A bit more of Ira, where his call to adventure, uh, calls.
The Phone Call
Most nights, Ira medicated himself with a finger or two of whiskey before bed. It didn’t stop the nightmares, but it distracted him from them long enough to get some sleep.
Some mornings, like this one, he treated himself to another finger for breakfast.
It always happened more or less the same. It was his own fucking room, he felt awake, but it wasn’t the real world. Something crawling from the shadows up his bed.
The monster was different each time, though. Maybe he should’ve been a writer because apparently his imagination was goddamn endless.
The worst part, the part that haunted him for hours after and kept him from getting back to sleep, was that the monster never just wanted to kill him. He always knew: it wanted to take him. Eat him. Own him.
Even when he was wide awake with the sun in his face, he could dump a bucket of ice down his back by thinking about what might happen if he didn’t wake up in time.
These cheerful thoughts kept him company while he stared with blank sleepiness out his window at the street. The braying ring of the phone snapped him out of them, woke him up, and nearly gave him a heart attack all at the same time.
It was so fucking early. He hadn’t even managed to totter out to his office yet. He padded into the front room in sock feet, with his battered house robe swishing around him, and snagged the handset from its cradle. “You’ve reached Ira Carpenter, Private Investigations.”
If his phone voice sounded a bit dead inside…well, anybody who couldn’t handle that probably shouldn’t be hiring a private investigator.
“Um…hi?” He blinked. And then a couple more times. The girl on the other end of the phone sounded…well. Young. “Are you, uh, a detective?”
“Yyyyeah? Miss…uh. What can I help you with?”
“My…um.” A pause with the distinct silence of confusion to it. He considered asking if this was a prank, or a wrong number. But she had asked for a detective. “My name is Emily. My, um. My friend, Agnes. She’s—she’s missing. I need help finding her.”
Okay. Okay, that was good. Promising. Right number, anyway. Maybe he shouldn’t have had the morning whiskey. He wasn’t ready for this. He turned and stared piningly back at his coffee, out of reach in the kitchen. “Okay, Emily. Finding people is something I do. How long has she been missing? Can you tell me what happened?”
The girl took a breath that shook. From somewhere in her vicinity, a man’s deep voice muttered. Ira couldn’t make out the words. “Right,” she said as if she were pulling herself together. “So um. We were playing in…in the woods.”
Playing? Fucking hell. She really was a kid. “Is that your dad I hear? Can I talk to him?”
“He’s not my dad.” Her light voice went hard with something like offense, but she immediately undercut her momentary gravitas with a sulky addition of, “He wants to talk to you.”
Fumbling with the phone on her end, and then that voice. “Hello, Mr. Carpenter. My name is David.”
It felt like being slapped across the face. Only he didn’t know why. It was like he knew it from somewhere, but he’d swear to heaven and hell he’d never heard it before.
The man kept talking in that fucking voice like he didn’t even notice he’d sent Ira’s head flapping like a laundry line in a high wind. “Emily’s request is legitimate, I’d like to assure you. I’m a friend of the family, and I’ve agreed to cover all costs and expenses for this job, if you’re willing to take it. But you should ask her for the story. She has a good head on her shoulders. She can tell you exactly what she saw. Even if it sounds…mmm, unlikely to you.”
Dark and deep and purring, that voice. That wasn’t what’d reeled back and cracked him, but it wasn’t helping him pull himself back together. Why did he feel like it was mocking him, when all the guy was doing was laying out information?
Shit, he really wanted that coffee.
“So, so…” The girl, again. “So Agnes and I—and a couple of boys—were playing in, in uh, in the woods.” A lie, he could feel it. “And we got a-attacked.”
“Attacked.”
“Yes.” Her voice shook. “Attacked. And Agnes, she…it, it, it got her.” Truth. He rubbed his face with his free hand. He knew way too much about what a little girl sounded like when she was genuinely upset. “She. She. She. Only she didn’t!” Her voice rose to a wail. “They told me she died, but she didn’t. I know, but no one will believe me!”
Ira pulled his office chair out and dropped into it, then bent forward far enough to smoosh his face against the desktop. “How do you know?” he asked, craning his neck at an awkward angle so he could speak without sounding muffled.
“She brought my teddy bear back!” she shouted, somewhere between triumphant and accusing. “I lost him! That day in the woods! But when I woke up the other morning, he was sitting in my windowsill waiting for me! I know she brought him back, and that means she’s alive and I need you to help me find her, because nobody else will listen to me! David said he would find someone who could help!”
Ira rolled his face back and forth on his blotter. The uncomfortable squishing of his nose was an anchor to reality. This was bullshit, oh, he could tell, but his brain was cracking open and he couldn’t think. “How old are you?” That was a terrible question, he knew the second it left his mouth, but it was what he wanted to know most in the world just then.
Well. Second most, maybe, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know anything about that voice. He also wanted to know everything about it. He sat up, but set his fingers to his nose to smoosh it to his face again.
Who knew that was a tactic for maintaining sanity?
“I’m eleven,” she nearly snarled. “I’m not a little kid. I’m not making this up, Mr. Carpenter. Agnes needs my help. I need your help.”
“Emily, may I?” David asked in the background, and then, into the speaker, “We’re in Hopewell, Mr. Carpenter. It isn’t that far. Will you come, just to discuss it further? It’ll be easier to understand the situation if you can see for yourself. You can ask any questions you have and decide then if it’s a case you want to take.”
“Yeah, okay.” They were the wrong words, he knew as he said them, but he was helpless to say anything else. A little girl shouting, “I need your help” was more than he had the power to refuse.
This was stupid as hell.
“Thank you, Mr. Carpenter.” Those words had some heavy gravity. The kind where maybe he should wonder why the guy would be that grateful. “We look forward to meeting you.”
“Thank you,” Emily echoed. Fuck, she sounded tearful. He was gonna do this.
[…] Chapter 1: The Phone Call […]