After some pounding against my ceiling reminded me that not everyone, especially neighbors, appreciates jubilant shouting at eleven at night, I calmed down and reminded myself to look at it rationally, reigning in my runaway thoughts. I had what looked like solid evidence of Wanderer’s movements … but I needed to prove it. Even with the six or so examples I’d found, I couldn’t be positive that I wasn’t just seeing shapes in the mist, my overeager eyes straining to find something that wasn’t there.
On the other hand, proof wouldn’t be hard to get. All I would need to do was conduct a few experiments. And from there … Well, I had a glimmer of an idea, but I’d need to make sure that I wasn’t just chasing a ghost first.
As it turned out, I was chasing something much worse.
SEVEN
I called my boss the next day and told him I needed the day to track down a lead. I didn’t give him any other details, but thankfully enough, he trusted me and told me to take it. I left my apartment in high spirits, with dozens of new ideas swarming around my head and a faint temptation to try all of them. In the end though, I let reason win out.
I went back to the pawn shops I’d frequented and picked up a few new toys. Well, really old toys, to be accurate. Basic audio tape recorders, the kind that would run off of a battery but had a high capacity tape and long life. Long enough to get me at least six or eight hours of recording time, which was exactly what I needed.
Then I went around to all my covert camera spots. I got a lot of odd looks from pedestrians—and quite frankly, I didn’t blame them. They saw a young woman walking through their neighborhoods with a massive duffel bag thrown over her shoulder and a look that was probably coming in somewhere between determined and fanatical, climbing up to odd positions and ledges and taking down small, plastic-wrapped packages. Quite honestly, looking back I’m a little impressed that no one called the cops on me. Or asked what I was selling.
By noon, I’d gathered everything I needed, having spent the last two hours collecting every single tape-based camcorder I owned and slinging them in my duffel. If Wanderer’s passing somehow did have an effect on the tapes as I suspected, the best way to be sure of it was make them unavoidable.
So that’s what I did. I cut across town, towards the next area his pattern indicated he would be policing, and set up a perimeter, a circle of cameras around the entire area, along with two lines running through the middle that cut my circle into quadrants. It wasn’t a perfect circle, nor a perfect division, and there were plenty of holes in it, but I decided that it would have to do.
I did have some backup, however. Using my credentials as a journalist, I stepped into each and every single store I saw along the way and asked the owners about their security system, specifically cameras. While a few of them had digital cameras, the majority of them were still using old, tape based technology, and with a few bucks slipped across the counter as encouragement, most of them agreed to let me take a look at the tapes at some future date.
With that, and with the evening quickly approaching, I set about carrying out the last step of my plan. I retraced my steps, doubling back along my line of cameras and leaving a little extra security, as well as an experiment.
Cassette recorders. I activated each one as I placed it, letting them go to work at sucking in the ambient sound. I wasn’t sure how I was going to stomach pouring through the hours of audio later—for starters, I didn’t even own a tape player—but I wanted to know. If Wanderer’s presence was interfering with camcorder recordings, would the same interference be present on an audio recording? If it was, it was one more tool I could use.
I returned home with a nervous twist in my gut. All of my “sensors,” as I was starting to think of them, were in place. All I had to do was wait. So wait I did, my fingers checking the news feeds every few minutes to see what sort of reports of Wanderer’s activity had popped up.
It was eight when my hopes were crushed. The first report came in across the internet, a quick tweet about a drug deal being broken up on the south end of the city, and I felt the world drop away beneath me.
The south end of the city. I’d set up my camera net on the west side of the city. Wanderer had gone elsewhere for the night. Broken the pattern, as he sometimes did.
There wasn’t much I could do about it either, and I forced my frustration back as I watched more reports spill in. Wanderer was busy to the south, and there was no way I could get a second day off on such short notice. I would have to wait until the weekend to move my cameras, and that was three days away. The only consolation I could find with the fact was that at least now I’d be able to plan where I’d plant my cameras in advance, so the job wouldn’t take as long. In the meantime, I could at least go swap out the tapes each day, and if I could get off from work a little earlier than normal, I could swap the tape-recorder tapes as well. Or just set the recorders to overwrite what they’d already recorded.
At the time, I was a little irate. I felt a bit like the rug had been pulled out from beneath me. And though I wasn’t planning on giving up, I was tempted to just take a slight break and not bother with the cameras or the recorders for a few days.
Luckily enough, I decided not to break my habit. I took my lunch to swap camera tapes as normal each day that week, and spent a half hour after work each night switching out batteries and flipping tapes over. Each night I was depositing almost two pounds worth of batteries into the dumpster outside my apartment complex. I don’t know what the neighbors thought about it. I still wasn’t sure what I thought about it. Technically, I was burning through batteries for absolutely no reason; it wasn’t like I was going to find what I wanted if Wanderer wasn’t even around.
Friday night came and I went to bed early, not even bothering to check my news feed and ignoring the ping sounds from my phone that said Wanderer had shown up in the news again. I was tired, worn out, and exhausted. I’d even looked it a little when I’d checked myself in the mirror. There had been no point in staying up to hear more disappointing news, so I went to bed.
As I discovered the next morning, all my frustration had been for nothing. I got up, made myself breakfast, and didn’t even reach for my phone to check the news until I had a hot chunk of egg speared on the end of my fork.
Then I bolted from my apartment, breakfast forgotten. Wanderer had returned to his pattern, breaking up a domestic disturbance that had ended in gunfire … at an address literally one house down from one of my camera traps.
It was time to find out if my theory was correct.
I cycled through my equipment in record time, not even bothering to replace the tapes or batteries. I dropped by each of the stores where I’d spoken to owners, though several of them were closed, and got copies of their tapes too—though a few of them backpedaled on our agreements or pretended not to know me. Dirtbags.
Still, an hour and a half later, with my stomach growling and a smile on my face, I was back in my apartment, wolfing down my cold breakfast as I scanned through multiple tapes at the same time: watching, waiting for the telltale flickering signs of static interference.
One by one, they appeared, close enough to one another that between their locations and the time, I could chart Wanderer’s path through the city as he approached the site of the disturbance the night before. One by one the images I was watching went fuzzy, the scene twisting and jumping as the interference hit it. Then, around the same time that Wanderer was reported to have appeared on the scene, the fuzzing vanished. Two minutes later, it was back, and once again I had a clear view of his path as Wanderer left.
To this day, I could have sworn that my heart stopped beating. I had it. I’d done it. I’d found the key that I needed to finally meeting the city’s superhero. The key to beating whatever methods he’d used to keep himself secret for so long. And I was going to use it.
Not to expose him, no. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to know his secret identity, and if I happened to learn it, well, I wasn’t about to exploi
t it or let anyone know. Wanderer was a hero. He didn’t deserve to have his private life destroyed by the news-media vultures I worked for. He deserved to be respected.
No, I wanted to do the interview, but to learn more about why he did what he did. Maybe to get information on some of his capabilities, or discover why he was a superhero. What his origins were and why he’d picked our city. And even why he favored some crimes over others, now that I’d seen the numbers. I didn’t want to hound him over it—after all, a stopped crime was a stopped crime—but I did want to at least learn a little bit about his methods. What made him follow his patterns? Did he even know he was making them? Why did he favor certain crimes? Was he looking for something? There was so much to ask and so much to learn, and my brain was running over all of it at once.
Which is undoubtedly why I screamed like a little girl when a hand dropped onto my shoulder. Thankfully enough, my first reaction was to jerk away rather than go on the offensive, because when I spun around, the face that met mine with wide eyes was that of my mother.
“Mom!?” My voice almost cracked as I spoke, and I shook my head, trying to regain my composure. My mother looked equally shocked by my outburst, her own mouth open in a small “O” of surprise and her hand recoiling like she’d just touched a venomous creature. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you,” she said, her forehead creased with worry. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.” I could see her eyes flickering towards the multitude of screens on the TV.
“Well you could have called, or knocked, or something,” I said. My heartrate was starting to slow, but I could still feel it pounding, pumping away inside my chest like I was the drum section of an orchestral concert winding down after a pitched performance.
“I did call,” my mother said. “And knock. You didn’t answer to either.”
“I …” I let my eyes fall to my phone. There were two missed calls and several new text messages. I hadn’t even looked at them. “Sorry, I was distracted.”
“Well, I can see that,” my mother said, giving me a soft chuckle but at the same time combining it with a look that said “No, really?” and made me want to voluntarily go hide in my bedroom. “Seems you’ve been distracted for a couple of months now.”
“That’s not entirely true,” I said, trying to muster some defense as my mother turned her eyes towards my massive map. I could see in the way she was cocking her hip to one side, and from the disapproving look in her eyes, that trouble was brewing. “I mean, a few weeks ago—”
“A month ago, Samantha?” my mother asked. I flinched at her tone. She almost never called me by my full name. It was just Sam. She tilted her head in the direction of my map. “This what you’ve been up to instead of spending your time with friends and family?”
“It’s for work,” I said. Not exactly a lie. But still too far from the truth for my mother.
“Sure,” she said, one eyebrow rising as she looked down at the plastic cassettes scattered across my couch. “For work. I wasn’t aware that your job had you looking into the Wanderer.” She’d always called him that, with the “the” in front of his name. I’d never been able to break her of that.
“Well it is,” I said, crossing my arms. My mother just lifted one eyebrow, and I could sense a good, old-fashioned tongue-whipping coming unless I confessed further.
“And it’s a bit of my own project, too,” I admitted. My mother nodded but to my surprise didn’t speak. Instead she just took another long, look around the room, her eyes panning over the spread of folders, markings, and hastily scrawled lines. For maybe half a minute, we were both quiet.
“Girl,” she said, speaking at last and shaking her head. “I swear you are the reason I’m getting these grey hairs.” She brought her eyes back to me, and I could feel the weight of her disapproving stare pressing down on me. “This is becoming an obsession, Samantha. Maybe it always was, and I was just too loving to see it, but this can’t go on like this. You need a life outside of devotion to some superhero you loved when you were a kid.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. My mother shook her head.
“No, it is.” Her tone brokered no argument. “I was all right with it when you were using your obsession to get a degree, or to have some fun, but this?” She gestured towards the spread of lines and notes splayed across my wall. “This is too far.”
She was wrong, but in the heat of the moment, I didn’t want to say anything. I let her keep going, my jaw tightening as she continued to rip into my work.
“This stops,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re letting this take over your life. You’re not going out; you’re not returning my calls.”
“One time,” I muttered through clenched teeth.
“And now this,” my mother said, stepping up to my map. “How long did this take you?” She glanced back at me as I didn’t answer, and I remember being almost ready to lash out, right up until her face softened, and she said one, single word. “Why?”
I almost didn’t respond. Her question had caught me off guard. “What?” I managed to stammer out.
“Why?” my mother asked again, turning back to the map. “I know you’re a grown adult, and you aren’t stupid … So why? Why are you spending so much time on this?” She took a quick step up to me and put her thumb above my eyelid, peeling the lid back. “Your eyes are bloodshot, you look like you haven’t been sleeping well, and for what?”
“Because I’m going to meet him,” I said.
“You already met him,” my mother replied, almost a little too quickly. I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “All this? This isn’t just for show. I’m tracking him, or learning how to, anyway.”
“For what?”
“So I can interview him,” I said. “Me. I’ll be the first. I’ll be the one to get every the answers to every question we’ve wanted to ask for almost two decades, but never have. I’ll interview him.”
“Why? Isn’t he entitled to some privacy?”
I wanted to groan. “Yes, mom, but look at what he does! He fights criminals, stops muggings … saves people.”
“If this is about your—”
“It’s not about dad, mom,” I said, shaking my head. “It never was. Wanderer is a hero, a hero who came to our city, to protect us. Don’t you want to know what makes someone do that kind of thing?”
“No.” There was a sense of absolute seriousness in her voice. “What I’d rather know is why my fool daughter is wasting all her time trying to track down someone who doesn’t want to talk to anyone just to try and talk to him. Hell, girl, don’t you think if he wanted an interview, he could get one? He’s a superhero! They can do all kinds of stuff. For all we know, he’s some high-up executive in the same news company you work for. If he wanted to talk to people, he would!”
“Yeah, well, he’s going to talk to me,” I said. “Because I want to know why. This is our city. He came here. He chose us. I want to know why. I want to look him in the eye … visor … whatever, and tell him thanks for stopping that robbery all those years ago. I want to let the world know who we have here.”
My mother stepped back, a frown on her face. “Well, it isn’t just hero worship then,” she said, her voice low. “But I’m not sure it’s anything better. People like to be left alone, Samantha. This Wanderer is no different. If he has reasons for why he hasn’t answered those questions, it might be best to let them lie.”
“Why?”
My mother shook her head. “Because sometimes knowing is worse.” She took a long look around the room. “So, you feel like spending an afternoon with your mother, or are you going to spend the rest of the day pouring over old tapes?”
I sighed. “Sure, mom,” I said, shaking my head. “I can spend the afternoon with you.”
“But you’re not going to stop?”
I shook my head again. “No, not now. I’m too close.”
“And if you don’t like what you find?”
&nb
sp; I felt a cold tendril of worry begin to coil itself around my gut. There were a few things that were really odd about Wanderer. Like the crimes he went after. But …
“Let’s just go, mom,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s have some fun. You’re right; I could use it.”
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t lost on her that I didn’t answer her question.
EIGHT
Monday I gave my boss the news. Not all of it, just enough to let him know I was on to something big. Something huge. I didn’t have to specify; nor, thankfully, did he ask for me to be specific. He’d had enough hints to know where I was going with what I was doing. He just hoped that I pulled it off. In retrospect, he was a very chill boss. I’d need extra hands to number the amount of bosses at my job that would have abused their workplace power to steal that story away from me.
Fate, I suppose, had other plans. Unexpected ones.
My promises were vague, but my boss trusted me. My corporate leash extended, I now had permission to go about following my plan on company time. Which was good, because I was going to need it.
The first thing I did was drop off my recorded cassettes with someone inside the station. Not my video tapes, just the audio cassettes I’d recorded. I’d spent some time going over each of them, but hadn’t been able to pick up any distortion discernable to my ear from the regular background noise, so I passed the job off to an audio expert. I gave specific times on the tapes to go over and told them I was looking for anything out of the ordinary—anything that wasn’t part of the existing background noise.
I almost expected the audio team to put up a fuss, but instead they just shrugged and said “Sure.” I suppose that in a news media collective like ours, where the biggest story of the day can be a poorly-shot cell phone video we found on YouTube, going over lousy audio work wasn’t the most surprising task. I think they were more perplexed that I was handing them cassettes than anything else.
Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection Page 33