Body and Bone (11 page)

“What?” Isabeau said. “What time is it?”

“Where's Daltrey?”

“He's asleep, of course,” Isabeau said, yawning.

“Go in his room right now.”

“What?”

“Do what I said!
Now!
”

“What's going on?”

“Just do it!” Nessa yelled so loud her voice cracked.

“Okay.”

Nessa watched the time count down on her phone, at a glacial yet speed-­of-­light pace, her breath loud and panicky.

“Yup. He's asleep. Just like I said.”

“Is he breathing?”

“Of course he's breathing! What in the world is going on?”

“You need to call the cops.” She went on to explain what had happened.

“You better screenshot it, Nessa.”

“Why?”

But as the word left her mouth, the photo began to pixelate and dissolve.

“What's happening? It's fading, and—­”

“Click the power button and the home button at the same time,” Isabeau said.

Nessa let go of her phone and fumbled with the iPad, which slipped from her sweaty hands and dropped to the floor. As she scrambled to pick it up, the photo disappeared altogether, and a logo appeared: TempHoto.

Nessa screamed in frustration.

She heard a knock. “Nessa?”

“Just a minute,” she called.

“You okay?” Otto called. “It sounds like you're filming
Saw
in there.”

She looked at her phone. Six minutes until she had to be back in the studio.

“Just give me a fucking minute, will you?” She lowered her voice before speaking into the phone again. “Isabeau, I want you to go down and make sure the doors and windows are all locked.”

“All right,” Isabeau said, wide awake now but not fearful. “But everything's fine here.”

“I want you to call 911 right now and get a patrol car out there to search the woods, the whole property. Tell them what happened.”

“Okay,” Isabeau said, not as enthusiastic as usual at Nessa's request.

“Call me back as soon as you're done.”

She clicked off and waited, staring at her phone. Was she overreacting? It was possible, but she didn't care. It was another few minutes before “Jeep's Blues” played.

“They're on their way,” Isabeau said, yawning again. “They said if you don't have a copy of the image sent to you, there's just not much they can do. Those temporary photo apps are pretty much untraceable.”

Nessa growled in frustration. “All right. Thank you, Isabeau. I've got to go. I'll be home at four-­fifteen.”

“See you then,” Isabeau said, and clicked off.

Nessa made her way back into the studio with two minutes to spare. Otto didn't look up, obviously stung that she'd rejected his concern.

“Sorry, Otto,” she said. “Had a bit of a panic attack there.”

He looked up then and said, “Fine. Whatever.” His body language got even more defensive and injured.

“Oh, now,” she said. “Don't be like that, princess.”

He shook his head, his eyes still on whatever he was reading tonight.

When King Crimson ended, Nessa got back to the original play order.

“Hey, Otto,” she said.

“What,” he said, head down, pretending to read.

“What do you know about these temporary photo apps? You know, the apps that you can text a photo to someone's phone, and within a few minutes, the photo deletes itself?”

He looked up, interested. “You want to send someone a pic of your junk, or what?”

“Yeah, no,” she said.

“Why do you ask, then?”

She sighed. “Never mind,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “Does this have something to do with what just happened?”

She nodded.

“Is someone . . . harassing you?”

She nodded. He regarded her for a moment and said, “Good.”

6/14

Hi, I'm Nessa, and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober six years, four months, and twenty-­six days.

I might as well stop even trying to sleep. The Riley County Sheriff's Department is going to think of me as the little girl who cried wolf. Of course, the patrol they sent to the house turned up nothing and nobody. Poor Isabeau.

I talked to the patrol officer, and he confirmed what Isabeau said—­that without any record of the photo, there's nothing they can do.

I can't even think about what life would be like without my little guy. I can't even go there, because I'll go insane for real, and he needs me to stay sane.

I've read that losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a person. My mom knows what it's like, and I'm sorry about that. But it was my death that helped her pay for Brandon's frequent hospital stays.

I read all about it in the
LA Times
.

I've known ­people say they wish they could be at their own funeral so they could see who their real friends are. Seeing my obituary in print was nothing like that. The sad, pathetic circumstances surrounding my “death” play out every day in big cities around the world. No one gives a shit.

But my mother, as I knew she would, made big-­time lemonade out of my death. I have to admire her for that. If she hadn't hit the talk show circuit again, speaking about what it's like to lose a child, the dangers of drugs, the crappy county Medicaid we qualified for would have killed Brandon for sure. Plus she became a minor celebrity in the bargain, which she parlayed into some parts in TV shows and B movies.

I haven't seen her in anything in a while now, and treatment for Brandon's periodic pneumonia thanks to the radiation therapy ain't cheap. I've actually thought about trying to send him some money on the sly, but he'd give it to her, and she'd use it on quacky facial treatments to keep herself looking good for possible television appearances.

She's got be getting pretty desperate about now.

 

Chapter Fourteen

Thursday, June 16

T
HE NEXT TWO
and a half days were mercifully uneventful, although the tension in her back and neck made turning her head nearly impossible. There were no new comments from DeadJohnDonati, no new websites, no sponsorship cancellations. Nessa had even gotten a decent night's sleep the previous night. But on Thursday, the silence had an unsettling effect on her, one of dread and horrible anticipation. The troll was not done with her, she was sure of that, felt it in her bones.

At eleven
P.M.,
Otto called. “Hey,” he said. “I'm going to be late tonight. I've been up in Kansas City all day at an antinuclear power rally, and my car won't start even with a jump.”

“How late, do you think?” Nessa asked, irritated he was calling so close to air, irritated that he spent his time performing random acts of environmental kindness.

He sighed. “I'm hoping by three.”

“Three? Why bother coming in at all, then? I'm going to call Kevin and see if he can come in and—­”

“No, no,” Otto said. “I feel bad for leaving you high and dry. Let me call him. I'll offer him a six-­pack or something to cover for me. I'll call you back if he can't do it. But you've seen me do my job. You know what to do. You'll be fine.”

“Wow,” Nessa said. “That's maybe some of the nicest things you've ever said to me.”

I
T WAS A
starless, moonless night as she approached the station, all light blocked out by high cloud cover with a hot west wind blowing. Otto had been as good as his word and called back to let her know that Kevin wasn't available, and once again reassured her that she would be just fine.

She wasn't so sure.

Once inside, she locked the outside door of the glass vestibule, and then the inner door. On deep, dark nights like this one, the reflections of the inside light on the glass walls of the vestibule doubled and tripled and warped in on themselves until she swore she was seeing ghosts—­and not the friendly kind. Until recently, she was never nervous coming here alone at night. But now, there was a burning in her chest and she couldn't keep her hands from shaking.

Without Otto here to annoy her, she started to imagine what it might be like if she were actually arrested for the murder of her almost ex-­husband. Who would raise Daltrey? Of course Linda and Tony, John's folks, would swoop in and take him.

This thought gave her chills. Sure, their parenting hadn't made him bipolar. That was biology. But even though she got along with her in-­laws fairly well, the thought of losing her son and them raising Daltrey the same way they had John nearly paralyzed her with fear.

By three
A.M.,
Otto still wasn't in, and she started to worry about him. She called his cell phone four times, and it went straight to voicemail. She really hoped he was okay.

Nessa had maxed out her caffeine intake, her skull felt like it had been hollowed out, and she started seeing things: sharp-­angled, barbed, darkly malevolent characters out of the deepest part of her ugly subconscious. She needed to stop obsessing and scaring herself. Enough.

She decided to play stump the music expert.

“This is Nessa, you're on the air,” Nessa said, opening up the phone line.

“I have a trivia question,”
the female voice said.

“Shoot,” Nessa said, swiveling in her chair, watching the clock's secondhand sweeping toward her release.

“Who played lead guitar on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps'?”

“Really,” Nessa said. “You're asking me a Beatles question. Is that right? You're asking me a Beatles question.”

“But who played—­”

“It was Clapton. Everyone knows that, even ­people who don't listen to music. Even the hearing-­impaired.”

She realized, grudgingly, that had Otto been here screening calls, this question never would have slipped through.

Nessa clicked the end button. As she could have predicted, the phone lines lit up after that. She answered another call.

“Why do you have to be so mean?”
a whiny, plaintive voice asked her.

“Because my producer isn't here to screen the calls,” Nessa said, and hung up, and immediately realized she'd made a huge mistake, broadcasting that she was alone at the station. Of course, most ­people didn't know where this show originated, but still, it was a stupid move.

“He's at a
Minecraft
convention,” Nessa amended, giving herself a little thrill at demeaning her coworker. As a rule, Nessa didn't demean ­people who weren't there to defend themselves. But she was desperate.

“What's the spine number on—­”

Nessa hung up unceremoniously. “Come on. You know the rules. No spine number or album-­cover color questions,” Nessa said.

“What's Elvis Costello's real name?”

“Declan MacManus,” Nessa said, and hung up. “Next?”

“Four famous rap artists went to the same high school in Brooklyn, New York, called George Westinghouse Jr. High School of Career and Technical Education. Busta Rhymes, DMX, and Jay-­Z are three of them. Who's the fourth?”

“Let's see . . . the fourth would be—­”

Was Nessa imagining it? Was there a masker on that voice? It had the low bass line of an old Funkadelic song, almost outside of the range of human hearing. Suddenly it was as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the room. Nessa couldn't breathe, couldn't finish her sentence.

“Come on,”
the caller said
. “You know the answer.”

Yes. She did.

The answer was the Notorious B.I.G.

She hung up on the caller. “Oops,” she said, hearing her voice shake inside her headphones. “The call dropped.”

Nessa stared at the blinking phone lines, which now looked urgent and sinister to her.

She tentatively reached for the buttons and pushed one.

“This is Nessa, and you're on the air.”

“The answer,”
said the same masked voice,
“is the Notorious B.I.G.”
The same person was on two phone lines, obviously calling in from multiple cell phones.
“You look really good in that black shirt.”

Nessa stood up so fast that her face bumped the microphone, setting off a screech of feedback.

She looked out the window, through the three consecutive panes of glass. He was out there. He could see her. He knew what she was wearing.

Nessa sat back down with a thud and clicked the next song button, then yanked the headphones off her head and ran out of the studio. Looking through just two panes of glass now, she could see nothing but the amorphous shapes made by the light reflecting back on itself into infinity.

Nessa turned off the lights as “The Prey” by the Dead Kennedys played in the background. Great. Only one of the creepiest songs ever recorded. Nessa pressed her face against the glass, her hands making a wide telescope around her eyes, straining to see into the dark nothingness of the field beyond the station.

Was he out there in the tall weeds? Nessa mashed her fists into her eyes, trying to clear her vision, distorted from light and reflection and now dark. She squinted back out into the windy night and couldn't see the figure anymore.

Nessa flipped the dead-­bolt lock and crept out into the dark, looking around wildly.

“I know who you are,” Nessa shouted.

Nothing but hot wind and darkness. She couldn't see anyone or anything.

“What do you want?”

Her fear was turning into something else. She wasn't afraid. She was livid, and it drowned out everything else. Who did this guy think he was, terrorizing her and her son like this? Trying to frame her for murder? This aggression would not stand.

“I'm not afraid of you,” she yelled. “If I catch you, I'm going to kick your pathetic, rapey ass!”

No sound, no movement.

But someone was out there. Someone was watching.

Friday, June 17

N
ESSA KNEW
BETTER
than to call the cops for this one. What would they do? Nothing except lose a little more respect for her. But she was definitely going to call them to ask whether they could determine Nathan's whereabouts. That, she could do.

Although she slept little after the disturbing night she'd had at the station, she decided to take Daltrey and Isabeau to the Sunset Zoo in Manhattan. Spending the day outdoors, watching Daltrey delight over the animals, was just what she needed.

When they returned home after lunch, Daltrey took a nap, Isabeau worked on cataloging Nessa's music collection, and Nessa managed to bang out a blog post about the band Quasi. Then she went downstairs and looked out the back door. Isabeau was watching Daltrey run through the sprinklers.

Nessa tried to decide what to do about dinner. She was looking up the pizza delivery phone number when the doorbell rang.

This made her sad, because there was no Declan MacManus to announce an arrival. She went to the door, and there stood Otto, a cooler on the porch next to him and bags of groceries in his arms.

He looked sheepish. “Sorry for just showing up like this, but—­”

“How did you know where I lived?”

He looked taken aback by her sharp tone. He stammered, “I just—­I looked you up online.”

“No, you didn't,” Nessa said. “My address isn't online.”

His face reddened and he stuttered some more. “I used to be a reporter—­and I—­I—­I . . . covered public records and that kind of thing. I still have some friends at the courthouse and I . . . looked up your property records there.”

Stunned, Nessa started hyperventilating. She leaned forward, trying to regulate her breathing. “Can . . . can anyone do that?”

“Well, yeah,” Otto said. “But it's not a big deal—­you don't need to—­”

So anyone could find out where she lived. Why hadn't she known this? Now she cursed the day she and John had bought this huge property in the middle of nowhere.

“Hey,” Otto said gently. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done it. I should have called you and asked if I could come by. I just . . . wanted to make it up to you for missing my shift. I'm sorry.”

Nessa realized she'd just given her professional adversary a salacious glimpse into the peep show that was her anxiety and stress. Into her weakness.

She stood straight and gave him the most imperious look she could manage. “Right,” she said, folding her arms in front of her. “No need to let me know that you weren't lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”

He grinned a little. “You were worried about me?”

“You'd know that if you'd listened to any of the dozen messages I left you last night.” She pointed at the bags. “What's all this?”

“Like I said, I want to make it up to you,” he said. “I'm going to cook you dinner.”

She stared at him. “But what the hell happened?” She crossed her arms again like some scolding housewife.

“Can I come in and put this stuff down? Then I'll tell you.”

She rolled her eyes, but she was curious what sort of dinner he would come up with. Would it be better than delivery pizza? Maybe. But she was too tired to argue. “Fine,” she said.

“Kitchen this way?” he said, walking past her with his grocery sacks. “Can you grab the cooler?”

This guy. Still trying to be the boss. She sighed and picked up the blue and white cooler and followed him into the kitchen.

“You won't believe it,” he said, opening the cooler and pulling out two PBRs, and offered her one of them.

She shook her head and leaned back against the counter. PBR. Of course.

“Do they actually give you a handbook when you become a hipster?” she said. “Like you must drink this shitty beer because it's so ironic?”

“I'm not a hipster,” he said, offended.

“Really. How would you describe yourself?”

“A free-­thinker,” he said, almost triumphantly. “A progressive with good taste.”

That you had before anyone else.

She needed to cut down on the nasty thoughts. He'd extended an olive branch, and she was still being a jerk.

“Sorry,” she said. “You seem to bring out the worst in me.”

“Why?” he said. “Is it because you were a hipster before I was?”

“How meta of you,” she said.

“Well, I brought some wine too,” he said. “You have a wine bottle opener?”

“Nope,” Nessa said.

“No wine for you, huh?” he said. “Let me guess. Only Cristal for the star.”

The back door opened and in walked Isabeau and Daltrey, fresh from exploring in the forest out back.

“She doesn't drink,” Isabeau said. “Hey, Otto.” She turned to Nessa. “We had a ­couple of classes together at K-­State.”

Daltrey ran out of the kitchen when he saw Otto. Isabeau ran after him and brought him back in.

“Daltrey, this is my friend Otto. He works with Mommy at the radio station.”

Daltrey covered his eyes with his hand.

“Hi, Daltrey,” Otto said.

Without uncovering his eyes, Daltrey waved at Otto with his other hand, and Otto laughed.

“You want to watch
Arthur
until dinner's ready?” Nessa asked Daltrey.

He nodded, still blindfolded. She carried him into the living room and turned on the television.

“You don't have to be afraid of Otto,” she said. “He's a nice man.”

Nessa tried to say it without sarcasm and mostly succeeded. She returned to the kitchen.

“So, Isabeau,” Otto said. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm Nessa's nanny and aide-­de-­camp. She told me she worked with an Otto. Didn't know it was you.”