Hot Mic!

by Jamie Collins

  She had deduced from much of the content that the writer was most probably not an adult. The music references and grammatical errors suggested a teenager or adolescent, but might have been intentional to throw her off. Hannah had received enough mail from pre-teens to recognize the thought patterns and rationales; yet, this one was different—very disturbing in so many ways. The writer was most definitely reaching out, calling attention to his dissatisfaction with authority. Why, if he was truly seeking her help, didn’t he just ask for it? It was puzzling, all right, and she knew that it would be better not to engage with him.

  Still, flashes of the twisted verse floated through her mind . . . the faces of Bremen’s Hall will fall and blood will pay for Redfish’s Day in streaming glory. Be ready!

  Hannah climbed in bed and slipped into a deep, restless sleep. She dreamt of horrid, frightening creatures with large fish-heads and spiked fins chasing her in a labyrinth of hallways—every turn producing closed doors and shuttered windows; brick embankments and cold steel cabinets . . . “cabinets with a code . . . number to number . . . name to name, before the bell they will all go up in flames!”

  Hannah sat up in bed with a jolt. The images she saw in her dream were as clear as day. Cabinets with a code! She was certain that her gut instinct was spot-on, and that her interpretation of the poem might be true—the picture was growing clearer by the moment.

  “He’s talking about lockers, like in a school.”

  She raced to the office the next morning and met Jon at his cubicle before he had a chance to fill his mug with the usual jolt of one-hundred-watt Novotny java made from three packets of industrial grounds and a hint of coca powder. It had been raining all night, and the office was emptier than usual.

  “Hey!” she said brightly. “I brought you one . . . a real one from a coffee shop—tall, hot, and full of octane. Can’t have a good show without a hot mic, right?” She chuckled nervously and produced two Starbucks coffees and plopped one on his desk and started right in. “I need you to do me a little favor, Jon.”

  “Bribery. I like it!” He smiled.

  She opened the tattered file folder with the letters from EJ and spread them onto the desk. Jon noticed that many of the pages had been marked with yellow highlighter and blue ink. “Now,” Hannah began, arranging them in some sort of meaningful order, “I have reviewed each of these carefully, and I think I found some definite clues to substantiate my theory.”

  Jon stared at her blankly. “Your what?”

  Hannah went on. “Our psycho-guy . . . he’s a kid. A kid with a real problem, that’s what I think. Only, I’m afraid from the sound of it, that he’s planning on taking out some sort of vengeance on himself—or others.”

  Jon’s eyes widened. “You think . . . ?”

  “Could be, Jon. I don’t know. And can we take the chance of not finding out?” She adjusted her designer frames further down her nose and looked over them. “There are still so many damn unanswered questions. His poems are filled with threatening innuendo. What is The Day of Atonement? Who is Melissa? And where on earth is Bremen’s Hall that he refers to?”

  “That’s easy,” Jon said, switching on his computer and clicking away as she spoke.

  “I think this kid is more than serious, Jon. He’s obviously reaching out to me for some reason. I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to do something, right? And if—”

  “Holy shit!”

  “What?”

  Jon was gawking dumbly at the screen in disbelief. She leaned in over his shoulder. “What is it?”

  “Well, it looks as though we’re not going to have to hunt down the junior terrorist after all. He just sent his next correspondence to your personal email. The return address is: EJ2000@aol.com.”

  Jon scooted over to let Hannah sit down. She shuffled the mouse across the pad and began clicking to open the document. Finally, the message appeared: NICE TO SEE YOU – BITCH! I’M STILL HERE . . . WAITING FOR YOUR REPLY. THE DAYS DRAW NEAR. THE MASSES WILL GATHER AND FILL BREMEN’S HALL WITH HOMEGE. REDFISH EVER REIGNS AND SWEET, SWEET MELISSA WILL SOON KNOW MY NAME, BUT WILL YOU?

  Hannah paled.

  “I’ll call security. He’s too close for comfort now, speaking to you like this!” Jon reached for the phone.

  “No! Don’t—please! Don’t tell anyone about this. If Allison finds out I’ve been threatened, she’ll send me far away for safe-keeping, someplace like a long vacation in the Himalayas. Not a word to anyone, you understand? Please, just let me handle this. I promise, it’s going to be all right. No one is going to bully anyone, and no one is going to get hurt. Okay?”

  Jon nodded, wondering how in the world she could be so sure. He was unconvinced.

  “I promise, Jon . . . trust me,” she reassured. “I’ve got this.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to respond. It’s what he wants, isn’t it?”

  She clicked on the reply icon and tapped away at the keys haphazardly, nervously missing the fine points of capitalization, periods, and commas. WHERE ARE YOU, EJ? I AM READY TO LISTEN IF YOU WANT TO TALK. I AM SORRY IF YOU ARE ANGRY WITH ME. YOU CAN TALK TO ME NOW IF YOU LIKE. WHERE DO YOU LIVE? WRITE ME BACK AND LET’S CHAT ABOUT WHATEVER YOU’D LIKE. OKAY?

  She sent the string of words in what truly felt like a futile attempt to toss a book on swimming lessons to a drowning man. Within minutes, the network alert message popped onto the screen, indicating quite officially that the message sent from Hannah’s terminal to EJ2000@ aol.com was undeliverable. His email account had been disabled.

  Chapter 54

  Friday, August 14th

  It had been a stressful several months for Hannah, and it was about to feel even more like she was living someone else’s life. She was in a whirlwind of change. It all became real when earlier that summer, she had flown out to meet with Bumpy Friedman himself and enjoyed a delightful lunch with him, his staff, and his talented writers after being given a tour of the studio and a rundown of their vision for the talk show. She and Marney had attended the meeting, with Marney staying on another few days to iron out the particulars for the final contract, which would be signed ceremoniously by all four show hosts right there at Global Studios on the twenty-first of August, officially cementing the deal.

  Hannah was exhausted. She needed to prepare not only for the big signing session, but also for a huge promotional photo shoot that was slated for two weeks after that back at Global Studios with the entire cast. She hadn’t begun to imagine what she was going to pack or wear for the high-profile events. It was hard to believe that it would all be set in motion in just one short week.

  In spite of everything, Hannah was excited and knew that the challenges ahead were ones that she had been preparing for all of her life. She was going to change so many lives. And she couldn’t wait to get started.

  That evening, following her show, Hannah begged off a production meeting with Jon and the crew, even though it was tradition that on Tuesdays, the meeting was followed religiously by an hour of socializing and winding down over a couple of cold ones at City Scape just up the street. Instead, she caught an earlier flight home. She missed Olivia something awful and just wanted to spend some time with her. She had planned the details of their entire weekend. Hair braiding, watching Netflix marathons, and eating endless bowls of popcorn. Olivia was growing up so fast. Nothing else rejuvenated Hannah’s soul more then to just chill with her beautiful, amazing daughter.

  Together, they would also make their bi-weekly visit to the nursing home to see Charlotte. It was hard to believe that she had been there eighteen years, well before Olivia was born. Regrettably, Olivia had never gotten to know her grandmother, nor could remember her grandfather, Robert, who had passed away in the summer of 2006, when Olivia was just six years old, and right when Hannah’s career was about to take full flight. Hannah felt extremely guilty that somehow h
er dear mother, who now could not recognize any of her family members, or dress or feed herself, was left to linger in a state of anxiety and delusion. The only solace being that on good days, she still called out Robert’s name and seemed to be conversing with him for hours on end in contented lucidity. This, for Hannah, was a blessing that only her dear deceased father could have brought to his eternal bride.

  “Who are you talking to?” Hannah would ask, stroking her mother’s knotted and vein-riddled hands folded languidly atop her lap.

  “Him,” she would say with a watery smile. “Lieutenant Colonel Robert Courtland. He says that the baby . . . is crying.”

  “Look who’s here,” Hannah would say, motioning for Olivia to lean in.

  “Hi, Grandma,” Olivia would say, softly and sweetly to the vacant blue eyes.

  “Oh, hello,” would come the startled reply.

  And then Olivia would brush her grandmother’s silver hair as long as she would allow her to, while Charlotte sat in silence. Together, they would color beautiful bluebirds from her coloring book, and then Olivia would tape them up on the walls of Charlotte’s room.

  These were beautiful, bittersweet exchanges when a beat would pass and then Charlotte would once again ask, “Are you going to take me home?”

  “In a little while, Mom. Why don’t you rest a bit for now?”

  So went the exchange that was stuck on repeat like a song in one’s head, or a gif on perpetual replay. Flashes of Hannah’s mother were ever present, though, in the unspoken bond that no illness or disease could erase, day after day. Year after year. It was all that they had, and in the end, it would have to be enough.

  When it was time to leave, Hannah would watch Olivia select a housedress for her grandmother to wear the next day and lay it out on the chair, often tucking a sticker or a little love note in the pocket for her to find. She’d hoped that it would make her grandmother smile. Hannah knew that the sweet, enduring spirit that made Olivia came from the finest souls in Charlotte and Robert. And that no matter what life would bring, she would be okay. They all would be.

  Chapter 55

  He had been careful, all right. He made sure to buy the steel pipe and two end caps at different stores and to dispose of the receipts. He got a fast, reliable fuse at the hobby store. The moon-faced lady at the checkout must have thought he was model rocket geek, or some such. He flashed a fake smile and let her think whatever she pleased.

  He hurried home, locked his bedroom door, and turned up his stereo. Code X wailed from the thumping speakers. He donned rubber gloves, heeding the sagacious advice gleaned from the internet tutorial: NEVER handle the pipe with your bare hands, or you’ll go straight to jail—forensic science will bust your ass on the real.

  He then proceeded to wash all of the pieces individually with rubbing alcohol on cotton balls that he got from his mother’s bathroom cabinet—especially tending to the threads.

  Next, he laid everything out on the carpet so that it could dry thoroughly.

  Then, he drilled a hole into one of the end caps for the hobby shop fuse. He reread the instructions printed from a screen shot: If you want to make your own fuse, you can (carefully) do so by grinding up about 1000 white-head stick matches and gluing the granules to some durable cord. Be careful to give yourself a good six to eight inches of coating, or you’re going to blow yourself to fucking pieces . . . HAHAHAHAAH!

  There was little anyone could ever do with Eric. He was a sullen, conflicted soul right from the womb, it seemed. Dora Johansson did her best to appease her finicky child, whose tantrums started well before he started preschool. He was distant and aloof most days, preferring to sulk away the hours tinkering with his cars and blocks alone in a corner rather than interact with other children. Throughout the years and with him being her and Wayne’s only child, they searched for answers to help them to connect with their brooding and emotionally distant son.

  By the time he had reached middle school, it became apparent that he was defiant and possibly even dangerous. School issues arose, and although there was nothing wrong with Eric’s IQ—quite the contrary, he was quite brilliant—it was evident that he lacked social skills and graces that would serve him into high school and beyond. This, of course, was of great concern to Wayne Johansson, who had been recently placed in the position of Superintendent after a seventeen-year tenure climb from teacher to principal, to top-level administrator in the district.

  Reprimanding Eric was pointless. Wayne and Dora frequently had resorted to taking his bedroom door off of the hinges so that he could not hole up in his room and refuse to come out to eat, bathe, or interact with the family. Each time they took it off, he would do just enough to earn it back and—for a while—appear to be okay and compliant. But this was always too short-lived, and more often than not, Eric’s parents were prisoners in their own house that they shared with a boy whom they sometimes feared.

  Wayne Johansson by no means considered himself the perfect specimen of humankind, but the information that burned its indelible mark into the bark of his family tree could not be denied and seemed to suggest something sinister and culpable. His Aunt Ruth had relayed the truth to him on his twenty-first birthday in October of 1991. She had just celebrated a birthday herself—her fiftieth—just two days prior, in which she felt the need to divulge a gargantuan “family secret” that had been burning in her bosom for decades. Together, they shared his first taste of whiskey—and the dark truth that had plagued their family since the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Aunt Ruth had felt the need to unburden herself to her dear nephew, who, it seemed, deserved to know the truth about his heritage. With the new decade upon her and her newfound freedom from divorce number three, she no longer felt the need to hold the information under her hat.

  “You know that our decedents were early settlers who came West from the Southern Appalachians before settling in rural Missouri, right?”

  “Right,” Wayne said, proud of his English and Scots-Irish ancestry said to be the lineage of one Theodore Johansson, his paternal great-grandfather.

  “Yeah, well, our dear ole grandpappy did more than till the land. He married a child bride, Constance Johansson. She had that name because when she married him at the tender age of just sixteen—they were first cousins.”

  Wayne’s eyes widened, and he took another swig of the brown liquid. “Aren’t we supposed to be one-fifth Native American as well?” he asked.

  “That is also true, but for what I am about to tell you, you’re going to need another swig of that fire water.”

  It seemed that Aunt Ruth was a whiz with genealogy and had uncovered more than just dirt on the family gene pool. An exhaustive search through the archives and historical annals revealed a scandal that might have explained the litany of destruction and dysfunction that ran through the veins of the Johansson men for more than a century.

  Ruth’s words were haunting. “Your father—my brother—was holding a secret that he never even shared with your mother.”

  “How do you know that?” he had asked.

  “Trust me,” she’d said. “Caleb never shared it with a soul. He took it to his early grave when he took his life all those Christmases ago. You would never know any of this if I hadn’t told you. Not even your Aunt June knows.”

  Wayne was uneasy. He had definitely had a strained relationship with his father through the years, but never really knew why. What had his father hidden from all of them all these years? He had to know, and poured a second shot of whiskey that would keep his dear aunt talking. She had since produced a large graphic that she had made from posterboard set out on the table before them.

  “It is recorded that Theodore and Constance Johansson had four children between 1913 and 1919, the last born being a girl named Mary Kate. The only boy was named Arnell, your paternal grandfather. In 1937, at age twenty, Arnell married a young woman named An
n Marley. She was found murdered in their farmhouse, having been brutally dismembered with a chopping ax. Granddad Arnell had called the authorities, who found him weeping over the body with blood splattered on his coveralls and holding the ax, which he had taken down from the barn wall.”

  “What!” Wayne was incredulous.

  “They arrested him for the murder,” Aunt Ruth said coolly, and then continued. “Arnell pleaded guilty, citing childhood abuse at the hands of his father, Theodore Johansson, that caused him to do it. Further, Arnell had been accused, according to hearsay around the family camp, of having molested his baby sister, Mary Ellen, in her crib back in 1919, when she was just seven months old. Constance, it was said, banished him from the house and made the then-nine-year-old boy sleep in the barn for the remainder of his years, until he had come of age, and then he was sent on his way with a one-way train ticket north and three dollars tucked in his dungarees. They ostracized him and never spoke of the incident until years later, when the murder of Ann Marley occurred in Jefferson City.”

  She went on to explain how Arnell then did hard time at the Missouri State Penitentiary, where he dodged the new bill calling for execution by lethal gas due to a technicality. He was out on good behavior within ten years. Then, he married wife number two—Lorna Boothe, a seamstress from Kansas City. Together, they had three children—Wayne’s father, Caleb, and the two girls, June and Ruth. According to a journal of which Aunt Ruth swore that she had obtained from Wayne’s father directly, it was then-nine-year-old Caleb who had discovered his mother’s body, which had been stabbed thirteen times at his father’s hand with a kitchen knife, fatally severing her neck. Caleb had walked in unknowingly on his father frantically attempting to mop up the blood. They made eye contact, and then Caleb ran as fast as he could to the back of the house and locked himself in his parents’ bedroom closet. Arnell, in a panic and rage, pounded on the door for him to come out and face his wrath, telling young Caleb that he would not live to tell what he had seen. “I’ll smoke you out like a rat,” he had heard his father say. And then all went quiet. He later learned that Arnell had gone back into the kitchen to fetch a box of matches. His heavy work boots pounded from the shed back to the house, and Caleb could remember hearing the sound of him pouring kerosene on all of the floorboards.