Confluence (Short Story)

“That’s just how things are done here,” said Melody.

William Barnes was normally the sort of kind-hearted man that wraps up a stray puppy in his coat on a cold day, but Melody’s words made him want to do violence. He imagined himself seizing the heavy-duty, high-capacity, Swingline stapler – one capable of punching a staple through over 200 sheets of 20 pound bond paper. He saw himself lifting it high and bringing it down on the head of Melody A. Stenton.

He could imagine the surprise in her dead fish eyes and on her dead fish lips as that piece of equipment, made by a company founded the same year as the Scopes trial, came hurtling through the air. He would strike a blow for everyone, everywhere, confronted with a senior manager who recited rules off a tablet computer like they were high-quality erotica. For one instant, the fantasy was so intense that William Barnes thought he had acted on it. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened them again.

To his relief and dismay, Melody stood there unharmed. He picked a spot on her nose to look at, between the latitudes of dead fish, and did his level best to smile.

“Of course,” he said.

“That’s a good soldier,” said Melody.

Everyone was a good solider to Melody. The account managers were good soldiers. The researchers were good soldiers. The supervisors, the assistants, the interns, the guy who delivered water, they were all good soldiers. The pigeons in the parking lot, the ones that inevitably crapped on William’s windshield, were probably good, avian soldiers in the mind of Melody.

She turned and walked away, doing her best to swing her hips and nonexistent ass. That might have worked when she was twenty, thought William. At fifty, her dyed-blonde hair and Botox-frozen features made it a sad parody of sexuality.

#

William sat alone on a small couch in his barely furnished apartment. A plastic container was open on the coffee table. The remnants of the salad he bought on the way home sat in the residual dressing: an archipelago of lettuce. He didn’t look at it, but he felt the presence of the television looming on the other side of the room like 50-inches of high-def, app-enabled, blank-faced accusation.

There was a bookcase next to the TV filled with DVDs William had painstakingly placed in alphabetical order. He had always loved movies, as a child and an adult. It was a hobby that bordered on obsession. The DVDs were covered in a fine layer of dust, undisturbed by human touch for the year William had lived in the apartment.

The television had been a gift from Lisa, his wife, and the very last thing she bought. It was expensive, more expensive than she could afford on her teacher’s salary, but she had insisted and he had relented. He could tell Lisa anything, except no. He went with her to the store, hoping to talk her into a cheaper model, but she just laughed. She helped him lug it into their starter home and smiled indulgently as he set it up.

He had put in a Schwarzenegger movie, True Lies, and turned the volume up louder than it needed to be. Lisa kissed him on the cheek and told him she was going to take a shower. William lost himself in the film, falling into a trance-like state that Lisa had dubbed William-be-gone. It was only after the movie was over that William registered the slight groan in the pipes and the patter of water striking a hard surface.

He ran to the bathroom and found her, half-in and half-out of the shower, her eyes wide and her lips blue. The smooth, discolored scars on her chest from a lifetime of surgeries to repair her heart stood out too bright in the bathroom light. She had needed a valve replacement in the end. The doctors warned them that it increased the risk of an embolism, and it was an embolism that stole her from William

Since that moment, the television stayed off. He knew that even if he had been standing in the bathroom, the end would have been the same. He knew this because the medical examiner told him as much, as did the six specialists he posed the question to and endless research on the internet. He knew it with a cold certainty that did nothing to soften his self-loathing. He could never escape the thought that he had been watching a damn movie, insensate to reality, while his wife died, alone, less than thirty feet away.

Six months later, a corporate headhunter touched base with a job offer. William was past the phase where everything inside was screaming emotional agony or dead numbness, but not the part where everything reminded him of Lisa. He took the offer, more to escape the daily reminders of her absence than because he wanted the job. He sold the house and most of what was in it. He kept the TV, unable to watch it, but incapable of selling off Lisa’s last gift.

He grabbed the salad container off the table, sending the lettuce archipelago careening, and dropped it in the kitchen trash. He pulled a craft beer out of the fridge and took it back to the couch. A work friend had recommended the beer and William found it adequate, but not excellent. He opened the app he used for audiobooks on his smartphone. If the phone ever rang after work hours, he might have hesitated to use it as glorified MP3 player, but it never did.

He hit play and picked up where he had left off the night before, in the middle of a Stephen King novel about a writer and a haunted cabin on a lake. It was read by the author and King’s New England accent filled William’s ears. He discovered audiobooks only after the television became unbearable to him.

He listened for an hour or two before he felt the rumbling of a stomach left unsatisfied by the salad. He frowned, accepted the inevitable and ordered a plain pizza on reflex. Lisa hadn’t liked toppings on pizza. Half an hour later, William answered the door, took possession of his pizza and paid the driver. They shot the breeze about the autumn chill in the air, briefly, before William took his pizza and set it on the coffee table.

A sensation like ice water being poured down his back passed over him. His legs buckled, the muscles too weak to support him, and he dropped back onto couch. A migraine moved across the inside his skull: a tidal wave of pain. He leaned forward, putting his head on his knees, and breathing shallowly. He wondered if he was having a panic attack.

He thought of Melody then, which shocked him. He never thought about her outside the office. Then the migraine receded, an outgoing tide that carried the fatigue, pain and the random thought of Melody with it. He sat up and tried to make sense of what happened. It had the slippery quality of a dream and, after taxing the meager limits of his medical knowledge, William shrugged it off. He flipped open the pizza box, grabbed a slice and went back to his audiobook.

#

William was about to knock on Melody’s office door. It was something he tried to avoid. Most days, duress was the only reason he made any contact with the dead fish latitudes, but she wanted him to attend a conference. He wanted the company to pay the expenses. He girded his loins and raised his hand to the door.

“I don’t think she’s here today.”

William looked over his shoulder and saw Tom standing there, an open folder in his hands. Tom glanced up at William, his baby blue eyes hovering beneath pale, red eyebrows.

“Did she call out?” William asked.

“I don’t think so. Nobody’s seen or heard from her. It’s kind of weird, actually. She missed a client meeting this morning. Things went smoother without her, so I’m not complaining, but it’s not like her to go AWOL.”

“That is weird,” said William. “Maybe she’s got the flu?”

“Maybe,” said Tom, shrugging and then wandering away.

William gave Melody’s door a dirty look. He could talk to her about the conference on Monday, but he’d wanted to get it out of the way. He pushed that Melody-annoyance aside and went back to his desk to deal with the other Melody-annoyance, the open document on his workstation.

He was an internal auditor for the company’s projects and had just finished a review. He liked the work. It made him feel useful to assess a project that went off track and give salient advice about it. When he turned in his report and recommendations, however, Melody demanded that he reformat it to the new guidelines.

She’d instituted those guidelines with zero staff input. If she’d bothered to ask him about it, William would have told her that unilateral changes were, if not the worst approach to change, than one of the worst. She had not asked him. Melody believed in the appearance of cooperation, but not the actual process. He buried his resentment and spent the rest of the day reformatting the document to her new standards. He was all but alone by the time he knocked the document into shape. Without the boss there, everyone else started their weekends a few hours early.

William ran off a hard copy of the report. He liked checking documents on paper, often catching minor errors he missed on his computer screen. He grabbed the paperwork out of the office printer and took it back to his desk. The report was short enough that it didn’t require the services of the Swingline and he tried to move the stapler out of the way.

It stuck fast and William gave it a firmer, perplexed tug. The stapler came off the desk with a quiet pop. Curiosity got the best of him and William flipped it over to look at the bottom. He saw a small, black stain. He pulled it closer and the light caught on a strand of blonde hair that was stuck to the stain. William looked at the hair and his eyes jerked to Melody’s office door. He felt a little sick and then felt stupid.

The stain was probably ink and that hair could have come from anywhere, he reasoned. He grabbed a napkin from the break room, wet a corner of it, and dabbed at the spot on the bottom of the stapler. It came away red and that same, vaguely sick feeling came back.

“You didn’t do anything, William,” he muttered to himself. “It’s just ink.”

The sound of his own voice reassured him. He looked over his report and noted two errors. He fixed them in the document on his computer and emailed it to Melody.

#

As he rode the elevator on Monday morning, William’s eyes were burning and every thought felt like it was being sucked down into a quagmire. He hadn’t slept well all weekend. His mind kept turning back to that spot on the bottom of the stapler. Every time it did, a vague nausea settled into his gut. He knew it was stupid. The spot was only ink. Any number of blonde women who came through office might have shed a stray hair. Knowing that didn’t satisfy his conscience. William took one step off the elevator and came up short.

Everyone was standing in small groups and talking. Uniformed officers were pulling people aside, one by one, and taking statements. He mind went into a shrieking panic for a second. Something about a police uniform made him feel reflexively guilty, in the same way the sight of a police car made him automatically check his speedometer. He shook off the guilt and reminded himself that he hadn’t done anything. He walked to his desk and set his attaché case on it.

Sheila drifted into his peripheral vision. She was a pale woman and slender to the point of looking frail. William had intuited her schoolgirl crush on him, but didn’t act on it. He hadn’t been able to form more than the most superficial of relationships with anyone since he moved. It was as if his ability to love had played Fortunato to his pain’s Montresor and been sealed away, never to see the light of day again.

Sheila whispered to him, “What’s going on?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “Must be pretty serious or there wouldn’t be so many cops.”

It took a while, but eventually a plainclothes detective approached William and Sheila. He was middle-aged. His short cropped hair was shot through unevenly with gray. The detective was in the middle of a losing battle with bad diet or genetics and his gut hung over his belt. He looked worn down, his eyes dull, and his face pinched in the way William associated with chronic pain.

“Hello. I’m Detective Markham.”

“Hello,” said William and Sheila in unison.

Markham checked his notes and said, “You’re Mr. Barnes and Ms. Timmons?”

Sheila and William nodded.

“Ms. Timmons, I’d like to speak with you privately for a moment.”

William watched the detective lead Sheila away. They spoke for a few minutes, the detective jotting notes and Sheila looking confused. Sheila asked a question, insistent, and then she burst into tears. The guilty nausea grew in William’s stomach as the detective offered what looked like a platitude. Sheila ran out of the room. Markham came back over to William.

“Mr. Barnes,” said the detective, “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Okay,” said William.

“Can you think of anyone that might want to hurt Melody Stenton?”

William went cold all over. He had only been in one serious accident and the moments after the detective’s question felt the same way. Everything unfolded too slowly, but with unshakeable inevitability.

“Mr. Barnes, are you alright?”

“Yes,” said William, forcing the word out.

“Can you think of anyone that might want to hurt her?”

“No. I can’t think of anyone.”

“Do you know if she’s received any threats recently?”

William shook his head and said, “I wouldn’t really know, though. We don’t spend time together outside of work.”

“Has she seemed out of sorts lately, maybe had any arguments with anyone here?”

“No, nothing like that. She seemed fine the last time I saw her.”

“When was that, Mr. Barnes?”

“Last Thursday. She was still here when I left for the day,” said William.

“Did she do anything unusual recently? Unexplained meetings out of the office? Long lunches?”

“She missed work Friday. Nobody knew where she was. That isn’t like her. Other than that, she’s been business as usual.”

“Are you aware if Ms. Stenton is in a relationship with anyone?”

“Not that I know of, but I doubt she’d tell me about her personal life.”

“Why’s that Mr. Barnes?”

“Like I said, we don’t socialize outside the office.”

Another plainclothes detective came over and listened. Where Markham was dulled out and tired, the other detective was younger, leaner, and his eyes were bright with suspicion. Markham glanced at the younger man and nodded.

“Mr. Barnes, this is Detective Raleigh.”

William nodded to Raleigh. The younger detective didn’t return the nod, just narrowed his eyes at William. Another surge of guilty nausea threatened to drive bile up into William’s throat. Markham didn’t seem to notice, but Raleigh did.

“Nervous, Barnes?” Raleigh asked.

“This is all a little upsetting,” said William, annoyance displacing the guilt.

“Not if you haven’t done anything wrong,” accused Raleigh.

“Knock it off, Raleigh,” ordered Markham, with a look of long suffering.

“I’m just doing my job,” said Raleigh.

Markham directed a stare at Raleigh and William could feel the weight of that stare. He watched Raleigh wither beneath the older cop’s authority. Raleigh mumbled about checking on something, directed one last suspicious glare at William and walked away. Markham shook his head and turned back to William.

“I apologize, Mr. Barnes.”

“You should make him apologize. Its better management,” said William on reflex.

Markham gave William a level look and said, “Oh?”

“Sorry,” said William. “Force of habit. Part of my job is advising people on how to get better results.”

“What would making him apologize accomplish?”

“It makes the person own their behavior. Plus, it’s painful. Most people learn to hold their tongue, just to avoid the pain.”

Markham glanced after the retreating Raleigh and said, “I’ll have to remember that.”

“Detective Markham, did something happen to Melody?”

William didn’t want to know, but he needed to know.

“I’m afraid Ms. Stenton is dead,” said the detective.

“Dead?”

William’s sense of balance went out of sync and he swayed on his feet. He’d suspected as much, thought he could even guess how it happened. Hearing the word, dead, spoken aloud gave it all a gravity he hadn’t expected.

“Murdered, to be precise,” said Markham, watching William’s expression.

William tried to process the new word: murdered. It hung in the air like a wrecking ball. He said the first thing that came to mind.

“Jesus.”

Markham either found or didn’t find whatever he was looking for on William’s face because he closed his small notebook with a practiced flip.

“I’m hoping for a better suspect than that,” said Markham.

William snorted a little when the gallows humor seeped through the shock. The old detective gave William a half-smile.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Barnes.”

“Detective,” said William with a nod.

From across the room, Raleigh glared.

#

Raleigh sat opposite of William, his face a portrait of judgment. They’d been at this for hours. Raleigh kept going over the details of William’s story, looking for mistakes or just making accusations. He hadn’t found any mistakes, but it was clear to William that Raleigh believed he had his man.

“I think it’s funny,” said Raleigh, “that you didn’t bother mentioning that you and Ms. Stenton didn’t get along. Makes you look very guilty from here. Why didn’t you mention that, Barnes?”

“We’ve been over this,” said William, his patience waning. “The company hired me, not her. She resented them shoving me down her throat. I didn’t like her because she was bad at her job. That doesn’t mean that I killed her.”

“Why should I believe that? You didn’t like her. You’re a loner. As near as I can tell, you don’t have any friends here at all. Maybe you got obsessed with her, couldn’t take her being bad at her job anymore and just had to put a stop to it.”

William didn’t say anything.

“Nothing to say, Barnes?”

“You didn’t ask me anything,” said William.

“You think you’re real smart, don’t you Barnes?”

“Compared to whom?”

“I know you killed her,” said Raleigh. “Just come clean and make it easy on yourself.”

“I didn’t kill Melody.”

“Why don’t you have any friends, Barnes? How can you live somewhere for a year and not make a single friend?”

Markham came through the door and caught the last question. Raleigh hadn’t asked that one before. William closed his eyes, not eager to dredge up the past or all the pain it contained. He opened his eyes and fixed them on Raleigh’s.

“My wife died,” said William, his voice raw. “I came here to start over somewhere that everything didn’t remind me of her. Friends ask you questions I couldn’t answer without ripping open all that pain.”

William saw the certainty on Raleigh’s face waver. He saw Markham in the background and could almost watch as the older detective slid the name William Barnes out of the sinister loner category into the grieving widower category.

“Raleigh,” said Markham, “a minute.”

Raleigh stood up from the table and walked over to Markham. Their voices were low, but William caught the word alibi. William was bleeding inside. He just wanted this to be over. He thought that Markham never saw him as a viable suspect and that Raleigh was the real reason he was here. Raleigh, with his suspicious eyes and mind, was the reason this wasn’t already done.

William imagined a great, translucent hand plunge into the mind of Detective Raleigh. He watched the hand close into a fist around Raleigh’s suspicion. William imagined that suspicion as a hissing, spitting rat that whispered poison and spite. The fist tore that suspicion out and carried it off into the ether. William thought he saw Raleigh jerk a little bit, but he wasn’t sure if that was part of his fantasy or if Raleigh really moved.

“Mr. Barnes,” said Raleigh, looking a little glassy-eyed, “you’re free to go.”

Markham coughed a little. Raleigh looked like he was trying to choke down a full-sized grapefruit.

“I apologize for keeping you here so long,” growled Raleigh.

“Thank you,” said William, stunned at the about face.

“Your alibi checked out, Mr. Barnes,” said Markham. “Your pizza delivery guy confirmed he was at your door at the time of Ms. Stenton’s death.”

William didn’t believe for a second that Raleigh was going to buy that alibi, but he didn’t wait around for anyone to change their mind. He was halfway back to his apartment when it hit. The feeling of ice water down his back and the nausea arrived first. He felt the migraine coming, knew it’d make him a danger to other drivers. He managed to swing his car into a gas station as the pain slammed home in his head. He was seeing double as he tried to get his car into a parking space.

He bent forward, his head on the wheel, trying not to cry and shaking. He wasn’t sure how long he was there and, thinking about it later, William suspected he blacked out. The next thing he knew, someone was a tapping on the window. He looked up and his heart skipped a beat at the sight of the police officer.

The moment passed when he saw the coffee and half-eaten bear claw in the hand that wasn’t tapping the window. William was pretty sure that if the cop was going to haul him back to the precinct, both hands would be free. He clicked the key forward enough to get power to the electronics and rolled down the window. The cop watched William, a little suspicious, but mostly just concerned.

“All you all right, sir?” The cop asked.

“I think so,” said William.

“Have you been drinking?”

“No, just felt like I was going to pass out. I wanted to get off the road, so I wouldn’t cause an accident.”

The patrol officer leaned down, sniffed a little, and satisfied himself there wasn’t any booze involved.

“Are you okay to drive yourself home?”

“Yeah, I think so. Probably just dehydrated. I’ll get some water before I go.”

The explanation clicked with the cop, who brightened up.

“Oh yeah,” said the cop, “Same thing happened to my uncle once. Poor guy ran his riding lawnmower right into my aunt’s new car. He’s never going to hear the end of that.”

“Ouch,” said William, starting to feel like himself again. “My dad chipped a piece of my grandmother’s good china. It’s been thirty years and he still gets an earful every Thanksgiving.”

The cop shook his head in disbelief and said, “That’s rough. You be sure to get that water and drive safe.”

“I will, officer.”

#

William kept expecting Raleigh to show up with evidence, real or imagined, to connect him to Melody’s death, but it never happened. If the investigation was progressing, he saw no sign of it. The lack of police attention was a relief, but the interrogation unearthed feelings that he’d buried deep and for good reasons.

William moved through his days like a ghost, talking, doing his job, but he could not have described any of it after the fact. He lived in a gray haze. A dull ache in his chest was the only constant. Lisa was dead, and he was alone. He left everything behind to escape that truth, but it had found him again.

He wasn’t sleeping and, when he did sleep, he was plagued by the sight of Lisa’s body, half in and half out of the shower. He saw her eyes staring off into nothingness and woke in cold sweats. After a week of cold sweats and sleep deprivation, William could barely think in a straight line. All he knew was that he missed his wife, and he’d do anything to make that feeling stop.

He sat on the couch, in a fatigue stupor, and his overtaxed body demanded sleep. He slipped into unconsciousness. Lisa was sitting next to him, her head on his shoulder, and they were watching a movie. She never loved movies like he did, but she loved sitting with him while he watched. He slid his arm around her.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” said William.

She leaned in and kissed his cheek.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

The words struck a deep, discordant chord in William’s chest. He turned to stop her, but she was already out of the room. He stood up, chased after her, but couldn’t move fast enough. The rest of the world was traveling at regular speed, but he was caught in a slow lane filled with mud, molasses, and quicksand. He strained against that slowness, his heart pounding, and an intuition that something terrible was about to happen screamed at him to hurry. He heard the shower and his pulse doubled. He needed to hurry, to undo what was about to happen, but he couldn’t move fast enough. Time was betraying him.

Time shifted into normal speed and William crashed through the house. He knocked over a table and heard a vase shatter behind him. He hit the bathroom door at a run. It burst inward and he came to a stop. Lisa was there, half in and half out of the shower. The surgical scars stood out in sharp relief under the energy-saving fluorescent lights she had insisted on getting.

“No,” he moaned. “No!”

He reached out toward her and his eyes snapped open. He saw his reflection in the television screen. He was haggard, hollowed out, with a clawed hand in the air. William knew it was wrong. He knew it deep in his bones, but his mind, overtaxed, traumatized by the dream, didn’t care. He imagined. He imagined Lisa out of her coffin. He imagined her alive and well. He imagined with all the strength and will left in him. He saw her in perfect health, eyes bright and laughing.

Some part of him swung into sluggish motion, his conscience perhaps, and brought a fist down on the fantasy. William shuddered and sobbed. He shivered as he sat there and thought he should turn up the heat. Autumn was coming. He started toward the thermostat, felt his legs quiver in fatigue, and remembered too late what was coming.

The pain wasn’t just in his head this time. It crashed into his body hard enough to send him flying. He hit something hard. He didn’t know if it was the floor or a wall. He felt muscles seize up all over his body and there was a keening noise. The last, beleaguered thought that passed through William’s mind was that he was screaming.

#

“If I didn’t know better, Mr. Barnes,” said the neurologist, “I’d say you suffered a serious brain trauma.”

William had come to in a hospital room, hooked to machines he half-recognized from medical dramas. The nurse told him that he’d been in a coma state for days before she left to page the neurologist.

“If you didn’t know better?”

“We’ve run every test we can think of on you and, if there is a problem in your brain, we can’t find it.”

“I’m not sure if I should be relieved or worried,” said William. “So what now?”

“We can keep you here a little longer, rerun some of the tests, but I don’t think we’ll find anything.”

“What’s option two?”

“You go home, Mr. Barnes. Come back for follow-up and let us know if you have another episode.”

“I think I’ll go home,” said William.

#

William couldn’t remember exactly what happened before his seizure or episode or brain trauma. He’d been too tired, too caught up in a surreal haze, to ever be sure. He remembered the gist, though. He remembered the feeling of deep wrongness and tried to put it all out of his mind, but the phone calls made that impossible. There had been dozens of missed calls and voice messages when he got back from the hospital. Lisa’s parents, who stopped speaking to him after her funeral, were calling. The calls sank a hook of fear so deep in him that he trembled constantly.

He sat on the couch, alone, and his phone sat on the coffee table. It rang. The words Lisa’s Parents appeared on the screen. He didn’t reach for the phone. He didn’t even breathe. He shuddered and looked away, squeezing his eyes shut like a child. He didn’t want to see the phone, but he also didn’t want to see the TV. Closing his eyes didn’t help. He felt its presence from across the room. The phone rang again. William trembled. The television loomed.

#####