Chapter 11 – Unyielding
Nathan liked being in control. He liked to be the one that was in charge of what he was doing and where he was going. Haven was such an unpredictable place, and he had lived such an unpredictable life, that he clung to what little sense of control that he could manage. He had habits and routines and patterns that he worked to keep to even while the town he lived in spun on an angled axis. He hated feeling helpless and out of control, and he had never felt more so in his life than he did now.
He shifted uneasily in the passenger seat of his truck, missing the familiar motions of steering and shifting gears that would have given him something to focus on. It was bad enough that he had now lost four of the five human senses, but now he couldn't even drive his own truck. Instead he was stuck staring out the windscreen and waiting, consumed in thoughts he'd rather avoid.
It wasn't like he'd never thought about dying before. As a police officer, even a small town one, it was always an assumed risk that came with the job. For an officer in Haven, Maine, it was even logical to consider dying in unusual and sometimes horribly gruesome ways. That was just part of the agreement when signing up to deal with the Troubles. He'd gone head-to-head with death before, there had been near-misses in the line of duty, but this felt different. Now, just sitting and waiting for death to come and claim him, he realized he really didn't want to die. Not now, with so many good things coming into his life, and especially not like this.
But it didn't matter. He and Audrey would solve the case and make this go away. She could always figure these things out. She had saved countless other people, she'd even saved Duke. She had never failed him on a case before. They would fix this. She would fix him.
Audrey turned the truck onto the road in front of the building strip housing the bookstore, and Nathan straightened up in his seat in anticipation. The street was lined with cars and Audrey had to drive halfway down the block to find a place to park. Nathan watched her to make sure she'd shut off the engine before he opened his door and climbed out onto the sidewalk. He waited for her to come around next to him, and he saw her half-open her mouth before she remembered and quickly shut it again, setting off down the sidewalk.
As they passed the pizza parlour Nathan figured out the reason for all of the cars. Through the front window he could see a huge crowd of people inside, and judging by the decorations it was some sort of party. Although people were dancing, he couldn't hear the music or the loud voices that should be coming from them. He didn't realize he'd stopped walking until he felt Audrey's hand in his, tugging him forward.
When he looked over at her, she frowned in concern and he saw her lips form the words, "You okay?"
"Fine," he said, shaking his head and starting to walk again. He tried to ignore the sick feeling that had boiled in his stomach as he was reminded of his – illness, as well as the chill in his gut when Audrey's hand slipped from his as she fell into step beside him. If it weren't for the fact that it would raise a lot of awkward questions from his partner that he didn't want to answer right now, he'd reach out and take her hand again just to feel like he was still grounded in the real world around him. That he wasn't just a ghost floating among them; existing but incapable of real interaction.
He held the bookshop door for Audrey as she walked in and the lack of bell made him look up curiously. There it was above the doorframe, the brass shape swinging from side to side, but it was silent. If it weren't so depressing, it might have been a captivating thing to watch.
Marion Yardley was standing behind the front desk, and as they walked in she straightened up and folded her arms over her chest defensively, scowling at them. He saw the derision and hostility showing openly on her face as she shot a short question at them, but her lips were hardly moving in her agitation and he couldn't make out what she was saying. In front of him, Audrey's posture shifted into cop-mode and he took up his usual stance directly behind her, trying to give off the impression that there was nothing wrong.
It was unnerving, watching the conversation going on between the two women without being able to hear any of it. Just as unnerving as it had been glancing between Audrey and Kelly and knowing that they were talking about him but not knowing what they were saying. Instead he was forced to stand and read the emotions that were crossing Marion Yardley's face. First was the hostility and defensiveness, then suspicion, then scepticism quickly replaced by confusion and curiosity, then fear and even something that looked like sadness before it all settled into a chilly indifference.
It felt like an incredibly long time later when Audrey nodded to Marion Yardley and turned to him, gesturing shortly for him to follow before heading out of the door. He made to give Marion a nod of acknowledgement before leaving, but the older woman was already busying herself with a small stack of books behind her desk, her tensed back turned on them. As he walked out of the shop he determinedly kept his eyes off the dismally swinging bell and anything else that he could think of that might have been making a noise he wouldn't hear.
"Well?" he asked Audrey when he reached her side. With a grim smile, she shook her head and started walking for the truck. Nathan bit back the urge to sigh and followed her. Right now he wanted answers and explanations, or at least theories, and all that he got was a shake of a head. What had she learned? What ruled Marion Yardley out? And if she was scratched off their list, where did they go next?
It seemed that he would have to wait for answers though, because Audrey's focus stayed on what she was doing as she climbed into the truck and turned on the ignition. Nathan settled himself awkwardly into the passenger seat, mentally making a note that he needed to clean out the things he'd left on the floor over there. Audrey was so much shorter than him that she'd never made comment on it, but even though he couldn't feel how uncomfortable it would be to have his legs stuck in at that angle, he was pretty sure it wasn't good for his knees.
During the short drive, he could tell that Audrey kept glancing at him. He could see her head moving out of the corner of his eye, and there was always that strange fluttering sensation in the pit of his stomach every time her gaze weighed on him. It was distracting and it was doing nothing to steady his already unstable nerves. They'd gone about four blocks before he gave up and said something. "Parker, do you think I'm going to explode or something? Because the staring makes it feel that way," he said dryly. When she had no smart assed response to that, he glanced over at her curiously, one eyebrow cocked, before he saw her lips moving and remembered. Whatever her sarcastic answer had been, it was wasted on him.
Actually letting his sigh out this time, he leaned back against the window and closed his eyes. It was painful how easily he kept forgetting about such a significant thing. He had always thought that with the loss of his sense of feeling, he'd trained his other senses into razor sharp precision. That he never took any of them for granted. But the truth of it was that somewhere along the way he'd stopped noticing things. Noises and sounds that had once been important had become catalogued and habitual again, noticed without consciously thinking about it. Background noise.
Things like the rumble of his trucks engine, the faint clicking that came from the piece of gravel trapped beneath the hubcap of the front passenger tire, the whisper of wind over the glass and the scratchy bass coming from the low volume of the radio, all of them had been carefully recalled and shuffled away into the back of his mind until he no longer consciously noticed them. Even now, when there was nothing but an oppressive silence pressing against his eardrums, he had to actually think about them before he really realized they were missing.
Just like in those years when his sense of touch had returned, he had started taking things for granted again. And now they were gone.
He felt the taunting fuzziness that precedes sleep tugging at his mind and he hastily opened his eyes, lifting his head away from the support of the window frame. Apparently the day's adrenaline was wearing off. It was probably a good thing the shift was nearly over.
Audrey seemed to be thinking about the same thing, because just a few minutes later she had waved a hand to get his attention. When he looked over at her she fixed him with a firm look and he watched her lips form the word, "Home." Her expression didn't really leave much room for argument. She seemed slightly surprised when he nodded in agreement, but she didn't comment on it as she turned onto the road leading to his house.
Audrey's car was parked to the side of his driveway and she pulled the truck in next to it before shutting it off. She placed the keys into his hand and he gave her a shallow nod of acknowledgement before climbing down into the drive and heading for the house. On the porch he turned around to call a goodnight to Audrey only to find her standing directly behind him. He raised a questioning eyebrow, and she just gestured at the door impatiently. Judging by the way she was tugged his coat – he vaguely wondered if he'd ever be getting that back, or if he really cared – tighter around herself, it must be starting to get chilly.
Nathan rolled his eyes at her behaviour, but obligingly unlocked the door and held it open for her as she walked inside. It was strange to watch Audrey walk in and make herself at home in his living room, hanging the coat on a hook by the door and sitting down on his sofa. Before today she had only been into his house perhaps three or four time. Now she was unlacing her furry boots and folding her legs up beneath her on the couch cushions like she was settling in for the evening.
Obviously attracted by the sound of their arrival, Delilah appeared at the end of the hall. Her tongue was lolling out of the side of her mouth and she looked like she was smiling as she gazed up at Nathan. Immediately she waddled to him and nudged her head against his shin. He couldn't repress the small smile as he reached down to quickly scratch her ears in greeting.
"So I take it you're staying for dinner?" Nathan asked vaguely, glancing across at Audrey. She simply flashed him her typical Audrey smirk and he fought back another smile. Wandering into the kitchen, he called back over his shoulder, "Then I hope you like tomato soup."
Snatching a can from the pantry, he turned around to find that Audrey had followed him into the kitchen as well. She sat down in one of the barstools at the island counter as he gathered a saucepan and set the soup to cook, and again he could feel her eyes tracking his every movement. Even after he'd filled two bowls with bright red soup and they'd sat down on opposite sides of the island, he could tell that she was watching him intently. Midway through the meal, he gave her a pointed look, arching an eyebrow and scowling, but she looked unabashed and went on with what she was doing.
"Let's get some work done on the case while we're here," Nathan said when he'd finished his soup, looking for any excuse to get Audrey distracted so she would stop watching him. He took their bowls to the sink, stepping carefully because, as always when he was home, Delilah was shadowing him, and then they moved back into the living room. He tracked down a legal pad he used for writing notes on cases when he was away from the office, and handed it and a pen to Audrey with the instructions, "Tell me what happened with Marion Yardley."
Audrey nodded and Nathan waited for her to finish and hand the notepad back to him, and then he read the summary written out in her looping scrawl.
She didn't kill Nurse Waters, at least not on purpose. She liked her, said the nurse was good to her husband. I really wasn't getting killer vibes off her. This time at least.
"So we believe she could've killed Halter, but not Waters," Nathan mused, shaking his head. "Great. Maybe she had an accomplice. No, hear me out," he added when Audrey looked sceptical. "Maybe she knows someone who has this sand Trouble, and she got that person to take Halter out for her. But now that person is killing more people she didn't ask for. Maybe trying to frame her."
Audrey still didn't look convinced, but she nodded and scribbled Accomplice? into a margin on the notepad. Then in the body of the page, she wrote, Or maybe it's another person entirely. But who?
They spent the remainder of the evening revising their previous list of suspects, trying to fathom links between the victims and the suspects, and writing up a long list of possible theories that they would need to check into in the morning when they got back to the office. It was well passed sundown by the time they had filled three sheets of paper with ideas and their progressively wilder new scenarios had finally reached the point of being completely irrational – even for Haven. After Audrey had yawned for the eleventh time, Nathan had stood up and declared that he was going to bed.
For a moment he was sure that he'd seen something like genuine fear alight in Audrey's eyes as she leapt to her feet next to him. Then she hastily schooled it into a normal expression of stubborn indifference, and she snatched up the notepad again.
Where am I sleeping?
Nathan read the sentence and snorted. "Your place?" he offered even though he could tell already that those were not her plans in the slightest. Her firm scowl chased off any doubt he'd had, and he sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose distractedly. "I don't need a babysitter, Parker."
There was a still moment when Nathan kept his eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose in a fruitless attempt to make himself believe it would relieve some of the tension in his brain the way it had years ago when he'd been able to feel. Then Audrey had grabbed his wrist and jerked his hand away from his face, and shoved the legal pad into his grip. He gave her a curious look before turning his gaze to the messier than usual scrawl.
They both died the morning after. I'm not leaving.
Something caught in Nathan's chest as he processed those words. It was true. Both Halter and Waters had died on the morning after their hearing had failed them. Whether that was a coincidence or some type of symptom, he didn't know, but apparently Audrey was not going to take that risk. And he realized it really was fear he'd seen in her eyes for that brief second. She was afraid if she left, then when she came back in the morning, he'd be dead. Rationally, as much as he didn't like to think about it, it wasn't like there was any evidence to contradict that theory either.
Letting out a small groan, he dropped the notepad onto the coffee table. "The guest room is this way," he said grudgingly and led the way down the hall. He opened the door of the small room that was furnished with a futon and a cabinet full of extra linens. "You can sleep here. There's extra blankets and pillows in the cupboard there, and I can find you a tee-shirt or something if you want something to sleep in."
Audrey nodded and he saw her lips shape the word, "thanks." He gave a short nod and disappeared into his room, digging an old tee-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that were a little short in the leg from the closet and bringing them back to her. She took them with a smile, and he could see her saying, "goodnight Nathan."
"Night Parker," he said and closed the door behind him, before returning to his room. Delilah had already gone in and made herself comfortable on the bed, and he changed quickly before climbing under the covers. As unnerved as he was at the thought of Audrey sleeping across the hall, in his house and in his clothes nonetheless, and as frantic as his brain was from trying to figure out this case, he was exhausted. He felt sleepy and heavy, and he was pretty sure that if he'd been able to feel his muscles, they would all be aching. Whatever it was, he wasn't getting up out of the bed anytime soon. Gravity was winning this round.
Delilah shifted around and crawled up closer to his side, resting her head on his arm. In the half-light coming through the window from the porch light of his neighbours' house, he could see her dark eyes fixed on him. Although she'd been lively and contented since he'd brought her into the house, at the moment she looked tired and aged and sad again. She looked like the dog they'd found alone in her house when her master never came home.
"You know it's got me, don't you?" he murmured to her, stroking her head. "You can tell. You know it's the same thing that killed your other owner too, don't you?" Delilah nuzzled her head further up his arm, her round body right up against his, and he watched her body heave with the groan she let out.
Closing his eyes, Nathan tried to shove away all of the dark thoughts until sleep finally claimed him and he drifted under the whims of his imagination.