Steven James - The Queen

“Really, Pat”-urgency in her voice again-“I need to go. Ashton and I need to finish some things up. I’m glad you called, though.”

“Yeah.” I wanted to mention Amber, tell Lien-hua the story of what had happened five years ago, explain that Amber wasn’t a threat, but all that came out was, “I’ll look forward to that surprise, then.”

“Good. Call me tomorrow.”

“I love you,” I said.

“You too.”

After we hung up I was still thinking of Amber, of the incidents from my past that I hadn’t shared with Lien-hua. The phone felt heavy and awkward in my hand, and I nearly missed slipping it into my pocket.

“Pat?” Jake’s voice. He was standing in the doorway. I wondered how long he’d been there.

“What?” Even to me, my tone sounded somewhat sharp, but I figured if he’d been listening in on my conversation he deserved it.

“We should probably find a motel before it gets too late.”

I heard Linnaman’s voice from the living room: “You staying in Woodborough, then?”

“If possible,” Jake said.

We joined Linnaman by the couch.

“Only one there is the Moonbeam Motel. The Schoenberg’s in Elk Ridge, but the Moonbeam’s a lot closer.”

“That’s it, then.” Jake looked at me expectantly.

“All right.” I tossed him the keys. “I’ll be right out.”

I did one final walk-through, trying to do what Margaret said I was good at-noticing what needs to be noticed-but didn’t feel very successful at all.

At last I returned to the night and left with Jake for the Moonbeam Motel.

In her dorm room at U of M, Tessa listened to Patrick’s voicemail from earlier in the day-holding the phone to her right ear because of the hearing loss she’d suffered in her left ear last summer, when it all happened.

When the message ended, she set her phone on the dresser. The mirror above the sink caught her reflection, and she whisked away a strand of black hair from her eyes so she could see to wipe off her mascara.

Over the past couple years she’d flirted with the Goth look, wearing black lipstick, fingernail polish, and mascara for most of her sophomore and junior years. However, this year she’d eased up on all that, moving into more of a neo-Bohemian thing. But the dark mascara had stayed. As her friend Cherise sometimes said, “Fashion trends may come and go, but black is always sick.”

As she was washing up, she brushed her fingers across the line of thin, straight scars on her right forearm, emblems of her cutting stage in the wake of her mom’s death. They marked her search for release, narrow red lines that each brought a thread of pain while also letting a different kind of pain out.

But these days, despite being totally into screamer bands like House of Blood, Trevor Asylum, and Death by Suzie-and being pretty much addicted to gothic horror stories-she wanted nothing to do with blood or dead bodies in real life.

Nothing at all.

She’d had enough of that.

Instead, lately, she let her pain weep out onto the pages of her notebooks, filling one every week or so as she passed through the quotidian rhythm of life.

But still, the notebook wasn’t quite enough.

She took the bottle out of her overnight bag.

Stared at it for a long time.

Slipped two pills out.

She caught herself glancing at the phone as she swallowed them and decided to return Patrick’s call in the morning rather than tonight. She shed her clothes, pulled on her pajama pants and one of the old T-shirts Patrick had given her, an XL Simon Fraser University tee from the days he’d done his postgrad work in Vancouver.

Leaving the dorm room’s bathroom light on, she swung the door only partly shut, then climbed into bed and grabbed the teddy bear she’d brought with her. Occasionally over the past year Patrick had given her a hard time about sleeping with Francesca, but she had the feeling that beneath it all he was glad she hadn’t grown up completely yet; that at least in a few small ways she was still a little girl.

And he was probably relieved she was sharing her bed with a stuffed animal and not some guy.

Even if the pills did help, Tessa didn’t expect to sleep much tonight, since she barely slept at all these days, and when she did, her dreams were harsh and scraped raw with images of her being chased by a man with a cold face and barren eyes and a wide unnerving grin that still gave her chills whenever she thought of it.

She’d been a part of something last summer that she could not forget and would never forgive herself for, something she tried not to think about every night when she lay down to go to sleep.

And every day when she awoke.

But the memory of that gun beside her ear, of squeezing the trigger, of the sound of the man who was about to kill her dropping to the floor, of seeing-out of the corner of her eye-all that blood splattered across the wall…

It had all happened so fast, so It was way too much.

She slid the memory to the side. Buried it.

Refused to let it crawl to the surface.

A distraction.

That’s what she needed.

She flicked on the light beside her bed, pulled out one of her notebooks, propped herself up, and picked up a pen, “as carefully as if she were pulling out a scalpel to do surgery,” the words whispered through her mind, seemed to hover in the air before her, “against the black insidious tendrils of shame tentacling through her heart.”

Okay, that was too much. Too melodramatic. Definitely in need of editing, but something else would come.

She placed the tip of the pen against the virgin page, but hesitated. When she opened herself up like this on paper, she could be certain it would bring everything to the surface again, paradoxically making her feel worse and better at the same time.

Just like the razor blades.

But leaving different kinds of scars.

However, when she didn’t write, when she kept everything inside, the dreams only got worse. She began with a few disjointed thoughts, then wrote, my soul is famished, yet feeds on phantoms. my stomach grumbles at me, starving for something real. i lift another forkful of vapors to my mouth. when my diet is made up of so much illusion and mirage, the more moments i devour, the emptier i become.

She tinkered with the words a little, then wrote for half an hour, poems stained with the past, but the harder she tried to forget, the clearer she seemed to remember.

At last, clicking off the bedside lamp, she put the notebook aside, drew Francesca close, and stared at the light easing from the bathroom doorway. “She knew it was important that she rest,” she thought, visualizing the words again, almost as if they were scribbled on a page, “but Tessa Bernice Ellis did not close her eyes, lest the sleep she needed, the dreams she dreaded, would find her once again.”

After picking up our room keys at the motel’s front desk, Jake and I agreed to meet tomorrow morning in the lobby at 8:00, when it would finally be light enough to view Tomahawk Lake. Natasha, who would also be staying at the motel, told us that she was returning to the Pickron house in the morning but would meet up with us later in the day.

In my room, I stowed my suitcase in the closet and gave Torres, the SWAT Team Leader, a call. He told me they hadn’t found Reiser. “Don’t worry, Pat. We’re on this. We found blood on two of his knives. We checked the DNA. Matched that of two missing persons-one in Milwaukee, one in DC. The DC victim was female, but the one from Milwaukee was male. Doesn’t fit the pattern. And no prints on the knife. He must have wiped it clean.”

DC? He brought the knife in the knife block back here from DC?

“I’ll be back down there as soon as I can,” I told him.