He started with the bank. When he pushed through the door, a blast of cold artificial air swirled up around him, scented with potpourri and a comingling of the perfumes and colognes that had already passed through the brightly lit bank that morning. The woman behind the counter looked vaguely familiar.
He read her nametag as he stepped up to the hard edge of the gleaming Formica counter.
“Hi, Mr. Wolfenstein. How are you?” she asked.
He smiled, still searching and then he remembered. She was the mother of Gary Phillips. Gary had moved on to high school the year before.
“Mrs. Phillips,” he said, tilting his head. “I’m okay. I hate to bother you-”
She waved a dismissive hand, gold rings gleaming on her thick fingers. “Nonsense. I haven’t had a patron in an hour. And I love to see a friendly face.”
Max nodded, wondering if she’d find it so friendly after he started asking questions about the woman who’d been murdered.
“Were you here when the woman across the street was-“
He didn’t have to finish. She’d already begun a dramatic bobbing of her head. She clasped her hands at her chest and then shifted to an equally dramatic shaking of her head from side to side.
“It was just terrible. Horrifying! I saw the whole thing right through the glass there. Mr. Davis put that spray frost on the bottom, so I didn’t see everything, but enough. I doubt I’ll sleep well for another month.”
Max tried not to reveal his own horror at the images he’d seen on the video. The horror wanted to appear there on his stiff face, a gruesome scowl that might never leave once he allowed it to slip into place.
Don’t make that face, his mother used to say when he pouted. ‘Your face will freeze like that and you’ll spend the rest of your life looking like a whipped puppy.’
He remained impassive, though he felt the corners of his mouth tugging down to match Mrs. Phillips own look of dismay.
“Did the woman, Kim, come in?”
Mrs. Phillips bit the side of her cheek and then picked up a pen, pressing it against her lips, a shade of girlish pink that seemed more suitable for teenagers than a grown woman.
“No, I don’t think so. We had a busy morning. Typical weekday. Karen worked as well, but she was covering the window. I don’t remember seeing Kim. She didn’t have an account with us, I don’t think.” Mrs. Phillips lowered her voice and leaned forward. “She was a battered wife. Apparently, her husband killed her.”
Max nodded. Usually he found the small-town judge, jury, and executioner gossip daunting and even shameful, but instead he nodded.
“The chair would be too good for him,” he mumbled.
Mrs. Phillip's eyes popped wide, but Max had already turned away. “Thank you,” he called over his shoulder, as he pushed back into the warm day. He didn’t dare turn to look her in the eye.
He moved along to Furry Friends, though he doubted Kim could have gleaned any groundbreaking news from the owner’s son, a pimple-faced twenty-something who spent his days perched on a metal stool getting lost in his latest fantasy comic.
Max visited the store frequently to buy food for Frankenstein. Each time, Max found the boy slouched over the counter, eyes bulging as he flipped furiously through the pages of a comic book. The kid rarely bothered with a hello or a goodbye. He merely took the money and thrust Max’s cash back into his hands, as if even ten seconds away from the story was ten seconds too long.
It surprised Max not to find the boy behind the counter. Instead, his father stood there, a large jovial man who also bred and trained German shepherds.
Max had gone to school with the man’s oldest daughter. She’d moved to California just after high school, and as far as Max knew, never looked back.
“If it isn’t Max Wolfenstein.” The man beamed. “How are you, Son?”
Max smiled, again forcing his mouth to tilt up at the edges and the emptiness inside to retreat down again.
“I’m good, Jeremy. How are you?”
“Oh good, good. Got a new group of pups wearing me out, but I can’t complain.”
“I haven’t seen you in here in a while. Usually your son-”
Jeremy’s face darkened.
“Not exactly an ambitious young man, that one. Apparently, my wife and I lost some of our heavy hand with the second one because we can barely get him to the store, let alone convince him to talk to the customers when they come in.” He chuckled and wiped a hand through his thinning hair. “He’s healthy. I try to be grateful for the little things, you know?”
Max nodded.
He thought of Kim, cold and hard on a morgue table somewhere, waiting for the sharp blade of a scalpel to expose her secrets to a stranger’s eyes. What he wouldn’t give to say the words she’s healthy.
“Everything okay, Max?”
Max looked up to find Jeremy’s brows knitted together.
“Yeah, sorry. I drifted there. Jeremy, were you here yesterday when the woman was killed across the street?"
Jeremy frowned and shook his head.
“To tell you the truth, that’s why Ben’s at home. He saw the whole thing. He’s pretty shaken up.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Do you know if he talked to Kim?”
“Kim?” Jeremy blinked at him.
“The woman who died?”
“My God, Max, did you know her?”
Know her. The words rolled around in Max’s mind, a heavy metal ball clunking against delicate things. He thought of her red-gold hair falling over her pale shoulder, her eyes big and bright as she sipped her coffee and watched the sunrise. Did you know someone who’d come in and out of your life in mere days? Could he make such a presumption?
Max nodded, unable to commit to more, unwilling perhaps.
“My condolences, Max. What an absolute shame. Dr. Patterson is one of my oldest friends. They just loved her over at Safe Haven. The man is just shaken to his core by the whole thing.”
“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Max agreed.
Max had begun to back away. His legs hit something flimsy. A stack of cat food samples as tall as Max himself topped over backward. They thudded to the floor, the hard little pellets inside the boxes crunching against one another.
Max turned and dropped to his knees.
“Shit, I’m sorry, Jeremy.” He fumbled with the boxes and tried to stack one on top of the other only to watch them fall a second time.
He felt Jeremy’s hand on his shoulder.
“I’ve got this, Max. It’s a hobby of mine. My wife thinks I should have been an architect.” He chuckled. He offered his hand and helped Max stand up. “This gives me something to do today, anyhow.”
“Thanks, Jeremy. I’m just trying to gather some information about Kim’s last day. Did Ben mention if she stopped in at all?”
Jeremey shook his head. “I’m sure she didn’t. He said he’d never met her, but saw her walking the dogs a few times across the way. He thought she looked really nice.”
“Yeah,” Max sighed, heading for the door. “She was.”
He hit another dead end at Katie’s Clothing Store. The woman who owned it had worked the day before and had never seen Kim.
As he pushed into the arcade, the onslaught of beeps, clinking coins, and the strange gravely voices announcing Game Over assailed him.
The dim interior appeared hazy. The neon signs and yellow flashbulbs of the pinball machines cast him from the bright world of day into a sort of backroom reality, as if he were getting a peek behind the curtain into another dimension.
For a moment, he stood transfixed by a yellow Pac-Man eating his way across the screen of the machine directly in front of him. The player, a girl of eleven or twelve, leaned close to the screen, her ponytail swinging as she rocked the controls from side to side.