Messages, a Psychological Thriller Read online

  Cooking comes naturally to Lacey, and she is comfortable in any kitchen. Even in the run-down little kitchen in her first apartment, she’d created aromatic meals that had had the neighbors giving her admiring looks in the hallways. She is a taster, and it is this habit that keeps the extra ten pounds on her frame. At five foot five, she is not short, but neither is she tall. In advertising jargon, she’d be called curvaceous. James calls her a handful. The weight does not look bad on her now, but it is something she will have to watch, she knows, as she gets older.

  James is behind the closed door of his office. The closed door is a recent development. He’s only been doing that for the last three months or so. At first, Lacey had considered whether James might be cheating on her. She didn’t think so…he wasn’t the type to cheat…but she had to admit that it was possible. Anything, after all, was possible. So she was learning.

  When they had met, his nervousness had been one of the things that had drawn her in. He’d seemed so awed by her, so honestly knocked out; it was hard to resist. Especially because in her only other serious relationship, the one that had brought her here to New Jersey, Michael had really had the upper hand. She’d been head over heels for him. Looking back (with some embarrassment), the only thing she can attribute it to is age. She was eighteen when she met Michael. At twenty-six, she can see it with a clear eye. But she also wonders what her current relationship will look like when she is looking back at it through the eyes of a thirty-year-old. Or a forty-year-old.

  Is she being just as naive now? As she’d been at eighteen?

  She stirs the chili and reduces the heat. Soups and stews–anything mingled–taste best when the ingredients are allowed to get close over a long, low flame.

  Lacey tiptoes down the short hall in her still-bare feet and stands at the office door. There is vague murmuring. He must be on the phone. She taps on the door with her fingertips.

  “James?”

  The murmur stops. She waits, listening. He doesn’t answer. She taps again, a bit harder.

  “James?”

  No answer.

  She wraps her hand around the knob, but stops short of turning it. Tension tightens her stomach. “James?” she says, a small whisper of breath.

  There is a shuffling, sliding noise. Papers being moved? A drawer closing?

  “Yes?” he says.

  “I…I made dinner…chili, white chili,” she says. Her hand is still on the knob. Something keeps her from turning it. “We’ll eat at seven,” she says and tries to stop there, to be firm about the time, to not equivocate. But then can’t seem to help herself from adding, “Okay?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” he says.

  She nods, even though he can’t see her do it. It just makes her feel more decisive, somehow. “Okay, well, seven then.”

  “Yep.”

  She squeezes the doorknob. It has grown warm in her hand. She turns it just enough to feel it catch up against the lock. So, not just a closed door anymore. Now it’s progressed to a locked door. She returns to the living room and curls up on the couch, turning on the television. She doesn’t see the news program that comes on.

  She’s thinking about locked doors. And naiveté. And wondering if you ever see your life clearly while you are in it.

  James hesitates a few seconds after the TV is turned on, listening for her to come tiptoeing back. He sits, frozen, one hand on his desk, the other still on the drawer handle where he’d dumped the file.

  He’d been taking notes. Writing down the information he’d been able to gather about the teenagers earlier that day.

  He’d pulled from the lot and followed them. It had been tricky. They’d been on foot. He’d been driving. But the highway was commercial, so he’d popped in and out of parking lots as they’d ambled along. Finally, they’d turned down a residential side street, Mossy Lane. It was tougher to follow them as it became more rural.

  This part of south Jersey was like that. Miles and miles of major highway crowded by a jumble of strip malls, fast food joints, and car lots. A driver unfamiliar with the area would never realize that tucked behind all the commerce were miles and miles of neighborhoods, some carved right out of (or into) the Pine Barrens.

  The town where he followed the teens was Essex. Essex was blue collar, rough around the edges. The houses were small, post-World War II Capes, three bedrooms–two up and one down, one bathroom, and you made do. Most had a small kitchen, small formal dining room and one living room. These houses were built before the idea of family rooms or great rooms. Some people had put in dens or laundry rooms or half-bath additions, using space annexed from existing covered porches that hung off the backs of the houses. Backyards were a sea of rusting chain link and primary-colored plastic fantastic that faded year by year to pastel hues that more closely matched the Easter decorations people affixed to bay windows and screen doors every year around this time.

  Mossy Lane was the start of a big neighborhood of these typical-for-Essex bungalows. Mossy would take you all the way from one major highway to another, with the neighborhood sandwiched in-between, but it was a long drive on a slow, residential road and, so, not heavily traveled. The other roads spiked off of Mossy at even intervals and seen from above, it would look like a neatly laid out grid. Until it got to the edges where the roads doubled back on themselves or just petered out into woods–like a project started with the best of intentions and then left to flounder undone partway through after interest had been lost.

  James pulled to the shoulder. He watched the teens as they crossed Mossy and ambled down another street. James put the Impala in gear and drove past, noting the street where they turned: Oak Avenue.

  He made a left at the next road (Willow) and followed it to a cross street (6th Ave.) that he surmised would cut back over Oak. He pulled to the corner of 6th and Oak just as two of the teenagers were crossing over.

  James looked back the way they had come and saw one of the teens at the door of a small, shabby bungalow three houses up. From the numbers on the mailboxes, he knew the kid’s house must be 18.

  18 Oak Ave.

  Gratitude and relief washed over James so thoroughly that he felt lightheaded. The sweat that had popped out on his forehead while he’d followed the teens now seemed to cool his racing mind.

  He looked the other way, and the other two were still on Oak, one block further down. They turned together into a drive, and James made a mental note of that house number…32. That was troubling, a troubling number. It doesn’t work, James thought, it doesn’t fit. He pulled onto Oak in the direction of Mossy so he could go past 18. That part fit. Yes, indeed…that part fit very well. And just like that, he knew he’d been right. He’d found another piece.

  Now, in his office, locked away, he has started a file. A new file. He has put in everything he can remember about the day. The sequence of events. Even certain snatches of conversations. Everything that has led him. Everything that adds to the proof.

  Jim See Me Dick

  Cash or Credit

  18 Oak Ave

  Report them

  James taps away at the calculator. Then he sits back, idle, staring up, mouth slightly open. For no particular reason, he thinks about Lacey. Her ponytail and shorts. Fannying around in the kitchen. Making dinner. Dinner at seven.

  She’s so grounded, so ordinary.

  It crosses James mind that perhaps he is behaving…oddly.

  He squints down at the sheets of paper. There are arrows and calculations. Snippets of conversation. Letters divided by word count, divided by syllables.

  He thinks, Am I losing my mind?

  He thinks, If I had an enemy…isn’t that what they’d like me to think?

  He feels cagey and confused. Pressured from inside and out. Balanced by that inner and outer pressure. Pressurized.

  It reminds him of something. It is at the back of his mind. Can he get it to come forward? Out into the light? He puts a hand on his chest. Takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes. Press
ure on his chest. Big hands. He is small. A baby. There is a face. Lots of hair. Lots of teeth. Hot, foreign wind fills his lungs even as the big hands press and press. Air in, breath out. The pressure is good. It holds him in place, holds him steady. The air is good. It fills him up, gets rid of the cold emptiness. The face again, the big face…

  In his office, James opens his eyes. His own hand is pressing on his chest. His heart rustles under his hand, like a secret, like an attentive pet. James breathes out a long, slow breath. He smiles.

  He looks at the clock on his computer screen. Seven. What was he supposed to do at seven?

  Chapter 4

  “This is really good, Lace,” James says and smiles at her. She smiles back. He hasn’t touched the spinach, but so what? He doesn’t have to appreciate everything she makes. The chili is the main part of the meal, anyway. The part that took the most time and care to create.

  “I used a lot of garlic, and I put rosemary on the chicken when I browned it…can you taste the difference?” she asks.

  He squints and tilts his head. “A little, I guess, yeah.”

  “It’s really good with the salad,” she says, forking up the spinach leaves. “It complements it.”

  “Uh huh,” he says. But he still doesn’t touch the spinach.

  It is Friday night. She is happy to be home to cook for James. She isn’t home at dinnertime most weeknights because she works Monday through Thursday from four thirty to eleven at the corporate offices of WelCare Insurance. A lot of companies have main offices or satellite offices in the business parks of the New Jersey suburbs. Lacey is glad she doesn’t have to make a commute into the city, especially considering how little she makes.

  Her shift overlaps with the day shift designers so they can explain the jobs that are being passed over. Because there is no art director on the night shift to make decisions or arbitrate conflicts, the work tends to be straight production: typesetting, corrections to current jobs, gluing together mock-ups. The creative stuff, the design, gets done during the day. And the day people tend to not let the night people forget it.

  Every two dayshifters get a nightshifter to share. Lacey’s ‘partners’, Mary and Eugene, are generally all right to her. Condescension is the worst they’ve doled out, so she counts herself lucky. She’s heard horror stories about dayshifters treating nightshifters like crap–crabbing at them for putting anything in their trashcan, berating them for moving files, and even bad-mouthing them to the art director. And the worst part is, you have no recourse. The art director doesn’t take the word of anyone on second shift.

  Last night, while Eugene had gone over–in excruciating detail–the changes he needed made on his job, Mary had sat and tapped her foot impatiently, her own set of corrections heavy on her lap. Lacey smiled at her and raised her eyebrows a bit, but Mary just shook her head and glanced at her watch.

  Lacey wanted to stay on everyone’s good side. If a dayshift position came up, she wanted it. Along with the perk of working normal hours came a bump in pay. The night shift people made a decent hourly rate, but their hours were so truncated that it didn’t amount to much, and if you missed a night, you didn’t get paid at all. And no benefits.

  “They want an e dropped in here, and here they want the s taken out, and you have to remember to do a global change, because it also appears here on page five, here on page six and here and here on page…” Lacey tuned Eugene out. The corrections were all very clearly marked in red; why did he feel the need to point out every change? She controlled her irritation and fixed an attentive look on her face. Like a mask, she had thought. And for some reason, that had made her think of James.

  Certainly, he’d been strange recently, or stranger. Stranger than normal. But not a stranger…that was taking things too far. She didn’t feel as though she didn’t know him or that he’d changed in any fundamental way. He’d just been distant. Distracted. Maybe something at work was bothering him. In the past year, he’d been working on a special project. It kept him really busy. Most nights, when she got home at eleven-thirty, he’d still be in his office, working.

  She could generally convince him to come to bed. He was normal in that respect. But sometimes, even in the midst of making love, she thinks she can hear numbers in the outrush of his breath.

  Now she stares at him across the table. She’s not sure why she wants so badly for him to eat the salad, she just does. She made it…he should eat it. She opens her mouth to say so when he glances over her shoulder, into the kitchen.

  “Is the dishwasher running?” he asks.

  She nods, tightening her lips.

  James looks at his bowl of chili. He looks at her bowl, her small salad plate, their two glasses. One spoon in his hand, one spoon in hers, her fork on the salad plate.

  He shifts, takes a sip of water, spoons chili and then lets it drop back into the bowl, and she knows he is trying to resist what he is about to say, trying to let it go, let it go, let it go.

  “You don’t think there would have been room…” he trails off, gesturing at the table. “It’s just a handful of things. I think they might have been able to fit in there. Did you…how long ago did you start it? Because if it just started, then…” his face had brightened but fell as she shook her head.

  “It’s been running for fifteen minutes, at least,” she says.

  James sits back and breathes out a long, controlled lungful of air. His hands grip the edges of the table. “No big deal,” he says. He smiles, but it is a false smile, stiff and artificial looking.

  Lacey lowers her head. He makes her feel terrible. A waster, a squanderer of their own and the Earth’s resources. A barefoot hick, incapable of organization, careless and reckless. None of which are terms she would have applied to herself before she met him.

  After dinner, when he thinks she is reading in the living room, she surreptitiously watches as he stares into the dishwasher. His right hand is up, and his index finger flicks rapidly up and down, side to side. She knows him well enough to know what he is doing. He is rearranging. Mentally shifting plates and bowls, making room for what was on the table, proving to himself…what? Just how incompetent she is? How brainlessly foolhardy?

  Lacey lowers her eyes back to her book, but doesn’t see the print. She is thinking about her old apartment and wondering if it was really as bad as she remembers.

  James is mentally rearranging the dishes, but that isn’t all he’s doing, and if Lacey could see into the complicated web that is James’ mind, she’d be surprised. Lacey doesn’t figure into his accounting of the dishes, which gleam cleanly before him. He doesn’t blame her, he isn’t even thinking about her.

  He is trying to balance the pressure he feels on his chest with the pressure he feels in his chest. Yes, he is mentally rearranging the dishes, but he is also turning back the clock. In his mind, he is stacking their dinner dishes in the dishwasher with the rest of the dirty dishes, doling out the soap, closing the door, running it through its cycles, and all the while, he feels the pressure equalizing.

  He turns to the sink and quickly washes their dinner dishes by hand. He dries them and then puts away the plates. Then he pulls the plates from the dishwasher and puts them away. Then their glasses from dinner, then the glasses from the dishwasher, and on, until everything is put away.

  You’d never know, James thinks, that some were washed by hand, that they hadn’t all been washed at the same time, together.

  He takes a deep breath. He puts a hand on his chest and smiles. Every dish is clean. All at the same time. He is equalized.

  He sits next to Lacey and puts on the TV. She doesn’t look up from her book. After a while, James realizes she is upset, but he doesn’t know why. Is it the TV? Is she mad he turned it on while she’s reading? Is it because he didn’t want the salad?

  Then the dishwasher enters his mind. The dishwasher? Is she upset about that? James re-examines the conversation from earlier. For a brief instant, he sees himself from her perspective–control
ling, disapproving, unbending–and he wonders at his own odd behavior. He is mortified that he could treat her so…that he puts the dishwasher ahead of…but then…it is like a blind being rolled down over a window, blocking out the excessive, too-hot sunlight… I’m fine, he thinks, I just likes things a certain way. He’s a conservationist. Ahead of his time.

  I’m a bit controlling, maybe, but otherwise…she’s just being too sensitive. It’s nothing serious.

  He puts an arm around her shoulders. Pulls her to him. She stays focused on the book in her lap. He squeezes her, jostling the book, and thinks he sees the barest glimmer of a smile, a faint tuck in her cheek. He jostles her again and then keeps jostling until the book slides off her lap.

  “All right, all right, enough!” she says, laughing, pushing back against him. Pushing him once, playfully; then again, harder; hard enough to make him gasp, to make his ribs hurt. She pauses, glaring into his eyes, chin raised, jaw clenched. Then she softens, and her arms go around him. She nestles into his lap, her face buried on his shoulder. He puts an arm around her and squeezes.

  Then he slides his free hand to the remote and brings up the guide. He feels her tears on his shoulder, and he frowns. He pushes the page button until he finds the channel he wants. She sniffs, and he turns the volume up slightly. She turns and looks at the television and then back at him. He squeezes her again, absently, focused on the screen.

  Lacey bounces up, retrieving her book from the floor, and goes to the bedroom.

  After fifteen minutes go by, James says, “Lacey?”

  But she doesn’t answer.

  Chapter 5

  Arch digs through his mom’s purse, searching for her battered, black wallet. He is supposed to meet Joe and Stang at Brother’s Pizza at four o’clock–it’s their weekly, Sunday night ritual. It’s in the plaza that sits outside the development. They like Brother’s best because it’s next to the Perfect Ten nail salon. They like to watch the Asian girls trot back and forth from Perfect Ten to the unmarked door sitting between the storefronts. They’ve speculated that Perfect Ten is a front for a handjob hut that lies behind the mysterious entrance. But they’ve never seen men going in or out. James knows it’s probably just an apartment, but still…it’s more fun to think about them giving handjobs. To think about getting one from one of those girls.