Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“I told you already.”

“Are you paying somebody for information?” Schroder asks, and it has to be-it’s also how he knew Schroder had been suspended and not fired, though anybody who saw the news probably would have drawn the same conclusion.

“I’m psychic,” Jonas says. “It’s a gift.”

Schroder curls his right hand into a fist. Jonas sees him do it, so Schroder curls his left one into a fist too.

“Go ahead,” Jonas says, looking at Schroder. “Let me walk out of here with bruises on my face. See what the media says about that,” he says, only he doesn’t sound that sure.

“Don’t think I’m not willing to try,” Schroder tells him. “You deliberately interfered with a police investigation. When we prove you’ve either been following us or paying somebody for information, you’ll be charged. If Stanton dies, you’ll be an accessory to that.”

“That’s bullshit,” Jonas says, “and even if it weren’t bullshit, you can’t prove anything. Jessica told me to come here. I asked her, and this is where she led me.”

“Oh, we can prove it,” Schroder says. “It’s an online world, Jones. We’re going to track where your cell phone has been today, we’re going to check traffic cameras, we’re going to talk to witnesses-we’re going to dig up all of your dirty little secrets.”

Jonas is shaking his head. “No way, that’s not what happened. I talk to the dead. That’s what happened. You just have to open your mind.”

“And you know what?” Schroder asks. “I’m looking forward to doing it. Hell, even if I don’t have a job to go back to, I’m going to make it my mission to prove what an asshole you are. I might even write a book about it. What do you think, Theo?”

“I think you’d have to market it as a comedy, because this guy is a joke.”

“Very funny,” Jonas says.

“You phoned the media,” I tell him.

“The whole country is worried about Octavia,” he says. “I was trying to put them at ease.”

“With your gift,” I tell him.

“Exactly! I was right about the stab wounds too, wasn’t I?” he asks me.

“Definitely have to write it as a comedy,” Schroder says. “Or perhaps even a tragedy, because the main character doesn’t see how fucked up he really is.”

“Don’t people die in the end of tragedies?” Detective Kent asks.

“They do,” Schroder says, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his Wake-E pills. “Isn’t that right, Jonas?”

“Fuck you,” Jonas says.

“You might have a fan base who believe that shit you’re sprouting,” Schroder says, “but unless they’re on the jury, you’re going to jail for what you’ve done here.”

“You’ve got nothing you can prove, and no real reason to arrest me,” he says. “I’m a real psychic,” he says.

“Good,” Schroder says, tossing a tablet into his mouth, “because then the shit that happens in jail to you won’t come as a surprise.”

“I want my lawyer,” he says. “Until then, I’m not saying anything else.”

The two officers come inside, beaten back by the media. We leave them to watch Jonas and I head into the kitchen with Schroder and Kent and Hutton.

“What was he talking about?” Schroder asks me, “when he mentioned the stab wounds?”

“He figured out the victims had nineteen stab wounds. He told me just before the briefing. He figured it out before the rest of us.”

“And you didn’t tell us?”

“I didn’t think it made him a suspect. If anything, it made him either a great detective or very lucky.”

“So that was his idea,” Kent says, “about the stab wounds. Not yours.”

I feel myself turning red. “According to Jones, it wasn’t even his-a dead person told him.”

“Maybe he really is psychic?” Hutton suggests, proving that with questions like that his body-fat index is higher than his IQ. We all stare at him. “I mean, he did know the girl had been here,” Hutton says. “Come on, a million psychics in the world, a few of them have to be genuine, and that’d explain how he knew about the stab wounds. Some of the stuff they come up with, it’s way too accurate just to be a guess. My sister, she went to a psychic a month ago and he told her-”

“Jesus, Hutton, we get it, okay? You believe in psychics,” Detective Kent says.

“I’m just saying, is all,” he says, and shrugs.

“So what the hell do we do now? It’s already over the news,” Schroder says. “Caleb isn’t coming here. No chance of it.”

He looks at me to agree with him, and I slowly nod. He’s right. And that’s not good for Katy, her father, or for Schroder’s career and future children and victims he could have helped. He’s been caught working a case while suspended, and I’ve been caught lying to Stevens that Schroder wasn’t here. Jonas Jones has fucked us all.

But right now none of that matters.

“I need a car,” I tell him. My car has been driven back to the station, well away from the area since Caleb knew what it looked like.

He hands me his car keys. “It’ll be here in two minutes,” he says, then reaches for his phone to call for it.

Caleb was halfway to the house when it unfolded. It was breaking news. The media and the police had shown up at the house where he had left Octavia. He had pulled over and listened to the report come in, then he had done a U-turn and come back.

In the bedroom now with the TV going, he’s in time to see two cars pull up outside Tabitha’s house. Seven people step out the front door and climb into them. At first he doesn’t realize what has taken them so long, but then he figures out that it’s a replay. All of this happened twenty minutes earlier.

So, the police had lied after all. But he had never thought of the possibility of a trap. Somehow they had found Octavia. They were using her to draw Caleb back to the scene. They were using children to try and get to him, and he understood that because he too was using the kids as tools.

He’s relived that Octavia is fine. And just as equally, he’s concerned. How did the police find her? Is he leaving a trail? If so, will the police come here? Or did Tabitha manage to escape? Should he move to a new location? Where would he go? What difference would it make?

He stares at the TV, studying the man he recognizes from his earlier fight and from the cemetery last night. There’s another detective he’s seen on the news over the last few days, and then there’s Jonas Jones, the psychic he’s seen on morning breakfast shows, the psychic he’s wanted to see more than any of the others. When he started seeing them, Caleb contacted Jones only to learn the man was backlogged with clients and also charged more than Caleb could afford.

He sits on the edge of the bed with the knife back in his hand. He watches the news as it goes back in time, showing men running out of the house and approaching Jonas Jones. He is fascinated with Jones-is it possible he is looking at a true psychic? There is a confrontation. Jones starts explaining why he’s there.

Caleb tightens his grip on the knife at the sound of his daughter’s name.

Jonas Jones is saying it was Jessica that sent him there!

Why would Jessica do that?

As if to answer his thought, Jonas tells the police and the cameras that Jessica sent him there to protect the girl.

Caleb lowers the knife onto the bed. Would she really do that? He thinks that she would. Jessica was hurt-and the last thing she would want would be for another girl to be hurt too. Jesus, has he slipped so far that even his own daughter doesn’t have any faith in him?

Jones is put into handcuffs and dragged back into the house. The police look angry enough that Caleb spends the next ten seconds waiting for a gunshot and a flash of light, but it doesn’t come. The camera cuts away, and the scene is given a live update. He listens to what the reporter has to say, then switches between channels to get different perspectives on what happened, but the reporters are all saying the same thing-Jonas Jones led them to Octavia Stanton through a vision he had had where Jessica Cole, the ten-year-old girl who was murdered fifteen years ago, came to him.