Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“Lots of cars,” he answers.

“Describe it to me.”

“Geez, I don’t know,” he snaps. “Ten or more cars. What’s the difference? There’re people walking around with weird-looking equipment looking at the ground, kind of like lawn mowers but not lawn mowers.”

“They’re looking for bodies.”

“What they’re doing is walking through my home! They’re ruining it with their. . their lights and equipment and touching everything. I thought it would be good going out there, I thought they wouldn’t come. You said if they did they would just look around and leave! I went into the trees up on the hill and waited for them to go but they’re not going. They’re all walking and searching and invading my home. Our home!”

“Listen to me, Adrian. It’s going to be okay. But you have to be careful not to get caught, Adrian.”

“I wish I knew who each of them were,” Adrian says, not listening, and there is blood in his hairline and while he talks, he digs a finger into it and starts scratching. His other hand goes to his neck and starts scratching at that too. Cooper can see welts beginning to appear. “I should invade their lives in the same way. I should make a list, a list like I made with those mean boys, only this time instead of killing their pets I’ll kill them. I’ll visit each and every one of them. Let’s see how they like having their homes invaded!”

“You’re bleeding,” Cooper says.

“What?” Adrian pulls his fingers away and looks at them. “Sometimes I get itchy,” he says and goes back to scratching. “But you were right, Cooper. You didn’t lie or trick me and if there’s a silver lining here then that’s it.”

“Listen, Adrian, you need to focus here. The woman last night, the one we killed,” Cooper says, including Adrian in on the killing, “where did you bury her?”

“I hid up in the trees and nobody knew I was there,” Adrian says. “When I was young I used to dream of escaping to those trees. I’d imagine what it would be like picking fruit and cooking rabbits and never having to deal with people again.”

“You hid the girl up there?”

“Those dreams led me to think about getting cold and lonely and struggling to survive.”

“Adrian!”

“What?”

“The girl,” Cooper says, talking slowly, talking calmly. “Did you hide her up there?”

“What? No. How many?”

“How many what?” Cooper asks.

“How many girls have you really killed?”

“Why? I told you already.”

“How many are buried at Sunnyview?”

“What? I don’t know, a few, I guess.”

“How can you not know?” Adrian asks, and Cooper is worried that if he keeps scratching himself at the current rate he’ll bleed to death in the corridor and then he’ll never be getting out of here.

“Calm down, Adrian.”

“How many?” Adrian asks, almost screaming now. Spittle flies from his lips through the slot.

“One. There is one buried there,” he says.

“The girl you took out there on Monday night?”

Emma Green? No. Emma Green is still alive, at least he thinks she is. And if this is Sunnyview, then Adrian would have found her already. Okay. There are two possibilities. Either Adrian hasn’t checked all the rooms-and really, there is no reason he should-or they’re not at Sunnyview. Which means they might be at Eastlake, which means Adrian has been lying to him.

“What are you going to do with her?” he asks, avoiding the question. Let Adrian think what he wants to think.

“I just need her, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

“If I tell you, will you let me out?” Cooper asks.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Then I’ll think about telling you.”

“But I need to know,” Adrian shouts, and he bangs his hands against the door. “Please. It’s important. I have to know. Have to!”

“I can show you.”

“No, no, you have to tell me.”

“Why?”

“In case the police find her,” Adrian says.

“You’re lying,” Cooper says.

“Please, I just really need that body. I promise when I get back things will change. You want water, right? And you said it’s too hot, right? Tell me where she is and I’ll give you water and fresh air. If you don’t tell me then that means you don’t want to be my friend so I may as well close this slot and never come back.”

As much as Cooper would love to never see Adrian again, being locked in here would be an awful, awful way to die.

“I’ll tell you where she is,” Cooper says, “and then we start working as a team, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But first, Adrian, you still haven’t told me where the girl from last night is.”

“In the ground, of course.”

“How far away from the building?”

“I think the police have already found her,” Adrian says.

“Shit,” Cooper says, banging his fist against the door. The body will give them a whole lot of evidence to work with. “And the knife?”

“The knife is here,” Adrian says. “I would never throw it away.”

Good. That’s at least something. “Listen to me, it’s time you let me out. I can’t afford to get caught. Neither of us can. We have to get away from Christchurch. We have to try and leave the country. If we work together we’ll be okay, but you have to start by letting me out and we have to trust each other.”

“You said you were going to tell me where the girl is,” Adrian says, almost whining.

Yeah, he knows what he said, but his mind is all over the place, probing at every possibility. “There’s a path that goes around the back,” Cooper says, giving him directions to the girl who gave up on him last year and died. “Keep following it, it follows a low brick wall. You come to the end of that brick wall and you turn right. Walk fifteen meters parallel to the building and you’ll find a ditch. Follow the ditch further from the building another twenty or thirty meters and you’ll find a tree that’s fallen over. Cross over that tree, walk another ten meters, and that’s where she is.”

Adrian closes the slot.

“Hey, hey, Adrian,” Cooper says, banging against the wall, but Adrian is gone, and all Cooper can do is lie back down and wait.

Adrian feels agitated. He needs to do something to release the anger and there are only a couple of things he’s good at. His face is hot and he digs at the itches and flicks the hair off his forehead as he runs back out to the car. He’d left it running. It’s not like there was anybody out here to steal it. Up on that hill looking down at those men, they all looked like ants. He pinched his forefinger against his thumb and pretended to squash them, then he turned his fingers into a gun and pretended to shoot them instead. It’s what he should have done to those boys back in school. Should have gotten a gun and finished them off instead of killing their stupid pets.

He snaps off a branch from the tree the car is parked under and uses it to get at the itch centered in his back. It tears at his skin but it’s immediately soothing. The backs of his arms are starting to get blotchy, his skin raised up and raw-looking. This only ever happens when the stress arrives quickly. He snaps the stick in half and throws it onto the driveway. He wants to scream, to release some energy. He would get like this on occasion during his Grover Hills years. Things would upset him, and he wouldn’t be able to calm down. Things like eating nothing but mashed potatoes for a hundred days in a row or not being allowed to go outside for an entire summer. He would panic and scream and he’d be put into the Scream Room and left there for a couple of days, sometimes he’d be beaten. Other times he’d be left alone until his frustration faded and he’d forget why he was so mad. More than once he’d be left down there and he’d beat his hands bloody on the door, begging to be let out.