American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,81

you. You want answers, and I think I know how I can give them to you. But you, in turn, must also help me.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“It is simple,” Parson says. “All you have to do is solve a murder.”

Parson lets her sleep on the office couch that night, for it is too dangerous outside to return home. How it is dangerous, he does not tell her—he cannot.

He sits behind his desk as she sleeps, listening to the radio. He likes the radio. It is a very soothing experience, he finds, to hear the voices of the dead past in his ear like they’re still alive and fine. Two moments in time brushing against one another.

He looks at the woman asleep on his couch, rolled up in an old white blanket and face buried in the cushion, and he wonders what she truly is. For he knows she is more than just a rather pretty woman with a sad past, as she first seemed: he is beginning to suspect that what he is looking at is something like a bomb, waiting for the spark to set it off.

Parson stands and examines the board of keys on his wall again. He looks for a long, long time before finding the right one, which is last in line behind a long row of them in the corner. The key is unlike most of the others: it is long, its metal is dark, and it has one thick, awkward tooth at the end.

He walks to one section of the paneled wall in his office. He looks back at Mona and confirms she is asleep. Then he feels the wall, fingers probing its nooks and crannies, until he finds one hole whose existence would not appear coincidental to a casual glance.

He inserts the key in the hole and turns it. There is a clunk from somewhere in the wall, and one section of the paneling pops out a little. Parson works his fingers into its edge and pulls it open.

It is a small, narrow door, one that could not comfortably allow a taller person to pass. On the other side is a wooden staircase, and Parson peers down it, inspecting its wooden steps, for they have not been used in some time and he is not sure they’re still sound.

He begins down the staircase, which is dark and unlit. After the first turn he begins feeling the wall for a switch, and on finding it he hits it. A string of caged lights along the ceiling flicker on, leading him down the rickety passageway, and he continues until he finally comes to the motel basement.

The basement is lit by a single old halogen work lamp dangling from the ceiling. Besides this, the basement is almost entirely empty, its cracked cement floor totally bare.

But it is not completely empty. In the center of the basement, directly under the work lamp, is what appears to be a large, rough-hewn cube of dark, stained metal. It is nearly four feet tall and wide on all sides. Its edges are somewhat notched and its sides a little scratched, and it’s missing one corner, but besides that it is whole and unharmed. Yet despite its simplicity, one cannot help but get the feeling that there is something more to the metal cube; perhaps it is how it manages to attract the eye, no matter where you look: you could stare at your shoes as hard as you like, yet eventually you would find your gaze slowly, inexorably lifting to rest on the cube sitting in the light of the work lamp. Or maybe it’s the way the very air seems cooler the closer you get to the cube, eventually growing so cold that, if you were to approach it, you’d feel sure you were about to freeze over. Or maybe, if you were particularly observant, it would be the cracks in the cement floor that would disturb you, for a quick study would show that all the cracks radiate outward from the cube, as if it has been slowly pushing down on the slab of cement with greater and greater pressure.

Parson does not enter the basement. He stays on the stairway, on the very bottom step. He is not willing to venture any closer.

He looks at it for a long time, reflecting on how little it has changed since he first stored it here.

He says, “This is your doing, isn’t it.”

If he expects a response from