This one of my short stories which appeared in my “Stories for Shut-Ins” series, sent to over 300 readers during the Covid Pandemic.
Remote
Leonard Defore, 52, is digging out the roots of a dead tree on his property, nearly a mile from the small town of Indian Lake, Illinois. It is the beginning of the spring of the year 2012, not yet warm, Midwestern chilly. Leonard is sweating, though, and glad to be sweating. He enjoys physical labor, a passion for him. His old, well-kept home rests on an acre among many trees, mostly planted by himself. He also tends a small garden and repairs his fencing, and he once tried to build a shed all on his own, with blueprints and careful planning, but it was beyond his skills, so he hired a local man and became the willing helper to the builder.
He pauses now in the digging of the roots to catch his breath and is held still by a ‘V’ of silent birds in the sky. He is lifted by the sight, watching until the flyers are only specks and then continuing with his task, glad to have it, glad for his health and strength but glad mostly for the weariness he’ll feel this night, so that if he dreams at all, he won’t remember.
Nearly four miles from Leonard’s home a search party is moving carefully along the banks of a channel that is 12 to 15 feet wide. Most of the party is made up of police officers. They are in uniform except for their detective lieutenant, a woman sent out from the larger town of Waukegan. She is 46 and her name is Betha Kane. Betha walks slightly behind the searchers, but her eyes are moving constantly in case something is overlooked. Beside her is another uniformed officer and a woman also in her late forties named Isabelle Shew. Isabelle is searching, too, but her eyes show a deep well of pain because this search is for her son, Charley, a man of 24. Trailing Isabelle is her daughter, Willa, 16, carrying the same stricken look as her mother.
“It’s coming up,” the mother, Isabelle, says, “where the bank juts out.”
“This is his fishing spot?” Betha asks.
Isabelle says, with no life or color to her voice, “One of’em.”
“Have them mark it,” Betha says to the cop beside her, and he moves ahead while the women stand still a moment. “You said you looked at all these places?” she asks the mother and girl.
“Hope we didn’t wreck anything,” the girl says.
The mother turns to the detective and stares, drawing her attention. “I called that man, that…Leonard Defore.”
Betha sighs and says, “Didn’t you tell me you’d wait?”
“Try waiting when it’s your son.”
Betha stares at Isabelle, unhappy, but understanding. “I just don’t want anyone dropping into this investigation out of nowhere, confusing things, giving you false hopes or… I know you’re terribly upset, Isabelle, but let’s give this a chance. This is the procedure. It works.”
Isabelle Shew puts her eyes back on the murky water of the channel that is ever sliding slowly toward the lake three miles away. “He said no,” Isabelle says, “but I’m trying again. He helped the police before. It’s my Charley, and I’m not giving up.”
Leonard has read about the disappearance of Charley Shew in the local weekly paper, seen the young man’s photo: “Charles Shew Still Missing After Three Days. Shew was last seen with a man at the Harmony Restaurant on Saturday night. It is believed this man was in the area for a college reunion in Lake Forest. He has not yet been identified.” On the same day that Leonard saw this, the missing man’s mother had called him.
“Anything you can do,” she had said, her voice unstable as though she was shaking. “Anything - like when you helped the police…”
“That was almost 12 years ago, Mrs. Shew.” He had kept his voice gentle, taking in her pain through the phone, thinking of his own daughter and how he would feel. “It was a…just a coincidence…”
She had cut him off with, “But it’s a chance. I’ll… Listen, I’ll pay you, whatever you…”
“There was never money involved and… I’m just not able to help. That…part of me is gone, Mrs. Shew. I’m not who I was and I really, truly can’t help you.” He had heard her ragged breathing, but no further words, and he had said, “Sorry,” and cut the call. Now, this evening, there is a car parking in his drive and now a knocking on his door, and he knows it has to be her. Who else would come here?
She stands one step back from the door as he opens it, and she is holding the drawer to a dresser that is full of objects, an old wooden dresser drawer, so it must be a heavy burden, but Isabelle is a large woman, having no trouble with the drawer. Her daughter Willa stands behind her, taller and also thick-set, looking, to Leonard, somewhat like her missing brother had looked in the photo in the paper. The same fleshy mouth.
“You know who we are?” Isabelle asks.
“Yes, but…” Leonard gets no further as she interrupts.
“I know what you’re going to say, about…’that was a long time ago,’ but just imagine, please just imagine if it was your family member, your son or daughter. Do you have kids?”
“Mrs. Shew, I…yes, I can understand, and it must be awful, but….”
She interrupts again. “In here I’ve got photos of Charley and his friends and some of the things Charley wrote. He liked to write stories sometimes, but mostly music, and he moved around with his band, his country band, and there’s pictures of that and some tapes you could listen to. There’s a tape player in here…”
“Mrs. Shew….” Leonard begins again, and still she cuts him off.
“Call me Isabelle, and this is his sister, Willa, and if you look through this, you just might get a feeling, maybe dream something like you did back then. I read all about it.”
“Twelve years,” he says to her, “and it doesn’t happen anymore, so…”
“So, what have you got to lose?” This comes from Willa, whose eyes are tearing.
And her mother says, “So you’re saying it’s a million to one that you could be of any help to us at all.”
“Yes, I’m sorry, but…”
Isabelle extends the heavy drawer toward him, saying, “I’ll take that. I’ll take that million to one. I won’t expect anything. I won’t hold you to anything. It’s just a million to one, and I’ll take that.”
He stares, and then he accepts the drawer because he sees how it strains her arms, holding it out to him, and because this woman and child are so beleaguered, so riven by fear and loss. He takes the drawer, and Willa says a muffled and liquid “Thank you,” and Isabelle only stares and nods, her lips twitching, and then she turns away, and they move toward their car.
He puts the drawer on his kitchen table, but doesn’t look through it, not yet. He sighs a great breath and moves about, aimless, turning on lamps because of the thinning of the evening light. He is hungry so he feeds himself early and enters his office and works for an hour at his accounting business, but that drawer is pulling at him, full of a life, full of someone’s stories, someone’s music, full of the hopes of a mother and sister and full of Leonard’s own memories and the brute force of his dreams.
It’s nearly ten o’clock, and he is still looking through the material, the life-to-date of Charles Shew. He has played two of the young man’s songs. His most recent photos do not stir any memories in Leonard or remind him of any dreams he has had lately. He is now re-reading the brief letter that was put into the drawer by Isabelle: “We didn’t see him much. He came home late last month while his band was scattered and resting, and he had a plan to increase the money they were making, new management, better venues. He was always thinking about it. He would walk all over the area, go to town, see his friends, and go fishing to relax. Perch and bluegill and carp but we don’t eat the carp.” She’s telling him they don’t eat the bottom fish, the carp. Why tell him that? Because she has nothing else to tell him. So, he studies the recent photos again, taking in that face, the eyes. There is an intensity there. Only one smile, in one photo of Charley and his sister. He studies the smiling young man and feels nothing at all beyond the sadness and panic of a mother and daughter as the time beyond the disappearance ticks away.
He looks up from the letter because another car has come into his drive, and he feels a tightening in his chest. Isabelle again? Another drawer? Sorry, he says in his mind to the woman, sorry but leave me alone now. Leave me alone. There is a brief, hard, two-tap on his door, and he sighs and rises and pulls it open to see the detective Betha Kane. She stares without a smile. There was no photo of her in the paper, but she is holding up a badge briefly, then putting it in her pocket, staring again, making calculations, it seems, her eyes hard on him.
“Detective Lieutenant Kane,” she says, and he steps back and she enters, taking in the room. More calculations, practiced, professional calculations. And conclusions? She seems, to Leonard, to be full of conclusions. She stares at the drawer. “Heard about that,” she says. “Have you been through it?”
And he answers, “Yes.”
“And you’ve solved my case?”
“I don’t know anything about your case, anything that could help.”
“At least you admit it.” She moves to the drawer, studies it, then lifts her eyes to Leonard. “So, are you done, then? Going to call her, tell her you can’t help her?”
“I already told her that,” he says, “but she wouldn’t believe it.”
“Tell her again.” Betha asks if she can sit and he nods, and they both take chairs at the table. He slides the drawer from between them and they stare, the overhead lamp bathing their faces, his strong jaw, tanned face, looking harsh, but her brown skin is burnished by this soft light, as if absorbing it, and he studies her, wishing for a part of a second that they weren’t adversaries, that she was someone who had simply come to call.
“So you had a dream and you called the police – that time years ago. Tell me about that, okay?” Her stare settles deep and doesn’t waver.
“A man had been killed by a rifle shot,” he says. “The…incident was in the paper. I had seen the man around town, the one who was killed, didn’t know him.”
“And…?”
“And that night I had a dream. I saw a man holding a rifle, walking toward a barn. And again, it was somebody I recognized from around here but didn’t know.”
“So he was walking to a barn.”
“Yes, that’s all I saw. He looked…upset, afraid, and…since it was a rifle…”
“How many men around here keep a rifle? What made you think…?”
“Look, Detective, it wasn’t just any dream. This kind of dream is different. I can’t explain it. It has…more weight. I woke up and… Well, it felt important, ominous. I knew the cops wouldn’t believe me, but I had to tell them, just in case. I figured I’d tell them and I’d describe the rifle and the man and the barn, and they could do whatever they wanted with the information, or do nothing.”
She sits back, but doesn’t break her stare. “And what did they do, Leonard?” He sighs and holds her eyes.
“You know my first name. What’s yours?”
“Detective,” she says, and they each show a miniscule smile, her eyes still hard, penetrating.
“They did nothing,” he says. “They laughed. But then that afternoon one of them drove out here. They had a few possible suspects by then, and he wanted to take me to one of their homes. I went with him. He stopped the car and nodded out the window. ‘That looks like the barn you described,’ he said, and I said it was the barn and that I was sure, and that was that. He drove me home. They got a search warrant, found the rifle in the barn, checked it, and it was the murder weapon.”
“So, you were a hero?”
“No, a freak.” Their eyes hold a long time, then he goes on. “Half my accounting clients left me. I gave up the office. Had to work from here.”
“Two years later, you and your wife separate. Was that related?”
“You’re out of your territory,” Leonard says, and after another long look, he asks, “You want some coffee, a drink?”
She ignores the question. “There is no, no hard evidence that what’s called ‘remote viewing’ even exists.”
“Of course there isn’t. It might go on in my dream state for a few seconds, maybe five, maybe ten at the most, and then it’s gone.”
“How many times for you, Leonard?” He knows he doesn’t have to answer, but he likes having her at his table, in his home, in that burnishing light. “For me, it’s always at night, always a dream. Eleven times I’m sure of, other possible events that…I can’t swear to.”
She nods a while, then says, “So you see something happening somewhere else?”
“I’m going to have a drink,” he tells her, standing, moving to his cabinets. “Got scotch…bourbon…. you in?”
“Bourbon,” she says. “Water.”
While he’s pouring, he begins. “One time in my twenties, I’m having a hell of a dream. I’m up high, looking down. I see a…spectacular sight, a big navy ship, a carrier, and it’s on fire: chaos, sailors jumping off the deck.” He places the drinks, sits again. He sips, waits until she does. “Then I was on the deck, inside the chaos, right there. I woke up…amazed at that dream, how real it was. Shook me. I got up, had my day, put on the TV that night. ‘Australian Aircraft Carrier Burns At Sea’. So…what do you think? Coincidence?”
“Has to be,” she says.
“No,” Leonard says flatly. “No, it went too deep and it was too exact.”
“Coincidence,” she repeats.
And he says, “So then I’ve had, over the years, eleven coincidences, right?” They sip their drinks, not breaking their stares.
She leans closer, elbows on the table. “So now you’re going to dream what happened to young Charley Shew. You’re going to tell me where to look and solve my case. or…you’re just going to give a mother and sister some false hope for a while, string out their misery so when they fall apart it’ll be even worse for them. All for what? What do you get?”
“I would never ask money for this,” he says. She sips her drink again and stands. He stands. She begins to leave, then stops.
“Maybe there’s something else you want.”
“What?”
She waits, then gives it to him, “Worship.”
He says, “Bullshit,” and she opens the door, then turns to him once more. “Anything you see or dream or even think about this case, you bring it where, you bring it to who?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “You won’t tell me your name.” It takes her a moment.
“Betha Kane.”
“I’ll tell you, Betha. I’ll bring it to you before anybody.
“Good boy,” she says, and leaves.
He dreams nothing that night, or forgets it by daylight, but he would have known if he had had a ‘viewing’. Those are not forgotten. He remembers clearly the punch of ‘those’ dreams, and that punch has not come for…three years now. He avoids the dresser drawer. There’s nothing more to see. He throws himself into the digging out of the small, dead tree and finishes too early, with too much time to think. He saws the wood into fireplace logs, takes a walk almost all the way to town and comes back along the hills.
While he’s walking through the weeds, he scares a pheasant that blasts into the sky, shocking him, and he watches its flight as his heart bashes his chest. What is he afraid of, he wonders, but, in truth, he knows.
At this same time, the police are continuing their slow search of the channel banks. They have found two items and called Isabelle Shew, and she is there with Betha now, examining a few partial footprints in the mud, three stepped-on cigarette butts – Charley’s brand – and an empty bottle of high-end whisky, too expensive for Charley’s choice. All is bagged for the lab. Betha looks about now, as she talks to Isabelle.
“Looks like two men sat here, looking across the channel. Not much to see. Had a mostly full moon that night.”
“So, what do you think happened?” Isabelle asks, her jaw out and stiff as if waiting for a blow.
“Still can’t tell,” Betha says. “But the weeds here, these smashed weeds…. It looks like they kept going on down the channel.” Both women look along the bank, where, just forty feet away, is a stand of willow trees, delicate, dancing slightly with the breeze. “Isabelle……I need to know if Charley was gay or bisexual.”
“Jesus, no. No!”
“It’s not a judgement,” Betha says. “We’re wondering why two men came to this bank and lingered here. Could’ve been just a talk.”
“Yes, a talk,” Isabelle says, her voice louder now. “Of course it was just a talk.” Betha doesn’t answer, but takes some slow steps toward the willows, following the searching policemen.
It’s not an ordinary dream, but how to describe the difference? For Leonard there is an overall sense of alarm. There is a stripping away of everything non-essential, down to basic images only. There is a weight, a palpable weight to these images, sounds, feelings, and there is a steady and stable viewpoint, and, for this dream, Leonard’s viewpoint seems to be the back seat of a car – though he does not feel he is seated.
He is just there. His presence is there behind the driver of the car, and it is night, and he can see part of the man’s head and his right ear and jacket collar, and he can see the man’s right hand on the steering wheel, and he can hear the sound of the car moving, the engine, the tires on the road. He studies this unchanging event, this driving along on some road somewhere, and he notices that there is a flurry of snow outside the front window, but not enough so that the driver turns on the wipers. Leonard sees all of this, sees the man’s hand with a ring, a small portion of the side of the man’s face, which is not clean shaven, the facial hair not long enough to be called a beard. He watches the man’s hand lift from the wheel, the man’s right hand, with its ring, and the hand elongates a finger and the finger touches a button on the dashboard and there is a quick slice of music that is jarring in the purring car, and the dream ends. It has lasted approximately eight seconds.
In waking from the dream, Leonard sees that there is no early light on the shade of his window. He guesses that it’s three or four in the morning. He feels the aftermath of the dream and notices his breath is short, his chest pounding, and he knows, he simply knows, that he has been somewhere else. His consciousness has been in an actual car with an actual man on an existing road, and he knows he will not fall back asleep this night. He rises and turns on the heat and gets back beneath the covers and studies every slice of every second of the dream.
At eight in the morning Betha Kane is walking the channel area, a paper cup of coffee in her hand that is too hot to drink. There are six officers and five volunteers with her. Her phone sounds and she trades hands with the coffee and answers. It’s Leonard Defore, saying, “I dreamed last night. I saw things.”
“Leonard, I‘m at the channel. I have to keep my mind on the work here.”
“I’m coming there,” he says.
“No,” she answers. “I’ll call you when we’re done.”
“I’m coming there,” he says, and cuts the call.
He’s there in twelve minutes, and she is not happy, but sees how different he is, tightened and…is he shaking? So she allows the conversation as she keeps her eyes on the searchers. “So tell me your dream, and then leave me alone.”
“You first, please,” he asks. “Tell me what’s new that you didn’t know when we talked? Please, Betha.”
She sighs, still watching the search, and she takes a tentative sip of the too hot coffee. “The other man’s name is Daniel Frieberg. 34, and yes he was at the Lake Forest reunion. People in the bar described him, tall, thin…”
Leonard presses in. “You have a photo by now, right?”
“Why show you that?” she asks. “You describe him, Leonard. Tell me about your “viewing” first.”
“I will. I will, but go on, all right?”
“People in the bar saw Frieberg and Charley Shew talking for about an hour, then they left together, about eleven o’clock.” She puts her eyes on Leonard now, sees the tight focus, the slight but definite trembling, and feels a wisp of sorrow for him and wonders if he might be insane. “Describe him, Leonard. You first,” she says this matter-of-factly.
“In my dream I was behind the driver of a car, behind, so I didn’t see the face. Jacket with the collar up, leather and…light tan. Car was…low to the ground, small, expensive looking. I saw his right hand on the wheel, saw a ring…” He sees that she has deepened her stare.
“Describe the ring,” she says, “and the watch he was wearing.”
“I didn’t see the watch…”
She interrupts him, “You didn’t see anything. You just dreamed it.”
“I saw only his right hand, and I…drew the ring.” He takes a folded paper out of his shirt pocket, but doesn’t show it to her. “You first,” he says.
She waits, then says, “Solid gold wedding band, small diamond in the center.”
He shows her his drawing. There are arrows pointing to the ring with the words “gold” and “diamond inset.” She stares at this a long time.
“Are you playing me, Leonard? Do you have access to the information I’m getting…?”
“No. I don’t. What else about Frieberg?”
She is thrown by that drawing and hesitates, then… “Lives in Columbus, Ohio, attorney, recently divorced. His wife moved out and took the children. There is a restraining order against him. No violence, but… a bad temper. This is him.” She finds a photo on her phone, turns it to him, tall skinny man in a suit, goofy smile. Leonard nods, then looks back to her, his eyes asking for more, and she decides to go on. “He had planned to fly in for the reunion, but decided to make it a car trip, take some days, so…the law firm isn’t happy. He hasn’t kept in touch with them or with his wife. He doesn’t answer his phone. Listen…. I don’t know what this is, Leonard, but it feels like I’m being had. You got the jacket right…and the car, the ring. How did you do that?”
“I told you. I told you everything,” he says. “But you just won’t believe it.”
“Okay,” she says, challenged now. “Okay, you say you saw Daniel Frieberg in his car – so where is he? Huh? Tell me where he is. Then I’ll believe it.”
He stares, then…. “He’s somewhere where it was snowing last night, a light snow.”
“A light snow…that’s what you’ve got?” He turns and begins walking away and she calls after him. “Give me something I can move on. Snow? He could be in Canada by now. He could be in friggin’ Alaska!” He walks on toward the road and his parked car.
He has been home for two hours and has taken everything out of the dresser drawer and spread it on the table and checked the items one at a time, taking them in, taking in Charley Shew in pieces, in moments. Then, one by one, he puts each item back in the drawer, slowly, studying it again as he runs the dream in his mind, each second of the dream, each half-second. He only stops when he hears a car and thinks it might be Betha, and he opens the door, but it is the girl, Willa Shew, staring hard at him as she approaches, her face dulled down even further now by the waiting and the strained hoping.
He steps back from the door, but she only stands there and says a muffled. “Anything? We want to know if you found anything, if you…have anything to say.”
What he says is, “Please come in,” and she does, staring at the drawer on the kitchen table.
“Been through it?” she asks.
“Couple of times,” he says, but he’s not looking at the drawer. He’s studying her, Willa, sister of Charley, staring at the resemblance. “Are you about…Charley’s height?”
She nods. “Almost.”
“Weight?” he asks, and she nods again. “Can you show me your hands, Willa?” She stares, and he nods, and she does, and he looks at them, at the three rings, at the thickness of the fingers. He stares at this, at all of her, and he’s deep inside the dream, and she is wondering. “Do you mind turning around, please?” She does. “And…move the hair away from your neck, your…right ear,” and she does – and then her phone sounds.
It’s a rock tune, and she swipes it and puts it to her ear, “Yeah?” And then she’s suddenly very still, and then she’s falling, sinking to her knees on the floor, her face all pulled together and the eyes wet and her throat wet as she says, brokenly, “They found Charley’s body!”
He offers to drive her to the channel, but she shakes her head and hurries out the door, runs to her car. He turns back to the drawer and looks at everything, at nothing.
Leonard drives to the channel road and parks and walks toward the group just beyond the willows. He is surprised by how slowly the three police officers are moving, under Betha’s direction, moving through the weeds, uncovering the ground so that nothing is overlooked and nothing is destroyed. They have roped off the area. What can be seen so far through the dirt is blood, one small glimpse of muddy skin, the mostly buried jacket of Charleyt Shew. Betha has insisted that the mother and sister are far enough back from the delicate digging that they see nothing. They sit on the ground, Isabelle covering her face with her hands as Willa holds her. Leonard passes them and moves toward the burial until a cop calls sharply, “Sir!”
Everyone looks up, and Betha’s angry look screws into him. “You don’t belong here, Leonard. Back off.”
He stares at her and says, not shouting, “It isn’t him.”
Nobody moves, then Betha takes a step toward him. “Move, or I’ll have you moved.”
“It’s not Charley,” he says. “It’s Frieberg,” And then he does turn and he does walk away, and the faces follow him and then turn back to the burial.
“Rafael,” Betha says to one of the plain-clothes cops, “uncover the face. Go gently.” The cop nods and carefully pulls away dirt and dead leaves, twigs and bugs, until…. The cop stands straight and stares at Betha. Further back from the body, Isabelle and Willa stand, trying to see.
The cop says….“Frieberg.”
When Leonard reaches his car, he hears someone running and turns as one of the cops shouts, “Stay in your car, sir. The lieutenant says stay in your car!” Leonard nods to him, enters his car, shuts the door, rolls down the window and waits. It’s twenty minutes before she comes. Time enough for his intensity to slacken, his trembling to disappear. He feels very tired now. The sun has moved and lays on his shoulder, the side of his face. He turns when Betha comes, but she walks around to the passenger side and opens the door and sits before she looks at him.
She takes her time. “Let’s hear it,” she says.
“It was the ring that got me, as I thought about it, went over and over what I saw. You told me it was a wedding ring, so why wear it on the right hand, on the little finger? So, I went through the most recent photos of Charley. He has a ring, a kind of Native-American ring on his third finger, left hand. So, if he took a ring, he might put it on his right hand, that’s true, but also, Frieberg was a thin man and…Charlie’s hands are thick, just like Willa’s. So, he would put a ring like that on his little finger, where it would fit – until he could sell it. And all this…it led me to study that neck, that ear that I saw. It was more hefty, not a thin man. So…. So that’s it.” Betha’s stare has not changed. She opens the door, but doesn’t leave for a moment. Then she does.
But before she closes the door, he says, “You just can’t do it, can you?” And she puts her eyes back on him. “You just can’t take that step,” he says, “that step over the line. Can’t let yourself believe, right?”
She takes a long time, then says, “I’ll let you know, Leonard,” and she closes the door and walks back toward the channel. He watches her.
He hears nothing from her for six days. He hears nothing from the Shew family and so delivers the drawer, leaving it at their front door. He’s grateful that he hears no more from the police and nothing from the local newspaper. He plants a new tree. When Betha calls, she says she’ll be in the area Friday, seeing the Shews, and she’ll come by his place after. Ten o’clock? He says he’ll be there.
He already has the drinks poured when she comes. He makes sure it’s the same seating at his table because he remembers how the light was like a low flame on her dark skin, and he enjoys that again. He waits. She’s quiet, then begins without any urgency.
“Charley Shew didn’t come home to rest. He came home to try and borrow money from his mother, from Willa, too. He was using, and the band kicked him out. So, he meets this wealthy lawyer with the fine car and the gold watch and the ring and…he got drunk and went for it. Maybe it was going to be just a knock-down and a steal. Maybe Frieberg fought hard. Death by choke hold. Quiet. We got him in Minnesota where he tried to sell the car. Y’know…Isabelle and Willa…they said they hate what he did, but they’re glad he’s alive. That’s how they put it.”
He nods. They drink again. She sighs a long one. He smiles just a bit, studying her. “Am I going to see you, Betha? I’d like to see you.”
Her stare lingers. “Oh, you’ll see me, Leonard.” She lets a pause fill in. “In your dreams.” It’s the biggest smile he’s had from her, and he loves it.