She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,145

for some time now.

I swung my legs off the side of the bench and pinched my eyes shut against the sharp sun poking through the trees, and the little movement hurt, too. A tiny hammer inside my head gave my temple an exploratory thump, then followed through with a hard-handed pound, another after that. My stomach rolled, followed by a guttural noise that left my mouth tasting like rancid pork and whiskey.

As hangovers went, this was bad, but I’ve had worse.

I very much needed to take a piss.

When I left Penn State in the spring of 1994, I fell off the wagon.

Let’s face it, I never really climbed all the way in. At best, I held onto the back.

It was the damn white coats.

Got to be I saw them everywhere.

Every other car in my rearview was white.

In Richard Nettleton’s letter, he mentioned Florida was the worst, and it truly was. Damn near every other car was painted white in the Sunshine State, and while nobody wore a single coat, white shirts and shorts were all the rage. I quickly realized when someone watched you from across the street in a white shirt and shorts, it was no different than a long, white trench coat. I had no idea where they hid their guns, but there was no hiding the look in their eyes—that look was universal. They knew me, and I quickly learned to spot them.

I got good at spotting them.

I went to Fort Lauderdale, because according to the file I stole from the Penn State Registrar, the last known address for Perla Beyham was off 17th Street in the heart of the tourist district. An apartment above a tee-shirt shop with a nice view of the beach. She wasn’t home when I arrived, on account of being dead. Her neighbor remembered her—not many people drown in a bathtub, so the story took on a life in the building, and most of the other six residents knew about it.

Perla Beyham dropped out of Penn State in the spring of 1979. Nobody knew why. She got a waitressing job at a tiki bar (also on 17th Street) and died about two weeks later. The coroner ruled it an accident—fell asleep in the tub, the report said—there were rumors of suicide. The happy girl who left for college was not the girl who returned. Most blamed her paranoia, her fear of being watched, on drugs, even though nobody had ever seen her take anything. She left work on May 22, 1979, went home, and took a bath, and that was that. They found her body two days later.

The neighbor I talked to, a nice old man named Dave, said some of her belongings might still be down in the building’s basement. When I broke in that night, I didn’t find anything, and I tossed the place pretty good.

I still owned the Jeep back then and happily left the Sunshine State. I went in search of Garret Dotts next. Garret wasn’t too hard to find. His grave sat in the far back corner of the cemetery in Cantonville, Georgia, not too far from Atlanta. The tree where he hung himself in March of 1980 was only a short five-minute drive from where he was buried. A large willow.

I returned to Pittsburgh on August 7 of 1994.

When I spotted Detective Fogel and some of her friends in the cemetery the following night, watching my bench, I remained in the woods, where I could keep an eye on them and the bench. I doubted Stella would show—at that point, I wasn’t sure she was even alive—but I wanted to be there just in case. At a little after midnight, I was back on the road, and I didn’t stop driving until dawn.

More than a week passed before I learned about the four people who died at a hospice in Montana. I ate breakfast at a diner outside Cleveland, and whoever occupied the booth before me left their newspaper folded on the seat. I found the story on page four—not very long, but enough. I knew it was Stella. I knew.

The people in white coats knew, too.

They were crawling all over the city by the time I arrived, particularly around the hospice ward at St. Francis. More near the homes where the four people had lived out their lives before entering the hospice. I watched two woman in long, white coats leave the coroner’s building and climb into a white Chevy Suburban SUV. One of them