Free Amid the Recesses: A Short Story Collection of Fear by J. A. Crook Page A

Nothing out of pocket. We get a show, you get some relief,
alright?”
    “ Right.” Eddie’s grin
returned. He combed a hand through his hair.
    The camera lifted. “Five
years ago? Did something happen, Eddie ? When it started? ”
    Eddie nodded. “Yeah,
something.”
    The cameraman stuck a
thumbs up out from the side of the camera.
    “ I worked as a private
investigator. Small town, eh?” He coughed out an anxious laugh.
Sweat ran into his eyes.
    “ Yeah?” The cameraman
watched Eddie during the monologue.
    “ We had five kids disappear
in a year. Five.” He showed five soiled fingers to the camera. His
brows rose and his forehead wrinkled in a portrait of his age. “I
couldn’t find anything. Nothing that year. No leads. No suspects.
No kids, you know?” Eddie pulled his leg up and set his ankle at
his knee. He looked away from the camera. His eyes glossed over. “I
felt like in a town this small, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be
able to fix something like that, right? Or find something. But I
didn’t and I quit.”
    “ Quit being an
investigator?” The cameraman urged. He pointed to one of the other
cameras. It began to surf the piles and stopped at a side angle
near Eddie’s face.
    Eddie saw the coil and
contraction of the lens as it zoomed in on his tearing eyes. He
blinked the gloss away. He stared at the camera in front of him.
“Yeah. I left. I saved a lot of money in the time I worked. I lived
by myself mostly. I didn’t have my own kids to worry about, or a
family. I felt empty, you know? Nothin’ to find anymore.” He
gestured again to the mountain of nonsense behind him. “I,
uh..”
    Eddie stood from the chair.
The cameras backed away to catch his movements. He dug through the
epidermis of the filth, tearing away tattered scraps of paper and
plastic from stinking trash bags. He pulled from it a
doll.
    “ See this?”
    It had long, stringy red
hair and a patchwork dress. The doll’s face was made of porcelain
and the paint that designed its face was applied poorly. Its
twisted smile and widespread eyes stared dumbly at the
camera.
    “ What’s a grown man doing
with dolls anyway, right?” He put the doll back into the pile.
“Talked to one of the parents of the kids that went missing and
they said she collected dolls. Gave me that one right there.” He
stared at the figure for a long time in silence. The cameras zoomed
and buzzed.
    The second camera searched
the room for other dolls. Dolls sat throughout, on chessboard
thrones or beneath lamp cover tents. Their desperate stone faces
stared forward and empty like Eddie’s. Eddie sat down.
    “ I bought ‘em. Anywhere I
could. Whenever I could. I thought she would have liked them, you
know? I bought a lot of things that I knew they’d like. The
children. It was, uh—“ He rolled his shoulders and his eyes swelled
again with tears. “—kinda my way of saying sorry for not finding
them in time.”
    The camera moved in for
those tears. Eddie let them fall.
    “ In time, Eddie? Did they
find them? The children?” The cameraman asked.
    Eddie shook his head. “No. No, they
didn’t.”
    “ What do you think happened
to them?”
    Eddie didn’t answer.
    The camera adjusted with
its mechanical indifference. The cameraman tried a different
question. “You blame yourself, Eddie? For them not being
found?”
    Eddie peered away from the
center camera to the one at his side “Yeah. I do.”
    The cameraman lowered the
camera and the red light went out. Eddie released a breath he’d
been holding for some time.
    “ I guess we’re done here?”
Eddie’s voice shook.
    “ Yeah, Eddie. We’re going
to look around the house a bit, alright? Just document a couple
things.”
    “ Document?” Eddie stood and
crossed his arms. “Document’s a nice word for expose, ain’t it?” He
laughed.
    “ It’s alright, Eddie. If
you get uncomfortable, we’ll shut down shop and continue tomorrow,
okay? We’ll take it as slow as we need to.