Chapter Thirteen

I drove over to the county administrative complex.  It housed not only the Sheriff’s headquarters but also the main jail and, down in the basement in the far northeast corner of the building, not that far from the cafeteria, the Morgue.  The morgue’s proximity was one reason I never ate in the cafeteria.  Not even on Fridays when they featured free apple muffins. 

The hallways in the basement were always semi-dark.  There were long tubular florescent lights overhead but seldom were all of them working at the same time.  Some flickered, others were dim yellow, their life about to expire.  As I rounded the corner, I could hear the conversations from the cafeteria echoing down the hallways.  I passed by the open door and the dining sounds receded as I moved further into the building’s underground.  At the very end, I could make out a large shadow leaning against the wall.  It moved, straightened up to a towering height and I knew it was Wanda.  My Wanda.

I walked up to her and she looked down at me and smiled.  A bit of girly coyness was in that smile.  Cute.

“Counselor,” she nodded.  We were smiling at each other and contemplating what to say, something intimate and juicy I’m sure, when we both heard other footsteps and turned to see Detective Wiley coming from the same direction I had come. 

When he got to us, he started talking without any preliminaries.  He appeared nervous.  Unusual for the laconic Detective Wiley.

“The report came over the police radios two hours ago.”  

I realized that was about the same time I was entering my meeting with the ruling council of community leaders.  

“Two sheriff’s deputies were doing a check on status at the Hi Fame motel.  It got my attention because that’s where we were housing Dora Mason.  Since she got into town and gave us the information, we had made arrangements for her to stay there.”  

Anticipating my question, he went on, “She was destitute.  According to her anyway, and she would have had to move on, maybe to L.A. or San Fran. She would have been gone, if we hadn’t sprung for the room.”

Wiley stopped as if he just realized he had been giving out all this information without requiring us to ask questions, without requiring us pull it out of him.  Why was he so nervous?  

Wanda stared hard at him and I suppose he got whatever message she was sending telepathically because he went on.

“Anyway, the report.   There had been a 415, a Disturbing the Peace call.  Some overturned furniture it had sounded like, some loud words, fighting, then a scream.”

“Did you go over there?” I asked.

“Of course.  But by the time I got there, there were Sheriff’s units everywhere and they were wheeling her out.”

“No security,” I said.  “You didn’t provide her any security?”

‘From what?”  The good detective sounded extremely irritated at my question about why Dora was left alone.  Maybe that’s why he was nervous.  Maybe he felt a little guilty.  Good.  Somebody else besides me to feel guilty about what happened to Dora. I liked that.

Wanda intervened.  

“We didn’t see a need, Nick. There was no indication she was in danger. We asked her if she had any fears and she said she didn’t.  The only thing she seemed really interested in was meeting you.”

Again?  That took me back a bit.  What was all this with Dora?

“Huh?  Why?  What’d she say?”

“Just simple.  She wanted to meet you.  She said she wanted you to see her now, not like she used to be or something.  Didn’t make much sense.”

“That doesn’t seem shy.  Everybody said she was shy.”

Wiley and Wanda looked at each other.  They shook their heads in unison.

“Shy she wasn’t,” Wanda said.  “Yeah, real confident chick,” Maurice added, “maybe shy one time, but she must have got over it.”

I wanted to shake my own head to clear out the cobwebs.  Here was a girl, now a woman, I had never met, never noticed, never knew, never cared to know.  She had, according to everyone, and I mean everyone, been completely ignored by me decades ago as if that was some great sin.   But, further, I had evidently played some outsized role in her pitiful little universe back then, but she now had multiple personalities, possessed traits I would not expect of this person I didn’t know in the first place.  My ability to ask basic questions like a good lawyer would ask, like I would normally ask, deserted me once again.  I stared at Maurice and Wanda.  I’m sure my mouth was open.

Wanda sensing I was nonplussed took over.  She asked Maurice, “Well, whatever.  Did you find out what happened to her?”

“Beat to death.  It was pretty brutal.  Baseball bats.  They left them behind.”

“They?” I asked, “There were two?”

“More than two.  Had to be three maybe four pounding on her.  Did a job too.”

“Well, let’s go in,” Wanda suggested.

A few minutes late we were standing over the body laid out flat on a slab in the morgue.  It was covered by a sheet.  The surgeon pulled down the sheet to her neck and I looked at the bloody pulp that had once been Dora’s face.

‘Well”, I said, “I still don’t know what she looked like.”  I looked around the room at the others.  “Does anyone have a picture of her so I can actually know, uh, remember what she looked like when she was alive?”

No one did.

Chapter Fourteen

The pathologist made his entry into the autopsy suite like he expected us all to applaud.   Doctor Preen.   I knew him.  He was an arrogant ass like most doctors and all pathologists.  

He just couldn’t wait to demonstrate his erudite methodologies to us plebes. 

“Well, it appears we have a fallen angel of unrequited love.”

Oh no, not him too!

“And it looks like her fall was from twenty stories up.”  

The Doctor smiled in expectation that his ghoulish cleverness would be awarded with a chuckle or two from those assembled.  No one laughed.  No one even smiled.  Wanda appeared to be considering a right cross to his chin.  Fortunately for him, she opted instead for a professional approach.

“Doctor Preen, we are especially interested in a detailed cataloguing of injuries, the types of instruments that caused the injuries, if there were more than one, and if the angles of the attack indicate multiple assailants, and, if so, how many.”  

I couldn’t have put it better myself.  

The doctor evidently got the point that everyone was serious on this one and the usual gallows banter wasn’t called for.  He stepped up to the body, adjusted the microphone hanging from a cord directly over the body and picked up one of his carving instruments.  It was time for work.

I wasn’t in a good mood.  I wanted to leave, but Wanda wanted me to stay.   

I stood around for the next hour.  I didn’t watch much of the autopsy.  I knew the cause of death.  I wasn’t an expert, but I had read my share of autopsy reports and since baseball bats were used I knew the phrase “blunt force trauma” would appear somewhere. Probably would account for multiple entries. 

I did stay next to the table long enough for them to pull the sheet all the way off.  

Nice rack.  Her head was beat all to bloody hell, but there was no mistaking that little Dora had a pair.  In fact, if you looked past all the bruises and black marks and dents and blood, she had a very good body indeed.  Her pubic area was shaved clean.  There was a butterfly tattoo on her inner thigh.  This was little shy Dora?  Anyway, once the carving started in earnest I moved away.  

Wanda and Maurice were interested in the dissection, bantering away with the Doc as he lifted, inspected and described the internal organs one by one, noting the injuries and internal bleeding everywhere.  He spoke often into the microphone hung from the ceiling, which I assumed, captured his narrative as well as the detective’s responses.  Documenting their spontaneous unreviewed observations should have been worried me, but was I hadn’t the energy to mention my concerns.  

I wandered around the room.  As I walked by a metal table I saw some clothes and a purse.  

“Hey, is this stuff her’s?”

Maurice looked up from the body.  “Yeah, that’s what she had on when they brought her in.  Same thing she was wearing the other day when I talked to her.”

“How about the purse?”

“Looked through it but haven’t done an inventory yet.  We’ll get to it after this and then we can log it all in at once.”

I picked up the purse.  It was not too large, light, didn’t seem to have that much in it.  I sat it back down on the table and unzipped the top and pulled it open to peek inside.  The lighting inside the autopsy suite away from the gurney where poor Dora was being dissected was so dim, I couldn’t make out much.  

I looked over my shoulder.  They were all busy with the body.  To them, it must have been fascinating stuff.  To me, I figured the inside of Dora looked like the inside of everyone else.  

I reached in and felt around inside the purse much like the Doc was feeling around inside Dora’s abdomen.  I found what felt like a wallet and extracted it from the purse.  I glanced over and saw the Doc had lifted a bloody messy ball of something, maybe a kidney, out of Dora’s body and was pointing at something on its side while Wanda and Maurice looked on like eager students. 

I flipped open the wallet and examined the contents.  No credit cards though there was a Chevy roadside assistance card.  I looked at the date.  It had expired last summer.  Some simple photographs too.  Of who?  Friends?  

There were eight pictures.  After flipping through them once, I went back for a second look.  There was something familiar about the faces.  Seven of the people pictured were in their twenties or early thirties.  All healthy looking, smiling.   Doing interesting things.  One was painting portraits, another victoriously holding up a paddle on a raft with some dangerous looking rapids in the background, one sitting in a nice new corvette convertible, another waving from a nice yacht.  And finally, there was one picture of an elderly lady.  

Hair gray, she was bent over in the shoulders as if a great weight had been strapped around her neck for many years.   She looked directly into the camera.  Her eyes lively, her look cheery, she wore a satisfied smile.  Wonder why she is so happy?  Then it hit me.

Mrs. Vuitch! In the picture, she was at least 20 years older than when I last saw her in high school, and she hadn’t been young then.  It was her.  No doubt. And with my recognition of her, the dam broke and I started seeing who the others were.  

All from high school. They were that group. Her group of favorites. The smart ones that used to hang out in Mrs. Vuitch’s class over lunch hour.  Her pets.  Bunch of nerds and weirdos.  But these weren’t the same. These people were living special lives, privileged lives.  I could tell, there was nothing socially backward or awkward about any of them.  I thumbed through the pictures again.   I thought, “No, these are not the same people.  They are, but they are not.” 

Each photo depicted a person who had the same look as they back in high school, but not the same carriage.  Not the same attitude.  There was a swagger to those in the photos the kids who hung around Mrs. Vuitch didn’t possess in high school.  

“Who are they?”  It was Wanda.  She was standing behind me looking over my shoulder.  I could hear the loud whirring sound of a skull saw grinding in the background.  I was no expert, but I had seen enough reports to know that the words “coup-countercoup” would be in the autopsy report denoting the bruises from the bouncing of the brain in the skull when someone’s head is hit very hard with a “blunt instrument.”  A baseball bat was, indisputably, a “blunt instrument.”

“Do you know them?”

“I think so.”

And then I stopped at one picture.  It was of a very nice-looking woman.  Classy.  A babe.  I stared.

“That’s her isn’t it?”  This time it was Maurice who had wandered over. He stood to the side and looked at the picture I was holding. 

“Yes. Sure,” I said out loud.  “That’s our first Vic.  The ax.  That’s Brenda.”  I didn’t add that the attractive female pictured might be Brenda, but not like my vague memories of her in high school.

“I know,” Maurice said.  “But that’s not the Brenda I told you about.  We have her.”

I must have looked mystified.  Again.

“I keep telling you, Counselor, the real one is very much alive. That isn’t her.  And, its time you talked to the real one.”

Chapter Fifteen

I sat looking through the two-way mirror at my victim.  Victims in homicide cases are, by definition, always dead.   This one, however, was very much alive.  

She was seated at a metal table across from Wanda.  Standing behind Wanda, leaning against the wall was my laconic second detective, Maurice Wiley.  As usual he was feinting disinterest.  Wanda’s posture, on the other hand, was one of hulking intensity.  Though seated, her bulk dominated the room.   The tightness in her shoulders belied the smile she wore.  There was tremendous strength in those shoulders.  I should know.  

I hadn’t bothered yet to flip the sound switch.  I knew the entire interview was being recorded anyway.  Instead of listening, I was studying Brenda.  

She looked like she was supposed to look.  At least how we imagined the person pictured on the nametag at the reunion would look later in life.   Considering how she appeared in high school, it seemed inevitable.  Heavy set around the hips, her belly was loose, in a state of muscle collapse, resting in her lap.  Her abdominal muscles long ago had given up the fight to contain the fullness of her stomach.  

She was listening to something Wanda was saying.    The smile on her lips was the same self- effacing grin she had affected so many years ago.  It was still irritating.  

This was the real Brenda which then begged the question of who is or was the other Brenda, the one who had had an ax buried in her forehead.  That one had certainly looked like Brenda early the evening of the reunion, but a Brenda who had gotten out of school, grown tired of being a joke and set herself to right, exercised, ate right, got some decent clothes.  And developed a personality.  We, our group, had immediately liked her better.

Our impression that night was that Brenda was an actual success story.  Rare.  The only one I had ever heard of.  And now it appeared that one was a counterfeit.

I flipped the switch and listened. 

Wanda was saying, “I know how it is.  I had similar issues back in my day too.  But you know what, I said fuck it and went my own way. Maybe you said fuck it to and got some of your own back, maybe that meant planting an ax in some bitch’s face.  Is that what it meant?  You finally gave someone what they deserved.”

Brenda shook her head side to side.  “No.  No.  It wasn’t me.  I mean I wanted her to be gone.  I didn’t want her to take my place.  Not after I found out that’s what it was.  After all the lies it turned out that’s what it was.  But no, I didn’t kill her.  Drew must have.  It was his job.  For all of us.  It meant maybe we could get out, could get back here. Get our lives back from them.”

Wanda asked the question I was hoping she would ask.

“Tell me something, Brenda.  Just say it straight.  Who was this person?  This other Brenda?  The dead one?”

Brenda paused.  She stared at the top of the table as the seconds ticked by.  Maurice shifted positions.  He straightened up.  Rotated his shoulders and stepped over to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down.  I wondered if it was a rehearsed move, meant to convey the importance of the response Brenda was soliciting.  Whatever it was, it didn’t work.  Brenda never moved.  Finally, Wanda stretched out a big paw and rested it on Brenda’s shoulder.

“Look, we are here to help, Brenda.  It’s real hard to do that if you aren’t straight with us.  We need to know what you know.”

Brenda nodded her head.  At least she was still coherent, connected to reality.  I had begun to suspect an actual break.

 Wanda continued her grooming.  

“We just want to figure out the truth here.  Whatever it is.  No matter how fantastical or imaginative.  Just put it out there. Let’s get a look at it in the harsh light of the mid-day sun.”

I liked the phrasing of that last bit.

Brenda remained silent then folded her arms on the table and laid her head down on them.  She shook her head twice and mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

Wanda looked up at the mirror.  She must have known I was on the other side watching and listening in.

“Say that again, Brenda.  I didn’t hear you real plain.  Sit up, Sweetheart.  Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Given Wanda’s size, she should include that in her Miranda warnings before every interview.  Nevertheless, Brenda did sit up.

“She was me.  At least she started that way.  My exact chromosomes.  A replica.  But one with a few modifications.  I got to pick those.  Mrs. Vuitch said they were my choices, and only mine. But she lied about that too.  She put other stuff in.  She lied about a lot of things.”

Wanda acted puzzled but then she rallied.  “Wait a minute.  You mean like a clone? They cloned you?”

“Better.  I was given choices. I could pick more than just my weight,” and with this she looked down at her hopelessly loose belly, “I could make myself have confidence.  You know she, Mrs. Vuitch, said we are all born with tendencies, ingrained in us.   She called it situational survivability.  Helped some ancestor, some caveman, survive and the tendency, instinct maybe, became an evolutionary modification, a characteristic.  See evolution wasn’t limited to physical traits.   Judgment, personality, likeability, even unlikability in all species contributed to survival. It’s all there in our chromosomes.” 

 She shook her head like she was becoming impatient of her own explanation.  She went on. 

“See, they said, we could pick a lot of things we wanted and they could make it happen just by just changing the tendency sequence.  And it all sounded good.  Well, it sounded good if you were actually going to be that person, but then at some point you realized you could never be that person.”

“Well, of course not,” Wanda stated emphatically.  

I thought that a rather brutal response from Wanda. Not in the least sympathetic.   Maybe a lack of empathy was one of Wanda’s evolutionary characteristics.  She could mercilessly administer a spanking and harshly.  To that I could happily attest.  

“What did you think?” Wanda challenged her, “that you were going to have a new more perfect you?”

“I don’t think you understand.  These others are not just copies. They are us.  

Mrs. Vuitch bragged how she solved something she called the accelerated growth conundrum.  To advance their development so that in a year, they would be even with us, the same age as us.  So they could be us.  But if they are us, they take our place.  We can’t live the same life.  We can’t exist in the same place at the same time. Neither person, the new or old would want that.  

That’s the paradox none of us really understood until it was too late. The new one was us. Our memories, our past, but new, reborn.  The original one,” and she looked down at her sagging body, “the inferior one, would have to go.  That was the plan.  They didn’t tell us we would have to give up our lives.  Another version of us was living that life.  We had to go.  The plan was that we would be put somewhere.  The new ones who would replace us would want us gone.”

Wanda looked over at the mirror. She was as lost as I was.  She turned back toward Brenda who had been watching her and now was looking at the mirror.

“Who’s on the other side?” she asked.  Wanda didn’t hesitate in answering.  “A friend.  He’s an attorney.  He can help.  Just be straight with us, Brenda.  And this isn’t making lot of sense.”

“The teacher, Mrs. Vuitch, can make you understand. Talk to her.  Listen to her.  She’ll convince you.  She did us.  She made us figure it out, at least as far as she wanted us to understand.”

Brenda paused for a minute. And then I saw tears forming in her eyes.  They weren’t running down her cheek yet, but they were there.   

“Just don’t forget this”, she said.  “This has bothered me all along.  We weren’t the only ones got put over there.  We weren’t the first.  That would have been bad, but I think we might have stayed if it had only been us.  Us alone.  I mean we weren’t that happy anyway and we knew a version of us got the life we wanted, well, maybe that would have been okay.  But there were the others.”

“What others?’

“Dozens.  Couple hundred.  Some whole families.  Been there in limbo kind of.  And the kids.  Many were kids.  Just kids.  Imperfect kids.  Not beautiful or real smart.  Some even crippled.  But just kids.  They got created before they perfected the acceleration.  The kids over there were nothing special.  But they were still kids.  That’s what got Drew fired up.  He could never abide that.  He was going to change it back and the only way to get us to cross back over the border, to get out of the room was to eliminate the new ones.  He had to get his first and then he went after the others.”

“Brenda.  Where is this place you keep talking about?”

There was no answer for a while.

“I’m not sure I can make you understand. The teacher could.  I don’t think I can.  See once the replacement is engineered, it must be accelerated to the right age.  But it can’t be here.  It’s grown where physical limitations don’t apply.  They called it a dimensional shift.  I’m not sure I believe that.  That’s what we were told.  It’s a prison though.  See, a gene modification is added to make the new one.  They pick a replacement age and its grown quickly there and then it’s moved out and the original stays there.”

“Where?”

She paused.  She looked at the confused look on Wanda’s face and then she turned to the mirror and spoke directly to me.  “A room for Monsters!  That’s where they all are.    And none of them will come back until the new one’s are gone.”  She paused again.  “Or sent back, forced to return to where they came from.”  She paused.  “Or killed.”

No one said anything for a few moments.  Brenda kept looking at the mirror.  I was wondering if she was seeing her real self in the reflection or the new Brenda, the dead Brenda, the one who got an ax planted in her forehead.  Of all people it was Maurice who broke the silence.

“What else?”

She turned to him.  She slowly shook her head.

“There’s something else.  What is it?” he pressed.

Brenda looked first at Wanda, then glanced at the mirror like she could see me sitting there, and finally she turned her eyes back to Detective Wiley.

“They know we are coming.” 

“And?” 

“And they are fighting back.”