VALERIA ARRIVED ABOUT a quarter after noon. Her eyes looked puffy, and she walked with dog-tired sluggishness; her starched business suit seemed to be the only thing holding her up. Ruby busied herself in the kitchen preparing fried chicken and mashed potatoes. I told Valerie about my meeting with Vernon, Mark, and Bill Robertson.
"You don't believe anything will change?" she asked.
"Did you see the paper this morning? No, apparently nothing I said sank in." I lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke away from her. "I don't know why they even bothered."
She thought a moment. "Maybe they sized you up to see what kind of threat you might be."
"That's right, I'm from out of state and don't have any contacts here." I sighed at the track my mind took. "I hate thinking about him and his campaign."
"Good," she agreed. "Don't let him get into your life. He dictates too many peoples' lives as it is."
"Val, you look tired. You okay?"
"Just not sleeping well." A faint smile flickered on her lips as if she were apologizing for her appearance. "I have too many things-"
"Lunch is ready," Ruby yelled from the kitchen. She fanned the scent of the crispy chicken, buttery potatoes, and biscuits smothered in gravy toward us with her apron. "It's getting cold."
We converged on the table like vultures on road kill; Ruby talked of planting her flower garden and of the neighbors' gossip. I didn't think to ask Valerie again about what was keeping her up at night.
The phone rang, and Ruby got up to answer it. "Derek," she called from the den, "it's for you."
The thought of Daniel rushed me toward the phone. "Hello?"
"Is this Derek Mason?" a scratchy male voice asked.
"Yes. Who is this?"
"Never mind who I am. I have a piece of advice for you: Get the fuck out of town. We don't want fags here."
Recovering from the shock, I replied, "Go to hell, you mother-fucking redneck."
He laughed, and I slammed down the phone. Who knows I'm here? My name was in the newspaper, but people couldn't find me from that. Only one thought came to mind: family. My relatives knew where I was. I walked back to the dining room trying to decide who would do such a thing.
"What's wrong?" Valerie asked.
I didn't want to upset her or Ruby. "Nothing, just a wrong number."
"But they asked for you." Ruby piled more mashed potatoes on my plate. "I thought it was your young man."
Valerie brightened. "You went to dinner with him after all? What was his name?"
"Daniel, and yes, I went to dinner."
Ruby grinned, and I knew she intended to tell Valerie about my all-night date if I didn't.
I rolled my eyes at Ruby, and turned to Valerie. "Yes we had dinner, and I ended up staying the night. I came in this morning."
"Well, well," Valerie shook her head and smiled, "you have Tim's knack for making friends."
The women let it drop at that, and I gladly changed the subject to Valerie's job at the accounting firm. I didn't want to think about Daniel while I still had the sound of the caller's voice in my head. The good part of Charlotte had just been eclipsed by its dark side. Every city housed bigots and small minds, no matter how much money and culture the corporations pushed in. I wondered if a caller like that could be capable of violence.
The scene before me, of Valerie and Ruby laughing and talking, disintegrated as my imagination saw white-hooded figures spin their pickup truck to a stop in the front yard and rush the door. After kicking it in, they pushed Ruby and Valerie to the side, and wrestled me to the floor, their putrid whiskey breath in my face, fat round hands tying my arms and legs, carrying me to the oak. I could feel the rough rope tighten around my neck, the knot to one side to ensure strangulation, then the tug as they pulled the rope down over a branch, bringing me up to my toes. A quick strong yank lifted me off the ground and my feet kicked as I fought to get free.
"Derek, what's wrong?" Valerie brought me back.
"Good Lord, boy, you're sweating." Ruby felt my forehead. 'Cold and clammy; you need to lie down."
Valerie and Ruby guided me out of the chair and toward the bedroom. "I'm okay. I just…"
"Lord, I hope it wasn't the chicken." Ruby looked to Valerie. "Do you feel all right?"
"Yes, Aunt Ruby," she replied, "I'm fine. The chicken was wonderful. Derek should feel better after he gets some rest."
The voices started to run together as they reached my ears. The last thing I heard before blacking out was Ruby saying, "No wonder, out all night with some boy I don't even know; I should have been properly introduced before…"
THE SUN'S RAYS stretched long and warm across the room as I woke. I ran my fingers through my hair and joined Ruby in the den.
"Feel better?" she asked.
"Much. I guess I needed some rest."
She smiled and said, "Your young man called."
A chill sliced through my stomach; had it been the scratch-voiced man? "What did he say?"
"He said he would love to meet me. I told him I wanted you to stay, and he agreed it would be nice."
"Did he leave his name?"
"Derek!" she scolded. "I can't believe you spent the night with someone and don't know his name."
"I know his name; it's Daniel Kaperonis."
"Yes, that's it. Guess he's a Greek boy."
The tension melted away. "Did he leave a message?"
She grinned. "He said he had to work tonight, but to give him a call. He left this number." Ruby handed me a grocery receipt with his name and number written on the back.
I dialed the number.
"Daniel Kaperonis," he answered.
Warmth surrounded me with the sound of his voice. "Hello, Daniel. This is Derek."
"Sleeping Beauty wakes," he kidded. "Ruby said you were sleeping after, how did she put it? Oh, yeah, after 'tomcatting around all night.'"
"That's me, the tomcat." I winked at Ruby.
"I'm at the newspaper office; I have a deadline at midnight. You mentioned something about checking out the morgue?"
"The what?" Did I hear him right?
"The morgue, the back issue files. I thought maybe you could bring in dinner for us, and after a romantic desk meal, I'd show you how to look up old articles."
"That would be great." I looked at Ruby and put my hand over the receiver. "Have you started dinner yet?"
"Again?" she asked. "You eat out more than a cockroach in a
Chinese restaurant."
"Daniel is working late and wanted me to get take-out and join him for dinner." I could hear the excitement in my own voice, so I knew she wouldn't object.
She pushed herself out of her chair and took the phone from my hand. "Daniel, do you like home cooking? Well, I have a roast in the crock-pot; I'll send some over with Derek. You boys need to eat right and get more rest. Okay, bye."
She handed the phone back to me and went into the kitchen to check the roast.
"Daniel?" I asked to see if he was still on the line.
"Sounds like we'll have a good meal," he said. "I'll just have to keep the other guys in the office away from it."
"What time?"
"How about an hour? You know the Observer building? Have the night watchman call me when you get here."
"Sounds great." I almost jumped out of the chair with anticipation thinking about seeing him again. "Can I bring anything else?"
"Maybe your toothbrush, if you want to go home with me when I finish up."
A tinge of guilt cut through my gut as I looked at Ruby digging out containers for our dinner. "That would be great, but I need to spend the night here with Ruby."
"I understand."
"Tell him he can come over here if he wants; I still haven't met him," Ruby yelled from the kitchen.
"Are you listening to my conversation?" I asked.
"Of course," she said.
"Daniel, I'll see you in about an hour."
"I'm looking forward to it." His voice soothed me like warm milk.
Ruby cut a couple of pieces of carrot cake and wrapped them in waxed paper. "Don't worry about me, I'll call Valerie for dinner. Us two old maids can sit here and watch television."
"Yeah, the two of you will put on your dancing shoes and be out bar-hopping before I make it out the driveway," I kidded.
"That's an idea," she said and batted her eyes. "Maybe I can make some money like those girls in the strip clubs." She shook her chest and waved her arms, stirring spoon in hand.
DANIEL CAME DOWN to meet me at the front desk after the guard called to tell him I was there. I had an uncontrollable urge to kiss him in the elevator. His lips tasted of coffee, his face rough from beard stubble.
"Glad you could make it," he smiled, flashing dimples. "I thought about you all day."
The rude caller came back to mind as I reviewed my day without him. "I'm so glad to see you. I had a strange call around lunch time; it unnerved me a little." The elevator doors opened to a large room of gray office cubicles with ringing phones and clicking computer keyboards.
"Who called?" he asked, and led me down a narrow hallway to his cubicle.
I sat in the side chair. "Some asshole. He just said the usual stuff gay-bashers say behind the safety of an anonymous phone call." I placed the containers of food on his desk. “What gets me," I considered if I should reveal my suspicions. "I know my name has been in the paper and that opens me up to a lot of crazy people, but only family knows I'm staying with Ruby. How could a stranger get that number?"
He voiced what I hadn't. "Maybe it wasn't a stranger."
My mind whirled through the suspects. Gladys the Bitch came first, but could she pull off a good imitation of a male voice? Vernon? Why would he bother? Maybe someone on his campaign?
"Does Ruby have Caller ID on her phone?" he asked as he poured sweet tea from a jug Ruby had provided.
I took a sip. "No. Hey, she only got a push-button phone because her dial one broke last year."
"Hopefully he won't call back. If he does, press *69 to get the number of the last caller, then report it to the police."
"Good idea." I sat back and watched as Daniel ate roast, potatoes, and carrots. His eyes sparkled as he talked. How he pulled it off, I don't know, but he looked incredibly sexy under the fluorescent lights of the newspaper office.
We finished our desktop picnic, and Daniel took me down to the basement. "An appropriate place for the morgue," he commented. Elevator doors opened to a brightly lit floor with high shelves of boxed microfiche. The only differences between this floor and Daniel's office floor were that the shelves replaced the cubes and there were no windows. Or people. In a corner, several old computer terminals lined the walls. Our footsteps broke the silence.
"This is the morgue," Daniel announced.
"Smells like it," I quipped.
He motioned to the computer terminals. "Those CRTs are connected to the AS/400 that houses information on each back issue."
"Doesn't the public library have the same system?" I asked.
"Close, but we have a better index. You can search not only on dates, but also on names or keywords. Do you know Boolean structured queries?"
I smiled. "You're talking my language now. I've programmed computers in VB, COBOL, Java, C++, even in PASCAL; I can handle a simple query."
"The computer will return a code that corresponds to the shelf and bin where the microfiche is. The viewers are behind those shelves." He pointed to the far end of the room.
"Easy, easy stuff," I laughed. "No problem."
"Go to it, computer boy." Daniel patted my butt. "Come back up when you're done." He turned and disappeared into the elevator.
Silence amplified my breathing to a gusty breeze. I settled next to one of the old 5250 CRTs just like the ones I'd used on my first job out of school. What was the date Walterene wrote that entry? Of course, I forgot to check, rushing out of the house to get here. I searched for the name "Sams" and found nothing. Broadening the search to include anything with the letters SAMS didn't help-over sixty thousand entries returned. To get as specific as possible, I played with different combinations of queries: with a date range, the letters for SAMS, and keywords "obituaries" or "death" or "murder" or "suicide," I ended up with thirty hits. I printed out the list and headed for the shelves to gather the microfiche.
Once I found the first two, the codes made more sense to me. The first character in the code told me which area to search, the second character which aisle, the third, shelf unit, and so on until I located the box where the fiche was supposedly in chronological order. Since I'd have to return these to their proper position, I decided to view three, then return them and get the next three until I discovered… Well, I'll know it when I see it.
In the far corner away from the elevator, the microfiche machines sat in the shadows. Several light bulbs had been loosened in the ceiling's fluorescent lighting fixtures, allowing the machine users to better see the black and white images displayed on the screen. Loading the second issue into the machine and finding the correct page, I found only another dead-end. This is going to be a long night.
A door slammed somewhere on the basement floor. I whirled through the filmed pages, found my destination, and then stopped to read. The silence of the air around me wormed its way into my mind. Where's the person who just came in the door? No footsteps. No keyboard clicking. No shuffling through boxes. I turned to look toward the elevator and staircase, but all I could see was a forest of shelves. Maybe they'd turned and gone right back up the stairs. I dismissed it.
My third microfiche brought up nothing. I gathered the other two up and re-tracked back to their proper locations. I decided to pull ten of the issues to cut down on time spent roaming the maze of shelving. As I pulled down a box from the top of a corner shelf, a shadow moved in my peripheral vision, but when I turned to look I sawnothing. You're paranoid, I thought, moving on to the next fiche code on my list.
I couldn't hold the five microfiche rolls in hand and needed to drop them off at the reader station. Turning left, I hit a wall of shelving; to my right, I followed the path I thought I had taken, but again I came to a dead-end. "This is stupid," I said aloud, disgusted with myself. "How can a grown man get lost in a basement?" I decided to look at the labels on the shelves, to follow them back in the right direction.
"Damn it." I kicked a shelf. The index card labels on each unit didn't follow a logical order. 5SG came before 2WR, which was not right, and not how it had been five minutes before. "Okay, Daniel," I yelled, "the joke's over." Silence.
"I see you switched some of the tags." No response.
"I admit it; this isn't as simple as I thought." I heard my voice shake. I put the rolls of film down, and climbed one of the shelves to look over the top. Just as my foot left the floor, the lights went out. blackness surrounded me. I could feel the cold metal of the shelf next to my cheek, but I couldn't see it.
The scratchy voice sounded as if he stood three feet away. "Die, faggot."