so-called demons. As before, I found talking to Saul easy. And as before, he listened with the upmost absorption.

  “I’m sorry for being so angry,” he whispered after I finished.

  I pulled back immediately. “No, Saul. It’s me who should be sorry. Not telling you today was wrong.”

  “But….”

  “But nothing. It may now seem understandable, but it doesn’t excuse it. I caused so much trouble, not just for you and Ethan but also for all those people searching for me. You were right, I need to grow up.”

  “I was being too harsh.”

  “You were being correct.” I knew this now. “I love how you don’t treat me like a child, overprotect me like so many others do. You’re always honest. You don’t bullshit me or pretend that everything is okay when it’s not. You encourage me to handle things on my own. You treat me like an equal. And all I want to do now… is to grow up so I can be your equal. You were one of my biggest motivations to sort myself out today. You and of course, Simon.”

  Saul lightly stroked his thumb across my bottom lip. My stomach flipped and I groaned quietly. “I’m really proud of you, you know that.”

  “I do.”

  “What you did today, wouldn’t have been easy.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  He drew me back to him, began affectionately playing with my hair. It felt nice, calming. “I was so worried. You never go anywhere without that bloody green bag of yours or your bloody musk sticks. I overreacted.”

  “Ethan told me why you did, how you felt.”

  “Sometimes Ethan talks too much.”

  “He thinks you’ll be upset with him, for being disloyal.”

  Saul chuckled. “His loyalty to me is exactly why he told you in the first place. Sometimes, I think he knows me better than I do.”

  I had never thought of that. I wondered if Ethan had.

  “This question that Simon wanted you to ask, have you figured it out yet?”

  I had. But first, I needed to talk about Simon. I told Saul this.

  Saul skimmed my forehead with light kisses. “Then tell me about him, Claudia. Tell me about that day.”

  My chest tightened at the thought of that day… the day I found Simon. “I’ve never told anyone the whole story before… ever.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I want to tell you.”

  Saul waited with remarkable patience. I used it to draw upon my new strength. “The break-in to our Sydney unit was my fault.”

  My voice was trembling. I think my body was too. I waited for Saul to respond but he didn’t.

  “We had two locks for the door. A normal, everyday ‘knob lock’; not the most secure but still dependable. And a Smartcode deadbolt that Simon had installed. Being an investigative journalist, he had to travel a lot with his work and was concerned about my safety.” The irony of it was plain ridiculous … my safety.

  I remembered how much Simon loved his job, in particular that aha moment when his investigations would fall into that perfect, place of answers.

  “You should’ve been a detective,” I would often joke.

  “Nah,” he would joke back. “I could get hurt… worse killed.”

  I swallowed hard, watched my fidgety fingers knot.

  “The day after Simon had left for one of his longer trips, the Smartcode began beeping and wouldn’t lock. I replaced the battery, did everything the troubleshooting guide told me to do. But nothing worked.”

  I remembered how annoyed I was. I would often come home exhausted from the high demands of my teaching job, too exhausted to play with disobedient locks.

  “So what did you do then?” Saul asked.

  “I rang the company. They said it sounded like the lock wasn’t aligned properly, something to do with movement in the door. A common problem but easily fixable. They gave me the name of their nearest repairer but….”

  I stopped, lifted my face, sucked in the marvelous, coastal air. How I loved it, its saltiness so incredibly sweet. And the stars; like thousands of lit-up mobile phones at a packed rock concert.

  “But what?”

  I closed my eyes and breathed in.

  “Claudia?”

  “I didn’t ring the repairer.”

  Saul went quiet; his rigid muscles said enough.

  “I was so tired and cranky.”

  The excuse sounded pathetic, even worse when said aloud.

  “I was on a deadline with report cards; it was that time of year. They were due in three days and I was still marking major assessments. On top of that, I was studying my part-time master’s degree. I had an assignment due, a small one but still due. Time at home was increasingly precious. The last thing I needed was someone banging away inside my unit. It was another four days before I finally rang the repairer.”

  “I don’t get it,” Saul said, “fear has governed you most of your life.”

  Fear still did. But a lifetime of inexplicable dreams, of nameless watchers that no one believed existed, was what had generated it. Or so I had thought.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know how to explain it. In Sydney, my dreams and the watchers had lessened, quite a lot. After an entire, blessed year of it, I had actually begun relaxing. Besides, we lived in a pretty upmarket
area. Break-ins were rare. Our block of units, old as they were? Non-existent. And I still had a perfectly functioning lock. I guess I never really believed anything would happen.”

  “And when you finally rang the repairer?”

  I shook my head and groaned. “He couldn’t come out for another week. That if I had rung a few days earlier….”

  “What did Simon say?”

  That was the hard part.

  “I told him about the lock the first night he rang me.”

  “And?”

  Simon’s voice is anxious. “When’s the locksmith coming out?”

  I am silent, wondering what to say.

  “Clauds?”

  “I haven’t rung him yet.”

  He swears, asks me why.

  “I came home late. I’ll call him tomorrow morning.”

  “First thing?”

  “First thing.”

  “Promise me.”

  I promise him but he is still not satisfied. The unease I hear in his voice is peculiarly strong, making me question why.

  “Clauds, this is important. Promise me and mean it, promise me on my life.”

  “Simon….”

  “Promise me, damn it.”

  And I do.

  I recounted the conversation to Saul. He cupped my chin, tilted my face up to him and stared solidly at me. “Claudia, just because you promised on his life, doesn’t mean that’s why….”

  “I know,” I interrupted, staring right back at him. “But the way he sounded, really edgy, almost scared.”

  Saul’s eyes narrowed. “You think he knew something, knew that your lives were in danger?”

  Again, I shrugged. “At the time, I brushed it off to my imagination but afterwards?” I sighed, broke away, searched for the moonlit waters. “Well… afterwards….”

  “You don’t know he’d been threatened for certain.”

  “What other explanation was there? I should’ve trusted my first instincts.”

  Hindsight, what an amazing attribute, one that richly fertilized blame and guilt like nothing else.

  “The line between natural instincts and imagination is a very fine one, Claudia. Sometimes barely visible.”

  I had learned that, was still learning it. “Whatever, the fact remains that I didn’t keep my promise. One thing, only one thing Simon asked me to do. And I didn’t. Not right away as he wanted. But at the time, the urgency didn’t seem as important to me as getting everything else finished. I figured the lock would be fixed before Simon got home and he wouldn’t have been any the wiser.”

  “But he was early.”

  Five days early.

  I began drawing haphazard shapes in the cool, moist sand, wanting to avoid Saul’s gaze. “That day” I continued, “I had come home in high spirits. I had just gone food shopping. Simon would be back on the weekend and I wanted to surprise him with his favorite meal. Our wedding plans were in full swing, we both had great jobs, and we absolutely loved Sydney. Life was just sweet.” My heart began pounding a little too fast, too loud and my muscles tightened. “As soon as I opened the door to our unit, I could smell it, that stench.”

  “Death,” Saul whispered.

  I closed my eyes and trembled. It all started flooding back to me, my automatic reluctance to go in the unit, Shamus, Clinton, as brave as they were. And my old fears returning in torrents.

  The stars suddenly dulled, the salty air soured. I gripped onto Saul’s hand, suppressed the angry, biting tears and ordered myself to keep going. I then painfully recounted the rest. “Shamus eventually called the police.”

  I pictured the normally exuberant and colorful Shamus, pale and badly shaken. Many months later, I had contacted him. He was polite but unexpectedly standoffish. Now, the only time I heard from him was a generic Happy New Year text. It hurt, naturally. But, in some ways, I understood.

  “The police said the ‘knob lock’ had been tampered with; that and the freakish positioning of the body, the rose petals, the obsessive cleanliness, all spelt a ritualistic/gang-like killing and most likely something Simon was involved in.”

  “But no link was found.”

  “None.”

  “And you blamed yourself.”

  “Of course, I blamed myself. If the Smartcode had been working, if I had it repaired earlier as promised….” I sat up straight, cradled my tired, throbbing head. “Can you imagine what Simon must’ve thought when he came home and found the lock still broken? Worse still, that I hadn’t taken my promise more seriously?”

  “Claudia, guilt is….”

  “Very destructive? Yeah, you’ve said that already. And you’re right, it was.”

  I was hissing but not at Saul, at myself.

  “At first, it was like I was floating in this other world or parts of me were, the parts that responded to my family and friends. But without any emotion, you know, like a pre-programmed robot. What I didn’t understand was everyone’s compassion. Even Simon’s parents, they were so sympathetic. How could they be? I was responsible.”

  I could still, even now, recall my increasing repulsion for them. “I found the more empathetic they were, the angrier I got. And this anger just festered like the sick thing it was, until it ripened to a very silent, very twisted rage.”

  I stared ahead and saw only black nothingness, felt myself partially disengage from my body. “Soon I didn’t want to hear their annoying, reassuring words or see their disturbing, kind faces. I just wanted them to go away. And they did. And I retreated into my home, all alone. And, well… Simon….” My voice was indistinct, scratchy. “Simon wasn’t there.”

  The memories of my first night back in the Sydney unit hit me with all the impact of a heavy-duty, industrial sledgehammer, the stark, in-your-face emptiness, the vivid, bloodstained bed, the sudden uninvited reality of what had happened, the crippling mental shock that followed.

  I labored for air, felt as if I was going to be sick. But, again, I ordered myself to move on.

  “I would call out to him, to Simon, a thousand times a day telling him how sorry I was, telling him I would get that fricking lock fixed now if he would just please come home. But he didn’t, Saul. He didn’t come home.”

  My chest was exploding and hot tears began spilling uncontrollably. I tried to swipe them away, but I was too shaky, too uncoordinated.

  Saul grabbed my arm. There was nothing gentle about it or in the way he spoke. “Claudia, stop; don’t do this.”

  I shook my head. “I have to.”

  “No, you don’t,” he bellowed. And for one brief, weird second, my thoughts digressed and I wondered if I had unintentionally ruffled him again. I battled off the next round of fresh tears. “Saul, I’ve come this far, so please… yes I do.”

  He grimaced and then slackened his hold. I broke away and continued.

  “Soon I imagined that everything was turning black, the walls, the furniture, even the air around me, until I became black along with it. I remember willing it to swallow me whole and then I remembered nothing.

  About a week later, my Aunt Lia turned up. My family was worried. And rightly so. They hadn’t heard from me and I lived so far away. The rest? I only know through Lia. She found me sprawled on the bloodstained bed, wrapped in Simon’s already worn clothes, cuddling them, smelling them, muttering his name over and over. I didn’t even recognize Lia.”

  Saul shot up fast. “Fuck this, Claudia. Give yourself a break, even if just for a minute?”

  My aching, miserable body was ordering the same. Saul cradled me and I wept freely. It felt so good; my constricted chest loosened, my stiff muscles relaxed. And when I stopped, I noticed that once again, I managed to mascara-stain another of Saul’s shirts. “This is becoming one very nasty habit,” I joked.

  “One I can live with,” Saul said, seriously. “So, how did Lia help you?”

  “She called for an ambulance and escorted me to the nearest hospital. I was treated for everything from dehydration to severe depression. When
I was semi-back on my feet, medicated to the hilt, Lia convinced me to return home. That’s when I went under the care of Dr. Cruikshank.”

  “And your dreams returned along with your watchers.”

  “Yes, very much so. I understood that many of my symptoms, at the time, were classic Post Traumatic Stress, but as I told you already, I couldn’t convince Cruikshank that the dreams weren’t, that I’d had them since childhood, nor the fact that I wasn’t paranoid; that I did have watchers. He just tacked them with my other symptoms.

  In time, I went along with whatever he said. I was just too weak to fight it. Anyway, it was Mel and Lia, who encouraged me to get off the meds and return to teaching. Once I had, they helped me get a place of my own… my Zephyr unit.”

  “So, seeing Simon today or thinking you saw him must have been….”

  “Gut wrenching. He seemed so real; the whole thing seemed real. I don’t understand what I experienced. But, he kept insisting that I ask this question, and that the answer would give me something important.”

  And it had.

  “You see, much about Simon’s death was kept from the media, you know regarding the flowers and stuff.”

  “Makes sense. So you’re wondering how was today’s killer aware of such detail? Sadly, Claudia, it’s possible. If someone really wanted the details of that crime, they could get it. It’s not difficult. I’ve done it many times.”

  “But how did they know about the hands?”

  Saul pulled back, held me at arm’s length. “What are you talking about?”

  “That was the question; the one Simon wanted me to ask. It was staring at me the entire time. How could whoever did that today, have known about the hands? They were crossed, right over left, directly above the heart.” I copied the exact movements with my own hands.

  “Same as Simon.”

  “Yes, but you see, only I could’ve known that.”

  I didn’t wait for Saul’s why.

  “I was the one who opened Simon’s arms wanting to lie close to him. That’s how the police found me. I never told them about the original position of his hands; I’ve never told anyone; you’re the first.”