by Ivy Thorne
“I didn’t murder him,” Marla stated firmly. “I used to be his tenant, just like you. I also used to work at that Sipping Saucers. Sorry if I upset you that night at Reggie’s. I hadn’t meant to.”
Her sincere tone seemed to resonate with Sommer. “Wait, you used to work here?”
Marla nodded. “Yeah, it sucked ass! I thought the people in Wallsberg all were nice. Now I know the truth: Before they’ve had their coffee, they’re raging jerkwads.”
Sommer smiled. It was the first time Marla had seen her smile.
“The reason I came to find you was to ask you about Reggie. The only way I can prove to the cops that I’m innocent is if I find out who killed him,” Marla said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. If you like, I’ll take you out for a burrito. I know a place within walking distance.”
Sommer looked down, hesitantly.
“I get it if you don’t want to trust me. After all, I’m just some stranger,” Marla added. “Though, if I were you I’d trust me more than some of the other characters you might see around these parts.”
It was true that the area surrounding the café was a rough one. Like any town, Wallsberg had its fair share of problems, drugs being one of them. Drug dealers often could be found exchanging packets of mysterious contents within the sketchy shadowed alleyways of the downtown area, where Marla and Sommer were standing.
Marla didn’t know whether the girl trusted her, was scared to be alone, or whether she just was too hungry to turn down food, but Sommer agreed to go with her.
Marla led the way to her favorite burrito place. While they walked, she attempted to engage in small talk to kill the awkward silence.
“Have you ever been to The Burrito Bar?” Marla asked. “They’re open until midnight.”
Sommer shook her head. “No, but I’ve heard it’s good.”
“You heard right,” Marla affirmed. “I’m vegetarian, so I usually get the sweet potato burrito. It sounds kind of gross, but it’s surprisingly delicious. Just avoid using their bathroom.”
“I avoid using any public restroom,” Sommer remarked. “I’m also a vegetarian, by the way. Honestly, I could eat anything right now so long as it’s not another stale donut or greasy sandwich from Sipping Saucers,” she admitted.
“Hey, that’s cool that we’re both vegetarians,” Marla said. “I don’t meet many people here who don’t eat meat. Most of them came from farming backgrounds, so I can imagine that would be the reasoning. Meat is sort of a farmer’s way of life.”
From the brief walk to the restaurant, Marla found out that Sommer was a recent high school graduate who’d only just moved into Reggie’s basement at the end of the school year to begin the transition into life as a responsible adult. Marla recalled this transition all too well and knew it wasn’t an easy one.
Sommer was planning to spend a year working to earn money and save up for college. She was interested in working in a field that involved animals, as she loved them more than people. When she discovered Reggie dead, her parents were happy to take her back in until she could find another place to live. She was lucky to have a family willing to support her, but because her grandparents lived at the house due to their need for care, there wasn’t much space for Sommer to stay.
“How did your parents react when you told them your landlord had been murdered?” Marla asked.
She remembered the moment she’d called her parents to inform them she’d discovered a dead body. At first, they’d thought she’d been pulling a sick prank. Marla had been angry with her parents for not believing her, but back then she’d been known to cause trouble. Now, reflecting upon their response, Marla realized it had made sense for them to react the way they had.
It hadn’t taken long for the media to get a hold of the story. An article had been released in the paper detailing everything. It had mentioned Marla’s name as being the person who’d called the police. After they’d read the article, her parents no longer could deny their daughter had been through something traumatic.
Bells chimed as Marla and Sommer entered the Burrito Bar. The restaurant was a new addition to the town, only arriving about two years ago. Initially, there had been a pizza place in the building the Burrito Bar now occupied. Given that the town already had three well-known pizza eateries, this pizza place hadn’t been much of a competitor and had gone out of business only a short time after it had opened.
Sommer stumbled upon this realization the moment she saw the restaurant’s interior.
“Hey, didn’t this used to be a pizza place?” she said.
“It did,” Marla responded. “Ironically, it was called The Best Slice. You and I both know it should have been called The Worst Slice.”
Sommer chuckled. Marla was happy to see how much more comfortable she seemed.
Maybe I’m not as bad with people as I think, Marla thought.
When the place had been The Best Slice, the walls had been plastered with red and white striped wallpaper, as if it was housing a circus. The workers all had had to wear ugly yellow polo shirts. Marla once had applied for a job there while she’d been in search of a position with a funeral home. She hadn’t been disappointed when someone else had been hired. She hadn’t been thrilled with the look of the uniform.
Now the walls of the restaurant were painted solid colors. One wall was green, another yellow-orange, and another red. The three colors were commonly found within burritos. Whoever the interior decorator was had known how to stir customers’ appetites.
The place smelled of fried onions − a smell that was perhaps one of Marla’s favorites. If she could design a scented candle that smelled of fried onions, she would.
Marla ordered her usual sweet potato burrito with all the vegetable fixings. To drink, she selected a soda. She knew the caffeine would keep her up half the night but didn’t care as she wasn’t scheduled to work until the afternoon the next day anyway.
“Oh my God, this tastes so good!” Sommer exclaimed after taking the first few bites of her naked burrito.
Marla had commended Sommer on her choice. A naked burrito was a burrito without the soft tortilla wrap. Instead, the filling was placed in a bowl. It sounded like it wouldn’t be near as good as the standard burrito, but it was much better. Without the constraints of the bread, one could choose as many toppings as desired without having to worry about the burrito bursting and spilling everywhere. Like Marla, Sommer had chosen the sweet potatoes in place of meat.
“What did I tell you?” Marla said.
She gave Sommer enough time to relish the flavors of her meal before starting with the questions.
If there was one thing Marla had learned from reading murder mystery books, it was that the person who found the victim sometimes was the murderer. Marla doubted Sommer murdered Reggie. But if she was going to play detective, she couldn’t eliminate any possibility. Although she certainly wasn’t about to noodle through all of Sommer’s personal belongings and steal her cutting utensils.
“How would you describe Reggie?” Marla began.
Sommer shrugged. “I never interacted with him much. But the one time I did he came across like sort of a creep.”
Other than Reggie’s unwillingness to take responsibility as a landlord, Marla never had paid attention to his personality traits. He’d had a bit of a stoner vibe, but that wasn’t anything unusual. Marla could see him getting into trouble for not paying back a dealer if he’d been into drugs.
“What happened?” Marla probed.
Because Marla had lived in that house, she was familiar with the layout. Other than the second living space within the bottom half of the house, there was a laundry room with a washer and dryer. This was the only room that Marla had shared with Reggie.
According to Sommer, she’d once received a visit from Reggie while she’d been alone in the basement. He’d knocked on her door to inform her that she’d left a piece of her clothing inside the laundry room. Sommer had expected him to return a T-shirt o
r pillowcase, but the article of clothing he’d come to return had been her panties.
Marla made a face. “That is creepy,” she said. “Why would anyone go out of their way to return another person’s underwear?”
If anything, it might have made sense simply to place the panties on the machine for Sommer to find when she returned to the room, but the act of personally returning them to her was strange.
“Yeah, I had no idea what to say,” Sommer said. “I just took them and shut the door as fast as I could. It freaked me out.”
“I don’t blame you,” Marla said.
“Worst of all, I didn’t remember losing them,” Sommer added. “ The pair that he’d returned was a pair I rarely wore. They were more lingerie: something I wore exclusively for my boyfriend. It was almost as if he’d stolen them.”
Now Marla felt disturbed. She looked down at her half-eaten burrito. Suddenly, she’d lost her appetite.
Reggie sounds like the kind of guy who would go out for a beer with Speckleman and talk filth about women, Marla mused.
“Did you ever tell anyone about that?”
“I told my boyfriend,” Sommer replied.
“Did you tell the police?”
“No. I was too embarrassed to tell them.”
As a woman, Marla understood her decision to withhold that information. The last people she’d want to know about a man stealing her underwear was a group of men. Besides that, police rarely took that sort of thing seriously.
“My boyfriend lived with me in the room in the basement for some time. He helped me pay the rent. He moved out only recently. It was after he’d gone that Reggie turned up with my underwear. When I told him, he got pissed, but I know he wouldn’t kill anyone. He moved closer to the city, where he’ll be going to college in September. He was the first person I called after I found Reggie’s body. It sounded like he was in a bar when I called. I could hear chattering in the background, and he mentioned he had to leave so he could hear what I was saying. I can give you his contact if you want proof he wasn’t in town during the time Reggie was murdered.”
Marla accepted the number, though she doubted Sommer’s boyfriend was the culprit. Why would her boyfriend go to the trouble of slitting a man’s throat because of an incident involving some underwear? It was more likely he’d yell at the guy or maybe sucker punch him. Besides, whoever murdered Reggie seemed to be familiar with Slasher Saul’s killing method. That was one of the reasons why the detectives were so keen on suspecting Marla − she’d seen his work.
Other than having remembered the infamous murder of Jared Hopkins, Sommer knew nothing about Slasher Saul, nor did she seem to think her boyfriend did.
Marla drank her soda in silence for a moment. The incident involving the panties was bizarre, but she had no idea how it could be related to Reggie’s murder.
Speckleman probably had stolen countless pairs of women’s underwear, but that didn’t make him a murderer. All it meant was that he was a perverted piece of crap.
Sommer had mentioned her boyfriend getting pissed when she’d told him about Reggie’s behavior. Perhaps Reggie had behaved inappropriately with a different woman, whose boyfriend, unlike Sommer’s, had decided to take Reggie out.
Chapter 9
Marla continued with the interview. She knew she only had time for a few more questions before Sommer became too worn out to respond. Having finished her burrito, the girl’s eyelids were beginning to sag and she was yawning a fair amount. Working at a fast-food establishment was unruly. The long hours tending to demanding customers with only the smallest time allotment for a break was exhausting.
“Do you have any memory of Reggie getting visitors? Did you overhear any arguments upstairs, or witness any drug use?”
Sommer shook her head. “He never had any visitors that I recall. If he did, I never paid any attention to them. I never heard shouting or anything like that. I don’t know if he used drugs. I think the police were checking his car and rooms for stuff like that. As far as I know, they didn’t find a bong or even a lighter.”
Bongs and lighters weren’t always required to consume drugs. Marla wouldn’t have been surprised if Reggie had been into recreational drug use. However, if he had been a substance abuser, she’d have thought the police would have found some sort of evidence of that in his half of the house. It wasn’t easy to hide a drug addiction. Surely they’d be using their time to question Reggie’s buddies about his drug use rather than pilfering Marla’s knife block.
Unable to think of anything else to ask Sommer, Marla walked her back to the parking lot of Sipping Saucers. The time now was approaching midnight. The air finally had cooled and the roads were ominously lit by the streetlamps. She could hear the sounds of raccoons and other nocturnal scavengers rustling through dumpsters for food scraps. At least she hoped it was raccoons and not homeless people.
“Do you need a ride back to your parents’ place?” Marla offered.
There had been times before Marla owned a car when she’d been forced to walk in the dark. As soon as a town was cast in darkness it became a place of fear and the unknown.
Sommer seemed to know this all too well, as she was quick to take Marla up on her offer.
During the car ride, Sommer remained quiet, apart from giving Marla directions. There were moments when the girl would act as though she was about to say something, but then hesitate and stop herself. Marla wondered if there was something more she wanted to add.
It was when Marla pulled over to the curb in front of Sommer’s house that the girl found the courage to speak her mind.
“After you saw Jared murdered, how did you cope?” she asked.
Although Sommer’s face was shrouded in darkness, Marla could see the pain within the creases that formed across her forehead. The sight of Reggie’s blood-bathed body and clouded eyes was tormenting her.
“I saw a therapist for a while,” Marla told her.
The therapist had been a choice Marla had been coerced to consider by her parents. She’d never been the sort of person to declare her woes. Now, she’d learned to share her feelings to deal with them, but then she’d been different.
Jared’s gored body was a sight Marla never could unsee. Even for a person without a photographic memory, murder was not easily erased from the mind. It had helped to have an objective person to talk to and support her through the trauma.
“It might sound lame to see a therapist, but it helps,” Marla said. “It’s a therapist’s job to listen to you from a non-judgmental standpoint. Why don’t we exchange numbers? You can text me if you need to talk. I also could help you find a professional to speak with if you want.”
Sommer gladly provided Marla with her number before leaving the car. A sense of satisfaction washed over Marla as she drove away. This was the sort of feeling she craved: pride in her ability to help others.
There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to guide a family through funeral options, she thought. I had no problem connecting with Sommer. What makes other people in pain any different?
When Marla returned to her condo, she reflected on the time she’d spent living in Reggie’s basement. Sommer had mentioned that her boyfriend had rented the other room from Reggie until recently. The moment her boyfriend had left, Reggie had pulled the stunt with Sommer’s underwear. Marla wondered if Reggie would have been a creep to her had her boyfriend not been around frequently.
The night was hot, even with the air conditioning on. Marla remained in her bed, tossing and turning beneath her single sheet. Because her bed had been torn apart by the police, she’d had to make it up. The rest of her place was still a disaster.
What a waste of time, Marla thought, bitterly.