Making her way along the aisle towards the small bathroom stall, Laurie made only polite glances at the other passengers. There was nothing outwardly peculiar, but, as she glanced at the faces of the twenty-six commuters, she felt momentarily disturbed. It was not a conscious awareness, rather an instinctive feeling that something was missing. Perhaps it was simply there was so little conversation for so many people, but then again, the afternoon heat on an intercity bus could easily stifle that.
When she reached the three steps descending to the toilet, Laurie paused. For an uncomfortable moment, she thought she was the only female aboard the vehicle, but she felt herself relax, as she looked to the back row of seats where a pretty blonde woman was sleeping on the shoulder of the fat man next to her. He was wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and gently stroking her hair as she slept. They were sharing iPod headphones.
The toilet was nothing more than a small closet of polished steel. It smelled of antiseptic. Despite the apparent hygienic state, Laurie was a creature of habit, and she used three or four pieces of toilet tissue from the wall mounted dispenser to wipe the lid. Having checked the door was locked, she slid her jeans over her hips and knees, and sat down. As her bladder hissed empty, she stared ahead at metal door, and noticed it was dented in the centre, as if a bull had charged into it.
‘Somebody needed real bad,’ she muttered.
Laurie finished her business, and reached into the box on the wall to retrieve more tissue. It was then that her fingers met something unusual. Tucked inside the dispenser was a small, folded piece of paper. Laurie’s fingers unfurled the crushed note, and realised it had been ripped from a bus receipt, with part of the logo still visible in the bottom corner. The indistinct message on the paper was simple:
My name is Joanne Chapman. I know he’s going to kill me. Let anyone know it happened here. Tell Mark I love him, and he was right. 117-565-6315
The words had been written using a flesh coloured pencil – make-up most likely. The writing was oversized and clumsy but the final three numbers were more misshapen suggesting the author had rushed at the end.
Laurie felt her stomach flood with cold adrenaline. She stared intently at the shaky writing, trying to dismiss it. Maybe it was simply a stupid joke. Public bathroom stalls were often defaced with threats and messages. Yet, this message had not been scrawled on the wall; it been hidden, and the rest of the bathroom was clean. Despite the unsettling nature of the discovery, it seemed unlikely to think anyone was murdered in the toilet. Still, something about the note was sinister enough to unsettle her. The word “here” stood out the most.
Standing up, Laurie pulled up her jeans, and she inhaled deeply. As she buttoned her fly, she decided she would get off the bus at Victorville, twenty minutes down the interstate, and contact the police. Whatever had happened deserved to be investigated.
Closing the neat bathroom door behind her, Laurie returned quickly to her seat. Once she had ensured that her bag was untouched, she noticed the curtain had been pulled across the window blotting out the view and the light. She thought it was the creep sitting behind her, trying to get some kind of reaction out of her – or maybe he was a dumb enough to consider it humorous.
However, the elderly man with the book spoke softly. ‘I did that.’ He nodded to the curtain. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but the sun was shining on the pages.’
‘I’m fine,’ Laurie said. What did it matter now? She would be getting off in about ten minutes. This meant she would need to contact Vicki, and let her know. Laurie reached into her bag, and produced her phone. It was in that moment a dark line passed in front of her face so quickly it appeared as a momentary blur. She instinctively glanced down at her chest to see a loop of metal appear on her body like a long metal necklace. There was not enough time for her to register what it was, before the brake cable pulled suddenly upwards. Vicki gagged as the metal noose dug into her throat, and she grabbed crazily at the hands squeezing life from her, but they belonged to the man in the seat behind, who simply grunted as he twisted the cable tighter.
Her legs thrashed, and her body bucked, knocking her bag on to the aisle. Laurie’s panicky brain held on to the desperate hope the other passengers would stop her attacker, but in her final gasping moments, she saw something that made her thrash all the more. Around her, all of the passengers remained calmly seated. The people in front of her continued staring straight ahead, ignoring her struggle. Directly across from her, the elderly man had put his book upon his knees, and was now smiling at her.
As Laurie fought for her life at the front of the bus, in the back, the large man in the Hawaiian shirt sighed, recovered his earphone from the head of the blonde girl next to him, and let her dead body drop to the floor of the bus.
4
Vicki Reiner was running late, but that was nothing new. In her twenty-three years, it seemed to her that fate ensured she was consistently delayed in life – a fact which had placed her out of step with her fastidiously punctual parents. They would arrive at least half an hour early for any appointment or arrangement. Her mother, who seemed to consider herself above all mortals, liked to state arriving in plenty of time provided a window of additional planning to ensure she was maximising her impact on the world around her.
It was not like that for their daughter. No matter what the day or time, crawling motorhomes, mobile cranes, and flocks of kindergarten children desperate to cross the interstate all seemed to magically appear in front of her car. This happened regardless of the purpose of her journey – she had been tardy for classes, job interviews, and, more recently, therapy sessions. Whenever she complained to her father (who now asked her to call him Steve) in their weekly long-distance phone conversation, he would tell Vicki in an infuriatingly chilled out voice it was simply God’s way of keeping her safe. Vicki was not so charitable, and believed it was just God’s way of pissing her off.
Still, today she told herself, there was no point getting all stressed out now - after all, she would soon see Laurie, and that created the possibility things would be better again… like they had been before graduation, or, even better, before she had left college entirely.
The previous year had not been a good one for Vicki. She had never been naturally academic, and had slumped beneath the weighty expectations of two professional parents. Through most of her teenage years, she consistently felt her main function was to evoke a heavy air of disappointment in the Reiner household. At the end of each semester, her mother would scrutinize every report card, and interrogate every teacher to identify the cause of her daughter’s inexplicable mediocrity.
This was perhaps the reason why, towards the end of her course, she was not even sure that she would graduate. Four years earlier, she had left high school with good enough grades to attend college. This was not testament to her great intellect, but rather because she had always kept her head down and worked as hard as she could. Towards the end of June, she had been delighted to receive an acceptance letter from UC San Diego. The offer related to Computer Science, which appeased her mother mainly because the course had the word “science” in it. But, as graduation grew ever closer, Vicki’s dad had repeatedly told her this degree might open doors for further avenues of study.
That was, until he got stuck in his mid-life adolescence.