Heather(12)

Three dots appear on the screen, disappear, then silence.





CALLIE


Another night of restless sleep, moonlight leaking through the blinds. In her tossing and turning, she comes to a decision: She’s got to talk to Jenna again. The sooner the better. She’ll drive to her house, early, before she’s due in at the station. In the bright light of morning it could be a real chance to hash things out, before Jenna’s gotten started on the day’s drinking.

But when she pulls up to Jenna’s rancher she has to resist the temptation to rub her eyes, double-checks the house number, which is formed from gold-toned metal, not the peeling hardware store stickers of her youth. There are two glazed pots of impatiens on the steps leading to the door. The flowers are lush, hardy. The door has been painted a glossy red.

On the steps she stares at the flowers and feels a sense of vertigo. Is she at the right house? Did Jenna move and not tell her?

Callie knocks once, waits a beat, knocks again. She’s got a key on her ring and lets herself in, half expecting it to not fit in the lock. But it gives, and for the first time in five years she’s inside her childhood home. She calls for her mother but her voice rings out in the empty space.

She does a quick circuit of the rooms—the old habit of making sure Jenna hadn’t passed out, hit her head, choked on her own vomit—but no one’s there. Instead, she finds the coverlet has been replaced on Jenna’s bed, which is made, and not the nest of ash and empties she’s accustomed to. A new lamp on the bedside table.

The kitchen is similarly tidy. The trash isn’t overflowing. The table is wiped clean. There’s a coin on the surface, dark against the wood, but when she stands over it she realizes it’s not a coin but a chip from AA.

Three months sober.

Jenna had been telling the truth.

“No goddamned way,” she says out loud. Jenna had always said AA was for losers, that a room full of sad sacks telling their tales of woe only made her want to drink more. But she must have changed her mind. Maybe she’s at a meeting now, Callie thinks, embarrassed by the stupid hope that bubbles up in her chest, the kind of hope she thought she had mastered a long time ago. She scrawls a note onto a Post-it pad she finds in the kitchen drawer. Call me. A second later she adds two more words. I’m sorry.

As she turns to leave she finds herself staring face-to-face with her own photograph. An article taped to the fridge.

CALLIE HAUSER NAMED FIRST FEMALE CHIEF OF POLICE IN PINE LAKES

At thirty years old, Hauser is the youngest Chief of Police to serve Pine Lakes as well as the first female chief. Retired Police Chief Frank Caputo hails Hauser’s narcotics experience and says he has confidence that Hauser is the right person to help them tamp down the proliferating drug trade in the Pines.



The article is dated three months ago.

She turns back to the table, stares hard at the chip.

“How about that?” she says out loud to the empty rooms.



* * *



The call comes in at 1:00 P.M., just as Callie takes a moment to stare out the window of her office.

Suspected overdose.

Another one.

Callie slams out the station door, climbs in her cruiser, peels out of the lot. The afternoon is cloudy with occasional patches of weak, filtered sunlight breaking through. The lethargic weather is at odds with the pounding of her heart, the urgency flooding through her nerves as she speeds away from the station, braces herself for whatever she’s going to find at the scene.

The call came in from the owner of the paintball park ten minutes up the road. When she pulls in there’s a cluster of men milling around in the parking lot and the owner has the entrance gate pulled shut. His huddled form emerges in front of her, a skinny guy with a hooded sweatshirt draped over his body, and it takes him a minute to get the padlock on the gate undone with his trembling hands.

“She’s in bad shape. It … I don’t know, man.”

Callie clenches a fist around one of the vials of Narcan in her pocket. “Paramedics will be here soon. Take me to her. Now.”

The owner—guy called Kirby Lewes—is wiry, quick, with a slink that makes her think of a ferret. Callie has him slide in the passenger seat of her cruiser and they bump over paint-splattered fields, more dirt than grass.

“She’s on the bus. Nobody’s supposed to actually be on the bus, you know? It’s just like, a feature. It’s locked. But these kids, man, they’re always forcing the door open, climbing in there to smoke up or touch each other.”

“What bus?”

“It was my uncle’s but the transmission went, so he had it towed here. Cool part of the park, adds some detail and something different, you know? Up here. Just past the barracks.”

They pass through a row of huts supposedly made to look like an Afghan village. On the side of one of the buildings someone has scrawled OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM in red spray paint. She speeds up at the sight of the bus up ahead, squatting on flat tires. All of the window glass has been removed and there’s a little bit of the original yellow paint showing through Kirby’s attempt to blot it out with a sickly green she guesses is meant to be camouflage.

“Do I have to go back in there?” Kirby asks, shivering.

“Please don’t,” Callie says, her body feeling heavier as she closes the distance to the bus. “Just make sure the EMTs know where to find us.”