The phone on the nightstand next to him rang, the shrill sound filling the room and making his legs jump again. He looked at it and considered it but then closed his eyes. The mere thought of lifting the receiver, of talking into it, of trying to form a sentence… It was all too much.
He was a failure. A complete failure. His mother, before she hung herself in the bathroom on the day before his eighteenth birthday, had told him that he wouldn’t amount to anything and she’d been right. He’d failed at everything he had tried. He couldn’t handle the world, couldn’t handle making decisions, couldn’t handle living. It was all too much.
Even the thought of her, with her decency and sweet smile and angelic voice was painful. She’d be sickened to see what he really was inside, to see what was happening to him. He’d fooled her, fooled everyone, for awhile. But this, him writhing on the bed with a puddle of vomit in the floor, was the real him. They’d all see that soon enough.
He had to do something before they did.
Ten
“Hurry it up, Aker, I’m losing daylight,” Taryn snapped.
As he rounded the corner of the building and saw her standing with her hand on hip, tapping her foot impatiently, he paused and lowered his sunglasses. It was the first time Taryn had seen him without them. His eyes were piercing blue and startlingly unlined.
“I can do my job well or I can do it quickly,” he said, steel lacing his voice.
“I’d rather you did it quickly,” she grumbled but his continued gaze made her redden. “Sorry.”
Ignoring her, he marched to his chair and plopped down without ceremony. “It’s clear,” he snapped, picking up his book.
She smirked at the true crime novel and then turned on her heel, sketch pad under her arm. As she trudged towards the hotel, though, she could feel her ears burning. It wasn’t like her to be intentionally rude to someone, at least not to someone who didn’t truly deserve it.
“It’s the damn dream,” she grumbled aloud as she turned the knob to Room #5. “It’s thrown my whole day off.”
She was already inside with the light on before she realized she’d forgotten her fold-up chair back in her car.
“Well, shit,” she sulked.
Biting her lip, Taryn turned and peeked out the grimy window. From her vantage point, she could see Aker sitting in his chair. Although the book was open in his hands, even from where she stood she could tell that he was still alert.
“Like hell I’m going back out there again right now,” she said, embarrassment still shaming her. She’d much rather do it the Magill way and return a respectable hour or two later–when she could pretend like nothing had happened.
The chair in the corner of the room had seen much better days, but it had a plastic seat so she could dust it off and not worry about bugs or critters that might live inside the cushions. She hated thinking about some of the things that might have happened on such a surface. Still, desperate times called for desperate measures so, using the hem of her Eagles’ “Hell Freezes Over” tour T-shirt, she wiped away the dust and perched on the edge. When she was pretty sure it wasn’t going to collapse underneath her, she opened her charcoal case and began laying out her tools on the bed in front of her.
“This feels weird,” Taryn muttered, glancing up and taking in the sad-looking room. “Like I’ve been here before.”
Of course, she had been there before; she'd visited the room several times already, taking her pictures, and had just been in it the night before in her sleep.
There’d been no question about where she was in her dream. She’d known right away that it was Room #5 that the figure on the bed who was her but also was not her was writhing around in pain in. The dream had been horribly unsettling and painful; she’d woken up drenched in her own sweat with the lower half of her body in so much agony, it had taken double her regular dose of pain medication and a hot bath in Epsom salts to get it under control again.
She hadn’t felt right since.
Taryn knew it was Parker that she’d channeled in her sleep.
“No wonder the guy died of an overdose,” she said now as she remembered. “If that’s what withdrawal feels like I’m not surprised he couldn’t stay clean.”
She’d heard that withdrawal felt like the flu but what she’d experienced hadn’t felt like any stomach bug she’d ever had. It had been a combination of mental and physical anguish so bad that even death itself had felt preferable.
As unsettling as the dream had been, and as strong as her feelings were about addicts and self-medicating, especially when it was difficult for the people who needed pain medicine to get it, she still felt a soft place in her heart for the man she’d briefly “met.” The desperation had been real enough, regardless as to whether it was caused by the drugs or by something else. He had been in more than just physical pain; he’d felt hopeless.
“This room certainly didn’t help matters,” Taryn muttered, taking a look around.
For its part, the room seemed to grow just a little bit smaller at her words.
Suddenly feeling claustrophobic and closed in, Taryn set her sketch pad aside and walked to the door. “Let’s just let in some air, shall we?”
With the door propped open with an ancient rubber door stopper and fresh sunlight pouring in, she could breathe easier. The path of light only reached a few feet into the room but she could see it and coupled with the gentle breeze that found its way in she was reminded that there was still an outside world.
She wished Parker had been able to remember that, too.
“Okey dokey, let’s get started.” Taryn actually clapped her hands, a cheerful noise out of place in the bleakness, and began to draw.
True to her nature, two hours later she stopped for lunch and headed back outside where she plastered on a sunny smile and approached Aker.
“Hey,” she called.
The man looked up, his expression unreadable. He appeared to be more than halfway through his book already. Must be really boring sitting here by yourself, day after day, she thought.
“Are you taking a break?” he asked.
“I was going to go out for lunch,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll lock up after you,” he replied amicably.
“Actually, I was wondering if you’d like to go with me. My treat for being a bitch earlier.” She shot him her most winning smile and hoped she looked both pleasant and remorseful.
Aker frowned. “I don’t know. I was just going to run down to the sandwich shop.”
“Well, I was feeling Thai food,” she said, remembering that she’d seen him with a takeout carton from a nearby Thai place a few days before. “And I always eat by myself. It would be nice to have some company.”
“I suppose it would be appropriate, considering the circumstances,” he relented at last.
Taryn started to ask what the “circumstances” were but then shrugged it off. “Great! You want me to drive?”
“I’ve seen you drive,” he replied. “I’ll do it. Since you’re buying and everything.”
Since it was the closest thing the man had made to a joke since she’d been working with him, Taryn laughed. “I’ll wait while you lock it all up then,” she said.
The Thai restaurant was a ten-minute drive away but the minutes felt twice as long in the silence of the car. She was impressed by its cleanliness and general order and surprised by the Spanish guitar music that played softly on the radio.
“So how long you been doing the guard thing?” she asked.
“Eight years,” he answered, not removing his eyes from the road.
“And before that?”
“Detective.”
Well, so he wasn’t a conversationalist, she thought. He surely had other attributes.
“Have you worked for Ruby Jane before?”
At first he hesitated, as though trying to decide if it would violate a confidentiality agreement, but then he must have decided it was a harmless enough question. “I travel with her
on the road sometimes and provide security at her shows.”
That was a subject Taryn couldn’t drop, even after they were seated inside the small, crowded restaurant.
“So do the fans get wild at her shows? Do you have to, like, keep them off the stage or something?” She was trying to envision the fans at Ruby’s concerts. All she could see were hipsters and middle-aged women. Maybe the occasional star struck man who was trying not to show his adulation in front of his wife.
“You’d be surprised,” Aker muttered. “Her fans are a different breed.”
“What do you mean?”
Aker laid down his menu and studied Taryn from across the table. “I’ve worked with male entertainers, too. With them, you get the women. Women of all ages hanging out by the stage door, stalking the tour bus, screaming the performer’s name, throwing notes with phone numbers on the stage…”
“Just normal concert stuff,” Taryn interjected. She’d attended enough shows to know the drill.
“Yes, well, that’s for the male entertainers and their female fans. When it comes to female entertainers and their fans, it’s a different story,” he said drily.
“Like what?” Taryn was fascinated. She didn’t often get a behind-the-scenes look at the industry from an actual insider.
“The women want to be close to the men. It doesn’t matter what the man looks like or how he acts. They want to be physical with him, as though being close in,” Aker’s face reddened, “in that nature will make them a part of the singer’s life–if only for a moment. I see it all the time. They don’t really want the singer, they want a piece of that charisma, a piece of that talent, a piece of that idolatry. They do it through being physical.”
Taryn knew that was the truth. She’d seen women of all ages strutting their stuff around the stage, flirting with the roadies even.
“With the female performers, though, it’s a different story. Their groupies are of a different breed,” he continued.
Taryn stopped, her fork halfway to her mouth. “You mean there are male groupies for female singers?”
“Not men,” he shook his head, “women.”
That had her attention. “So there are women out there who try to sleep with their idols?”
Aker’s face turned red again. Taryn was starting to enjoy that side perk of making him uncomfortable. “No,” he said in a strangled voice. “The women don’t, ah, want to be physical with the other women. But they still want a piece of them. They do that in a different way.”
“Ooh, do tell!”
“Rather than trying to wear the revealing clothes and throw themselves at the singer in a sexual way, they go for their heads. They essentially try to make themselves the loyal best friend,” he concluded.
Taryn sat back, wheels turning. “So you’re saying that for female singers, the women groupies try to weasel their way in through friendship?”
Aker nodded. “It’s all for the same outcome, and no less obvious or pre-meditated.”
“So these women do what,” Taryn asked. “They ask Ruby out for dinner, invite her over to their house?”
“Sometimes,” he agreed. “And they tag her in photos of the two of them and call her by her first name, as though they were hanging out at a restaurant rather than at a backstage signing session. They send her Christmas cards and presents, inquire about the family, read up on intimate details of her life and then insert those details into the brief conversations they have with her as though she confided in them herself.”
“But isn’t it just kind of a country music thing to feel close to the artists we like?” Taryn asked. “I mean, I am a huge fan of George Strait. I know he’s married to Norma, I know his son goes by ‘Bubba.’ And sometimes I do talk about him like he’s a neighbor or a cousin. But I always thought that was because country fans feel a deep connection with the performers, something on a personal level.”
“There’s a difference, believe me,” Aker grumbled. “You might refer to ‘Cousin George’ in conversation but have you ever sent him an invitation to your college graduation? Followed him from city to city and pushed your way to the front of the autograph line with the sole purpose of him becoming familiar with you? Because that’s what this is about. These women, they want the artists to know them. It’s as though because the entertainer is in the public eye, if they know the fan’s name then the fan suddenly matters more–not just as a fan, but as a person.”
“Geeze. That is weird.”
“Ruby has one ‘super fan’ as we call them, who goes to all her shows, no matter where they are. She’s convinced herself, and her followers on social media, that she and Ruby have a special relationship. You know what it’s like on stage with all those lights? Ruby can’t see more than a face here and there in the crowd. But this woman convinces everyone that not only does Ruby zero in on her face for each show and direct songs to her, and her alone, but that she’s actually responsible for helping Ruby pick the set list and that Ruby is singing straight to her when she performs.”
“And that’s creepy.”
Aker nodded in agreement.
Suddenly, Taryn felt a stab of sympathy for Ruby. How can you ever know who is legit, she asked herself silently. Does she know who her real friends are? Does she have any real friends?
Taryn’s thoughts were interrupted by a commotion at the register. Aker was alerted as well and in an instant he was up on his feet, his body turned towards the front.
The small, friendly Thai owner who normally had a big smile and laughing eyes was plastered against the wall, a look of horror on his face.
A skinny man in dirty jeans and stringy hair who stood before him, waving a revolver, was shaking. “I’ll give you what I have,” the owner cried, his voice shrill. The tables closest to the scene recoiled in fear, shock on their faces.
On instinct, Aker stepped in front of Taryn and reached his hand back to her. Without turning around, he let his hand rest on her shoulder. “Under the table,” he snapped softly.
Taryn obeyed.
Before she knew what was happening. Aker had crossed the short distance of the room. From her view through the lace tablecloth she could see him swiftly disarm the shaky man with one swift movement of the leg. The revolver flew up into the air and then landed a few feet away, where a patron quickly grabbed for it and held it in front of him in disbelief.
Aker, with his arms locked in a grip around the man’s waist, calmly turned to the rest of the room and said, “Someone called 911 yet?”
An hour later, as they walked towards his car, Aker cracked his knuckles and rubbed at his hands. It was the first sign of nervousness he’d shown.
“Hey,” Taryn grinned, punching him lightly on the shoulder. “You were kind of a bad ass in there.”
“I have my moments,” he said thinly.
“You were like, gonna protect me and stuff,” she teased him. “I think that’s pretty cool. Admit it, you like me.”
“I’ve worked with worse,” he agreed.
But even with the dark glasses on, Taryn could tell that he was smiling.
Eleven
“I worry,” Matt said. “How do you get into these messes? Do they just find you or…”
“I don’t exactly go out looking for this kind of nonsense,” Taryn protested. “It just seems to find me.”
“I wonder if you did something in the past that’s turned the Universe away from your favor,” Matt mused.
Taryn, feeling slightly offended, sulked. “Well gee, thanks.”
“I just believe in karma, that’s all. And you do seem to have more than your fair share of bad luck when it comes to people wanting to hurt you.”
Taryn shrugged, even though he couldn’t see her through the phone. Or maybe he could. “Well, in any case, Aker was there and he took care of business. Like a boss.”
“I’m not sure I like you hanging around with a big, beefy, macho dude every day.” Matt’s tone was teasing but Taryn could hear a bit of worry mixed i
n there, too. Nobody would ever accuse Matt of being macho or beefy. Or big. He would fit in more with the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” than “The Walking Dead.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think I could ever hook up with a dude who rations his humor and smiles,” Taryn replied. “I’m not naturally funny myself. I need someone with a good sense of humor to balance me out.”
“Like me?” The hopefulness in his voice reminded Taryn of when Matt was a little boy, seeking approval for a science project he was proud of when his own parents ignored him.
“Like you,” she agreed.
“I’m going to come up in a few weeks. I have some time off. If I don’t take it, they’ll start complaining. There might even be a mutiny.”
“Are you being hard on your students again?”
Matt grunted. “They deserve it. I mean, really. I was never that unmotivated and lazy as a college student. What’s wrong with people these days? They do just as little as they can to get by.”
“Well, dear, some of them have social lives. The reason you were able to give 110% was because you never left your dorm room unless it was for class, the library, or work study,” Taryn teased him.
She could tease him about this, because she’d been the same way. Both were late bloomers as far as their social lives went; Taryn was thirty one and still waiting for hers to take off.
“You’re my social life. I just save it all up and use it on you,” he said with complete seriousness.
She believed him. Matt was all business and little play unless she was around and he’d always been that way. He divided his time between work, preparing for work, cooking, shopping for essentials, and watching television. He lived a short drive from the beach and only went when there was an employee function, unless Taryn was there.
“Speaking of visiting…” Taryn began slowly. She was in the middle of heating up a take-out carton of macaroni and cheese and paused with her hand on the microwave door. “I’m, er, getting company in a few days.”
Black Raven Inn: A Paranormal Mystery (Taryn's Camera Book 6) Page 9