The Quarry

by Mark Allan Gunnells

“Yeah, have you seen her?”

  “Leslie? No, not lately.”

  Sheryl began popping her knuckles, her face crumpling in on itself. She looked a bit like a mother who’d lost her child in a crowded department store. “She didn’t come back to the room last night, and she didn’t go to any of her classes today. I can’t find her anywhere.”

  “Have you talked to Steve?”

  “He says she was over at his place last night after ten but they…well, they had a fight and she left.”

  “Well, if I see her, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks,” Sheryl said distractedly, already headed toward a freshman playing one of the tabletop arcade games, asking him, “Do you know Leslie Butler?”

  * * *

  Dale was crouched down in one of the stairwells that led to the bottom floor of the Fort dorm, hidden in the shadows. He’d watched Connie exit the Student Center opposite his hiding place and head off toward Ebert. Part of him had wanted to call to her, entice her over, apologize and take her for a walk down by the Quarry where—

  No, he wouldn’t! He groaned low and grabbed his head as pain detonated behind his eyes and his stomach was seized by intense cramps. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he had a weird suspicion that the pain would have subsided if he’d just called Connie over. He had resisted, but the pain was wearing him down.

  Across the way, Emilio came out of the Student Center. His room was on the opposite end of Fort, so he turned left at the sidewalk and hurried away.

  Call to him, a voice in Dale’s mind that didn’t sound anything like his own whispered seductively. He’ll do just as nicely as the girl. Call to him.

  “I won’t,” he said, his voice coming out as a moan as more white-hot agony shot through his body. Still in a crouch, he crept further down the stairs, disappearing totally into the darkness, his voice drifting up toward the black bowl of the sky. “Stay away from me. Please, just stay away.”

  Chapter Seven

  THE DIXIE CHICKS were serenading Connie about needing room to make the big mistakes. Connie wasn’t much of a country music fan, but something about the Chicks appealed to her. Probably because the lead singer was a ball-buster who didn’t apologize for speaking her mind—a far better role model for young women than the Britney Spearses and Lindsay Lohans of the world.

  It was 8 o’clock Saturday night, and Connie idly wondered if it made her some kind of loser that she was spending the night lying on her bed, listening to her I-Pod, and reading her Psych assignment for Monday, instead of attending the party at the Greer dorm. No, she decided, it only made her a loser if she hadn’t been invited to the party. She had been invited. So she wasn’t a loser. She was a…well, she wasn’t sure she was, but definitely not a loser.

  She just wasn’t in a partying mood. Not that she planned to sulk her life away over a stupid breakup, but she did need a little time to process the strange suddenness of it and wasn’t ready to face people. If anything, the sympathy she would no doubt receive from others would make her feel like a loser for sure. And she couldn’t have that. Hell no! Better to stay in her room and avoid the whole scene.

  Despite the early hour, Connie felt herself dozing off, the textbook dropping for her hands, but her head snapped up when the door opened and her roommate walked in. Patty was wearing a skirt that was way too short, a blouse that was much too tight, and enough makeup, incorrectly applied, to make Tammy Faye Baker snicker.

  Connie pulled out the earbuds and sat up, careful not to bump her head on Patty’s bunk—they had stacked their beds to make better use of the room’s meager space. “Back already?” Connie asked. “You only left like half an hour ago.”

  Patty shrugged, kicking off the high-heeled shoes that she’d been wobbling around on like a pair of stilts. “Party seemed kind of lame.”

  “Oh,” Connie said, figuring that meant her roommate had tried to flirt with some guy who had either ignored her or blatantly laughed in her face. “Well, you can hang with me and we’ll watch some TV or something.”

  “Actually I think I’m going to get out of these clothes—they’re cutting off my circulation—and go do my laundry.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, it’s getting pretty dire. I’m down to two clean pair of underwear. Besides, with most everyone over at Greer, I’ll have the laundry room to myself and won’t have to wait for a machine.”

  Connie laughed. “Well, look at us. A real pair of party animals we are.”

  Patty smiled, grabbed some formless gray sweats and disappeared into the bathroom.

  Connie stretched out on the bed again, lying on her side, and tried to concentrate on the chapter for Psych. She found herself reading the same sentence over and over, her mind refusing to focus. Finally giving up, she closed the book and decided to ask the question she wished she didn’t care to know the answer to. “So Patty,” she called out, “was Dale at the party?”

  “I didn’t see him,” her roommate said through the closed door. “But it was pretty packed so he could have been there somewhere and I just didn’t notice.”

  “Oh, okay, just curious.” Connie started tracing the lines of Sigmund Freud’s face on the cover of her textbook with a finger, trying to put Dale out of her mind and finding she could think of little else. Damn it, it wasn’t like her to get this hung up on a guy. She’d made the decision to say good riddance and put him behind her. Now her intellect just had to convince her emotions.

  Patty came out of the bathroom in her sweats, her face scrubbed clean of the blue eyes shadow and pink bubblegum lipstick and crimson blush. “Everyone at the party was talking about Leslie Butler.”

  “No one has seen her still?”

  “Nope, not since she left Steve’s house Wednesday night. I hear the police are involved now, that it’s officially being declared a missing persons case. Apparently her folks are putting a lot of pressure on the Dean to start an internal investigation here at the school as well.”

  “Why? I mean, she was last seen off campus.”

  Patty shrugged, gathering her dirty clothes into an overflowing clothesbasket, hunkering down with it in front of the mini-fridge in the corner. “Want a soda or anything?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  Getting back to her feet, Patty propped the clothesbasket on her hip while awkwardly popping open a can of Diet 7-Up. “Connie, you don’t think maybe Steve has anything to do with Leslie’s disappearance, do you?” She took a swig of soda, then, with a smile, stifled a belch. “Excuse me.”

  “Steve? Are you serious?”

  “Just thinking out loud. But…I mean, well, he was the last to see her, and Sheryl seems to think he might have done something to her.”

  “Steve’s weapon of choice is indifference, not rage. God knows he’s a sonofabitch, but he seems to be of the harmless variety.”

  “That’s what they say about pretty much every serial killer just before they find his basement full of body parts.”

  “Girl, you watch too many—”

  Connie was interrupted by the ringing of the room’s landline. Patty sat down the clothesbasket and snatched up the phone on the second ring. “Hello.” She listened for a moment, her face becoming pinched, then said, “Hold on a minute.”

  Putting a hand over the mouthpiece, Patty turned to Connie and stage-whispered, “It’s Dale. Do you want to talk to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Connie said but was already up from the bed and walking across the room. “Maybe I shouldn’t. What do you think?”

  “Totally up to you. I’ll hang the phone up right now if you want me to, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Maybe he wants to apologize.”

  Patty probably meant this as a motivation for Connie to forgive and forget, but it had the opposite effect. Feeling a little Dixie Chicks backbone taking hold, Connie knew she wasn’t yet ready to make nice. Taking the phone from her roommate, she made her voice hard when she said, without preamble or greetin
g, “What the hell do you want?”

  At first it seemed that Dale wasn’t going to speak, then, “Connie, I need to see you.”

  “Funny, last time you called you said you didn’t want to see me and told me to stay away from you, like I was some mangy flea-ridden dog or something.”

  “I know what I said before, but I was being a fool.”

  “No arguments here.”

  “I want to make it up to you.”

  “You think it’s just that easy?”

  “I didn’t say it was going to be easy, but I want to try.”

  “You know, Dale, I don’t think you have a damn clue what it is you want. One day you’re all apologetic, the next you don’t want anything to do with me, then the cycle starts all over again. The suddenness of your mood swings is giving me whiplash, and I think I’ve had just about enough of it.”

  There was a muffled sound over the phone, and Connie thought Dale might be crying. She started to melt but then forced her heart to harden. She would not be so easily manipulated. Dale mumbled something that sounded like, “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Don’t want to do what? You’re not making any sense.”

  Dale took a few shaky breaths and seemed to regain control of himself. “Connie, just come meet me, okay?”

  “Oh no, we’ve played this game once already, and I was left looking like an idiot. Won’t happen again.”

  “I’m not going to stand you up this time, I swear. I just really need you to meet me. Down by the Quarry in, say, twenty minutes?”

  “You need to get over yourself, thinking you can just snap your fingers and I’ll come running. You’re not that hot.”

  “Connie, please.”

  “Forget it, Dale. I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  Glancing down at Patty’s clothesbasket, Connie said, “Doing my laundry,” then hung up the phone.

  “Damn!” Patty exclaimed. “You really let him have it.”

  “Trust me, he got off easy.”

  “Well, remind me not to piss you off.”

  Connie retrieved her Psych book and sat back on her bed, fuming but feeling oddly good about herself for not letting her emotions lead her around like a puppy on a leash.

  Picking up her clothesbasket, Patty said, “So do you really have laundry to do?”

  “No, I just said that to put Dale in his place, to let him know he ranked below dirty clothes with me. But I can come down to the Dungeon with you and keep you company if you want.”

  “Oh no, I’m fine. You stay here and study. I won’t be long.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  With a smile, Patty took her clothes and left the room. Connie settled down with the textbook again, but operant conditioning was boring her to tears and she was having trouble keeping her eyes open. She was right in the middle of a paragraph when her head dropped to the pillow and she started snoring softly.

  * * *

  The Dungeon.

  That was what most of the girls of Ebert called the dorm’s laundry room, located in the building’s basement at the end of a long, dimly lit hallway.

  Walking into the musty space, empty just as she’d suspected it would be, Patty sat the clothesbasket on the nearest washer and reached into one of the pockets of her sweatpants, pulling out the Ziploc baggie full of quarters she kept for laundry. It seemed a bit unfair with the astronomical amount of money her folks were paying for room and board that she should also have to pay to do her laundry, but at least the machines here in the dorm cost less than in most Laundromats. Patty used some of her quarters to purchase detergent and fabric softener from a dispenser on the back wall.

  The Dungeon contained four washers, four dryers, a rusty sink set into the wall opposite the appliances…and a stove. No one was entirely clear why there was a stove in the laundry room, but it was there all the same. An older model, off-white, coated with years of grease, four burners (one of which didn’t work), and a large oven with a glass window in the front (too dirty to actually see through anymore). It was a bit odd, but residents had been known to come down here and make cookies and brownies on occasion.

  After starting a load of whites and a load of darks, Patty reached into the bottom of her clothesbasket and pulled out a can of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. She’d hidden them in the mini-fridge behind her diet sodas for the express purpose of sneaking them down here as soon as she got a chance.

  She was being silly and she knew it; it wasn’t as if anyone in the dorm would really care whether or not she stuck to her diet. Still, she preferred to do her binging in private; it added an illicit thrill to indulging in a decadent snack. Besides, if she told anyone about it, she might have to share the goodies.

  She set the oven to preheat at 375 then retrieved an old cookie sheet from the sink that someone had donated. After rinsing off the thin silver sheet, she went about opening the can, peeling away the label until the corner came apart with a soft pop. The uncooked rolls were gooey and sticky, and she placed them evenly on the cookie sheet, six in all. Into the oven they went, and she licked her fingers clean of the messy residue before rinsing her hands in the sink.

  Just fifteen to twenty minutes and she’d be enjoying some delicious cinnamon rolls. She knew that come tomorrow she’d be plagued with guilt and dieter’s remorse, but right now she just didn’t care. Her sweet tooth was jonesing for a fix. She hopped up onto the washer with her whites in it, enjoying the churning vibrations from the machine that radiated throughout her body, and waited.

  She found her mind turning back to the party. The little of it she had seen looked pretty wild. Three of Greer’s four RAs had gone home for the weekend, and the one that was left had actually orchestrated the party. A lot of booze, loud music, dancing that looked more like rhythmic dry-humping. And it was still early. Patty couldn’t imagine how much rowdier things would get as the night progressed.

  She had intended to stick around longer, but shortly after arriving she’d spotted Phil Adams, Emilio’s roommate. After cornering him in the upstairs common area, she’d proceeded to machine-gun questions at him, asking him all about Emilio, trying to find out if he ever talked about her.

  “Shit yeah, all the time,” Phil had said.

  “He does?”

  “Sometimes it’s like he can’t talk about anything else. It’s all Patty this and Patty that.”

  Patty had felt a blush creeping into her cheeks, although it probably wasn’t noticeable under the thick foundation she’d applied to cover up the acne on her forehead and around her nose. “What kind of things does he say about me?”

  “Oh, you know, how pretty you are, how much he likes you, wondering if you like him back.”

  “Really?”

  Phil had maintained a straight face for only a fraction of a second before bursting into laughter that was high-pitched and loon-like. “Hell no, I’ve never heard Auntie Em mention you. Far as I know, he doesn’t even know you exist, freak.”

  Several people had been nearby and started laughing along with Phil. Patty had bolted. She’d put on a brave face for her roommate, not wanting to let on just how much that asshole had hurt her. Now she would drown her sorrows in cinnamon and carbs.

  She wondered if what Phil had said was true, if Emilio truly didn’t know she existed. Of course he knew she existed, she was rooming with Connie, who was a good friend of his, and he’d spoken to Patty on several occasions. All nothing more than pleasantries, though—“How are you?” and “Did you have a good weekend?” and “How’s the assignment for class coming along?” Nothing personal, nothing that established any kind of connection between them. So while he knew who she was, it was more like knowing the sky existed. It was there, he saw it every day, but he probably spared little thought for it. Hell, he probably thought about the sky more often than he thought about her.

  She wanted him to think about her. There were a lot of cute guys on campus that she had crushes on, but her feelings for Emilio were
strong. More than just a crush. He was cute but seemed unaware of it, which made him even cuter in her book. And he was sweet and decent. A true gentleman. Unlike most of the guys at Limestone, he didn’t seem to be shallow, judging everybody by looks alone. A girl who wasn’t exactly a model might actually stand a chance with him. If she could just get him to notice her.

  Patty sniffed the air, the aroma of the baking pastries making her stomach grumble. Checking her watch, she took an old dishtowel that hung by the sink and used it as a potholder, removing the cookie sheet from the oven and sitting it on top of the stove to let the rolls cool. She was preparing to open the little packet of icing when she heard what sounded like footsteps echoing down the hall.

  Feeling as if she were about to be caught in the middle of some shameful act, she tossed the dishtowel over the rolls in a half-hearted attempt to hide them and stepped to the door, peering out into the hallway. It was too dark to see much, and she no longer heard footsteps. “Hello?” she called out, her voice coming out timid and small. “Someone there?”

  No reply, only silence. Patty was about to turn away from the door, figuring she’d imagined the sound, when she heard a scraping, like something being dragged across the floor, originating from the end of the hallway by the stairwell.

  “Connie? Is that you?”

  A soft murmuring drifted to Patty, a voice too low to make out any words.

  She backed up into the laundry room again, suddenly forgetting about her hunger as a cold fear settled in her gut. It was probably just someone playing a prank on her—maybe Sandra Hawkins from the third floor, she could be a real bitch—but that didn’t do much to soothe her unease. She wanted to call Connie, but she’d left her cell in her room. The stairwell was the only way out of the basement, so Patty was going to have to confront whoever was out there sooner or later.

  She looked around to see if there was anything she could use as a weapon—if someone was trying to scare her, she might just put a scare right back into them—but there wasn’t much in the room. One by one, she removed her cinnamon rolls and placed them directly on the stovetop, then picked up the cookie sheet. It was pretty lightweight, but it was all she had.