Visit my Projects>NaNoWriMo page to find out what the heck this post is all about, and to read from the beginning, in order.
I hit a wall again last night, though for a different reason. I knew what was going to have to happen in this section, i just didn’t know how it was all going to work together. Also, when dropping a bombshell, it has to be done just so to avoid destroying your credibility, or having the bomb fizzle into a big “who cares”. In the end I just had to go for it, get it down on paper, and realize that this is simply a first draft being written at a swift jog, and I can fix it all later, after the story is down.
The sub plot, about Nick and Yadira’s past together, gets a whole lot messier in this installment. This isn’t something I consciously planned, though it works really well. I made a decision at some point to just leave in all of the odd little things the characters were doing and saying, even if they seemed superfluous initially, and it’s starting to pay off. There’s more that hasn’t paid off yet, there are clues back along the way whose importance I’ve realised, but that haven’t come back yet, and I can’t wait to fit them into future installments.
I’m sure this story has a few surprises for me yet, I’m only a quarter of the way through, or less, after all.
For Idle Hands (working title) - Part 8
Holding a wadded handkerchief up to the gash in my forehead where Reggie had hit me, I trudged into town, trying to to wonder what long dormant diseases and contaminants I might be exposing myself to right now. I didn’t even remember having a handkerchief in my pocket - until I’d searched every pocket looking for something to stem the bleeding and had found it - so who knows how long it had been there, or what I’d used it for last.
As I passed through a small intersection with a flashing light, I entered Idle village itself. The town of Idle had an odd habit of placing speed limit signs in places where they would sneak up on you, or could be missed altogether. This one, a rather important one as it dropped speed from 45 mph to 25-mph, was actually bolted to the post that held the flashing light out over the intersection. The road that crossed this one led to the new middle school to the left, and a relatively new development to the right. It also fairly clearly delineated West Idle, the area I’d just walked through, and been nearly run over and attacked in, from Idle village. On one side there was only the occasional side street with a handful of houses, and business to break up the fields and patchy forests. While on the other side there were sidewalks and street lamps and houses close enough that the residents could see their neighbors. Another half mile on and the houses were practically touching, with tiny little yards if any, and slowly bled into Idle’s business district, such as it was. There were two intersecting streets featuring large subdivided buildings holding multiple businesses, churches, restaurants, a large grocery store, and a small plaza. On the other side of all that was the University of Maine’s Idle campus, the one reason most of the village existed any more.
When you stopped to think about it, the transition from rural countryside to rustic village was remarkably swift from this direction. For whatever reason, West Idle has always sort of been a place between places. In this case between Idle proper and the cities of Westbrook and South Portland. Some people lived there, it was becoming increasingly popular with developers of subdivisions because of all the space, but it was still mostly empty space as far as most people were concerned. Ironically, until the turn of the century this area was Idle’s bread and butter. While North Idle had farms, West Idle was something of an industrial center. There were several mills here years ago that employed most of the townsfolk, kept out here to spare the villagers the noise and pollution. The ruins of those places were scattered here and there over the countryside, most falling into serious disrepair. Some businesses of that type still survived out here. There was a working sand pit, for example, and a small mill that spun fiber into yarn and thread for hobbyists and specialty markets. There was also a large tree nursery, a few small churches, a junkyard, and of course Rosie’s. Rosie’s resided in a building that used to be an auto shop, and still featured the large bay doors, though they’d long since been nailed shut.
Idle village was the white collar to West Idle’s blue. Small as it was, Idle had two attorney’s offices, half a dozen accountants, a couple engineering and architectural firms, and of course one private investigator.
I walked towards the center of town now, glad for the street lights, passing tiny yards and home fronts decorated for Halloween. Checking my watch it was almost five thirty, the sun wouldn’t be up for another two hours, and I was sick of this night. I was also getting cold, and I really needed to sit and rest for a bit after that blow to the head.
Happily, I was almost there. The one stop I had to make before heading back to the office to immerse myself in the details of Yadira’s murder.
It was a small house, across the street from one of the entrances to UMI, near the library. There were unlit orange fairy lights in the neatly trimmed bushes that fronted the sidewalk, and home made foam tombstones decorated the lawn. Three jack-o-lanterns sat on the front steps, one on each step, each sporting a different mockery of human emotion. Mom had really gotten into the Halloween spirit this year.
I hesitated at the end of the walk, on the sidewalk. I didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to deal with this right now, but I knew I had to. The light was on in the living room, she was awake, so I had no excuse. Better to get this over with now, I supposed, though I didn’t really believe that.
As I walked up to the door I could faintly hear strains of Bach on violin in the air. It was a beautiful recording and I had to blink away a few uninvited tears. That music always got to me and probably would have even if not for the current circumstances. It was what she had always played for me when I was upset, or couldn’t get to sleep at night. It was what she played for her now.
It was too much, I turned to leave but before I could go the door opened. A short, stout woman with silver hair cut short stood in the door, pulling her flannel night robe around herself against the cold. I turned towards her and she looked up at me, a sad smile on her face. She’d been crying judging from her reddened eyes.
“You haven’t even arrived yet, Nick, and you’re already trying to leave?”
“Hi Mom,” I said quietly. “You’ve heard about about Yadira?”
“Yes. Now come inside Nick, and we’ll talk about it.” She squinted at me in the low light. “I’ll get some ice and a bandage for your head.”
She ushered me inside and I didn’t fight it. I don’t know if this is true for everyone, or if this is unique to my mother, but I swear her house hadn’t changed in decades. The wallpaper, the furniture, the smells in the air, it was always the same whenever I was here. Or, maybe not exactly the same, but always in the same spirit, in the ways that really count. I sat on the couch and couldn’t help but feel that it was too small, or maybe I was too big, in any case that the scale was off. How long had it been since I was smaller than I am now, thirty years? And still, in this house, I can’t seem to assimilate that fact.
My mother bustled back into the room with a washcloth filled with ice-cubes, a bottle of iodine, and a box of butterfly bandages. She took the handkerchief from my hand and fussed over my injury until she was sure it was clean and bandaged to within an inch of my life, then told me to hold the ice to it in a tone that let it be known she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
When she was done she sat down in her arm chair and folded her hands on her lap. For a time neither of us spoke.
“I heard,” she began finally, “that you were the one who found her.”
It wasn’t a question, it was an invitation, an opening to get me going.
“Yeah,” I laughed lightly, “it’s been a bad night.”
“So I gathered,” she said, eyeing my head.
“So I’m guessing the PD called you?”
“No, actually, Detective Gunn came by personally. He’s a good man, always has been. Far better than this town deserves.”
I grunted.
“Fine, you to have had your differences, but he is a good man, and a fine police officer. He came by himself so I wouldn’t be alone when I got the news.”
Here she broke off, taking a deep breath to steady her voice.
“He was right to worry, I don’t know what I would have done if I’d gotten a phone call like that in the middle of the night, or heard it on the news,” she shook her head. “Far better than we deserve.”
There was another moment of silence. She wiped a tear from her eye.
“Have you told Alyson yet?”
She shook her head, “no, I can’t bring myself to wake her. Not for this kind of news. I don’t know what it will do to her.”
I stood and walked softly down the hall towards Alyson’s room. Mom didn’t move to stop me.
Her door was open slightly and I nudged it a bit further. She was there, wrapped up in what looked to be several layers of blankets, the top most featuring characters from the cartoon Futurama. Her long golden hair streamed over her pillow, a tangled mess. The walls were decorated with movie and music posters, with a definite slant towards science fiction and electronica, respectively. And above her bed, held up with a single push pin, was a photograph of Yadira, smiling and full of life.
Alyson was Yadira’s daughter, from another lifetime it seemed. She would be thirteen years old in January, though it was near a miracle that she was here at all.
Fourteen years ago, Yadira had been a cop in Boston, at the same time that I’d lived there. She was a vice cop when we met, and I had just started out at a large private investigations firm.
I had recently gotten out of the army - I decided the military wasn’t the life for me, finished my tour in Iraq, and got out as soon after that as I could - and had discovered that living at home was almost as unbearable, so I’d gone to Boston to start my “real” life. My firm had been hired by the DA to quietly and unofficially investigate corruption within the Boston PD, and that was how we met.
Yadira was in bad shape. She’d gotten wrapped up in her work, and had taken in too far, committed too many sins in the name of getting ever closer to the people she was trying to take down. She didn’t know I was a PI when we first talked, and I didn’t volunteer the information. A friend of hers, under pressure due to some dirt we’d dug up on him, introduced me as a friend from out of town.
We got really close over the next few weeks, and eventually I fell for her. It broke my heart to see her systematically destroying herself with drugs and petty crime, and it didn’t help that I was ultimately there to destroy her, so I tried to help her.
I quit my job and moved in with her. I tried to keep her clean, tried to keep the people who were slowly poisoning her away, but there was only so much I could do. Then she turned up pregnant, and enough was enough.
Together with a good lawyer, who took every last dime I had to my name, we negotiated with the DA. In exchange for her testimony against some fellow cops, and in light of her pregnancy, she would be allowed to leave Boston with a clean criminal record, provided she stayed clean. She agreed, made good on it, and then I packed us up and came crawling back to Idle with my tail between my legs.
My mother was a saint and took us in without so much as a cross word. Yadira was having a rough time, dealing with a troubled pregnancy and extreme withdrawal at the same time, but together we kept her clean. At some point in all of this the PI in me came out, and I demanded a paternity test.
I was not the father.
Yadira had been so messed up that she had no idea who the real father was. I couldn’t deal with it, it was just too much. I ended our relationship, though I agreed to help Yadira land on her feet if I could. In time it became clear that Yadira was still in no shape to raise a child. We were discussing adoption when my mother announced that she would be taking care of Yadira’s child, and that was that. After Alyson was born my mother made good and then some, she adopted Alyson legally a year later.
It took Yadira another two years, and several rounds of rehab, to straighten herself out. During this time we agreed that it would be best if Alyson didn’t see her biological mother, and even after she’d cleaned herself up Yadira couldn’t deal with the shame of what she’d done.
Just a year ago now, shortly before her twelfth birthday, Alyson had demanded to know who her real mother was. We talked it over, and finally Yadira agreed to give it a shot. She hadn’t seen Alyson since she was two, but they’d fallen into it as if they’d known each other all along. Alyson had her mother, my mother, and that didn’t change, but now she had another mother, who was more like an aunt to her, and she couldn’t have been happier. For the first time since I’d known her, Yadira seemed truly happy.
And now Yadira was dead.
Dante had said that Yadira was dirty, but I didn’t buy it. She’d been through too much, and had too much to lose now, to just fall into her old patterns again. At least, I hoped she did, I had little enough faith in humanity as it was without adding that to my list. And Alyson, Yadira dying was bad enough, what would it do to her if she became known as a dirty cop who got herself killed over it?
No, I wasn’t going to let that happen. There had to be another explanation, and I was going to find it. For Alyson, for myself, and for Yadira.
I lingered a moment at the door, then turned and went back to the living room. My mother was as I’d left her, and she looked up at me as I entered.
“You couldn’t do it either, could you?” she asked.
I shook my head and sat back down.
“This is going to kill her,” mom said,” it’s going to break her heart, and I don’t know if she’ll ever recover.”
“She won’t, not really, but she’ll figure out how to live with it sooner or later. She’s a smart kid, mom, she’ll be fine so long as she doesn’t have to deal with it alone.”
She smiled at me, “and we’re not going to let that happen, are we?”
“No, not a chance.”
“Then do try to be more careful in the future,” she gestured towards the wound on my forehead. “Find out who did this, I know you won’t be able to accept what’s happened until you do, but don’t let it kill you in the process. Yadira wouldn’t want that.”
I nodded. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to just sit here for a bit and think. It’s been a long night, I think I need a few minutes.”
“Of course,” she said, then she bustled off to the kitchen, undoubtedly to put some tea on.
I sat in the dark, with the beautiful notes of Lara St. John’s recordings of Bach’s violin concertos washing over me, and I wept silently.
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