The Memory Detective

by T. S. Nichols

  Cole didn’t lift his head. He let it rest in his hands as if they were the only things holding it up. Then, he let the memories come again. He let them wash over him. He was careful this time, though. As much as he could control them, he tried to force the memories to come one at a time so that he might have a chance at making sense of them, so that he might be able to keep them from bleeding into each other.

  A shot of laughter came to him first: an irrepressible giggle; a jolt of pure joy. Even knowing how these memories would eventually end, Cole couldn’t help but smile at the sound of the laugh. Then the immersion began. They were in a room together. It was a small room, just big enough to hold two beds and two dressers with a bit of extra room in between them to walk through. It was dark. The lights were off, and the room was illuminated by the soft gray-blue glow of the low midwestern moon.

  “Go to sleep, Annie,” Cole remembered saying. He recognized the voice. It was Meg’s, only it sounded far younger than it had on the bus.

  “But I’m not tired,” said the little voice from the bed on the other side of the room.

  “What does Dad say?” Meg chided her little sister. “Sometimes you don’t even know how tired you are until you lie down and close your eyes. It’s really late, Annie.”

  “But what about you?” Annie argued. “How come you’re not going to sleep?”

  Cole looked down. Meg had a book in one hand, the moonlight glowing off each empty white page. She had a pen in her other hand. “I’m going to bed soon, Annie,” Meg promised her little sister. “I just need to write one thing first.” The sisters spoke in conspiratorial whispers, knowing that their parents were asleep not too far down the hall.

  “What are you writing?” Annie asked, trying her best to change the subject. She was sitting up in bed in her pink flannel My Little Pony pajamas, hugging one of her pillows in front of her.

  “It’s my journal, Annie,” Meg answered her. “You know that.” The frustration in Meg’s words echoed inside Cole.

  “Can I read it?” Annie asked with another electric giggle.

  “Annie, sshhh!” Meg hissed at her sister. “And no, you can’t read it. Nobody else even knows I have a diary, and nobody better find out. Okay?”

  “Is it about boys?” Annie asked, saying the word “boys” like it was something profane.

  “It is definitely not about boys,” Meg promised her sister.

  “Then how come I can’t read it?” Annie bounced up and down on her bed as she spoke. Cole could hear the squeak of the springs.

  “If I let you come into my bed, will you try to go to sleep?” Meg asked Annie. Annie was across the tiny room and sliding under Meg’s sheets almost before Meg finished asking the question. Cole could feel Annie’s warmth through her flannel pajamas. She curled up beside Meg and put her head on half of Meg’s pillow. Meg reached down with the hand holding the pen and began to stroke her little sister’s hair. There had to be a good five years between the two of them. Annie closed her eyes and snuggled next to her big sister.

  Meg placed the pen inside her journal and closed the pages around it, then put the journal on the dresser next to her bed. She would pick it up again in a few minutes, after Annie fell asleep. She could wait. Instead of writing, she stroked her little sister’s auburn hair. “I love you, Meg,” Annie mumbled quietly as she began to drift off to sleep.

  “I love you too, Annie,” Meg whispered back. Then she leaned down and kissed Annie on the top of her head. A contented warmth spread over her. Annie’s face glowed in the moonlight like a painting. It didn’t take long for Annie to fall asleep. When she did, Meg climbed out of bed, slid her arms beneath her sister, and carefully carried her over to her own bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.

  Now that Annie was safely asleep, Meg climbed back into her own bed and picked her diary back up. She opened it to the page where she’d placed the pen. She’d written the date at the top of the page. It was six years ago. Meg was thirteen. Her little sister had to have been about eight. That meant that Annie was now fourteen years old. Meg began to write but, whatever she was writing, Cole couldn’t remember it. They were only words—words that meant something to Meg when she was thirteen but that had lost their significance over the years. The words had seemed so important then, but it was everything else about that night that stuck with Meg.

  The memory ended with Meg hiding her journal under her mattress and then getting up to close the shades. The room and the memory went dark at the same time. Cole wanted more. A small pang of voyeur’s guilt ran over him, but he told himself that he needed every memory to help him solve Meg’s murder. So he let another memory come. The next memory was later. The girls were both older. Meg was old enough that she could hardly even be called a girl anymore. Cole could sense the age in Meg’s memories. They felt like the memories of someone much older. In the same way that the last memory began with a jolt of Annie’s laughter, this one began with the sound of Annie sobbing. The sound was painful. It hurt Meg. It hurt her even more, Cole noted, than the falling of the hammer.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Annie protested. They were outside. It was light out. Judging by the lush golden color of the sky, it may have been early evening. They were sitting on swings next to each other. Cole followed Meg’s vision toward the horizon. The land around them was flat and seemingly endless.

  “You know I can’t stay, Annie,” Meg said to her little sister. Cole guessed that Meg was roughly eighteen. This memory wasn’t so old.

  “Why not?” Annie asked through falling tears.

  Meg fought back her own tears for Annie’s sake. “You know that this town isn’t meant for someone like me, and neither is our house.”

  “Wichita isn’t so bad, Meg. People will understand,” Annie promised her sister.

  “Okay, but will Mom and Dad?” Meg asked.

  “Why does it matter?” Annie asked. “They love you. You know that.”

  “Do they?” Meg asked, a head and heart full of doubt.

  “I love you,” Annie said. “What about me? What happens to me?” Annie asked, gripping the chains of her swing.

  “You’re going to be fine, Annie,” Meg said. “You’re popular and you’re smart and all the boys like you.”

  “I need you,” Annie pleaded.

  “No, you don’t,” Meg said with a laugh. “I can only mess things up here for you. Things will be easier when I’m gone.” Meg thought back to the teasing at school and the shouting at home. She thought back to the first time she heard Annie get teased because of her and how Annie had fought back, defending her big sister. Meg didn’t want Annie to have to fight for her anymore. She wanted Annie to be free.

  “What if I don’t want things to be easier?” Annie replied.

  “Well, then I guess you’re fucked,” Meg joked. “Do you remember when I used to push you on these swings?” Meg asked her sister.

  “Yeah,” Annie said, laughing a little bit through the tears. “You used to push me so much higher than any of the parents would. I remember the looks on their faces. They were so afraid that I was going to fly off the swing and land on my head. I think sometimes you were trying to make me fall.”

  “But you never fell, did you?” Meg said.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Annie said, the sadness in her voice ripping through the air around her.

  “Do you want me to push you?” Meg slid off of her own swing.

  “Now?” Cole could hear the excitement in Annie’s voice.

  “Why not now?” Meg answered. She walked behind her sister, her little sister who wasn’t so little anymore. Then Meg placed her hands on Annie’s back. Even that small touch was a gift to them both. Then Meg pushed and Annie began to float back and forth through the air. With each swing, Meg pushed Annie again, pushing her higher up, pushing her farther away.

  “Higher!” Annie called back to her big sister, reverting to her seven-year-old self again.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” Meg called
up to her sister in the sky. Annie simply responded with a laugh that echoed across the flat, endless land around them.

  After a few more minutes of pushing, Meg let the swing slow down again until Annie came to rest. “Will you write to me?” Annie asked Meg.

  “What do you mean?” Meg asked in return.

  “When you get to New York,” Annie said, “will you write to me so I know that you’re okay?”

  “I can send you emails,” Meg argued.

  “No,” Annie said. She knew what she wanted. “I want you to write me. I want to be able to hold the paper in my hands and know that you wrote on it and know that the paper was there with you in New York. I want to be able to smell it and know what New York smells like and to remember what you smell like. Will you write to me like that?” Annie asked again.

  Meg walked in front of Annie’s swing and squatted down so that their eyes were level. “Of course I will, Annie,” Meg promised her. “Will you write me back?”

  Annie nodded. She didn’t speak. Meg knew she was afraid that saying anything would make her cry again. Then Meg reached out to Annie and pulled her close, clutching her in a long, deep embrace. Cole shuddered on the bench as the memories came to him. When they stopped, he felt weak. He felt spent but still, he wanted more.

  Chapter 10

  Cole didn’t bother going home. He went straight from the bench to the police station. His desk was piled high with old newspapers and half-finished paperwork, and he pushed some of the papers aside. He pulled the check from the restaurant out of his pocket and placed it in the middle of the space he had cleared. Then he logged on to his computer.

  Cole waited as his computer came to life. He listened to the footsteps shuffling through the hallways around him. He tried to temper his excitement. Once his computer was ready, Cole opened up a web browser. He looked at the back of the check on his desk again, barely recognizing the neat, feminine handwriting. Cole typed the address into a search engine. A map came up. Cole clicked on satellite view and saw a wide angle of a small neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, with house after house lining the nearby streets. He zoomed in closer to the roof of the house at 17 Scudders Lane. He could see the backyard, a single tree growing in the corner. He hit zoom again. Now the house and the yard were taking up almost his entire screen. Then he hit the street view button and a picture of the front of the house appeared.

  The image showed a small white house with a screened-in front porch, lit by bright morning sunlight. Through the porch, Cole could see the dark green front door. Then the picture came to life, and he fell into another immersion. Shadows began to move inside the house. Cole could hear shouting, the deep growl of an angry father. Beneath the shouting, he could hear crying. Then the green door swung open.

  Meg stepped out of the door and, as she did, Cole was yanked suddenly inside her head, as if sucked there by some elemental force. He was her again, inside her memory. “I’m sorry, Dad,” Cole remembered yelling, tears flowing down her cheeks.

  “Get out of my house,” Meg’s father shouted at her, pointing toward the street as he yelled.

  “But, Dad,” Meg responded with so much sadness that Cole’s body ached. He couldn’t take it. It was too much. He looked away from the computer and pulled himself out of the memory.

  Then he picked up the phone and dialed Ed’s cell phone number. Ed answered on the fifth ring. “Hello?” Ed said, sounding disoriented.

  “Ed, it’s Cole. I’ve got something.”

  “Cole?” Ed responded. He sounded tired. Cole looked at his watch. He hadn’t realized it was almost one o’clock in the morning. “What did you find?”

  “I know where her family is. I have their address.” Cole glanced again at the picture of the house on his computer screen but made sure he looked away before getting sucked in again.

  “That’s good, Cole,” Ed said. “We can reach out to them tomorrow. We can tell them what happened to their daughter and give them some closure.” Everything Ed said was protocol. Everything he said was reasonable.

  “No,” Cole said to Ed. “I want us to fly them out here. I think they can help us with the case.”

  “You think they know something about the murder?” Ed asked, confused. This was why people hated working with Cole. “Do you think they’re suspects?”

  “No. It’s not like that. They have another daughter. The victim, Meg, she had a little sister. The sister’s thirteen or fourteen. I think she knew where Meg lived.”

  “Can’t we just ask them for the address?” Ed asked, still trying to figure out what Cole was up to.

  “No,” Cole said, “I want to talk to the girl myself.”

  “What good is that going to do, Cole?”

  Cole didn’t have a good answer. In truth, it was all about his need for more memories. It would help the case. He kept telling himself that it would help the case. “Do you think we can arrange it?” Cole asked instead.

  “You’re the celebrity, Cole,” Ed said. “You’re the Memory Detective. You’ve got a lot more clout than I do, so you’d know better than me.”

  “I think we can arrange it,” Cole said, as much to himself as to Ed.

  “I’m going to go back to bed,” Ed told his partner, not bothering to hide his growing frustration. “My kids are going to be up first thing in the morning. Maybe you want to get some sleep too.”

  “Okay, Ed,” Cole said. “See you at the station in the morning?”

  “See you then, Cole.” Ed hung up the phone.

  Chapter 11

  Carter found himself in a small wood-paneled room being prepped for surgery by a startlingly attractive female nurse. Despite the medical equipment, the room didn’t look much like a hospital room—more like a country club locker room. Everything was pristine. The wood glistened. He could see himself in the metal doorknobs. Not one thing was out of place. Carter couldn’t spot a single smudge. The nurse, who looked more like a Hollywood actress playing a nurse than an actual nurse, wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his upper arm and pumped it until Carter felt the constriction cut off his circulation. Then she placed a stethoscope on his skin and let the pressure go. “Is all this really necessary?” Carter asked.

  “The doctors are going to put you under,” the nurse told him. “We need to make sure that the anesthesiologist has all the information he needs to keep you safe.”

  “Why do they have to put me under?” Carter asked.

  The nurse smiled at him. “Because the procedure works better that way,” she said to him. “Don’t you want the procedure to be as successful as possible?”

  “I guess so,” Carter said, reminding himself how much he was paying for all of this. He was getting a little nervous. Not nervous enough to think about backing out, but nervous nonetheless. He didn’t even know where he was. Fergus had sent a car to pick him up at his apartment. He sat in the back. The car had plush leather seats, a minibar stocked only with spring and mineral water, and a glossy catalogue advertising the Company’s services. What the back of the car didn’t have was windows. Carter picked up the catalogue. He had seen an earlier version before, but he picked it up again and flipped through it. This time he skipped the beginning, which was full of a dozen or so pages of sales mumbo jumbo about what a person’s life was meant to be and how everyone now had a chance to remember living life to the fullest. Instead of having memories of conference rooms and board meetings, you could have whatever memories you wanted. You could remember whatever you thought you’d missed as the years flowed by while you toiled away. It wasn’t that the pitch wasn’t effective. It was quite effective. After all, it had worked on Carter. Carter simply didn’t need to read it again. He was already sold.

  Instead, he flipped right to the actual catalogue part of the catalogue, the part that described the various products they currently had for sale. He wanted to make sure he still believed that he’d made the right choice. It hadn’t been easy. Carter had seriously considered a few of the others. He
was intrigued by the jazz musician who traveled the world, staying in the finest hotels and playing trumpet in private late-night clubs. He considered the high-stakes gambler. He even thought for a few minutes that one of the women might be interesting. In the end, he chose the surfer. Carter didn’t have any experience surfing; he chose the surfer mostly because he was the most expensive. If you’re going to do this, Carter told himself, you might as well go all the way. The descriptions of the products were extensive. Section after section detailed where in the world the person had lived, where they’d traveled, what their interests were, what they had seen, what they had done, what their type was. Parts went into extraordinary detail about their sex lives, describing their partners, what the partners looked like, and what they had done together. Carter noticed two new additions from the last time he had read the catalogue. One was a mountain climber. The other had spent five years sailing around the world, from island to island, stopping to explore—and everything that entailed. Every time Carter read a new description, he wanted that one. He was satisfied with his selection, though. Fergus had assured him he had chosen wisely, describing the surfer’s memories as “a private work of priceless art.” Only, Carter noted, it actually had a price.

  Carter had no idea how long he was in the windowless car. He had been asked to surrender his watch and his cell phone before he got inside. He felt naked and vulnerable without them. He guessed that he’d been in the car for about three hours. When the car stopped, they were in a high-end garage with an elevator that led straight to where he was now being prepped.

  Fergus had shown up at his apartment the day before, to go over the logistics of the procedure and to see if Carter had any more questions. Carter did have one question that he hadn’t seen addressed. “What about bad memories?” he asked Fergus.