Five
Renewing an ancient membership at Vestemere Fitness had been socially painful—“What brings you home, Owen?”—yet pathetically cheap. Which was good, because if the prices here matched what he’d paid for a gym in the city, he’d be shit out of luck.
He concentrated on his mirrored image, the precision and predictability of lift-and-curl calming him the same way looking out at the patterns of trees in the orchards and vineyards had this morning.
It also helped him think.Once the work at the residential development had wrapped up for the day, he’d smacked the sawdust off his jeans and approached Rob. The storybook thing had nagged him all afternoon—could he take a look at the ‘weird’ mail Rob’s wife had received?
He’d followed him home, the drive much more pedestrian than the white-knuckled fish-tailing he’d done following Steve. But pulling onto a driveway tucked deep in the Valley, accessible only by a dead-end road only locals would know made him frown. “Awful private,” he remarked, when they parked.
“I deal with people all day.” Rob shrugged. “I don’t have to do that out here.”
Fair enough, but didn’t he, or more importantly, his wife, feel vulnerable stuck way out here?
He couldn’t ask. Rob was squinting at him in a way that reminded him of Steve, then said “Do you really want to talk about keeping yourself private, Old Man?”
Owen jammed his hands in his pockets, kicked a pebble that skittered over the ground.
Rob’s foot stilled on the first riser leading up to a porch that wrapped his bungalow like a cocoon. “Your brother’s not here,” he said, and his big eyes did not look naïve or boyish. “So spit it out. You in trouble?”
Yes. No. Depended on what defined ‘trouble’.
“If you are I don’t expect you to tell me what’s going on,” Rob said. “But I would want to help if you needed it.”
Just like that, no expectations, no judgment, no condemnation or scorn. Just ‘Tell me what you need and I’ll give it’, Rob Haslom’s life philosophy. Owen re-assessed the cocoon porch encircling the house. No wonder Rob sought seclusion (which, ironically, left him just as vulnerable as being so open-hearted). His smile felt lopsided. “You’re good people, Old Man.”
“I’m your friend.”
The same shame from this morning stung and he looked away, down the paved drive that went nowhere. He didn’t deserve this. All he’d ever done was leave Vestemere to go gulp adrenaline. Then he’d never come back, hadn’t even had the decency to come home to meet the woman his best buddy had married.
Rob eyeballed him. “Whatever you’ve been sucked into out on the coast,” he said, “and however it’s warped you into thinking that the rest of the world ceased to exist while you were out there…you can talk to me, Owen.”
Owen gaped. How the hell had his unworldly buddy made such a succinct—and deadly accurate—summary? And how was it that this pithy little speech (which coming from anyone else would have pulled every trigger of his temper), merely made him feel tongue-tied? “H-how did you know?” Know that his universe had shrunk, populated only by colleagues on one side and cronies on the other, opponents to a game whose rules were as dark and brackish as the water in the ports off the harbor?
“Mostly because I know you.” Rob folded his arms ’cross his chest. “And also because I’ve paid attention when C.C.’s told me hiswar stories.” He smiled, grim. “Seems to me that policing’s a lot like a cult.”
A defensive retort bit at Owen’s tongue like a reflex, and yet…the truth was the truth.
“I also know that outsiders, civilians like me, get pigeon-holed into something lesser-than when someone becomes a cop—and that means we often get dumped.”
Shit. That was true too. Owen examined his shoes. “That…that’s why I’ve quit.” It wasn’t, but claiming it was at least let him own everything Rob was saying.
Rob examined him. “You quit,” he echoed, and though he did not form it as a question, Owen nonetheless braced himself for the interrogation that would follow: ‘So what are you going to do now?’. ‘How can you afford to be unemployed?’ Answers: I don’t know, and I can’t, in that order.
But—“So then are you sure you want to take a look at this fan mail Jessie’s got?”
This jerked his gaze off the ground and he laughed, unexpected.
Rob frowned, looked confused. “I mean…maybe I should just take them all into town to the police.”
All? How the hell many were there? “You should—and I’ll kick your ass if you don’t—but I’m not fragile, Old Man. I really do want to see.”
Rob shifted weight from one foot to the other, debating, and Owen laughed, touched by the protectiveness. Saddened too. ’Cause Rob was right; policing did mean forsaking most of your civilian connections—yet it was your civilian friends who, (ironically), were far more loyal and forgiving than the tight-knit circle of law enforcement. ’Cause at the end of the day, a cop’s so-called brothers and sisters were only ever championing what you were, not who you were. Case in point…he pulled out his cell, checked. No Sondra. No calls. Just like he’d thought.
“We’ll go in through the studio,” said Rob.
Owen followed into a room of windows, no walls. “Wow,” he murmured.
“Don’t be too impressed.” Rob’s face turned sour. “Heating it is like hemorrhaging money.”
Not to mention what it would cost to keep it cool in the upcoming summer months when the Okanagan would be blistered with heat.
“But it’s worth it,” said a female voice, and Owen swiveled, looking.
A small woman with unruly hair emerged from behind an easel. Jessalyn Haslom nee Chandler, he could see the resemblance to the Lieutenant in the line of her nose, and though she lacked his coloring (Cory Chandler had freckles and a shock of red hair that had always struck Owen as being so not cop), her mop of curls were the same—except longer, brunette, and right down to her waist.
“You’re Owen,” she said, and extended a hand.
He shook, aware that her eyes stayed pinned to his face. A cop’s kid. How many bedraggled officers had she seen in her lifetime? How well was she aware that ‘cop’ didn’t necessarily mean knight in shining armor?
Very well indeed, judging by her expression. He held her gaze and—When there’s alarm, use charm—affixed his best million-watt smile, one he knew snared the ladies in spite of (or maybe because of?) his scruffy face and long hair. “You must be clairvoyant,” he said.
“Or just a wife with a cell phone.” She pumped his hand once, let it go. “Robbie texted me first thing this morning to say you’d come to work for the day.” And why? Her eyes said. When you should be policing?
He ignored this, and “Robbie?” He turned, grinning.
Rob was rummaging in a drawer. “Owen wants a look at the storybooks, Jessie.”
“You do?” she asked and her tone immediately shifted, deferential to a police officer. Cop’s kid, indeed.
“I’m just curious,” he said, then glanced over at Rob. “And maybe a little protective.”
A current that looked sardonic lifted her brows and said If you’re so protective then where, exactly, have you been all this time?
He returned her stare without blinking. Hadn’t Jessalyn Haslom ever been away from a friend for years only to have every second apart disappear upon seeing them again? “Rob said you haven’t mentioned the storybooks to your Dad,” he rallied, and was satisfied when her bottom lip hopped into her mouth and made her look sheepish.
“I…well, maybe I should have said something, but—Robbie, do you think the books are something sinister?”
Rob set a clear, plastic bag full of the storybooks between them. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you know I’ve always thought they were weird.” He began pulling the books, and their envelopes, out of the bag and onto the counter.
Jessalyn arranged them in chronological order. “I didn’t save the envelope for the first one,” she said, pointing to it.
Owen nodded. Why would she have? It was only when the second, third, and hell—eighth? arrived that things could be officially defined as, to use Rob’s term, ‘weird’. He examined the collection. All post-marked from everywhere, just like Rob said. “And the defacement,” he asked. “Is it only ever at the end of the books?”
“Yes.” Jessalyn opened two of the fairytales to the end, ran her palm down the crease in the spine so they’d stay open.
Owen read the scrawl over the printed words of ‘Lived happily ever after’. Fairytales often end violently.
“Meaning…not if I have anything to do with it?” he murmured.
“Pardon?” said Jessalyn, and when he looked up both she and Rob were regarding him with large eyes.
He pointed, two fingers on the two different lines in the book. “Just my gut talking,” he said. “They lived happily ever after, obliterated by this.” He tapped the red scrawl. “It’s like someone’s saying ‘no, they’re not going to live happily, not if I have anything to do with it’.”
“Jesus.” Rob wrapped his arms ’round his wife—who glared at Owen.
Sorry for scaring you, sweetheart. Seriously, though—how could they not have taken these books as a threat? Because they sheltered themselves out here in the boonies? Fair enough, but there was still a border between being innocent and being a rube—and how could a cop’s kid wade over that border?
“I appreciate your concern Owen, truly, I do, but…” Jessalyn slipped out from Rob’s embrace, made a show of standing on her own and not looking afraid. “I’m still sold that these are just some whacko artist’s vie for attention from a known name in the field. I’ve had other stuff sent to me before.”
“Yeah, but just sketches, Jessie,” inserted Rob. “And those macaroni-art sculptures—remember?”
They shared a laugh and Owen could appreciate then, what Rob saw in her.
Sort of.
Still—“Look at the identical markings the sender makes on each end page.” He drew them back to the books, pointed to the red coils boiling off the princesses’ heads. To the slashes over each little throat and the pools of what was clearly meant to be blood at their feet.
“But that’s the art of it, Owen!” Jessalyn exclaimed and for shit’s sake if she didn’t sound enthused. “They’ve replicated their brand even though the artistic style of each book itself is different. And yes, I know now you think I’m whacked.”
She laughed and, despite himself, Owen smiled too.
“But there’s a message here. Granted, I’m not sure what it is.” Her petite features crunched, made her somewhat cute. “Some Shakespearean thing, maybe? Some nod to the notion that what looks like a fairytale is really a nightmare?”
Owen jolted as this, for whatever reason, made him latch on.
“I don’t know,” Jessalyn continued, “but I truly don’t think it’s personal. In fact, I’d place money that I’m going to get the punch-line soon—or, more accurately, the pitch—for me to endorse these pieces at a gallery or show.”
No. Owen looked down again at the storybooks. The mutilated couples…those coils roiling off the princesses, did those not look like long, curly hair? And the pupils on the characters were all poked out just like Rob had said, but look at the princes. Before the eyes had been poked, they were first drawn over as rings. Big eyes. Caricatures. And caricatures, despite their cruelty, often did accurately exaggerate the most obvious features. He looked at Rob and Jessalyn. Knew the characters in these storybooks were Rob and Jessalyn. “Can…how about we strike a compromise?” he said.
Rob’s blue eyes were big but Jessalyn’s smile remained wry.
He plowed forward anyway. “First, keep your heads up. Besides anything new you might get in the mail, keep a watch out for anything else that strikes you as weird. If it looks hinky, it is. Make a note of it, tell each other, and write it somewhere that keeps a date and a time.” Here he held up his phone as example.
They nodded.
“Then how about ask yourself—why am I getting these storybooks now? What’s going on? What’s different or changed? Who have I met recently?”
Jessalyn interrupted. “I’m getting them now—or at all—because I’m an artist. I—”
“You agreed to let me strike a compromise instead of just gathering these books up and taking them all into town to the cops myself,” he said, mock severe.
She grinned, genuine this time, back to being deferential again.
“Third: you do take these books into town and let your local police at least photograph them, start a harassment file.”
Rob nodded. Jessalyn did not respond. “Jessie…?” his buddy said, prompting her.
“Oh, okay. Okay,” she added, with emphasis.
Like a kid. A cop’s kid, determined to be defiant? They were sometimes and now, hours later, Owen reconsidered her as he set the free weights he’d been hoisting back onto the rack and wiped down the bench he’d been using. Jessalyn Haslom had lied. It was all over her expression. Thick in her tone of voice. She had no intentions of going to the police despite what was clearly a threat not just to her life—but also to his buddy’s.
And why was that? Didn’t you protect the people you loved?
Christ. He shook his head and could not meet his own eyes in the mirror. Look who was talking.
©bonnie randall 2005