Smooth Criminal
Heather chanted the whole way to the next door.
“God, don’t leave me,” she repeated over and over again. The mantra continued to whisper itself into the corners of her mind even after she stopped consciously saying it.
The newest door had many locks and Heather stared at each one of them. She counted as she unlocked them and discovered there were eleven.
She jumped at the each sound she made. Every time she applied pressure to a resistant lock, it made a screeching sound like nails on a chalkboard.
Heather finally pushed opened the door and she squinted into the darkness that waited for her. Enough light shone through an unknown crack and Heather realized she had walked into a bedroom. She tried to trace the origin of the faded light and discovered it came from a window on the opposite wall. Had the shade been up, the room would have become as bright as the outdoors but it wasn’t. The blue shade had been drawn tightly and taped at the sides. Somebody had gone to pains so that they didn’t have to see the world.
Heather still didn’t understand. The bed made her think it was related to lust but something didn’t feel right about the theory. She didn’t feel sex nearby. She felt the onset of grief and it was both familiar and recent.
She looked around to see what she could determine from the items in the room. It didn’t take long for her observations to answer her questions.
A collection of hats dressed up the wall over the bed. They looked like the hats of a fisherman. They were cute and goofy and spoke of a man who appreciated nature and loved life. A compass sat at the end of the bed and she pictured a Boy Scout packing up for camp.
Heather looked at the dresser and quickly changed her mind when she saw that three lines of white powder had been carefully carved out. They sat expectantly, waiting for their owner to show them some attention. A razor accompanied the lines and all of it reflected back from the mirror they laid on.
The hats, the cocaine and the bedroom belonged to Benny and Heather felt a stab of fear at the realization. She was afraid of what she had walked into and she started to look around desperately for the door that would lead her back out. At the sound of footfalls in the hallway, her banging heart started knocking against her chest.
Heather flattened her back against the wall when Benny walked through the door. She knew he couldn’t see her but still she felt as though she had just been discovered. Her first impulse was to scan the room for the dreaded weapon. She hoped she hadn’t been trapped in his room on the most fateful of days but knew deep down that she had. There would have been no other reason for her to be there though she wasn’t sure why Benny’s suicide had ended up being one of her sins.
Heather saw what she was looking for and her violent heart stopped beating altogether. The gun was laying beside the telephone on the nightstand by his bed. She ran past him, planning to pick it up and hide it. She visualized smashing the evil weapon to pieces or setting it aflame until it no longer existed but she couldn’t even lift it. Like a clumsy ghost trying unsuccessfully to haunt a family, she discovered she had no power over the gun or over anything else in the room.
Heather looked at Benny and tears