Junipers
by Liberty Price
A pair of scruffy
boots leaned against the doorframe. Caked in dried mud, they looked especially feeble next
to the potted junipers guarding the house. Stones in the driveway crunched under approaching
steps, but the knock at the door went unanswered.
Outside, an engine idled. Several
more severe bangs echoed through the empty hallway, unanswered. The house remained stoic,
until the door itself was under attack—separated from its hinges, it was thrown unceremoniously
into the carpeted hallway. The plants remained like pillars.
Three uninvited guests entered.
“Police!” called
one, rubbing his shoulder.
“Mrs
Pettigrew?” yelled another.
They pushed deeper into the rooms
and called louder, their uniforms like soot against the flowery wallpaper.
“Welfare check,
police!” PC Steven Surmount went upstairs.
PC
Kaylee DeLasim couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been here before. Her superstitious
partner, PC Anikha Seba, followed closely behind, looking over her shoulder at the empty
hallway they’d come through. The living room was void of any personality, a beige
room with white sofas, and some generic framed artwork on the walls.
However, the kitschy vase on the
dining room table jolted Kaylee’s memory: this was where she would sit, lulled by
her mother Jane’s conversation with her old friend Mrs Pettigrew— it was very
familiar. You could see the driveway from the windows, and the tips of one of those plants
outside.
“And
she would have sweets in this cabinet,” Kaylee continued, telling Anikha about how
she used to draw while the adults talked. “But they were always caramels. Hate
them!”
Within
the house, the static of a radio blasted. The walls were so thin that upstairs they could
hear their colleague Steven’s every word. Every beating heart in the vicinity dropped.
The already-terse situation had been upgraded—the specialists were now en route to
document a murder.
Hesitant
to move, Kaylee and Anikha stood grimly. A sense of duty to assist their boss tugged at
their sleeves with the same voracity of their fear, which pulled them firmly in the
opposite direction. Until this point, it hadn’t felt real to them— they hadn’t
expected to be launched straight into a murder so soon, after only a month of policing
between them.
The
house smelled vaguely of Kaylee’s mother’s perfume.
But, why?
A retired policewoman, Jane DeLasim
had risen through the ranks faster than any of her peers. She had been called a marvel,
single-handedly responsible for the trend in dropping crime rates, and she wanted nothing
more than for her daughter Kaylee to follow in her footsteps.
*
Kaylee
remembered the last time she’d been in this house, before Mrs Pettigrew and Jane
had butted heads. An overexcited and clumsy child, Kaylee had been tearing around
the house, showing off her drawing to the women. She accidentally tripped over Mrs Pettigrew’s
foot, stepping on it.
Jane’s
pride had made things worse. Kaylee never forgot the look on her mother’s face.
Kaylee
had been ready to immediately apologize for the bruised foot— but Jane was not one
to back down.
All
to protect her child, Jane still spat out cutting remarks about Mrs. Pettigrew.
*
“Why
couldn’t it just be vandals?” Kaylee attempted to ease the tension, which stuck
in the air like a bleating fire alarm. “Or someone locked in their car?”
“Yeah,”
Anikha said. “A nice easy one for us to start on.” After a pause, she said,
“Do you think we should—”
Kaylee could almost taste her mother’s
tight-lipped pride, the seldom-seen praise ladled on her, the ripples that would resonate
to other family members. More than anything, Kaylee didn’t want to go up there.
But that dead body
was someone Kaylee had known.
“Probably,”
she told Anikha, fearing what they would face. “Yeah,
we probably should.”
The
stairs were covered with plush cream carpet, much like the rest of the house, but each
step felt as if the officers were sinking.
When she used to visit, Kaylee was
never allowed up here, and this only weighed her down more. She felt as if she were intruding,
even though Mrs Pettigrew wouldn’t mind, anymore.
The door was already open, and
the victim was in bed. Neither officer could resist glancing over at her.
Kaylee saw the
woman whom she had known for years, the woman she used to visit earnestly, lying prone.
Mrs. Pettigrew
looked as if she were simply asleep, her head lolling against the pillows, eyes closed.
“Steve,”
Kaylee said, “Are you sure she didn’t go in her sleep?”
“Yeah,
she looks really . . . I . . . don’t know. Just—” Anikha said, “Like,
peaceful, and—”
“Not
to worry, ladies, you can be assured that I have done my job properly.” Steve was
an aged officer, with salt-and-pepper sprinkles flecking his stubble, and he wasn’t
about to be proven wrong— especially by newbies.
Deep
within his steely exterior, he possessed insurmountable knowledge but lacked tact. His
patience for social norms was either bled from him that time he got nicked with a knife,
or forcefully extracted after the blows he had earned from violent scuffles.
This may be why he
indicated the spreading bloodstain that the policewomen had previously thought was part
of the bedspread design, an oversized paint splatter.
“Bint
was murdered.”
Kaylee
and Anihka stood horrified. Steve’s refusal to adhere to politeness was assumedly
why he continued—flipping the duvet up, he exposed the pale leg of the victim, and
the beginnings of the bloodied stump where the other one should have been.
“See?”
he gloated.
“Ealayha
alsalam,” Anikha whispered.
Kaylee
was speechless. The image would stick with her for some time.
As she stared agape at the mutilated
corpse, a cold association between crime and perpetrator began to fester. Steve’s
unfriendly chuckle had become a harsh tune etched into her skull, and that surge of justice
present in every fresh recruit was beginning to take hold.
Kaylee was certain that she would
be the one to carve out justice, to get the person (or people) responsible to face the
consequences.
“Was
probably done after she’d been killed, or else this whole room would look like a
bleedin’ cranberry,” Steve continued. “Less oxygen, less blood flow
. . . Are you ladies gonna barf?”
When neither answered, Steve let
them go outside, one at a time.
When
Anikha came back, claiming she’d only needed to readjust her headscarf, Kaylee noticed
that she was the quietest she had ever been, and her eyes were red-tinged and puffy.
Kaylee went
back through the house, lingering on the décor before stepping through the doorway.
She thought for a moment about propping the door back up but decided against it. Today,
the disruption was impossible to clean up.
*
If
she had simply apologised, Kaylee felt, everything would have been forgotten.
But Jane had stood
firm, marching her away by the hand. “Eventually,” Jane told her, “The witch
would get her comeuppance.”
Even
then, Kaylee had felt sorry for Mrs. Pettigrew. For years after, Jane’s resentment
had grown, with “Mrs Pettigrew” becoming a name tinged in hatred, mentioned
often.
*
The
junipers didn’t divulge what they had witnessed— the woman following Mrs Pettigrew
into her house, carrying her shopping, their cheerful conversation swallowed by the
closed door. A good deed: the payoff would come. She had waited long enough already.
“I’m sorry, dear,
but I’m getting tired. Happens a lot these days! You can let yourself out, can’t
you? It was lovely to catch up again.”
It
takes a certain kind of person to be a police officer.
The days are differentiated—
one day a theft, the next an assault, but eventually the years do desensitise you to things.
The sooner this process began, the more effective an officer would be in the line of duty.
Of course,
daily exposure to many different types of crime hardens the right type of person.
“Of
course, no problem.”
Before
she turned, Mrs Pettigrew called her back. “Jane, dear!” By now, she was already
in her bed, bringing the covers up to her chin. “When are you going to bring Kaylee
by to visit? I haven’t seen her in ages!” She yawned.
After so long, Mrs
Pettigrew had been astounded to hear from Jane. She’d forgotten the argument completely,
welcomed her old friend into her home without a second thought.
But Jane knew that there could be
no black mark against Kaylee’s name, no matter how small or insignificant—
she had to be certain.
*
Kaylee
took deep breaths before she pressed the button, hopeful
that her mind was just overactive, that things were too convenient.
Her mother
answered.
“Hello?”
Jane could barely speak.
“When you were late back
yesterday . . . I . . . Did you ki—”
“Kaylee,
what a preposterous question.” But Kaylee could
hear the smirk in Jane’s voice.
She hadn’t even
finished the question.
THE END
