Bluesnake Lake

The boy met the girl on the rooftop of the Best Inn at the outskirts of the city, just as they had planned. It was peculiar – not many times, at least from what the boy could count, did she come before him. But this wasn’t like any other time. This time, the boy’s heart thumped irrhythmically. The only other time it had done that was when he saw her for the first time.

He sat next to her on the edge, overlooking a good portion of the city in front of them. At first, they didn’t speak. The boy offered his hand on the cement between them, and she took it. Her hand was small, and soft to the touch. He softly caressed it with his thumb, just as his mother had once done, when he was a child – when he came crying to her and she would let the boy put his head in her chest and put her hand atop his head and caress it, ever so gently, and it would calm the boy. It was one of the things he remembered from being a kid, and he hoped to apply it. He applied it that night.

“Talk to me. About anything.” He didn’t look at her, nor did she look at him – they just kept their hands interlocked, not firmly grasped but restfully handled.

“It just… it still hurts. It hurts and I don’t know who I can tell about it. I normally wouldn’t put this pressure on you, but… I just don’t know what to do.”

The boy had woken up that morning well-rested and a little complacent. It was only an hour after he had woken up, when he was still up reading the news and sipping at french roast, that he got the text from his childhood friend saying she was raped. In a few ways, he anticipated it – he never liked her boyfriend, and made it clear to at any point he could. The three used to go out, along with a group of separate friends, but the feud between the boy and the boyfriend continued to such an extreme that it was clear one of them had to be removed from the outing. The girl chose to bring her boyfriend.

In a vain and abhorrent way, he even wanted it to happen – not out of any sort of vain jealousy, but based on the fact that as the years went on the boy and the girl’s relationship began to dwindle from the peak it had reached during four years before. They say that the ultimate test of a friendship is its length, but the boy would tell you otherwise – it seemed that the longer things went the more distant the two became. He needed something to bring her back to him, and for them to rekindle their friendship. He believed that an incident of this proportion could have her consoling him first, and as it turned out, he was right. He quickly texted back, telling her to come to the roof of the Best Inn alone that night. Hours passed, and here they were.

“I know it hurts,” He replied back, never making eye contact. “I tried, but… I couldn’t figure out any useful advice to give you. I just want you to know that… I’m here for you. I really am.”

“I should have listened to you,” she kept in her tears, “I never should have done that to you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Now his eyes diverted, and he began to look at her figure. Her head was tilted down, and her eyes were shrouded by long black hair, that seemed to hide her emotions and describe them at the same time. “No, don’t. Don’t bother being sorry. The last thing you need to feel right now is guilt. None of this… none of it was your fault.” Rain began to fall, but only sprinklets. A car alarm went off somewhere in the northeast. “Maybe… maybe you could talk to your mother about it. She’d help you.”

The girl used her free arm to rest her chin on. “She really liked him. Plus, you know, my relationship with her hasn’t been the best. Not anymore.”

“So? She has unconditional positive regard for you, you know she does. All mothers do.”

“Unconditional positive regard is bullshit. You know that.” A tear streamed down her face, but under the shroud the boy could not see it.

The boy didn’t have any reply after that. He had spent so much time hyping up this moment for himself, and now there was nothing. What could he say? What was there to say? At some point the rain began to fall just a bit harder, hard enough that both of them, who had worn jackets due to the cold weather, put their hoodies up to stop the pit-pattering of the rain from getting on them. A useless exercise, to a certain extent. But after all – what now?

Finally, the boy spoke back up.

“I guess… since you trusted this whole thing with me, maybe this would be the good time to tell the secret I kept from you, wouldn’t it? To make things fair.”

She looked over at him, faint curiosity glowing from her eyes yet suffocated by her traumatized indifference. Thought she looked him in the eyes, he could not tell she had been crying. Rain and tears look the same. He continued anyway.

“I already told you I had social anxiety. You know that. Hell, everyone knows that. But, back then... they told me something else in the diagnosis. They wanted to address my apathy, since that’s not common among people with social phobia… and he told me – they told me – that I also was antisocial. They called me a medically-defined psychopath.”

She looked at him like she wasn’t even surprised. He went on.

“They told me I had to get special treatment for that… that I had to go to a facility to get help. I knew what they meant by that, so I ran. I told them that I needed to go to the bathroom, and just walked out of there. They tried to contact me on my phone, but I blocked the number. I mean… what else was I going to do? I knew I was different, I could just never pinpoint it. I told you that countless times. And yet that whole thing was such a long time ago, but I can’t help thinking about how… how it…”

He looked out upon city lights and sounds off in the distance. The hotel roof was far from the downtown center, yet the faint dim of activity still held its place within the symptoms. After taking a brie moment of contemplation, the boy’s story reached its finale.

“It makes sense. All of it. That’s the real reason I’ve had so much trouble with others. Why I’ve had so much trouble with you, and with your friends, and with… with everyone. I was thinking, a couple of nights ago, back about Bluesnake Lake… and I can honestly say I’ve never really felt that about anyone else. That… level of compassion. I’ve always hated everyone. Just hate. Hate, hate, hate. But that was never the same with you. That’s why I’ve known you for so long, and we’ve been friends for… That’s, I mean, that’s it.”

He looked on the face of his companion for some sort of equally passionate reply, but there was none. At some point her hand had slipped out of his and she began to thumb nervously in her lap. She looked down below to the floor of the hotel, where during this speech a Latino man had begun to sweep up some beer vomit from the parking lot. But make no mistake – she had listened. She heard everything.

“Well?” The boy asked, masking the desperate strain he felt. The girl finally spoke up.

“Well, what?”

“Well, I mean, don’t you have something to say?” The boy accidentally choked, and it became apparent his tone was out of frustration, even though he meant to hide it like so many times before.

“I… I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you want to hear.”

“I just want to hear… what you felt. I want to know your reaction. I don’t care what it is, I just… want something. Anything. Please.”

But she didn’t respond.

“You… you remember Bluesnake Lake, right?”

No response.

“You do, don’t you? Late during the night I’d leave my cabin with the guys and sneak into yours. We’d hide under the covers and just… read. We had to keep our voices down, and I remember… I remember we almost got caught because we were laughing so hard, and one of the aides came by the hall to see what the hell was going on. It was one of the most frightening moments of my life-” he laughed “-and it seemed like one of yours too. Anyway, we’d do that for an hour or so, then I’d get back up and sneak back to my cabin. But on the last night, one of us had the idea – I think it was you – to go down to the docks to watch the stars. But the docks were closed, so we just went to the shore instead. We slept together on the shore that night. I woke up that morning and you had your head on my chest, and I had my arm around you, and I realized for the first time… for the first time ever… that I didn’t have any regrets about our friendship anymore. I didn’t regret always knowing you but never quite getting anywhere with it. I didn’t regret the fact you always seemed to choose other friends over me. I didn’t regret the fact that in middle school I fell in love with you but you were busy with other guys. Everything just felt… felt right. And I felt at peace.”

Of course she remembered Bluesnake Lake. But she didn’t feel the same way. She did remember it… and in a lot of ways she did look back fondly on the experience… but none of that meant anything anymore. Because now the girl had understood the real reason he responded to her text that morning.

So that’s why when he asked if she remembered any of it, she shook her head, and his heart was broken.

“Fine. I just…” The boy now didn’t bother hiding his frustration with the girl. Tears merged with the rain, for both of them. “...I just, just, whatever. I don’t… Fine. I don’t have anything else to say. I’m sorry. I don’t. I… hope you feel better.”

He got up and went back down the service stairway, and the girl was alone again. Under her breath, she mentioned something harshly about men – “They’re all the same.” But it wasn’t men she was thinking about.

---

Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

 

Old World Blues

There’s a saying back from where I’m from – Old World Blues.

It’s used to describe a person who’s so stuck within the past that they can’t seem to see through anything else. I remember that’s what I was thinking about that summer morning. The Old World Blues.

I opened up the shop early, not out of necessity or desire but simply out of convenience. When I drove down that morning I had just happen to arrive a few minutes early, and instead of waiting it out I felt I should just open it up instead.

Private detective work doesn’t get too many customers – at least not on a daily basis. Standard investigations usually last two to three months, padded by small moments of hiatus in between. This was one of them. My last investigation – with which I can’t recall the details of – had ended a few days before. Now, I sat, waiting, thinking about those Old World Blues.

It was two minutes before the office usually opened that I heard a knock. The sound scared me, because I had grown so accustomed to later day calls – not early morning visits – that I forgot about the possibility. I had expected it to be some delivery man ready to give me a package that had been coming a few days late. What I ended up getting wasn’t that at all.

The woman at the other end of the door was clearly in some mix of distress and depression. I thought her to be on the older side, though that could’ve just been due to the stress in her eyes. It was clear that she didn’t choose me first – she had seen a couple of other agencies and all of them had declined. I’ve seen that look of desperation before. It worried me – most of the time when I’m not the first call it’s because they asked for too much, which is usually much more than I myself can handle. And yet the woman had a sort of urgency to her, and urgency that lead me to want to at least humor her in case.

“You’re here a bit early.” I told her, pointing to the Business Hours sign out front.

“Oh, I’m sorry… It looked like the lights were on.”

“Well they’re certainly on now,” I beckoned her, “Come on in.”

Either of us had barely gotten seated when she began her story. From the beige letter bag she had at her side she pulled out a folder, slightly worn, with the slightest dab of a coffee stain on its front center and filled to the brim with what I could only assume she was about to tell me.

“Listen, I’ve contacted a lot of place about this, but… My daughter is missing – she has been for a long time, you see – And I just-”

“Cold case?”

She stuttered. “W-what?”

“Has the official investigation ceased?”

“I mean, yes, but-”

“Sorry, I don’t follow through with cold cases.”

Already I could see her frustration boiling back up once more. She knew exactly what I meant – she had heard it many times before. But she was hoping I wouldn’t have said the same. Now, I did; and she came back to that ever present state. “What? Why?”

I got out my cigarette holder from amongst a pile of old scans, pulling out a very specific card – the only yellow one in the bunch, an old aged Japanese Musumi. They had always given me an age in heated negotiations. And so I lit it.“They’re dead ends. Nothing anyone can do about it. That’s just the painful truth.”

“Could you just… just listen to what I have to say? Please?”

The Musumi always works. Always did work, I should say… but Old World Blues was still on the mind. I struggled to resist the force that had already overtaken me. Following her up, giving her more hope – it was a mistake. But I couldn’t help it. The air was too thick with the scent of cigarette smoke and mystery. I had thought about my own life… the own mysteries I had experienced, as well as the closures I hadn’t. I decided it was time to break the rules.

“Alright, give me the foundations.”

Her eyes perked up. She was never able to convince anyone else. She began: “We were on a trip… we stopped, at a hotel not too far from here, just the two of us. There wasn’t anyone else there, not from what I could see. We got our room together, got ready and went to bed. Last thing I said to her before I dozed off… she was playing with her tablet, and I told her to get to bed or else she’d be tired in the morning. She nodded to me, and I turned and fell asleep. The next morning...”

“She was gone?”

“Yes. Out of nowhere. Tablet and everything was still there. The bed looked fine too… looked like she had just gotten out of bed and never came back.” The nameless woman began to quiver to herself under the recalling of events passed.

“Did you not hear anything during the night? Like her getting out of bed, anything?”

“I heard the bed ricket – her getting out of bed, I think – but nothing else.” The guilt that weighed her down was clear. I felt a tinge of sympathy; but I had seen and heard of many worse cases before, and my empathetic thought had been sanded down by so many years of hearing the same dreadful things over and over again.

“Did you hear the door open or close?”

“No. I heard nothing.”

“And what did the official investigation come up with?”

“That she must have wandered off during the night, or worse… someone got her. I… I just want to see my daughter again, that’s all.” I could feel the mood dampening even lower. She began to shed a tear.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“Not… not long. Almost exactly five days since.”

I thought about it. I thought about the case, and about the mother, and about her missing daughter. I’ve been brought people wanting closure before. Even I myself have felt the pain of not knowing the end of a story. Perhaps that was what brought me into thinking about the Old World Blues that morning in the first place. It was either luck or fate for that women, for in the first time of my entire investigative career, I sat down and decided to accept a cold case request.

“Oh, thank you sir! Thank you so much.”

I shrugged it off, pretending it had less meaning to me than it actually did. “Don’t mention it. I’ll get on it soon.”

I watched her slowly leave her seat, leaving some trepidation behind her, and move silently towards the exit. But right before she turned the brass knob, I recalled one case that I could get closure to.

“What is your name?”

She turned back to me, her panicked hair created a shadow that guised true meaning in her face. “Maria. Maria Cartwell. My daughter’s name is Susie Cartwell.”

No one else came that entire day. No one else needed to. I grabbed the stained portfolio she had left on my desk and flipped it open. It turned out to be a mistake, for the first thing I laid eyes upon was Susie’s smiling face. A smiling face that, perhaps at the time, was meant to have joyful meaning. Meant to be relaxing and peaceful, to calm one that was feeling particularly neurotic. But the context had changed now. For what I now saw in the young daughter’s face now was a beckoning. A plea. Save my mother, she told me. Save my mother, for I am already dead. But if you cannot save her… then at the very least, go and save yourself.

[END OF EPISODE 1]

---

Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis