This is an outtake from the new novel I’m working on. I wrote this, only to realize it wasn’t going to work. It complicates the plot, elevates a minor character unnecessarily, and simply didn’t work. But I like it, especially the part about her disappointment about the location she is headed to. I will say that this offers a pretty major spoiler for the new novel, but the novel won’t be out for several months, so the dozen or so of you who might read this will probably have forgotten by then. Enjoy.
Jennifer found the address for the strange-looking guy her father had asked her information about; if it was easy enough to find him online in the first place, it did not surprise her that learning his office’s address took a grand total of two minutes more. She wanted to ask her dad more about the guy, but the fact that he asked for her help at all with something like this made her understand the importance of it. And if it was that important to him, he wouldn’t have told her the truth. It had nothing to do with her distrusting her parents, and everything to do with being sixteen-years old.
Once she had the knowledge, she sat on it for a few days, wondering what, if anything, she would do. There had been a confidence inside her when she first made the discovery, but like with so many other things in life, not being able to act right away caused her confidence to falter, and to question why she thought it had been important in the first place. But thank god for boring classes, time she could spend weighing the pros and cons of the fledgling plan developing in her mind. Regardless of what side she took going into the thought process, it always evolved into the same circular motion, an endless rotary that she could not find an exit out of.
There was no point in going, because she didn’t know what to look for.
The fact she didn’t know what she might find was why she should go.
Of all things, it was the incongruity of a classmate’s presentation that made her decision for her. It was nothing that he said, but the shirt he wore, and the Nike logon emblazoned on the front. Before class ended, she mapped her way to the address via the bus, even making sure she’d be home in time to not raise any suspicion.
Her reaction had been much like her uncle’s, disappointed by the banality of the entire location. Private investigators didn’t work out of mini metro parks situated in decaying semi-suburban neighborhoods. She knew she would not head downtown, where she might find an older building, a dozen stories or so, terra cotta façade and fading elevators, squashed between the booming rush of luxury high rise her family’s business was partially responsible for, but she at least had been hoping the address was in a smaller arm of the larger city, a neighborhood built up decades ago by people wanting the feel of city living without having to go the two or three miles to where the actual city lay. It was a hopeful and not altogether out of line expectation. Last year, in a literature class, she heard the phrase “seven suburbs in search of a city” when talking about Los Angeles, and she finally made sense of where she had grown up. Yes, there was a downtown St. Pete, although even as little as six or eight years ago, it wasn’t much of a place anybody reputable went if they didn’t have to, but surrounding the downtown, stretching several miles in the three directions available, were any number of other towns and small cities, some with actual names like Largo and Clearwater, and others simply neighborhood designations still within the corporate borders of St. Pete. To the outside world, this was all one place, a place so small that thanks to the tourist-driven advertising content people thought they could sit on the beach and still watching the Bucs play, but to Jennifer, this created a mismatched quilt of a location. Most young children, when put in a moving car for more than five minutes, would be lulled into sleep, but she would keep her eyes wide open, watching the world roll by and trying to make sense of the changes, a natural curiosity that can’t be taught.
The address for Dillings place had been unfamiliar to her, giving her the hope that the building would be more momentous than what greeted her, but she accepted the squat three story building, steel beams and concrete floors sheathed in glass, one of three on two acres of over-watered green and shoe melting black. She made her way to what passed as the front door, a human-less lobby that faced not the sidewalk she had been on, but the parking lot, reinforcing the nature of human movement in 21st century Florida, found the name on the directory, and went upstairs.
Whoever removed the crime scene tape was not paid to be meticulous, and the sight of it made her hesitate, a flash of sweat breaking out across her body. The cons of doing this rang out in her head, but she was already here, and going back now would make no sense.
‘Perfect sense,’ her brain tried to tell her. ‘That tape alone tells you everything you need to know.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ her ego countered. ‘For all we know, it could be a prank.’
These thoughts ping-ponged in her head, her feet the entire time moving her closer to the door. The door locker was cousins with the tape remover, and the knob turned easily in her hand even before she knew what she was doing.
The interior of the room continued her theme of the anticlimactic. The room was still, only slightly disheveled, and showing no reason for the fragment of tape that stirred gently in the omnipresent air conditioning. The more time she spent in there, seeing not only anything out of the ordinary (not that she would have known what a private investigator considered ordinary) but nothing of interest at all, like a red flag with her dad’s name on it, fluttering in the same breeze as the police tape, the rational part of her brain won out. Tape down or not, this was recently a crime scene, and she shouldn’t be here. Trying not to panic, she moved back out the door, closing it carefully behind her.
Her scheduling skills were such that she made it home well within the time she needed to in order to not arouse suspicion. Dinner was as normal an affair as it could be for her, sitting on the truth of her actions even if they made no sense to her, and afterwards, back in her room, she wanted to let it go but couldn’t. Instead, she did what most people would do, and threw Dillings’ name back into a search engine, hoping to find what she missed before, something that would make her realize what a dolt she was being.
The only thing she found was a new news article, and it did nothing to quiet her concerns. It seems Mr. Dillings had been murdered a week ago, and his name was only being released now because the next of kin had been notified. Jennifer didn’t have to look at the calendar to figure out the dates: a week ago was two days before her dad asked her to look him up online.
PopcornJackTerry 