Chapter Twenty-Three: Through Hell

Song Selection: Orpheus—Shawn James

Avery drives home for Monet's phone; it would have her blog drafts, evidence, something he'd read a while ago but couldn't all the way remember. Damning, he remembers, still. He flings the door open and finds it ripped apart, his library books scattered on the floor, the shelves ripped out and crushed on the ground. His arm-chair is flipped, his mattress tossed off his bed and his drawers wrenched out of his bureau. All his clothes lay on the floor, all of his possessions rooted through. His stomach clenches up so tightly he fights back nausea.

Monet's room. Her phone. The books she keeps in a shoebox. Her laptop.

He races in and he finds the room neat. The typewriter in the middle of her white desk, untouched. Her prized possession. Her bed made, the floor clear and swept. But he reaches under her bed, where she keeps her laptop. It's gone. The shoebox, gone. He sniffs faint musk and spice; male cologne.

His heart pounds. He'd seen her when she thought he'd fallen asleep, her with a leather-bound journal that brought fear to her eyes. At the time, he ignored it. But it itched now. The journal was gone, the laptop, all of her notebooks.

He turns back to the typewriter, noticing paper in it he hadn't seen in his first desperate glance of his dying daughter's room. Three words in inky courier font.

FINALLY YOU LOSE

He wrenches the paper out of Monet's beloved typewriter, the very one that had been passed down from his father. Rage runs through his arteries like burning circuitry at the perversion.

Finally you lose. The police would call it a coincidence. Avery hates himself, hates how cynical he's become. How easily he tosses out his faith in the systems he'd been a part of. But he doesn't trust the police, he can't. Is the commissioner in the mayor's pocket? It's outlandish, but he can't know. He can't know who's a part of the plot to get rid of his daughter. He's alone.

So he doesn't call the police. He hops into his clunker of a car and drives straight to Anna Jaimson's house.

***

Carson Jaimson is the kind of man who has to compensate for his wife being able to crush his bones to dust. And he compensates by building all of their furniture with "wood he harvested himself." Every chair, every desk, every table, every sofa is made out of trees Carson himself chopped down on his father's Georgian farm with the very axe hanging over the mantle, Carson eagerly supplies to a stiff Avery Jackson sitting on an equally stiff couch.

Avery stares at the framed Metallica records and antlers tacked to the wood paneled walls, and tries not to assume he knows everything about Mr. Jaimson. The wounded masculine.

They'd never spoken, not really. Carson would usually be in his home office, lavishing on the phone about all natural chemical cleaner to people just tired enough to be easily coaxed into opening their wallets, and his wife would find her favorite lawn chair to sink into on the patio, far away from him.

There, Avery pretended to work. And it was work at first. She was guarded, as any good superhero should be. He had to lean in, let her get to know that he was trustworthy. They talked about bands and what it was like to raise a teenage girl. He had a small apartment, constant work, and no spouse to help. She was a remote stock-broker with a far-too attentive husband and a big home located on almost of acre of woodland, but the nuts and bolts of it was all the same. Worry and pride. At first, he was just doing his job; he had a tell-all memoir to write.

And then they started drinking lemonade and feeding the squirrels apple chunks from their hands, and it wasn't work anymore. Avery had a friend.

Avery should be at the hospital, but they won't let him see his daughter, and the kids had gone missing. But that was all a haze to him, everything whipped up and spinning, spinning. He's thinking about shotgun slugs and obliterated organs and his daughter, when she was desperately going on and on about the mayor being "in on" Masquerade's presence in his boss's office.

Masquerade, the mayor's smiley, well-mannered son.

Monet had broken the laws. She shouldn't know what she had. And Avery's heart slams in his chest while he waits in Carson's Dead Tree and Dead Animal emporium that functions as the Jaimson's living room. "When do you think she's getting back?" Avery asks, but Carson isn't listening. The little man's taken the axe down from over the mantle, spinning it.

"Monet Jackson this." Carson shakes his head. "Avery Jackson that. When all the women in the house are obsessed with another family?" He sighs. "I suppose you wouldn't understand. Pardon me, but I never understood their enchantment. I guess women will always go for you newspaper folk, the ones with the words, bees to honey."

Avery blinks. The only words he'd offered to Anna Jaimson were observations about how squirrels were just bushy-tailed tree hamsters, if you really think about it. And he'd honestly like to pretend he hadn't said any of that, at all. "I'm sure. Tell me more about the Georgian farm, the couch is...lovely."

Slugs. Monet knowing more than she should have. The mayor. The law is a burden, something he needs trampled, and quickly. But Avery, like Carson, is only a man.

The door flies open, and Anna Jaimsom tracks mud and rain-water into the living room. Her suit is soaked, the Lycra material clinging to every contour of her petite frame, red hair slicked against her back, long and loose. She tosses the mask onto the couch, drawing a squeal from her husband. "Another fire...Oh!" She crinkles her brow, eyes all big when she sees Avery. "Why are you here?"

"I need your help."

Carson clears his throat. "I thought you were just helping her with her memoir."

"It's about what we talked about in the chapel." 'Talked about' would be putting it generously. As soon as the words had left him he couldn't hold it together. The thought of that man, hurting his daughter. He had always told Monet that words were powerful, and to be careful of what you spoke into truth.

Saying it broke him, and he was safe, alone in the chapel with Anna Jaimson. So he sobbed and she cooed, rubbing his back until her earpiece buzzed and she left him alone with the oak pews, God, and the calls he had no choice but to make.

Her mouth forms a silent 'o,' until she decides what expression to make. She settles on a frown. "Avery, we don't know...."

That's what he would've said to Monet after Monet had found evidence of the mayor's wrongdoing. We don't know, we need to go about things the right way, lawfully. We need more proof. And Monet's dying.

"That's why I need you."

Carson clears his throat again. "This really doesn't sound like book stuff."

Anna Jaimson shakes her head. "Avery, that's your grief talking. I know you think you're doing the right thing, but we don't know that the mayor did anything wrong."

"Who paid for your powers to be drained?" His voice begins to tremble. "Who would be powerful enough to buy the destruction of all the superheroes in Silver Dollar?"

She swallows tightly. "We don't know. I know you don't trust the mayor, but you can't just accuse him--"

"If I don't, who will? My daughter said she had evidence that he was a part of the racket. I went through her unpublished blog posts." He can feel his blood pounding against his skull. He's talking to a wall, and Carson's looking at him like he's a rabid animal Carson somehow let in. "He had a motive to kill her. Shotgun shells in her back? Aimed directly in the spinal column? A policeman wouldn't miss Masquerade and hit her and keep firing. Masquerade has never carried a gun. Only one person has the motives and the means, and he has the power to cover it up. You have to help me!"

She shakes her head.

"You're a superhero. You're supposed to stand for justice." Tears sting the edges of his eyes. "Wouldn't you do the same for your daughter?"

"Let's talk." Anna puts her hand on his back, guiding him up the stairs. He can feel the minutes as they slide out of his hands, his phone burning a hole in his pocket against his leg. Any moment, he could get a call. Any moment, they could tell him that his little girl is gone, for good. His breath is spiraling away from him, faster and faster.

She guides him into her husband's office and slams the door shut behind her. It's all awful decor, just a plain desk out of more Georgian trees. Tapestries of wolves howling against a purple sky hang on the walls. It smells of disinfectant and stale incense. "Avery, listen to me, you're not thinking straight. You need to calm down. Would you like me to drive you back to the hospital? I'll stay with you if you need a friend right now."

He shakes his head. "I don't need that. If I break into the mayor's house, I'm going to get killed by the same thing that tried to kill my daughter. But you're the strongest superhero in the city, you can do everything that I can't."

She blinks, her eyes big and sad. "I can't break the law. It was all a horrible accident, Avery. For your own sake, you need to look at what happened like that."

"What happened?" Avery's voice trembles. Carson, glorified telemarketer that he is, has a landline phone, a sleek red thing that glimmers in his peripherals. The phone rings, and neither of him or the hero turn to look at it. "What happened is that the mayor shot my daughter--your daughter's girlfriend."

"No." She holds her hands up in the air, her tone changing to the one he's occasionally heard her use on Percy when the teenage girl forgot to make her bed or finish some other chore. "What happened is that the police misfired when they aimed at Masquerade. Avery, please."

The phone rings. It rings again. Neither of them look at it.

Avery presses his head into his hands. Maybe Anna's right. Maybe he's seeing things. But he'd taught his daughter his passion: a passion for truth-finding. Sure, every father only wants to imagine the best in their children, but he can't imagine Monet lying about the mayor playing a part in the heroes' disappearance. And she was a terrible liar, anyway. It made too much sense, the horrible picture he'd pieced together. To scrub it away so he could sleep peacefully was not the nature of a journalist, and Avery couldn't do it.

His blood burns white hot in his veins. He can't let the truth die with her. Mayor Preston fucked with the wrong family. "If I die." He shrugs, forcing a smile that doesn't make it to his eyes. "You'll know why."

He turns toward the door to escape those wide, desperate eyes. He can feel them searing into the back of his neck. He can feel her pity like it's a palpable thing , can almost hear the 'poor delusional thing' that must be going through her head. She thinks he's been driven crazy with grief, she thinks...

The voicemail plays off the ancient phone. It's Percy's voice, but he's never heard it like this. Low and cool and empty of emotion, except for the tremor on the ends of her words, a tremor that can only betray fear. "Hey mom, they got me. It's not right! Don't come! Mmph—"

"Percy? Percy!" Anna yanks the reciever off the hook, and dutiful reporter, Avery picks up his phone and opens the voice recorder app our of reflexs. "Put it on speaker," he mouths, and the room is filled with a terrible voice. Someone has Anna's daughter. The superhero cringes against him, the fear too raw, too human in the eyes of the godlike figure in front of him.

"There appears to be some loose ends the man whom I work for—I'm sure you know the one—wants tied up. He could've sent someone to kill the man, but then you'd get suspicious. So why bother?"

Anna opens her mouth to speak, and Avery grabs her arm. He points to his phone. They need to gather as much evidence as they can. She nods weakly.

"So if you want to see your daughter again, I best see you tonight at two. Bring Avery Jackson, and don't tell me you don't know him. Your colleague. And we want him alive, preferably. Let's see what he knows."

All the air squeezes out of Avery's lungs. He wants to scream. He wants to cuss the everloving hell out of the person threatening a kid. Another kid who's become a part of his family, too.  But he can't say anything. That would be foolish and he knows it. And it hurts, being helpless to the chuckling voice.

"Do you understand?" the woman on the other end asks, her voice throaty and soft.

"Yes." Anna uses her superhero voice. The one that doesn't sound like a person's really, far too big and booming. Like the clouds opened up and there's the peaks of Mount Olympus, and her, the hero, sounding off from the heavens. "Let me hear my daughter."

There's a rattle, a jostling of hands on the other end.

"Mom, you can't! They're going to kill him like they tried to kill Monet!"

"I love you," Anna says, and the line goes dead, just the angry hiss of dial-up. Avery stares at her, his cell-phone still recording in his hand. She could easily rip it from his hands and shatter it. She could easily knock him out and bind him. And at night, she and the kidnapper could easily throw him struggling into the sea. She has every reason to let him die; it's her daughter at sake.

But Anna grabs his hand. "What is it you wanted me to do?"

Avery takes a deep breath and turns the recording app off.