—The photographer-
The spiders had been busy the night before I discovered Santa’s body on the dock.
Spiderwebs at dawn. Spiders battle dew. The majesty of webs. Gates in the air. All pretension twaddle names.
Not fitting for the photographs I was capturing. Yes, dew, spider webs, early morning fog over a lake, and some self-congratulatory wood fencing that kept the retired folks and their grandkids from tipping off the walkway planks and into the lake. The lake with slimy rocks and alligators although I couldn’t see any right now. Just turtles swim swim swimming with moss on their backs and little fish trailing after them.
I was focused in on a bird, one of those dark colored long-beaked pose-happy birds that aired its winds by extending them wide - like a frat boy manspreading on a bench seat. Taking up space to feel good about themselves. Feel important in all their white faced blond hair blue eyed backward hat wearing and directionless boring life.
No, I’m not bitter, you’re bitter.
I stepped back to focus in with the long lens, the background fuzzing out slightly. And something to my left caught my eye, something in the frame to the left caught my eye.
I stood up and looked. Yes, obvious but looking is something that I’ve noticed people don’t do a lot of. They won’t notice the Pac Man earring worn by the checkout woman. Or the brown belt with tiny little dragons embroidered and leather punched on a belt worn by a police officer. Black uniform, brown belt, you know he got special permission for that. I bet it was his birthday or it was a gift from his child. Both acceptable excuses and it gave his friends a reason to tease him, gave everyone a reason to smile. We all need that.
It’s important I tell you that I looked because what I was seeing had been ignored by all the walkers and runners and rowers and strollers this morning already. Retirement villages never sleep past 4am and it was already 10am.
I looked and saw a trash bag, black like one of those industrial bin bags that are in cafeteria garbage cans. It was pulled over top of what looked to be a Santa. It was man size, standing with its back to a pillar on the dock. Clues of it being a Santa were simple - red velvet pants with white fur like hems. Hands, fingertips really, poking out and wearing black gloves. A Santa covered up for the night to prevent it from getting damp from the fog, or from birds pooping on it, or from stealing the fake hair to use in their nests. Except, something wasn’t right.
I’ve learned, when something isn’t right, something about the framing or the scene is giving me that itch between my shoulder blades, I don’t rush it. I took pictures, zoomed in, zoomed out, from different angles. Not looking for clues or hints, just letting my eyes see all the things they could see - my mind would work it out. It’s awesome like that.
The things came in a rapid 1 2 3. His boots were wrong, they were black cowboy boots. The bag was cinched down at his waist, would make sense to tie it down but the rope, bungee cord actually, went around the pole behind him and there was another on around his shoulders. Then I noticed the wet underneath him, not water, that has a luminous reflective quality on the boards of the decking closer to the water. No, this was dull, a color that wasn’t the same as the deck, wasn’t clear - it changed the tone the shade, like adding red on top of yellow on top of black on top of brown and letting them just bleed into each other. And no birds stayed near the dock. They kept their distance.
Oh god. It’s blood. It’s a body.
I was famous. Or at least a lot of people wanted to see my face. They didn’t ask my name, only who does she belong to, do I know her parents. Lots of questions from the police. Clear I didn’t do it. Too many other people had walked by the same scene and didn’t look, didn’t see. And, I was with my grandma all night with her neighbors sitting around a fire pit out back. Police might not believe me, but a bunch of in your face women that know the police officers mothers gave me credence. And probably a bit of sympathy too.
I sat on a picnic bench. I was in the officers’ sight but with so many of them wandering around, they forgot about me. I was someone else’s problem so I was invisible. Which was fine - it was a lot to take in.
How did Santa get there?
He’s obviously from the SantaCon that are in town this weekend.
Don’t jump to conclusions, he could have been dressed up like that to throw us off. Or he could have been at one of the holiday parties at the rec centers.
I don’t think this is a mystery novel, or a cozy mystery, we’ll find the person responsible by the end of the day.
Person responsible, not killer?
We don’t know he was killed.
No, of course not, he put a trash bag over his head and tied himself to a pole.
The officers walk away snarking to each other.
I play with my camera, no memory card since I gave that to the police as evidence but I can still practice framing. Flowers always calm me down. I lean off the bench, angling for an interesting frame between the grass, the mulch and the flowers the ground, almost like looking at it from a bugs point of view. Oh dear. The itch again. I point, frame, shift, bend, twist and there it is. The grass looks matted down. The flower leaf and mulch have red fluff in it. Weirdly, there’s also a French fry, lone and barely visible under the mulch. That spot of beige tan in the dark wood was what caught my eye. I wave over one of the officers, point it out.
—The murderer-
He broke my heart by breaking hers.
Watching him sit there, waiting for his burger and fries like some long lost teenage Fonzie or something like a long lost James Dean with a beer belly. Ok, he was still thin but more that thin in a I am dying kind of way instead of the I’m a healthy horse kind of way. I sound like her. I sound a lot like her. Even after all these years.
He broke her heart because he could. He was so handsome back then. Blond hair in that almost white shade. Deep blue eyes and he was so tall to all of us then. We were seniors in high school.
He dated her for six months. We both thought it was soul mate territory. A she married her high school sweetheart story in the making. We even wrote down everything we could remember because we thought it would make a good move some day. Not like the Where the Boys Are movie, but a light-hearted easy love story. Movies when we grew up always had happy endings because people ignored the ugly things.
That’s why we weren’t prepared when he broke up with her. It hit her out of the blue, just a simple, no, I don’t want to go out with you any more. It’s been fun. And then nothing. We, she, still saw him in school, the class wasn’t so small that she and he couldn’t get lost but it wasn’t so big that we could avoid him entirely.
She was broken for a month, lost and trying to look for explanations that he and she couldn’t provide. She lost weight, she dressed differently every week for that month, trying to figure out if she could get him back.
I was by her side the whole time. We’d hatch plans and ideas together. I was as convinced as she was that he made a mistake that he could come crawling back or running back if she did just the right thing.
It was after a basketball game. We were still in our cheerleading outfits, our cheerfits we called them. She went outside looking for him and I stayed inside talking to the girls. They must have felt something or something because they peeled off as one, saying they needed to go get a drink, go pee, do something. He was behind me. I knew it was him before I looked because he wore cologne. No other boy in school wore cologne but he had an aunt that went to Paris and brought him back this scent and he wore it like it was a badge. His scent around me, I turned to tell him the virtues and glory of her, and he smiled at me and said, “Hi, I missed you.”
He, who only treated me like the third wheel I was. He who would only ever slightly shift out of the way to let me pass or let me slip into the backseat, or would get angry if he wanted to talk to her and she was on the phone with me. The busy tone at her house was always my fault. He smiled at me, the same smile he used to give her, and I staggered.
I ran to the locker room. I wouldn’t tell her, couldn’t tell her. He hasn’t spoke a word to her in a month and now he tells me this. Never. I will die with this secret.
But I didn’t die. I was hunted. I’d find him in front of my locker, he’d show up at my house when she was there, crying on my bed, I’d hear pebbles hitting my window and tell her that it was sleet or snow or just a weird unknown clicking sound. He’d leave me notes in my locker. Gifts would appear on my desk when I walked into a classroom. I felt his eyes on me at every game, in the cafeteria, in the hallways.
I wasn’t strong. Pursuit like that is overwhelming and confusing. It’s easy for my young mind, I tell myself for the last million years, to misinterpret manipulation for love. I don’t know how he planned it. The moment I was the most vulnerable, after a failed French test, he found me in the hallway by my locker, wiping tears from my eyes. And he bent down and kissed me. I would like to say that I didn’t kiss him back, but I did. Tears making our lips wetter. I was only focused on him and I still heard her small intake of breath. That moment when all the air left her lungs, shock and betrayal and all the things whooshing out in a single stream.
She never spoke to me again.
Here he sits. The boy man who changed the course of my life. She and I didn’t go to college together, she switched schools. I was miserable and alone and found release from my guilt with drugs and alcohol. I dropped out. Spent the next million years searching for her. Working in resorts in places I remember her mentioning, South Carolina, Georgia, Las Vegas. I bounded around the country, waiting to run into her. The old saying if you sit still long enough, the entire world passes by you. I threw myself into places where she would be. And I never found her.
Instead, he shows up in my diner. Dressed as a Santa.
—The old friend-
“He broke my heart,” she tells her granddaughter. “I’m glad your name doesn’t appear with his in the article - it’d bring you nothing but misery.”
“The article only says ‘a visiting photographer’.”
“Yes, that’s enough.”
“How’d he break your heart, Grandma?”
“I thought he was the one. I was so naive. I thought lavishing of attention, someone wanting to be with me 24/7 and being jealous was love. It was possession. And the thing I learned was that my value was lost, the instant he possessed me. I," she breathes in bracing herself, "I slept with him. In the backseat of his car like a million other girls were doing at the same time. But I was the good girl, the untouchable girl I wasn’t into partying, I wasn’t into drinking, I wasn’t into anything but him. The next day, he dropped me.”
“He deserved to die.”
“Yes. The worst part is that he broke my friendship over it. I thought my best friend was behind it, was the reason he dropped me. I saw her kissing him about a month later. I had never felt rage that like before, not until your mother had that bully at school. I was hurt and humiliated and full of shame.”
“Did she know you slept with him?”
“No, that’s the only thing I ever kept from her. The shame of it wouldn’t be there if we’d stayed together or gotten married. But with him dumping me, I was just another dumb girl who could have gotten pregnant but didn’t because of the grace of god.”
Silence.
“I learned later, at a reunion we had with a few of the girls, I avoided any reunion where he could be there, where she could he there. And one told me that he had done that to another girl after graduation. Came on strong to the best friend after the breakup. The poor girl, both of them, was smarter and she told her friend. They ended up pelting his house with eggs and rotten tomatoes. I often wondered if that’s what happened to my friend.”
“Did you ever ask?”
“No. It was too much water under the bridge to go digging around for that. But…”
“But what, Grandma?”
“I saw a picture of her a few years ago. Someone ran into her and posted it. I remember thinking that her eyes were so different from what I remember. Cold, distant, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d killed somebody.”
—The murderer-
“Remembering people is weird, isn’t it? I would know her face from a million miles away, I knew your face from 10 feet away. But you, not even a kiss could bring me back to you. I don’t like that you can forget me, but I’ve been forgotten by more people that you. I’ll live.”
She looks down at him, moaning, doubled over on his side, face hidden, “But you won’t.”
Later…
“I thought I was close to finding her once. I think I saw her on the ski lift line from the window of the restaurant. I started to go out to see if it was her but by the time I opened the door, she was on the lift and going up the mountain. I described her to the front desk person to see if she was staying at the hotel. Even though they knew me by sight, they wouldn’t tell me anything. I was fired soon after that. Something about leaving my tables and making guests uncomfortable asking them if they knew this woman. I read a book once that had this private investigator and no one reacted weird when she asked them probing questions about a person they were supposed to know – the people just told her. That’s not how it is in real life – people are skeptical and they get this look in their eye when their eyes meet yours. That didn’t stop me though. That’s why I came down here, we’re both retirement age now and she always talked about retiring to a golf course community in Florida and taking her retirement seriously. I haven’t found her yet but I will, don’t you worry.”
—The police-
Coroner’s report [summary]: Autopsy shows he died from ingesting ground glass. It wasn’t quick and it was likely painful. I estimate his last meal contained it and it took him hours of slowly bleeding to death internally before he expired. Stomach contents look to be a burger with toppings, fries, and a shake. Unclear what contained the glass but given the amount, I suspect it was in everything he ate. His blood alcohol level was also elevated but given the liver damage he was a heavy drinker so I doubt he would have appeared drunk.
—The photographer-
Conversation doesn’t flow between me and old people. Any people really. I look, I observe, I have go-to topics that give me an opening. I don’t have an opening for ‘did you kill him?’
Why the waitress is suspicious is beyond me. Maybe it was the strand of hair I found on the bush when I went back to the flower bed. It stood out against the green, a purplish reddish when the sun caught it just right. I left it, I’m not an idiot. I called the detective, leaving a message that I saw it and it was just about the right height if someone was sitting on the ground.
Grandma and I came in here after the dinner re-opened. A friend of a friend of a friend of a church friend of a neighbor of the owner said being closed for two weeks made them hurt bad for money - them and their staff. The call when around and everyone went into the diner ready to buy and tip well. Or at least tip.
She didn’t wait on our table, she was so busy. Grandma was wearing dark sunglasses because we just came from the eye doctor and her pupils were so dilated. The waitress’s hair was pulled back into a bun, a few strands standing out and one on her white shirt, waving just a bit in the sun, the same shade. It’s the color that only is available online now. I imagine her buying it from some homehaircolordiscontinuedshades.com site, the case of boxes arriving battered and dusty and with images of women with 80’s eyeshadow and seductive looks.
I went back without Grandma. I asked for her section that time. Did she seem guilty? Did she seem like a murderer? No and no. We talked about the weather, the birthday party she was going to later, some places I should go to get good photos of the sunrise and sunset.
“Did the police find anything here?” I ask.
“They tested a lot of things but gave us the all clear. I’m glad, I was worried about paying rent this month. Folks have been very generous with their tips so there is a silver lining.”
“Do you want to know something weird?”
“I always like a good weird.”
“My Grandma knew the man that was killed.”
“I’ve heard that from a lot of people lately. Everyone seems to know him even though he wasn’t from around here.”
“No, I’m serious. She told me he broke her heart and broke up a friendship, years ago.”
“Your Grandma? Bring her in next time.”
—The murderer-
What was he doing in the same town she was? That both of them were? How long have they all lived in the same space breathing the same air? Was it a coincidence, it’s got to be a coincidence. But what if some places and times and people are like the sun and moon and planets aligning and cause things to go wacky? She would tell me I’m woo-woo thinking if she knew.
I can’t wait to see her again.
—The photographer-
“I recorded it. Just in case. I think I wanted to make sure I had proof he was at fault if we ever met,” the waitress/murderer says.
Grandma is nearly blue, all the color out of her face, I check her chest to make sure she’s breathing. It’s not every day a friend re-enters your life after 50 years and tells you she’s killed the man who broke the two of you up. Grandma is my hero.
“I know I’ll go to jail. Your granddaughter already gave me the detective’s number and I’m talking to him later today. I never wanted to hurt you and I never blamed you for leaving me. I would have done the same thing. But I couldn’t go to my grave with the idea that you thought I hurt you on purpose.”
“I found out later,” Grandma says. “Much too late. You remembered what we planned.”
“Wait, what?” I ask.
Grandma turns to me, “I was devastated,” she offers as an explanation. “At that time, it wasn’t polite for girls or women to be angry so we hid it in tears or silence.”
“Or in vodka,” the waitress/murderer says.
“Or in vodka, yes. I can’t remember how we got the bottle but one night my parents went to a party and we sat in the dark and drank vodka and cranberry juice. I dropped the glass and it shattered into a million pieces.”
“She went to take a drink from my glass but I stopped her because I saw something that looked like glitter floating around.”
“Glass dust and shards. As I was pouring it down the sink and she was dumping the glass pieces in the trash, I told her that I was so mad I wanted to feed him broken glass and watch him die.”
They look at each other, reliving that moment, more color in Grandma’s face. A cold look in both of their eyes.
“We never talked about it,” Grandma says. “The hangover and grounding we had was enough to put it out of our heads. And then, that day…”
“He kissed me and we never spoke again.”
Grandma reaches across, their hands clasped in the middle of the diner table, “Thank you. You’ve always taken care of me.”
“You were and are the world to me,” the waitress/murderer whispers.
—The photographer-
No mention in the newspapers of her arrest. They keep the ugly behind closed doors here in the retirement village.
Grandma visits the waitress in prison. Mom or me driving her the two hours there and back every month.
I swear the waitress and Grandma get younger each time they visit. They swap books and magazines, nail polish and lipstick, trading journals where they write what happens each week and make comments and notes to each other in the margins.
Grandma buckles herself in, watches the orchards and farm land roll by, “People with rage and means are a bad combination but it’s so lovely when they are on your side.”
The end.