Found You (3 page)

After a moment of looking between the word and the body, Steve looked at Eileen and said, “She couldn’t have written that herself.”

“Ooh, brains and brawn. You excite me. Take me.” She blew him a kiss, and without missing a beat, continued with, “But yeah, not likely she did it herself.”

Eileen stripped off her bloody gloves and disposed of them in an envelope. “It would have been a bitch and a half for someone else to get down here, kill her, write on the wall in her blood, and climb up again, unless he or she had help. Just look over by Rubelli at that mess of cords and shit—that’s what they’re supposed to use to get me the hell outta here. And if you wanna know my opinion, any equipment that would get a killing type up
and down this shaft would have probably attracted the attention of someone somewhere—ground patrol, security guys, what have you. From what I’ve overheard down here in the hole, no one saw nothing.”

“Doesn’t even look like there’s much room down there for two and a struggle. Not likely someone was down there when she died, right? Sure she died of impact?”

“Pretty sure. And yeah, I think she hit bottom alone. No trace of anyone else here, except this note.”

“Okay, thanks, Eileen. Thanks.”

She nodded. “No problem, handsome. Stop by later for wine and cheese and lab results. It’ll be a hoot.” She winked at him in the semideflected glow of his flashlight and then added, “Do me a favor, sugar, and tell them to hoist this old whale up, eh?”

He smiled. “Wonder you can’t float right up on your angel wings, beautiful.”

She laughed, and he gestured to one of the officers that Eileen was ready. He walked off a ways, checking the route marked off in police tape that the officers thought might have been Sally’s last hundred yards or so.

“No trace of anyone else here,” Eileen had said. A locked room job…so to speak.

“But I am here,” voices whispered close to his ear. His aunt, grandfather, Charlie, his old babysitter—a flood of voices that in an instant he both recognized and realized would be impossible. A fast shiver ran across his back. He turned sharply. No one stood close enough behind him to have said it.

Steve gazed around with deliberate, slow attentiveness,
looking for the smirking face, the chuckle stifled behind a hand, and saw nothing.

“And I still am.” This time, the voices came like a cold breath on his neck. He jumped, turning again. No one was there.

“Hello?”

“Hello, this is Detective Steve Corimar. I would like to speak to David Kohlar, please.”

Dave passed a hand over his face and sighed. Early morning phone calls never meant anything good. And police phone calls usually meant some kind of trouble, either for him or for his sister Sally. “Yeah, this is Dave.”

“Mr. Kohlar, we need you to come down to the station, please. It’s about your sister.”

Dave sat up in bed. The latter, then. “What—what about her? Is she missing?”

“We need you to come down to the station. Please.”

“Oh God, is she hurt? What happened?”

“We’re sending a police cruiser to pick you up. It should be there in a few minutes.”

Also not good news. If they sent someone to get you so you wouldn’t have to drive, that was like kicking off
a conversation with, “Mr. Kohlar, are you sitting down? You should be sitting down for this.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be ready.” Dave got out of bed, tugging jeans over his boxers as he balanced the phone between his ear and shoulder. He held the phone while he pulled a T-shirt down over his head. “Please, just tell me if she’s okay.”

The pause on the other end sat pregnant with discomfort. “We’ll see you soon, Mr. Kohlar.”

The policemen who arrived regarded his questioning expression with somber faces. There were two, an older man and a guy who looked a little younger than Dave. They introduced themselves as Jenkins and Pem-brey. Neither knew anything about Sally, or else just told him that to shut him up. They spent most of the car ride in silence. Dave felt like a total wreck on the way to the police station. His head pounded, his stomach rumbled with acid, and his hands felt cold and slippery as he clenched nervous fists. It was something wrong this time, something really, really wrong. He cursed the cop for not just telling him over the phone, cursed Oak Hill for letting something horrible happen to Sally. He couldn’t bring himself to curse Sally, but he felt angry toward whatever she had done to get herself in whatever trouble she was in.

And of course he cursed himself. The guilt, an ever-present albatross, never let him forget how pretty much everything to do with Sally was his fault one way or another.

He dove out of the car the minute the police pulled into a parking space at the Lakehaven police station and
half ran into the building, where he pounced with frantic insistence on the officer at the front desk. She was a stout woman with wild puffs of blonde hair; the name on her uniform read Shirley Columsco.

“I’m Kohlar, Dave Kohlar. You called about my sister. Is she all right? Is she…?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Kohlar. I’ll find you a detective.”

“Just tell me if she’s all right. Please.”

Shirley turned around, gave him a sympathetic look, and continued to a door over in the corner of the room.

Dave’s thoughts tumbled all over each other, scrabbling for the forefront. The one that came most readily and painfully to the surface was of a little blonde girl lying on the ground, blood in her hair, little chest shuddering. Another thought repeatedly told him that calls about Sally meant trouble; they always had. And although no one ever wanted to tell him over the phone what the problem was, this time felt different. This time felt final. Permanent. This time, he was fairly sure that Sally was—

“Mr. Kohlar?” The detective that came out to see him had a kind face, a good-looking face, and short-cropped light brown hair. From the polo shirt and slacks, Dave could tell he worked out and evidently had better taste in clothing than Dave did. He was, Dave thought with a strange non sequitor twist of bitterness, the kind of guy he’d always pictured Cheryl leaving him for.

“Hello, I’m Detective Corimar. We spoke on the phone.”

Dave nodded. “I’m Dave. Will you please tell me what’s going on with my sister?”

He could see from Corimar’s face that the news wasn’t good. “Mr. Kohlar, please, this way.” Corimar led Dave through a door and to a chair by a desk.

Dave frowned. “Isn’t this…Anita DeMarco’s desk?”

Corimar offered a warm smile. “Yes, actually. I’m covering her cases while she’s on maternity leave. You know her?”

“Yeah, uh, yeah, you could say that. She investigated my sister’s disappearance a while back.” Dave took the chair offered.

Corimar wrote something down on a legal pad and then looked up at him. The smile was gone. “Mr. Kohlar. I am really very sorry to have to inform you of this.”

Tears blurred Dave’s vision. The rest of what the detective said and whatever he managed to respond sounded far away, like it was coming through a long tunnel. “There was an accident…She’s gone, Mr. Kohlar…”

“How?…What happened?”

“…She fell in the catacombs, beneath her living facility…”

“…Suicide?”

“We’re investigating…”

“…You don’t think it was a suicide?”

“We’re looking into it…”

“Was there a note? Anything?”

“It was a word, Mr. Kohlar. HOLLOW. Does that mean anything to you? Anything significant about that word?”

That last part came clearly through the haze of grief. A word. A single word. An awful fucking string of letters
that yes, actually, did mean something to him, but nothing he would ever admit to, not now, out loud to this pretty-a way to find him. And he wouldn’t.

“No, nothing.” He thought he’d said it out loud, but his lips felt numb, and his head, his hands, his legs in the chair didn’t feel entirely there with him in the station.

“Can I get you something? Cup of coffee, maybe?”

Dave shook his head.

“Are you up to this right now? We can always—”

“No, if you’ve got questions, ask them. I’d rather do this now.”

“Understood.” The detective scribbled something else on the legal pad. “Mr. Kohlar, did Sally have any problems with anyone? Anyone she didn’t like maybe or was afraid of? Anyone who gave her a hard time?”

Dave shook his head. “No, not one. People liked Sally. She was like a kitten. People thought she was helpless. Fragile. She was, I guess. People always wanted to take care of her.” Dave had the strangest case of déjà vu, like he’d explained this to police before. He looked at the officer. “Someone killed her?”

“It’s too early to say. I’m just trying to get a picture of her life. An idea of what she was like, who came in and out of her daily existence, that sort of thing.”

“No one. She had her doctor and me. I don’t think she even had a lot of friends at Oak Hill.”

“So you aren’t aware of any friends she might have had at the assisted living facility?”

Dave cringed a little, perhaps more sensitive than he should have been to undertones of accusation that he wasn’t there enough for his sister to be aware of her friends. “No. No one that I’ve seen her with.”

Corimar nodded. “Okay. I think that’s it for now. Here’s my card. If there’s anything else you think of that might be of importance, no matter how small or unrelated it might seem, just give me a ring, okay? Again, I’m very sorry for your loss. Jenkins there will help you with arrangements and forms to sign.”

“Thank you.” Dave got up on shaky legs and followed Officer Jenkins. The rest of the afternoon blurred by. When he lay down later that afternoon in the dusky gloom of his apartment, he found the detective’s business card, crumpled and worn from the sweat of his palm, still in his hand. He tossed it on the floor by the television and sank into exhausted sleep.

Jake Dylan sat on his couch, elbows on his knees and hands dangling between his legs, staring at the baggie of heroin on the coffee table. He suspected that it belonged to his sometimes-friend Scott, who, despite never having done drugs in his life, seemed bent on ruining Jake’s sobriety lately. Maybe that sounded paranoid. Sure it did. And he couldn’t be sure, of course, couldn’t
prove
it, but there was no other explanation. Jake was very nearly sure that he did not buy the heroin himself or bring it into the house, so unless he was going crazy, someone was fucking with him.

He wanted it, though. He didn’t much care whose heroin it was. He wanted to get high.

Jake stole a glance at his cell phone, which he’d taken out of his pocket and placed gingerly next to the bag of heroin. He could call Erik, his sponsor. Or he could just pick up the baggie by the ziplocked corner and throw it away. Flush it. Burn it. Snort it. Shoot it up. Get rid of it.

His hand reached for the cell and drew back.

He didn’t need this shit. He’d been having some bad nightmares lately that had put him a little on edge—faceless parades of his aunt’s boyfriends in fun house distortion, towering over him, smacking him into walls, shoving him into closets, stuffing him down, down into places that light and air couldn’t reach. They didn’t have faces. Or rather, they had a stream of faces, one bulky body passing from one hateful twist of mouth or blazing eye to another. In the dreams, his brother couldn’t (wouldn’t) protect him. He could sense Greg just outside the periphery of his dream-vision. There but not there. Aware that he was being hurt in an intellectual sense, but completely devoid of compassion or anger or fear or anything that had compelled him to protect Jake when they had been kids. It hadn’t often come to physical confrontations in real life—maybe two that he could remember. But the things they said…God, the things they said drove Greg to mouth off with a quick tongue, while they drove Jake to drug-induced apathy.

The heroin on the table looked soft, inviting, not quite pure white but dazzling in his eyes just the same.

When the cell phone rang, he jumped and darted a hand out to grab it with a brief flicker of hope that it might be Greg that winked out, really, before his hand even closed around the phone. The incoming number
registered only as “Unknown Name, Unknown Number.” He pushed a button and said, “Hello?” His eyes never left the heroin.

There was a crackle of static. “Hello, Jake.” The voices that spoke sounded choppy, overlaying each other like the signal came from some long tunnel, maybe, or under some heavily tree-shaded road that wreaked havoc on cell phone reception.
Greg sounded like that the last time I
—

“Who’s this?”

“Don’t you remember me, Jake?” The voices melded into one.

Jake felt cold across his back. It was his aunt’s voice. His dead aunt’s voice.

She made a clicking sound with her teeth that Jake loathed. It meant she was disappointed. Or angry. Or frustrated. Or too tense to have him around, messing up the vibes in the air that surrounded her already unsteady calm. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”

“Who are you?” he repeated. “Who are you really?”

“You know who I am,” she said, but the sound on the other end of the line wavered, and for a moment he heard that other voice, a threaded multi-voice of male and female timbres. The cold spread to his gut.

“Where are you calling from?”

“Look out back.” The line went dead.

Jake pushed the hang up button and set the phone down next to the heroin. The sensation in his stomach was like taking a wrong step off a curb or sliding on ice—that slippery freezerburning feeling in the groin, like something awful was about to happen. Something
he couldn’t stop. Baaaaad high. Like the other times. Like the time he smoked that joint laced with PCP and all the people on the street started melting like wax hellip;

He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hands for a moment, trying to settle his stomach and push away thoughts of that…whatever it was.

It couldn’t have been his aunt on the phone. Maybe it was one of her old boyfriends calling to mess with him. Maybe it was Scott, or one of Scott’s friends, whichever idiot left behind the baggie of heroin. He opened his eyes, dropping his hands to his knees.

The baggie on the table was gone.

Jake frowned. He peered under the table, then on the couch around and under him. He slipped off the couch and looked underneath it and underneath the cushions. The baggie was nowhere to be found.

He stood slowly, wary eyes on the empty space where the heroin had been, and crossed through the kitchen on the way to the back door. The kitchen was small, as the rest of the house he rented on Cerver Street was small. The windows boxed out most of the light. Usually he liked it, the cocooning dark. But there was something in it now, something thick and cold and coppery that he couldn’t quite place. It felt wrong. Very wrong.

The back door, heavily painted wood that swung on uneasy hinges, groaned as he pulled it open. He squinted into the afternoon sun through the screen door. It took him a minute for his eyes to adjust enough to see the figure that stood at the far end of the yard by the tool shed. Its head was bent, and the dyed blond hair, darker at the roots, covered some of the face. It wore a dark
pink halter and capris that clung to the sizeable thighs. Strappy pink sandals showed off badly painted toenails.

Jake ran a hand through his dark, spiky hair, exhaled slowly, and opened the screen door. His eyes felt dry and heavy in their dark sockets as they kept up a steady stare. As he stepped outside, he pulled a pack of Marl-boros and a lighter from his shirt pocket. He tapped one out and lit it, his eyes all the while on the dark roots of the head across the yard from him. The feeling had come back in his stomach, the sensation of falling and being unable to stop it. He sat down with a heavy thunk on the top porch step.

Keep it cool, brother. It’s not her. Can’t be her. Keep it cool
and don’t do anything stupid and this whole thing will pass.
Even bad highs go away eventually
.

But Jake’s heart pounded in his ears.

The blond head picked up, and it took everything in Jake’s power not to cry out, not to bolt from that step and back into the house. He couldn’t do that; to do that would be to admit this was real or that he was crazy, bad-tripping on some kind of stress high or something. It would mean he’d lost control. If he stayed…it couldn’t be real if he could stare it down, right?