A Different Kind Of Place
Short Story | 10 minute read
I don’t know where you are when you are reading this, but over here, as I write this, lots of snow is on its way. Thinking of my story hoard, there was one story where snow played an important role from the get-go. It’s a story I wrote for one of the NYC Midnight contests. I had fun with it, especially with naming the characters after all of my entreprenaurial buddies in Stop Dreaming Alone. They are Kim A. Flodin (virtual assistant), Emma Isaacs (creativity coach), Johanna Peralta (keto coach), and Claire Oldham-West (hypnotherapist), you should check these awesome people out.
The body wasn’t cold because it was snowing. The woman was dead. The scene stunk of foul play. Whatever happened, it didn’t happen out in the open. No one would have dressed that way to go outside on a night like this. This was real winter. In fact, the snow would have hid it all in another ten minutes.
I looked at her splayed there — half in the shadows, half in the light — and I cursed myself for my need to observe every detail of a new place. I had been looking at the brick facade of the building trying to think of the best way to paint its visual with my words.
My podcast, A Different Kind of Life, takes me all around the country meeting living people who have a different kind of life than the one I was accustomed to in New York. I collect their stories, I share them with the world, I move on. I ditched my lease. I have no home. I live on the road. Mom says I’m a nomad. It’s okay, I say she’s stagnant. We get each other.
I’m just trying to understand more about life, about people, about human nature and what drives us. I’ve never really been interested in death, but true crime podcasts are blowing up the net and get the downloads, so I thought Haversen might be worth visiting. It’s known in the podcast world as a spot rife with stories.
“They have a collection of unsolved murders,” my friend Kim once told me.
“A collection?” I asked, thinking it was an odd way to describe it.
She laughed. “There’s a guy out there marketing it that way it to the true crime syndicate. He’s like a specialized travel agent for podcasters or something, and he’s always trying to pitch the town as a great place for a setting.”
That’s how I got here. I took the podcaster rate to Haversen and was booking a podcaster’s rate out, in the opposite direction. I wasn’t staying long. I wanted to do a quick profile of the place in the hopes dropping “murder collection,” “true crime,” and “unsolved mystery” in the description would grab up that huge true crime listening crowd.
But there I stood, staring at a true crime scene with both my feet deep in the snow.
I looked back at all of the footprints I had left leading up to the crime scene and wondered how on earth I could ever walk away.
It was too late. I was a part of this story. I discovered the body.
A half hour later I was in the police station — wood everything. I was actually taken aback when I saw the cell wasn’t sporting mahogany bars. It was empty. Everything was. This definitely was a different kind of life. I never considered a police station could be not busy. I wanted to pull my mic out and record in the hollowness of it all, but the chief sat across from me wearing a shiny star like out of a cartoon.
“Young lady, what are you doing in Haversen?” he looked bored by my presence and the whole idea of a dead body showing up on his watch.
“I’m a podcaster. I’m supposed to check in to Ben’s Airbnb. I was gonna take an Uber —”
The chief laughed, “Uber!”
“Yeah… well… the lady at the bus said I should walk,” I unzipped my backpack looking for the walking directions I had been given. It was a handwritten sketch from some lady named Claire with a bunch of boxes that I suspected were buildings with names on them. The first box was Emma’s, the last was Ben’s, I figured I’d just count them as I went and hope for the best. It was, however, an amazing “different kind of life” artifact.
“Fred,” the chief called over to the officer who just walked in the building, “get Claire on the phone.”
“Jerry,” he said, “Give me a god-damned break. She ain’t gonna pick up if she thinks it’s me.”
The chief closed his eyes and exhaled before looking back up. “Call from the station phone, Frederick. She ain’t gonna know it’s you until she hears your voice sayin’ the chief’s got questions.”
Fred nodded and shuffled back to his desk on the opposite side of the room. Everything was in slow motion in this place. Before Fred could pick up the phone, it rang. Chief Jerry let Fred handle the call while he continued with me, “About what time did you get this here document, Miss --?” He held up the piece of notebook paper as he sat back in his squeaky swivel chair.
“I’m Johanna. I only got that about ten minutes before I called you,” I said. “I just got off the bus and was trying to get a car when the lady said I’d need to walk. She had this thing all drawn out already. I guess she knew I was coming or something.” I shrugged. I was getting used to these small towns finding out about my arrival and rolling out their respective red throw rugs. “You see, I only got up to Emma’s place when I saw — um,” I swallowed, “what I saw.”
Jerry put the paper down. “Miss, that ain’t Emma’s place. That’s where you found Emma. Dead.”
I gasped. My reaction was to grab the paper, but the chief’s hand was already on it.
“The other names?” I asked. “I thought they were, like, the names of the people who lived there or something.” I leaned in and whispered, “Is it something else?”
“Johanna, listen here. You radio girls come out here and swing those mics around tryin to dig up them stories thinkin they all mean somethin they don’t. Don’t investigate. I’m the only one here with that authority, alright?” The chief smirked and started to pull open his drawer when Fred called from across the room.
“Jerry. There’s another one near the bus station.” The fact that the tiny window and slab of sidewalk with a park bench on it attached to the single gas station in town was called a “bus station” was a different kind of life detail not lost on me.
The chief slammed his drawer shut. “Another what? Another one of these radio girls?” I guess he kind of understood what a podcast was. Maybe we were going mainstream, after all.
“No sir. Another body,” Fred said. He stood straight, hand still gripping the phone, face pallid.
He didn’t look like he wanted to share this news. “It’s Lisa.”
Jerry leapt from his chair letting it clamor to the floor.
“What did you say?”“I’m sorry, Jerry.”
“There ain’t nothin to be sorry about. That’s a load of bullshit. Lisa’s home. She’s been home er since I left. Ain’t no reason for her to be out in the storm. This is some kinda mistake.” He pulled up his chair and swung his coat off the back and put it on in one, long clumsy movement. “You,” he looked at me with hardened, angry eyes. The boredom was gone, replaced with fury. “You’re comin with me. I ain’t leaving you here to make some of that there ‘behind the scenes’ shit.”
I stood up, looking to see if Fred would offer to watch me while I stayed out of the snow. The chief followed my gaze. “Fred, you’re comin too. We’ll all talk to Claire when we get over there. I’m sick of this Hollywood shit down here in Haversen. Now they’re drummin up drama tryin to say my Lisa’s all tied up in it?”
“It shouldn’t be her, sir —” Fred said, looking worried for his boss.
But when we got back to the bus station, the shit really hit the fan. There was another body and it was Lisa. Chief Jerry was inconsolable. He left with the body, forgetting about me all together. Feeble Fred had to take the lead. He stared at the back of the coroner’s van blinking away tears. No one was untouched by this.
“Is there anyone else that can help?” I asked. Fred turned to look at me. He had obviously forgotten about my existence until I spoke. I had missed my opportunity to exit stage left. He shook his head. “Would you like my help?” I asked. I shuffled through my backpack, pulling out my mic and portable mixer. “It’s not much, but maybe it’ll help with gathering the information.”
“You ain’t exactly impartial, here,” Fred said demonstrating a bit more brain than I credited him with. “You’re a suspect.”
“I get it,” I said. “In fact, that’s why I’m offering. I figure it’s this, or I’m spending the night in that cold cell all alone. You could keep an eye on me like this.” I shrugged, hoping I could appeal to his need for documentation and company. “Anyway, I don’t think you’re completely unbiased here yourself. Did you know the victim?” With the mic and mixer charged and always ready to go, I clicked record, knowing more content is always better.
“The victim?” he turned back to look where her body had been propped in the snow. The indent her body made was starting to disappear. “You mean Lisa? Jerry’s daughter? I knew her.” His eyes grew steely and he appeared to be looking through the snow at some place deep in the earth.
“She shouldn’t have been here…”
“And the other woman should have?” I asked nodding my head in the direction of the brick building I found Emma heaped next to.
Talking about something other than Lisa seemed to jar Fred from whatever deep thoughts he had lost himself in. He shook his head and looked at my mic. “Dammit. What’s your name again?”
“Johanna.”
“Yeah. Johanna. It’s time we talk to Ben.”
The snow wasn’t letting up, and Fred was a cautious driver, which gave me the opportunity to soak in the sights as we drove. Haversen would be the perfect backdrop for my show. Everything about the place was different than I was accustomed to. All the shops on the street were closed, and not a single one was a recognizable franchise. Each establishment was its own freestanding building, with no shopping center to speak of. Mom-and-pop shops closed due to the storm, even though it was only about 7 p.m. and it was only snow. That kind of thing didn’t really fly back in New York. Here everyone was home, huddled in, doing who knows what — living slowly — as Mother Nature buried their sparsely lit streets. Our transition from commercial zone to residential was only identifiable by the sudden absence of outdoor lighting. The car continued into darkness and Fred slowed even more as the view outside the windshield started to look like we were making a leap into hyperspace.
“It’s a lot of snow,” Fred said holding tight to the steering wheel, not taking his eyes off the road before him. “Y’know, the murders always happen in the snow.”
“Wait. What?” I asked, fumbling for my microphone switching back on to record.
“I mean,” he looked quickly to the mic, nodded, and then turned back to the road, “not every single murder. There was that ruckus kicked up at Bucky’s last June after Jim had too much to drink, but that was all just simmering for years. Not that kind of stuff. The weird ones. The weird ones always happen in the snow.”
“The collection?” I asked, tilting the mic ever so slightly toward me as I did so.
“Yeah. The collection. Lisa shouldn’t have been collected.” Fred slowed the car as he pulled into a snowbank on the right.
“I -uh- can’t get out this way,” I said.
He shifted the car into park, still looking forward. “That’s fine. Ben’s coming out to us.” Then he turned toward me looking me right in the eyes. “You should stop recording now.”
I clicked the mic off and lowered it to my lap. Fred hadn’t shut the engine off, but it felt as though the cold of outside had seeped inside. He’s a police officer, I thought. I demanded my brain find safety in that, but it wasn’t working. Another internal voice — a scared one — whispered back, This is a different kind of place, Johanna. I took a deep breath and nodded as there was a knock on the back window of the car.
“Stay here,” Fred said, getting out of the car.
I didn’t have any way out. He got out and slammed the door, the snow and the door muffling the argument. It didn’t last long. The back door opened and I heard Fred shout, “Get the fuck in!”
A guy in his late twenties, early thirties scuffled into the back seat wearing an old pea coat looking cold and defeated. “Hey,” he said, curled over with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. I suspected they were gloveless.
Fred was back in the front seat, a changed man. Animated and enraged. “And, you fucking idiot,” he said looking through the rearview mirror, “just a quick glance out the window would show you to dress a little more appropriate! What the fuck happened to the puffer I got you?”
I turned and looked to find Ben looking at me, then toward the mirror before saying, “I… uh… already used it today, Fred.” That threw Fred into a rage, slamming the steering wheel as he yelled, “When you went out when you weren’t supposed to? When you went after fucking Lisa? This one was mine, Ben. It was done!” It was quiet after that. The silence seemed to stretch on for an eternity. As I sat in the car with two strange men in a different kind of place than the one I was used to, I shivered for more reasons than cold. A story unfolded in my mind — two men bored with small town living, wanting to get their home on the map — creating stories that would entice storytellers. So desperate for attention, so bored with life, they turned to death — I was in a car with two murderers, both fresh off the kill. I didn’t know my way out, but I put my hands in my pockets and clicked the record button on my mic hidden within. “Are we going back to the police station now?”
“That depends,” Fred said.
“On what?” I asked.
“On what kind of podcast you’re going to make about Haversen,” Ben said from the backseat.
“On what kind of — what?” My head swung back and forth between the two men.
“We gave you the crimes, are you ready to tell the story?” Fred asked.
“Or be a part of it?” Ben asked, shifting in the back seat. I turned in time to see him pull a gun out of his pocket and point it at me.
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