Raveled (10 page)

Chapter
13

Allison… present

Kevin e-mailed me to say he’d confirmed Jasper Shifflett’s location, not an easy task given the innumerable Shiffletts in Virginia and North Carolina. Most Shiffletts liked to play around with the number of
f’s
and
t’s
in the name. Heck, there were families where the cousins spelled it differently because somewhere along the way, a
Shifflett
had married a
Shiflet
. At least
Jasper
was an uncommon name—fitting for an uncommon guy. Although my money would have been on Jasper staying off the grid with an aluminum hat deep in the West Virginia woods, his new address fit him even better. They say many mental illnesses manifest themselves in people’s early twenties. If that was the case with Jasper, he’d already been suffering a good eight to ten years, if not his whole life. Didn’t look like he’d be making the reunion, but he’d definitely be the subject of malicious group gossip when the cheap cocktails spurred the queen bees on. They’d share a quiet, derisive snicker when someone mentioned his current residence: Ravine Psychiatric Clinic in Roanoke, Virginia.

In Jasper’s defense,
he’d checked himself into Ravine. A little
me time
, he must have thought. Or me, myself, and I, depending on how many voices he was hearing at the time. Almost nobody in high school would have outright pinpointed Jasper as a future psychiatric ward occupant, but when they later heard about it, they’d say, “Yeah, that makes sense. Not a shocker.”

Despite
our two-year age difference, I knew Jasper in high school. Actually liked him quite a bit, and he wasn’t entirely unattractive. His thin face set the tone for the rest of his reedy body but he had skin that made the girls envious and a smile that could carry a room yet feel confidential when he flashed it your way. In keeping with the requisite genius appearance, he wore a tangled, bristly knot of light brown hair that sprung out three inches on all sides. He was a verbal spaz, but a clever one. After spewing out a series of tangentially related thoughts, usually about himself, he’d gaze at his audience of one as if fascinated by his or her contribution to the conversation. Their contribution usually consisted of discrediting his theories that an underground network of students ran a devious sub-school or that Ukrainians were plotting to blow up the place. But Jasper was convincing. And funny. A humorous undertone never failed to accompany his paranoid fantasies, and surely more than one classmate had told him he’d make a great science fiction writer.

His IQ topped the charts and
he knew it, but he couldn’t get over the futility of the more mundane classes in school so he failed them via disregard. If and when he wanted to, though, he could ace any test. Once, a rumor had spread that he’d kicked the SAT’s ass. A week later, in assembly, I’d watched his friends teasing him about his
all grade and no laid
perfect scores. Jasper had looked aghast and said he’d never opened the envelope with the scores because he didn’t see the point; besides, others might learn about it and take advantage of him. We’d all known, without clarification, that by
others
, he meant non-carbon-based beings.

My brother
included a quick bio in the e-mail. Jasper had completed two years at Monroe Community College, transferred to UNC with a scholarship, and dropped out four credits shy of a degree. He’d drifted for a few mystery years, then landed a consulting job with a security firm called ARO. No details on that nondescript acronym. To me, it sounded just vague enough to be shady. Whatever. For all I cared, Jasper could be light years off the reservation, as long as his memory remained intact. I needed him to focus on a single night when Lavitte’s homicide rate increased 200% over the previous five years combined.

I took my phone into the living room where Selena usually dozed and
called the number Kevin had provided. A direct line to Jasper’s room, apparently. The phone rang at least twenty times while I made myself comfortable in the nest of blankets Selena kept on the far end of the sofa. The rhythmic ringing lulled my tired brain into a hypnotized state, so much so that when a male voice answered in a muffled whisper, I almost dropped the phone.

“You are hearing the voice of Jasper Shifflett.”

Was it an answering machine? No. I could hear nasal breathing with the faintest whistle.

“Hi,” I said, lowering my voice in a natural reflex to his. “This is
Allison Fennimore.”

“Is it?”

Damn if he didn’t have me doubting my existence already.

“Pretty sure,” I said.

Silence. More silence. Breathing.

“Jasper, is that you? We went to high school together.” I don’t know why I used that lame prompt when the Fennimore name
usually did the trick. And he surely wouldn’t remember me from chemistry class.

“
Allison Fennimore,” he whispered, “Allison Fennimore.” It sounded like he was talking to himself so I didn’t interrupt. I heard pages flipping in the background. Was it possible he kept the old Lavitte High School yearbook right next to the phone? I couldn’t imagine that any other classmates were calling. Suddenly, I got an image of a skinny, wild-haired Jasper surrounded by tower-like piles of yearbooks from every high school in the country so he could distinguish between real callers, aliens, and secret enemies. “Regular reunion going on lately,” he mumbled to himself. Then his voice perked up. “You were two years behind me. Dark hair, oval face, excessively large eyes.”

Was it freakier if he remember
ed that on his own, or if he was analyzing my actual photo? Toss-up.

He continued in the fast patter he used
in high school, minus the humorous undertone. “I can summon you up quite well. We were lab partners in Dr. Duncan’s class, in a foursome with two subpar students who delighted in smacking their gum. You were smart, young, quick-witted.”

None of that was
in the yearbook. His mind had to be somewhat unbroken.

“That’s one way to go,” I said. “Most Lavitte natives remember me as the
daughter of Artie Fennimore, the man who shot Bobby Kettrick.” What was the point of beating around the bush? The guy needed to be reeled in, and fast, before he began reciting the flavors of gum Rosie Lawrence had chewed each day of the week. Always Tooty-Fruity on Fridays.

“Who sent you?” he said.

I pictured his eyes darting around the room in search of conspirators. “Jasper? I’m not there. I’m in Lavitte, calling you.”

“For now
,” he said.

“
I would like to get together, though.” The breathing slowed, as if he were meditating. “I’m looking into a few details about the night Bobby was shot. Do you have time to talk to me?”

“
Obviously. We’re talking.”

“I know.” I wondered if he did. “
But I was hoping to meet in person.”

“Why are you bringing up
that night? It can’t be a coincidence. Is there new evidence?”

“What can’t be a coincidence?” I a
sked.

“When the
scientists on the OPERA team suggested that neutrinos travelled 0.002% faster than light, did you believe it?”

I suddenly remembered
, with measured delight, how conversations between Jasper and others used to go. Challenging, playful, never straightforward. I was one of the few people who could decipher him. Outside of class, we barely acknowledged each other, but the walls of the chemistry lab offered a social safety net, where the quiet freshman geek, just coming into her looks, could talk to the oddball mastermind hanging onto the fringe of popularity. The oddball was testing to see if the geek was worthy of him continuing the conversation.

“Not for a nanosecond,” I answered.

“Do you believe it’s possible that anything will ever travel faster than light?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that particles are out there right now travelling faster than light. But when they’re finally discovered, the news will be so five seconds ago.”

“
Allison Fennimore.” I heard a smile. “Why do you want to talk about that night?”

I never claimed to be above playing the
Alzheimer’s card, even if my mother wasn’t close to diagnosable. And Jasper could surely relate to a sick mother. He’d had one since the day his parents conspired his birth.

“For my mom’s sake,” I said. “She’s not doing well and she’d like
some closure. I’m not trying to stir up trouble, just hoping for clarification. She wants a story, something she can die peacefully with.”

“
You must have spoken to other people,” he said. “Tell me, Allison of the oval face, from whom have you sought information to fill the holes in your tale thus far?”

“
Your old friend, Smitty, and Enzo Rodriguez, the boy who worked at my father’s garage.”

“
So the ball is in motion,” he said. “I can’t remember the nuances of your character, or perhaps they weren’t developed in you at such a young age. Are you a Rube Goldberg type, or more of a Lord Baltimore? I surmise the latter. Plodding. Never clumsy. Unwavering. Maybe even unsentimental, having grown coarse over the years since.”

Did I have to be either
? Although, to be honest, his last few words had summed me up quite nicely. A Rube Goldberg machine was a complicated, multifaceted machine designed to achieve a simple outcome. Like a mousetrap. And the mysterious Lord Baltimore, if I remembered from Kevin’s favorite movie, was the famous Indian tracker who’d pursued Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Bolivia. Why would Jasper assume I was devising a convoluted trap for him, or tracking him relentlessly? Was his paranoia in high gear or did he feel he deserved to be caught?

I remained silent, vaguely interested in the machinations of
his mind and not wanting to send him off on an irreversible tangent. Back in chemistry class, he’d cleverly led the teacher from a conversation about protons to an argument in favor of holding the class outside the next day. He’d had us all in stitches with each twist of logic and we did indeed find ourselves in the warmth of sun the next morning slapping at an endless horde of gnats while the teacher rambled. But now, the mental illness squatting in Jasper’s gray matter seemed to have crowded out all the fun. A shame, really, as it had humanized the weirdo.

“Lord Baltimore all the way,” I finally said.

“It’s time,” he said.

“For what?”

“Hmm,” he said, tapping rhythmically in the background. “Words or ships, Allison J. Fennimore? Words or ships?”

The hypnotic tapping, and the use of my middle initial, focused the yearbook image in my head. I zoomed in on Jasper‘s bony finger thumping up and down on my young face, his nail like a fish hook, my ninth grade mouth refusing to take the bait. Let’s hope he chose the thousand words. Of explanation. My picture should be worth that, and I had no use for a thousand ships. And as these ideas sailed through my mind, I suddenly felt worried for Jasper. If he really did have words he wanted to share with me, they wouldn’t be futile. They’d carry some weight and their revelation might put him in danger.

F
or now, I needed to give him an answer that continued our game. “I choose words,” I said. “Verbal or written, as long as they’re true. A thousand should do.” I needed to close the deal by earning his respect, let him know I understood his reference to a picture being worth a thousand words, but that a face could launch a thousand ships. “After all, that little thumbnail sketch you’re looking at wasn’t from my best side, and the plaid shirt muted my eyes, wouldn’t you say? Worth only 850 ships at most. The words are a better bargain.”

A deep, calming breath
voyaged through the phone line. “Excellent. But I never did count the words and can’t guarantee the quantity. It was long ago in human years. You have chosen well.”

“Thank you.”
Human years?

“I shall take extra care to ensure you receive them. It is time
, after all. When can you get here?”

Wow, he was agreeing
to meet me. My stomach surprised me by wringing itself out. The sensation travelled to my brain in the form of quiet fear, the first of that emotion to surface since the beginning of this bizarre exploration. Ignoring it, I said, “I can drive up tomorrow morning.”

“No,” he said. “Busy.
Possibly to your benefit. Possibly to your detriment. Two-thirty p.m. In the atrium. It’s public.”

Public?
Did he think I was going to attack him? “I’ll be there. And Jasper, thank you. I really appreciate this.”

“I’ll recognize you,” he said in closing.

Not creepy at all.

Chapter
14

Bobby… sixteen years ago

Bobby wished he’d thought to buy some ice at Westerling’s. Heck, he’d picked up a cooler and beer but had forgotten to throw in a bag of ice. That awkward chick at the store should have thought of it, for Chrissakes. The beer had been cold going in but not enough to fight this heat. He yanked out a can, sucked it down and tossed it in the street. Hoisting the cooler back up on his shoulder, he noticed how the more he drank, the lighter it became. Simple subtraction. He took out another one. Math class finally paid off and he hadn’t even needed Jasper’s help. He cut through a final field of dried-out, cut corn stalks and spotted Shelby up ahead, sitting on the same rock, picking at her nails.

“Boo!” he said
as he sneaked up on her.

She screamed, but
used the opportunity to grab his arm and tell him what a stinker he was.

“Well?” she said as she stuck out her shiny, red tongue.

It took Bobby a moment to remember the lollipop. “Oh yeah,” he said, “it’s red all right. Looks good enough to eat.”

“Bobby!” She pushed him playfully with both her arms
, but he didn’t budge. It was like a flea trying to move a brick.

He popped open a beer
and held it out to her. “One for the walk?”

“Sure,” she said, hesitating only a moment before taking a gulp.
“What about my bike?”

“Just leave it. We’ll come back for it later.
Let’s cut through that strip of land where the Simcoxes ride their four-wheeler,” Bobby said. “Then round about the Bakers’ place. It’ll be a little longer walk, but it’s got more shade.”

“That’s real thoughtful of you, Bobby, thinking about my comfort like that.”

Bobby didn’t give a crap about her comfort, or that shade. It was a different shade that prompted the alternate route, and he wanted to avoid it. The shade from Mr. Artie’s spook-ass eyes. They could make a guy feel guilty about something even if he was innocent. Which Bobby wasn’t. Yeah, he’d taken those tools, but he’d needed ‘em to work on his own car, and with all the money the Kettrick family had spent at Artie’s over the years, Bobby was owed a few stinkin’ tools. Maybe he’d return them sometime. They hadn’t done him any good. When he’d finally gotten down to it, he realized he didn’t know squat about the goings-on under the hood of any car. His dad wasn’t the type to hang out with his kid and teach him how rotors worked or what spark plugs did. His dad was more the type to steal a shipment of rotors and hook spark plugs to the balls of any dude who got in his way. Bobby had thought car junk would be intuitive or that Jasper or Smitty would have a clue, but Smitty’s dad was as useless as his and Jasper had gone into so much detail it had made Bobby’s head spin. So he and Smitty had used the tools to beat the living daylights out of an ugly, hobbled cat. Put it out of its misery and all that. And if Smitty had caused the cat’s injury in the first place with his B.B. gun, well, tough shit. That was the price of being a dumb-ass animal in a human’s world.

“This is a long way,” Shelby whined
after ten minutes, rolling her head dramatically towards her much taller companion.

“Here. Have another beer,”
Bobby said.

They sat on a split rail fence on the border of the Hesters’
foreclosed property and polished off another can each. In the few months since the Hesters had cleared out, teenagers had made the place their own. From bonfires to parties, more weed had been smoked at the Hester place than was growing in their neglected fields. And those reached chin-high.

Bobby poured the last third of his can onto a
black and yellow garden spider suspended between two of the fence rails. It scurried away on its web.

“Now that spider didn’t do nothing to you,” Shelby said.

“That’s why teachers love me,” Bobby said. “I do things without even being asked.”

Shelby s
hook her head ‘cuz from what she’d heard, Bobby Kettrick mostly did things in class he wasn’t supposed to be doing in the first place.

When they continued
on their way, Shelby grabbed Bobby’s hand. A bold move for a girl three grades behind him, but at a slight 95 pounds, two beers went a long way towards bringing the horny to the surface. By the time they reached the barn, Shelby’s tipsy brain would have been impressed if Bobby had pointed to a pile of cow manure and claimed he’d sculpted it into a mound of bullshit. But he actually offered more.

“You like Ferris wheels, Shelby?”

“’Course I do. No better place to make out than the top of a Ferris wheel.”

The way she said it made Bobby smirk. He could tell she’d never made out with anybody, ever, while suspended three stories in the air. Maybe today would be her lucky day.

“You’re gonna like this, then,” he said.

Bobby
slid open the huge doors of the barn. Sounded like a slow train humming down the tracks. He pulled Shelby in and pointed to the apex of the ceiling, over forty feet up. Outside, the sun provided one last ray at just the right angle to pierce the barn’s skylight and show off Bobby’s achievement. A thick, splintery rope hung from a horizontal rafter high in the air. It dangled down about fifteen feet, an old tractor seat tied to its base. Another rope attached to a swivel bolt on underside of the seat so that a rider could twirl in circles and still be secured by the anchor rope, which linked the whole contraption to the third-floor loft.

“Oh my God,
” Shelby said. “D’you make that? How’d you get up there and do that?”

“
Wasn’t easy. Been working on it most of the day. Wasted a good two hours this afternoon trying to toss the rope in such a way that I could latch it to something and climb over. Finally, I just shinnied along one of them rafters up there and did it by hand.”

“You didn’t!”

“Heck yeah, I did. Ain’t nobody been on it yet.”

“Not even you?”

“Nope. Got it at just such an angle that you need a second person to pull you back on the loft when you lose your momentum.”

Shelby pawed at
Bobby’s chest like a kitten seeking a nipple. “You think I could get a ride?”

Bobby
stroked the side of her face. He knew how that simple gesture sent chills to the girls where it counted. “I might let you earn a ride.”

Shelby slapped at hi
m friskily, then leaned in, letting his bulk absorb the weight of her body and compress her chest. The scent of her hair combined into an erotic combination of strawberries and sweat with a touch of lavender blended in. Shelby lingered there, her head bobbing back and forth in sync with his breaths. “So,” she said, “what does a girl have to do to earn a ride around here?”

Bobby
smiled. This would be too easy. “Let’s go up.”

He pulled a lighter from his pocket, lit a lantern he’d left
out earlier, and led the way.

As they climbed
the first ladder, Bobby heard gunshots. Morons, he thought. Who the hell goes out shooting in the dark? Then again, maybe Artie’s Autos was getting robbed. He pictured Artie taking a bullet right between those nasty eyes.

Just hope he
got my Chevy running first, Bobby thought.