Misery Loves Company

  Jules closed the bathroom door and put her back against it, catching her breath. There was something about being in his presence that was awe inspiring and terrifying all at the same time. As dazzling as his caramel-colored eyes were, they hinted at deep sorrow. They reflected the heaviness of her own soul. She wanted to know more of him and run away from him simultaneously.

  “What secret, Patrick?” She spoke into the bathroom mirror. If she was going to get out of this, then she was going to have to face it.

  “God . . . ,” she whispered to the Presence with whom Jason was so well acquainted. “Why? What is this?”

  A weird sense of purpose stirred in her soul. She couldn’t directly identify it, but something told her maybe it wasn’t a mistake that she was here after all. Patrick was hurting deeply. But could she offer any comfort? Any wisdom? She was as wounded and weary as he was.

  And the truth was, she was terrified of the secret he held.

  Jules started to brush her hair.

  “Juliet! Hurry it up!” Patrick called, his voice barely audible through the closed bathroom door.

  It jolted her. “Hurry it up.” Like they were getting ready to do something pleasurable or exciting.

  She leaned close to herself in the mirror. “Pull it together. If you are going to get out of this, you have to think. Be smart. Don’t overreact. Don’t underreact. Just do what you have to do to survive and get home.” Jules surprised herself, because only moments before, she’d had no will whatsoever to survive even a day.

  AFTER MOVING SEVERAL MORE BOXES, Chris managed to get a good look at the piece of hull leaned up against the wall. It was dirty white, with the hull number embedded in the fiberglass. Sitting right below the fragment was a cardboard file box, unlabeled, the lid slightly askew. Crouching, Chris took the lid off and peered inside. There seemed to be files and photographs, but the light in the back of the garage wasn’t bright enough for him to get a good look. He picked up the box and went inside the house. At the kitchen table, he got a better look at what was inside.

  Files. Lots of them. Copied. Photographs of boats and, more specifically, their hulls, where the numbers were embedded the same way as on the piece in the garage.

  Chris quickly flipped through the files. They held police documents on stolen boats in the area. “What is this? Hey, Jim—”

  The Lt. Colonel mumbled something and snorted, then returned to unconsciousness.

  Chris walked to the couch and shook the man’s shoulder until he aroused. “Jim, wake up. I need to ask you something.”

  The Lt. Colonel’s eyes slowly pried open, and he raised his arm to shield them like there was some grand light showering him. “What is it?” he mumbled.

  “Sir, I need to ask you something.”

  “Stop shouting.”

  “I’m not shouting. Are you awake?”

  He sat up a little, his eyes widening. “You find something about Juliet?”

  “No. But . . . I found something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you know if Jason ever said anything to you about stolen boats?”

  “Boats?”

  “Yes. Did he ever mention anything about stolen boats to you?”

  He wiped a dribble of slobber off his mouth. “I don’t recall anything about boats.”

  “Think hard. Maybe in casual conversation?”

  The Lt. Colonel’s face turned red. “I said no! I don’t remember anything! What’s this about?”

  Chris walked away from him. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The Lt. Colonel stood, swayed, and almost tipped over. “Is it going to help us find Juliet?”

  “No. Never mind. It’s nothing.” Chris closed the box, picked it up, and went to the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “What about Juliet?”

  Chris opened the door and stepped out, balancing the box with one arm. “Sir, you need to get yourself out of this . . . cycle you’re in. If we’re going to find her, I need your help. You can’t do it like this.”

  He waved a hand at Chris. “What good is an old man like me going to do you?”

  “I don’t know yet, but you need to be on standby.” Chris walked to his truck and checked the time. He had to get into work. He’d have to look at the files later.

  “You’re late,” Maecoat said as Chris slipped into lineup. The captain noticed, giving him a long, sideways glance.

  “Sorry. Just running some errands.”

  The captain let them go and Chris and Maecoat went to their car. About an hour into an easygoing patrol day, Chris said, “Do you remember anything about boat theft in the community?”

  Maecoat thought for a moment.

  “A couple years back,” Chris added.

  Maecoat slowly nodded. “Sure. Big theft ring. Seems like the sheriff’s department had to get involved and all that.”

  “Jason and I were responding to a call on a stolen boat the night he was shot.”

  Maecoat nodded again. “That’s right.”

  As Maecoat drove on, down into the town square, Chris remembered something. “There had been a string of calls on thefts and attempted thefts, but not in our jurisdiction. Remember that? Nothing was stolen from Wissberry.”

  Maecoat grinned. “That’s because we’re the best.”

  “But then one night, we get that call, and that’s when Jason was shot.” Chris leaned back in his seat, staring out the window, trying to collect his thoughts. “I never connected that incident to the other boat thefts. Jason’s death always seemed so random to me, like we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wondered if the shooting had anything to do with the boat theft we were going out to investigate, but not to the others. And of course nobody could connect it to anything at the end of the day.”

  “They ended up believing Jason’s murder to be random, not attached to the boat incident, right?”

  “Yeah. They thought it might be gang related. We’d gotten intel that gang activity was on the rise in our area. But nobody knew for sure. Nobody even knew how many men there were.”

  “Why are you thinking about those boat thefts?”

  Chris shrugged. “With Jules missing, maybe I’m thinking a lot about Jason. I always do, I guess.”

  “Reagan’s home being ransacked—was that the craziest thing ever?”

  “It’s connected somehow. I just don’t know how. I don’t know how to prove it.”

  “You got the captain backing you. And Walker on it, right?”

  Chris nodded. Maecoat kept talking, changing subjects multiple times like he always did when he got behind the wheel. There was something about driving that got Maecoat talking. Chris responded in all the right places, laughed at all his jokes, but the entire time he was plotting how to get out of the second half of his patrol. He had to get to that box. He had to read through it.

  After they stopped to eat, Chris seized the moment as they walked to the parking lot. “Dude, I don’t feel good.”

  Maecoat looked back as Chris stopped and held his stomach. “You okay?”

  “No . . .”

  Maecoat sighed. “I told you not to get that fish.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on. Let’s get you back to the station.”

  Jules walked down the hallway, fully dressed and presentable, with nowhere to go.

  As she turned the corner toward the living room, Patrick came from the other end of the house, carrying a large cardboard box. He set it on the coffee table and stretched out his hand to her. “Come. I have something to show you.”

  She looked at his hand, wondering if she should take it. The thought sickened her for a moment. But if she wanted out of this alive, she was going to have to earn his trust and make him believe she had the same affection for him she had before, when she hardly knew him but thought she did.

  When she reached out to him, he took her hand in his. It was warm and strong, but her stomach flipped and flo
pped as he guided her toward one of two doors she’d noticed the first evening, the one that opened off the kitchen. There were windows, too, but the drapes were drawn. She assumed the windows overlooked much of the same as her room: trees with pathless views.

  Patrick turned to her right before he opened the door. “You should brace yourself.”

  Jules’s throat tightened with fear, but a dazzling sense of awe shone through his eyes rather than a threat of harm. He opened the door and guided her out.

  Jules gasped, letting go of his hand. Patrick smiled delightedly. Jules stepped forward, a cold gust of wind snapping through her stunned thoughts.

  Before her was the most spectacular view she’d ever seen. The mountains rose out of the earth right before her. The clouds rested on invisible shelves, slightly lower than the peaks. The sun spread its light through them, moving shadows across the valley below. A few feet in front of her was a wrought-iron railing, taller than waist high. She was standing on a wood deck, but there was nothing below her that she could see. It was like they were floating.

  Patrick joined her at the rail. “The cabin is built into the side of the mountain.”

  “What is underneath us?”

  “Stable support,” he said with an assuring smile. “But it gives the feeling that we’re stepping into the air, doesn’t it?”

  Jules turned her attention back to the view, smelling the fragrant pine that swirled on the cold wind. It made her feel like she was on top of the world and, at the very same time, that she was only one tree on a mountainous planet. “No wonder you come here,” she said. “I wouldn’t ever want to leave.”

  He stared out at the scene before them too. “It is no mistake, Juliet, that I come here in the winter. The dead of winter. Everything dies in winter, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But it doesn’t die. Not really. It is dormant, inside the earth, protected by the very thing that has buried it alive.”

  Jules’s heart raced.

  “So it is no coincidence that I come here in winter, and it is no coincidence I leave rebirthed in the spring.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It is too cold for you to stay out here any longer, unprotected.” He opened the door. Jules didn’t want to leave, but she was getting very cold. She took one more long look at the scenery before her, then stepped inside, warming her hands by rubbing them together. She really wished there were a fire in the fireplace. Patrick went to the living room, and she followed him there. He opened the box, lifted it, and then dumped it.

  Hundreds of pages—notes, folders, documents—spilled out onto the large coffee table and the surrounding floor.

  “What are you doing?” Jules asked, gawking at the enormous mess that had just been made.

  “You can’t stay on the surface any longer, Juliet.” He gestured toward the mountain of papers. “It’s time that you drowned.”

  It seemed easy enough to drown in the sea of papers in front of her. She knelt beside the table, trying to take it in.

  “I will fix you something warm to drink. You begin. This is going to take quite some time.”

  Jules slipped off her shoes. She longed to be back out on that porch, but instead, she was suffocating behind the dark walls of gloom. And she had no idea where to begin. Or what she was supposed to be doing.

  Patrick stood nearby, his fist pressed against his chin, watching her as if with bated breath. As if something dynamic were about to happen. All she saw were random, mismatched documents, notes, pictures of numbers. She pulled one out in particular. Looking at it carefully, she realized it was a picture of a boat’s hull. She found another picture of an actual motorboat. She didn’t know what kind, but it was a common make and model around their part of the coast. A sporting boat or fishing boat.

  Again, a boat. What was she supposed to be figuring out here, other than having a constant reminder of where Jason was killed? She looked up at Patrick. He seemed fixated by her every move, the hot drink forgotten. She tried to ignore him and began digging through what looked to be police reports from towns around Wissberry, reports on boat thefts. She sorted through some handwritten notes on yellow legal paper. She divided out everything that looked similar and began making piles.

  After a while, Patrick went to the kitchen. He returned with apple cider and said, “So this is how you work? In compartments like this?”

  Jules didn’t look at him. “Now you’re going to dog how I sort through what is basically a gigantic mess?”

  Patrick sat down on one of the couches. “It’s not a mess. That’s what you’re not seeing.”

  “Maybe this is how I see better.”

  “Writing absorbs confusion and chaos, you see.”

  She glanced up at him. “No, I don’t see. But that’s the point you’ve been trying to make all along, right?”

  “You can’t box it up nice and neatly. You can’t follow a formula. It’s like a wildfire. It scorches whatever is dry and dying. Not even water can stop a wildfire. The fire consumes until it reaches something that has already been consumed.”

  “I’m supposed to make sense out of all this? Scrap pieces of paper? Police reports? Notes?”

  He knelt beside her and took a piece of paper off the table. “Look.”

  Jules peered at it. It was a handwritten police report on a boat stolen in nearby Belfast. She tried to concentrate on the details but couldn’t seem to focus with him breathing down her neck.

  “Okay, so I read it.”

  “But you didn’t see it.”

  Jules felt like bursting into tears. “I don’t know what you want from me. You’re going to make me sit and sift through all this, finding some needle in a literary haystack?”

  “Writing is about finding truth. But you can’t find the truth if you don’t see everything.”

  “I see. I see!”

  “No. You’re reading. See. Smell. Feel. Use all your senses.”

  There was obviously no getting out of this, short of running to the suspended deck and flinging herself off the edge. So she tried to “see.”

  The cop had responded to a call. The Dershires reported their boat stolen from their cabin. No witnesses. Jules closed her eyes and tried to imagine the scene.

  “Good. Good.”

  She wasn’t sure what good this did, but she might as well play the part he wanted her to. She didn’t want him throwing a fit again.

  After a little bit, she looked up. Patrick had sat down on the couch again.

  “I’m going to need some coffee.”

  He grinned. “Spoken like a true writer.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Captain Perry said.

  But he did. He knew he did. He’d taken off the shirt of his police uniform to try to stop the bleeding. Now he just wore a white T-shirt. It was cold outside, but he was completely numb.

  He walked the sidewalk up to her house. The door opened before he got there. He stopped short of the porch. Behind him, the captain had begun following. He could hear his footsteps stop too.

  He locked eyes with her. Hers were wide, filled with dread and disbelief. Her gaze fell to his T-shirt and then to his pants. He glanced down. There, smeared at his thigh, was a dark, shiny patch of blood.

  “No . . . no . . .” She started to step back, tipping like there wasn’t any ground for her foot to land on. Chris raced up to hold her. “No! Nooo!”

  “Chris! Chris!”

  Chris jolted awake, gasping for breath. It was dark and his skull cracked with pain. He jumped as he looked up to see someone hovering over him. A hand clasped his shoulder.

  “Chris, it’s me. Addy. You were . . . having a nightmare.”

  Chris looked around. He was at the kitchen table. He must’ve fallen asleep here. The paperwork he’d been going through was strewn across the tabletop.

  Addy sat in the chair next to him. “Are you okay?”

  Chris rubbed his eyes. “I’m fine.”

&
nbsp; “You were saying Jules’s name.”

  “I was dreaming . . .” Chris looked down. “That night, when I had to tell her Jason died.”

  “You’ve never told me about that night,” Addy said softly.

  Her scream. He couldn’t explain it. He’d never heard a human being scream like that. It sounded like . . . He shook his head. There were almost no words. But maybe it sounded like a soul trying to escape a body.

  “I have worried about you so much ever since Jason died. You watched your best friend die in your arms. And then you had to tell his wife.”

  “I didn’t have to. The captain was going to do it. But I felt I should. I think she’s hated me for it ever since. Or maybe she just hates me because I didn’t save Jason’s life.”

  “She doesn’t hate you, Chris. She hates life. She hates that Jason is gone.”

  “Now she’s gone too.”

  Addy rubbed his arm and looked over the clutter on the table. “What’s all this?”

  “Some files I found in Jason’s garage. There was a piece of the hull there too, hidden behind some boxes.” He pointed to the box. “Look what’s written here. ‘Trophies.’”

  “Trophies. Okay.”

  “But there aren’t trophies in here.”

  “No, but people put stuff in different boxes all the time, right?”

  “Not Jason and Jules. Everything is always precisely labeled with them. He mislabeled it on purpose.”

  “What’s in here?”

  “A lot of police reports on stolen boats. A couple of years ago, there was this big string of thefts just outside of Wissberry. It never hit us, but then we got the call to go check out a possible stolen boat . . .”

  Addy leaned in. “And?”

  Chris’s attention locked onto a small piece of paper peeking out from underneath all the others. He pulled it out. It was scrap, torn around the edges, with a faded name and number on it. The name simply read Roy.

  Chris jumped from the table and hurried to get his keys.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got to go up to the station. I need to pull Jason’s phone records.”

  IT WAS LATE in the evening when Jules finally finished sorting through the paperwork and notes. Patrick’s handwriting was terrible, so it took a while to decipher any notes he’d written. Mostly about what he wanted to put in the story—ideas, plotlines, character details, all written down randomly.