24. Abigail Closes the Case.

Oct 24, 2020

To read the story so far, visit the Table of Contents.

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Room 699

Abigail Harrison felt the deadbolt disengage from the frame; the door rocked slightly as it did. She opened her eyes, twisted the knob, and walked into the room where, she was told, her dad had killed himself.

Sunlight streamed through a thin part in the curtains and cast a white triangle on the green carpet. It ended in a sharp point on the back leg of the desk chair.

The door slammed shut on its springed hinge behind her, and she jumped at the booming sound, then took a deep breath and talked herself down. She pulled her overnight bag from her shoulder, set it down, and leaned against the wall.

For some reason, she thought about her Uncle Nick. He wasn’t a blood uncle, but he was closer than any of those. Nick was her dad’s old partner. After her dad left Abigail and her mom holding the bag of continued existence, Uncle Nick had swooped in to handle shit.

He’d moved into an apartment nearby and had spent a lot of long nights with the fractured family. When Abigail finally turned 21, she confronted Uncle Nick about fulfilling what she’d made him promise when she turned Sweet 16—to tell her everything he knew about her dad.

“He was a good cop, Abbie, and more than that, a good man,” he’d told her one late night over coffee at a diner. “Stevie Harrison was one of the goddamned best.”

Uncle Nick had detailed one particular case. Stevie had tracked a serial rapist down to his Westside squat. The chase went on for hours across three different subway stops before Stevie jumped a full flight of steps to physically land on top of him. With the perp subdued, her dad threw on the cuffs.

“Superhero kind of shit,” said Uncle Nick. He himself had been off the force a few years and now worked a “retirement” gig providing security for a jewelry shop downtown. “That was his style.”

Abigail waited for a pause in the conversation to ask the question she really needed an answer to.

“Do you think he killed himself?” she asked.

He rocked back in his chair so only the rear legs touched the diner floor.

“Why would you say that?” Uncle Nick asked.

“That reporter that had come by,” she said. “He mentioned there were, what did he call it, inconsistencies with the story. Said something about a case called Sunset.”

Uncle Nick sipped his coffee for what seemed like forever.

“That reporter guy,” Uncle Nick had said, then sat forward and placed hands on knees like he always did whenever he was finishing a story. “Don’t worry about him.”

There was a long silence before Uncle Nick spoke again.

“Stevie always worried about family first,” was all he said. “Family first. Always family first.”

An hour of prodding and yelling and defeated pleading didn’t convince him to give any further details. Abigail had cried and told Uncle Nick that he’d gone back on his promise, and he said that was all he could do—he couldn’t help anymore. He paid the check and they went back to their homes.

During a patch-it-up phone call later that night, he gave her two pieces of information: contact info for the Chronicle reporter who’d been digging around, and the room where her dad had died.

“You’d have found both on your own anyways,” he said before hanging up. “You’ve always been a good snoop.”

And so, weeks later, here Abigail Harrison was, inside Room 699.

She walked to the bed and took off her shoes and socked, feeling the carpet with her bare feet. She stretched her toes out flat, then curled and dug them in as deep as she could while examining the desk from afar.

It was made of dark brown wood, and had six drawers with brass handles. Each grew larger in descending order. The desktop was deep and wide. Abigail considered how her dad’s body would have splayed out across it after he pulled the trigger.

She was 12 when it happened.

She remembered being in the basement playing with the Erector Set she’d gotten the previous Christmas. She had heard a faint sound and noticed her mom in the shadow at the top of the stairs. Frozen solid. Abigail set down her wrench and approached. Her mom’s face was swollen with a pink hue, eyes stained red.

Whenever Abigail remembered her dad now, he was always sitting at the kitchen table during dusk. The orange ceiling light creating reflections in the window that looked into the backyard, oak trees against a backdrop of fading blue, until the sky darkened and the glass became a mirror. Like always, he’d be having his late-night cup of coffee and reading yesterday’s Chronicle.

She once asked him why he never read that day’s paper, why he was always a day behind.

“Other folks want to know the news,” her dad had told her. “But I already know that. I want to know how they’re telling the news.”

Once she asked him if he’d ever catch her if she became a bad guy. She remembered how he glumly folded up his paper and pushed out the chair, as if taking a meeting with a peer. She must have been six years old. She climbed on the chair, her feet dangling off the edge, her elbows set on the table, her face mimicking that stern, serious look she’d seen adults pull off before.

“You won’t ever be a bad guy,” he said, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “And that’s that.”

Abigail realized that her eyes were closed. Then she felt the mattress on the back of her head and put together that she’d fallen asleep. She sat back up.

Abigail didn’t quite know why she wanted to see the room. She knew it wouldn’t bring any closure, whatever that was anyway. He’d laid it all out in the letter he left behind.

“I’ve been struggling with this sadness my whole life,” he’d written in a script more scraggly than his usual hand. “The work of a tortured man,” claimed the medical examiner. “Please know that I tried everything else first,” was the letter’s final sentence.

Abigail felt that her eyes closing again, so she forced them open. In the first orange hue of the setting sun, she made herself get up and walk to the desk.

She pulled out the chair and sat down. She traced her fingertips along its top. It felt cool and smooth, like a stone carved over the eons by a raging river’s force

Without thinking, she mimed a gun with her thumb and forefinger and put it to the side of her temple. She flicked her thumb and made a soft “boom” sound, then turned to see where her dad’s brains and skull would’ve splattered. She reached out and felt the grain of the sickly green vinyl wallpaper.

She slumped back in the chair. The smooth desktop reflected the sunset colors cast from the window; she watched as they changed from purple to a fiery scarlet before the sun set entirely and darkness took the night. Abigail left the room lights off, so she was lit only by moonlight. She stretched her arms out to take in the desk’s full extent, then rested the side of her face flush against it.

She was at a wooden picnic bench at Frank’s Hot Dogs, back in their town across the river. It was damp from rain earlier that day. Storm clouds loomed above, but were disempowered by the pink and purple band that painted the sky.

“Looks beautiful,” her dad had said. “Like my little girl.”

She felt how she had blushed.

He was returning from the hot dog stand (itself shaped like a hot dog) with a red plastic tray in his hands. Chili cheese dogs and fries, packets of ketchup and mustard, two small Styrofoam cups of ice-cold tap water. They ate as the sun disappeared and the hot dog stand’s lights kicked in, bathing them in amber glow.

She told him about her day at school, how Joey got kicked out of sex ed because he started giggling when the teacher described what S-E-X was. That would put her in sixth-grade in this dream, Abigail thought. She noticed that the taste of Frank’s was way better than it had ever actually been.

She looked up at her dad. He had a coating of brown chili encircling his mouth like clown lipstick. She giggled as he pulled out cheap napkins from the dispenser to wipe it off. He looked back with stern eyes.

“I’m sorry I left when I did,” he said. “I was protecting you. I thought. I knew things that you or your mom couldn’t know. Because if you did know them, then you’d be here with me.”

Abigail tried to speak past a bite of hot dog. But then she recalled she was in a dream, or at least something like a dream, and her mouth was suddenly empty.

“I know,” she said, back in the clarity of her 21-year-old self. “I think I know. It’s difficult.”

He leaned back and nodded as if talking himself up to continue.

“You’re going to go through many events in your life,” he had said, or was saying now. “And it’ll seem like I’m not there, that I’m missing them. And while I can’t hug you again, not yet anyway, know in your heart that if there’s anything you need, I’ll be here for you. Right here.”

He stretched out his hands and placed them on tops of hers. As he did, faint crackles of electricity sparked through them.

Suddenly, the giant red metal sausage that topped the hot dog stand began to glow intensely. Then, it burst into flames, the fire contained within the massive fake bun. She felt its warmth and watched the flames glow in her dad’s eyes.

The scene broke away in long strips that peeled and curled and fell from view. She was now staring at the green vinyl wallpaper above the hotel room desk. The next morning’s sun was reflecting off it.

Her heart raced as she stood. She spun around and saw that the drawer of the bedside table had, at some point, fallen out and landed on the carpet. She hesitantly walked to it and looked inside.

There was an old Gideon Bible, nothing else. She grabbed it; when she did, she felt again in her hands that electric spark from her dream.

She sat on the bed and flipped through the Bible’s pages. She saw that there were markings throughout. Letters circled in a black pen.

She brought it back to the desk, opened the top drawer, and took out a thin pad of cheap stationery with The Palmer’s insignia. She began to transcribe the circled letters.

T-H-I-S-I-S-T-H-E-C-O-N-F-E-S-S-I-O-N-O-F-S-T-E-V-E-N-H-A-R-R

That was enough. She slammed the Bible shut. Whatever was in the rest would put her in harm’s way, she was sure of that. It would undo whatever her dad was trying to protect them from.

“Family first,” she muttered. “Always family first.”

She stuffed the Bible in her bag, left the room, and took the elevator downstairs.

At the front desk was the tall, pockmark-faced clerk. She asked for a large packing envelope and wrote out the name of that Chronicle reporter Uncle Nick had told her about, that Scoops Jervis, and placed the Bible inside. No return address. She handed it to the clerk, told him this was important to get in the mail, and checked out.

Over the years, Abigail returned to the Palmer twice more. Once before her marriage to Frank, and once again, before the birth of her son Jason. Both times she asked specifically for Room 699, and both times she forewent the bed for a night splayed out on the desk. She always dreamt they were at Frank’s Hot Dogs.

Later, after mom’s death, she’d discovered that the hotel had been converted into condos. That was okay, she thought. By then, her dad had taught her everything she could ever want to know.

Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.