Authors: J. C. Gatlin
Shaking
her head in disbelief, Kim watched the two disappear,
then
once again glanced at the note in her hands.
“If you
forget me, there's something I want you to know
” was all it said. This was proof, she thought. And she
moved through the crowd, searching for the waiter who handed it to her, or
possibly Ross himself.
When she
ran into Addison, he looked frantic and upset.
“Why,
Addison,” she exclaimed. “Where have you been?”
Addison
took her hands in his. “Kimberly, have you seen Mallory?”
“Yes,”
Kim said slowly, clutching the note, then asked again. “Where have you been all
evening?”
On the
dance floor, Mallory and The
Gunz
held each other
close and tightly rocked together as the band began a slow song.
“I never
meet lady like you,” he said to her. She smiled devilishly and nodded.
“And you
never will.” She held his hard, sun-darkened face between her soft hands and
kissed him, drawing the breath from his body. Then finally she gasped and
pulled her head away. “Would you believe I'm still innocent?”
“Como
una
Virgen
.”
His hands moved on her back, kneading the tender flesh in
an outpour of desire that was beyond either's ability to control. His hand slid
lower to
cup
the firm,
round
swell of her hip.
“Do you want
me…
”
Mallory was panting now. She had to concentrate
on each word to speak, “...as badly as I want you?”
“¡Ay,
caramba
!”
The
Gunz
bent her back in his
arms and looked her squarely eye to eye. He groaned.
Suddenly,
a hand forced its way between the two straining bodies. It was Addison Gaynor,
prying them apart. Mallory's eyes enlarged.
“Why,
Pudd'n
Toes - I was just looking for you,” she said
quickly, taking her hands from the ball player's grasp.
Grabbing
Mallory by the arm, Addison yanked her off the dance floor.
Kim
followed Mallory and Addison as they pushed their way through the crowd.
Addison was lecturing, on the verge of hyperventilating.
“Mallory
Astin
, this is scandalous.
Just
scandalous!”
He waved his arms as his voice rose. “What in the name of
all that is good has come over you? And wasn’t Kim wearing that dress earlier?”
Mallory
didn't seem to be listening. Turning her head, she glanced at The
Gunz
, who was still standing on the dance floor. She winked
at him. A moment later, they had disappeared around the corner and down the
hall.
Walking
past the corner too, Kim hesitated, feeling his presence. Ross was here.
Watching her.
She could feel his breath like a firm,
invisible grip. Turning her head, she saw no one familiar in the crowd.
Was
it just her imagination?
Stepping
into the entrance way, Kim ran after Mallory and Addison.
His voice
echoed in the marble hallway and carried over the music. “Just scandalous,” he
said again. “Scandalous!”
Before
midnight, Kim accepted a dance with the Congressman. She was graceful and light
on her feet. But there was an awkward distance between them.
Mallory
had found The
Gunz
on the dance floor. Their bodies
meshed together so completely they could have been one person. Kim watched
them, then smiled as Addison once again pried them apart and yanked Mallory
from the ballroom.
The
countdown began ten seconds to midnight. Everyone on the dance floor stopped.
Laughing and toasting, their voices counted down together, like one loud
amplifier.
Ten...
Nine... Eight...
Kim
smiled at the Congressman. Around them, waiters were handing out glasses of
champagne. He took two and handed one
flûte
to Kimberly,
then
they locked their arms together and joined in the
countdown.
Seven...
Six... Five...
Kim's
eyes searched the ocean of people for Mallory. She was standing beside Addison
as he was counting loudly with the crowd. Mallory noticed the well-endowed
blonde from the powder room and shot her a dirty look. The blonde stuck out her
tongue.
Kim
wasn't paying any attention. It was the end of the nineteen-nineties, and the
end of the Twentieth Century. And she couldn't believe she was spending the New
Year's Eve of a Lifetime at the most exciting party in town, locked arm in arm
with one of the most charming, celebrated bachelors she'd ever met. Their eyes
locked with the final seconds. Still she wondered where Ross was.
Four...
Three... Two...
“ONE!”
Kim
screamed just as the Congressman wrapped an arm around her and brought her
toward him. With one swift movement, he removed the reading glasses from her
face and kissed her. When their lips parted, he beamed and yelled, “Happy New
Year!”
She could
barely hear him over the cheering and screaming. Balloons fell from the ceiling
as confetti floated in the air. The music was blaring. And Kim noticed she had
once again spilled her champagne down the front of his tuxedo. He shrugged it
off and brought her close to him, tightly squeezing her.
Kim
turned so that her cheek rested on the Congressman's shoulder. They slow danced
amid the celebration around them, and she gripped his right hand in hers.
Still,
her eyes wandered the room. She thought about the shrink and wondered what
happened to him.
Had he really stood her up?
Then she thought about
Ross, and if he was here somewhere, lost in the crowd, watching her. Pushing
the thought further from her mind, she wrapped an arm tighter around the
Congressman's waist.
There was
a throbbing pang of alarm somewhere deep in her temples.
More
than just a dull headache.
She could feel it. Something was about to
happen.
* *
* * * * *
From the
shadows of the ballroom, a man blended with the crowd and watched Kim and the
Congressman hold each other, slowly rocking back and forth. He imagined what
they were talking about. He could see them whispering into each other's ear.
Stepping
away from the pillars in the corners, he moved across the dance floor, hidden
among bodies, unseen and unnoticed. Moving into the hallway, he slipped up the
large carpeted staircase and disappeared into a room upstairs.
“If you
forget me,” he said. “There's something I want you to know.”
3
Dead Man’s Time
Saturday,
January 1, 2000
2:03 AM
Twenty
miles north of Tampa, a semi truck pulled into the parking lot at the Flying J
Truck Stop, grumbling loudly as it rolled past the frail phone booth. A teenage
girl, no more than sixteen, came out of the store carrying a Big Gulp in one
hand and a suit case in another. She'd been crying.
Behind
her, a Chevy pick-up carrying an angry boyfriend skidded out of the parking lot
and onto the street. Its tires screeched as he sped away. Through teary eyes,
she watched him leave.
Out the
corner of her eye, she noticed the big semi truck pull around and park. Brakes
squealed as steam released above the tires. It blocked her view of the
storefront and engulfed her in deep shadows. Standing at the phone booth, the
crying teenager fished a quarter out of her pocket and deposited it into the
coin slot. She dialed. The phone rang.
That's
when she noticed it: A sticky, reddish-brown gunk on the pay phone, more
reddish-brown splatters on the
plexi
-glass. She
touched the glass, removing a
spec
of crust.
The
receiver to her ear, she listened to it ring again. Her father answered.
“Brianna,
is that you?”
came his overjoyed voice through
the phone. “
Happy New Year, baby... Are you okay?”
“Daddy.”
She
looked around. There was a puddle of the reddish-brown stuff at her feet, and a
trail winding through the pavement in the parking lot.
“Daddy.”
Her
voice trembled. “I think something's happened.”
* * * * *
* *
Kim and
Mallory made it home after two that morning. Zeus was waiting for them and Kim
could see his head staring impatiently out the front bay window in Mallory’s
townhome as they pulled up. Mallory was still begging for details about Kim’s
time with the Congressman as Zeus greeted them with leaps and bounds, wagging
his stubby tail. Mallory screamed at him for jumping on her. Kim hugged him and
walked him next door to their home.
Once the
Doberman was fed, walked and laying securely at her feet, she collapsed in her
grand-father's old recliner and wrapped herself in the hand-stitched quilt her
grandmother had made.
Burrowed into
the quilt as if she could stave off the cold dread stealing over her, she
waited for Ross. To pass the time she found an old scrapbook and thumbed
through the pages. Between its covers were all the love letters he had ever
written to her.
She
lifted one handwritten poem from the book. A poem she'd read for the
gazillionth
time. Sighing, she read it once again.
“Oh, Love
rips the heart in pieces,
When
distance fills the empty creases
Of time
And days
become long stretches
Of pain
and wretches
Of
torment
When our love ceases.
“So take
what little comfort and solace
To atone
In
knowing that you are not alone,
For every
tear that you have shed
My own
heart has wept and bled.”
Ross
wrote that, and it made Kim smile.
Turning,
she read the note she'd received at the New Year's Eve Party again. “
If you
forget me, there's something I want you to know”
Her eyes tearing, she
placed it on a blank page. It was now three weeks, five days and 23 hours.
“Oh, Ross,”
she said quietly, impatiently.
Where was he? Would he call? Or would he just
show up at her door step?
She imagined the door bursting open and Ross
stepping inside. He would come to her, pick her up in his arms,
then
carry her upstairs to their bed.
Over the
last three weeks, she had considered time and again just dropping by his job at
Eddy’s Garage downtown. But she didn’t want to make the first move. She didn’t
want to look desperate. So she waited. Kim knew sooner or later, Ross would
contact her.
By
two-thirty, she found the remote and turned on the television. She flipped
aimlessly from channel to channel until finding an “I Love Lucy
”
rerun.
Shifting
comfortably in the recliner, she laughed. Lucy read a murder mystery and now
she thought Ricky was trying to do her in. She'd seen this episode a hundred
times, and it made her miss being a little girl who would climb in her
Grampa’s
lap when he was trying to read the newspaper. With
no other option, he would turn on reruns of “I Love Lucy” and she would curl up
beside him, and they would laugh and laugh.
Zeus
lifted his head, cocking it to one side, and watched her. Rising to his feet,
he climbed into her lap. Kim squealed and pushed him down, yelling that he was
too big to climb into the chair with her.
By three,
she turned off the TV plunging the room in darkness. She stared at the phone,
willing him to call. At some point, she dozed into a light, restless sleep.
When she
woke again, Kim felt cold and alone. Slipping out from under the heavy quilt,
she moved toward the bay window, opened the drapes and stared outside. The moon
had long since vanished and the sky was black and forbidding; an angry January
wind howled and pressed violently against the glass. She paid no attention to
it as her mind wandered, and her eyes followed the room, coming to Ross'
smiling face in the framed photographs hanging on the wall. The scrapbook with
ripped notebook pages of handwritten love letters lay on the chair.
Three
weeks, six days and four hours. Where was he?
“I think
something's happened,” she said.
* * * * *
* *
Saturday,
January 1, 2000
10:35 AM
Black
Moon Manor was quietly lit with morning sunlight streaming in through the
windows, and the Congressman's bedroom, with an eastern exposure, was
especially bright making sleep impossible. A mass of blonde curls with a little
head poked up from under the covers and groaned.
Why hadn't they drawn the
drapery last night? Didn't he have
people
who saw to
those kinds of details,
she thought.
Stretching
an arm, she reached for the Congressman, but found the sheets empty and cold
beside her. The blonde sat up and groggily forced one eye open. She was alone
in bed. Unsnapping the handcuffs dangling around her right wrist, she wrapped a
sheet around her naked body and slipped out the room.
“Warren,
honey?” she called out in the hallway. There was no answer; the large house was
silent. The Congressman had given his staff the day off for tending last
night's New Year's Eve party and now the house seemed deathly still.
She
walked to the edge of the staircase and leaned over the banister. She tried to
remember his name.
Was it Warren or Willie or Webster?
“Winchester?
Are you hiding again?”
There was
no answer. She tiptoed downstairs. The large rooms, the banquet hall and the
dining room were all a mess, littered from the enormous amount of people now
gone. She entered the kitchen.
Long,
narrow and stainless steel, it looked even worse than the banquet hall. Jell-O
and eggs were splattered along the countertops. Chicken and ham sat spoiling in
the sink. Melted ice cream and ketchup, mustard and olives were left on the
island beside an overturned carton of milk. Shelves from inside the
refrigerator lay scattered on the countertops and across the floor. The girl
ran her hands through her long blonde mane and laughed.
“Looks
like a hurricane blew through this place,” she said and wondered if there was
anything left for breakfast.
Or at least a hangover.
She
opened the refrigerator and peered inside, then froze. The sheet wrapped around
her body fell to her ankles, as her hands rose to her mouth. She screamed.
Congressman
William Dietz was staring back at her from inside the refrigerator, folded and
stuffed like a frozen rag doll. Dark brownish-red blood stained his head,
matting his hair to his skull and leaving long streaks down his face. Thin
layers of ice flaked on his pale cheeks and in his eyelashes. His left eye,
wide open in terror, was vacant. His right eye was gone, leaving a bloody brown
crater where his eye socket had been.
The
blonde stepped back, gasping for breath. She clutched her hands over her
breasts and tried to calm herself. She was trying to think. What should she do?
She stumbled to the table and clutched a chair to help her stand.
Who should
she call?
She
inhaled deeply, remembering the acting exercises she learned in class to
relieve anxiety. She closed her eyes then counted backwards from ten.
Nine...
Eight... Seven... Six…
Okay, she
decided. I'm calm. Straightening her back, she regained her composure. First,
she shut the refrigerator,
then
looked for a phone.
There was one on the wall at the end of the counter.
She
picked up the receiver and dialed “0”
“Operator,
this is an emergency,” she said quickly. “I need the number for People Magazine.”