Page 61 of The Hangman's Rope

I nodded and said, “I know the feeling, I feel like I’m letting everyone down by not being able to get it together.”

“Oh honey, oh, baby no…” my mom reached out and chased one of the layers too short to be captured by my simple braid back behind my ear. My eyes started to well and my nose started to fill again. I sniffed and dashed at my tears.

“You should call him. If talking to him makes you feel better, and he gave you his number – you should call him.”

I nodded, and she got up, handing me my new cell phone off the side table off its charging pad.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” she said and her eyes lingered on the rope harness that was seemingly holding me together.I nodded and felt guilty, knowing it was weird but still taking comfort in it anyway.

“Okay,” I whispered as she went out, shutting the door softly but firmly behind her.

I felt a surge of emotion, gratitude chief among them, that she’d remained calm and measured and hadn’t lost her shit on me.

My mom wasn’tgenerallylike that, to be fair and in all honesty, though. Stiff upper lip and all of that British propagandist garbage. Mydad,on the other hand… he would be tearing his hair out, pacing back and forth in my bedroom ranting, raving, and probably screaming at the top of his lungs wanting to commit me to a lunatic asylum just for the rope harness thing.

I took several measured breaths and with shaking hands, keyed the number into my phone from the card Hangman had given me.

I tensed as it started ringing, and ringing, and ringing, my heart skipping a beat when it sounded like someone picked up.

“Ah yeah, this is Benjamin St. John. I can’t come to the phone right now so leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

Of all the names he could have, I hadn’t thought Benjamin. The phone made its shrill tone in my ear and I held my breath.

Shit. What did I say?

Chapter Seventeen

Hangman…

Ten days. I hadn’t seen or heard from Lorelai at all… It held a vague kind of hurt that was mostly made up of disappointment, but I couldn’t do anything about it except leave her be to do what she needed to do.

Still, it gnawed at me and I wondered if she really had felt the same or not.

I worked the backhoe in Hill Crest Abbey East cemetery, digging down the industry standard of four feet – not six – to accept the gleaming casket with the dead old man in it the next day.

We were working behind the scenes trying to find this Calrose Pierce motherfucker and were coming up empty. Whoever he was, he wasn’t from Savannah. You’d think it was a name that’d turn something up – but every turn we made we were hitting a dead end and it was pissing me off.

In the meantime, at least two more girls turned up in the local hospital with corpse weed in their system. Neither one of them faring half so well as Lorelai Gantz. One was in a vegetativestate. The other was in Reaper’s tender loving care… but she was dead for real unlike Lore.

“Ho!” My man assisting me today held up his hand, and I moved the arm of the backhoe out of the way, setting it down with its last bucketful of dirt by the pile amassed on the tarp beside the hole.

“How’s it look?” I called.

“Good!” he called back.

I took out my phone to check the time and my heart skipped a whole-ass beat.

One missed call. 843 area code… Charleston.

With numb fingers, I pressed the voicemail button and put the phone to my ear, turning the volume all the way up and powering down the machinery.

“Hi, Hangman, it’s Lorelai…” she gave a harsh sigh and carried on with, “I’m sorry to bother you… but… I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’ve tried everything and I…” She stopped and I pictured her swallowing hard. “I feel like a stranger in my own house. Like, none of this feels right or real, and I feel like I’m surrounded by just so much chaos and noise and I’ve tried. I’ve really tried… but,” her voice cracked. “Please come get me? Or at the very least, come see me?” She rattled off her address almost too quick for me to catch it, caught her breath on a sob, and thankfully repeated it, before ending the message without so much as a goodbye.

I swallowed hard, and lowered the phone, saving the message and reading the transcript of it on my visual voicemail over and over again while I sat with the sun beating down.

I swiped a hand over my face, the sweat dripping and sighed, trying to figure out if, or when, I’d given her the impression that she couldn’t or shouldn’t call me and I shook my head. I couldn’t come up with anything. It doesn’t mean that I hadn’t. It also didn’t mean that I had… she could have easily built somethingup in her traumatized head that wasn’t real and after everything she’d gone through, fuck… I’d be questioning a whole lot of reality too.

Ihadquestioned my reality, quite a few times, when the flashbacks had gotten real and I could see, hear, smell, and even taste things that weren’t even there.

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