WE’RE IN AN EMERGENCY | Fiction by E.A. Aymar

The murders quieted the town of Cromwell, Virginia, turned the storefronts into blank faces, the streets into empty, dreamless nights. Cromwell was typically a tourist destination this time of year, the weeks before Christmas. The town’s main street had been decorated to look like a holiday village, garland wrapped around streetlights, a group of carolers on the corner at six and eight pm, a horse-drawn carriage trotting determinedly up and down the street. But after three women had been killed within the past month, only the horse’s clops remained, echoing as tiredly as an aged heart.

It was the night after the third woman had been found when Monica Reyes told her fiancée she was in love with someone else.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Seth asked. He and Monica were in Chimera, their favorite wine bar. Chimera had opened earlier in the year, a cozy establishment intended to court visitors who came from DC and Richmond during the holidays and, off-season, popular among the town’s twenty-year-olds. But now the bar was subdued, silence draped over it like a dead cat. Monica and Seth were the only customers. The owner, a middle-aged man with thinning hair, sat by himself at a table on the other side of the room.

“Monica?” Seth prodded.

“I’m sorry.” Her confession hadn’t been planned but instead delivered rushed, as if Monica had knocked over her glass of wine and it had soaked Seth.

Worry outlined her fiancé’s eyes, like he was peering over a ledge. “Listen,” he said, speaking slowly, as if otherwise she wouldn’t understand what he was saying, “we’re in an emergency. No one’s thinking clearly.”

Monica knew Seth wasn’t wrong. Ever since Anne Peters, the first woman, had been found nearly a month ago everyone in town felt something was slightly off, like they were reading a story about their lives rather than living them. Anne had been discovered at dawn, hung from a light post in the center of Cromwell, the square where the annual Christmas play was performed. Even though Monica hadn’t known her, Anne’s death hit her with a horrified dread, an inevitability, the way she always felt when a woman was assaulted. Online neighborhood groups debated whether it had been suicide, strangers immediately arguing with people who had known Anne, or felt like they did. A former high school classmate lashed out, posted a video detailing how self-absorbed Anne had been, called the public nature of her suicide a galling example of her selfishness. Anne’s family disputed this in a testy statement, claimed Anne was beloved by everyone she’d ever met and, to a second point, happy, never given to the slightest signs of depression or suicide. And then, even as retorts were being written and recorded, the police officially classified Anne Peters’ death as a murder, revealed signs of struggle. Photos of her torn fingernails. Fist-sized bruises along her abdomen and spine.

And, not included among the photos but detailed during a solemn press conference, three lines carved into her forehead.

“Here’s what people are saying,” Seth had excitedly told Monica, an hour after the chief of police had finished speaking. “It’s probably the number three. Some think it’s a reference to the holy trinity, you know, God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit? Although there’s one guy online who says it’s a countdown, and another body is going to have a “2” on it, and then another with a “1.” But there’s a side reddit where everyone thinks that guy’s also the killer. This is insane.”

Seth couldn’t stop diving down rabbit holes, and he wasn’t alone. Online neighborhood groups, Monica’s colleagues at First Mortgage, her girlfriends – Anne Smith’s mysterious hanging was all they wanted to talk about.

In fact, sitting in Chimera after confessing her newfound love was the first time Monica had seen Seth truly somber in weeks. “We’re in an emergency,” he repeated, holding his wine glass on the table like it was stationing him, keeping him in place from somewhere he desperately didn’t want to go. “Everyone’s emotions are everywhere.”

Monica didn’t want to hurt Seth, although, if she was honest, she was almost too infatuated to care. Newfound love had a way of doing that, numbing you to the feelings of others, although this was the same emotional numbing she’d felt when Victoria Johnson, the second woman, had been found swaying from a basketball rim, five miles from town square, eyes beaten black and a pair of X’s carved into her forehead. And even though the excitement from the first death a week earlier was muted by the second, there was still a thrill thrumming through the town. Hours after the Victoria Johnson murder, Monica had to stop going online, asked Seth not to share his theories with her as he perched over his phone. He reluctantly agreed but committed himself to guarding their home with measures that didn’t necessarily make her feel safer, like setting his loaded gun on the nightstand, propping up a baseball bat behind their bedroom door. Seth wasn’t alone. By the following afternoon, store shelves emptied of mace. Men switched from concealing their firearms to openly brandishing them, holsters lodged on their sides, rifles strapped across their backs.

And yet, despite this vigilance, Monica still felt alone in her fear.

Seth’s hands flexed around the stem of his glass. “Is it someone I know?”

She could tell that Seth was mentally going through a list of her friends, and Monica wished she’d kept her feelings to herself.

But that hadn’t been possible. Being with Seth felt like a betrayal of this other man.

“It’s no one you know.”

His eyes relentlessly searched her face, refusing to accept that as an answer. And then his expression abruptly changed. A different light shined in his eyes.

“It’s Wild Jim, isn’t it?”

“What?”

Seth seemed shaken. “I’ve seen the way you look at him.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You’re in love with a fucking car commercial!”

Her face flushed. “He’s more than a commercial.”

She despised Seth’s expression at that moment, this same smugness when he and his male friends were debating politics and Seth felt like he had a damning point. Monica knew her attraction wasn’t rational…but attraction and obsession never were. The other night she’d woken at three in the morning, found Seth sitting up in bed next to her, his face illuminated by his phone, eyes so alert he couldn’t have yet slept. It reminded her of when she and Seth first started dating a year earlier. Constantly texting and calling, even after they’d just spent a long day together. Starved of each other. And she felt that same compulsion now, even if she’d never met Wild Jim, only seen his used car commercials on television, the way he would tell her, voice rising in excitement, about Toyotas down two thousand dollars, Honda sedans down three, all GMC trucks down five thousand dollars. And then he would lean conspiringly close toward the camera, voice deepened and serious, and say, “Come ride with me.”

To Monica, those words sounded like closing notes of some old-fashioned love song. She couldn’t stop listening to them.

“Do you want a new car or something?” Seth asked.

He was still smirking.

“Don’t be like that.”

“I mean, you’re kidding, right? You know you’re not the funny one in this relationship.”

Seth always did this, teased her in a way that cut deeper than he realized. Monica had told him before how she disliked her introversion, wished she was more outspoken. She was sensitive about her shyness, the way she stood in his shadow. They’d gone to the grocery store together last night – at this point, no woman in Cromwell walked the streets alone – and, as always happened when people were together now, ended up talking with other couples and families about the killings. Now everyone assumed it was someone from out of town, probably a stranger who had wandered down from DC. She moved away from the group, felt like she couldn’t breathe if she stayed.

No one had noticed her departure. Seth had a way of pulling people to him, a star around which everyone orbited. That was one of the first things Monica had loved about him. It was unforced, his natural personality. Seth wanted to know what others thought, was eager to engage them in conversation, remembered what they said. But she’d also noticed a churlishness when things didn’t go the way he wanted, when Seth was pushed away from the center. His appreciation for Monica never matched his enthusiasm for himself. She’d been promoted a month ago, made a marketing manager at First Mortgage, and Seth had used the opportunity to remind her of his promotion at his law firm months earlier. “You’re catching up to me!” he’d said, by way of congratulations.

“Listen,” Seth told her now, “we’ll go car shopping this weekend. Just not there. For obvious reasons.”

“I’m calling off the wedding,” Monica replied.

Seth hadn’t seemed to realize this was a possibility. His belittling vanished.

Without callousness, he looked young.

“You are?”

The broken thing in his voice almost broke something in her.

“I mean, Monica, I love you,” Seth said, uncertainly. “I’ve done everything for you. I don’t understand why you would tell me this now. We’ve planned…”

Seth went on but Monica’s mind was elsewhere. This was how things had been for the last month, as if only her physical being was in the town of Cromwell, but her emotions and spirit were somewhere else. Like she was Cromwell’s angel, watching from above, forever removed. She knew it wasn’t fair to Seth, had known ever since this new love occurred to her…but whenever she tried to go back to him, Monica felt nothing.

“I mean, did I do something wrong?” Seth asked.

Had he? Monica had asked herself this same question over the last few weeks, and all she could think of was an isolated incident just after Teresa Hodge’s hanging had been announced and a news reporter on television grimly said, “More information to come about this third victim.”

“Now we’re all hanging,” Seth had joked.

And then a commercial for Wild Jim’s Used Automobiles appeared.

Monica had almost felt Wild Jim’s hand take hers, pull her into another world, she sitting next to him in a 2020 black Honda Accord with a white leather interior. He drove her out of Cromwell and to his home in Richmond, an hour away. Wild Jim parked the Accord in his circular driveway and hurried around to her door, opened it, offered her his hand.

It seemed so real at the time that Monica almost felt like this fantasy was her true life and everything about Cromwell imagined. And the fantasy continued later that night. Monica had trouble sleeping but, when she finally fell asleep, dreamt she was in Wild Jim’s house. It was morning and they were in the bathroom, his shirt off as he shaved, only wearing pajama bottoms. Monica stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his soft waist, playfully ran her tongue over tattoos of different car logos on his shoulder. She awakened next to Seth but could smell the lingering scent of Wild Jim’s shaving cream.

“You know he’s not real, right?” Seth asked.

“His name is…”

Seth interrupted her. “I mean the commercial. You don’t know what he’s like.”

“But he feels real,” she said.

“What does that even mean?”

“I can’t explain it,” Monica told him. “It’s like, I don’t know, like I’m looking at a painting, but it’s alive.”

“I like the Mona Lisa,” Seth replied, “but I don’t want to fuck it.”

She knew Seth saw her surprise at his curt words.

“And Wild fucking Jim,” Seth went on, “isn’t the Mona fucking Lisa.”

Needless swearing was something Seth did whenever he was stressed. He hadn’t done it for weeks, not since some incident at the firm had almost cost him his job.

That was the only time she’d seen him near tears.

Monica stood.

There was no further use arguing, their conversation was over. Truthfully, Monica had known it was over since they’d first sat down. But Seth didn’t seem to realize it until that moment.

“What am I supposed to tell everybody?” He asked.

*          *

Monica is fucking insane, is what Seth told everybody, and everybody agreed. The guys he knew laughed and teased him about it. The worst was when a Wild Jim commercial would come on and his friends would make jokes about Monica appearing with him, Seth silently hoping that didn’t happen. But he couldn’t bring himself to change the channel, in case he might see her again.

He knew Monica had gone to Richmond, tracked her phone there, but she hadn’t stayed. She left Richmond after a day and driven to Pennsylvania, where her family lived. He wondered if she’d found Wild Jim, imagined Monica walking into the dealership, planning to confess her love only to find herself embarrassed. Damned by reality. Seth waited for Monica to return or, at least, reach out to him.

A part of him never stopped waiting for her.

Three more women were murdered, numbered and hung like cattle, strange symbols cut into their faces. Cromwell turned into a police state, the national guard patrolling the streets, reporters and true crime podcasters and bloggers and the curious descending on the town like locusts. But the hangings stopped. After a month passed with no more murders, local officials praised the authorities and their increased vigilance, even if it had meant cancelling the holiday festivities and keeping Cromwell forever suspended in a state of watchful authority. This change was easily accepted but, rather than finding peace, the townspeople and the media never stopped wondering about the killer. Who had he been? Why had he done it? Had he simply changed tactics and moved somewhere else? And so they followed stories of dead women to nearby towns and cities, desperately searching, like starved roots from a parched plant.

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