Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

Annie walked past Drew without a response. She went to the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and knelt at the side of the tub. Laurie was pink and shiny with several Band-Aids on her fingers and gauze wrapped around her knuckles. Because of the dressings, her hands were marooned on the sides of the tub. Otherwise she was perfectly formed. Three Barbies surrounded her, floating facedown, arms and legs extended, hair adrift like miniature drowning victims.

That’s when Annie noticed the Nokia cell phone lying on the wet floor. She picked it up. “Is this your dad’s?” she said.

Laurie clammed up and pursed her lips tight together. But she bobbed her head affirmatively. Annie slipped the phone into her purse. “This shouldn’t be in here on the floor where it can get wet,” she said.

“I really need my dad to wash me. My hands hurt if I get them wet,” Laurie said.

“Okay, I’ll tell him. But right now I have a present for you,” Annie said.

“Oh-thank you,” Laurie said apprehensively.

Annie took the medallion from her purse and carefully draped the chain around Laurie’s neck. Then she gently patted Laurie on the cheek, stood up, and left the bathroom.

Drew puttered in his cramped kitchen area, getting an ice tray from the small refrigerator. He dropped some cubes into two glasses and added ginger ale. In the bathroom, Laurie began to sing a lackadaisical lyric of her own invention. Annie stood very still in the middle of the room with her purse slung over her shoulder. She had her right hand stuffed into its depths.

“You know what the really hard thing is?” she said.

Drew carried the two glasses of ginger ale to his round coffee table. “What’s that?” He indicated one of the chairs, then sat in the other one.

“My father started making sexual advances toward me and my sister when we were not much older than Laurie in there,” Annie said.

Drew’s head came up abruptly. “That’s horrible.” He watched her for several beats. Annie had the feeling he was making some great male discovery about her and sex. “It must be difficult to talk about,” he said, leaning forward, looking genuinely concerned.

Smooth.

“It is, but right now I need to,” Annie said.

Drew nodded. “I’m a good listener.”

“I guess what set me off was seeing you and your daughter and you being naked. That’s like my dad; he’d wash us and then he’d show us how to-wash him.”

Drew winced. “You mean. .”

Annie nodded and studied his face. “Right, I mean .” An edge hardened in her voice that Drew hadn’t heard before. “By the time we were eleven, he had progressed to actual intercourse with Angela, my twin sister. Angela had always protected me. She convinced Dad to do it to her and leave me alone. I’d lie in bed and pray to God to help me. But the only person who helped me was my sister. I pretended I was invisible.”

Drew studied her face. Annie thought the story fascinated him. Just as he’d seemed to be excited by making love behind a curtain while his daughter watched TV fifteen feet away.

But his voice was serious. “Makes sense, denial as a cloaking mechanism. It’s one of the ways kids cope. Jeez, Annie, I’m really sorry. . how long did this go on?” He removed an ice cube from his glass and slid it in little melting circles on his sweaty chest.

“Until we were fifteen; that’s when Dad had a heart attack and died.”

“What about your mom?”

“She denied it right up until her death. Angela tried to stuff it, too. She worked hard as an attorney, but she had to take meds for depression.” Annie paused and set her jaw. “The meds didn’t work for the cancer.”

Drew winced. “Cancer? On top of. . Jesus, Annie, what happened to you?”

Annie shrugged. “I went to college in Madison. I floated from library to library and wound up back here. But when Angela died, something just. . snapped. That was just about the time Ronald Dolman was acquitted.” Annie leaned forward. “You remember Dolman?”

“Sure,” Drew said, “the child molester last summer. He was. . wait a minute.” Drew sat up, thinking out loud. “On the news last night, the prosecutor who committed suicide; they hinted she might have killed that guy last summer as well as a woman yesterday-that she was. .?”

“The Saint.”

“Yeah, the Saint.” The indulgent afterglow dropped from Drew’s face. He narrowed his eyes. “What are we talking about here?”

Annie withdrew her hand from the purse and dropped the medallion and chain on the table.

He pushed the chain with his finger. “What’s this?”

“St. Nicholas, he’s the patron saint of children. That’s why I gave one to Laurie just now.”

Drew sat up and looked at the bathroom door. “Wait a minute, you what ?”

“Hung it around her neck, to protect her.”

Drew began to breathe more rapidly.

Here comes the first fear, Annie thought. “Do you know how Ronald Dolman died?”

Drew tensed forward in his chair. Instinctively, he measured distances: the distance between himself and Annie, the distance to the bathroom, the distance to the telephone on his drawing table.

“Someone shot him,” Drew said slowly.

Annie nodded. “With a thirty-eight-caliber Colt Detective Special revolver with a two-inch barrel. Would you like to see it?”

Drew’s chair banged on the floor as he startled and planted his feet, pushing away from the table when Annie smoothly pulled the revolver from her purse.

“Oh my God,” Drew muttered. His eyes fixed on the bathroom door. “Laurie,” he said.

“Laurie has nothing to fear. She’s going to be safe. Now she is, I mean,” Annie said. “You sit very still. I’m not through talking.” She thumbed back the hammer and steadied the barrel at Drew’s chest. “You don’t know much about guns, do you?”

Drew shook his head. His eyes were riveted to the bullet tips he could see inside the pistol’s cylinder.

“Well, I do. Harry taught me. This is a double-action revolver. Cocking the hammer makes the trigger pull smoother,” Annie said.

It was silent in the room for a few beats. Just the faint sound of Laurie singing in her bath.

“Please, take it easy with that,” Drew said.

“Settle down, drink your ginger ale,” Annie said. “See, my sister had just died, and I was going through her things. She had this wig-well, that’s a long story-but the thing was, I was going out with Harry, and he’d go off all weekend with that Gloria Russell. We used to do a lot of things together until. . he bought her a gun and taught her to shoot.” Annie brandished the pistol. “This gun.”

Drew squirmed against the back of his chair, seeing the hate come to Annie’s face.

“He’d have me over and get his kicks; then he’d stick me in front of the TV and go down in the basement and load bullets for her to practice with. So I started watching her, when she left her apartment, when she came back. It was last summer, so she left her windows open. There was a perfect tree under the window. I climbed up, slit the screen, went in her bedroom, and took the gun.”

Annie drew herself up. “Then Gloria let Dolman get away. Harry came over drunk and said how she was raving about wanting to kill the guy. I even drove him over to her place so he could take the gun off her.” Annie smiled. “But the gun wasn’t there.” She moved the pistol out of line long enough to give it an admiring look.

“Maybe Gloria failed, but her gun didn’t. And the bullet casings left with the body could be traced back to her. All I had to do was return the gun to her apartment, hide it, and tip the cops.” Annie’s smile jerked on her lips. “But I kept. . putting it off. .”