Payton Hidden Away Read online

  Payton Hidden Away

  Jonathan Korbecki

  Copyright © Jonathan Korbecki, 2016

  Copyrighted Material

  Published 2016 by Jonathan Korbecki

  Payton Hidden Away Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Korbecki. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission from Jonathan Korbecki except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Inquiries should be directed to https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.korbecki

  ISBN-13: 978-0692678107

  For everyone who believed I could.

  Dedicated to everyone else.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  .

  Atlanta , Georgia. This morning.

  They say you never forget your first love, but sayings like that are born of convenience. Clichés and puns and motivational blurbs on Facebook walls are timely and thoughtful and funny for a day. They might earn a number of ‘likes’ and result in a few Retweets, but they fall apart when needed most the way memories fail with inconvenient precision.

  “Kristine Lambert,” she repeats. “Kristie.”

  The name sounds familiar, like finding something lost years ago but was never missed until accidently stumbled across while looking for something else. Mentally, I start spinning through my rolodex, my contact list, my clients, colleagues and co-workers while trying to match a face with the name. I’m an accountant because I remember patterns in numbers, yet I’m struggling to conjure up a clear memory of who she is even though on some level I remember loving her the way every teenage boy loves a teenage girl.

  Kristine Lambert. My high school sweetheart. My first love. The one I swore I’d never forget. I hear her voice over the tiny speaker of my iPhone, and I can place it in context with her name, but it’s been so long that I can’t remember her face.

  “How did you get this number?” I ask.

  There’s a long pause. Long enough to make me wonder whether or not there’s anyone on the other end. I even consider hanging up except I can still hear something. Breathing maybe. And the longer I listen, the more uncomfortable I feel, squirming in my chair, fidgeting nervously. Memories lurk at the fringes, coming back in fragments. A smile. A wink. The sound of a laugh. A taste of her raspberry drink on my tongue.

  “Tony,” she whispers. “I need your help.”

  “Today’s not a good day,” I say quickly.” I’ve got vendors coming in next week, and I’ve got wall-to-wall meetings that I haven’t even started preparing for. It’s a—”

  “I can’t do this on my own,” she interrupts. “These last few days have been…” She pauses. “I found something.”

  “You found something? How did you find this number?”

  “Tony…”

  “It’s been what, eighteen, nineteen years, and suddenly you call me out of the blue to say you need my help? I can’t just drop everything.”

  “I don’t think she just disappeared,” Kristie says. “And I think I have proof.”

  This is not the way I wanted to start my day. Whatever happened and whoever I was back then isn’t me now. I’m just a guy in his late thirties who looks like a guy in his early forties. Through premeditated acts of introversion, I’ve managed to blend in with the rest of those carefully perched at the center of society’s bell curve. I have an office, a desk, a brass nameplate, a plastic cactus and a window seat overlooking our inglorious parking lot, but nobody seated on either side of these paper-thin walls knows who I am or what I do.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. “Proof of what?”

  “Tony,” she says, and this time there’s a crack in her voice. “I think she was murdered.”

  One

  After hanging up, I sit behind my Herman Miller desk in my Haworth chair for several minutes. I’m trying to remember what happened more than half my life ago, and I’m finding that it actually hurts to drag out what I’d intentionally put away. It took years to forget my past, and I was so successful in doing so that I’m not sure I could find the house I grew up in even if I went looking for it. I don’t remember the street number. I don’t even remember the street name. All I have is a vague recollection that my leaving Payton County had something to do with the disappearance of...someone.

  I stare at the clock on my desk. It’s one of those novelty items you earn as a reward for ten years of servitude. It’s got a brass plate with brass hands set floating in a clear glass blob, and it’s telling me I’ve been sitting in silence for nearly fifteen minutes. Frustrated, I take a swipe at the clock, miss badly and manage to push a stack of papers from my desk instead.

  Papers go fluttering.

  Burying my face in my hands, I draw a breath, careful to fill my lungs, careful to exhale slowly. Opening my eyes, I look around the empty office. It looks ridiculous with the plastic cactus in the corner and my window seat overlooking our inglorious parking lot.

  I need you.

  I turned my back on her all those years ago, so it should be that much easier to look away again now. Whoever Kristie has become is not the girl I left behind, so any emotional attachment we ever had is long gone. I don’t owe her anything, and even if I did, I don’t remember what. Yet there is a sense of guilt. Whatever it was that happened must have been bad. Really bad.

  I close my eyes to think, clamping my jaw shut, trying to rewind two decades while attempting to remember something—anything—that would clue me in as to why I would have—

  And then it happens.

  A flash. It’s so brief that had I not been concentrating, I would have missed it altogether, but at the back of my subconscious, behind a lifetime of snapshots that include a fatherless childhood, a mismatched wedding, a miscarriage and a divorce, there’s a shadow in the corner of my memory banks, and in that corner I see a smiling face. A big, dumb smiling face with one tooth cracked in half. It’s the face of a man-child, a little boy trapped in a man’s body, and though that big smile covers the landscape of his flushed cheeks, his eyes are dull, almost as if he sees nothing.

  Then it’s gone.

  My eyes flutter open, jarring me back to reality and my empty office with papers scattered on the floor, the sound of a car alarm drifting in from outside and a phone ringing from the other side of the thin walls.

  I don’t remember a lot about what happened or who was involved, but I remember that face, I remember that smile, and I remember being afraid. I also remember my best friend, and Kristie, and that summer—that magical, beautiful, horrible summer. I know I left for the wrong reasons, and I know there was something I could have done or something I should have done, but I don’t remember what. None of it adds up to a complete memo
ry, but it does reaffirm one thought, and that is that I need to go home.

  Logging off the PC, I pack a few things, fitting them into my laptop bag. I restack the papers on my desk, put away the pens and pencils, turn out the desk lamp and stand. I take one last look around to see if I’ve left anything before—

  “Going somewhere?” Phil asks. Phillip Beltran. My boss.

  “Yes,” I murmur while slipping my laptop into the bag. I zip it shut before wrapping it over my shoulder.

  Phillip is blocking my exit, his impressive business paunch hanging over his belt and causing the buttons on his neatly pressed navy blue shirt to stretch to their limit. “Going where?”

  “I don’t have time to explain,” I answer. “I need a hiatus. A few days.”

  “A few days? You can’t take a few days. A few days is competitive suicide in our business. I need you here. Next week’s critical, and we have a lot of prep work between now and then.”

  “I should be back by then.”

  Phillip remains rooted in the doorway. “What’s this about?”

  “It’s personal.” I pause knowing an explanation so vague won’t be enough. Sighing, I lean against the desk while trying to figure out the best way to summarize something I barely remember into a single sentence. “Look, I just got a call from a childhood friend. Someone died that we both knew, and she asked me to come home.”

  “Home?”

  “Where I grew up.”

  Phillip shrugs. “I thought you said you grew up here?”

  “I went to school here. I’ll call you from the road.”

  “You’re driving?”

  “Flying.” I grab my bag and brush past him. “It’s a figure of speech, Phil.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I’m not, but I pretend that I am. If I were actually okay, I’d be filling a glass halfway full all the way to the brim, I’d be demonstrating moral fiber in the context of core values, and I’d be talking a lot of bullshit. Lying isn’t easy, and I know this because nobody gets good at anything without years of practice.

  “Tony…”

  “I’ll see you on Monday,” I say, punching the down arrow. I’m trembling as I wait for the elevator. One floor after another, the numbers light up. I can hear the gears grinding, the pulleys squeaking, and the elevator car climbing. Eventually, the doors will open, and then?

  And then this is where we’ll start, picking up where we left off two decades earlier when I fled town. Memories in fragments, conveniently imprecise, mashed together as expressionless faces in a blurred class photo. But there’s also that stupid smile and that cracked front tooth, there’s Kristie sobbing while looking at me with hatred in her eyes, and there’s someone else who looks just like her hiding in a place I swore I’d never go. The bell goes ‘ding,’ the elevator doors open and then…

  Part II

  When I woke up this morning, things were good. Not great. There’s always room for something better, but I felt moderately optimistic right up until she called. At 10:21, I was Tony Abbott, master of my own universe. I had a good job, a decent apartment, a mediocre outlook and a relatively okay life. Now, at 10:52, everything I’ve made myself into has been undone.

  The sun makes me squint as I step from the revolving doors. The over-ambitious entrance to InteGREAT Inc. boasts a waterfall and a brick walkway lined with greenery leading right up to its front door. It’s like a stranger luring a kid with candy. InteGREAT Inc. is the windowless van parked near the school, Phillip Beltran is the suspicious looking guy selling ice cream at recess, and I’m the sucker lured by the promise of the great American dream.

  I make my way across the lot, but my car isn’t where I remember parking it just two hours ago. Baffled, I look around, but all the cars look the same. Same color, similar make and a style like any other. I have to hold my key ring over my head and walk around like an idiot while repeatedly pushing the panic button until the lights of my Camry finally light up. It’s not until I close the door and shut out the sounds to lock in the silence that I allow myself a moment to acknowledge even a hint of the fear I’m feeling.

  It’s real. It’s happening. I’m going back.

  I start the engine, back out of the parking space, pull forward and drive toward the exit. Robotically, I stop and look both ways. There’s no traffic, but I feel compelled to wait a moment anyway just to see what’s coming around the next corner. I’m an accountant because I remember patterns in numbers, yet for some reason I’m thinking in fractions that don’t add up, like a hanging chad—something of a misnomer that I can’t seem to get out of my head. I don’t even remember what it means. I keep coming back to the number 44, and I can’t figure why, but something tells me it has something to do with the fourth row, fourth seat in some little baseball park hidden away in the armpit of America.

  Part III

  My apartment doesn’t feel quite like my home anymore. All of my things are in their proper places, but they don’t feel like mine either. It feels like an exhibit with a chain barrier and one of those signs reading ‘Do not touch.’ I bought each stick of furniture, each book and each framed picture as a means to define myself as an individual, but now as I look around, nothing I own seems to reflect who I am. I feel like an intruder in another man’s life, poking through dresser drawers, closets and medicine cabinets as I pack my suitcase. Opening the blinds, sunlight streams in, revealing a space that feels packaged for someone else.

  I step out onto the balcony. The sounds of the city hang like a cloud just below me. Honking horns of all shapes and sizes, faint laughter, faint shouting, people spilling into the streets like dominoes. Smells of diesel, asphalt and hamburgers. I can’t remember why I moved to Atlanta in the first place. All I know now is that I don’t belong here, though I don’t know that I belong there either. I feel like an orphan stranded somewhere in between.

  Tony, I think she was murdered.

  I haven’t talked to Kristie since I left home. I haven’t even thought about her. Well, maybe in the beginning, but just like any friends you move away from, those thoughts become less frequent until they’re no longer thoughts. They’re black and white prints from a life left behind. I remember her being pretty, but at that age, all girls are pretty. We were just kids messing around, jacked up on teenage hormones. Who really knows anything at that age?

  There are other memories too. Things like an ice cream stand, a rusty bike, a hammock, Payton Hill—that place teenagers go to make out. And things like that big, goofy smile boasting a row of chocolate-stained teeth, one of which was cracked in half during a fight while defending—

  Yo, Triple A…

  I smile without meaning to. Triple A. I’d forgotten my own nickname, and I’d forgotten who’d given it to me. Ritchie took shortcuts, and since baseball was his whole world, and since my first, middle and last name all started with ‘A,’ and since he didn’t like multi-syllable words, Anthony Alexander Abbott became Triple A. Together, we owned that town. We would—

  Ritchie.

  Ritchie Hudson.

  My best friend.

  I’d forgotten all about him. Him and his ways. Him and his transient little world where the term ‘couth’ did not apply. Nor did manners. He couldn’t understand the meaning of either any more than he could discriminate between the two. He was just a big oaf, rudely stumbling his way through life, as innocent as the bug that smacks the windshield and splatters, the wipers smearing its remains.

  Yo, Triple A, the distant call repeats from the back of my mind, this time with more urgency. I lean over the railing, looking down. The city is down there; millions of people, millions of cars, millions of miles of pavement, but when I look up, I don’t see anything that resembles the city life I’ve become adjusted to. There’s only a grassy slope held upright by trees swaying gently in the breeze, and there’s a chubby kid trudging up the hill toward me, that big, dumb smile on his face. “What you doin’?” he asks.

  “What?” I as
k, unaware that I’ve spoken aloud.

  “I gotta show you somethin’.”

  “It can wait.”

  Ritchie eyes me a moment before shaking his head. “Not really. You’ll wanna see this.”

  “It can wait.”

  Ritchie narrows his eyes. “Look, there’s something I gotta show you. It’s important.” He slaps me on the arm. “Let’s go.”

  I blink my eyes, the general sounds of the city drifting up at me. There is no hill, no trees, no grass. There’s just another gray building like mine not fifty feet away, an old man across the way leaning against his railing while smoking a cigarette and staring at me.

  “I’m going,” I whisper, turning my back and returning to my apartment to finish packing. I’m tossing in all kinds of crap. Underwear, socks, jeans, shirts, shampoo, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, deodorant and all the things I don’t really need but I have enough room for. I even pack Viagra. It’s past its expiration date, which reminds me of how long it’s been since I was last laid, but it’s also the only medicine I have in my medicine cabinet. I don’t even have aspirin, a thought that reaffirms my own judgmental perception of where I stand amidst society’s reliance upon pharmaceutical propaganda.

  My hands are trembling as I zip the suitcase shut, and it’s a sad commentary that my entire life apparently fits somewhat comfortably into a single suitcase. Standing in the open doorway with the lights out, my shadow stretches into the lonely apartment, though it’s not like I’m feeling nostalgic. I haven’t been happy here since I moved in, but now that I’m leaving, all those ‘things’ I spent so much time picking out—the couch, the recliner, the TV, the bookcase, the end table—they all look like an argument intended to keep me from changing my mind.

  Locking the door behind me, I push the keys into my pocket, grab my rolling suitcase by the plastic handle and make my way along the hall to the elevator.