Days 74 and 75

Write about a character through dress, expressions, gait, and mannerisms and what makes them memorable. Then, who do they love or fear, where are they going, and do they have a secret?

…

If there was one definable item about Jacqueline Bennet, it would be that she could not disappear in a crowd.

I know, I was sent by head office to collect her from the railway station, with the only identification, the fact she was wearing a red coat.

If only…

…

For the last six months it had been my assignment to collect people. From the airport, from the bus station, from the train station. The least favourite was the train station.

I had to try and find the new interns in the throngs of people who all got off the train and swelled up into a swirling mass of bodies so thick sometimes all I could see was heads.

Today was no exception, except…

Jacqueline was wearing a hat, purple, almost the shape of a peacock, and as large. I saw the hat before the red coat. That, itself, was so bright it hurt my eyes.

It took three attempts to introduce myself and convince her I was not trying to kidnap her and have her sent to some harem in Arabia. I said there was no such place as Arabia, and it elicited one of seven expressions which by the time I got her to the office I’d worked out to be, incredulous, surprised, dismayed, disappointed, happy, sad, and angry. These expressions were accompanied by little mannerisms, a tic in her left eye, blinking excessively, pursing her lips and sighing. There was a nervous giggle, but I was not sure where that fitted.

She was mostly disappointed, mainly because Mr Brightman, the CEO, had not come to greet her, and instead it was some minion.

I knew this much about her before we got out the main entrance to Grand Central Station, and it was more than I cared to know.

…

Outside the station, we caught a cab to the office and then spent the next thirty-five minutes in traffic. For some reason, it was unusually bad because the normal time it took was between ten and fifteen minutes.

The first five minutes were rather tense, so I thought I would lighten the atmosphere by asking, “Where did you come from?”

At first, I thought she was going to ignore me, but then, after a sideways glance that suggested she didn’t tell minions such personal things about herself, she said, “Bridgewater, Ohio.”

When I asked if it was big or small, she said it was a place no one had heard of because it wasn’t a real town. It was a hell hole that everyone wanted to escape. I can’t imagine any place, especially your hometown, as being somewhere you would want to leave willingly, but apparently, the highway that passed through and kept all the businesses going had its route changed and had now bypassed the town. It was the reason for her move, the cafe she worked at had closed, as did just about everything else.

Then there was the toxic relationship with her high school sweetheart, which had been affected by everything else and forced her to make the decision to get away. New city, new start. Our employment agency was recommended by one of her friends who had also made the decision to leave, and had found a happy situation in Florida. Jacqueline was hoping for California.

I had lived in New York all my life and had never suffered the problems that seem to plague the Midwest. Jacqueline was not the first or the last person who had fled their previous existence, but the story seemed to the the same.

But listening to her story tumble out in short, breathless sentences, I felt there was something more behind her move. It was that one statement, thrown in there among the others, that if you were not listening, you would have missed it. “Big cities, they provide an anonymity that can give you that ability to reinvent yourself.”

They could. But equally, a person could simply disappear and never be found again. It had happened to several of the people who had come to us for employment, and this girl, who was under all of that bravado and camouflage, people who had come from abusive homes or relationships, the production of bad education, wasted opportunities, and economic downturn. Anything had to be better than what they had.

“Don’t do it,” I said. We were about five minutes away from the office.

“Don’t do what?”

“Walk in the door, go and see Mr Brightman, accept the job he has picked out for you. Don’t.”

She picked up on the urgency in my tone. I knew what was going to happen, as much as I told myself over and over, it wouldn’t.

“Why? Why on earth would you say such a thing?”

“Because I think you were right when you said you’d finish up in a harem in one of those Arab states. Girls come and girls go, but when I try to find out where they’ve gone, they either never arrived or left soon after they started.”

She looked at me like she thought I was an axe murderer, not a messenger.

“How come you’re telling me this?”

“I don’t know. He’s going to kill me when he finds out, but I don’t like this job any more, and talking to you, hearing what it is he is using to lure people like you, that idea that ‘it’s too good to be true’ just reverberates in my head. I was like you three years ago. Small town boy with big aspirations, running away from an abusive father and a town full of bullies. I’m still that boy, big town, small town, the fears are the same, only here, it can swallow you up.”

I’d walked out of the boarding house that morning with nothing but the money I had saved and the notion that I could get on a train to anywhere, that I would not meet the girl, and hope that she would think she had been abandoned and do something else. Then, at the station, like the times before, I lost my nerve.

I pulled out the money and divided it into two. “Take this, find somewhere to stay, and don’t go to Mr Brightman. You can’t trust him. I’m not going back.”

“Now you’re scaring me.”

“You should be. Stop the cab. We’ll get out here.”

“But…”

“If you make one right decision in your life, let it be this one. Take the money. Please.”

The cab stopped, and I paid the fare. I got out and held the door. In that moment, I could see all of the fears that I had myself the first day I arrived, and the girl that Mr Bightman had sent to fetch me. If I’d known then what I know now…”

“Please.”

Finally, she stepped out of the cab. We both watched it drive off.

“Now what?”

“Take the money, and believe that it is the first day of the rest of your life.”

The sun chose that moment to finally come out from behind the clouds and transform that cold, wintry morning into a world filled with possibilities. She looked at me and smiled, the look of a woman who had made a decision.

“Did you have a plan when you left home this morning?”

“Other than I was not going to work for Mr Brightman any more, no. I was going to the station, but I was going to get on a train to anywhere but here.”

She shrugged. “I always wanted to go to California, but I didn’t want to go there alone. Fancy joining me? I mean, I still don’t trust you completely, but I can tell if you are telling me the truth or not.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But what’s the alternative if your suspicions are right?”

…

Decisions are made, rightly or wrongly, based sometimes on reality, but often on a hunch.

We went back to the station on foot, taking the opportunity to talk. I think it was her idea that if I was an axe murderer, I would lose patience and simply move on or show my true colours. That I
was willing to talk, tell her all my hopes and aspirations, and how I’d settled for three years in a rut that felt safe.

We had lunch and spent the afternoon getting ourselves from Grand Central to Penn station, and then the next three days sewing the seeds of a friendship that lasted the rest of our lives.

It was interesting to read a small article in the paper about three weeks later, as I settled into a new job working for a large distribution centre as dispatch clerk, the arrest of Mr Brightman, aka Chuck Sentry, aka Walter Winsome, aka Jonathon Bentley on charges relating to the disappearance of at least fourteen people.

They were all the names I could remember, and I wrote them down in a letter and sent it anonymously to the NYPD.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025