POLARITY Sneak Peek
SURPRISE! Read part of the Novella we're about to UNLOCK!
SNEAK PREVIEW of POLARITY!
We are so CLOSE to unlocking ‘Polarity’, a supernatural noir-novella featuring Private Investigator Dana Reeves, as the next STRETCH GOAL of the Campaign.
Read the FIRST Chapter BELOW, and BACK the Campaign if you haven’t already! Pledges $100 and above get the novella as a part of their reward, and it’s also available as an ADD-ON after pledging! (Those who have already pledged can UPGRADE too!)
Without further ado… meet Dana Reeves.
August 6th, 1991
She’d been in a lot of interrogation rooms before. The South Lake Minnetonka police had one of the nicer ones.
“You enjoy catching people with their pants down, Miss Reeves?”
Dana Reeves glanced down at the black-and-white photos laid out on the aluminum table in the nicest interview room she’d been in yet. Pictures she’d taken only the day before.
“You know…” she said, “comes with the territory.”
Sheriff Hank Ellis sighed. “That it does. Just tends to cause a whole heap of mess for hardworking policemen like myself.”
“I sympathize. And while I can’t exactly call it honest work, it is work, and this is America, last I checked. People have a right to hire who they want for what they want.”
He cocked a fuzzy eyebrow.
“Within reason,” Dana hastily added.
“Uh-huh. Seems you’ve been on the road a while. Tell me about that.”
She wasn’t sure what the angle was here.
But a part of her already knew.
That part that always knew things she shouldn’t know.
Stray.
“Not much to tell, really,” she lied.
Most weeks, she was in a new town—sometimes longer, maybe a month if she really had to put her back into a case. They always cracked open eventually. Just needed to find that chink in the armor, the angle that allowed for just the right kind of prying.
Said prying, though, led to a distinct sort of unpopularity among the locals, and she mostly found work in middling towns throughout the Corn Belt.
A couple of jobs took her around the Greater Twin Cities area. One of those, ironically enough, involved the subjects depicted in the photos in question—a pair of twins warring over their father’s lavish estate on Lake Minnetonka, heirs to some MLM scheme, another faddish fountain of youth and vanity.
The brother had hired Dana to dig up dirt on the sister, who, as it turned out, was in fact cheating on her husband. Unfortunately for the brother, her chosen lover was none other than the attorney he’d hired to find his chink in the armor of the ironclad living will and testament.
It ended with the sister paying Dana off—just after she’d been fronted half the promised pay from the brother, and just before he stormed into the mansion on the lake where the sister and the lawyer were bedded down. The two proceeded to trade pathetic bouts, which led to assault and battery charges.
Dana had a front-row seat to the whole thing through a pair of night vision binoculars out the driver’s side window of her ‘84 Mercedes.
Both heir and heiress ended up in jail, and Dana—aside from the brief questioning she was presently in the middle of with the police—had come out of the whole affair smelling like… well, not exactly like daisies, seeing as she hadn’t showered in a couple of days.
Pulling double-duty stakeouts and ducking into a bar in Excelsior furnished with old pub-stained glass windows and a whole bar imported from the U.K. A little fact she picked up while fishing for information on the Doherty twins from the bartender, who was clearly interested in more than serving her—hence the complimentary whiskey sour.
The trappings were fitting for a town named Excelsior, which conjured the image of a sword in a stone in the corner of her mind and made her think of her younger brother.
Which was what all of this was about.
Her roaming the country.
Combing through county records in more police departments than she ever cared to step foot in.
Jared was why she’d become an investigator in the first place.
Bail bonds back in Illinois, fresh out of high school, while everyone else around her moved on to college. Two of her best friends off to big universities in Chicago—because they’d moved on a long time ago.
She hadn’t.
Their hometown of Normal, IL, was anything but its namesake to Dana after the incident—after Jared disappeared.
Dana cooperated well enough for the sheriff when he came into the quaint little interview room—cutely adorned with a houseplant on a corner side table, nothing like the dingy podunk stations she’d found herself perusing over the past few years, a sheen of grime and vestiges of sweat stink from the myriad stoners, drunks, and other small-time offenders.
The South Lake Police clearly didn’t want to deal with any more song and dance than he had to, seeing as the Dohertys would be out on bail in a moment’s notice—probably paid by their go-between litigator—and hardly paid attention when she started in on what had become a routine approach for her these past few years.
“If that’s all you’ve got for me,” Dana said, placing her hands on the aluminum table, the zippers on her faux leather jacket sleeves rapping against the surface, “I wondered if I could ask a favor. Got a cold case I’m working on. Just need to take a look at some records. Shouldn’t be—”
Big bald Hank scraped his cork belly on the opposite edge of the table as he stood with a sigh.
“Yeah, whatever you need,” he barked. “I’ve got some brats to deal with and some bullshit PR to spout off. Margo will help you out. Records room is out to the left and straight back.” He grunted as he jerked open the door.
Dana stood, her bottom lip pouting in pleasant surprise at how easy that was.
Usually, she had to do a little more sweet-talking. In some cases, she’d found her way around a hard and fast no.
She reset her expression to avoid betraying that.
He held the door for her and gestured for her to go on through.
“And a gentleman too,” she said with a small flourish.
Too much, Dana, she chided herself.
He pulled the door three-quarters shut, jerking her to a stop.
“I know your type,” he said, flat and low.
Standing at an awkward frozen angle between the left doorframe and a protruding, taut light-blue police shirt, Dana weighed her words.
“What, redhead? Not as spiteful as you’ve heard,” Dana quipped. “Probably.”
Judging from his glowering expression and tightly drawn lips, she hadn’t weighed them well.
“No, I get enough of that at home,” he blurted. “P.I. stands for parasitic investigator in my book. But you at least didn’t withhold information. Just make it quick and keep it quiet.”
He cracked the manila file folder clutched in his hand against his thigh, probably for effect.
“Then get gone. We clear?”
Dana glanced up at his glistening bald head and felt the impulse to crack something about Mr. Clean and being crystal clear but couldn’t quite put it together.
Even if she had, she figured she’d be shown the front door instead of being allowed back to the records room.
“Sure thing,” she said.
He opened the door wider and lowered his head in an after-you, good-riddance stance.
Dana strode down the hall toward as the chief gave a cursory wave to designate Dana’s clearance.
Small-town police informality at its finest.
After gleaning that Margo stood for Marjorie, and that she’d earned the nickname by having worked in the Fargo, MN department for several years before her husband won a big health lawsuit settlement—allowing them to move to a comely cabin on Minnetonka—Dana was led back to the file folders.
Third row back on the left.
The R’s.
By now, she was pretty sure that if Jared was still alive, he must have either changed his name, someone changed it for him, or he was in a situation where his name didn’t matter either way.
She’d played out just what that situation could be about a million times in different ways.
Trafficked and sold into slavery. Other times, he’d just gotten lost all those years ago after the incident, wandering until he made his way one way or another.
Maybe he entered the foster system, and they couldn’t identify him for some reason, though that theory always seemed unlikely.
More likely, someone had chosen to make sure he wasn’t identified.
To make him nameless.
The why of that was something she hadn’t nailed down just yet.
Then there was the other option, which flickered in the corners of her mind like the malfunctioning drive-in movie theater projector that night the storm hit—the last night she saw her brother.
Flashes of the imagined lives he could be living, somewhere far off the beaten path. Obscure. Impossible to know—save for the right clue to tip the needle of the compass. And those flashes came on strong some days.
She passed them off as hunches for a while, because that’s what they were.
She’d always been that way, thinking of how things could play out. How they might have.
She got her skepticism from her dad, who worked as a bailiff for the state court. Her eye for detail? That came from her mom, who kept the house spotless—not just scrubbing stains out of carpets but reverse-engineering the cause like some bad episode of Murder, She Wrote. Only without any murder to write about.
Dana knew better.
She knew that some of these hunches, the ones that came on as suddenly and clearly as a strike of lightning from a demure nighttime sky, were something more.
She’d given them a name.
‘Stray’ never steered her wrong.
They were like memories she never knew she had, lodged somewhere in the deep, indrawn parts of her brain.
They came with an inaudible voice, imprinting on her mind. Sometimes she saw herself in a cabin, and stood across the room from a blurry figure in front a hearth, a moose head trophy looming above.
Some hunches were as fleeting as the shudder of her camera’s shutter. Others, an inaudible whisper—more like a garbled transmission of strange words from behind a thick wall.
Indecipherable, but still, somehow, they made sense.
The first came before she left Normal.
One morning, she’d set out from the bail bonds office on a bounty, fully intent on bringing in some crackhead repeat offender—single mom, kids taken in by CPS, just her to deal with now.
Stray flared. Showed her the face of a man she didn’t know.
Saw him pulling Jaared into an unmarked vehicle.
A vehicle filled with others—clad in nondescript black and dark attire—peeling away from the Cinema 4 drive-in, just as the freak tornado hit.
The man’s face had also come with a name—by way of the muffled thought/voice.
Dana kept flipping through the files until she pulled the one she was looking for.
One labeled Roper, Kenneth.
Her heart fluttered.
She’d gotten close before—once in a little Amish community in Wisconsin, another time near Gary, IN.
But this time?
It looked like he’d slipped up.
Something had gotten him on record here in the shining, voluptuary little town of Excelsior of all places, and she felt as though she had her hands around the hilt of that sword in the stone—about to pull it free.
She drew a breath and opened the folder.
His picture was like a perfect Xerox of the one in her mind’s eye, with a few years’ worth of pockmarking and wrinkles layered over it. His eyes sagged like a basset hound’s, liver spots climbing toward a thin head of combed-over French vanilla old-man hair.
Wages of the work of a kid-stealer, she thought.
Her eyes burned—but not with the onset of tears.
More like the pure thermal energy of rage, radiating from her brain, blood rushing to her head.
The quickened pulse in her temples.
She found the bastard.
And she was one step closer to finding her little brother.
Twelve years on, he wouldn’t be so little anymore.
“Ya doing alright back there?” Margo called, her voice thick with Minnesota nasal.
“You betcha,” Dana barked back in native vernacular.
The more you blended in, the more people were set at ease.
Most of the time.
She set the file folder precariously upright on the ledge of a nearby cabinet, open to Roper’s information, and slipped the yellow-and-red Kodak disposable from her leather jacket pocket.
Her thumb readied on the too noisy gray film winder.
Tom Cochrane’s Life Is a Highway whined through the tinny Panasonic radio on the records office desk.
Not quite loud enough.
Dana glanced up at the clock. 4:55 p.m.
“Big plans tonight, Margo?” she called down the room, turning the wheel at the same time and readying the camera.
She hated using disposables.
But her Nikon wasn’t exactly discreet.
Getting photos developed of official police records wasn’t without its risks—but that was a problem for another day.
“Usually, I wouldn’t,” Margo answered. “But wouldn’t ya know it, I’ve got a birthday party for a girlfriend down at Wayland’s. Good happy hour, and can’t beat the view. If you’re looking for somewhere to grab a bite, that’s the place I’d say.”
Dana snapped a few pictures as Margo talked.
“Good for you, Margo. Girl’s gotta get out once in a while,” she said as she stepped nearer to the file.
Dana, I’m ready for my close-up, she mused in what she imagined Roper’s voice might sound like.
Either a smoked-to-nothing rasp, or one of those comically high-pitched male falsettos that didn’t fit the face.
She was hopeful for the latter.
Either way, when she found him—she’d make him sing.
She would pry out everything there was to know about his illustrious, sordid career— and what the hell he’d done with her brother.
Dana washed away two and a half days of sweat and grime in the shower at the AmericInn. Peak summer heat in a no-A/C Fairlane had ripened her beyond what was reasonable.
The car still ran well enough, and for having gotten it off a client two years ago who couldn’t pay up any other way, she took the upgrade—issues and all.
It was a hell of a step up from her uncle Chuck’s old rust bucket of a pickup that had been on its last legs long before she ever pressed the pedal down.
She wrapped the cheap, sandpaper towel around herself and stepped out from what had been a tepid shower at best.
Cheap and fast living.
That was the name of the game.
She pulled on a Northwestern University sweatshirt the bartender had left in her room the other night. Not a damn thing sentimental about it, but she needed a good nightshirt.
She sat down on the bed, staring determinedly at the Kodak, flipping through the case file in her head. She wouldn’t call her memory photographic, but sometimes—when it mattered, and sometimes when it didn’t—it sure seemed that way.
Especially with the hunches. With Stray Some tied to Jared. Others, random things.
Blessedly, this was a time when it counted.
She could almost see the document as if she were still in the records room. Not all the details, of course—but the ones that mattered.
Roper had been pulled over on a routine traffic stop. Gave the patrol officer grief. Insisted he had somewhere to be. Refused to open the trunk.
That earned him a trip to the station.
Nothing came of it. The report was benign.
Didn’t matter.
Dana had already tracked him to the Twin Cities on a hunch that sent her to Cedar Rapids instead. Of all places, she ended up at the big mill in town, where the air smelled like cornflakes and Malt-O-Meal for a three-mile radius.
Roper had been working under the alias Carl Edgerton, which led her to a storage facility under that same name, a few miles down the road.
She had been this close to picking the lock when the security lights came up and she had to make a daring narrow escape from a portly, geriatric night watchman.
She might not have gotten inside, but when she touched the ridged, rust-red door, and the lock with two heads facing opposite directions etched into it, she got another flash.
A glimpse of Jared.
A glimpse of Roper.
And something else—
A white star bordered with blue and red. A congruent banner running behind it.
Mall of America.
She had floored it, arriving in the gargantuan parking lot hours before opening. Put the seat back. Power nap.
Then she shot up and went inside.
She had no idea what she was looking for.
Except Roper.
But after hours of meandering the endless maze of shops across multiple floors—getting lured into spending way too much of her pittance of PI cash on overpriced, greasy food-court fare—she figured her hunch had steered her wrong.
Local police records were always an option. A long shot, maybe.
But it had worked.
And she’d made enough money to get through and onto the next string to pull.
She replayed the file in her mind, reached for the styrofoam to-go box on the bedside table, and took a hefty bite of a now room-temperature burger from Wayland’s on the Water (thanks for the tip, Margo).
She leaned back against the chintzy wooden headboard, staring up at the white popcorn ceiling, eyes tracing the annotation at the bottom of the report.
Roper had claimed to be a truck driver passing through, driving a rental car to Billings to pick up a rig and a load.
Sheriff John must’ve been feeling extra persnickety that night, because he actually tried to verify the info. Apparently, it checked out through his alleged employer. Some logistics company Dana had never heard of.
The address was fuzzy.
She’d get it tomorrow when the Rite Aid down the road opened.
Roper had been pulled over just two days ago.
And his rig was set to depart on July 8th.
Two days.
Twelve-hour drive to Billings.
She had a heading.
More than just a fleeting flash of memory.
She shut off the dim, flickering lamp at her bedside and let the haggard A/C unit lull her to sleep.
Stray flared. A faint, muffled murmur whispered through her mind, as she found herself once again in the cabin, facing the blurry figure.
Just one word.
CLOSER