7. Saturday, September 9, 2023
Polly
“Thank fucking God!” Polly’s coworker Sierra yells. She locks the front door behind the last customer who lingered a full ten minutes past closing time.
Sierra is twenty-two and has worked at the Merry Cups café for years.
She has her own apartment that she shares with another coworker, Ethan, and is apparently saving up to go to school in England for parapsychology.
Polly pretended to know what that was and then googled it and was even more confused, having no idea that studying the paranormal was a legitimate thing.
When Polly started working there, only three days ago, Sierra’s short hair was bright blue; today it’s pink.
Her apron is crammed with pins telling you all you need to know about her at a glance—proudly bisexual, large and in charge, a black-cat mom, a modern-day witch, a fan of Stranger Things, and don’t talk to her before she’s had her coffee.
“At ease, soldier,” Sierra says from the other side of the counter. “I think that espresso machine is cleaner than it’s ever been. You’re gonna make the rest of us look bad if you keep this up. We don’t like the overachieving type around here.”
“Don’t worry,” Polly says, giving the metal of the machine one last wipe. “My sister was the overachiever. Not me.”
“Good. Otherwise, I couldn’t hang out with you. You wanna come to my place for an after-work cocktail?” Polly is about to politely decline, but Sierra holds up her hand. “I won’t take no for an answer. I only live a couple of doors down, above the pizza place.”
They lock up the café and walk half a block before Sierra steps into a narrow doorway, unlocks a graffitied black metal door, and ushers Polly up a carpeted staircase that smells like cat piss and looks like it hasn’t been vacuumed, ever.
At the top of the stairs is the door to Sierra’s apartment, which she unlocks, then steps back, giving it a hard kick with her Doc Martens.
“Not exactly five-star, but the rent is cheap,” Sierra says, waving Polly inside.
The apartment is dark, lit only by a lava lamp in the far corner of the living room.
A few feet into the space and a wall of heat hits them.
The smell of cat piss is replaced by that of yeasty dough from the pizza place below.
Sierra moves around the room, switching on some lamps that cast small pools of light below them, barely making a dent in the deep shadows beyond them.
“Have a seat,” Sierra says, gesturing to the couch. “You good with beer? I only said cocktails to get you up here.” She squawks a laugh and then disappears through a doorway. A light comes on so that Polly can see her very cluttered kitchen.
She sits down on the couch, sinking into a lumpy cushion, releasing the smell of cat. A massive TV hangs on the wall across from her and all around it are movie posters for horror movies, most of which Polly hasn’t seen. A black cat suddenly leaps up onto her lap and she yelps in surprise.
“That’s Pennywise,” Sierra says, coming back into the room. “Penny for short.”
“I didn’t even see her coming,” Polly says, forcing a laugh while shifting so that the cat slides off her thighs and back onto the ground.
Sierra hands her a beer and sits down on the couch beside her. “So, what’s it like living in the murder house?”
“Wow, news travels fast around here,” Polly says before taking a sip of her beer.
“Yeah,” Sierra says with a shrug. “Your application was on Pete’s desk when I went into his office this afternoon to get the bank-deposit bag. I saw the address. I kind of have a thing about the Gordon murders and that house.”
“A thing?” Polly says, feeling a mix of relief that Sierra hadn’t asked her up there to hit on her—which she thought might be the case—and annoyance that the visit is just a guise for getting information about her stupid house.
“Okay, an obsession. I actually knew the older Gordon kid. Well, knew of; he went to my high school the year they moved here. We were in the same year and had a class together. I never talked to him or anything though.”
Polly nods, takes another sip of her beer.
Sierra gets up from the couch and goes to a trunk sitting in the far corner of the living room.
She kneels down and lifts the lid. “I honestly couldn’t believe it when I saw that I was going to be working with someone who actually lives in the murder house,” she says, rummaging around in the trunk.
“I mean the case is just so fascinating. How Justine Gordon said the woods made her do it. And now you live surrounded by those very woods.” She chuckles. “I mean, that’s fucking craaazyy.”
Polly takes a gulp of her beer, deciding that as soon as she’s done, she’ll make an excuse and get out of there. A line of sweat from the suffocating heat of the place has started crawling down her spine. “It’s hot in here,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s ’cause of the pizza oven downstairs,” Sierra explains, still rooting around in the trunk. “Great in the winter but shitty in the summer.” She pushes herself up out of the trunk with a shoebox in her hand. “Got it.”
Sierra sits down on the couch beside Polly and puts the shoebox on the coffee table. “My collection of Gordon-murder memorabilia.”
Polly recoils slightly and wishes like hell she’d turned down Sierra’s invitation to come up to her smelly apartment. “That’s a bit morbid, don’t you think?” Polly says with a nervous laugh.
Sierra puts a hand on Polly’s knee and leans in so close that Polly can smell the coffee and beer on her breath and something else, like sage.
“It’s not for the shock value,” Sierra says with the utmost seriousness.
“It’s an honoring of the people involved.
It happened to our town as much as to the Gordons themselves. ”
Polly thinks she detects the shine of tears in Sierra’s eyes, but she looks away too fast for Polly to tell and flips the lid off the shoebox.
“This is a piece of the police tape that surrounded the house after the murders.” She places a small piece of yellow plastic on the coffee table that could be from anywhere.
Then she reaches back into the box and pulls out a blue pencil that’s missing the eraser on the end and has bite marks on it.
“This belonged to the younger brother. I bribed the janitor at the middle school to give me something when his locker was cleaned out.” Sierra sounds incredibly proud of herself.
“This is a rock from the property that I got on the day Justine Gordon was sent away.” She puts a small rock on the coffee table that, again, Polly thinks could be from anywhere.
Polly gulps down the rest of her beer and slams the bottle on the coffee table. “I’d better get going,” she says, wiping at the film of sweat that’s collected on her upper lip.
“You can’t leave yet,” Sierra screeches.
“I haven’t shown you the best part.” Reaching into the box, Sierra pulls out an item of clothing and holds it up.
The name Gordon is printed on the back, along with the number ten.
“This was the older brother’s basketball jersey.
Two days after the murders, I broke into the boys’ locker room and stole it from the laundry bin.
” She carefully lays it across Polly’s lap. “It still has his sweat on it.”
Sierra gets up off the couch with her now-empty bottle of beer and heads toward the kitchen. “You want another?” she asks Polly before disappearing.
Polly calls out a firm no.
She stares down at the jersey on her lap, thinking of her dead sister, wondering if someone, somewhere, has a piece of her clothing that they’re holding on to.
Polly feels such a strong connection to the Gordon brothers in that moment that she’s worried she may burst into tears.
She lifts the jersey to her nose and is about to inhale deeply when a loud thud against the front door startles her.
She tosses the jersey back onto the coffee table and jumps up off the couch as though she’s been caught doing something shameful.
There’s another loud thud and then the front door bangs open, revealing their coworker Ethan standing there with a pizza box in his arms. “You didn’t tell me we had company, Sierra,” he says, his voice sharp with annoyance.
“I was only able to get a medium Hawaiian.” He kicks the door shut with one foot as he moves into the apartment.
He drops the pizza box on the coffee table amidst the mess of Gordon-murder memorabilia.
“Oh hey, you’re the new girl at the café,” he says, squinting to make out her features in the dimly lit room.
Polly nods and then starts toward the front door. “I better get going. My dad needs his car.”
Sierra emerges from the kitchen with a fresh beer in her hand and a frown. “But you just got here. We haven’t even talked about living in the murder house yet.”
“I’ll come back again. I promise.”
“Fine,” Sierra replies, pouting her pierced bottom lip.
“You wanna take a slice for the road?” Ethan offers. “We get it free from downstairs.”
“That’s okay,” Polly says, moving closer to the exit. “Thanks for the beer, Sierra.” She’s got one hand on the doorknob and is gently guiding the cat out of the way of the door with her foot.
“Which room is your bedroom?” Sierra calls out before Polly can make her escape. “The one at the side of the house with the tall windows or the one at the back of the house?”
“Umm, the one at the side,” Polly says, her hand still on the doorknob, glancing back over her shoulder.
“That was his room,” Sierra says, her pout turning to excitement. “The older Gordon boy. A girl I knew went to his house once and she told me all about it.” The line of sweat down Polly’s spine turns cold, and she shivers despite the heat of the place.
“Oh my God,” Ethan says with a mouthful of pizza, a small piece of pineapple flying from his mouth. “Would you shut the fuck up about the Gordon murders?”
Polly yanks open the door and races down the smelly steps.
She’s relieved when she reaches the street, away from the heat and the smell of rising dough and cat piss, and stops to drink in the cool night air.
She tries to shake the sorrow that feels heavy in her limbs after holding that basketball jersey in her hands.
The idea of going home to curl up in her bed and wait for Gray is no longer as appealing as it was before.