Investigator Hudson wasn’t one of those renegade cops like you read about in books or see on TV, she thought as she’d crawled into bed last night. He was the type no one gave a shit about, the type who followed rules, who dotted his i’s and crossed all his t’s. She’d emailed him yesterday to meet, but he didn’t get off work until 10:00 P.M. As if that were a reasonable response. What kind of guy had an opportunity for information regarding his best friend’s murder, and then asked the informant to save it for the morning?
But, at least he knew what “off the record” meant; he’d asked her to come over to his place, not the police department. Perhaps he had a rebellious bone in his body after all. It might only be his pinkie bone, but still.
Morgan popped an Ambien into her mouth and washed it down with a swig of vodka. Tucking the bottle back in the couch cushions, she aimed the remote at the TV, powering it up for another night of The Simpsons reruns. The news was on. A police officer with steely hair spoke into a mic held by a reporter just out of view of the camera. A bar at the bottom of the screen read SGT. ATCHISON, BHPD.
“… recovered at the bottom of Lake Michigan,” he said. “We have reason to believe it’s been down there since July 2000. If anyone has information regarding Clive Reynolds’s 1978 Porsche 930 Turbo and/or the human remains located inside, please call our tip line.”
“Thank you, Sergeant Atchison.” The camera shifted to the reporter, a petite woman in a red wool coat who posed a stark contrast against the grim, colorless backdrop of the police department. Snowflakes fell and melted in her hair. “For viewers just tuning in”––Morgan felt called out—“the vehicle of Clive Reynolds, former CEO of Reynolds Capital who has been missing since July 2000, was located in Lake Michigan when the sheriff’s department dive team was searching for the gun that shot Officer Garrison of the Black Harbor Police Department.” The screen changed to show a portrait of Officer Garrison dressed in his patrol uniform, in front of the American flag. Morgan’s insides turned to ice. Her hand had gripped the remote so tightly the plastic groaned as she remembered his empty eyes and the spark of recognition that had lit in them, remembered the soundless words his lips had formed. I found you. She remembered the blood that had pooled around him, then reaching toward her like crimson fingers, and she’d recoiled with her back up against the candy shelves, paralyzed by fear and straight-up what-the-fuckery.
The news continued with Morgan hardly paying attention, until another image appeared on the screen. It was a mug shot, showing a man in an orange jumpsuit. She expected to see the man with the red dreads that Hudson had shown her earlier, but this guy was older. His grin revealed one silver eyetooth, and his head was shaved close to the scalp. On his neck was a tattoo of a geometric snowflake.
“Since opening the tip line this afternoon,” said the reporter, “police have identified one person of interest in the shooting of Officer Garrison. Tobias Shannon, also known as ‘Hades,’ previously incarcerated for delivery of cocaine and armed robbery, has been connected to several homicides in the city, but never convicted. Multiple tipsters have confirmed they saw Shannon walking away from the area of the Fast Mart on Sixth and Lincoln shortly after shots were fired. Anyone with information regarding where Shannon might be staying is encouraged to come forward so police may question him regarding his whereabouts that night. All tipsters will remain anonymous…”
The Ambien had taken effect. Morgan closed her eyes, the image of Tobias Shannon’s tattoo blinking like an optical illusion.
Morgan approached the stoop and rolled her eyes as her gaze landed on the iron nameplate above the entrance: HUDSON HOUSE. Not only was he a nerd posing as a cop, he was a pretentious nerd posing as a cop.
She stood on his doorstep now, her hands balled into fists and shoved in her armpits. Unlike Hudson, who had waited at her parents’ front door some twenty hours prior, she didn’t look like she’d just exited the stage of The Book of Mormon. She wore black tights that had a run down one leg, combat boots with scuffed toes, and an oversized black sweater she’d repurposed as a dress. Her beanie was red, though. How festive. After all, Christmas was just three days away.
Damn. He’d mentioned he lived close to the police department, but close was an understatement. If it weren’t for the pothole-ridden street cutting between them, his house would be in the department’s front yard. In the corner adjacent from City Hall, she observed the black-and-white SUV parked on the snow-covered lawn. The blue marker on the signs for Officer Garrison had all but washed away. Deflated balloons flopped on their strings like fish that had been yanked out of the water.
She pressed the doorbell and took half a step back. That’s when she noticed the keyhole. Morgan sucked in a breath. A house this old might have a lock that fits a skeleton key. Rolling up her baggy sleeve, she finagled hers from her leather cuff, inserted it, and turned.
Nothing.
She pulled it out a notch, jiggled it.
Still, nothing.
At the sound of footsteps coming from inside, she concealed the key in her fist. Hudson opened the door. “Good morning, Miss Mori.”
It was 9:00 A.M., too early for formalities or niceties. Nevertheless, Morgan invited herself inside. She was met immediately by a small cinnamon-colored puff.
“Pip, let Morgan in.”
The yippy dog bounced backward, nails clacking on the hardwood floor. Morgan knelt to pet it as the door shut behind her. The kitchen smelled like toast and something sweet. Jam or honey, maybe? The white walls had a bluish tint to them, like hoarfrost or a duck egg. On the far side of the room was an alcove with a built-in table. The chairs might have been rescued after fifty years of chilling in someone’s attic––metal frames, leather mustard-colored cushions. A ceramic butter dish with a peacock painted on its side sat in the middle of the table, next to a plate with crumbs and a swipe of strawberry jam. She narrowed her eyes at Hudson. She would have pegged him as more of an avocado toast guy.
“You find my camera?” she said. “Or my car?”
Hudson scratched the back of his neck. She’d unnerved him in his own home. She liked that. “Unfortunately, not yet. We’ve got an ATL on it and we’re combing the database for any cameras that match yours showing up at pawn shops in the area. No word so far, though.”
Morgan clenched her jaw. The news was what she’d expected, but it was still a kick in the teeth. Tears brimmed in her eyes and she told herself it was from the wind a moment ago when she’d stood outside. She wiped one away, silently swearing at the fact that she probably smeared her eyeliner. Shit.
“I wouldn’t give up hope,” said Hudson. “It’s only been––”
“Almost forty-eight hours. Isn’t that the cutoff?”
“Not always. Sometimes articles turn up months later.”
Months. She couldn’t go months without work. And her camera was more than an article. That camera was her life, her livelihood. It was the only way she could make money. Without it, she was fucked, destined to keep leeching off her parents, who could already hardly afford to live. Destined to stay here, in Black Harbor, forever. She sighed. “Well, he couldn’t have gotten too far. I practically coasted on fumes to the pump.”
The slight but visible quirk of Hudson’s brow told her this was new information to him. “You hadn’t filled up yet?”
She shook her head. “Had to pay inside first.”
Hudson was quiet as he digested this new morsel of information. Morgan watched his eyes move behind his glasses, the stark light from the kitchen windows reflected in his lenses. He looked like a robot, processing lines of code. The sound of her setting her purse on the countertop snapped him out of his trance. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, water?” he asked.
“Peppermint mocha, extra whip.” When his mouth twitched in a nervous smile, she added, “Kidding. Coffee’s fine.”
He didn’t have any brewed. Which was surprising. She thought all cops drank coffee. Coffee and donuts, wasn’t that the shtick? By the looks of his thin frame, Hudson didn’t look like he put down too many pastries. Or maybe he was a smoker with a high metabolism. His house didn’t smell like a smoker’s house, though. Having lived with Bern, she was all too familiar with the way the tobacco infiltrated the fabric of everything, coated it in sticky grime so the place appeared to be under some vintage film filter.
He brought the empty decanter to the sink and began to fill it. Morgan seized the opportunity to peruse his house, which, by the way, didn’t look like it belonged to him at all. A floral blanket sprawled over the back of the couch and decorative plates hung on the walls. A glass mosaic lamp was perched on an end table, and there was a corner cabinet displaying ceramic peacock figurines.
“You like peacocks,” she stated.
She heard a click as he set the coffeepot to brew. “Nan did. She grew up on a peacock farm.”
“Is she dead?”
She saw him blanch but wasn’t sorry for it. What was the point of beating around the bush? He’d been the one to use past tense, after all. “Yeah. She died two years ago.”
“From what?”
She watched his jaw tighten. “Accident.”
“Sorry,” Morgan offered. “My grandma died last year. Now my grandpa lives with us. He’s totally lost. He’s got dementia and…” She shrugged. Why was she telling him this? There was something about him. He was like her. Adrift.
“The grandpa you take to the senior home on Sundays.” There was something about his tone, relief, perhaps, at steering the conversation away from his life and back to hers.
“And Wednesdays. He’s the one who convinced me to come talk to you, actually.”
“I owe him a thanks, then.” Hudson poured her coffee in a mug. She noticed he didn’t prepare one for himself. “You take cream?”
“How much you got?”
He smiled like she’d made a joke, but went to the fridge and extracted a carton of heavy cream.
“Sugar?” Morgan asked, her gaze skipping over the countertops, searching for a sugar canister like her mom had.
Hudson opened a cabinet and took out a glass sugar shaker with a silver top. She took it and began to pour, watching the crystals dissolve like snowflakes on asphalt.
“Would you like to sit?” he asked. “We don’t have to stand in the kitchen.”
Morgan let him lead the way into the living room. The hardwood floor creaked beneath her feet, protesting her presence. Loneliness was an entity in this house, and it was used to having Hudson all to itself.
“This is an old house,” she said.
Two main pieces of furniture—a couch and a love seat—were arranged in an L. Hudson walked over to the love seat. He waited for her to sit on the couch before sitting down himself. “Built in 1889,” he offered. “You should see the basement. It’s a dungeon. Dirt floor, no windows.”
“You film horror movies down there or what?” Morgan clutched her cup. It was too hot to drink.
“No, but I could probably lease it out if there were any promising filmmakers in the area. You know any?”
Uncrossing her legs, Morgan gathered up some of her sweater and used it as a makeshift coffee collar, showing off the tops of her thighs. “I’ll let you know if I come across anyone. Everyone thinks they’re either a photographer or filmmaker these days. You could have a sweet side hustle.” She watched Hudson avert his eyes from her legs; his cheeks colored. And then just as she hoped, his gaze slid back for one more look.
She seized the opportunity to study him, too. A fleeting thought caught her by surprise: She would like to photograph him. Just as he was, his profile illuminated by the cold light streaming in through the window. Her eyes traced the imperfect slope of his nose, the indent between his lips, the curve of his chin. It was moments like this when the reality of her stolen camera hit hardest. When she noticed something gorgeous in this grotesque world and couldn’t capture it.
The TV was on, barely audible. Obnoxious yellow and red shapes flashed on-screen, advertising a going-out-of-business sale. Pip hopped up on the cushion next to her and curled on a pillow. There were loose papers and manila file folders stacked on the coffee table. She squinted. They could be police reports. “You take your work home with you?” she asked.
Hudson looked a little guilty. “Sometimes.”
“You need a hobby, Detective.”
“Got any recommendations?”
“We could start a book club.” The word “we” surprised her. Had she used that pronoun before, ever? Why, then, had she just used it with him?
“Let me guess. The first rule of book club is we don’t talk about book club,” said Hudson.
Morgan smiled—a real teeth-showing smile—and stared down at her coffee. “Exactly. That could be our first book, I guess.”
Hudson laughed quietly to himself, the precursor to a story. “When I was in college, my roommate worked at the campus dining hall. Every night, he’d have me send in an order under the name Tyler Durden. And every night—surprise—Tyler Durden never came to pick it up.”
“So … he got to take it home?”
Hudson nodded. “I ate a lot of shitty pizza that year.”
“I still eat a lot of shitty pizza,” Morgan admitted, and felt a tiny shift in the cosmos. It was the first time she’d sat with a cop and not been questioned. For the first time, maybe, she could let herself believe that he was here to help her, or even just get to know her. Not hunt her down or mount her on his wall like a trophy.
Maybe.
She stared at the table. At the uneven stacks of paper. Her fingers itched to cut the decks, make them even. But it might mess up his work. She took in a deep breath and settled for picking at her cuticles.
“Do you read?”
The question shook her. She felt like an eight ball as her thoughts rattled and ricocheted. She used to read. A lot. She’d spend whole days immersed in stories and characters’ lives. Because characters didn’t judge her for how she dressed or whether or not her facial expressions showed an appropriate amount of emotion; they just let her be a silent observer. But real life was different. People weren’t characters. There was no linear narrative, no central plot. Everyone just slogged through life trying not to get murdered or hit by a bus.
“No,” she said after a moment of awkward silence. Not books anyway. She read people.
He raised a brow, but not in judgment. “Kinda tough to have a book club then.”
Morgan shrugged. “Don’t people just drink wine and gossip at those anyway?”
“I wouldn’t know.” The quiet began to settle again, disturbing the once perfectly frozen particles in the air. Morgan could see the conversation withering before her eyes. He wasn’t a trained interrogator, she knew that. It was part of why she’d agreed to sit with him in his car yesterday. She’d wanted to see what he was all about. What lay beneath the badge and the button-down shirt, the practiced composure. His lack of confidence bled from his pores like ink.
“Do you?” she asked, commanding the equilibrium to stay put. Pulling on threads as he’d done with her. “Read, I mean.”
“I do.” He looked a little sheepish, and she caught a glimpse of who he might have been in his college days, eating pizza his friend brought home from work. She didn’t figure he’d changed much in those—what—ten years? How much nerdier and devoid of self-esteem could he have been?
“I mean, other than these.” Coffee cup in hand, she pointed at the stacks of reports. She didn’t look directly at them. The asymmetry was driving her crazy.
Hudson laughed. “I used to. When I was on patrol. Some nights, Black Harbor was a ghost town.” He paused, furrowed his brows. “Less than a ghost town. Ghosts are smart enough to leave.”
“Unless they have unfinished business,” said Morgan. “Then they’re stuck here forever.”
Something about that statement struck him. He looked as though someone had just turned a screw in his back. All around them, Morgan felt the air particles shake. The sphere that had been protecting them from the outside world shattered, like the windows of the Fast Mart. She heard a car alarm blaring. The wind slamming into the brick, like the Big Bad Wolf insistent on blowing Hudson’s house down. Voices shouted at one another in the street, the soundtrack of Black Harbor.
“You, uh…” Hudson folded his hands in the space between his knees. “You wanted to talk off the record?”
Haven’t we been, she wanted to say, but she swallowed her sarcasm. “He spray-painted his shoes,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“The guy who shot your friend and stole my shit. His shoes were red, but he spray-painted them black.”
Hudson leaned forward. “How do you know?”
“Because I could smell it. It was fresh. And I could hear it.” Yes, it was coming back to her now. The sounds of shoes sticking to the floor.
“Red treads.” He repeated her own words, the ones she now remembered saying over and over again as she’d rocked against the candy rack. Red treads, red treads. Hudson worked his jaw, as though literally chewing on this new information. “He could have paint on his hands. Under his nails…” He paused, and then: “Can I ask you something?”
Morgan lowered her cup, licked the sugar off her lip. “Shoot.” She flinched, too late to catch her poor choice of word.
“What happened?” Hudson asked. “That night. When the suspect came in.”
Morgan stared at him, tilted her head like a bird. Was he being serious? “Um…”
“I know. I mean, I know what ultimately happened,” said Hudson. “But … order of events. The suspect came in and … held up the cashier?”
Morgan thought back to two nights ago. Hadn’t she given her statement to the other investigator at the scene? Devine, was that his name? Apparently, he and Hudson didn’t talk. “Yeah, he came in. He said something about money and … shot Officer Garrison.” Her words fell to a whisper. “But he didn’t take anything.”
Hudson leaned a little toward her. “He didn’t … what?”
“Take anything.” She remembered it clearly now. The suspect had entered the store, all dressed in black. She’d heard the jingle bells clang against the glass door. The cashier called for Officer Garrison. And then five shots. The skull-splitting sound of bullets boomeranging off concrete walls. And then the ringing silence.
When she looked at Hudson again, she could almost see the gears turning behind his eyes. “It’s weird. The suspect came in, asked for money or something, but then he didn’t even take any.”
“He just shot Garrison?” said Hudson.
She swallowed. Tears welled in her eyes as the memory of that moment came rushing back to her. Garrison bucking with the impact of the bullets. She couldn’t look at Hudson anymore. She turned toward the TV. The news had come back on, showing an excavator dredging a rusted vehicle out of the lake. Clive Reynolds’s photo appeared on the screen.
“Turn it up,” she said.
“… suspect the vehicle to have been down there since July of 2000,” said the reporter, “possibly only days before the car’s owner, Clive Reynolds, went missing.”
Clive’s photo filled the screen. He wore a suit and tie, arms crossed, smiling like a man on top of his world. A cold phantom hand gripped Morgan’s spine and wouldn’t let go. Her gaze flicked to the papers on Hudson’s coffee table. Clive’s name was all over them. She saw the photos of the drowned car, too. It looked like a tick, all turgid and white. There were bank statements and other boring white paper documents; glossy, grainy photographs; handwritten letters …
“No wonder you were so interested in me having been at the Reynolds residence.” Morgan fixed her eyes on him and tried to hide the disappointment she felt, in herself, mostly, for trusting him.
“It’s just … a connection I can’t ignore,” confessed Hudson. “Look, the county’s dive team found Clive Reynolds’s car when they were searching for the gun that shot Garrison.”
“So, what do you think is my connection?”
“I don’t know.” The way he said it sounded honest, not dismissive. His eyes roamed her like she was a book. What kind of book was she? Horror? Psychological thriller? Whatever genre, she’d have a fucked-up beginning, middle, and end. But what was this? A little black book sat near the stack of reports, a faded red ticket stuck between its pages. The words ADMIT ONE stared at her in bold caps, and she knew the scripted font that would be on the other side.
“… and for Eleanor Reynolds, the reopening of this case could either be the final turn of the key—or a cleared name. I’m Jada Taylor, and this is Channel 6…”
“Morgan.”
His voice sounded like he was underwater. Her coffee cup crashed to the floor, shattered on the hardwood, splinters of ceramic bone. She was gone before he could hurt her.
Or before she could hurt him.