Ghosted: A Mystery in Four Parts Part IV
Keri saw the shopfront diner that faced the bus station parking lot, the long windows fogged and streaked with rain, but if she went in there, she knew, someone would talk to her.
She didn't want that.
She went to the bus station: a white-painted space beneath an overhang lit by overhead fluorescents, with a long bench, two vending machines, a ticket counter hidden behind a locked wooden shutter. There was a schedule thumbtacked behind a scarred plastic shield. She looked at it. The text was too small, the shield too streaked with rain to make out any words. She realized she was crying.
She sat down, wiped her eyes, looked at her soaked and splotchy Docs for two long, shuddering minutes where she was able to slow her breathing and get the tears to stop flowing. If a bus to New York pulled up at that moment she'd climb aboard, ticket or no, and it would take more cops than this shit town could field to get her off of it.
Then Paul was standing too close, asking if anything was the matter.
"I was at the diner," he said, pointing at the storefront where it glowed in the night and rain. "I thought it was you." He didn't smile or add anything to this engaging insight.
Keri looked up at him, feeling wretched, absolutely spent, and thought he's going to kill me, and then, the change coming so swiftly she couldn't defend against it, began laughing at the idea.
Paul took a step back.
Even now, half in shock I could beat the living shit out of this sorry man child. She laughed harder, edging into hysteria.
"You're shaking pretty badly," Paul said.
Keri could hear the concern in his voice, perhaps even a ripple of suspicion.
She began to resent his unwelcome interruption of her crisis. "I'm shaking, yes, what about it?"
Paul didn't answer that. "Trey still at the mill?"
"I don't know where the fuck he is," she said. "Halfway back to New York for all I know." The lie came with careless speed.
"Not on the bus," Paul answered. He walked past her, lifted the plastic cover of the bus schedule. She hadn't realized it was hinged at the top.
"No buses after 4 on a Sunday. He was still here at 4. I saw you guys at the mill."
Keri folded her arms, shifted her weight, turned her head away from him.
"Is Trey… Is Trey gone?" Paul asked.
"What?" Keri asked, at once absolutely present.
"You guys were going in and out of the mill." He stared at her, hard, his brown eyes fixed behind the smudged and slightly fogged lenses of his glasses. "Did something happen to him?"
"He just…" was all Keri said.
"Is he in the mill?" Paul asked, standing even nearer to her now, both beneath the overhang, the rain something that was happening apart from them. "Did he go in and not come out?"
When Keri didn't answer he took his phone from his pocket. He opened it; finger paused over the number pad, and said "Should I call the police?"
Keri turned to him. "What? The police?" What would she even say? Would they even come if he called them? Would they hold her, maybe keep Trey's car? They certainly wouldn't fucking find him. "No, don't."
Paul held the phone like a threat. "He's missing, isn't he?" he pressed. "Trey's missing."
"No it's not like that…" Keri collected herself. Stopped thinking about Trey, about the thing that had dragged him off. She started trying to frame the moment as a practical problem, a technique that had gotten her through other situations where inaction meant disaster.
"He fucking left," she said, putting as much weight and finality in the sentence as she could. "Left me here," she added, adding a few drops of embarrassment to the words, a shade of shame. Admit to a different crime was a trick she learned back in her trouble-filled school days. "We had a fucking row and he fucking left town, alright?"
Paul looked at her for a moment. His shoulders were hunched with concentration, his nostrils flared as he considered her words, her expression.
He put the phone in his pocket and turned and left her, heading straight for the mill.
She let him get onto the street, prayed that someone would run him down. When Paul had crossed safely, she followed.
Keri got in Trey's car and waited. If Paul didn't come back, she'd hitchhike to New York. And if he did come back, she'd have a plan for him.
Photo by F. Andrew Taylor
Paul came back.
He rapped on the window, and when she didn't get out, crossed to the passenger side, and got in. She could see the hem of his jeans were black with mud. She realized he'd gone beneath the mill.
Whatever was down there hadn't wanted him.
Paul held Trey's multi tool, flashlight, and car keys in his hand. Without speaking, he opened the glovebox and took out the registration; saw Trey's name and address.
"I thought you said this was your car."
She was ready for this one. "It is my car," Keri said. "I bought it, but I'm not a resident of New York, I can't legally register it or get insurance."
"The tool and the keys were under the mill," Paul said. "The flashlight I found on the factory floor. It flooded, I guess? The chalk faces are gone. Whole place is soaked."
Keri hadn't expected Paul to find the keys. She'd been preparing lies about how Trey had taken them with him. She sat mute to buy time, thinking that Paul wasn't the type who could manage long silences.
"This is important," he said. "Trey would be a second disappearance in four days, that's… that's way sooner than my model predicted. And it's only hours old."
His excitement was grotesque.
"We need to get the police here now. The State Police. If it's a wrongful death, it's their jurisdiction anyway. We have to call them, tell them everything you know."
Keri sat in a stunned silence. Somewhere, a river spirit was digesting its meal and this man wanted her to tell the police about it.
"Where's your car?" she asked.
"What?" he asked. "At the diner. Why?" he said.
He set the keys on his leg while he examined the registration. She snatched them from him and started the car.
"I don't want to talk here," she said, throwing the car in reverse and spitting gravel as she went into a three-point turn.
"No!" Paul shouted. "We need to stay here! We need to call the cops!"
"I'll need a beer first," she said as she dropped the car into drive and fishtailed onto River Street. There was a pub up the road; she'd seen it when Trey had been circling for a parking spot that morning before the search. "I've had a hell of an afternoon."
"Slow down!" Paul shouted as he struggled with the seat belt. The guy who had made a late-night run beneath a haunted mill suddenly sounded anxious.
Keri found a spot in the municipal lot across from a pub called The Millhouse, shut the car off and stuffed the keys into her purse.
"What do you think is going on here?" Paul asked. "This could be a murder; Trey could be dead. This needs to be an open investigation and we need to alert people now."
She snatched the registration and put it in her purse. "You're buying me a drink," she said, and she got out of the car.
Paul's strident "Tell me where Trey is!" was truncated by her slamming the door behind her.
Keri stepped to the sidewalk, stopped beneath a streetlight, and looked back at him. She felt horrid and likely stank like the river, but she was twenty-two, fit, her wet clothes clung to her, and her bright red hair framed her face in careless curls.
He looked through the windscreen at her, his round face flushed with frustration and anxiety.
Keri tugged at her wet shirt, pulling it tight over her breasts as she adjusted the hem.
Paul got out of the car. Keri could see his priorities change as he closed the door and followed her into the Millhouse.
They had three drinks; she stoked his ego, played on his sympathies, took the role of abandoned lover, and apologized mightily for Trey's plan to steal all of Paul's insight and research.
He said you were a fool, Keri spun. I thought you might have had something. Trey is an asshole but he's not dead. He's not in the mill or in the river or in a cannibal's freezer somewhere. He just left town with people you don't know and who you didn't see. If you call the police, you'll look a fool, and then American Mysteries may judge you harshly.
"Is that why you fought?" Paul asked. "About whether I'm crazy?"
"We always fight," Keri explained. "About everything."
She started to tell Paul about her father, whom she had also fought with. Well, a father. Not hers. From a book she'd read. Cleaned it up. Made the dynamic less pulpy but kept it sad. Explained she was attracted to older men. Why she let them treat her the way they did.
After a while Paul didn't even care that they weren't talking about Trey anymore.
She carried on until he thought she was too drunk to drive. His place was nearby.
They walked there arm in arm, Paul vibrating with excitement. She'd been a little afraid of him at times, thought his madness might be deep enough to make him dangerous. But now she'd decided he was genuinely a child. If she faked passing out, he'd likely leave her be, but then she knew he'd be awake all night, watching her pretend to sleep. She thought if she could get him off and onto sleep with some heavy petting and maybe some hand stuff, she might not even have to kiss him.
His apartment was small and cluttered.
There was a long mirror hung over a weary sofa and Keri almost gasped when she saw her reflection. She looked half dead and half drowned.
The weight of events came back to her. She was at once struggling against tears. "I'm a fright," she said. She touched her hair; it was a tangled ruin.
Paul stood close behind her; timidly put his hands on her shoulders. "You're lovely," he said. He kissed the side of her head just above her left ear.
"Do you have a hairbrush?" she asked, trying to slow things down.
He took his hands away, stepped into the bathroom and returned with a black rubber hairbrush. She reached to take it, but he stopped her and kept her facing the mirror. They watched their reflections as he slowly brushed her hair.
Keri looked into her own eyes, thinking about monsters no one ever saw.
Then Paul's hands grew bolder, and she turned away from the mirror.