Andrea Lepri - The Last Christmas On Earth

It was the typical dead moment when one would like to ask a question, but at the same time he fears a question from the other, so neither of them makes the first move to not open things up.

"Can you recommend a good Motel?" Luke asked to break the awkward silence.

"Go ahead for five or six miles and you'll see the Spring sign. It's clean and well equipped, the food is good and its prices are honest."

"Well, thanks for everything. See you soon," Luke greeted him, shifting the gear. The attendant answered with an awkward hand gesture.

"... I know that I am a pain in the ass, a cynic and that I have a bad temper and I recognize that if you have organized all this to make me a joke I probably deserved it" the Coroner mumbled, "but I guarantee you that it is not funny at all. To get the reports and come here as soon as possible I had to raise hell, I antagonized the staff of the whole laboratory of analysis," he added, while Helen stared in shock at the empty beds she had taken from the cold room.

On the metal floors, there were only a few hairs and a few shreds of skin left, and she wasn't even sure that they had belonged to the bodies of those two or even to those who had occupied those beds before them.

"Come on, where did you hide the bodies?" Stevenson asked, pulling out all the compartments from the cold room one after the other, but he found them all empty. "Have you already sent them to their relatives?" He went on, rummaging through the desk drawers, looking for documents attesting to the transfer. Helen gave him an expressionless look, then put her hands to her face, bowing her head and then Stevenson calmed down.

"Do you realize that two bodies have disappeared here?" He asked good-naturedly. "What are you going to do?" He insisted after a few moments, but Helen remained barricaded behind a wall of silence. Then the Coroner sat down at his desk and pulled his packaged sandwich out of his leather briefcase, always keeping one of it for every eventuality because he became even more ravenous when he was nervous. He began to unwrap it and the noise of the tin foil attracted the attention of Helen, who finally uncovered her eyes and surprised him with his hands fixed on the sandwich and his open mouth ready to bite it. He froze.

"I ... I ... oh, dam nit!" he exclaimed. He threw the sandwich angrily into the garbage can, picked up his belongings and walked down the corridor to leave. At the front door, he met James, who was returning from his visit to Bob.

"Hey Stevie, where are you going so fast?" he greeted him.

"Go to hell!" Replied the Coroner pulling straight on his way.

It took Luke Mc January less than a minute to realize that the chirping lady who ran the Spring, a beautiful woman in her fifties named Sally, was the gas station attendant's wife. He booked the room until the end of the Lobster's Festival and exchanged a few chats with the lady, studied the map of the area hanging in the small hall to put the focal points well in his mind and finally went inside of the room. He found it small but welcoming, the door was half armored and the windows had double glazing; furthermore, he was satisfied that the furniture included the two things he needed the most, a desk and a bar fridge. He opened it to check the contents and found that in the freezer compartment there were even ready-made ice cubes, then he took from the travel bag his inseparable shaker and the ingredients necessary to prepare his habitual drink, the devastating and horrible mixture he had named "L.M.J." . Between a sip and the other, he unpacked the few bags he had with him and arranged them with meticulous care in the wardrobe and in the chest of drawers. Once the unpacking operations were completed, he put his precious briefcase under the bed and sat at the desk to update his logbook. When he finished he closed the notebook and looked at the phone, because like every time he arrived in a new place he was tempted to make a few calls, but like every time he told himself too much time had passed since he showed up, and give up the idea. He lay down on the bed to finish his L.M.J. and thought back pleased about the reaction the gas attendant had when he saw the photograph hanging from the sun visor: that was the umpteenth confirmation to his theory that the old trick of arousing curiosity in the interlocutor always works and that, moreover, it is much healthier than going around asking direct questions. He had learned it at his own experience that time when, by asking too much, he had hit someone's susceptibility and received very annoying answers. Instead, he had just thrown his bait and now he knew that sooner or later some fish would take it, it was just a matter of time. Luke then judged the fact that the attendant had sent him to his wife's Motel had been another stroke of luck, because if you know how to take them the right way, women can be very talkative. He told himself that he had to walk on eggshells because he had been already disappointed several times, but the attendant gave him the impression he knew the person depicted in the picture very well. It could also be only a resemblance, but contrary to his initial expectations there were instead good chances this time he had definitely hit the mark. Or at least that he went very close. He smiled and narrowed his eyes to rest a little; later he would have gone for a pizza and a beer in the village pub, because often in those places it is enough to know how to listen to rumor to be able to capture important information.

For the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, Helen and James had fruitlessly stuck looking for an idea, a logical thread, a clue.

"Just yesterday, Stevenson had told me jokingly, but it seems to me to be right in the middle of an episode of X Files ..." Helen murmured suddenly demoralized.

"The only thing I'm sure of is that fortunately, you weren't here last night, everything else counts very little for me..." James answered seriously, and she nodded gravely. He sensed how deeply she was suffering and felt the impulse to embrace her, but after the incident of the night before he was not sure she wanted that too. And then, shortly afterward all the agents would have returned, if someone had caught them in an equivocal attitude they would have added complications to the problems.

"What can we do?" Helen asked in a faint voice.

"I swear I wish I knew," he replied, disheartened.

"Perhaps it would really be appropriate to call the Bureau, what do you think?" She then proposed judging that they had already run out of gas. James looked out the window and found himself frustrated.

If they haven't had all those problems it would have been a wonderful sunny day, one of those that at the end of the shift you take your family and load them in the car driving straight to the sea to take a nice bath, so much for December. And then to eat a sumptuous pizza. He snorted indecisively.

"I believe it would not be good. Obviously, something happened beyond our understanding, there are very powerful forces at play that we do not know and that act in the shadows. Stevenson is probably right, maybe the best thing would be to simply pretend that nothing ever happened ..." he suggested.

"You know it's not possible. Surely sooner or later this story will come up and then someone will come and ask us to give an explanation of what happened," Helen objected.

"On the contrary, it seems to me that whoever is behind all this is working to eliminate all evidence of what happened. Indeed, if we were to tell this story, that someone would do anything to make us ridicule or, worse, to put us in silence. Except for this mysterious box, which until proven otherwise could only be an empty box, we have nothing in hand. And, furthermore, by making this story known, we would be investigated for letting us swindle all the evidence in such a manner," James explained.