Authors: Shay Ray Stevens
The way she looked had nothing to do with my mouth hitting
the floor. I was surprised simply for the fact it was
her
.
She had to be a senior by now—seventeen? eighteen?—but even
without seeing her headshot in the program I would have known it was her. It
was those eyes. The ones that had stared at me from across the dining room table
that October. The ones that had questioned and gotten angry.
**
“Did Elliot put you up to this?” she had asked on that
afternoon two years ago. Her question stabbed sharply at the thick air.
“I can’t tell you who filed the report.”
“You don’t even
have
to tell me who it was. I know
who it was. Who else would make up such a stupid story?”
I set my jaw and fixed my eyes in an unemotional stare.
“It’s amazing what a guy will do when he’s a little
jealous, right?” she said. “I can’t believe he went to you guys with this made
up crap…”
She slammed the papers down on the table, undoing the
perfect pile she’d spent the length of our conversation creating. She was so
angry at whoever Elliot was that I almost wanted to defend him and let her know
it wasn’t even a guy who had filed the report. It was a classmate who had moved
to town the year before and claimed she’d seen a much older man kissing Stefia
in an old green Cutlass after school. She’d played detective and supposedly
tracked the vehicle to Stefia’s neighbor, Niles Connely.
Stefia continued on her tirade against Elliot and was close
to convincing me everything between her and Niles was perfectly innocent. An
actress of the finest measure, she might have distracted many well-meaning
questioners with her witty responses and a flip of her hair. Most people would
have easily believed there was nothing going on. And I might have believed her
too, if it weren’t for her eyes.
I’ve seen and heard a lot of strange things in my
job—unbelievable things. You spend enough time on the darker side of life and
pretty soon you naturally seek out the explanations that most people don’t
realize exist. I was carefully aware of the squint in her eyes as she spoke,
the abstract anger she hurled around the room. It all told me something else was
going on and that she had firmly decided not to say a word about it.
Decisions matter, and I can’t help people who don’t want to
be helped.
Did I believe her? No. But it really didn’t matter either
way. Police work often doesn’t pan out like in the movies. We don’t sneak
around and search for clues. We can’t just pretend we have a reason for wanting
to know or being somewhere we shouldn’t be. More often than not, if the cards
don’t line up, there is simply nothing we can do. If Stefia wouldn’t say
anything, I had to move on.
And no matter how hard I tried, she wouldn’t say a thing.
But then the victim almost never does.
**
Stefia continued her parade around the stage, now in a more
conservative costume, angry at something another actor had said to her
character. I’d missed the exchange while my mind wandered, and I worked to get
back into the plotline of the play.
“You don’t have a clue,” Stefia bawled across the stage. “You
don’t know anything about what’s going on…”
“How can I know if you won’t tell me?” her fellow actor
spit back. He pounced at her, taking both wrists and shaking her.
God, how often I’d felt that way when talking to the
victim. I wanted to shake them. Slap them. Grab them by the face and push their
lips open.
Why can’t you just tell me?
Open up and say something.
The world is so full of noise and yet void of the things
that need to be said. And as Stefia regurgitated lines that someone else had
written down, I couldn’t help but wonder if the stage was where she finally got
out the things she needed to say without the commitment of having admitted
them.
They were just lines, right? She was only reading lines.
Some might have said I was over-analyzing the situation.
Others might have thought it was just part of being a cop and looking deeper
than I needed to. I called it being careful. Paying attention. Not being fooled
twice.
Not that she’d fooled me the first time. Like I said, I’d
guessed as I sat across from her at the dining room table that afternoon that
she wasn’t telling the full story. But six months later at Beidermann’s completely
confirmed it.
At least it did for me.
I’d been hired at Becker County as their newest deputy and
Chief Randall decided a shake at Beidermann’s was an appropriate send off. So
after I signed off as an officer with Granite Ledge for the last time, I met
Randall in the parking lot of Beidermann’s.
“I hate to see you go, kid,” he said as we waited in line
at the outdoor counter. It was unusually warm for April and I was looking
forward to the cool ice cream sliding down my throat.
“Thanks, Chief.”
“But I know Becker is where you really wanted to work,” he
continued. “I’m glad they hired you. They’re getting a fine addition to their
department.”
He slapped me on the shoulder and turned to place our order.
“Two banana split shakes,” he told the girl behind counter,
and handed her cash to pay.
Chief Randall then made small talk with the girl who whipped
up our shakes, something about a surgery the girl’s mother had scheduled for
the following week. I politely nodded along to their conversation, but found
myself distracted by the old green Cutlass that had pulled into the parking
lot.
The driver’s side door opened and a tall and distinguished
looking gent who I guessed to be in his late 40s stepped out. He dressed as
though he didn’t belong in small town Minnesota; his perfectly tailored skinny
slacked suit gave him the appearance of someone merely passing through,
possibly lost.
Ah. Niles Connelly, the eccentric and wealthy part owner of
the Crystal Plains Theater. He walked around to the other side of the car and
leaned down to his passenger through the open window. He flashed a dazzling
smile at whoever sat there, then walked towards the outdoor counter to place
his order.
Paying no attention whatsoever to the conversation Chief
Randall was having, I slowly moved away from the counter to get a better look
at who was sitting in the passenger seat. When my suspicions were confirmed, I
casually moved towards the car, approaching it from the back bumper.
“Gosh, Niles,” Stefia said when she sensed me coming up by
her window. “You’re always so fast.”
Then she looked up from where she sat.
Two things happened at exactly the same moment. One of them
was that Stefia realized I wasn’t Niles. The second was that I noticed Stefia’s
skirt was cinched up on her left leg—so high that I could see the turquoise
colored lace on the edge of her panties.
“Just your neighbor?” I said, watching her fingers clasp at
the hem of her skirt as she slowly pulled down the fabric to cover her thigh.
She stared straight ahead out the windshield like I wasn’t
even there. I put my hand on the roof of the Cutlass and bent down so she could
see my face.
“You know, you might be fooling a lot of people,” I
whispered into the car, “but for the record you have never fooled me.”
She continued staring straight ahead, keeping her breath
constant and measured.
“So, Stefia Lenae Krist, I’m gonna ask you one more time if
there is anything you want to tell me.”
She turned from the windshield and looked right at my face
with those bottomless eyes.
“He’s just my neighbor.”
I blinked.
“And,” she continued, “the owner of the theater I work at.”
“Bullshit,” I hissed into the car.
“Yeah? Prove it.”
And then she smiled because she knew I couldn’t.
**
The performance continued on stage in front of us, but I’d
spent so much time in flashbacks I wasn’t even sure what the storyline was that
I’d paid sixty bucks for Mindy and I to see.
It almost didn’t matter.
“You can’t prove what you can’t see,” Stefia said to
another actor on stage.
It almost didn’t matter because it was as if the lines she
recited in the play were delivered with perfect timing to the disgusting
nostalgia in my head. Questions about everything I’d done or failed to do
stabbed at my brain as my stomach worked itself into a giant knot. My armpits
wept with perspiration like it was July, not February, and a warm twinge of
nausea pricked at the top of my throat. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, trying
not to be a distraction.
“What’s wrong?” Mindy whispered.
It obviously wasn’t working
“I don’t feel well at all,” I said, swallowing hard. “I need
to sneak out for a bit.”
She nodded and I left as quietly as possible, whispering
apologies to a few patrons who didn’t bother to hide their annoyance. An usher
standing at the doors pointed the way through the lobby to the restrooms.
I ran water in one of the sinks until it was icy cold and
then cupped my hands under the stream. I lowered my face into the puddle I held
in my palms, a soothing chill enveloping my head.
The mirror reflected a pale face back to me.
**
What do you do when people won’t say anything? What
can
you do?
I was only eleven when I had woke early that morning to
hear mom crying in her room. Nameless Boyfriend Number Six had just left, but
not before screaming obscenities and cracking mom’s face against the
nightstand.
I wanted to help her. My god, the frustration of standing
over her how many times as she bled into the carpet, the helplessness of
hearing, “Don’t tell anyone, Gage. He didn’t mean to.” I couldn’t fathom her
slipping away, moment by moment, year by year, and knowing all she had to do
was speak up. Tell somebody. Make an admission.
At fifteen, I rested my hand on top of my mother’s closed
casket and spit out guilt and frustration at her defeated body that had been
beaten lifeless for no other reason than she’d believed her lips were sewn
shut. I had tried to make things better. I had tried to help my mother, but it was
like watching a shadow bind a piano wire around her throat while she believed
she had no hands to pull it off. I couldn’t open her mouth for her. I could not
reach down her throat and pull the words out. I couldn’t help her.
Maybe that’s why I became a cop. In some naive corner of my
head I believed that some victim somewhere would be saved if I just walked in
and said, “Tell him to stop!” It hadn’t worked for my mother, but maybe it was
because I had started too late. If I got there quicker…if I started earlier…I
was going to empower someone. I was going to save someone’s life.
The longer I was a cop, the more I realized that superhero
I’m
going to change the world
fairy tale was a joke. You couldn’t help every person.
Shit, you couldn’t help
most
people. There were an infinite number of
souls who slipped through the cracks because of their own decisions, and that’s
just the way it was.
**
I checked the men’s room mirror again, desperately hoping
for a darker shade of pale than when I’d first splashed my face.
And then I heard it. Screaming from somewhere outside the
bathroom.
I pulled open the restroom door and the chaotic discord
swelled. They were not squeals of delight in reaction to a stage effect, nor
were they cries of surprise or awe. No, this wailing was primal. A collective
howl of frantic voices that pricked something raw at the base of my neck.
Something was wrong inside the theater.
I picked up my step, headed for the door to the audience, my
head electric and alive with synapses firing in preparation for whatever was
happening inside.
And then I heard it. A gunshot.
And then another one. Another gunshot.
The average reaction time for a cop is 2.2 seconds. It’s
immediate. It was the entire reason we trained. I couldn’t tell you how many
situations I’d been in where my brain quickly processed I should grab for my
gun, and I looked down to find it was already in my hand.
Another gunshot. And another one.
Shit.
I hated Granite Ledge.
Before I reached the door of the theater, it slammed open,
a crowd of patrons spilling into the lobby. They screamed in disjointed, short
breathed phrases I couldn’t string together.
“The shooter?” I questioned one man. “Where is the shooting
coming from?”
“Stage,” was all he could choke out.
Shit.
Slowly pulling open the theater door and slipping inside, I
probed my way into the dark audience. Always aware of my back, my feet, my
head, where my gun was pointed, the crying from behind me as I crept forward in
the aisle.
Taking shelter behind a ledge, I craned my neck to see
ahead. In the stage lights still lit, I could see three bodies lying on stage,
blood leaking into puddles around them.