Page 40 of Best Served Cold
Lee Holmes could not have retrieved the card faster if she tried, and yet upon placing it in her fingers, she simply stood and stared.
She had seen Morgan Finch only two days prior, and yet something had been aching inside her since, something she couldn’t quite explain. Sometimes, she thought, feelings didn’t have an explanation, they simply just…were. As she stood there within the kitchen, holding the piece of card within her fingers, there was a closeness she felt to the woman she had loved for five years.
This piece of card was not Morgan Finch, but itwasa piece of her, and Lee was holding it, just as she had once held Morgan.
She exhaled gradually, allowing the air inside her lungs to release the weight off her shoulders, if only momentarily. When the atmosphere felt somewhat lighter, she unfolded the card and indulged in its contents.
“Thank you. For everything. M. x”
The ink blotted as the weight inside of Lee came loose, falling down her cheeks and onto the card below. She closed her eyes, attempting to stop the tears from falling, to preserve that little piece of Morgan as much as she could. With shaky hands, she placed the card onto the counter, steadying herself against the countertop's edge upon doing so.
The word ‘everything’ was not vast enough to describe the multitude of intricacies that had developed amongst the course of their five years together. Perhaps it was the largest word of allin the human language, encompassing all things on the planet, but to Lee Holmes it was nothing more than a microscopic particle floating in the infinite expanse of the universe. And, as a result of their five years being everything, she herself felt like a particle, only the universe as she had known it had been sucked into a black hole.
The ghost of Morgan Finch lay upon the countertop, now, but the thing about ghosts was that you couldn’t hold them. Any attempt to do so would be like standing in front of the mirror and reaching out, desperate to touch the reflection looking back. She couldn’t touch her own reflection, just as she could not touch the spectral presence she felt in that very room, but she could touch her own skin, and so, she did.
She traced along her right arm with the fingertips of her left hand, acknowledging that Morgan had traced her own fingers along these same patches of skin. Doing so now was like driving down the same road at different times; like standing beside a monument hours after one another.
And yet, there was that underlying feeling that she had made the decision that they both drive in separate cars, and now, being in the driver's seat felt underwhelming, the touch of her own fingertips against her skin was nothing more than a doused out cigarette, when Morgan’s touch had been a forest fire. It was then that she worried that anything, or anyone, for that matter, to come into her life now would merely feel like a counterfeit—a subpar replica of what she had already experienced.
As Lee Holmes went to bed that night, pulling the covers up over herself, she felt haunted by the silence. She was no stranger to it, after all, the silence had lingered even when Morgan had slept beside her, and yet, it felt louder now. Like a child pulling at her trouser leg, it begged for her attention. Finding positives from a negative, she told herself that perhaps at least now Morgan was no longer sleeping in the same bed, the nightmareswould stop, and that whilst the silence haunted her, it would only do so until she fell asleep soundly, becoming a part of it, instead of being possessed by it.
But after an hour of tossing and turning, as her eyes grew heavy and she had finally started to rest, the nightmares greeted her once again.
Chapter Thirty-Three
There was something to be said about the area of town in which Lee found herself in, house hunting with Sienna and her closest friends. That something was on the tip of her tongue, and yet she wouldn’t say it aloud, acknowledging that it was perhaps best left unsaid. That something was that should they spend longer than five minutes on this particular street, they may become either witnesses to a crime, or part of one.
She let out a sigh of relief when they stepped across the threshold of an apartment with graffiti on the walls, grateful to no longer be outside amongst the police sirens and domestic disputes. The landlord of the apartment in which they were currently visiting wore a long, brown trench coat, and reminded Lee of cheap cigars and old detective movies.
He jiggled the key into the lock a few times before it popped open, and Lee made an internal note to herself that should Sienna need to run away at any time and hide within the safety of her apartment, a scenario not entirely outside the realm of possibility in an area such as this one, she would need at least a thirty second head start to do it.
Lee could only observe, pessimistically, as the landlord pulled a single bed out from one of the living room walls, extending it into the room until it essentially separated both herself and Kat on one side, and Natalie and Sienna on the other.
The landlord smiled and nodded, seemingly pleased with himself, as if the act didn’t always go as he had planned. Lee wondered at that moment, given how dire things were now, how it looked when things didn’t go as planned. “You see?” he said, still smiling. “An easy process that you can undertake yourself when you need to retire for the night.”
Because there was little else to do but smile back, albeit for different reasons than the landlord currently had, Lee did exactly that. “It’s…I mean, I see the vision,” she lied. “But it’s a little cramped, don’t you think, Sienna?”
Standing on the other side of the room, which was to say, a few feet away from both herself and Kat given the lack of space that occupied the four walls the landlord had the audacity to call a living room, Sienna attempted her best look of positivity, hiding any sense of being mortified as she nodded ever so slightly, as if worried that she would anger the landlord. “It’s rather nice,” she said, forcing a smile herself as she folded her arms. “It could do with a little homely touch, that’s all.”
“Babe, this isn’t a living room, this is a room where people come to die; it’s a dying room,” Natalie scoffed, clearly not adhering to the memo that everyone else in the room was apparently abiding to.
Kat placed a hand over her mouth to the left of Lee, stifling a laugh as the landlord looked at Natalie as if she was a bug to be squashed; an action he was likely used to if this apartment was any indication. “If you’ve seen enough,” he said, sternly. “Then perhaps you wouldn’t mind if you vacated the premises so that I can prepare it for the next potential tenants.”
Edging closer to her, now, Kat leaned forward, whispering into Lee’s ear. “If the next potential tenants are lucky, he might be able to prepare the premises within the next several years or so.”
Whilst it was uncharacteristic of Lee Holmes to laugh so openly at an uncomfortable situation, she found herself practically cackling as they left the apartment, if they could even call it that. Perhaps her behavior was out of the ordinary today, but she reminded herself that it was also out of the ordinary for her to dispose of a body, and break into the home of a murderer, and yet, she did both of those things, and so, for that reason, she chuckled until they were finally outside, and more importantly, into fresh air that smelt less like mold and cat vomit.
“Okay,” Lee said, calming herself down now. “I’ve come to the rapid conclusion that I no longer want to move apartments.”
Sienna raised an inquisitive eyebrow in her direction. “Oh?” she said. “Whyever not, Lee?”
The group began to break down at that remark, laughing in unison like an acapella group deprived of oxygen. When they finally composed themselves after a minute or two, Kat placed a hand on Sienna’s arm, supportively. “You know there is no rush to leave my apartment, right? You can stay as long as you like. No one is kicking you out.”
Lee Holmes knew this translated to something else entirely, namely, that Katherine Myers didn’t necessarilywantSienna to leave. She knew this, and yet she would never say it aloud. She just hoped that Kat would find the words eventually herself.
“I know,” Sienna sighed, leaning into Kat as she placed her in a hug. “That means a lot to me.” The pair retracted, and as they stared at one another, it almost felt like both Lee, and Natalie, were intruding on something they shouldn’t be a part of. “I love living with you. I do. But I’ve been dependent on other people for most of my adult life, and now I think it’s time to do something just for me. Does that make sense?”
Whilst Sienna was not necessarily talking to Lee, she wanted to tell her that it made complete sense to her. After all, she had been dependent on Morgan, so much so in fact that she had done unspeakable things if only to retain that dependency. Except, these were things she couldn’t say aloud, even if Sienna was speaking to her, and so, as a result, she kept quiet.
