Podcast of a Teenage Super-Villian

Chapter Twenty-Three: Through Hell

Song Selection: Orpheus—Shawn James

Avery drives home for Monet's phone; it would have her blog drafts, evidence, something he'd read a while ago but couldn't all the way remember. Damning, he remembers, still. He flings the door open and finds it ripped apart, his library books scattered on the floor, the shelves ripped out and crushed on the ground. His arm-chair is flipped, his mattress tossed off his bed and his drawers wrenched out of his bureau. All his clothes lay on the floor, all of his possessions rooted through. His stomach clenches up so tightly he fights back nausea.

Monet's room. Her phone. The books she keeps in a shoebox. Her laptop.

He races in and he finds the room neat. The typewriter in the middle of her white desk, untouched. Her prized possession. Her bed made, the floor clear and swept. But he reaches under her bed, where she keeps her laptop. It's gone. The shoebox, gone. He sniffs faint musk and spice; male cologne.

His heart pounds. He'd seen her when she thought he'd fallen asleep, her with a leather-bound journal that brought fear to her eyes. At the time, he ignored it. But it itched now. The journal was gone, the laptop, all of her notebooks.

He turns back to the typewriter, noticing paper in it he hadn't seen in his first desperate glance of his dying daughter's room. Three words in inky courier font. 

FINALLY YOU LOSE

He wrenches the paper out of Monet's beloved typewriter, the very one that had been passed down from his father. Rage runs through his arteries like burning circuitry at the perversion. 

Finally you lose. The police would call it a coincidence. Avery hates himself, hates how cynical he's become. How easily he tosses out his faith in the systems he'd been a part of. But he doesn't trust the police, he can't. Is the commissioner in the mayor's pocket? It's outlandish, but he can't know. He can't know who's a part of the plot to get rid of his daughter. He's alone.

So he doesn't call the police. He hops into his clunker of a car and drives straight to Anna Jaimson's house.

***

Carson Jaimson is the kind of man who has to compensate for his wife being able to crush his bones to dust. And he compensates by building all of their furniture with "wood he harvested himself." Every chair, every desk, every table, every sofa is made out of trees Carson himself chopped down on his father's Georgian farm with the very axe hanging over the mantle, Carson eagerly supplies to a stiff Avery Jackson sitting on an equally stiff couch. 

Avery stares at the framed Metallica records and antlers tacked to the wood paneled walls, and tries not to assume he knows everything about Mr. Jaimson. The wounded masculine.

They'd never spoken, not really. Carson would usually be in his home office, lavishing on the phone about all natural chemical cleaner to people just tired enough to be easily coaxed into opening their wallets, and his wife would find her favorite lawn chair to sink into on the patio, far away from him. 

There, Avery pretended to work. And it was work at first. She was guarded, as any good superhero should be. He had to lean in, let her get to know that he was trustworthy. They talked about bands and what it was like to raise a teenage girl. He had a small apartment, constant work, and no spouse to help. She was a remote stock-broker with a far-too attentive husband and a big home located on almost of acre of woodland, but the nuts and bolts of it was all the same. Worry and pride. At first, he was just doing his job; he had a tell-all memoir to write.

And then they started drinking lemonade and feeding the squirrels apple chunks from their hands, and it wasn't work anymore. Avery had a friend.

Avery should be at the hospital, but they won't let him see his daughter, and the kids had gone missing. But that was all a haze to him, everything whipped up and spinning, spinning. He's thinking about shotgun slugs and obliterated organs and his daughter, when she was desperately going on and on about the mayor being "in on" Masquerade's presence in his boss's office.