Read part 1 here.
Read part 2 here.
Eating a burger in the back booth of a diner, I was on my phone flicking through crime scene photos when I got a text from my sergeant. “I don’t like radio silence.” The precinct had called a few times looking for updates but I was content to ignore them.
The truth was I had nothing to say. I’d done my due diligence. I checked both victims’ phone records but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Friends went to a bar with the victims on Saturday night and they all left in good spirits and at reasonable hours with corroborating witnesses and air-tight alibis. I hadn’t yet looked over the surveillance video from nearby businesses but if those didn’t turn up something monumental, I was fucked. As far as I could tell, there was nothing tying these bodies to anyone but me - and I couldn't even prove that.
My thoughts were interrupted when the waitress walked over to refresh my coffee. She was big and matronly, with kind eyes. “That gonna do it for you, sweetie?”
I nodded and at that moment my mind was hijacked by another vision.
I was in Beverly Hills, walking along Wilshire. Traffic whizzed by as I skipped down the sidewalk, my arms swinging in the air. I was free. My hair clung to my face as I spun with my arms outstretched, beaming brightly up at the starless sky. I laughed, high and hard and unembarrassed at absolutely nothing until my lungs were empty and I stopped, with hands on my knees, to catch my breath.
“Sweetie? You okay?" Suddenly, I became aware that I was gripping the table. The waitress hovered over me. Her eyebrows furrowed as I turned to look up at her, sweat beading on my brow, saying nothing as -
- a car horn blared. I was dancing in the street, laughing. Lights and horns and engines went from a rumble to a roar as the vehicles sped around me and swerved to miss. A Mercedes slammed on their brakes and screeched to a halt just a few feet away from obliterating me. The people in it screamed. They swore at me. More car horns drowned them out. I lifted my arms to the sky and spun in a joyful circle. I couldn’t stop laughing.
The waitress looked me over with evident concern as I struggled to control my breathing. “Sorry. What was the question?”
“Check?”
Sweating and short of breath, I smiled as normally as I was capable. “Yeah, that’d be great."
---
Forty-five minutes later I was looking for street parking on Wilshire. After circling a few times, I finally gave in and paid $15 for the pleasure of a cement garage. I drove up to the roof, found a space, and then walked to the edge and looked down at the street below.
It was rush hour and I wondered what I was even doing there. Below me was a six-lane road with a bumper-to-bumper stream of headlights. The sidewalks on either side were bustling with foot traffic. Everywhere you could put a person or a car, there was one. How was I supposed to find anyone here?
I took the stairs to the street level and waded out into the wasteland. Roaming Beverly Hills with my hands in my pockets, I eventually found the part of the street that matched the vision I had in the diner - the place where I’d danced into traffic. I don’t know what I expected to find but there was nothing there. The investigation had the distinct feeling of retracing my steps.
But then I had another vision.
I heard voices, snippets of conversation all around me. I was poolside at a rooftop party, scribbling on a cocktail napkin. In the corner of the napkin was a blocky logo made from the letters “P.H.,” and in loopy, girlish handwriting, I wrote, “Hide and Seek.”
When my senses returned, I looked across the street and realized I was standing about a hundred feet from the Peninsula Hotel.
---
The elevator let me off on the roof, and I stepped out into a crowded movie premiere party. The dancefloor was crammed with people. There was a steady pulse of club music coming from a DJ in the corner. He never once made eye contact with his audience, who all acted like he wasn’t there anyway.
I walked over to the bar and ordered something to help me adjust to the sudden stimulation. The bartender had a mohawk and a handlebar mustache, and the drink convinced me he was there to look the part. I choked it back but then -
I was wearing a black dress, standing within a crush of people, easing my way through a dancefloor. My fingers delicately pulled at arms and pressed into shoulders, clearing a path through the beautiful people until I emerged, the lights of the city looming high above me. I was by the bar, approaching a thin man in a limp, black suit. I walked over, reached out, and put a hand on his -
The vision was interrupted by a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and found myself looking at a dark-haired woman in a black cocktail dress, beaming up at me with big, brown eyes.
“Angie!" I sputtered.
“Ellis.”
“Hide and seek?” I asked.
"Ready or not, here I am.” Angela laughed, and everything failed me. My wits, my mouth, my mind. I grasped for words that were just not there.
“You knew it was me,” she said. When I didn’t respond, she said forcefully, “You remembered.”
Despite standing two feet from one another, she had to shout over the music. Grasping my lapel, she led me somewhere quieter—somewhere private—a walkway between the bar’s backstop and the handrail surrounding the roof. She whirled around to face me with her eyes wide and electric.
“You knew, right? Our link, our tether, our little... twin thing. I’m not delusional.” She looked at me seriously, her eyes burning with intensity. “You knew about it.”
I sputtered, unable to find coherency. I think I tried to say something but the words stopped at the back of my throat.
She grabbed my shoulders, stopping me, and took a deep breath. “I can see through your eyes, Ellis. Not your thoughts, but what you see. I’ve always been able to. I didn’t even realize that other people couldn’t do it for a while. I didn't realize how special we are." She waited for a response but I didn’t have one. “I was so lucky. I was never truly locked away at that hospital because I could always be with my brother.”
There was sweat on my back despite the cool night breeze. “What do you mean?”
“Ellis, I sat in a wheelchair at the corner of a psych ward and watched what you did for almost twenty years. Your eyes were like my favorite TV channel. You were my salvation. I saw every milestone, every crime scene, every trip to the urinal. I saw it all.” She smiled coquettishly, “Wanna see?”
I saw a blood-covered woman, dead on the floor of a kitchen. Her neck was twisted unnaturally, broken by a jealous husband I'd put in Pelican Bay. It was a case from almost three years ago. The kind of thing you hope you can unsee. I squeezed my eyes shut. Then -
I saw three gang members, lined up in an alley, each one shot in the back of the head. Executed. The flies were thick in the air, buzzing incessantly. One landed on my lip, and I swatted it away.
Back on the roof, I grabbed the handrail for support. “Angela...”
Her mouth was a straight line. “Not very pretty, I guess. But you know what’s worse than watching body after body? Watching your brother abandon you. When they took me away, I watched it through your eyes. I saw it the way you saw it. Through the window. And it scarred me, But you...” She was practically vibrating with anger. “You tried to forget me, and I saw that, too.”
Tears welled at the corners of her eyes. We stared into each others eyes in silence for a long time. It was the accusation I’d been dreading, and it ripped through me because I knew she was right. “You really couldn’t feel me in there? Not even a tickle at the back of your mind?” It was more of an accusation than a question, asked between rivulets of tears coursing down her face.
Suddenly, she laughed, a hand to her lips in pure delight. “My god. If you could only see yourself right now. Wait, what am I saying? Of course you can.”
Suddenly, I was standing in a little walkway between the bar and the railing, looking up at a man who was rail-thin and pale with bags under his eyes. His mouth was open in horror, eyebrows knitted together. He looked like a ghost who had seen a ghost. And he was me.
She laughed again, and the spell was broken. “After the hospital—well, after the meds wore off—I figured out I could actually reverse the flow. I could send the images back to you, I could feel it. And that’s just so handy. Because now that I know it works and we’re catching up on lost time, I don’t have to tell you how things have been... I can show you."
I was wearing soiled pajama pants, screaming on the tile floor of a hospital ward. Hot piss ran freely between my legs as two orderlies held me down. They stabbed me with a hypodermic needle, shouting, “Relax! Relax!”
I saw a hospital ceiling as electricity coursed through my brain. I was lying on a table. Straps across my chest and legs held me in place. My back arched in agony, and I bit down on a rubber mouth guard. I heard nothing but the throb of electricity, as though it were the only sound the world ever made.
I lay in bed, near catatonic, unable to move from the overdose of haloperidol tablets I’d just swallowed; a week’s worth of tablets that I’d saved, hiding them beneath my tongue. My eyes felt heavy, and I couldn’t focus, not visually or mentally. The room became dim. Further away. I was prepared for death. Welcoming it. Done. An orderly rushed in to save me just before I lost consciousness.
My knees buckled, and I had to grab the railing with both hands to stay on my feet. There was blood on my lip where I'd bitten it. Angie leaned in conspiratorially, her eyes twinkling with mischief. “I went through all of that because you wouldn’t tell them it was real. You know that, right? That’s why you’re here. Doesn’t seem very fair, does it?"
I noticed I was breathing heavily, struggling to find enough oxygen on this wide open rooftop.
“I think it’s your turn to watch, Ellis.”
“Watch what?” My voice was dry, nearly lost beneath the dance music.
"Whatever I want."
And then I saw 238. I was looking at the address, memorizing it as The Redhead leaned against the door and The Suit drunkenly fumbled his key into the lock.
Angela leaned in and whispered, “Those two wanted to have sex with me.” She gasped in mock horror.
I leaned back on the couch as The Redhead kissed me, groping my breasts, her hands working their way under my blouse. The Suit sat in the corner, watching and drinking wine out of a coffee mug.
“They found me outside a bar. Took me home. But I wasn’t interested in sex.”
The Suit walked backward, through a beaded curtain, beckoning The Redhead and me into the bedroom. They didn't notice me steal a blue-handled knife from the table.
“No. I needed them to help me find my brother."
My hand clamped tightly around a fistful of The Redhead’s dress. Beneath us, on his hands and knees, The Suit was bleeding from his chest.
“Or, I guess, so you could find me,” Angela giggled.
The Redhead screamed.
"It's your turn to watch, Ellis. I'm going to show you so many wonderful things. So many-"
I lunged at her, my forearm impacting her throat, shoving her back against the railing. I grabbed her leg behind the knee and pulled up with all my strength. She spun backwards, feet over her head, and tumbled off the edge of the roof.
I saw my own haunted face as I fell backward, engulfed by a sudden rush of air. Lights spun around me as I plummeted past hotel windows, looking up at the sky, accelerating to the street below.
And then I saw nothing.
---
Beneath the cover of screaming pedestrians on the sidewalk below, I left the party unnoticed. Back at home, I called my sarge and told her I had no leads.
Angie died a Jane Doe. She had no ID, no identity at all, really. If someone ever figured out her name, the story wrote itself. She was a missing psych patient who died tragically in a strange city.
But the truth is, I abandoned her. And that's what killed her.
Everyone carries shame, and if you don’t, you will. Something that’s never talked about, never toyed with, and if you could cut it out of yourself, you wouldn't hesitate. But it's there, and there it will stay. I used to tell myself that the worst parts of me are bedrock. That I’ve constructed what good I am capable of atop a sturdy foundation of necessary evils. But it's a lie. When the other side of the mirror came for me, it told me the truth about myself. And I didn't like that.
So I broke the mirror.
