What Strange Creatures (5 page)

“Do you think you dreamed it? Rolf jumping up there from the floor?” Jeff wanted to know.

“Probably,” I said.

A
t the office I spent the better part of the afternoon on a jade green Outdoor-category candle:

At the last minute, I changed “lazy” to “dreamy.” Middle-aged women might not like the implication that they are lazy just because once in a while they get a decent night’s sleep—just because once in a blue moon their husbands might drag themselves out of bed before them and mow the goddamned lawn.

Jeff’s car was in my driveway when I arrived home. He’d let himself in, and Geraldine was curled up at his side as he sat in the darkening living room.

“How sweet,” I said. “She likes you better than me. Where’s Wayne?”

“Sleeping on your bed. I gave both dogs a walk.”

“At the same time? How’d that go?”

Jeff shrugged and petted Geraldine. “Fine. Wayne couldn’t care less about Boober. More of a priority for him was smelling that rotting stump in front of that red house down the street. I also took out your trash, by the way. Because it smelled like old Fancy Feast.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking through my mail and hoping he’d skip the crazy-cat-lady comments.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry you have to deal with Wayne.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m liking it so far. For the most part.”

Jeff nodded. “So I called those numbers on Kim’s phone.”

“And?”

“And I found a few strange things. First of all, I got hold of the woman whose voice mail answered last night. From the
Chronicle.
Her name’s Janice Obermeier. She didn’t know Kim personally, but she said Kim had contacted her a couple of times in the past few weeks.”

Boober pranced into the room, sniffed around Jeff’s ankles, and gave a couple of commanding barks. Geraldine promptly got up from the couch and dashed down the hall.

“Contacted her about what?” I asked.

“Well, Kim told her she had some ‘special information’ about Donald Wallace.”

“What information?” Boober barked again. I threw him a pull toy, and he began wrestling with it on the carpet.

“That’s not clear. But apparently Janice Obermeier didn’t feel that Kim was a serious source. So she didn’t pursue it.”

“But how would Kim . . . ?”

“I have no idea. But she said she had some video she thought was gonna go viral. The Obermeier lady thought it sounded odd, too. She seemed concerned when I said Kim was missing. She said she’d wondered if Kim was . . . ‘one hundred percent well’ was the way she put it. She told Kim she’d give it some thought, but she didn’t call her back. I got the feeling that’s what she does when crazies call her looking for publicity. And then the next time Kim called, she left a message saying she had some
new
video footage she thought she’d be interested in. Some special footage she’d uncovered or something.”

“You didn’t know anything about this? Her calling the newspaper?”

“No. But the whole viral-video thing actually does sound like Kim. She has a kind of obsession with viral videos. Except she was usually interested in animal videos.”

“Like the dog riding the skateboard?”

“Exactly like that. She was constantly filming Wayne, hoping he’d do something really charming she could put up on YouTube and get a million hits.”

I scoffed. “Like eating a two-hundred-dollar handbag? Something like that?”

Jeff shrugged. “He actually does cute stuff now and then.”

“Even if it worked . . . to what end?”

“I don’t know, Theresa. I never
asked
her. I thought it was kind of sweet.”

“But she never mentioned Donald Wallace?”

“Never.”

“And never Janice Obermeier.”

“Nope.”

“Did you look for any video on her phone?”

“Yeah. There wasn’t any. But I wasn’t surprised, since she has a handheld video camera she usually uses for her Wayne footage.”

“Oh,” I said, rising to find a snack in the kitchen.

Jeff followed me. “There’s one other weird part of all of this that I thought would interest you,” he said. “One of the other numbers . . . it was Zach Wagner.”

Zach Wagner was a young instructor in the English department—my department—at the university. He taught the memoir class where Jeff met Kim. He occasionally wrote pieces for the
Chronicle
and the prestigious national magazine
Waltham’s Review.

“That’s actually not that weird. He writes for the
Chronicle,
too. Did you talk to him?”

“No. I got his voice mail.”

I fished in the cabinet for a box of Triscuits and watched Jeff open my fridge. He took out the leftover beer from the previous night.

“I was hoping you could do something for me,” he said, rummaging in my utensil drawer until he found a bottle opener.

“What’s that?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask.

“Talk to Zach Wagner. Ask him if he knows why Kim was calling him.”

“Oh. Uh . . .” I would certainly feel like a creeper doing that. And Zach was pretty cute, which would make it doubly painful. “I guess maybe I could do that. But you could, too, you know.”

“But he’d probably take you more seriously. You’re, like, his colleague. You’re on his level.”

I suppressed a snort, lest Jeff think I was being snide again. “Not ex
act
ly . . .”

“Well, more than him and
me,
right?”

Negligible, I thought. “We don’t need to quantify it. I’ll think about it, okay?”

“Just offhand the next time you’re on campus.”

“I’m not on campus much these days. Not to mention how I’d manage to bring Kim up without admitting we were snooping on her phone—and what exactly do you think he’s gonna be able to tell you?”

Jeff held his beer bottle with both hands and bowed closer to it as if confiding in it. “I care about Kim, and she’s gone. Any clue would help.”

I stared at the beer in his long, bony hands. For the first time in a while, I wished I had another to offer him.

“I’ll consider it,” I said. “In the meantime I think you ought to get a hold of her family. Don’t you?”

“Yeah. I guess I should. I only met them once, and I don’t think they like me. Once they heard I was looking for a job, it was over.”

I expected Jeff to continue, but he was silent.

Boober skittered in. This time when Jeff tried to play with him, he nipped him on the hand.

“Boober!” I said, scooping him up, and taking his ear gently in my mouth.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I bite him on the ear,” I said. “It kind of brings him back to himself.”

Jeff shook his head. “Did you hear what you just said?”

“Yeah. It’s like a Zen thing for him. Look how calm and present he looks now.”

“
Jesus,
Theresa.”

“What?”

“I’m not going to say anything.”

And he didn’t. But he finished his beer before he left.

N
ot just her family,” my mother insisted over the phone. “The police. Your brother always takes everything personally. Well, what if it’s
not
personal? What if something happened to her? What then? See, he needs to call the police, just in case. Do you want me to call him and tell him to do it?”

“No,” I answered.

“If he doesn’t do it, maybe you should.”

“Probably.”

“And if you don’t, maybe
I
should. God, I wish he still drove a school bus.”

I was surprised to hear my mother say this. She used to go around saying to people,
I’ve got two kids. One drives a bus and the other’s a Ph.D. candidate.
As if the juxtaposition were hilarious. As if transporting children safely to school were comically unimportant in comparison to working a dead-end job by day and lurching anemically around a university library at night.

She stopped saying that a couple of years ago, presumably because her friends noticed that the word “candidate” was still included in the statement long after it should have fallen away.

“What does driving a school bus have to do with this, Mom?”

“Then he’d just be brokenhearted. Not brokenhearted
and
unemployed.”

“He’s still working under the table for Mike’s cabinetry business.”

As I said this, Wayne hopped onto the couch, over my lap, and up to the windowsill, snuffling anxiously.

“That’s not a real job, Theresa. That doesn’t even pay his rent.”

Wayne growled. I wondered if he could hear my mother’s voice and thought it was some sort of game bird.

“Well, I know. . . .” I sighed.

“I know you know.”

I never used to call my mother before she moved to Florida with her fiancé last year. But these days it felt necessary. I halve my worry over Jeff by splitting it with her. And since he never calls her at all, questions about him usually occupy the space of the conversation that used to be about me and my romantic life.

My father calls only about once a month. Technically he still lives in Thompsonville, but most of the time these days he was off on a cruise ship. A couple of years after he retired from his job driving the P&H Oil truck, he got a job as “gentleman host” on a cruise ship. They pay older men to dance with the widowed ladies who go on the cruises. All those years my mother had dragged him to ballroom-dance lessons in their “let’s try to save this marriage” stage had ended up giving him a pretty sweet deal for his retired bachelorhood. It was quite a good gig for a guy who’d spent most of his prior years griping about what shitty luck he had.

“I wouldn’t say he’s brokenhearted,” I reassured my mother. “Maybe perplexed.”

“Perplexed. Wonderful. Either way Jeff needs this drama like he needs a hole in the head.”

“Like a hole in the head” is my mother’s favorite all-occasion phrase about Jeff.
Jeff needs a history degree like a hole in the head. Jeff needs another drink like a hole in the head. Jeff needs a yoga retreat like . . .
You get the idea.

Wayne barked once sharply.

“Is that the puggle?” my mother demanded.

“Yeah.”

“Tell him to shut his kibble hole.”

Wayne took a deep breath and let out a full sentence of barks.

“He doesn’t usually do this. I don’t know what’s up.”

My mother worried for a bit more over Jeff’s weight, Jeff’s viability as a family man, Jeff’s heating bill. By the time she got around to asking me if I was dating anyone, Wayne was barking too loudly for us to continue the conversation.

After I hung up, I saw my mailman come into the yard. At that point the barking reached a dramatic crescendo: a long, continuous ROWROWROWROW interrupted only when Wayne took an occasional gasping breath.

I decided to go out and greet the poor mailman—and apologize to him. I slipped out quickly and shut the door behind me, because Wayne was still going apeshit in the living room.

“Sorry about that,” I said to the mailman as he handed me my
Bon Appétit
and an electric bill.

“You have a new dog?” he asked.

I’d never spoken to this mailman or seen him up close. He had a Tom Selleck mustache and jumpy little eyes.

“Um. I’m dog-sitting for someone.”

“He’s done that every day this week.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Yeah. A couple of your neighbors have asked me about it.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “Because he’s relatively quiet when I’m home.”

“Okay,” the mailman said uncertainly. I tried to determine his age. Probably mid-thirties, like me. It was an odd feeling to realize this. Usually I think of mailmen as being much older than me. Mr. McFeelys and so on.

“I’m hoping he’ll be back with his owner in the next couple of days,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” the mailman said, then continued on his way.

It was true. I was hoping Wayne would soon return to his rightful owner. But I had a feeling that wasn’t likely to happen. In fact, I somehow
knew
it wouldn’t.

What sort of punk was Kim, lying to my brother like that and leaving her fat, special-needs dog with a near stranger? I liked Wayne okay, but I didn’t want to do Kim any favors. I wanted to know where the hell she went and who exactly she thought she was. The longer she stayed away, the more she pissed me off. It was time to go looking for her.

K
im’s apartment was in Barton Village, which was populated mostly by university grad students. I’d heard it was clean but had thin walls and dicey plumbing. I found Apartment B8, where Jeff had told me Kim lived with her roommate, Brittany—a grad student in sociology.

A young woman answered—overweight, but in a pink-cheeked, healthy-looking way.

“Hi there,” I said. “I’m looking for Kim.”

“She’s not here. I don’t know where she is.”

“Are you her roommate? Are you Brittany?”

The young woman shifted slightly and stuck out her lower lip. Her lipstick was a candy red that looked similar to Kim’s shade—only more skillfully applied. Her hair was pulled into a high, slick ponytail that dipped up cheerfully at the top and flipped at the end. It was the sort of ponytail I’d wasted many hours in high school trying to achieve, usually without success.

“Yeah,” she said.

Of course someone named Brittany would get that ponytail exactly right.

“Have you heard from her recently?” I asked.

Brittany sucked in her lower lip again. I wondered how she managed to do it without messing up the lipstick. “Are you a friend of hers?” she asked.

“Sort of.” I tried to sound casual. “A friend of a friend. She left her dog with me. And now I’m wondering where she is and when she’s going to pick him up.”

Brittany’s eyebrows did a little jump. “She left Wayne with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Are you Missy, then?”

“No,” I said. “My name’s Theresa.”

“I assumed she’d left the dog with that boyfriend of hers. Or with Missy.”