She and the girl continued to talk. The quality of their voices improved as the microphones seemed to be adjusted and the levels on the board were checked and rechecked.
The girl mumbled, “English muffins…biscuits and gravy…”
Mitzi was only half listening to the tape when the scream exploded, a burst of agony from every speaker in the studio.
At its peak the shriek broke apart into short, jagged cries, each more quiet, ebbing, ending in ragged breathing, each gasp shorter, trailing off with a final long exhale.
A rasp and click sounded on the tape. A sound Mitzi knew from every headache of her life. The sound of a cigarette lighter sparking. The sizzle of a cigarette being lit. The draw of a long inhale and the crackle of tobacco burning, a sound so true-to-life that even now she sniffed the air for smoke. A recording so clear and pure that it seemed to trump the fact that she was alone. She sat alone at the console in a locked studio, listening to sounds so real that they might be ghosts in the room, unseen. Or that she, herself, might be the ghost listening to a world without her.
Footsteps approached on the tape and a voice called out, “Gentlemen!” This new voice belonged to a man. The sensible, practical voice of Dr. Adamah, a devout smoker. How long he’d also been in that room, there was no telling.
Mitzi closed her eyes to hear better. In the dark, the past took over the room.
The doctor called out, “Gentlemen, you may clean up the scene now.”
Blush asked for a lug wrench. “Like for changing tires? Do you have one?” she clarified. They’d parked at a wide spot in the road, both of them sitting in the front seat by now.
Foster couldn’t say if he had, not for certain, so he walked around to open the trunk.
They’d followed a narrow street up into the nighttime hills, rising above the city. At her direction, he’d turned onto a dark lane. His headlights had washed over a sign that read Private Drive as the surrounding houses had fallen away behind them. Their path had traced the thin spine of a high ridge with one side falling away in a steep, rutted slope. From this height he could see downtown, where helicopters circled playing searchlights over a space between buildings. Sirens wailed.
Dogs, dogs and coyotes alike, every canine in the greater Los Angeles Basin howled along with those sirens. An eerie reminder of how every animal was still wild.
The night air smelled of juniper and sage. In the trunk Foster felt around in the dark until he produced a steel bar bent at an angle. One end was cast into a hexagonal socket to fit lug nuts. The opposite end was pinched into a sharp wedge for prying off hubcaps and wheel covers.
Blush stood next to him now and took the tool out of his hands. Striding away, she held the lug wrench in one fist and swung it like a weapon to slap the palm of her opposite hand. Foster hurried to catch up as she followed a stucco wall that lined the side of the road opposite the view. Pink stucco, flaking and crumbling, too high to see over. Every few steps signs for a security service were fixed to the wall. As were No Trespassing signs, screwed to the wall and bleeding trails of rust stains. Ahead, the chimneys and rooflines of a dark house rose above the ragged top of the wall.
Near the house, they came to a gateway. Pure movie studio Spanish Renaissance, the gates were, with twisted ironwork branching and crisscrossed. Iron birds roosted among the bars. Through these they walked up a circular driveway to large doors barricaded with plywood. The unpainted sheet of wood, buckled and warped, clung to the house like a scab. Stapled there, a sun-bleached sign warned them “No Trespassing by Writ of Foreclosure.” With surprising violence, Blush reared back and lunged, stabbing the sharp end of the lug wrench under one edge of the wood. She worked the bar up and down to sink it deeper, then yanked at the wood. The plywood splintered around the screws that held it.
Foster stepped close and put his hands around the bar. They pulled together, and the plywood crackled like bones breaking in the movies. Not a loud noise, but a lot of noise on a night so quiet and a street so deserted. It broke away along three edges and swung aside. Beneath it, a door showed hazy with spiderwebs.
Blush dug into her coat pocket to bring forth a ring of keys. One she fit into the deadbolt and turned. A second key she put into the knob.
The door stuck along the bottom, opening inward, rubbing against the threshold with a barking rasp. She snaked a hand inside the frame.
Foster heard the click-click of a switch, but no lights came on.
“Give me your hand,” she said.
The light from the street filtered inside only a few steps. The air wafting out smelled hot, a musty heat built up over months of day-to-day sun not relieved by open windows at night or air-conditioning. Into that stale smell Blush stepped. Past that point, she dragged him as she took long, confident strides into the dark.
Mitzi had been washing dishes. Mostly wineglasses. Her hands had held the glass wrong, a too-strong grip on a too-slippery soapy-smooth glass with the results one might expect. The little outcry glass makes, and the glass failing, surrendering itself to become two pieces. Each with one razor-sharp edge.
She’d been so tense. The tape recording playing and repeating in her mind. Dr. Adamah’s words looped in her memory, as did those of the dying girl. A waitress? In addition the troubling voices of men she’d never met but who seemed to know her. Worst was her own mysterious other self, that slurred voice, a drooling drunk, but undeniably her. The Village Idiot voice of Mitzi Ives. Tension clenched
