Haunted Organic (2014 Watty Award Winner)

Five: Ticker (Part 2)

FIVE - Ticker (Part 2)

Josie left the interrogation room. The belly of the police station was bustling, but everything stopped dead as soon as he walked in. No voices. Just whispers. The clacking of keyboard keys. The slight moving of chairs. The whirr of fans. All eyes following him.

They hated him.

He felt their loathing pelt his skin like little lead balls. He kept his head low, but he could see, out of the corner of his eye, Miss Hanes sat at a police desk, signing a piece of paper. She talked in a whispered voice to two women sitting next to her, Gerty and Frida.

That's how they knew about the nightmares. Miss Hanes had told them.

He walked by them, trying not to look, but still wanting to see their eyes, so he could gauge how much they hated him, how far this all had gone. Miss Hanes looked at him as if he were a slug in the dirt, no better.

Gerty, her eyes rimmed with red and sorrow, watched every step he took, carefully sized him up, and stared him down. He was her undoing and she wanted him to see it and feel her pain. She lunged at him, and a police officer grabbed her and held her back. The tears poured out of her. Her voice unable to form words, simply shrieked. And then, she collapsed into a puddle of her own loose parts.

Frida was stone, pure stone, unable to cry or even look his way. She couldn't admit that he even existed. She could barely imagine that Trinket was gone at all and half expected her to be playing in the front yard when they got home.

Josie kept walking. He heard only his own steps on the tile floor. Then, just as his hand hit the door handle, just as he was almost out of the station, he heard Miss Hanes talking, her voice quivering and fast.

"He told me he had dreams about hurting her....Oh, why didn't I take him seriously...I could've stopped him..." Then, her voice went muffled, and Josie suspected she had buried her head in her hands.

He pictured Miss Hane's bush of hair shaking like Jello.

&&&&

They didn't have enough evidence to charge Josie, but The Barrel and most of the neighbors on Tamarama Street had made up their minds, of this he was sure - they believed he had either killed or abducted Trinket.. He was released to his parents custody and only allowed to be at home or at school.

Not that leaving was a possibility anyway. News vans lined the street, watching for any glimpse of him, ready to pounce with questions like: "Why did you do it?" and "Where did you bury the body, Josie?"

Trinket's disappearance was the biggest news story of the year, photos of the girl hung on every lamp post, teams of volunteers worked the neighborhoods and beaches, looking for signs of her.

The old ladies gathered inside the Organic Food Store comparing the days apples and new developments in the case.

"I heard they found a body floating in the tide pools at Bondi," Mrs. Fockerson said, smelling the rock melon.

"Really?!..." gasped Mrs. Kippelibby. "I heard the Browns had Josie admitted to a mental institution when he was three."

And then, she whispered conspiratorially over the rutabagas, "Heard he's quiet because they gave him all kinds of electro-shock treatments...made him loopy in the head."

Mrs. Kippelibby made the crazy sign next to her head with her index finger.

"I saw him looking at me once..." said Agnes Heddlemonkey, butting in, while fingering the parsnips.

"Scariest day of me whole life," she said without even noticing, she said in her thick Scottish brogue.

A mob formed outside Josie's house, carrying signs with Trinket's photo, the sweet ruby-haired, fat-cheeked baby with the pink pacifier in her mouth. They shouted for Josie to turn himself in. They carried signs with his photo, with the words "Jail time for Baby Killer" scrawled in blood red ink across his face.