Headlights(31)

All the things I can’t face.

Once I was past the initial post-trauma period as a kid (this is what my therapist called it), my dad wanted to show me the trunk, tell me of the history of the people who were here before us. But the Bad Feeling hung around it like a shroud, and I didn’t want to go near it.

Three sets of owners of this house, all contributing to its history and legacy. And the fourth one, now letting it all rot.

Back upstairs in the living room, I light six candles among the files, put two flashlights on either side of it all facing in. I’ve got a third one to use as I read. I add another log to the fire. My stomach rumbles. I fish out my phone again, put in a delivery order from the local Chinese place. Every now and then Josie and I would pick it up on our way over here to see my parents. I only realize after I’ve hung up that I placed the order for the four of us, our usual. I call them back and change it. I turn to the corner of the great room, swing open the French doors to the bar. The alcove is dark and dusty like everything else, wallpapered in an Egyptian pattern Marianne loved. I grab one of the six bottles of whiskey and step back over to the files.

I reach into my pocket slowly and pull Hannah Lawrence’s drawing from it. My heart pounds again. I turn it back and forth.

A fox, sketched on the six of spades. Did I mean to grab that one, or was it just there in front of my hand? I think of her. Picture her. Hannah, alone, in that cabin. Creating this. My senses on full alert suddenly, adrenaline coursing.

Why? Just because she was in my old room at the motel?

I’m not sure if it’s more than that. Not sure why thinking of her makes me need to run, or do something. Anything. Why I took this card from her cabin.

The candlelight flickers over the card. I drop it, watch it slowly fall and land on top of one of the files.

Another creak upstairs, and the music drifts back in. A shadow darts past the stairs.

This card. Hannah Lawrence.

The whole of a city holding its breath.

Something feels different this time. Strained, inevitable.

Like it was always all coming to this.



* * *



It’s six AM when the phone rings. I fell asleep on the floor, slumped against the mantel, a file splayed open on my lap. Photos of bite marks on the former bodies. The images capturing my midnight attention, an itch in the back of my brain.

The bite marks on the last two bodies before the hiatus seemed to indicate a smaller or missing canine in the person cannibalizing them. Meaning it very well could have been the same person eating the last two bodies before the haitus, and either it was a different person than the one who ate the previous bodies, or they lost or chipped a canine between the sixth and seventh killings. Forensics deemed it inconclusive. It probably is a dead end. So many pieces, crooked useless paths. And me, going over it all still. Following it straight off a cliff.

The candles have all burned down, the fire gone out.

Whileago Manor is dark and silent.

Jack’s voice on the phone. “Dan,” he says. “She’s awake.”





5



Denver sunrise, clouds over mountains, geese and dry branches and a waking city. Front lawns covered in leaves, brown roofs, brick and wood and steel.

My mom—Rose—in a pink dress, sitting on a big rock in a river. Me sitting beside her.

Her crinkled old paperback sticking out of the picnic basket, with our sodas and snacks.

She reaches for my hand, bruises on her face. A tear in her eye.

“She requested a nose plug,” Jack says, putting his cell phone back in his pocket.

I’m at the office, boots on office carpet. That memory—what is wrong with me?

I don’t know that river, have no other memory of ever being there. Wherever there is.

I shake my head.

Jack, Tillman, and I stand on the other side of the one-way glass of the interrogation room. Jack checks the time. Ten more minutes until she arrives from the hospital.

Hannah Lawrence. Hannah, who is coming here. Garcia and Frazier have gone to get her, at one of their suggestions that maybe she should only be in close proximity to women after what happened.

“Nose plug?” Tillman asks.

Jack shrugs. “They said after the motel, she doesn’t want to smell anyone.”

We take this in, all of us. She was taped into that bed with a dead man for days with his tongue in her mouth.

Hannah Lawrence coming here.

A shadow moves at the edge of the room. When I started here, there were only a couple, but the number grew, especially when the case gained momentum. Crowding, waiting until I was alone in an elevator, staircase, bathroom, until it was late, my nerves on a hair trigger. Appearing before me suddenly, shoving something to the floor.

Externalizations of stress. Hallucinations. It’s a trauma response.

I drop the files I’m carrying on the table. Tillman for once is silent. All three of us tense, waiting. The question of Hannah, the potential implications of her part in this. Tillman is sitting across the observation room, closer to the door. Jack’s loosened his tie. I sit, stand back up again.

I startle when the door to the interrogation room opens. I glance down at my watch. Ten minutes have passed, I’m not sure how. Time stretching, warping.

She walks in.

I can’t breathe.

I don’t know what comes over me. But seeing her, Hannah Lawrence, I feel as though I’ve lived this moment before. Or I knew it was coming, or— Of course I knew. It’s more … Why is my heart racing like this?