Shivers (2 page)

ONE

“
M
Y BROTHER IS
missing.”

Steven Everson sat on a bench in the police station, waiting to speak to someone in the Department of Missing Persons. He was unshaven, and his clothes were disheveled. He had not slept for hours. Though normally a good-looking man of thirty-one, he now looked unattractive and on the verge of forty-five. He kept rubbing his eyes, trying to clear away the persistent cloudiness. He sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Thirty minutes later a young woman ushered him into an office for his appointment with one of the detectives on the Missing Persons Squad. He sat down in a chair next to a cluttered desk. The desk was full of papers and .the remains of a half-eaten breakfast. The big man at the desk introduced himself as Detective John Albright. He looked like he drank too much beer and ate too much pasta. He was broad-shouldered and big-boned, so his excess weight didn’t look quite as bad on him as it could have. During the conversation he kept scratching his crewcut and rubbing his puffy cheeks with his fingers.

The whole thing seemed unreal to Steven. Thinking back on it later, he would hardly remember what either of them had said. He simply explained what had happened, and asked what could be done to locate his brother Joey. The officer listened to him patiently, now and then asking a pertinent question.

“How old is your brother?” the detective asked.

His brother had disappeared on October 15th, sometime between two-thirty and three-thirty in the afternoon. He had gone out jogging, like he did every day, wearing red shorts and a white T-shirt. He had been in his usual good humor. He’d refused a cup of coffee from the pot Steven had just made. Rushing out the door, he’d promised to return within the hour.

He had never come back.

Steven hadn’t started to worry until after a quarter to five. Unable to concentrate on his latest mangled manuscript, he had turned on the television to watch a couple of mindless game shows and sitcom reruns, finally switching to an old science-fiction film at four-thirty. He got up at the first commercial and went to raid the refrigerator. He had glanced up at the wall clock in the kitchen. Joey was only about an hour late, but he was usually so punctual that Steven couldn’t help but feel a bit uneasy. After all, everyone knew that Central Park wasn’t the safest place in New York City, even in the daytime.

“My brother is twenty-one.”

“Does he have any friends in the city?”

“Not really. He’s only been living with me a few weeks. He graduated from UVM—that’s University of Vermont—last June, spent the summer bumming around with some classmates.”

At six o’clock he’d finally gone out to look for Joey. He’d followed in the boy’s footsteps; he knew which path his brother took. He had walked down along Central Park West until he reached the entrance to the Park at 72nd Street. He had stood across from it, on the other side of the road, watching as cars passed by, looking absently at the pedestrians gliding through the shadowy dusk. The park had nearly been deserted at that hour.

Briskly, he made his way toward the jogging path that Joey liked to use. To his left there had been a big, wide-open field that stretched almost all the way to the east side of the city. Only one of the several baseball diamonds had been in use —by a small group of teenagers who seemed oblivious to the darkening sky. Steven had seen the skyline of the East Side buildings. They’d been all lit up, as mysterious and beautiful as a city of the gods. Monuments of loneliness.

“There is a woman,” Steven said.

Albright raised his eyebrows.

“Nothing too serious. Someone he met in a singles bar one night.” He saw a funny look on the detective’s face and added: “Joey didn’t spend all his time in bars. He spent most of his time looking for work, going out on interviews—”

“What sort of work?”

“Something in the sociopolitical field. He had a BA in—” he stopped short. “He was something of an activist.”

“Tell me about this woman.”

“I never met her. He saw her two, three nights a week. Name’s Vivian.” Steven scrunched up his face trying to remember the last name. “Vivian something—I forget. He told me very little about her. She was really the only person Joey knew in the city—aside from me, of course.”

Albright leaned back in his chair, took a sip of coffee, and said: “Mr. Everson, there are some things I have to be very blunt about. Your brother is the—let’s see,” he checked some papers in front of him, “the 315th person to disappear this week.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard right. I said the
315th
person to be reported missing this week.
So far.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“Nobody
ever
realizes. But in a city this size, well, you can imagine.” He took anther sip of coffee. “Most of the cases are solved pretty quickly. Kids run away from home. Fathers chuck it all and leave the family. Stuff like that. In fact, you might get a phone call, or find your brother waiting for you, when you go back to your apartment.”

“You mean, there’s nothing else we can do?”

“About 15,000 people a year disappear, Mr. Everson. There’s not much more we can do. When some people still don’t turn up after a long absence, the family often hires a private detective who can give his whole attention to a case. We can’t do that. We haven’t got the manpower. We circulate pictures, ask around, the usual. But that’s all we
can
do.”

“But . . . my brother. What about him?”

“Don’t start worrying yet, Mr. Everson. Believe me. We got people like you who have been waiting
years
for their loved ones to come home. For you it’s barely been over a day. I’m sure your brother will turn up if you give it time. He did the singles bars? He might just have wound up at somebody’s place last night. You ask me, he’s shackin’ up with this girlfriend of his. You get in touch with her?”

“I don’t have her number. Can’t remember her name, as I said. He would have called me by now, in any case.”

Albright sighed. “Mr. Everson, we’ll do the best we can. Let’s see. You’ve given us a picture, right? We’ll check with hospitals and morgues. Give it time. He’ll show up.”

“What if he shows up
dead?”

Albright just looked at him. “Have faith, Mr. Everson. Kids—young guys on the make on the loose in the big city—you know how they are.”

Steven tried to control his anger, his frustration. “He was wearing
jogging shorts.
He never came home to change. How can I make you understand? He never did a thing without telling me! He went into Central Park and never came back.”

“Mr. Everson, if something happened to your brother in the park, we’d know about it by now.”

A thought flashed through Steven’s mind. The acres of woods and grass and rocks in Central Park—no-man’s-land. Bodies that could be buried, hidden, lost without a trace if no one was looking for them.

“You remember the last name of this Vivian gal, you tell us. Or call her yourself. That’s where your brother is, you can bet. Kids aren’t very responsible to their elders these days.”

“But—” What was the use?

Albright’s demeanor seemed to soften a bit. He was studying the picture of Joey—fair-haired, a lightly freckled face, blue eyes, a
handsome
boy—staring at it as if some secret place inside him had been touched and a vague memory stirred. “Good-looking kid.” He looked up, all business again. “He’ll be all right.”

“Isn’t there
anything
you can do?”

“Please, Mr. Everson. Keep in mind the enormous workload we have. If we were to spend so much time and effort on every individual case, especially in this instance, when a boy has only been missing a little over a day—well, you can imagine how much work we’d get done. We’ll just have to wait.”

Steven almost laughed.
We’ll
have to wait. Who was he kidding? He’d spent the night calling hospitals, going from one Third Avenue singles bar—Joey’s haunts—to another asking if anyone had seen him, spent a sleepless night tossing and turning. And he says,
we’ll
have to wait.

New York was so huge—when someone disappeared it was like they’d jumped into a slimy ocean of uncaring rabble.

Steven got up and shook the detective’s hand.

Neither of them had anything more to say.

Harriet MacGruder waddled into the elevator of the Berkley Arms Hotel, pressed number nine, and dropped her shopping bags onto the floor. Like the hotel, she’d seen better days. She was a short, squat woman with big, fleshy arms, an imposing bosom, and a homely—but pleasant enough—face. She wore a weather-beaten straw hat at a cock-eyed angle. While the elevator wheezed its way up to the ninth floor, she hummed a tune she had heard in the supermarket.

When the elevator stopped, she got out and walked down the grimy pink hallway until she arrived at her room: Number 917, completely furnished with a hot plate and a tiny refrigerator. The bathroom—which she shared with three other people of both sexes—was further down the corridor. Now and then she would get down on her hands and knees and scrub it like crazy with detergents and cleansers, but within a week it was just as dirty and smelly as before.

She couldn’t understand it, as her neighbors appeared to be clean. Especially Mr. Peterson, the man who occupied the cubicle—they called it a room—to the immediate right of her own. Most of her neighbors were old people like herself—spinsters, bachelors, widows and widowers left alone to die by their uncaring children and relatives. It made no difference. Whatever their lives had been like once upon a time, they were all living the same life now. The single-room-occupancy hotels contained so much loneliness and despair they had developed their own special odor. And it was a foul one.

Mrs. MacGruder entered her room and placed the two shopping bags on her bed. She hadn’t much space to move around in. Most of her clothes were crammed into the wardrobe, and her other possessions were in and on top of the desk in the corner. Little mementoes of seventy eight years. Toys. Old love letters. Souvenirs from trips with her late husband. Trips all over the world, she said, though she had really never been out of the country.

She opened a can of soup and sat down to read the paper while it heated on the hot plate. She skipped to the movie section. Now and then she and Mr. Peterson would go to see a film together. They had to budget carefully to make their small checks last throughout the month, but they could afford to see a film if the price was right and the theater nearby. One particular movie caught her attention. She took the paper out into the hall with her and rapped on Mr. Peterson’s door. There was no answer, which surprised her. Perhaps he was asleep.

She went back to check on the soup, glad to see that it had not yet started to boil; she hated the way boiling made it taste. She remembered then that she had not seen her neighbor for quite some time now, and began to worry. She turned off the hot plate, opened her door, and went out to check on him again.

His door was not locked; a suspicious sign.

She gave no thought to what she might find, but opened it abruptly and entered. It was hard to see, as the lights were out and very little sunshine filtered through the windows at this time of day on their side of the building. Everything seemed to be in order, except there was an odd, fruity smell in the air. The room was colder than it should have been—no wonder. The window was broken.
Now how did
that
happen?
she wondered.

Mr. Peterson was definitely not there. She snapped on the lights, looked around more thoroughly, including a peek under the bed and in the wardrobe, then went back to her soup and the newspaper. Strange, very strange. Perhaps Mr. Baloos had seen him; she would have to ask him later.

She ate the rapidly cooling soup, finished digesting the grim news of the day, and took a nap.

She’d meant only to sleep for a little while, but when she finally awoke it was four hours later. She felt quite refreshed; in the mood for a good movie. She went back out into the hall, opened Peterson’s door once more, and stepped again into his room. Now the sunlight was coming in so brightly through the shattered window that she didn’t need to turn on the lamp.

Her eyes were attracted to a strange splotch on the wall near the window. When she’d first noticed it before, she had assumed the reddish stain was simply the result of dripping water running down the pink wallpaper. It happened all the time, what with the lousy plumbing in the hotel.

But now she could see the stain more clearly, more distinctly. She went over to it, and saw that it was actually composed of a rather sticky, dripping substance not unlike blood, but with the consistency of jelly. She reached out to touch it, but drew back, suddenly frightened. She stepped back a few feet, staring at the wall, and it was then that it hit her. The shape on the wall had a very familiar outline.

Mrs. MacGruder could have sworn that it was shaped just like a man.

Joey, where the hell are you?

I was supposed to take care of you, that’s what Dad said. In case anything happened, I was to take care of you. I’ve done a lousy job, huh?

Steven sat in the living room of his apartment, a converted brownstone, staring at the couch his brother had been using for a bed. They hadn’t had much time to talk. Joey was always on the run—an interview, a date, a night on the town. He’d saved up a lot of money by working part-time while he’d been in college. He’d even intended to pay Steven back the money he’d lent him for tuition as soon as he got a job.’

Only twenty one. Twenty one years old. What a time to die.

But he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be! He had to stop thinking that way. Joey would walk in the next morning, bright and smiling, with some story, some sensible, if infuriating, excuse. And Steven
wanted
to be infuriated tomorrow. He’d take anger over sorrow anytime.