Liars, Both of Us

I hated Moe's bar. I hated the way it smelled, like day old spilled beer and sweat, with a token hit of cheap perfume. I hated the dark and the drabness of it, that the floors were black linoleum tile and sticky, that the  booths were poorly lit, and the walls blood red. Dead blood red. You know what I mean.

I went there anyway, right on schedule every Tuesday and Thursday nights, and sometimes even on a Saturday night, late. Past the time a nice woman like me should be in bed with her husband - that is, as long as he wasn't already out with his whore.

The last time I saw her was a Tuesday. The past weekend I had been in the bar, drunk before I even walked through the door on nips of rum and whiskey that I downed with Shannon in the parking lot, like teenagers. The liquor made my throat burn and eyes water, but I loved the confident haze I settled down into whenever I drank to any excess.

That night, I had screamed at a waitress to turn up the music; I danced around the pool table until Shannon led me home.

The last Tuesday wasn't like that, though.

I pushed open the bar door and pushed my glasses up the brim of my nose at the same time, head down as I pretended to struggle with my purse and the laptop I was carrying in my arms.

"Hey there, Hannah," Moe said to me. The bar was empty, and he was sitting perched on the edge of a booth at the back of the bar, playing a game of Solitaire and looking like he didn't want to be bothered. His fly was unzipped, but of course I didn't tell him.

I sat down in my usual booth, the one that gave me a view of the whole bar. I knew she was there if Moe was playing his cards. I was expecting her.

I opened my laptop and started skimming over what I had just written at home, but it was only moments before I heard footsteps coming out from the kitchen, and I looked up to see Amy's stupid face.

She didn't slow her steps. She didn't pause or jerk, her eyes didn't stray from mine once they'd connected. She didn't flinch or falter. But from across the bar, I could hear the sharp intake of breath that my eyes hadn't seen.

It's that moment when your heart contracts suddenly. When the shock of something steals your breath and sets your heart to racing.

I smiled sweetly. "Hello, Amy."

"Oh, hi Mrs. Mulraney."

I narrowed my eyes at her.

"Sorry," Amy stammered. "Hannah, sorry. I always forget."

"Come on, we're like old friends now, we see so much of each other," I said.

"You've been coming in a lot lately."

"I find it a very relaxing place to write in the evenings. Not much business this early."

"Right," Amy said, and blew a big pink bubble with her chewing gum.

Bubble gum. It was so tacky, such a disgusting little habit, to be chewing something constantly and popping it in people's faces. I pictured her suddenly in a cheerleader's uniform, her bare, perfect young ass peeking out from beneath a pleated miniskirt, her hair in pigtails, her mouth stretched wide open and her head bouncing up and down on my husband's cock.

"I'll take my usual," I told her, and went back to my writing.

I couldn't concentrate though. How could I? I wasn't really there to write that day, I was there to observe. To intimidate, maybe. To threaten.

I had suspected that Amy and Evan had been sleeping together for a while at that point. It had been three months to be exact, but I had never had any proof. For the longest time it was only speculation I had as to where Evan was going all those nights. Evan said he had joined a bowling league, and for a long time I believed that every Wednesday and Sunday nights he left the house for the lanes just like he said, to drink beers and knock pins with his work buddies. He would come home late smelling of cigarette smoke and have beer on his breath, then that changed.

He started drinking vodka around that time, and the scent of beer had left him. Sometimes he would come home having not drank anything at all, I could tell. Those nights he came home wired, laying in bed awake next to me for hours. I would catch him with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling and smiling. That's when I began to wonder.

Evan kept going to bowling league, but then he started coming home and didn't smell like cigarettes, he smelled like powder. It was only the slightest hint at first, and then since I noticed it I kept on noticing it. Baby powder has such a distinct smell. You think it's subtle, probably, but it isn't. Not when your wife is suspicious.

Finally, I called Jeannie Harper, the wife of one of the men Evan bowled with.

"I'm so sick," I told her. "I just want Evan to pick me up some medicine on his way home but I can't reach him on his cell. Do you mind calling Bill at the lanes so Evan can get it from me?"

She called back ten minutes later. Evan wasn't there. He hadn't been there in three weeks, he hadn't even called to say he was leaving the league.

It was easy, finding out who she was. I just decided to follow Evan out one night, and he had come straight to Moe's. We both acted surprised to see each other, husband and wife meeting as strangers. I told him I just wanted a change of scenery to write, he told me that the guys in the league were taking a night off. Liars, both of us.

And then she walked up to the booth we had sat down at, she had taken that same gasping breath, but that first time she didn't hide it as well. Her face had flushed and she had smiled at me too hard and too often.

Amy walked up to my table holding a tray with a little metal tea pot and a mug. I smiled at her and pulled out my own box of tea bags and set it on the table.

I wonder what she thought of me, then. I wonder if she laughed at me behind my back, knowing that she was fucking my husband and I was a dowdy little housewife whose glasses were always slipping down my nose and who carried around her own bags of tea like a grandmother. That was not who I was. It was just who I wanted her to think I was.

"How's college?" I asked as she poured hot water over my tea.

"Really boring," she said, not looking at my face. "I just have back to back English and history classes this semester. I hate writing."

I stared up at her blankly and caught her eye, then smiled slowly.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't even think."

"Oh, Amy, it's fine. What are you majoring in, again? I keep forgetting."

"Liberal Arts."

"Ah," I said. "That's what my husband, Evan, majored in. It seems to be just the degree for people who can't make their minds up about things. Evan never knows what he wants. He told me the other day that he just wants to take off, leave this town and disappear somewhere. Whisk me away to some tropical island or something, isn't that crazy?"

Amy chewed furiously on her gum. Her eyes were widened and her limbs looked stiff as she stood there holding the tray.

"Sounds pretty great to me, actually."

Was she jealous of me? Was she picturing her lover with his wife on a beach, scantily clad and in love? Was she wishing that it were her instead of me?

"I admit, it would be very romantic," I said. "Not to mention thrilling, to just take off like that, to just disappear. And sexy, those islands. Have you ever been to the Caribbean? Evan and I actually just went this past fall. There's something so... erotic about it."

Amy's cheeks flushed and I could see her working the gum in her mouth, spreading it around over her tongue. She took a deep breath and blew another enormous bubble.

"Our sex life is great anyway, though. Evan just can't seem to get enough of it at home."

The pink bubble burst and splatted back onto her cheeks and hair, and Amy dropped the tray she had been holding.

I covered my mouth with one of my hands and tried to not have an outburst. I wanted desperately to keep my cool.

Amy picked up the tray and straightened back up, pulling strings of bubble gum out of her hair and off of her furiously red face. "I, um.."

"You'd better go take care of yourself, Amy. You're just a mess."

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Carrie challenged me with "The pink bubble burst and splatted back onto her cheeks and hair." and I challenged Kelly Garriott Waite with "There was a dark shadow crouched in the corner of the room. It looked human, but how could I be sure?"

This story is part of The Hannah Sketches.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

Detective Don Belarus sat in his recliner, brushing popcorn off his protruding belly in the cool glow of the television. His wife had gone to bed hours ago, and though he found himself dozing every once in a while, he stayed up to sit in front of the television he chronically ignored to think about his life and what had gotten him here, to this place. He was high up in the force, but his boss was hounding him daily for more details on the Mulraney woman’s disappearance, and Belarus just didn’t have anything to show for the hours that he had put in on the case in the last few months. 

He thought back to that moment he had seen Hannah Mulraney in the elevator at the police station - at least, he had thought it was her. He thought it was Hannah when he saw the woman in the park today. He had been on his lunch break, sitting on a bench in the cold spring air, steaming coffee in one hand and giant sandwich in the other, when a woman walked past him with the same wavy blond hair and sly smile as he had seen in all of the pictures of the woman he was looking for. He’d thought about jumping up and running after her, chasing her through the park and grabbing her, spinning her around to demand her name, but he didn’t. He remembered what had happened the last time he went chasing someone down in a park, and all he wanted to do was forget it.

They had ruled it an accident. Sure, they had pulled Belarus off the beat and put him behind a desk until he transferred out of the New York City department, but that was what he had wanted anyway. Belarus was always a bit too jumpy to be a beat cop. He was always getting into some sort of trouble, usually by disregarding or just forgetting the rules he was supposed to follow, and he did better work behind a desk or on a phone - researching, interviewing, finding people who were lost.

Sure, it had been an accident. But just because you didn’t mean to do something doesn’t mean that the consequences of your actions won’t haunt you forever.

It was the middle of the night, and he and his partner had been patrolling Central Park. His partner, Steve Brooks, was a decade younger than Belarus and had only been a year on the force. The night was quiet, they were strolling peacefully toward Belvedere Lake, with the castle on their right and the obelisk jutting out from the ground ahead of them when Belarus heard the crackle of static before a voice came through his radio.

“We’ve got a guy heading your way, about five feet tall, black, armed and dangerous. We’ve got an officer down on the East side of Belvedere Lake and we are needing your assistance, over.”

“Copy that,” Belarus said into his radio, and he nodded to Brooks, who drew his gun from his holster. “We’re on the West side of the lake, proceeding forward, over.”

Belarus drew his weapon and unlocked the safety. There was an officer down, a short, black suspect on the loose, that was all he needed to know. He nodded and gestured to Brooks to flank the north side of the small lake while he took the south. Sure there were other officers on their way, Belarus decided he would move low and slow through the bushes, hoping he’d be able to catch the suspect by surprise without having to fire his weapon - something he’d never done before in over a decade with the force.

A moment later, he saw movement in the bushes coming toward him. Belarus crouched low,  hoping to jump out and grab the guy, take him by surprise. The suspect got closer. Closer to where Belarus had tucked himself away.

He saw the gleam of black metal in the suspect’s hand.

Belarus stood suddenly, pointing his gun at the suspect who he’d taken by surprise.

“Drop your weapon! Do it now!”

But the man didn’t drop his weapon. Instead, he raised the hand holding it, raised it toward Belarus.

Without hesitating, Don Belarus fired his gun for the first time since he’d joined the NYPD out of the Academy. Pulling the trigger was as easy as pushing “Start” on his microwave at home, but the gun exploded in his hands, he felt the thrum of the shot move from his hands and up his arms and into his shoulders, his chest imploding with the shock of the gun’s force and the weight of the consequence that he’d just shot and likely killed another human being.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!” Belarus heard the crackling voice of his partner over his radio as he stepped carefully toward the fallen body. He could hear footsteps of other officers approaching, and Belarus dropped to his knees beside the body he had fell.

It was just a boy. His name was Jakar Toombs, Belarus later found out. He was thirteen years old and on his way home across the park after going out into the night to find baby aspirin for his little sister. And it hadn’t been a gun that he’d raised to Belarus. It was just a black Nokia cell phone, his mothers, and he’d sworn to her that he wouldn’t lose it or drop it on his trip to the store. She had given it to him so that he could call the police if he ran into any trouble at night, in the park.

Blood pooled from beneath the boy’s body. It spread in a circle and then it followed the slant of the ground Belarus kneeled on, soaking into his pants. He couldn’t believe how hot the blood was. He couldn’t believe that this hot blood came from the hole that he had put directly over the boy’s heart, that the bullet had gone through him and came out the back, that this blood was all over him now. On his clothes, on his hands, on his conscience.

In a moment, three men stood above him. Brooks and two other beat cops he’d seen before, but now he couldn’t remember their names. Belarus reached up without looking and Brooks took the hot pistol from his hand, but Belarus could still feel the throb from having fired it. It wasn’t like when he went to the range for practice, it wasn’t like then, when you grew numb to the feel of shooting, when you are just aiming at far off pieces of paper and not living, breathing, innocent boys.

“I thought it was a gun,” Belarus said. “I thought it was a gun.”

Belarus felt a hand on his shoulder. Brooks. “It’s alright man, it’ll be okay. It was just an accident.”

The other two officers, having seen the carnage, sprung back into action. One called on his radio: “We need a bus at Belvedere Lake, shots fired, we have one victim, teenage male, you better hurry,” and then the two of them shuffled off into the night, still on the lookout for the real suspect.

“He’s dead,” Belarus said flatly.

“It’s okay,” Brooks said, “We’ll let the paramedics decide that.”

“His blood’s all over me.”

“Get up man,” Brooks said, helping Belarus to his feet.

Brooks looked nervous, he couldn’t quite look Belarus in the eyes.

“It’ll be okay, man. He fits the description. You gotta admit, from far off, those phones can look like guns, especially at night. You told him to drop it, I heard you.”

“Did you see him raise his arm at me?” Belarus asked.

The answer was no, and Don Belarus knew that. Brooks had been yards away, coming around the other side of the pond when that shot was fired. Steve Brooks hesitated for a moment, then steeled his gaze and looked, finally, into his partner’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I saw everything.”

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Billy Flynn challenged me with "Use as inspiration or verbatim: The police in New York City / They chased a boy right through the park / And in a case of mistaken identity / They put a bullet through his heart. -The Rolling Stones, (Heartbreaker)" and I challenged Nimue with "We'll make believe we never needed any more than this."

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This II Challenge piece is part of The Hannah Sketches, a project I am currently working on. I try to write them so they can be read in any order or will work as stand alone pieces, but if you'd like to read the rest, you can read all the other Hannah Sketches so far: Hannah, Speculation , Deceitful, and The Descent. Future sketches can be found on the category page: The Hannah Sketches

The Descent

Detective Don Belarus had had a long day. He was finishing up his work at his desk, updating files on some cases that he had let fall by the wayside in the last two weeks that he had been hot on the tail of that Mulraney woman, and he was having a hard time focusing on anything but her. 

The problem was, Belarus had nothing to go on. They had located that woman’s car two states away, but there was nothing in it but a pair of her shoes, the shoes her husband said she was wearing on the day she disappeared two weeks ago, and paperback copy of a book called “The Memory or Lies.” Both the shoes and the book sat in a box on the floor by his desk, and his day wouldn’t be over until he delivered it to Evan Mulraney, the woman’s husband, with the news that there wasn’t any news - they had no leads whatsoever on Hannah Mulraney’s disappearance.

Belarus sighed as he powered down his computer, and he looked down, nudging the box father away from him with his foot as if it held a nasty dead animal and not just some shoes and a book. 

What did it mean, Belarus wondered, that the woman had left her shoes and book behind. She must have had other shoes with her, though the husband said that all of her shoes and boots were accounted for at the house, besides the pair of dirty black Converse they’d found in the car. She must have bought other shoes, Belarus thought, or else someone had snatched her out of the car and left the shoes behind. It was winter, there was at least two feet of snow on the ground where her car had been found abandoned, and there was no way that a woman in her right mind would have walked out into the snow without shoes on. Besides, they had searched the entire area, and had found no tracks or traces of her. They had just brought in the dogs today, searching for the scent of death, the scent of a rotting, putrid body, but they had found nothing.

Belarus put on his coat and picked up the box. He was one of the last ones in the office tonight, and he walked alone out to the fourth floor elevator bank, pressed a button, and waited. He sighed when he saw it was elevator two that reached him first, that elevator was known for clunking to a stop every once in a while, and since it had been deemed a small electrical problem and nothing very unsafe, the department hadn’t called anyone in for the repair yet. Belarus had about a fifty-fifty chance of getting stuck in the elevator for a few minutes, but when the doors opened and revealed a pretty woman standing inside, he decided to take a chance.

Belarus stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor. The woman was standing in the far left corner of the elevator car with her face buried in a book. She had a halo of blondish, wavy hair around her face, and her scent carried over the few feet of space between them, and she smelled like hyacinth, a pungent flower that grew in his wife’s garden in the springtime.

They began their descent, and had managed to reach the second floor when the elevator car groaned and lurched to a halt. Belarus clutched the box in both arms and leaned his head back against the steel wall of the car.

“Don’t worry ma’am, it happens all the time. Just give it a few minutes and it will go again. No need to worry.” “Well, I won’t worry then, I’ll just read my book,” the woman said. Her voice was soft and pleasant, and Belarus looked up at her. He couldn’t see her face very well, what with the book obscuring most of it, and - 

Don Belarus’s heart skipped a beat. The cover of the book she was holding, he could see the title clearly now and didn’t know how he had missed it before. 

The Memory or Lies.

Belarus looked down, and there it was. The same book the woman in the elevator was holding was the same book that was still resting in the box in his hands.

“Who are you?” he asked, looking back up at her. He one of the woman’s eyebrows raise above the pages of the book and could see a hint of a smile in her eyes.

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m a detective in the department here. What’s your business here today, ma’am?”

“Oh, I was just looking for someone. I didn’t find them, though. It happens, I’m sure you understand.”

“Put the book down ma’am, let me see your face.”

Slowly, the woman lowered the book and looked directly into Don’s eyes. Her eyes were green and cunning, her skin a ruddy pink, filled with blood and life. 

Don Belarus shook.

“Hannah?”

The woman smiled and the elevator lurched again, they resumed their descent. 

“It’s you. Hannah Mulraney. We’ve been looking for you for two weeks. I have your shoes,” he said, feeling stupid even as the words left his mouth.

“It’s okay detective, I don’t need those where I’m going.”

The elevator bell dinged as it came to a stop, and the doors slid open.

“After you,” Hannah said, gesturing to the open doors with her book. 

The detective’s heart pounded, he could hear the blood whooshing in his ears with every beat, and he stepped out of the elevator as she’d instructed and then turned right back around to ask her to please follow him, he would take her home to her husband who had been waiting for her.

But the elevator was empty, and Hannah was gone.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Kirsten Doyle challenged me with "You are trapped in an elevator, and realize that the only other person in it is someone who was recently reported missing in mysterious circumstances." and I challenged Crosshavenharpist with "You're getting on that train and you're never coming back".

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This piece is part of The Hannah Sketches, which you can read in full on their category page, right here. I suggest starting with the oldest sketch, Hannah, but since they aren't part of a cohesive story yet, it probably won't matter much at all.

Black Star

In a secret compound, hundreds of feet underground, Wayland Smith used a clean, microfiber cloth to polish the bomb he’d worked so carefully on for the past few months. It was a new technology he had used, a technology that the rest of the world didn’t know about yet, because Wayland had conceived of it in his captivity and had been forbidden from sharing his secret with the world. When it was unleashed, of course, it would be no secret that this bomb was stronger than any nuclear weapon ever made, and it may just in fact destroy the world.

Wayland was a scientist, and up until a few months ago he had lived a relatively normal life outside of his work, which was always intense and impossible to speak about with anyone else. It hadn’t been a secret back then, that he was working on explosives, it was just that talk of chemistry had always bored people so much, he never bothered trying to explain to his wife or friends what he was doing at the lab all day.

Looking back, Wayland realized this may have been his biggest mistake. Perhaps if he had told Mary what he had been working on, she would have encouraged him to find another project. She probably would have told him it was dangerous, and she definitely would have told him that he should do good for the world with his talents, he should work to create and to help people, not to destroy and kill. She would have been right, and Wayland may or may not have listened to her. But he never did tell her about his projects, and so the day the President’s brothers came to his lab to pick him up, he was surprised.

Wayland didn’t recognize the men walking into his lab. He looked up briefly and said: “Please leave, there’s restricted access on this floor, you aren’t supposed to be here.”

But the two men walked right up to him and opened a briefcase on his worktable. One of them removed papers and handed them to Wayland as the other spoke.

“Do you know who we are?”

Wayland looked up at the man and squinted through his glasses. The men did both look familiar, but Wayland couldn’t place them.

“Just read it,” the man said.

Wayland was annoyed at the interruption, but he became quickly intrigued when he saw that the top of the page was stamped with the seal of the President of the United States, and that it looked like the letter, which was demanding he come to the White House immediately, was legitimate.

“Is this some sort of joke?”

“No, Mr. Smith. You need to come with us immediately.”

Wayland locked up his lab and followed them out, of course not knowing that he would never return.

At the White House, he didn’t have to go through security. He strolled with the two men right into the West Wing and was deposited into the Oval Office, where the president shortly met him. Still, Wayland was annoyed at being pulled away from his work. He couldn’t even feign awe, he didn’t even try to pretend that he was impressed or grateful. He just wanted to know what was going on.

North Korea was going to attack America, the president told Wayland. They had nuclear weapons and were threatening to use them on Americans, and the president had heard of the secret project Wayland had been working on, a project that Wayland hadn’t even bothered to name, but the president called it Black Star.

Wayland had tried to argue with the president that the bomb wasn’t ready, that there were still serious problems that needed to be worked out before he would even be convinced that it would work, and even then, Wayland professed that he didn’t want the bomb to ever be used, and he tried refusing then to be a part of it.

But it didn’t matter, what Wayland said. 

The two men who had brought Wayland to the White House entered through a door behind him. Without a word, one of the men handed him a slip of paper, and Wayland glanced down.

It was a picture of Mary, his wife. She was sitting in a cell of some sort, on a small metal bench with no mattress, and she was looking up to the security camera in the corner of the cell that snapped the photo.

Wayland’s eyes flicked back up to the man, and he instantly realized who the two men were. The taller one, who had handed him the photo, was the White House Chief of Staff, and the other was the president’s personal assistant. 

The man said: “We have your wife in a secure location. You WILL comply with orders from the president, do you understand?”

Wayland understood, and he had gotten right to work.

Now, the bomb was ready and the president’s brothers in crime were on their way down to retrieve it.

Wayland kept polishing the bomb, and with his right hand, he squeezed repeatedly on the handle of the hammer he was holding beneath the table. 

The door opened suddenly, and Wayland tensed, coiled for the strike.

Fuck the bomb. It wouldn’t work, anyway. He had made sure of it.

Wayland smiled as the men proceeded toward him.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Wendryn challenged me with "Wayland the Smith in the modern world. What would he be like here and now?" and I challenged Sarah Sparks with "We don't need Wall Street's Occupy movement, we need Tyler Durden's Project Mayhem."

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For the record, this was a hard challenge for me. However, it was rewarding in its challenge, because it forced me to write something out of my comfort zone, something I wouldn't normally write. I had no idea who Wayland the Smith was when I saw my prompt - I had to Google for information, and when I read it, my mind spun with possibilities, but none of them really CLICKED with me. I know nothing about blacksmithing, I know hardly anything about mythology.. and I knew that I could easily just throw this line into a story somewhere, but I felt at the same time that THIS IS A CHALLENGE.

I wrote this piece quickly, in about an hour or so in the afternoon. To my horror, when I tried to publish it to my blog, my blog editor wasn't working!! At nine o'clock last night, after exhausting my efforts to get it online, I emailed an appeal to Supermaren, who was kind enough to publish this anyway.

Please, if you want, click here for a link to Wikipedia, where I learned a tiny bit about Wayland.... So now, what do you think? 

Deceitful

It had been a month since Hannah’s disappearance, and for the first time since his wife had walked out the front door to (maybe) never return, Evan went to Moe’s after work instead of going straight home as he’d been doing.

Work was wearing him out. He had taken two weeks off after Hannah disappeared, but the time came when he realized that even though his boss at the high school was understanding about his situation and was willing to give him all the time he needed to cope, staying home alone and thinking about Hannah was worse than facing a room full of teenagers and thinking about Hannah. Somehow, the kids helped drown out the little voices in his head, the ones that never stopped chattering about the wheres and the whys.

Usually, Evan would go right home after school. Sometimes he would stop at the liquor store to pick up a bottle of vodka or two – he’d been drinking more than usual since Hannah disappeared – but most of the time he would go straight home, start drinking, and eventually heat up one of the many meals that had been cooked and brought over to him from well-meaning friends and family members. He’d been eating more this past month than he had since college and the pounds were starting to stick on hips and belly. Hannah would be so disappointed with him, he always thought as he reached to brush crumbs from his shirt, or when he would look in the mirror hours after eating and see that he had ketchup stuck in the corners of his mouth. Grief was making him sloppy, and so far he hadn’t managed to care enough about himself to do better.

If Irina hadn’t called, Evan would have gone home as usual to eat his fill and drink until he got even more sloppy, but Irina Culver was Hannah’s literary agent, and she needed something that was on a disk in Hannah’s office, a disk that only he could get because it was locked up in one of her filing cabinets.

“I’d rather not come over and invade your privacy,” Irina told him on the phone. “Will you just meet me somewhere in town?”

Evan knew that it was a bullshit excuse. Irina Culver didn’t care about anyone’s privacy, especially the privacy of any of her clients or their families. Irina didn’t want to come over for the same reason that so many other people didn’t – they felt uncomfortable being in a woman’s house when no one knew where she was. It was never Evan’s house, not really. Even though he was the one whose name was on the mortgage and it was his teaching salary that paid for it, it had always been Hannah’s house. When people came over lately, most of them wore a face of guilt, like they were intruding into the residence when no one was there, even though Evan stood right beside them.

“Let’s meet at Moe’s,” Evan said without thinking, and it was only after he had hung up the phone that he realized he’d made a terrible mistake and couldn’t even call Irina back to change the location, because he didn’t know her number. He could find it, of course, but that would mean digging through Hannah’s things in her office, and just getting a disk out of her filing cabinet was hard enough – those were her things, her little babies that she nurtured and worked on to the point of ignoring Evan for days.

The next night, Evan walked into Moe’s with a sense of dread. Maybe Amy wouldn’t be there. He hadn’t seen her in over a month, not since Hannah disappeared, and for all he knew, Amy could have gotten another job or just have changed her schedule. When he walked in, instead of sitting at the bar he took the closest booth by the door. That way Irina would see him as soon as she walked in, and maybe they could get this business over with quickly before anyone spotted Evan.

Amy wasn’t working the bar, that much Evan could tell. It was being tended by Moe himself, who gave Evan a solemn nod and raised a glass to him. A moment later, Moe brought a glass of vodka and tonic to Evan’s table and walked away without a word. Evan  hadn’t talked to Moe in a month, but it was obvious that everyone in town knew about Hannah, and Evan was very grateful to not be questioned or otherwise bothered by the man he’d begun to consider a friend. Men knew better than women when to keep their mouths shut, and to wait for delicate conversations to be brought up rather than engage in them.

Irina walked in when Evan was about half finished with his drink, and she slipped into the booth across from him, looking all business.

“Did you find it?”

“Yeah,” Evan said, taking the compact disk from his pocket and sliding it over the table. “May I ask what it is?”

“It’s related to Hannah’s last book, Those Girls. She was screenwriting a commercial to speak out against high school bullies. It’s a shame she won’t get to be in it. I always thought she had a face for the screen.”

Evan stared at Irina, whose face took on a shocked look, as if she herself couldn’t believe what she had said.

“I’m so sorry Evan. I’m so sorry. I mean, the filming won’t begin for another few weeks, so of course there’s a chance…”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Evan brushed off her comment with a wave of his hand and then put his empty glass down at the edge of the table, praying inside that Moe would replace it with a full glass before Irina had the chance to say anything else. Unfortunately, it was Amy who replaced his drink a moment later, sliding a full glass of vodka onto the table and whisking up the empty one as quickly and quietly as a magic trick.

Evan and Irina looked up, and Amy smiled at Evan.

“Hi,” she said, ignoring Irina. “How are you, Evan?”

“I’m…”

“Well, I’d better get going,” Irina said, standing up and gathering her purse in her arms. “It was good to see you Evan, I’ll be in touch,” and then she was out the door, fleeing Evan as so many people had done under pressure lately.

Evan’s gaze moved to Amy, starting at her legs – he wondered why she was wearing shorts in the middle of winter, no matter how hot it got inside the bar on busy nights – up to her slim waist, to her perfect young breasts, to that face that used to make him smile uncontrollably, the face he used to think he loved.

“Hi Amy,” he said.

Amy sat down in the booth where Irina had been a moment before, reached her hand across the table and tried grabbing for Evan’s hand, but he didn’t let her take it. Instead, she gave his wrist a light squeeze. Her eyes were searching him, trying to figure out what he was thinking and where she stood now that his wife was out of the picture, and Evan could barely hide his disgust and shame. His skin was crawling under her touch, and so he pulled away.

“I heard about your wife.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I’m really sorry,” Amy said, and Evan laughed, a mocking scoff that he instantly regretted.

Amy’s face sank and lips trembled. He’d never seen her cry before, but Evan imagined that this was the look a twenty-two year old girl’s face had before she fell apart.

“I was just so worried about you,” Amy said, her voice soft. She looked around the bar, making sure no one was watching too closely before she went on. “I thought you might call me, or something. I wanted to help you, to be there for you if you needed me. You never returned my texts or my emails, and no one had seen you around.. I just didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what was going on. Are you okay?”

“Amy, my wife disappeared.”

“I know,” Amy said, sitting back in the booth, pulling farther away from him. She looked out the window next to her, and Evan saw one tear fall down her cheek, but nothing more.

He finished his second drink, putting the glass down with more force than necessary, and Amy’s attention snapped back to him.

“More?” she asked, and Evan nodded.

Amy got up, taking his two empty glasses with her to the bar. So Evan watched her walk away – watched the muscles in her calves flex, watched her breasts bounce with each step, watched her ass shake, making every head turn that she passed.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Lilu challenged me with "Screenwriting a commerical" and I challenged Liz Culver with "You wake up in the middle of the night and there's a T-Rex standing outside, peering into your bedroom window with its huge, unblinking eye. What do you do?"

Speculation

It was loud in the house; the mourners clomping around the hardwood floors created a cacophony that set Evan’s head to pounding. He sat at one end of the couch in the living room, only looking up to make brief eye contact with the few people who walked up to him and began conversations of their own accord, because what could he possibly say to anyone? He’d just buried an empty coffin, empty but for Hannah’s pristine wedding dress, because somewhere out in the world her body either lay or moved, undiscovered.

A little girl skipped up to the couch and plopped herself down at the other end. Her hands, Evan could see, were sticky with frosting from one of the cupcakes that had been laid out on his dining room table. The girl scooted toward him, smearing pink frosting on the couch Hannah had always made sure was perfectly clean. She would never have let anyone eat in this room. She would be having a fit if she were there to see this girl messing up her couch.

“Is this your house?” The little girl asked him, her eyes wide and curious. She was maybe four or five years old, and Evan had no idea who the girl belonged to.

“No,” he answered. “I’m just visiting. Hey, want to do me a favor?”

“Sure!” The little girl said, an excited smile spreading across her face.

“Go get me one of those little cupcakes over there? They sure look good.”

“They are good,” the girl said, holding up three fingers. “I’ve had two already.”

Evan smiled as the girl scampered back to the dining room, and got up from the couch quickly. He kept his head down and didn’t make eye contact with anyone he passed as he moved through his house and went out the back door that opened onto the stone patio.

“Oh, God,” Evan said under his breath. There was only one person sitting on the patio and it was the one person Evan had no interest in talking to, but he knew he was trapped.

“No God here,” Detective Belarus replied as he exhaled a lungful of smoke. “God’s away on business. Stuck with me.”

Evan collapsed into a patio chair opposite Belarus, reaching across the small patio table and nodding towards the detective’s shirt pocket that bulged with a cigarette pack. Belarus passed one to Evan, then slid a lighter across the table. After Evan had lit up and passed the lighter back, Belarus spoke again.

“Quite a turn out.”

“My wife was a nice woman. She was a well-respected writer. No reason there shouldn’t be a lot of people attending her memorial.”

“Just didn’t expect you’d have such a big reception afterwards.”

“I didn’t want to, trust me, all this is thanks to her sister.”

“Bet you just want to kick everyone out of your house and get back to life.”

“Hannah’s been gone three months. I’ve already gotten back to life. I wish we hadn’t done this.”

“Interesting choice of words there, Mulraney. Hannah’s been gone, you say. Not Hannah’s been dead.”

“Well, show me proof that she’s dead and maybe I’ll change my words, but you and your people haven’t been able to come up with much of anything, have you?”

There was so much more Evan wanted to say to Don Belarus, who was the lead detective on his wife’s disappearance, but he bit his tongue. He had already been through the wringer with Belarus more than a few times in as many months - apparently when a person disappears, the spouse is always the first one questioned, the first one suspected of any wrongdoing.

Heavy silence hung between them. The men smoked and put out their cigarettes in the ashtray on the table. Time passed without them talking, and Belarus lit up again, passing the pack and lighter back to Evan. He took another cigarette gratefully. He had stopped smoking years ago, before he and Hannah had married, but he’d picked up the habit again recently, figuring he had nothing else to lose.

“What’s that like, burying an empty coffin?”

Evan almost choked. “Are you fucking serious? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Belarus laughed. He had always been a mean one, had suspected right from the beginning that Evan had done something to Hannah - killed her and hid her body, hired a contract killer, scared her off - something. He had never given Evan the benefit of the the doubt, and it looked like he wasn’t about to start now.

“Just curious, just curious. Doesn’t happen every day; I might not get the chance to ask anyone again.”

“Well you know what, Belarus? I hope you get to ask Hannah one day. I hope you get to ask her ‘What’s it like knowing your husband buried your empty coffin?’ Maybe one day I’ll finally get you off my back so you can start doing your job and find out what really happened to her.”

Belarus leaned toward Evan and spit on the patio. “I’m workin’ on it.” The detective’s voice was low and gruff. Evan could see that he was angry at himself for having so little to go on and it gave Evan a warm pulse of pleasure, quickening his heart.

Belarus sat back and then turned his head sharply to the backyard. Evan followed his gaze and saw a flock of wild turkeys making its way across his lawn and towards the bit of woods separating his yard from his neighbor’s.

“You ever think that’s how she did it?” Belarus asked, and Evan looked at him. “You think she just got up out of that car and walked into the woods on her own accord?”

Evan didn’t say anything, so Belarus continued.

“Sometimes I wonder whether that’s what she did. I think about her sometimes, Hannah. Sometimes when I shouldn’t be thinking about her, like when I’m eating breakfast with the wife or when I’m driving my boy home from school. Not on the job, you know? Sometimes I think of reasons she might’ve done it. Like you were beatin’ on her, or maybe she had some secret lover that she was running off to meet and maybe she got eaten by a bear or something. Sometimes I think we’re going to find a pile of her bones in the woods with teeth marks on them.”

Evan narrowed his eyes at Belarus, and then turned to look back at the turkeys disappearing one by one into the trees. Belarus wouldn’t stop talking for anything, and really, Evan didn’t mind all that much. At least Belarus had the balls to say what he knew everyone else was thinking. They didn’t find her body - what can anyone do but speculate, often and imaginatively?

“I think about the shoes sometimes,” Belarus said matter-of-factly. “But lately I’ve took to thinking that they are just an anomaly in the case. She could have had other shoes with her, right? Those were just beat up old Cons, and there was snow on the ground. She could have had other shoes, snow boots, stashed in the trunk.”

“All of her shoes were in the house except for the Converse she was wearing when she left. I’ve told you that a hundred times.”

“What, Mulraney? You expect me to believe everything you say?” Belarus shook his head and gave a throaty chuckle. “That’s cute. But really, you can’t expect to believe everything your wife said either, right? How are you to know whether she didn’t just buy some other shoes, paid cash and walked out of the store with them an hour after she left the house? You don’t know about the shoes, because there’s nothing to know about the shoes. The shoes don’t matter.”

“How could they not matter?” Evan asked. He was exasperated and growing tired of this chat with the detective, but on the other hand, this was the first time Belarus had ever really opened up to Evan outside of the station. He had expected Belarus to be cruel, but he had never thought him to be cunning. There had to be something about the shoes that mattered. Besides that stupid book, the shoes were the only things Hannah had left behind.

Belarus shrugged. “So maybe they do matter. Don’t know the how or the why of it yet, that’s all.”

They watched the last of the turkeys disappear into the woods. Voices from the house carried out from the house - “Where’s Evan?” They heard someone ask, and Evan looked over his shoulder nervously, praying no one came out to find him.

“Some people, I think, just don’t want to be found,” Belarus said, and Evan stood up. “And sometimes, things just disappear. That’s it. Poof - they’re gone, and you can’t ever find them.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Evan said, walking out into the yard, leaving Belarus and the mourners behind him.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Grace O'Malley challenged me with "God's away on business" and I challenged Sir with "I want the operation, but she doesn't. We are at an impasse. Being conjoined gets old, you know?"

It's just one of those days.

This is one of those glum, rainy days where all I can do is feel sorry for myself that I am "stuck" with a job I can't stand and the dreams of accomplishing my ultimate goal, which is to make a living writing, seems so far off BECAUSE I am stuck at this job I can't stand. I think to myself, if only I didn't have to work five days a week, I could get more writing done. If only, if only. It's all I want in life - to not have to answer to anyone, to support myself. Well, okay, it's not ALL I want in life, but lately, and especially today, not having to come to work tomorrow is at the top of my list of things I want to have happen. 

I shouldn't complain, because last week, I "won" the Indie Ink Writing Challenge. My short story that I posted last time, Hannah, got the Editor's Choice. The confidence boost this gave me was amazing, but it was brought along with a healthy dose of shock. I didn't expect this, if only for the reason that I didn't try very hard in writing it. I saw something in my head - a scene - and I picked one of my favorite themes to write about, which is disappearance. Then that thing happened - if you are a writer, you will know what I mean. That thing, where the story just comes, the words just come. How do I write? I have no clue. I just do it. Evidently, with Hannah, I did it really well. 

So now, I'm in this situation where I signed up for next week's challenge, it's due tomorrow at 9pm, and I have no idea what I am going to write about. Creatively, I'm a deer in the headlights. I want to write to the best of my abilitity, I don't want to produce crap after producing a winning entry last week, but at the same time I don't want to get to thinking that I HAVE to win - I signed up to do this for fun, as a creative excericise, and now it's morphed into this psychological thing that I am stressing out over. 

It's just one of those days.

I need to make more time for myself. I do intend to do NaNoWriMo next month, and I am actually nearly halfway done with outlining the whole thing, which I have never done before, but with doing NaNo comes giving up pretty much everything else. I am going to have to tell my friends that I won't be around next month, and why. I'll have to force myself to lay off the Netflix and stick to Pandora radio. I'll have to be prepared with a case of energy drinks the likelihood that I won't get a good night's sleep for a month.

Above all else, I just have to write. It's what I have to do. The more days that go by, sitting at a desk at a job that I hate, the more I know there's only one thing in the world I'm capable of being good at and enjoying, and that's writing. And I want to enjoy life. I want to smile when I get up in the morning, not groan. I want to do this, and I have to find a way to make it happen - soon.