Drt (15 page)

I thought of the other pieces of evidence, especially the tear stained picture drawn by Hayleigh. Whose tears had covered it? At first I thought they were hers, but that didn’t make any sense.
 
The picture had been in the locker at work. The tears likely belonged to Jerry Morris.

But what was the reason? A guilty conscience from visiting Craigslist prostitutes? I wasn’t sure. I needed more information and I had no idea where to look for it.
 
Who should I ask? Was there a person I hadn’t spoken to yet that had the missing pieces? Someone who had known Jerry during his life and could now offer guidance? I needed it to be someone who could work quickly because I only had three days left to live.

One thing was for sure, Hayleigh needed help. From what, I had no idea. Leigh Ann seemed unstable but I had no evidence that she was the problem. I started turning over a couple of things in my head about the Morris house. The first was that Leigh Ann was smoking in the house. This caught me as odd because of two children living there. The house wasn’t dirty or yellowing in any discernible way. That didn’t really give the impression that Leigh Ann had always smoked in the house. It must be something recent.

I was also put off by her callousness toward her late husband. I wondered what Jerry had done to deserve her hate filled insults. I wondered about the prostitutes. Had Leigh Ann found out? Worse yet, had she maybe even caught him? That kind of scene could be burned into a person’s memory for decades later. That would put a marriage on the rocks without a doubt.
 

Maybe Leigh Ann had decided to take some revenge. That would explain the presence of Mr. Baxter. Maybe Dravin Baxter was Leigh Ann’s counter argument. Maybe they did not make for a happy couple after all and Hayleigh needed to be saved from that.

The headphones piped up again. “Let’s go to Greg Harris in the traffic center.”
 

I was staring at the monitor in front of me, trying to figure out what was going on with Dravin. He had been kind but I couldn’t trust him. Something about Dravin Baxter’s appearance in the house had seemed new. How new? Was Dravin there before Jerry’s death?
 

“Greg?”

What specifically was the thing that bothered me the most about Dravin? At first he seemed like a good guy but the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that he had something to hide and I had a hunch it had something to do with Jerry.

The phone rang angry, interrupting my work to string together all I knew about Dravin Baxter.
 

“Traffic Center.”

“Where were you? We went to you and we had nothing but dead air!”
 

“Yeah…sorry, I can go after the weather.”
 

“Okay. We’ll go to you in 30 seconds and you need to be ready. Greg, I am sorry, but I have to call-”

I hung up while the producer was still talking. I didn’t have much reverence for what he had to say while I was concentrating on trying to live to see next week.
 

“We have found Greg Harris in the traffic center.”
 

I faked a laugh before delivering the traffic report. I pushed the microphone off and removed the headphones as the phone rang again.
 

“Traffic Center.”

“Greg, it’s Bob. Are you okay?”

“I’m not feeling all that well today, Bob. I am probably going to need tomorrow off.”

“Greg, we just talked about this the other day. People on their 2nd strike don’t take days off.”
 

“Well, Bob, I don’t know how much baseball you watch but it’s impossible to throw two strikes with one pitch. Either way, I am not feeling very well and I won’t be here tomorrow. So, unless you want me to shit all over the seat I am sitting in, you are going to be okay with that.”

“Greg I don’t think-”

“I am not going to be here tomorrow. I will be back on Monday. You only have to cover one day, Bob.”

“…”

“Okay, Bob?”

“Uh…yes, very well Greg, I’ll…uh…make those arrangements.”

I hung up the phone. I was frustrated. I really didn’t have time to deal with this. I had to focus on what to do next.
 

I kept coming back to my worries about Dravin more than anything else. The fact that he was new in the Morris household didn’t bode well. Was Dravin the person whom Hayleigh needed to be saved from? Was he hurting her in some way? I felt something deep inside of me burn with violence at the thought of it.
 

Then I remembered the trucking company. The woman in the office had spoken of problems between Jerry and Leigh Ann. What had she meant by that? I should go back and ask her if she could explain. Would anyone else there know anything about these problems? The locker room, of course, why hadn’t I thought of this in the first place? I could go ask questions around there too.

The morning crew started filing in without giving me or my bandaged face a second glance. They didn’t ask about the wound because they didn’t see it. They couldn’t see my wound because they didn’t see me. None of them ever acknowledged I was there before, why should a horrible gash on my face change that? The feeling of complete anonymity came to me with unmistakable clarity. Something inside of me was neither angry nor sad. There was nothing because I had this truth.

I finished my work for the morning and stood up. I considered for a minute the chance that I would never see these people again. This could be the final time I would ever have to say anything to them.
 

I contemplated saying something vulgar or insulting to them, but I fully understood the futility of that act and decided instead to just walk out of the traffic center without wasting my words.
 

I drove back toward Virginia. The most important thing had been accomplished today, which was meeting the Morris family, but it wasn’t enough. I had to finish this. I at least had the full day tomorrow and I would need every single minute of it.
 

20

I took the Beltway to 95 south and encountered no traffic down to Dumfries. This was the first stop. I figured that I could spend some time asking around Jerry’s former place of employment before heading to Sylvia’s house.
 

I pulled into the Intransition parking lot and put the car in park. There were booming sounds coming from the tractor trailers as men threw heavy objects into other things made of metal.

I walked out to the garage where all the sounds were coming from. I saw a man with his back against the barn wall. He was a big guy in a shirt too tight for the type of body he had earned. A pair of red suspenders was straining to keep his work pants in the proper place. I walked to over to him.

“Can you help me?”

“I can try.”
 

“Did you know Jerry?”

“Yeah…why?”

“I am looking for information about him and his wife.”

“You don’t think she cut the brakes or nothin’, do ya?”
 

“It’s Greg, by the way.”

“Kyle.”
 

“Kyle, why did you mention that?”

“I know that him and Leigh Ann were havin’ issues. I say fuck that bitch.”

“What kind of issues?”

“She was fuckin’ some dude. That’s what he told me. Some dude with a funny name.”

“Dravin?”

“Yeah, sumthin’ like that. Jerry was real pissed about it and apparently he had a real problem with Dravin bein’ around his daughter.”

“When was the last time you saw Jerry?”

“Hell I don’t know. Day before it happened, maybe two.”

“Do you know why he didn’t like Dravin?”

“Dude was fucking his wife. I’d say that’s a pretty good reason.”

“Good point. I am going to be looking around, okay?”
 

“Fine by me, man. You’re pretty old to be a cop.”

“I’m not. I’m a reporter.”

“That’s cool, man. Anything you need you let me know. Fuck that lyin’ cheatin’ whore.”

I didn’t know how to respond so I nodded and walked away.
 

The barn was cavernous; you could set two tractor trailer trucks on top of each other if you wanted and still have room to spare. Men and women wearing yellow hard hats were working in various spots in the barn. The men stole glances at the women and the women pretended not to notice. They let their gazes linger, some of the women wore tighter clothing then they probably should while they were still sporting wedding bands.

I watched them for a while, trying to decide who to question next. For a moment I forgot what I was there for because watching this scene made me realize something. I thought about my life before the traffic studio, when I worked at the sports network and I actually interacted with the people there. I remembered talking to the women with their gathered hair in soft pony tails and summer dresses that moved when they walked.

I remembered the last friend that I had at the network, Nick Tewksberry. We would talk about fantasy baseball teams for hours. I would go to bars with Nick and drink copious amounts of beer that eventually became shots followed by the drunken train ride home. Nick would always see me the next day at work and give the small nod of hangover acknowledgment before going back to attempting to cover it like everyone else shuffling through the office avoiding bright lights. We had actual conversations about sports and careers and cars and Nick would occasionally talk about whatever girl he was dating at the time.
 

Nick got a job working stats for a national TV network right around the time that I started working traffic. I couldn’t hang out with him anymore because of wildly differing schedules. We couldn’t connect. A few years later I heard that he killed himself. I always wondered why and I wished I could have talked to him. Maybe I could have talked him out of it, maybe not. I never had another work friend after that. Since I worked alone the opportunity just wasn’t there or at least that’s what I always told myself.

I stood and watched the men and women interacting, laughing, making plans, and having the kind of familiar conversation that only comes from working with someone every day, five days a week. I realized what I had lost. I found myself welling up with sorrow over the fact that I never made any other friends or did anything to hold on to the one I had.
 

I stood there as the waves of regret crashed down on me. I could finally see the truth. The world had not abandoned me; it was the other way around.
 

I saw life around me as cold and unfeeling but now it was clear that the world was just a bunch of plants that I had neglected water.
 

If you wait for people to come to you, you become the invisible man. Friendless and alone, isolated and forgotten, dead inside. You can’t blame humanity for burying you alive when you closed the coffin door yourself.
 

“Can I help you?”

It was Kelly, the blonde woman from the creepy front office. She was dressed completely different. Gone was the unnatural blouse and skirt, replaced by a tight t-shirt and jeans. Her hair was gathered up in a messy pony tail and her face was spattered with rubs of oil and grease. She was smiling.
 

“Hello.”

“Hey, you’re that guy who came around the other day, right?”

“Yeah, your name is Kelly right?”

“You remembered,” she said smiling a little broader.

“Are you working out here in the garage now?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t very good at working in the office.”

“Well, it seemed like it was pretty awful in there.”

Her eyes got wide. “I didn’t say that. I never said that they were bad in any way. You said that. There isn’t anything weird going on in that office. That was something you said, not me.”

“Sorry, I was mistaken.”

“Okay. Yes, yes you were.”

“...”

She calmed. “Are you looking for someone?”
 

“I was just looking for some information about Jerry Morris. He is…uh…was a friend of mine.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything, anything you can tell me. My name’s Greg.”
 

“Nice to meet you. Well, I don’t know if it’s important but Jerry was doing the whole ‘Craigslist’ thing before the accident happened.”

“What?”

“Look, it seemed weird to all of us around here. There was some crazy shit going on with Jerry and his wife. Then suddenly he winds up in a crash?”
 

“How do you know about it?”

“Well, we’re all pretty close here. We don’t go on long runs. We’re just a local trucking company so we’re pretty tightly knit but not like that, I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression.”
 

“Okay.”
 

“Jerry and I talked a lot. He would come into the office all the time after runs. He told me pretty much everything. I told him everything too. It’s like we were ‘work-married’.”
 

“What does that have to do with Craigslist?”

“It’s not like he was hiding it. When Leigh Ann started having her problems, especially when she began seeing that Dravin guy, he started going on Craigslist to try to deal with it.”

“To get hookers?”

“No, of course not! Just the massage girls, you know, happy endings?”
 

“I don’t understand what this has to do with anything.”
 

“Well, the last time Jerry was here he went home early. He was really upset about something. We think that Leigh Ann found out about the massage girls”
 

“But why would Leigh Ann have a problem with that? Wasn’t she with Dravin at that point?”

“Well, I am not saying that Leigh Ann was being rational. When have you known a tweeker to be rational?”

“What’s a tweeker?”

“Oh, a person on meth, you know.”
 

My stomach dropped. “Leigh Ann? Really?”

“I guess I thought you knew a lot more. Yeah, Leigh Ann had gotten deep into meth the last year or so. She’s been arrested a bunch of times.”

“So where does Dravin figure into this?”