Lisa Unger - Smoke

“When I look at you,” he said, “I see what they’ve sold you. This color in your hair, these clothes to hide a body you think is substandard, this paint to hide a face you don’t want to see when you look in the mirror. But I also see you .”

The woman started to tear, put a hand to her mouth. “You’re beautiful,” he told her. “You don’t need to hide from me.”

He embraced her then and she started to sob. She could hear other women in the audience start to sniffle. One man got up and left. No one tried to stop him; he was shaking his head skeptically as he stalked past Lydia. She noticed that he didn’t have a cup.

All the people in here had come because they were in pain; there was no other reason to join a group like this, no reason to come here. Lydia would bet that on the meta-tags of the New Day website, they’d listed words like “depression,” “despair,” “loneliness,”… maybe even things like “weight loss” or “hair loss.” So that anyone searching for those words on the Internet might find a link to The New Day. She glanced at her watch and wondered whether Dax and Jeffrey were in place.

“In this New Day,” Rhames went on, “you work for the betterment of yourself and for the world around you, not for the profit of some corporate giant. You spend your free time getting to know God by getting to know yourself, cleansing yourself of the poisons you’ve been fed since before you were old enough to even know what was happening to you. Imagine a life free from addiction, anxiety, depression, bad relationships, dead-end jobs, and financial worry.

“Imagine,” he said, a wide smile splitting his face. “Imagine a New Day.”

As Rhames continued his spiel, Lydia waited for him to turn his back for a second, then slipped from the darkened room into the hallway. She stood there for a moment, looked around her as if lost and trying to orient herself. She looked for cameras, waited for some tunic-clad hippie to arrive and escort her from the building. But if there were cameras in the long hallway, she couldn’t see them. And when no one came, she made her way deeper into the building, toward the kitchen. Dax had managed to obtain an old building layout from his contact, so she had an idea which way to go, though she’d never really been good with maps.

Doors were closed; lights were dim. There was a palpable hush. The building had an air of desertion to it, like a school empty for the summer, its hallways echoing with the memory of footfalls and voices. Lydia walked quickly, trying to keep her boot heels from clicking on the tile floors.

When she came to the place she thought the door should be, she realized that she must have turned right where she should have turned left. She doubled back, feeling a little stupid, butterflies in her stomach. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy to move around a building that had such tight security. It would have been more logical for Jeffrey to come in with the meeting group, she knew that. But she’d had a strong desire to see Trevor Rhames, to understand more about The New Day. Now she wondered, as she usually wound up doing at some point, if she should have listened to Jeffrey. Maybe they knew who she was, were watching her, giving her just enough rope to hang herself. Then again, maybe she was just being paranoid. Maybe the cameras Dax had mentioned didn’t come on until the building locked down.

At the end of a long hallway, she came to an institutional-sized kitchen. She pushed through one of the doors marked NEW DAY STAFF ONLY. In the dark, she felt her way through a maze of large ovens and grills, metal sinks and cabinets, shelves of canned goods. It was a kitchen that served a lot of people, maybe hundreds. For some reason the place gave her the chills.

At the back of kitchen, she found the door and took a deep breath before opening it, bracing herself for an alarm if Dax’s intel was wrong and preparing herself for a sprint. But the door pushed open quietly and standing there was her favorite sight. Jeffrey. He stepped inside and took a roll of electrical tape from his pocket and taped the latch of the door down so that it appeared closed but remained unlocked. When the place shut down, they’d still have a way out, unless the system read that a door wasn’t closed properly. She let the door shut behind him.

“I told you it would be all right,” she said.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Anyway, what are we looking for in here?”

“Lily Samuels for one. Or any evidence that she might have been here,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know exactly. I guess we’ll know it when we see it.”

Hello?” The voice was groggy, as if its owner had been sleeping. Matt looked at the clock. It was just after ten… not that late.

“I’m looking for Randall Holmes.”

There was a pause on the line, a drawing in of breath, a rustling of sheets.

“Who’s calling?” It was hard to tell if he was talking to a man or a woman, the voice was hoarse, sounded old.

“This is Detective Stenopolis from the NYPD. Mr. Holmes made a call to a tip line. I’m following up, sir. Sorry for the late hour.”

The voice heaved a sigh. “Son, that was two weeks ago.”

“You’re Randall Holmes?”

“Well, who the hell else would I be? You called me.”

Matt smiled. “You’re right, sir. I’m sorry.”

The man grunted on the other end of the line.

“You told the tip line operator that you saw Lily Samuels in church. Is that right, sir?”

“No, that’s not what I said,” he said. “That place is no church, I’ll tell you that. Bunch of Moonies, if you ask me.”

“Which place?”

He heard the man breathing heavily on the other line. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

Matt put his head into his hand. After going through Lily’s file and finding nothing, he’d started sifting through some copies of the tip line transcripts he’d brought home with him. About halfway through the stack, he’d come across Randall Holmes, who’d claimed that he’d seen Lily at church. The notation from whoever took the call was that Holmes was “unstable, ranting.” A note indicated that Jesamyn had made a follow-up call the next day and came to the same conclusion, that the guy was nuts. But now, knowing about The New Day, this call about a church from a man who lived in Riverdale held more potential. At least that’s what Matt had hoped.

“Sir, I’m a Missing Persons detective with the NYPD. I’m one of the good guys. I promise.”

The old man snorted. “I’ve heard that one before.”

Matt sighed, feeling disappointment and frustration squeeze at the back of his neck, tense the muscles on his shoulders. Another dead end.

“Okay, Mr. Holmes, thanks for your time,” he said, getting ready to hang up and go to sleep.

“Anyway, you’re too late,” he whispered.

“Too late for what?”

“Too late to help that girl.”

Matt felt his stomach do a little flip. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I watch them go in. Some of them come out. Some of them don’t. I sit on the porch after most of the others have gone to sleep. I like to go outside still, like to breathe the clean air. The rest of the people in this place are already dead, they’re just waiting to stop breathing. Not me. I want to suck every last breath of air out of this world.”

“Where are you, sir?”

There was a pause. “At the home here, the Sunnyvale Home for the Elderly. Boy, you don’t know much of anything, do you?”

He was calling from almost directly across the street from The New Day.

“No, sir, not really. Maybe you could help me out.”

“I sit in the dark corner of the porch so I can see without being seen, you know. It’s always so much better not to be seen.”