Life on Mars (Take Away the Saints Anthology)

Night Walk

It was night when an attendant finally found me two showings later. I was fast asleep in the front row of a movie I'd seen ten times before, my head on the crushed velvet wall. I'd slipped in during intermission and swallowed a dose of quacks. I was groggy when the attendant shook me into the real world, fetid by stale butter and body sweat and a gnawing in my chest that was trying to chew a hole right through me.

"Miss, do we need to call the police?"

I laughed.

The movie was a black and white. Scene changes lit the dark theater in flashes, lifting the sheet off the scattered audience, then dropping it, then lifting it without warning. No single person had long enough to spy another. They had to wait for the next spray of gunfire to try again. Searching out friends or victims with film-light sparkling in their glassy eyes.

You didn't see a girl alone in the theater. You didn't see girls alone anywhere these days if she was under nineteen. How a loner like me had gone unnoticed for five hours was a testament to why the girls in Nowhere were dying in the first place.

On the sidewalk, the kiosk sign hung above me like a wall of fragile stars, I stretched my back and thought of the boy I called Lucky. Had he finished his movie without me? Or left, angry. I had an idea he was spectacular when angered.

A cigarette was what I wanted. The edge of the Quaaludes made the street soft. It had rained. Puddles caught the lamp lights and the neon window signs like a path of hellish mirrors. I walked on the curb to avoid shattering them. The storm drains smelled swampy, but I didn't mind...

The town was a different animal at night. And I liked it. The dank soil trapped in the cracks of cement and tarmac like dirt under a fingernail. The quiet on the intersections. The old newspapers bleeding words as they wasted away discarded. I could finally breathe.

I swiped a cigarette pack from a convenience store while the clerk rang up a customer and tucked them in my shirt pocket. When the thrill of walking alone wore down, and nothing happened to threaten my life or anyone else's, I turned up at the Sheriff's station.

"I thought you didn't smoke."

I spread my knees and leaned back in the waiting room chair. "On the contrary, Jimmy."

Phones rang. Officers in brown shunted papers. The lights were strainingly bright compared to the night walk I'd taken, and it was hard to look alluring with my face scrunched.

"If you won't stop, then at least do it in your father's office."

It was silent with the door shut. The blinds on the partition window looking out onto the station's main floor were shuttered. The office was not unlike my dad: closed off on the outside, an unboxed mess on the inside. Files scaled his desktop, and there was a corkboard in the corner under a warm yellow lightbulb. Everything else was dim.

The dead girls were pinned to the board. I examined the faces again as I approached. The faces that looked like mine. I ran a finger along a red strand of yarn that connected one to the other on push pins.

I stopped on Busy Hutch.

"For fucksake," I mumbled.

"Watch your language."

My dad closed the door behind him again and shuffled the files on his desk. My mouth pressed together as I listened. Busy's pale lips were sewed shut around her teeth. The longer I stared, the more I could make out her skull underneath.

I tore the picture free.

"Why is she up here?" I said and threw the glossy 8x10 on the desk.

"Fiona."

"She has nothing to do with this."

"She has similar wounds as the other four—"

"She wasn't strangled."

"She was!" he snapped and then closed his eyes and took a breath. "It could look that way with the right paperwork. I'm trying to make this go away."

Fee-o-nAH. He'd tried to shut me up.

I tossed the photo at his chest. I was short. Like my mother. And he was tall like the tree behind our house.

"You said I did this."

"It was an accident."

"I still did it. You can't disappear that like you did mom. Are you going to disappear me next? The last piece of evidence. Maybe Jimmy will do it so you don't have to."

Nothing was making a dent. Even when he stood right in front of me, he wasn't really here.

"What if I told you he's been screwing me," I tested the words. "All those times you sent me home with him. Right in the front seat."

His jaw pinched. "Stop."

Now, we were getting somewhere.

"What if I told you I wanted it."

"STOP."

But I was kidding myself, he didn't believe me. I lied, often, to change things like the film cells in a movie. He wasn't even angry.

I curled my lip, "Your life would've been better if I was never born."

"Are you high?"

"No. Maybe."

"For fucksake..."

He rubbed his forehead. My dad carried weights no one could see, but I read between the lines on his brow and the parentheses enclosing the corners of his mouth. I'd put those lines there the day I was born. I knew the stories behind them. I'd written the addendum.

"Why are you here?"

I dropped into a chair and crossed my arms. "I was out with a boy."

This caught his interest. It upset him, and for a moment, I was forefront. I was more than a passing note or a pile of dishes.

"Someone I know?"

"He's not from around here. Just passing through." This was me, adding addendums.

"Jesus!" He said. "I'm here seventy hours a week putting pinholes in prom photos of dead girls your age, and you decide to go on a date with a drifter? Do you want to die?"

The cigarette smoked in my fingers, but I didn't touch it. I was looking again at the board and the photographs tied up with strings.

"What are those?"

I pointed the stub of the cigarette toward a close-up photo of what looked like circular smudges on grainy paper. The ash tumbled off onto the office carpet, but I kept pointing.

"Burns," Dad said, and sat down. His desk chair squeaked. "The victims were tortured before they were..." he gestured at the air near his throat.

This was the longest conversation we'd had in two months.

"That wasn't in the newspapers."

"No. No it wasn't."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

He moved the glass ashtray toward the front lip of his desktop. "Because I thought you'd quit."

I was mesmerized by an idea blossoming in the field of my luded mind.

"Could the Lady Killer be a cop?"

He adjusted the nameplate on his desk, Sheriff D. Mars, and picked up the receiver on his beige rotary phone.

"It's time you went home, Fiona," he said.

And rang for Deputy Bithell.