Nowhere to Run (3 page)

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Authors: Nancy Bush

Tags: #General, #Fiction

BOOK: Nowhere to Run
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“Hey!” Aaron Dirkus snapped his fingers in front of her face.
Liv sat bolt upright, as if goosed. “Aaron,” she said tightly to Kurt Upjohn’s son, her only “friend” at Zuma.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he answered affably, though he clearly didn’t care one way or another. Aaron’s last name was different than his father’s, due to some undefined wrangle between Kurt and Aaron’s mother—Kurt had only managed to marry her after Aaron was born and that pissed her off but good, so much so that she’d given her son her maiden name rather than Upjohn. Then later, she and Kurt had divorced anyway. The story went something like that. Liv had never quite got it in full detail, but it didn’t really matter. She’d never wanted to question Aaron further because that would have given him carte blanche to ask her about herself and she didn’t want to go there. Ever.
“You’re kinda in a fog. C’mon, let’s go out back and have a smoke,” Aaron said.
“I’ve got some work to catch up on.” She wasn’t interested in smoking anything, especially Aaron’s type of cigarettes.
“Bullshit. You work too hard as it is. You’re giving the rest of us slackers a bad name.”
“The boss is your father. You can get away with it. I can’t.”
“People are starting to hate you around here, you know that? You gotta come with me.”
He wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and he’d been known to actually pull her out of her chair to get her to comply, so she reluctantly got to her feet. Truthfully, she really didn’t take enough breaks, according to the law, so she followed him to the back door on the first floor and outside to the enclosed patio-type area, with its overhang and its gate that led to the employee parking lot. Her blue Accord was three in, facing out as if ready to take off.
Aaron normally stuffed a brick-sized rock in the door to keep it ajar, but today he actually pulled out a key and unlocked it from the outside, so that the door would stay open until he relocked it.
“Where’d you get that?” Liv asked.
“Kinda lifted it,” he admitted. “Don’t worry. I’ll lock up before we leave tonight. I just can’t stand walking by that asshole de Fore every time I want to breathe some fresh air.” He shot her a quick smile as he pulled a joint and lighter from his pants pocket.
Aaron liked to smoke “maree-wanna,” as he called it. Liv stayed away from all drugs; she’d been encouraged to take enough during her yearlong treatment at Hathaway House to last her a lifetime and then some. She liked a clear head and, apart from a very occasional drink, mostly steered clear of alcohol, too.
“You don’t say much,” Aaron observed with a sideways look as he belched out a lungful of smoke. “I like that about you. Although you’re kind of shut down.”
Remembering her six-year-old self, Liv felt a pang of sorrow for the loss of the independent, headstrong little girl she’d once been. That girl had apparently died along with her mother.
She stood to one side, leaning against the gate to the parking lot, gazing out. Occasionally she’d left the building this way when Aaron had propped open the door. She completely agreed with him that bypassing Paul de Fore was worth breaking some rules. Paul was just one of those guys no one could stand, the type who took his job too seriously and made it hell on everyone else.
Being too serious, though, wasn’t Aaron’s problem.
“Tell me something about yourself,” Aaron said now. He had long hair and wore a plaid shirt over a T-shirt, slacker-style. It hardly mattered since his dad was the boss, but truthfully the programmers and game designers who were on the upstairs floor kind of dressed the same way. Slacker, hacker, computer techie, video game designer . . . there seemed to be an unspoken dress code with them that thumbed its nose at accepted business attire.
Only Liv and Jessica Maltona dressed in legitimate office wear: skirts or slacks, blouses, vests, jackets, sensible shoes, tasteful jewelry and makeup. Paul de Fore wore a navy shirt and pants as if it were a security uniform though there was really no such dictum.
“Well, I’m a Leo,” she said. “I like Italian food and expensive coffee and live in an apartment with a three-hundred-pound cat.”
Aaron coughed out some smoke on a laugh. Liv had never so much as hinted that she might have a personality and she’d taken him by surprise. She wasn’t even sure why she’d said it. She’d just wanted . . . to not be so serious for once.
“Cool. What’s the cat’s name?” he asked.
“Tiny.”
He grinned at her and Liv smiled back at him. It was the most playful conversation they’d had to date and though Liv was simply talking to talk, Aaron peered at her as if she were something he’d just discovered.
“Who are you?” he asked. “You’re too good-looking to be this mousy bookkeeper you want us all to think you are.”
Too good-looking? She had straight brown hair, hazel eyes and a mouth and jaw that were set too tightly, or so she’d been told. “I’m kind of average-looking.”
“Look in the mirror, sometime.”
She shook her head. Whenever she looked in the mirror she saw a woman with anxious eyes whose personal life was nonexistent and whose professional one was practically invisible, too.
He flapped a hand at her and sucked in his last toke. “You’re good-looking and you’re too serious. You should have some of this.” He held out the teensy little end of the joint.
“Nah.”
“Or a glass or two of wine, or a few mojitos, or some Xanax. You just need to let go.” He pushed on the gate and let himself into the back parking lot.
“You’re going to piss off your father by ignoring security,” she warned him.
“A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. You go out this way sometimes, too.”
It was true. Though Liv generally played by the rules, there was this inner part of her that occasionally liked to flout authority. Most of the time she pretended it wasn’t there. But sometimes it stretched and peered around like a waking beast, looking to prowl. Was it because she’d spent time constrained by others? Or, the fact that the police had left an indelible impression on her since her mother’s death, and not a good one. Or, maybe it was just a side of her personality that she mostly ignored and that surprised her and others now and again when it suddenly popped up. She wasn’t the meek worker bee everyone thought she was, though she took pains to make others see her that way. A kind of camouflage, like an animal’s coat or a bird’s feathers.
By the time she left work she still hadn’t opened the package and when she got back to the apartment she dropped it on the kitchen counter while she threw together a quick meal—a microwavable TV dinner with limited calories and limited taste; her eating habits hadn’t evolved over the years, either.
She went to bed at ten-thirty and stared up at the ceiling through the dark. She could hear the comfortable sounds of the refrigerator humming and the tinny voices from her neighbor’s television, which seemed to be right behind her head, set against the paper-thin wall that separated their units, her bedroom butting up against theirs.
She fell asleep, then came to abruptly at midnight, wondering what had woken her. There was moaning from behind the wall. It had been her neighbor Jo’s last climactic shriek during lovemaking—something that happened regularly enough—that had penetrated her sleep.
Sleep . . . That’s what some people called it, though Liv was pretty sure her sleep was different than others’; she’d learned that over the years. Hers was disturbed by images that kept coming back, creeping into a dream that had nothing to do with whatever the dream was about, images burrowing inside, memories from her childhood that simply wouldn’t go away. Gruesome visions. The kind that had sent her to Hathaway House, a place for troubled teens who were recovering from serious issues: drug addiction, suicide attempts, self-mutilation . . . whatever. She’d been sent there because she was “disturbed,” or so said her evil stepmother—yes, she really did have one—who had convinced her father to seek help for his nutso daughter. Only it hadn’t helped, apart from making Liv realize that her problems were small compared to some of the other kids’ at Hathaway House.
But because she was underage and had no choice, Liv put in her time there and finally, much to the evil stepmother Lorinda’s dismay, had been pronounced “in recovery” sometime in what would have been her senior year of high school. She was released into her family’s care and she went on to earn her GED. She’d learned by then that the best thing to do was just not to tell anybody about the powerful images she had of her mother’s body hanging limply from a noose that had been attached to the rustic kitchen rafters of their old home. Images that stole her sleep. Images of a suicide that had left Deborah Dugan’s two children, Liv and her brother, Hague, in the hands of a stunned father who quickly took a new bride.
Liv blinked in the darkness. The television next door was now tuned to an old sitcom that ran in the off hours and every so often the canned laughter would burst out in little fireworks of
har, har, har.
Liv listened to it and thought of the couple who lived adjacent to her in Apartment 21B. Young and in love, around her own age, they seemed to live on pizza and Diet Coke. At least the girl did. The guy had a penchant for beer. “Whatever’s on special,” he told Liv one day when she met them on the outdoor balcony and he was lugging a six-pack of Budweiser. They were trying to hug, kiss and giggle with each other while he also was threading the key into the lock and then they sort of fell inside and slammed the door shut behind them.
Liv had opened her own door and was greeted by the scent of loneliness and lost opportunities.
The next-door couple’s name was Martin and though they hadn’t formerly introduced themselves she knew the shrieker was Jo. His name started with a T . . . Travis, or Trevor, or something kind of cowboy-sounding to Liv’s mind. She should know what it was as she’d heard Jo scream it out enough times while they were making love, but it always made her feel like an auditory voyeur and therefore Liv covered her head with her pillow whenever they went at it.
The worst of it was that their lovemaking reminded Liv of the two times she’d gotten close to sex and the third time that she’d actually gone through with it and had been left wondering, what the hell? Where were the bells and flowers and rainbows and endorphins? She’d mostly felt sort of depressed and wondering if sex, too—touted as a supposedly wonderful expression of love—was just another part of life that she wasn’t able to experience like everyone else.
Cynical. That’s what she was. And afraid . . . afraid to open a package from someone who’d sent it to her long, long after her death.
The following morning she went through the shower, dressed in black slacks and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt, drank a glass of orange juice and ate a piece of peanut-butter toast, her gaze on the envelope. She grabbed her purse and keys and headed out the door, then turned around abruptly and went back for the package, ripping it open while her heart pounded. She fought the crippling anxiety that sometimes overtook her and left her gasping for air and practically in the fetal position and shook the package’s contents onto the counter.
Out tumbled several pictures and a couple of folded pages.
She saw her mother with several other people in one of the pictures, and she staggered backward to the couch and sat down hard, the photo in her hands; the other papers flew to the floor—someone’s birth certificate among them . . . hers.
Drawing a long breath, she tried to stem a tsunami of coming panic. Her ears roared. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t see. Could scarcely recall where she was.
Her vision went inward, to the memory of a long ago, cool, summer evening, the air breezing inside the kitchen through the opened back door. The toes of her mother’s shoes drifted from side to side . . . her face purple . . . her tongue fat and sticking out....
Liv squeezed her eyes shut. Attempted to shove the image into blackness, but it shone white on the insides of her eyelids like a negative. Her eyes flew open again, and for just a moment her mother was standing right in front of her.
“I’m done,” Mama said, then the mirage
poofed
into mist.
Chapter 2
Liv drove home from the office during her noon hour, even though there really wasn’t enough time, even though she would probably skip lunch entirely. She’d left the package opened and spread across the coffee table. She couldn’t look or touch any part of it when she’d left for work this morning, but the way everything was exposed had haunted her inner vision all morning.
Now, she took the steps up from the apartment parking lot to the second level of the L-shaped building where her apartment lay one in from the end unit. She threaded the key in the lock and pushed open the door before she felt someone behind her.
She screamed. One short, aborted shriek and stumbled into the apartment, turning, facing the intruder.
“Whoa, whoa! Sorry!”
It was her neighbor, Trevor or Travis or something. He was standing there in shock, holding up his hands. Liv felt the energy drop out of her and she leaned against the wall, near collapse, quivering inside.
Worried, he grabbed for her and said, “Geez, sorry.”
She flinched away. “I’m okay. What . . . are you doing?”
“Come on.” His arm was around her shoulders and he started to help her to the couch against her protests, her legs moving forward, but feeling detached from her body.
“What do you want?” she asked, trying to keep all traces of fear from her voice.
The pictures from the package were scattered across the coffee table as was her birth certificate and the note from her mother. She glanced at them, then at him, but he was only looking at her. “Just wanted to invite you over tonight,” he said apologetically. “Didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. She was working to get her pulse under control.
Then his gaze swept over the photos and he focused on one where an angry-looking man was stalking toward the cameraman, his hand up as if he were about to rip the offending camera away. The same man was in several other photos with Liv’s mother, but he was always turning away, frowning, as if he didn’t want his picture taken.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Liv said stiffly.
“Looks really pissed. This an old photo?”
The color had leached out of the print and the women’s permed hair and over-the-shoulder tops and black stretch pants, straight out of
Flashdance
, spoke volumes about the date of the picture. “Yeah.”
“Huh.” He turned back to her. “So . . . Jo and me . . . we’re just havin’ some drinks and pizza. We don’t get goin’ till late. That work for you?”
“Thanks, but I’ve already made some plans.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She’d determined over the course of the morning that she was going to show her brother the contents of the package. Hague had his issues, but he was strangely insightful as well.
He’d only been a baby when their mother died, but maybe there was something buried in his psyche that could offer some explanation. “Another time, maybe? I’ve gotta run. I’m on my lunch break.”
“If you change your mind, just stop by,” he said.
“I’ll do that.” And she hustled him out the door.
 
 
The apartment where Liv’s brother, Hague, lived was on the third/top floor of an older, industrial building on the east side of the Willamette River that had been converted into loftlike units during the ’60s. Those lofts had subsequently grown tired and in need of maintenance over the intervening years, but the place still had a spectacular view toward Portland’s city center, its westside windows looking back over the river. Hague’s unit was in the northwest corner and would have commanded an amazing slice of Portland skyline had he ever opened his blinds.
Liv parked her blue Accord a block and a half from Hague’s building, the closest spot she could find. She hurried toward his apartment, the package tucked beneath her coat, feeling unseen eyes following her, though there were probably none. It was more likely her own paranoia, always on the prowl. She usually could hold it at bay, but there were times when it simply took over and she was powerless to do anything but feel its paralyzing grip.
She wished fervently, like she always did, that she could change the past, but it was impossible. She’d lost her mother and huge parts of her life—days, weeks, months, years—and there was no getting them back. She could still remember the policeman’s probing questions after she’d woken from her trauma-induced coma. She was in a hospital with its bad smells and gray walls.
“Did you see anything when you were in the kitchen?” he’d demanded. She didn’t know he was a policeman at first. He didn’t have the clothes of a policeman.
“I saw Mama.” She forced the words out. Her lips quivered uncontrollably.
“Anything else? Something?” He threw an impatient look toward the woman who’d come with him. A social worker of some kind, she knew now, but she hadn’t understood at the time.
Livvie’s quivering lips were replaced by out-and-out sobs.
“Useless,” he muttered.
“She’s just a child,” the woman responded tautly.
He turned back to Livvie. “The back door was open. Did you notice that?”
She nodded jerkily.
“Did you walk outside? Look outside?”
“NOOOOOOOO!”
“Calm down,” he told her. “Was there anyone—anyone—around?”
“H-Hague was in his bed,” she stuttered, plucking at the covers. “He—he started crying. . . .”
“Any
adults!
” His mouth was smashed together like he was holding back something mean to say.
She felt the tears rain down and the woman walked over to her, patted her hand, glared at the man and said, “Let the poor child be!”
“Maybe her mother killed herself because she knew something about those dead women out in the field behind her house.”
“Shhhh.” The woman’s mouth was a flat line, too, but Livvie was glad to see it, understanding that it was for him, not her.
“Or, maybe somebody thought she knew something and decided to take care of her himself ?”
The woman marched right over to him and said in a low voice, “This child
found
her mother! It was suicide, and it was tragic, and she’s been terribly traumatized. Try to remember that.”
He gave her a mean, mean look, and said, “I’m trying to catch a killer. You should try and remember
that
.”
 
 
With the hindsight of age Liv now realized the man had been a plainclothes policeman with the small Rock Springs police force and completely out of his realm working with children. But that didn’t excuse him. And he hadn’t given up after that first interview. Oh, no. He’d come back to the house as soon as she’d gotten out of the hospital. By that time she and Hague had a neighbor woman taking care of them but Liv would not go into the kitchen. She was in the den when the officer came to interview her, and this time she was on her own with him . . . and the panic started to rise.
He tried a little harder, but Liv had lost trust completely.
 
 
“Try to think back to the night your mom died,” he told her, smiling at her through his teeth. She recognized that he was trying to be kind, but his smile just creeped her out all the more.
“Okay,” she said in a small voice.
“Don’t think about your mom. Think about the kitchen.”
Panic swelled. She saw the table and the sink and the window. “It was really dark. The outside was coming in,” she said.
“Yes. The back door was open,” the officer said, nodding. “Do you know who went out the door?”
“My dad?”
“You think your dad went through the door?”
“Mama was holding her face.”
“Your dad told me they had a fight. Do you know what the fight was about?”
That made Livvie think hard, but she shook her head.
“Have they fought before?”
“Yeah . . . Mama hit him once.”
“Your mama hit your dad?”
“I think he hit her, too,” Livvie said solemnly. “That’s why she was holding her face.” Then, remembering Mama, she started shaking and hiccupping.
“Now, be a big girl and stop crying. I need your help. Your mama needs your help.”
“Mama’s dead. Mama’s dead!!!”
“You can help her.”
“You’re lying! Mama’s dead!” Livvie wailed and clapped her hands over her ears and the policeman left the den, said something mean to the neighbor lady and slammed the front door.
 
 
After that the police gave up trying to interview her, though the social worker questioned Livvie further about her parents’ relationship, which created havoc for her father and was probably partially to blame for their chilly relationship ever since. The police questioned Albert Dugan thoroughly, and he’d been furious with Liv for telling tales. Still, he admitted that he and Deborah’s relationship had been tempestuous. He might have slapped her . . . once . . . or twice . . . but she’d hit him, too. He admitted to slapping her the night of her death before he’d stalked out the back door. Deborah had bitten him and he’d struck without thinking. But he was so sorry. So, so sorry.
It was also why Mama had said, “I’m done,” Liv was pretty sure.
Even so, to this day Liv wasn’t sure what the truth had been between her parents. Her father swore they’d loved each other . . . well, at least he’d loved her . . . but then she’d taken her own life and there had to be a deep-seated reason for that, and he just couldn’t understand it. He’d never agreed that Deborah had committed suicide. Wouldn’t talk about it. Within the year after her death he married Lorinda, and the whole family moved from the house with too many memories to another one across town. Employed by the forestry department, Albert pushed his old life behind him, and made a new one. Liv understood he was as haunted by the events of that night as she was, maybe in a different way, but in one just as powerful. Deborah’s death had affected and shaped his life from that day forward.
As it had Hague’s . . .
Now Liv climbed in the rattling elevator with the accordion door, slamming the handle shut, watching the floors pass as she headed for the third story. She let herself onto the hallway with its scarred wooden surfaces and scents of floor wax and dust and overcooked vegetables, and walked quickly to Hague’s door.
After their mother’s death, the policeman had interviewed Hague, too, for all the good it did. Hague had babbled about “that man.” The authorities had looked around for help but no one seemed to know what he was talking about. Liv asked him later, when they were alone, and he squirreled under the blankets of his bed and said, “Zombie man. Kill you. Kill you!” And he was crying and laughing and crying some more.
He’d scared the living daylights out of Liv, who ran to her own room, hiding beneath her covers. Later Hague said Mama had a friend. “A friend!” he’d yelled at the authorities. “Mama’s friend!”
They, in turn, labeled “the friend” Deborah Dugan’s Mystery Man.
Liv never mentioned Hague’s zombie man comment to the police, nor that he’d also said
kill you
in the same reference, like he’d said when he’d been sitting in his high chair, if that’s what he’d said that day; she’d never been completely sure. And she didn’t know then that his words were the first inkling of the behavioral changes that would send Hague down, down, down in a descending spiral that would last until his life to date.
“Hello, Olivia.”
Della Larson, Hague’s companion, stood in the open doorway, answering Liv’s knock. She leaned her head back and crossed her arms, assessing Liv suspiciously; behind her the place looked like a dark hole. Hague didn’t like lights, or fresh air, or anything remotely
different.
Unless, of course, he chose to do an about-face himself, which happened occasionally.

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