Finding Susan

by Kahn, Dakota

  “I’ll get this all started in a moment,” Blake said.

  Kate didn’t reply. She looked again at the face down photograph, and curiosity overtook reason. He was out there on the balcony, and he was concentrating on something else. Kate didn’t see the harm - maybe it was some sweetheart that he left in Seattle and was pining over.

  Kate grabbed the photo and flipped it over, keeping her body between it and Blake to block his view. It was a picture of a young black girl, smiling like an angel. She had braces on her teeth and glasses. The picture looked like a cutout from a photograph - half of somebody else’s arm was in the shoot, going round the girl’s back. The photo didn’t fill out the frame, and it looked sad and strange there, like it was floating out in space.

  “What are you doing?” Blake said, his voice filled with urgency. Kate set down the picture. Caught red handed. He wasn’t a bad cop.

  “Cute kid,” Kate said. “Yours?” She turned around, and when she saw the expression on Blake’s face she froze. He grabbed the picture away from her and set it back down on the glass table. He glanced at it and closed his eyes. Kate couldn’t tell if he was about to be furious or if he was going to cry. He slapped the photo down and it landed against the glass with a large cracking noise.

  “I’m sorry, Blake. Bad joke.”

  “Why did you look at that? That wasn’t there for you,” Blake said. He was starting to look nervous, and finally he turned away from Kate and went back out onto the balcony. Kate reached out for the photograph again, but stopped herself. This isn’t something you want to get involved in, Kate thought. But the ice had been broken, and she could tell something was hurting in Blake.

  This was quick work, she thought. Just yesterday we were practically at each other’s throats and today... Thank God he broke my porch, Kate thought. Maybe it was just that they were both lonely, and both back in the small town they thought was restraining them when they were children. Whispering Pines wasn’t what was holding them back now.

  “Blake?” Kate called as she headed out to the balcony. The fire was raging in the barbecue, but Blake wasn’t minding it. He was staring out at the view. The clouds were darkening as the sun cycled down, and a wind of deep chill was blowing now. Kate tapped Blake on the shoulder, but he didn’t respond.

  “Blake, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to pry.”

  “That’s all right. Guess it’s in your nature,” he said, and his voice was gruff.

  He wasn’t going to make this easy, thought Kate. Better to ease into it.

  “Looks ready for the steaks,” she said, pointing at the barbecue.

  “What?” Blake said, then he looked. “Oh hell, that’s getting too high. Why didn’t you tell me?” And like a switch had been thrown, Blake was changed. This is going to be a long evening, Kate thought as she watched the fire burn.

  *********

  Fire would sustain here, thought Joe Bob. He was standing on the eastern part of Mr. Sticha’s old property, now his own, on the place where he was laying down the foundations for his new structure. It would take him all day to build that thing, but it would have taken most men the better part of a week. The cinderblock walls would be high enough so that he could stand in here without a person knowing, hidden from the casual passerby. At the same time, the hillside and brush would help disguise it.

  Just a dozen feet away was a concrete bunker Mr. Sticha had dug underneath the ground. Mr. Sticha was something of a crank, sure that the reds were going to “let fly with the nukes” and that the only things left in North America would be roaches and, thanks to his bunker, Mr. Sticha. Joe Bob wondered if, unless one knew ahead of time, anyone would be able to tell Mr. Sticha from a cockroach. Maybe they could, but they wouldn’t compare him favorably to one.

  Joe Bob walked to the bunker, stepping around the leaf-covered dirt that surrounded it. It was uncovered now, but in a matter of minutes he could hide it under leaves and a sheet of tarpaulin and no one could ever see the wooden trapdoor that lead into the hiding place he was building. Joe Bob had modified the function of the bunker a great deal from Mr. Sticha’s paranoid intentions. He had his own.

  He knew he was probably going to have to deal with Kate and her nosy ways. And maybe Blake, too. He had to keep them out and he didn’t want any sign of what was below. He had his plans. No one was going to get in his way.

  Chapter Seven

  The steak was probably great, but Blake couldn’t really taste it. It wasn’t exactly ashes in his mouth, but he couldn’t concentrate on flavor. Kate was making small jokes, trying to draw him out. Thanks, but no thanks. These last two days had been weird, and that wasn’t what he was looking for in life. Life should have a rhythm, an ebb and a flow. Blake’s had been thrown out of whack exactly as much as he could stand already.

  “You could play football with this potato,” Kate said. She’d slathered hers with sour cream and butter and cheese, and then seemed to be doing her best to eat around all the fattening parts.

  “No you couldn’t. Thing would fall apart after one toss.”

  “Well, yeah, cooked. But raw it’d make a good football. For a bit. I prefer short games to long ones, anyway. Hey, if I start babbling, just tell me and I’ll shut up.”

  Blake sighed. Under other circumstances, this could have been a pleasant evening. The lights were a bit bright, but Kate went and put up candles and turned off a few of them so the atmosphere was much more... atmospheric, Blake decided. Under other circumstances, this would look one whole hell of a lot like a date.

  There were no room for other circumstances in Blake’s life, though. Other circumstances, leading his life in the way he felt rather then thought led him to disaster before, and it would do so again. His instincts and his heart were the greatest liars of them all. He could never trust them again.

  “Wow, this is lively, Blake. If you get anymore animated, a funeral is going to break out.”

  “Hey!” Blake snapped at her. Kate was in the middle of taking a drink, and she stopped, cup in midair, looking like she was bracing herself for a hit. “You stole that line from Rodney Dangerfield. Here I was thinking that you were some great wit, coming up with barbs at the rate of... something really fast, when the truth is you’re nothing but a common thief.”

  “I take exception to that,” Kate shot back. “I’m an extraordinary thief!” She was still looking ready to defend herself, but Blake could see this hint of a smile in her face. She’d just come up with a game, and he was going to win.

  He pointed at her with his index finger, like shooting a pretend gun. “Die Hard - that’s what Alan Rickman says when Bruce Willis’s wife accuses him of being a common thief.” His grin was triumphant. “Isn’t this like the games we used to play as kids?”

  Kate gave him a quick quelling look, and he knew what it meant. Talking about the game was against the rules of the game - it had to be figured out by playing along.

  “I guess it is,” she said slowly, looking wise. “And I know what you’re thinking: how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?”

  “Hah!” He slapped the table. “Die Hard II. I’m sensing a theme here. Gonna tell me you see dead people next?”

  She looked like the proverbial cat that ate the canary. “All I see is dead people,” Kate said. She couldn’t help but grin now.

  She thinks she has me, Blake thought. And he thought, and thought, and realized she did have him. He couldn’t come up with an answer.

  “Sixth Sense, I guess,” he said, groaning as he said it. He knew it wasn’t exactly right.

  “Wrong! Twelve Monkeys.” She laughed happily. “I won, so I get to decide what we do next.”

  “I get it wrong once, and you’re the winner?” Blake said, being grumpy.

  “I never said the game was fair,” she said. She pulled a stick of gum out of her pocket and started to chew. She offered one to Blake, but he didn’t take any. “I get to ask you a question now, and you have to answer it, okay?” She spoke, cutt
ing off Blake’s refusal. “Why did you leave Seattle?”

  He shot right back. “Why did you leave San Fran?”

  Hadn’t they been down this road before?

  “All that stuff you brought here—I’d say you’re moving in. Why aren’t you taking on the big city anymore?” Blake tried to keep his tone measured, but it was difficult. He wasn’t going to be dredging up all his feelings just to satisfy the curiosity of some girl, even if she was... a friend.

  Kate heard the emotion being tamped down in his voice and she saw the flicker of something cagey in his gaze. Her instincts were usually good and this time her instincts were sending out a bright, clear signal. “Who is that girl in the picture?” she said.

  His gaze hardened. “How did you get that scar on your thigh?”

  Kate paused for a moment, and she looked like she was going to ask a new question, and for just a moment, Blake frowned. “There you go. She just wants trivia, something to joke about later on,” he thought.

  But she surprised him. Her head came up and she told him straight out.

  “I was in a car accident coming back from a concert at the Warfield. I’d hopped on the freeway to lengthen my drive - I didn’t feel like going home, but I had nowhere else to be. I was moving a little faster than I should have been, and my mind wasn’t 100% on the road, but I did notice the lights coming on. It didn’t register - headlights coming your way just doesn’t happen, so I didn’t realize it was real until it was too late and I couldn’t miss it.”

  She finally blinked, but he couldn’t read any emotion at all.

  “We hit head on. This was an older car, not my pretty little PT Cruiser. I flipped over. It was a miracle the cage of the car didn’t crush down around me. Part of it did, actually. That’s where I got my scar. I was stuck there for three hours with the damned thing biting into my leg. The other driver was an old man who confused an offramp with an onramp. He was driving one of those old man Cadillacs, so I got the worst of it in car damage. He had a heart attack and died on the scene.”

  Blake winced, but didn’t say a thing.

  “I was actually lucky. Besides the nasty gash and a bruise that didn’t want to go away, I was fine. Just the scar. And being there in that car for three hours, that was the hell of it. I think I passed out twice, but only for a few minutes.” She made a face. “But there was no way I could put all the blame on that old man. I shouldn’t have been going so fast. My mind was going over things when I should have been alert. I should have stopped and made evasive moves when I began to realize what was going on.” She looked at him, her eyes filling slowly with the tragedy of what had happened, the reality of pain and death. “But I was being me, typical, bull-headed me. I knew I was in the right and I wasn’t going to give way to anyone.” She stared at him as if appalled at herself all over again. “Can you believe that? In some ways, that accident was mostly my own fault.”

  He shook his head. “No, Kate. You can’t think that way.”

  “I can and I do,” she said softly. “And the whole thing began eating away at my self confidence. If I could make such a stupid mistake, what else was I doing? Me. I’m always so sure I’m right. You know that. You’ve called me on it enough times. And I had to face that you and people like you were probably right. I need a little more humility in my life.”

  The world became more vivid for Blake as he listened to Kate’s story. His dripping faucet, the subtle howl of the wind outside, pushing needles from the trees. He could hear and feel it all. Most of all, he felt like he’d been an ass.

  “Humility,” he echoed. “Yeah, we could all use a little of that I guess.”

  “I’m trying,” she said with a quirk in her grin. “I know you don’t think I’m trying hard enough, but I’m trying.”

  She sat back in her chair and sipped a little more white wine, then looked up at him again, her eyes bright.

  “So how did you see the scar? You did molest me in my sleep, didn’t you?”

  “Uh, no... I... just saw it.” He sighed. She’d gone above and beyond what he’d expected from her. “I guess it’s my turn, huh?”

  *********

  Kate felt the slightest bit guilty. She’d essentially played a trick on Blake, and even though she wasn’t going to insist on quid pro quo, he was going to give in. There was a lot to complain about with the big goof ball, but he always had an innate sense of fair play. It made him so easy, she thought for a second. So easy to like and so easy to depend on.

  “Okay, um... I don’t know what to say. Hell, you’re a lawyer, ask me some questions.”

  “Why did you leave Seattle?”

  “Because it was time to go,” Blake said. He wasn’t looking her in the eye - it didn’t mean he was lying, of course, but the avoidance told Kate about as much as a direct answer would. He was ashamed of something. That didn’t fit well with Blake, though. Ashamed of what?

  “Does it have something to do with the girl in that picture?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He grimaced again, obviously in some kind of torture. “I don’t know if I really want to do this,” Blake said. He jabbed his knife into the remnants of his steak.

  “How did you know her?”

  “I didn’t.”

  That was cryptic. He wasn’t making this easy. But, Kate decided, that wasn’t because he was hiding something. He didn’t know how to come out and say what he felt or thought, at least not about this. Still, coming up with the right question to draw him out was like putting together a puzzle without knowing what your pieces looked like, or what the final puzzle would come out looking like. It would be tough, but that just meant that Kate wasn’t going to give up.

  It was almost like the game. She couldn’t approach it directly - she needed side roads. If they were kids, this would have been easy. She’d just have to dare him. That was the one thing they could never refuse of each other - the dares. It was the sacred bond of adolescence.

  “Do you remember the time you dared me to shoplift from Mr. Peters store?”

  “What?” Blake said. He was looking in her eyes now, focusing in on her. Good, Kate thought, he was thinking now.

  “Don’t you remember that? I was thinking, with the little girl today...”

  “Yeah, I dared you to get something we could play with and something we weren’t allowed to buy. You came back with candy cigarettes. My God, you always were a smart aleck.” Blake was smiling now, but there was something bittersweet in his eyes.

  Kate got it. That’s what was missing. When he was a kid, he’d toy with getting in trouble. He wasn’t as much of a hell raiser as Kate was, but he had his ways, like when he tied little Timmy Waits up in that tree. He wasn’t going to hurt the kid, but he’d go to the edge. He trusted himself enough to push. That wasn’t there anymore. He was cautious, and he’d never been cautious before.

  “So, where did the wild streak go?” Kate asked. Blake sighed and sat back.

  “Some people would say I grew up.”

  “No, when people say you’ve grown up they mean you’ve refined yourself, not reinvented. Come on, Blake.” He looked away from her again, and Kate could sense he was going back inward. She might as well hit the nail on the head. “Blake, what scared you?”

  He was wiping his hands on his napkin, and when the question came he started to wring it. His looked at Kate then looked away.

  “What happened?” Kate asked.

  “I screwed up, Kate. I screwed up, and there’s no way to fix it. That girl,” he pointed over to the picture, and paused for a moment. “Cynthia Cooper. Never got in trouble. Played trombone. She was a little thing, weighed practically nothing when I carried her out of there...” Blake stopped, coughed, then started again.

  “Missing Persons, my first lead case. Cynthia Cooper hadn’t come home from school. Only eyewitness is a janitor at the school. Said his name was Wally Green, saw her get into a white panel van. Canvassing the area, doing our jobs, talking to everyone we can. Two days later I go for a
follow-up at the school.”

  Blake paused, staring at the picture, looking at the girl like she could say something to him, anything to make it better.

  “The principal of the school told me they didn’t have anyone named Wally Green on staff. Their janitor was a 70 year old black woman. It was almost a week before we found the girl, and we never found him. Wally Green is in the wind, and Cynthia Cooper is dead.”

  “My God,” Kate said. She sat silent for a moment, trying to think of some sort of follow-up, but nothing was coming. What do you say to a story like that? Sorry, get over it? She looked back to the coffee table, at the photograph. The metal frame hung over the side of the table a bit, face down like it couldn’t bear to look at either of them.

  “So I screwed up and I quit, and came to a place where that wasn’t going to happen ever again.”

  “Were you a good cop?” Kate asked. It was the only thing she could think of.

  “Not that day, I wasn’t. Maybe before... But I lost my nerve - I couldn’t do my job anymore. Couldn’t make decisions. So that’s the big story, Kate.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said finally.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did what Wally Green did become your fault?”

  “Don’t bother, Kate. I’ve heard it all before - it wasn’t my fault. Not my neighborhood, I don’t know the schools or who works there. Someone says he’s a janitor, why wouldn’t I take him at his word? That everyone did their jobs, including me. Well, if that’s me doing my job, what the hell good was I?”

  “Wow. There are a lot of things I could have expected from you, Blake. I thought maybe you’d become hard from being a cop, or that there was some sort of disability that forced you out of Seattle, or maybe even a scandal. I never expected this.”

  “That I was just mediocre?” Blake said.

  “No,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “That you would be gorging on self-pity.”