Dreams

Chapter 1

"No," Kerry said sharply, "I told you before that I didn't know what happened to Ethan after I was locked in that room in the basement."

"Let's go over this again," Chief Atherton said, not unkindly. "Your father wasn't there to pick you up."

Kerry sighed, picking up the bottle of water placed before her on the scarred table. The meeting was informally held inside the Chief's office, but it may as well be in interrogation room one where they had first questioned her eight years ago. Kerry could still feel the squeeze on her heart when she realized who the car belonged to, where for one incredibly foolish moment she had thought he was the skeleton they were still drudging for pieces of in the silt at the bottom of the vehicle. As much as she wanted to deny it, the experience made her realize she still had feelings for him.

It wasn't love – that was what she currently had with Luke – but it wasn't the hate she had become so familiar with either. It was a strange caring that was born out of history together, and it didn't bother Kerry as much as she thought it would to realize that this probably meant she was finally over Michel. In a way, she was relieved to find he didn't warrent such strong emotions from her anymore.

"Dad wasn't there to pick me up. It was a Friday night, and he had made it a habit to be on time in those days, but he was usually early on Fridays because he thought that downtown after dark was filled with drunks and freaks on weekends. I guess he was probably right in this case, huh? Anyway, so I noticed right away that he wasn't there and tried to contact him. Then I practically knocked over Ethan as he was leaving with groceries. He offered me a drive and I accepted." Kerry took a drink of water, and then lowered the bottle with a grin. "I had a little crush on him at the time. He was a nice guy. It's too bad he's dead."

"What happened next?"

Anyone else might have been nervous about recounting a lie to the cops, especially someone who had such a close relationship to one like Kerry did, but it had never phased her to tell the story as it wasn't. At first, she had done so because of her feelings for Michel: sixteen year old Kerry had been so in love she was willing to perjure herself in order to allow him time to get away. Now, she certainly didn't have any ties to him, especially since it was becoming increasingly obvious that he had killed someone in his place. What she did have was decent survival instincts telling her she couldn't change her story now and a steel-trap memory for everything that happened concerning him.

Just in case, she had stopped at home between leaving the riverside and coming into the police station for an interview. She had kept a journal of every lie she had told in story format so that it read like true events. It was only a simple matter of flipping through it to get the basics. Even Chief Atherton didn't expect her to remember every small detail of something which had happened almost a decade ago.

"Hmm," Kerry responded. "We were walking towards the car, and I think we were flirting a little. He opened the door for me and I got in, he placed his groceries behind me, and as he was walking around to his side of the car Marsala walked up. I can't speak for Ethan, but I noticed him approaching and didn't think anything about it. He didn't look nervous or anything. He just looked like some guy who was out of milk or something. Anyway, instead of walking in front of the car like I expected, he pulled out a gun on Ethan and yelled "Get in the car!"

"Did he?"

It was on the tip of Kerry's tongue to say "you know he didn't" but she managed to keep her mouth shut. "No," she said tersely. "He didn't. He tried to struggle with Marsala for the gun. It went off. Suddenly there was blood splattered over the driver's window and Marsala was pushing Ethan into the back seat. I still don't know how no one heard the shot. You would think someone would have heard it, wouldn't you? It was so loud." Kerry placed her head on her upraised palms, covering her eyes with her fingers. "Or maybe I'm remembering the other shot."

"What happened to Ethan?" the Chief asked gently, putting her back on track.

"He was clutching his stomach," she said quietly, suddenly realizing that if anything ruined her story it would be this detail. She couldn't take it back now – the stomach had been the place she had claimed Ethan Bryne had been shot eight years before. If there wasn't evidence of a gun wound there, or worse, evidence that had the bullet in his leg or somewhere else, it definitely wouldn't look good for her. "There was blood coating his fingers and he kept making this horrible gulping noise. I still hear it sometimes. He looked at me, and he told me to run, but it was far far too late for that. Marsala was already climbing into the driver's seat and the gun was pointed at me. He told me not to make a sound or he'd shoot me, and there was nothing he would like more than to rid the world of vermin like me. I did what he said. I was too scared to even move. And on some point during the drive I passed out. The next thing I know, I was waking up in that room in the basement room that was my cell for almost two days."

"And Ethan," Kerry continued, correctly interpreting the impatient flicker in Atherton's eyes as one more detail she would have to say out loud for the record. "Ethan was gone. I don't know what happened to him."

"Thank you Kerry," Atherton said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I'll let you know if we can finally put the poor boy to rest."

"I do know one thing, Chief," Kerry said, standing with her purse clasped in her hand. "Ethan Bryne did not deserve to die because of me. He barely knew me, and yet he could tell I was upset enough to need a drive home and then he died trying to save my life. That was the kind of guy Ethan Bryne was, and I think he deserves a little recognition for being a hero."

Atherton sighed, looking much older than he had eight years ago when they finished an interview very similar to this one. "I'll see what I can do, Miss Nowicki."

Kerry left the police station feeling slightly dazed at everything she had said. For a while she had actually believed the story she was telling, and she actually felt guilty for Ethan's death. None of it had felt like a lie because she could see it in front of her as though it had really happened. She could see the blood pouring from beneath Ethan's hands as he moaned, coating the back seat of the car. She could remember terror as Marsala pointed the gun at her, driving to his house. The terror had been so great, she had passed out.

In those moments she had recounted the story, it had happened.

Or maybe she was just telling herself that in order to swallow the idea she had lied to the cops again more palatable.

She crossed the street, her mud-covered heels clipping on the solid pavement. Kerry waved to the person driving the car which had stopped to allow her to cross, and then jumped up on the curb and continued through the front door of the Tribune office. "Hey Gordon," she called out to the receptionist. "How's it shake-n-bakin'?"

"Ha ha, good one," he answered like he did every day, after she had learned that the knife scar along his thumb was from an unfortunate accident with a bag of just-add-chicken mix. "Gallant wants to see you ASAP."

"Oh?" Kerry answered, eyebrows winging up in feign surprise for the benefit of all the people who had stopped working and started to listen the moment she walked through the door. "I guess I'll go see what he wants. Is he in his office?"

"I suggest you don't bother stopping for coffee this time. He means ASAP unless you want to go AWOL."

Kerry turned and gave a mock salute as she continued towards her boss's office in the back of the ground floor. They referred to it as the fish tank due to the glass wall Gallant commonly left open in order to spy on all his underlings. For a bunch of people who wrote for a living, it was an incredibly uninspired name. As Kerry approached the office, she could feel the eyes on the back of her neck as her coworkers watched, and she could understand their interest. Being called into Gallant's office during midday hours was synonymous with doing the walk of shame. Kerry hadn't directly reported to him for very long, but up until a few weeks ago she had been one of the ones watching with barely concealed interest as her superiors were called to face Gallant.

Getting bawled out herself by the editor in chief was just one of the perks of her new position.

"You wanted to see me?" Kerry asked, sticking her head through the glass door. She didn't knock because Gallant thought knocking was a sign of timidity, especially since everyone knew he was watching them approach through the walls.

"Get in here and close the door."

"Yessir," Kerry said, closing the door behind her and observing her boss. He was a small man with a gruff voice which matched his attitude. To new employees, it was a mystery why everyone feared him due to the fairness and joviality he showed in day-to-day life as well as the computer-nerd appearance his glasses and pocket protector gave him. Kerry hadn't been fooled for a second back then, and after she had seen the way he blew up Editorials for typoing a local businessman's name, Kerry had her proof that Gallant was not a man to mess with.

Instead of speaking, he threw a file onto his pristine desk. Notes and pictures tumbled out, the one on top depicting her at age sixteen sitting in the back of a police car. She couldn't remember the picture being taken, but she knew the exact moment it had captured. She had led the police back to Marsala's house and they had let her stay in the back of the car for warmth while they investigated the scene. She had never been arrested, and she knew that since she was a minor at the time that no pictures could run in the paper about her.

What she hadn't known was that they had something so juicy that made her seem like a murderous criminal.

Kerry raised an eyebrow, trying not to allow her boss to see her surprised reaction. "So this is about Ethan Bryne?"

"Of course it's about Bryne! Dammit girl, we're sitting on a goldmine here. Did you even think to tell me that you knew the victim? How did you think I was going to take it when I called for the file on this boy and found a picture of one of my reporters staring up at me from a cop car? Did you think I enjoyed hearing that you weren't in the office because you were being questioned by the police?"

"I'm not guilty of anything!" Kerry retorted, finally flustered. "I didn't kill him. I just identified the car before they tracked down the license and registration, and then I had to give a statement."

Gallant looked at her as though she were insane. "I know you didn't kill him. What I mean is – do you think I'm happy to learn that one of my reporters had an inside connection to a story and didn't contact me with information immediately? You've wasted valuable writing time."

Kerry was tempted to apologize for reacting like a human to the situation when she realized that despite everything, all her connections to the vehicle and the person supposedly dead inside, that she had been right in the beginning: this was the story of the year, and she had already blown it. "Who did you put on it?"

Gallant snorted in disgust. "You. Do you think I'd give up the personal angle just because you decided to go play footsies with your boyfriend for an hour over at cop central? So get your ass out of my office and go make me a rough draft."

Kerry moved automatically, feeling a bit shell-shocked. She couldn't base the future of her career on a bunch of lies, could she? She was too close to the story. She couldn't be objective. Surely Gallant wanted something more than sentimental drivel.

Unless he thought that a heart-felt eulogy written by someone who survived the same ordeal would sell more papers.

Ethan Bryne was a hero, she typed out as the first line of her story once reaching her desk.

.x.x.x.

"Doctor Roberts?" Kerry called out, her heels clicking ominously against the tiled floor of the morgue. The air was chilled, the atmosphere was dim and slightly dusty, both giving credence to the slightly creepy feeling she always experienced in this building. When the doctor didn't respond to her call, Kerry stepping into the room where the autopsies were performed. The minute she opened the heavy doors, Kerry could hear Bon Jovi playing from the stereo system and she knew that it probably meant the doctor was thinking about something. Roberts was bent over the examining table, a magnifying glass held over the rib bones with a concerned frown on his face. "Is something wrong?" she asked, slightly breathless with anxiety.

"Oh, Kerry!" Doctor Roberts exclaimed with surprise as he straightened. "You haven't snuck up on me for so long I wasn't expecting it. Don't know why, though, considering that this is our boy."

"Yeah," she said, grabbing a wooden chair from the wall and dragging it towards the examining table. She straddled it and looked down at the bones with interest. A lot of the smaller ones were missing, along with the right tibia and a finger on his left hand. All in all, the reassembled skeleton wasn't in too bad a shape, all things considered. "What's going on?"

"See here? This knick in the rib bone? This is where the bullet entered. And over here, do you see this gouge in the vertebra? That's where it ricocheted back into his left lung. The poor boy was probably in excruciating pain before he died. With a wound like this, it's possible he died before you even reached Marsala's house."

"Could he have survived, though, if Marsala had just taken him to the hospital?" Kerry asked, thinking it rather perverse that she needed to know. Would whoever this body belonged to have survived if Michel hadn't shot him and dumped him in a river? Probably.

"Maybe. With only the bones to work with I can only give you a rough trajectory and an estimate of how he died. A person can survive a stomach wound like this. The lung is another matter, but there's a possibility he could have lived. But Kerry, you know there's a possibility that a good majority of the people who come through here could have survived but didn't. You can't look at it that way."

"I know," Kerry responded, frowning slightly as she looked at the body. "It just makes me angry that his death if my fault. Aaah, before you say it," she interrupted Dr. Roberts quickly before he had a chance to argue with her. "I know that I wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and shot him, but that doesn't make me feel better."

"Yes, well," Dr. Roberts said awkwardly, rearranging the safety glasses covering his eyes as he put down the bone in his hand. "About that. I did mean to ask you how you were. Terrible shock this morning, terrible."

Kerry shrugged, unable to look in the doctor's eyes. She found she couldn't lie to him anymore when faced with his direct and genuine concern for her. She couldn't tell him that her delight over getting a major by-line in the paper almost completely overshadowed her empathy at this poor, unknown sop that Michel had killed to cover up the whole story. She couldn't tell him that the guilt she felt was half because she was relieved that this wasn't Ethan Bryne, or worse, Kerry Nowicki lying dead on the slab. "I'll be fine," she muttered, turning her attention back to the bones. "Have you positively identified him yet?"

"The dental records were faxed in just before you arrived. Let me check."

As Dr. Roberts efficiently checked the teeth for a match, Kerry waited with bated breath. She could feel the nervousness tingle at the base of her spine as she looked at the strange bones. Whether or not the teeth matched, and corroborated her story, all depended on Michel's efficiency at cleaning up after himself. Once upon a time, she would have absolute faith in him, and it didn't surprise her to realize that though her faith was damaged and dented, she still believed that he was one of the best at covering his tracks and staying alive.

"This is Ethan Bryne," Roberts said. "The poor boy can be put to rest now."

"Yeah," Kerry responded mournfully. She also had a newspaper article that needed to be put the rest. "You'll let me know when you've signed off on the cause of death?" she asked, almost amused as the doctor nodded absentmindedly, his nose already back among the bones.

Back at her desk in the newspaper office, Kerry flipped through the pictures from the original file. Most of them were of her, looking worn and exhausted beyond her sixteen years, and yet vulnerable at the same time. Some she was behind police tape at Marsala's house as she explained to them what had happened, and others she was reunited with her family after their ordeal. That one had been published in the newspaper.

After the pictures of the aftermath there was a grainy shot of a boy with brown hair, and she stared at it for similarities with Michel. The blurred shot didn't show any of his features in detail, and it could be just about any teenage boy, taken at any time. It didn't show his arresting face, or self-sure grin, or the confident way he stood.

The final picture did, and her stomach flopped over as she took in the way he had his arm carelessly slung over a nameless girl's shoulder, a beer-bottle draped carefully between two fingers. He was wearing the white Brockport SUNY sweater she had first seen him wearing, and as she made a note to the editor to crop out the girl and run the picture, Kerry couldn't shake the idea that she was somehow betraying him by putting his image in print. "My name's Ethan Bryne. When you get out of this, tell the police –"

God, he had played her, even from that first moment and definitely up to the last. With a burst of indignant anger, she signed off on the article and left, not looking back with any sort of regret.

x.x.x

Kerry unlocked the door to her apartment, suddenly feeling exhausted, as though the weight of the day had finally worn her to the ground. She just wanted to take a relaxing bath and maybe snuggle up with her boyfriend over a fun movie on television. She didn't think she could stand being alone with both her thoughts and her memories swirling in the forefront of her brain today.

"Hey babe," Luke said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek, not bringing up the body in the water, or the way she freaked out at it. He didn't ask how she was, and se appreciated it. "It's take-out night. I was thinking Chinese." He gave her a hopeful look, knowing that though she loved the taste of the food from the local take-out place, it rarely ever loved her.

"Sure," Kerry grinned back, returning the soft kiss. "Just so long as you're willing to ignore any unseemly bathroom sounds. Why don't you order? I have a quick call to make." She grabbed her BlackBerry, heading into their bedroom for privacy.

Luke shot her a suspicious look. "Ok, but don't take too long. You know how I feel about work interfering with take-out night."

"It's just one, short call," Kerry promised, backing into the bedroom with a reassuring smile. Once the door was closed behind her, she wiped the fake expression off her face and sighed, feeling a stress headache coming on. It had been a long day. The number she needed was listed under 'pianist' in her directory of work informants, and she pressed the talk button with a fist squeezing her heart. It had been a while, she realized. The number might not even be valid anymore.

"Hello?" His voice was the same as it had ever been and always would be – smooth and sexy, but a little rough when he was angry or sarcastic. She felt like a teenage girl again listening to it and the clench on her heart tightened.

"They pulled Ethan Bryne's car out of the swamp today," she said without preamble, careful not to link it back to him. She didn't mention the car was his, her reporter instincts warring against her general suspicion of the world. Ears were everywhere, both beyond the door into her living room and also possibly on his end. On her more paranoid days, she might even wonder if someone else was listening in on either of their phones, and today was shaping up to be one of those days.

He was silent for a moment. "They were bound to find it at some point."

"There was a body," she informed him – accused him.

"Was there something you wanted?" He asked. "I'm a busy man."

"Naturally my boss took the opportunity to put me in charge of the story—"

"Naturally," he mocked.

"And I thought you would like to know they'll be running Ethan's picture in the morning news. We pulled the one we had on file from when he went missing." They'll be running your picture, she was really saying. It may complicate things for you.

"You shouldn't have called." A sigh. "But thank you. You'll make sure Ethan's article accurately represents the facts?" You'll make sure no one digs too deep into this and comes up with information I'll have to kill them for, she translated.

"I'm on it." She hung up before he could, the vise on her heart had moved painfully to her stomach. There was a time, she thought, when she would have melted at his voice over the phone and kept him talking as long as possible. Those days were over. She was no longer sixteen and she no longer thought of Ethan Bryne.

But as she stood, knees slightly trembling – she had been on her feet all day, after all – Kerry realized her stomach wasn't really up for Chinese tonight.

©RelenaFanel.July10.2008