Death and Repair

By Jonathan B. Zeitlin

Michael Hart would do anything to bring her back.

Fate took her away from him, then, years later, fate pushes him to the town of Malway, a town with a secret. Michael, a retired policeman, believes he has stumbled across a crime, but soon discovers it is something far more incredible, something that could make his one wish come true. But it might come with a terrible price.

Death and Repair explores the power of love and the permanence of death. It is a re-imagination of the classic Djinn tales, part mystery, part science-fiction, part love story.

 

"This engaging debut novel from Zeitlin proves the myths and creatures of past tales still has the power to capture our imagination. What will happen? You absolutely have to pick up Zeitlin's first fictional novel to find out for yourself." Graeme McGaw, of Book Series in Order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Overkill Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393746812

Jonathan B. Zeitlin

Zeitlin is a 27 year veteran of law enforcement. He has served as a police officer, prosecutor, and for the last 17 years, as a special agent of the FBI. His career has taken him throughout the United States and all over the world. He enjoys writing books and putting perps in jail. 

Book preview

For my Mom, whose number will always be in my phone, and for my Dad, who can still take my calls.

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Copyright © 2019 Jonathan Ben Zeitlin

All rights reserved

Second Printing

CHAPTER 1

I would do anything to bring her back.

Stopped at the traffic light at the edge of campus, I imagined her sitting with me in the car, smiling despite the foul weather.

The light turned green, and as it did, the world took in a big breath, sucked up all the moisture in the air, then spit it back out in a torrent of cold rain. In seconds it became a storm of biblical proportion, and I was forced to trust the pair of brake lights in front of me as I merged onto Interstate 90, the lack of visibility making my car feel as if it were floating above the pavement.

I mindlessly followed those brake lights until I passed a sign for Springfield and realized I had missed the on-ramp for I-84. I cursed under my breath and elbowed my way into the right lane and got off the highway at my first opportunity. The off-ramp led to a three way intersection with a faded stop sign and a dilapidated service station. Visibility was so low that I decided to stop and fill up the tank, hoping the storm would dissipate.

Sheets of rain fell as I pulled into the parking lot. The years and seasons had been hard on the pavement, leaving it cracked and broken, with narrow lines of unhealthy grass outlining the cracks. It felt more like driving over gravel than pavement.

I turned off the engine, then closed my eyes and pictured her sitting in the car beside me. Even after three years without her, I still played that game. I imagined her there, wearing her gray sweater, texting Edward even though we had just left his dorm, casting a bashful smile my way. I focused on every detail, as if by doing so, by sheer force of will, I could make it real.

Eventually I must open my eyes, and every time, I slowly open them to reality; today, a seat with nothing on it but a coat and back pack.

╧

The rain assaulted the tin overhang of the pump islands and I was thankful for that noisy protection as I emerged from my car. There were two pumps, and neither had been updated to accept credit cards, forcing me to head inside first to pay. I took the three rotting steps up and onto a covered porch sagging in the middle. There was a bench to the side of the door, and seated on the bench was a woman, possibly in her forties, dressed in layers of damp and grimy fabrics. She was clutching a valise on her lap, as if waiting for a train. As I took the steps she checked her watch, then looked up at me with interest as I approached, her gaze steady.

As I reached out for the door, the woman called out it’s you! I took a closer look; I had never seen her before. Still smiling, she turned away and nodded to herself. Beneath the bench upon which she sat, I saw numerous canvas bags, an old and torn backpack, and another small, dirty satchel.

The wooden door was warped from age, and I had to slam it shut behind me. The inside of the station smelled of mushrooms and wet, old, wood, and was deathly silent. In the corner, to the left of the front door, was a small counter. The store clerk stood behind it, staring out at my car and smoking a cigarette.

That there’s a 2009, ain’t it? Yup, I can tell by the wheels.

I turned toward my car, impressed.

Yes, yes it is. Good eye.

He couldn’t have been older than twenty, with curly hair and acne scars across his face. He had the patchy half mustache wishful high school boys grew, with a few extra wisps of what might one day become a beard. The boy nodded, then smashed his cigarette into the ashtray beside the register. He still stared outside.

That’s the last year they made ‘em here. Yup, last year. Po-lice gotta find something else to drive now. Caprices, Impalas, even Tauruses. Ford really screwed the pooch if you ask me.

The boy had emphasized the o in police, an inflection I had heard before in those from the South. I nodded politely, and approached the counter with a $20.

Can I fill it up?

He finally turned to me and smiled. His teeth were stained, and I realized then that in addition to smoking a cigarette, he had a dip in between his lower lip and teeth. With his blue vest and plaid flannel shirt, he resembled an extra from a bad Western. He took my money and pressed a few buttons, then gave me the thumbs up sign.

You’re gonna get wet if you don’t pump quick. You only got eight minutes, then boom!

He emphasized the boom by smacking his hands together. I wasn’t expecting it and winced at the sound. Then he laughed with a phlegmy cackle and took another cigarette from his pack.

I filled the tank then returned for my change. The boy counted out a few dollars, looked at his watch, then back out of the dirty glass of the station.

Then, with his hands on his hips, he announced yep. ‘Bout two more minutes now. Hey, don’t forget to say hi to Wanda! It’s important.

When I passed through the rotting door I found the bench empty. I looked down the street in each direction but she was nowhere to be found. I walked briskly to my car, shivering from the huge raindrops sneaking under my collar. Just as I reached it the bottom fell out of the sky again, the rain drops worming their way through my clothing. I jumped into my car, noticing as I slammed the door shut that the boy behind the register was watching me through the dirty glass, nodding his head.

I shivered as I started the car, then rumbled slowly over the cracked pavement to the intersection. I stopped at the exit to check for traffic, and just as I started rolling, there was a terrible cracking sound and an explosion of light. I slammed on the brakes and stopped, blocking the road from all directions.

My car trembled from the impact of something very large hitting the earth with a sodden thud. The rain had begun pouring in sheets so thick I could see nothing past the hood of the car. I crept forward, head craning toward the windshield in an effort to see the way ahead. Lucky for me I was driving so slowly, because I had enough time to stop when I found the source of the crash. A very large tree had fallen across the road, blocking my return to the highway. I turned hard to the left, then rolled down my passenger window just enough to get a better view. The rich scent of ozone was thick, overpowering, the air still buzzing from the lightning strike. The tree had fallen upon the sign I had noticed earlier announcing the Brimfield State Forest, and it lay beneath the tree like a mangled accident victim.

Now there was no going back.

I finished my turn and again faced the service station, nothing more than a gloomy apparition floating behind a wall of rain. The way to the highway blocked, I had two options: left or right. Each option snaked into a wet darkness. I hesitated, then turned right, following my gut. I navigated around limbs and foliage littering the street, my tires skittering from scores of wet leaves glued to the pavement. I passed another sign for the Brimfield State Forest. The rain slowed for the next several miles as I drove under a multi-colored canopy of fall foliage, the leaves steadily tumbling down like a ticker tape parade. Eventually, I passed another weathered street sign, this one announcing that I was on Prospero Avenue.

The Town of Malway appeared by surprise around a deadly curve on Prospero. The new map of Massachusetts that I bought when Eddie left for college didn’t even have a dot for it. I pulled off the road for a moment, my foot on the brake. I opened my window and wiped my side mirror with my hand and looked behind me into the fading afternoon, then forward again to the road as it curved out of sight. I wondered briefly whether I should have gone to the left instead, then sighed, having reached that point in a poorly planned trip when turning around was no better than moving forward.  

I accelerated into the encroaching darkness. I pictured the strange kid behind the counter of the service station smacking his hands and yelling ‘boom!’ almost as if he predicted the lightning strike. As if he had the power to see the future. If only I had that power. Things might have been so different.

I felt very alone on that road. Well, to be honest with myself, I felt very alone everywhere. Eva had been dead three years. Eddie was at his dormitory. Our house was now nothing more than a dusty snapshot of what was once our life.

I passed a small, metal, copper colored sign. Stamped upon it, in simple letters, were the words MALWAY, EST. 1886. The second line contained only the partial word POPULATIO with no number following, just blank space, and I imagined the man responsible for the sign dropping his stamping tools and running from the spot. Beneath this word was more blank space, where in other towns one might read that they were standing on the site of a terrible and bloody battle.

Prospero Avenue led me through groves of stately but sodden red maple, their distinctive leaves flashes of color over trunks blackened by the rain. I then entered Malway proper, and rolled into a traffic circle. The center of the circle contained a monument of magnificent proportion. In the failing light I could at first see only the outline of a horse, slightly larger than life-size, standing at rest in a field of overgrown bushes. Looking up from its flanks, the horse bore a rider wearing a three edged cap and gazing west toward the horizon where a sunset was hiding behind black clouds. The monument looked to be made of bronze, with a weathered, greenish patina. I craned my neck toward my windshield to get a better view as I passed under his shadow.

A moment later, raindrops started to smack my windshield again like tiny clear insects on a country road. The drops expanded into the size of eyeballs, pelting my ratty Crown Vic in a furious torrent. The wet became a wan, milky fabric that pressed against my car. The street lights were too weak to do anything but add a pinkish glow to that fabric, and were spaced too far apart along the street to provide anything more than intervals of a lighter shade of gray on that bleak canvas.

My headlights illuminated the downpour in two spectral tunnels, and I floated along until I saw what I hoped was a series of empty parking spaces. Beyond the reach of my headlights, maybe twenty feet ahead, was the outline of several windows lit from within by yellow incandescent light. The rain tricked my eyes into seeing them wobbling and floating in mid-air like will o’ the wisps luring travelers to their doom.   

An aimless drive ended in an aimless stasis as I watched the rain falling in long sheets. The minutes passed, and eventually the downpour settled into a driving rain. With the improved visibility, I could see before me an ivy covered three story building with gabled eaves. Beside the door was an oval shaped sign, marked simply with the word INN. There was an old, rusted mailbox to the side of the door, a hulking, steel anachronism of curves and angles. In the police academy we used them to teach rookies the difference between cover and concealment. They were one of several ubiquitous objects from a dying generation, like pay phones and eight tracks. Like me, I thought to myself. I reached for my notebook, careful not to let the items shoved between the pages fall out.

When I shut off my car, the windshield quickly became opaque, foggy, reminding me of some of my wet midnight shifts spent sitting in my patrol car, waiting for sunrise, the world invisible beyond the glass of my Ford. But of course that was all history. Like Eva, like Eddie’s childhood, I had to shed everything in my life that was mine like the discarded shell of a hermit crab. Every time I thought of her, my mind only conjured up that day, the gurney, her face bloody, intubated, the state trooper trying to pull me back, away from her.

Some days I felt closer to her than others. Some days I felt like she could be in the next room, and that I would walk in and find her on the couch, reading a magazine, the sun’s rays streaming through the windows and illuminating her, casting a golden glow around her as if she was more than the product of a wishful imagination, as if God himself had considered the matter and decided to return her to me.

I closed my eyes for a moment, imagining her sitting beside me in the car. She hated my car; she wanted me to buy something nicer, something newer, something less like the cop cars I had driven so many years. But I had known them for so long, was so familiar with every inch, they had become a part of me. Just like her. I felt her presence like an amputee felt his missing limb.

I looked ahead, seeing the moisture from my breath condensed on my side of the windshield, as if the rain had finally figured out some devious way of absorbing into and through the glass.

Fate had seized control of my life that day, pushing me forward like an angry river rushing toward the ocean. I cursed under my breath as I realized that in this part of Massachusetts, in this weather, I could spend all night driving aimlessly and never find my way back to the highway. I was stuck for the night.

I grabbed the door handle, then took that long pause most people take before stepping into a downpour. I clutched my bag and my notebook inside my coat and made a run for it, but I was drenched before I reached the overhang of the inn.

I approached the mailbox and inspected it to make sure it was still serviced by the local post office. Some had become forgotten receptacles, slowly rusting, collecting nothing but trash from passersby. This one, however, still had a recently affixed pickup schedule, and the postal blue paint, though faded, was still visible. I placed the letter inside and let go, trying to listen for it to hit the bottom. The sound was drowned by the steady beat of the pounding rain.

With every letter I wrote to her, I got a brief rush, a fool’s hope, one that twinkled briefly before being extinguished by reality. It was just like when I dialed the numbers of her telephone, listening to it ring, imagining her walking across the hall to pick it up.

But while the letters I placed in the mailbox gave me hope, the letters I received destroyed it. Medical bills continued to come even after so much time had passed; bills from the ambulances, the emergency room, the hospital, the insurance company, all very efficient and very formal.

Beyond the mailbox, beside the door to the inn, was a tall bush quivering. A dozen sparrows burst forth at my arrival, twittering furiously as they beat their little wings past my head.

The lobby was small and low, almost cave-like, and built at odd angles in contravention of modern design standards. Despite its cozy look and warm incandescent light, the space was drafty and unpleasantly cold when I arrived and for a moment I stood, dripping, just inside the doorway. A stone hearth sat against one wall, blackened and empty. There was a musty smell, and faded, sad, floral printed wallpaper adorned the walls, a color scheme in stark contrast to the dark floors. Beneath the musty smell was a vague and unpleasant odor, perhaps formaldehyde, conjuring forth memories of high school science classes, or one of my visits to the coroner.

No television, no music; this was no Marriott. Along the entry wall was a series of sepia toned photographs mounted in large ornate frames of dark wood portraying what I assumed was Malway in more fortunate times, many decades ago. Hung throughout the lobby were framed oil paintings in scratched gilt frames. One caught my eye, depicting a child rocking in a tree swing, smiling parents nearby. The canvas was covered in a layer of dust. I walked down the hall toward the front desk but froze when I looked past the dusty paintings.

Hanging in between and slightly above all the art were various specimens of macabre taxidermy; owls in various poses, each glued or nailed to its wooden perch, bizarre guardians that appeared to be watching me as I moved. I gradually turned in a circle, pausing as I turned to the front door, over which was perched another owl, reminding me of a Gothic gargoyle in its posture, as if ready to spring forth and attack. Its unblinking eyes made me so uncomfortable that I almost jumped for cover and drew my weapon when I heard a woman’s voice.

Check-in is 3:00. We don’t normally take guests at this hour.

I turned in time to see a woman emerge from a door beside the front desk. She looked to be around my age, in her early to mid-sixties; her unkempt gray hair suggested she had not been awake when I entered. She came to a stop just outside the doorway, watching me with glassy, red-lidded blue eyes framed within a face that had too long frowned upon the world, her skin hanging like a sheet draped over old furniture. The pattern of her shirt accentuated her weight, as did her long, pleated skirt. I looked down at my watch, then back at her, initially more surprised than insulted.

It’s barely 6:00. Is it really too late for a room?

She sighed and muttered, as if speaking to someone else, Well, do we have any vacancies? I suppose we can check, can’t we?

She shuffled behind the desk and reached for a large, leather bound guest register. As I approached her, still distracted by the dead birds glowering at me as I passed, she thumbed through the register, studiously focused on the pages. She went through the motions of checking me in as I split my attention between her and the peculiar decor. Beside her, on the desk, was another owl, this one standing tall, its wings spread as if trying to escape the wooden stand and metal stake that was propping it up. As I stared at it, the woman behind the counter snapped the register shut and turned her back to me. Behind her was a tall series of cubbies that each held a key and, when needed, I suppose they held messages for guests. She seemed to be inspecting them as if trying to find an available room. She took one from its resting place, then, while still facing away from me, said It’s a Great Horned Owl.

She turned her head to glance at me quickly, searchingly, and when I didn’t respond, she placed the key on the desk, closer to her, as if she hadn’t yet decided whether to let me have it.

Room twelve is at the top of the stairs, last door on the right. Breakfast is at 8. She paused, then looked down and muttered, This is a quiet inn.

There was an uncomfortable pause, then she took the key and held it out to me in an upturned palm, like the Queen from the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, disguised as a hag and holding out the apple. When I took the key, she stepped back and grabbed the table behind her, her eyes widening into a wild, desperate expression, the whites exposed all around. She shuffled along the table, turned, then scurried away, backwards, disappearing into the bowels of the inn and leaving me in the lobby holding the key.

The stairs creaked under my feet as I went looking for room twelve. The doors along the hallway were all closed; solid core, heavy, stained dark with a shiny polish. The doorknobs appeared to be cut crystal.

Room twelve was small but serviceable; a pleasant surprise after my observations on the floor below. The room had two large windows facing the back of the property, made from wavy, leaded glass, clouded from age. It was too dark to see outside. The radiator in the corner choked and clattered but dispensed only the slightest hint of warmth. The only modern refinements were a green shaded incandescent desk lamp and a rotary dial telephone, the latter something I had not seen in many years. It was flesh colored, a ruddy peach that was so popular for telephones fifty years ago.

Eva would have loved the inn. She would have called it quaint, and, after meeting the strange innkeeper, she would have taken a deep breath, fixed me with a Cheshire cat smile, and dismiss her as merely quirky.

After a moment of restless pacing, I sat down with my notebook, stared at its mottled black and white cover. Its thickness had shrunk by half since the time I bought it. I opened it to a fresh page, and released my pen with a click.

Dearest Eva...

I considered the empty page, and as always, my mind drifted back to the familiar terrain of the past.

I could still recall the astringent smell and unadorned taupe colored walls, just like the county jail, as if the county sanctioned the color for all county buildings. The overpowering of that smell by my handcuffed prisoner, reeking of drink, urine, and the universal odor of the unwashed. Then she emerged from the nurse’s station, a vision in white, eyes green, hair brown, pulled back into a ponytail, strictly business, a face that rouge or powder could not have made more perfect. The county had assigned an officer to guard the ER nurses; that night it was a younger, somewhat doughy rookie. We both stared at her as if experiencing a holy vision of Mary herself, slack jawed and slump shouldered.

While we stared at her, my drunk stared at us, recognized the opportunity, and took advantage of it. He yanked out of my grasp and lurched toward the exit, which was blocked by the nurse. I launched after him. The rookie watched it happen, paralyzed by surprise, I suppose. He remained glued to the wall while I knocked the drunk to the linoleum floor. We ended up in a pile, the drunk and me, and her, breathing in a layered aroma of urine, metabolized alcohol, and antiseptic. As I regained control of my prisoner, she crawled away, stood, and brushed off her white lab coat. She smiled at me as I struggled with my drunk. I think it was at that moment I fell in love with her.

I owed that drunk a drink. He changed my life.

Back then, as a young patrolman on the midnight shift, dating was complicated. When I wasn’t arresting drunks and chasing criminals,