“Why are you going about this so dramatically?” Al asked flatly.
“Because I don’t get to have a lot of fun in real life.”
Al sighed again, throwing a cautionary glance over his shoulder, where the smell of burning coffee was growing stronger by the minute. He typed in his search, eyes narrowing.
“I think you know which link to click.”
“Already there…” He began to read testimonials from a Yahoo Answers. “I once left a pot of coffee on for a day and a half. When I got back, the glass had cracked, and there was a smoldering sludge stuck to the bottom.”
“There’s over twenty entries on that page…” Jessica approached the desk, leaned over and pointed. “Don’t have to do more than skim; most of them don’t involve fire alarms going off. Some do, but see the one constant?”
“Most of these people left their coffeemakers on anywhere from twelve hours to an entire weekend.”
“And yet, I saw Clarence Davenport just four and a half hours before the fire department found him. Now these people are talking coffeepots. What happens when you switch it on without the pot in place?”
Al lifted his eyebrows.
“Pretty much the same thing…Unless you’ve got a problem with one of these.”
Jessica pulled a small, plastic device from her pocket and tossed it on the desk. No bigger than a thimble, shape of a miniature nightlight. Al picked it up, brought it close to his face.
“It’s a thermostat,” Jessica said. “Inside there’s a small metal strip. When it gets hot it expands, pulls away and cuts the current. When it cools off, it contracts, it closes the circuit. On and on, until someone turns off the unit.”
“Where did you get this?”
Jessica nodded towards the file cabinet. “From what would appear to be a perfectly functioning coffeemaker.”
Al turned once more, too lost in the moment to even notice that the coffee was beginning to consolidate into a black, static tar pit at the base. “Are you saying what I think your saying?”
“I’m saying exactly what you think I’m saying. I’m saying that in order for the smoke alarm to have gone off when it did, Davenport would have had to turn on his maker without putting the pot in place, and on top of that, the thermostat would have had to have chosen that precise night to stop working.”
“Unless someone went ahead and removed it.”
“Took me all of five minutes,” Jessica said somberly.
“Do you think he was trying to time-stamp the attack?”
Jessica shook her head. “I thought about that. And no. Not unless neighbor Cates walks his dog at the same time every evening. And even then, it’s a pretty slim bet that he would have heard the alarm.”
“So what are we left with?”
“You remember how you got the cops to admit that there was almost no forensic evidence because the maid did a cleanup job on the entire house?”
“Angry Jonny may not have even wanted the fire department to have come as early as they did.”
“Maybe he wanted an actual fire to break out. Pandemonium. As it stands though, just a cover of the same song. Fire department busts in. Not only does protocol force them to handle Davenport’s body, administer any first aid they can… but in the process, they storm the kitchen, turn off the coffeepot, maybe even spray the place with their extinguishers. The kitchen, which was also the entry point. Any way you slice it, they’ve completely contaminated the crime scene.”
Now that she had laid it all out, the excitement had turned stale. Almost rotten, giving birth to strains of disquiet, fear, and above all else, paranoia.
“He did this on purpose,” Al mumbled, dipping into Jessica’s frightened thoughts.
“What’s worse, if he didn’t do it on purpose the first time, then…” Jessica was only now just starting to get the bigger picture. “Not only is Angry Jonny still out there… He’s getting smarter.”
The smoke detector finally decided it was time to sound the alarm.
Jessica almost let out her own scream to rival the octaves blasting through the room. In two bounds, she was up on the chair, struggling with the hysterical device.
Ethan Prince burst in, waving his hand to clear the air. “What the FUCK?”
“Shut it off!” Al yelled, unplugging the coffeemaker.
Jessica threw the smoke detector on the floor, took a large, vertical leap.
With a loud crunch, everything went quiet.
“Jessica, what the hell are you doing?” Ethan seethed, before being knocked off his mark by Malik, rushing in with a fire extinguisher at the ready.
Malik took a wild look around, eyes landing on Jessica. “Are you working today?”
Jessica smiled weakly. “Where you been, homeboy?”
Malik held up a box of pens and shook them.
Al slid the windows open to a blast of fresh air. “It’s all right! Everything all right, everything’s good!”
“Clock it,” Jessica said.
With a loud, rasping cough, Al stumbled over to the computer, jiggled the mouse. “Four-thirty.”
“Four-thirty what?” Ethan demanded.
“Fifteen minutes,” Jessica said, catching her breath. “I think we’ve officially got a pretty good idea of when Angry Jonny actually struck.”
“Ethan…” Al let out one last, rasping cough. “Get Janine in here. I want Lloyd in here, and I want you on the phone with your guy down at the department in fifteen minutes. Get layout, get whoever’s doing the Michael Jackson story and tell them to put it on hold.”
Celia ran into the fray. Momentarily confused by the stench of burning coffee, she quickly recovered. “Sir, there’s news breaking on fourteen right now, you really ought to –”
In an impressive display of autopilot, Al blindly reached for the remote and turned on the television.
While the B-roll of Davenport’s house was more than a day old, the BREAKING NEWS caption beneath spelled out something entirely new. The voice of the anchor was rendered meaningless in the damning words at the bottom of the screen:
CHILD PORNOGRAPHY FOUND IN BASEMENT OF DAVENPORT RESIDENCE.
“Oh, shit…” Malik whispered.
Ethan’s hardened, time-tested jaw practically fell off its hinges. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Without taking her eyes off the screen, Jessica dialed star-one on her cell phone.
“And who are you calling?” Ethan asked.
“Dinah…” Jessica replied, raising the phone to her ear in a hypnotized stupor. “I’m guessing we’re going to be here for a while.”
Everyone began talking at once.
Chapter 22: Clean Slate.
“And then she set the whole room on fire!”
Eli and Dinah rocked back, laughter tempered with a synchronized pull of beer.
Jessica averted her eyes from what she expected to become a sloppy, half-drunk kiss. She spotted another couple by the jukebox locked in a fairly explicit game of grab-ass. A couple of degrees to the left, and a simian preppie was bending his date over a pool table, teaching her proper use of a cue stick. His girl was all bubbles and heart-shaped laughter.
Apparently, destiny was going to have its way with Jessica that evening.
“Jess?” Dinah and Eli were watching her expectantly.
“What, what’d I miss?”
“Tell Eli,” Dinah urged, a mother prompting her baby girl to sing God Bless America before a hoard of drunk dinner guests. “Tell him about the press conference.”
“Yeah, tell me about the press conference,” Eli said.
“Uh…” Jessica had been off her game since the moment they had walked in and found Eli waiting for them. “So Ethan nailed it. Brought up the whole thing involving the coffeemaker. The thermostat. Basically got them to confess that the fire alarm had all been part of Angry Jonny’s plan… big day for the Observer.”
“And who was it made it happen?” Dinah asked in a game show voic
e.
“Me.”
“Jessica!” Dina raised her beer in the air. “My niece is going to bring down the whole freaking system!”
“Easy now.”
“Best part…” Dinah continued to gush. “Jessica, tell Eli the best part, tell them what they found along with all that smut in that pervert’s basement.”
“Yeah, apparently there’s evidence that... Glen Roberts was –”
“The fucker who sexually harassed Jessica.”
“ – yeah the guy who sexually harassed me, there’s evidence that they had both been collecting these pics and home movies over the course of many, many years.”
“The two of them!” Dinah cackled. “Davenport and that bitch Glen Roberts!”
“Yeah.”
“That pretty much proves you were right about Glen. You are in the clear, and a lot of dumb motherfuckers are going to have to EAT their motherfucking words!” Dinah twisted in her seat, pumping her fist in a regrettable impression of Muhammad Ali. “EAT YOUR WORDS! EAT YOUR WORDS!”
The rest of the pool hall erupted in a barrage of whoops, simply because something loud had happened.
Dinah plopped herself back down. “This solves everything.”
“It don’t solve shit.”
“Sounds like a pretty good deal to me,” Eli said.
“You think it’s good this happened?”
“Child pornographer exposed for the world to see?” Eli postulated. “Yeah, it’s good this happened.”
“Really.”
“Tell me you don’t agree.”
“I don’t.”
“Interesting…” Eli took a sip of beer, leaned into the dirty look. Pulled out his poker chips and began to shuffle. “Because I don’t think a day goes by I don’t think about it. I see a mother slapping her kid around, right before the eyes of a dozen strangers trained to look the other way? Don’t care if she is a lady. In my dreams, I see myself picking up the nearest blunt object. One solid crack across her face. Bye-bye cheekbone, so long molars. High school teacher likes taking dirty pictures of little boys? Both eyes and his tongue doesn’t begin to cover it. In my dreams, I make Angry Jonny look like a choir boy. And how about that Michael Vic? NFL quarterback drowns dogs, pleas himself down from three years to six months and a measly twenty-five-hundred-dollar fine. When he gets out, you just watch if the Eagles don’t bring him right back into play. What do you have planned for him when you close your eyes?”
“Clearly, you can imagine.”
“Yeah?”
“But I wouldn’t. We’re all angry. We’re all pissed. To quote the comic, There’s a reason to kill everyone… just don’t do it.”
“So our prayers are not singular, and none of us dreams alone. Your hands may be clean…” Eli’s eyes made sure he didn’t miss an inch of Jessica’s face, monitoring her every twitch and tell. “But your mind is just as dirty as mine.”
Dinah set her beer down. “Eli –”
“So what can you tell me about the night you slept with Dinah?” Jessica asked.
“Jessica!”
“We all know what we could do,” Jessica stated flatly. “I’m more interested in what we have done.”
Eli turned to Dinah. “What did happen?”
Jessica snapped her fingers. “Don’t look at her.”
“What do you want? I was at the bar, had a few drinks, and I can’t remember most anything after that. The whole night’s a blur. Next thing I know, I wake up. Dinah’s waking me up. An entire evening gone. You really want to tell me that’s never happened to you? I mean, alcoholics do have a history –”
“Eli…” Dinah interrupted. “Go grab us a few more beers.”
“Yeah.” Eli slid out from his seat, picked up the empties. Turned to Jessica. “Another orange soda?”
“Go fuck yourself, Eli.”
“Don’t go fuck yourself, Eli,” Dinah ordered. “Just go.”
Eli gladly sauntered up to the bar and flagged down the bartender.
Dinah flashed her angry set of blues. “What the fuck is your problem?”
“Ain’t got a problem. Just looking for the facts.”
“Jessica, you’ve got five seconds to tell me you’ve got a problem with Eli and me.”
“Or else what, mom?”
Dinah looked as though she’d been socked in the gut. She slumped back in her seat. Reached out and gave her empty bottle a few twists. “Or else nothing. Shit, what am I going to do, send you to your room?”
Jessica was stuck mimicking her aunt’s moves. “OK, I’m sorry… Of course, I was obviously catching feelings for Eli. Shit, you know as well as I do that there’s a shortage of interesting men in this world.”
“Interesting, nothing,” Dinah snorted. “Eli’s a goddamn mess.”
“OK, or that.”
“Not just that. You and I are equals, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Mm-hmm…” Dinah lit a cigarette, kept on. “But here’s the thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m thirty six.” Dina reached for her beer. Found it empty. “I’m thirty-six, baby, and I’m still stuck behind a bar. And the funny thing is I’m not looking for Mister Right. I’m not sitting in some beauty parlor, taking some Cosmo quiz to guide my search. But I also ain’t doing much of anything else.”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t,” Dinah insisted, smiling sadly. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but you’ve got a big chunk of time ahead of you. And when I look at you, I’m so proud. Really. But with every day that passes, if I have to be honest with myself... That’s one less day I’ve got left. And if Eli ain’t Mister Right, then for the time being, he’s doing what he can to make this world a little less lonely.”
“Yeah,” Jessica agreed, absently toying with the pack of Camels. “I don’t know shit… Catching feelings for an older man, that’s pretty twisted. Wrong, right? Puts me under the column marked daddy issues.”
Dinah half-smiled, set the crescent moon on its side.
“Hey, look,” Jessica said. “You and me? Friends forever, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then this isn’t the last time this is going to happen. I like hanging with older people. You are older people. And I’m not the same fourteen-year-old who came to live with you way back when. So let’s get used to this, all right?”
Dinah managed to turn her smile into something more resolute. “Yeah, let’s do that.”
As if to test the accord, Eli returned with a pair of beers. “All clear?”
Dinah reached up and took hold of his arm. “Eli. Apologize to my niece for that comment you made earlier about her alcoholism.”
Eli nodded. “I apologize for what I said. It was a cheap shot and I –”
“Shut your hole, that’s good enough,” Dinah interrupted. “Jessica?”
“I hope red ants crawl into your ears while you sleep.”
“Now that’s certainly good enough,” Eli replied. He picked up Jessica’s empty bottle and gave it a wiggle. “No kidding, how about I get you another one of these?”
“If you would.”
Eli went about making things right.
Jessica watched him leave, sent him a silent goodbye. “We cool, Dinah?”
“No.”
“What?”
“Jessica…” Dinah took a sip of her beer and laid her hand flat on the green felt table. “That was my coffeemaker. I need my coffeemaker, it understands me.”
“Here…” Jessica reached into her breast pocket, retrieved forty dollars and slapped it into Dinah’s palm. “Compliments of Chaucer Braswell.”
Eli returned with an orange soda, and the three of them reconciled over a hearty toast.
But despite all the reassurances, Jessica was still forced to keep an eye on Eli.
Always wondering.
PART FOUR
July 4 - July 7
Chapter 23: A Man of Letters.
“It’s getting strange out there…”
Al Holder stood at his office window, staring out at the highway through slanted shutter gaps. Absently winding the drawstring around his fingers. He sighed with a noticeable wheeze in his breath. “Did you read my opinion piece today?”
Jessica rested her hands on the desk, pinstriped with midmorning sunlight. “Yes.”
“What’d you think?”
“Very good.”
Al nodded, breath heaving. “There’s people out there who wouldn’t agree with you.”
“User posts?”
“Lighting up. Scrollbar’s the width of a toothpick.”
“Scary stuff.”
“Getting strange out there…”
Jessica couldn’t argue with that. In the six days since the revelation of Davenport’s kiddy stash, the Angry Jonny investigation had splintered even further. Concerns that Davenport and the deceased Glen Roberts could both have been part of a larger ring had the entire department in panic. Computers were seized, hard drives dredged for correspondences and deleted files. Friends, family and colleagues were questioned. All dead ends; not a soul among them could have possibly imagined what had been hiding behind those smiles for so long.
Not even in my worst nightmares, was a juicy bit of testimony that had found its way into print.
The only ones who could have shed any light on the investigation were Davenport and Roberts. Davenport had been officially placed under arrest, though he remained in intensive care after slipping into a coma.
Glen Roberts was obviously unavailable for comment.
For Jessica, the strangest development had been her immediate exoneration. Al Holder had insisted that their first article on Davenport’s secret stash include the sexual harassment complaint Jessica had filed, along with how the community had rallied around Glen Roberts. And against Jessica Kinkaid.
With their very foundations shattered, people could not apologize fast enough.
Her Facebook page had gone ballistic. Every hour brought a fresh barrage of friend requests, mostly from Brookside students she barely knew. A few though, she remembered. Their grinning profile pictures clashed with memories of their furious slurs – bitch, slut, whore – all hurled at her in plain sight and volume. Even the teachers who had turned a blind eye to these incidents had jumped on the bandwagon. While none of these requests had come with any official apologies, she supposed that this was online equivalent to my bad.