Estienne

Wendy dated a lot of people. Too many to count, really. But there are a few who stand out. Of these few, there are but two who are likely to have done something as extreme as kill her. One of them is Estienne.

Now, before we get too deep into this, I’ve written stories with Estienne in them before. If you haven’t read those or don’t remember, nevermind. Just skip to the next paragraph. But if you did and do, then try to relax your mind about where and when in the order of events this might be happening. Just let it happen, experience it, and then you will remember it, and it will be in the chronology, such as it is, okay?

So Estienne.

He wasn’t at the funeral. How do I know? Because I was. I helped lower her into the ground.

I’d questioned a few people that day, drawn some conclusions, then went off—half-cocked, some might say—and dealt out a little Jungle justice. Or I thought I had. Then, years later, I saw the guy I thought I’d sliced up … at someone else’s wake. So I don’t know what really happened that night, but in any case, he wasn’t the right guy.

Estienne might be. Why? Because he’s the kind of jealous guy that would threaten to kill people—like me, which he did on occasion—who were around Wendy and for whatever reason he didn’t like. He never said anything to Mickie, for example, or Roxy as far as I know. I don’t think he menaced Danielle but that’s because she’s a fucking lunatic.

Anyway, we find him—you and I—in his studio at the edge of town. It’s the western edge, if that matters to you.

The studio is a converted waystation, so it used to be a small shop and stop where folks would buy shit and recharge or refuel their cars—that kind of thing. But it had been abandoned decades ago, and he’s since gutted it and made it into a workshop.

Estienne’s one of those rich fucks that everything just works out for. Like he doesn’t really do much to help others, he’s a dickhead, and he treats people like shit. But he’s hot and has money and sometimes is funny, so people tend to put up with him, and he gets what he wants. That’s how I remember him, anyhow.

Today, he’s older. How much older? Well, he’s a couple years older than I am, so … fifty? Just shy. Something like that. He’s still pretty hot, I guess, if you’re into that sort of guy. He has a tank top and old jeans on and is grinding away on some kind of metal sculpture when we approach.

I stand somewhat close—close enough that when his peripheral vision passes by, he’ll notice me.

You do what you want to do. You can stand near me or flank him or try to look around the studio while I talk with him.

It takes a few minutes, but eventually he powers down the grinder and catches sight of me.

He’s startled, I can tell, but he tries to hide it. Then, he picks up his glasses from a stool nearby, puts them on, and looks at me again.

“Teresa? Is that you, are you Teresa Anderson?”

I smile and take a couple steps closer. “It’s me, Esti.”

He smiles and swats his hands together, wipes them on his jeans, then comes toward me.

My old reflexes tell me to sink into my center and pull my blade. But I don’t carry that anymore, and I don’t fight people either. So I sort of sway a little in place and feel the air around me, smell the smells.

“How the hell are you, girl?” Estienne says happily, almost joyfully, and puts his arms out in a way where I could just shake his hand or hug him.

We shake, and I try to smile a bit better.

“Jeez, it’s been what, thirty years?”

“Something like that,” I say.

“I heard you’d moved off and become, well, you know, famous.”

I shrugged. “Yes and no. Mostly no. But I did move.”

I tell him where—but I’m not telling you right now because it will only serve to confuse you—and he says he’s never been there, but hears it’s cool. His sister’s husband’s brother and his husband live there or something like that.

He’s close enough to me now that I can smell him, and my body remembers that scent. It makes my teeth itch. And I can see his nipple ring through his thin shirt. He’s still got it after all this time.

“What brings you back here?” he asks as he gets a drink of water from a bottle on the stool.

“Business,” I say flatly.

“Oh. Okay,” he says. “What sort?”

I can see the muscles in his throat tensing now. You don’t live as long as he has on the Jung without instincts. He knows what’s coming.

“The unfinished sort.”

He sighs, takes another drink, then sets it down on the stool. “Listen, Teresa … I know we were pretty hard on you back then. And I know about your work with the Ministry. So I get it. You’re upset and you have every right to be. But we were kids, man. I’m sure you’ve done some things you aren’t proud of, right?”

You have know idea, I thought. Then I said, “You have no idea.”

“Right!” he said, jutting both hands out toward me in support or supplication. Maybe both. Prolly both. “We make mistakes. Kids do dumb things. They make mistakes. Then we grow up. We do better.”

That choice of phrasing isn’t lost on me, and I can’t help but smirk at it.

Unless you’re being super stealthy, he notices you at this point.

“Who … who’s this?” he asks.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say with a handwave. “You were saying? About growing up and doing better?”

He looks from you to me, then back to you again. Then he starts to answer my question while he’s still looking at you—unless you’re hidden, in which case he’s just looking in your direction without knowing you’re there.

“Look, Tee. I’m married now. I have kids. I’m about to have a grandkid. I’m an artist. I don’t do that kind of shit anymore.”

“Oh?” I ask.

I see the ghost of Wendy. She stepped out of the wall and walked over next to him. She looked the same as she did back then, back when I helped put her under ground.

If you want her to be an actual ghost and add a supernatural element to the story, that’s fine. If you prefer this is more like a metaphor, like she’s not really there, it’s just my overpowered writerly imagination, that’s also cool. Whatever you want, babe.

Estienne looks in the direction of Wendy’s ghost, stares at the wall.

“No. I’ve put all that in the past,” he says.

“How deep, Esti? Six feet?” I ask. It’s corny, I know. Maybe I’ll write a better line in revision.

“What?” he asks.

“You know I saw a lot of people at the funeral. But you weren’t one of them,” I say.

“Funeral, what funeral?” he asks.

“You know the one,” I say and gently nod toward Wendy’s ghost—her ghost who was smiling the way she always would when someone was in a tight spot, usually because of something to do with her. It made me feel weird inside.

She must have seen that, in me, cos she looked at me then and said, “Don’t bitch out on me now, Teresa. You said you’d do this for me.”

I know, I say to her. I just … he has kids now.

“So? she said. “I’ll never get to because some piece of shit murdered me. Find out who. If it isn’t him, fine. He gets to go back to playing house with Molli-Polli.”

He married Molly Polomic? I ask, then dimly recall having heard that from someone a million years ago.

“Just find out if he did, heaux. Jesus fucking christ, the simplest god damn thing …” she said.

Estienne hesitates, then says, “Yeah, I know the one.”

I shrug. “So why weren’t you there?”

“Is that what this is about?” he asks.

Two-fifty, I think. What’s that mean? It means there are only 250 lines allowed to be used by screenwriters and that is one of them. I’m kidding, of course, but it’s my way of pointing out clichéd and overused lines, especially ones that help the writer with movement or exposition rather than sound like things people actually say.

But, some folks are more comfortable with being a cliché than others, and that’s what Estienne says, so.

“Yeah, Esti,” I say. “That’s what this is about.”

“Jesus christ, Teresa, that was thirty years ago. I haven’t thought about her in ages.”

I look at Wendy’s ghost, who looked pissed. It makes me smile in a sadistic kind of way. Wendy always had to be the center of everyone’s universe, and the idea that she wasn’t anymore for Estienne had upset her, which I find amusing.

“Do you know how she died?” I ask, trying to mollify Wendy and to get through this fucking scene.

“It was an accident,” he says. “A car crash.” He grips his own arms, and rubs them slightly, which tells me he probably didn’t do it, but I let him talk in case he knows anything helpful. “We had been in one before, you know. A different crash.”

I do know that, but you probably don’t, and he could say something else I don’t know, so I let him tell me about it.

“We were on Old Page Road … just over there.” He motions with his head in what he believes is the direction of the road. He’s off by about forty-five degrees, which tells me his spatial awareness is not exceptional, at least not right now, under stress.

“Argos had been drinking and chemmin’. Shit, we all had. He was driving too fast. I knew that, but.”

I know Estienne was the one driving, not Argos. But I want to hear more. Maybe I can tell if he’s lying or if his memory has changed.

“I didn’t say anything. We went off the road and through the brush, between the trees. I thought for sure we were toast and would crash right into a tree. But we didn’t. We hit that old crane. You know the one I mean?”

I do, so I nod, keeping my eyes fixed on him.

“The one that everyone says is haunted,” he supplies, even though I nodded already that I knew what he meant. “We didn’t hit it all that hard. I guess the foliage and underbrush had slowed us down a lot. But it was hard enough to throw the girls into the windshield. They were in our laps, you know.”

I do know that. I had seen the scars from it.

“But we caught ‘em. Argos and I. We both caught them. Each held onto our girl, so they didn’t go through,” he says.

Wendy’s ghost rolled her eyes. “He’s such a pussy. Always was. I can’t believe I used to let this guy inside of me.”

I glance at her, but don’t say anything.

“When we got to the hospital,” Estienne says, “she was completely traumatized. She was acting like a little kid. It kind of freaked me out. She was babbling, like literal babbling. In fact when I had kids of my own and they started babbling, it gave me nightmares …”

“Why?” I ask, taking a step toward him.

He almost recoils at my approach, but then hides it. “It was some freaky shit, Tee. Seeing her like that. Fucked me up.” He looks in the direction of Wendy’s ghost again, then adds, “Haven’t thought about that in years.”

Which doesn’t surprise me. He’s not really the introspective type.

“So she, what, babbled like a little kid and that gave you nightmares?” I say.

“Well, yeah,” he says. But I need him to say more to move the plot along, so he adds, “But she said other things, too.”

“What ‘other things?’” I ask.

“Dark shit, Tee. Like really dark. I try not to think about it. About her grandfather’s farm, out in Eugyna. And whips and chains.”

“Chains?” I ask.

He nods. “And barbed wire coffins.”

Wendy’s ghost sighed and chewed gum, filed her nails. “He’s such a little punk bitch. He doesn’t know anything, Tee. Let’s leave him to all this,” she said and gestured absently between file strokes.

I’m not as certain as she is, so I ask, “Is there more?”

He looks nervous.

Now, in the past, I would have leaned into that and tried to scare him more.

But wiser kinder gentler T softens, and says, “It’s okay, Estienne. I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

“You,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Me.”

But that’s not what he means.

“She talked about you,” he says. “And a dungeon.”

That … I did not know.

I look at Wendy’s ghost, who—still filing away—looked up at me and shrugged.

“She said that you were going to take her away, that all of her pain would be gone, and no one would ever bother her again,” he says.

I … vaguely recall something like that. Maybe.

“She said that you promised her, and that if she didn’t love you for it, you would do it harder until she did,” he says.

That doesn’t sound right, but. Can I trust my own memory of that time? I was pretty fucked up back then.

“She said that you said to her if even that wasn’t enough, you would take her underground, deep underground forever, where no one would ever find her or hurt her again,” he says.

I sigh faintly and just look at him.

“You get it?” he asks.

I do not. “No, Esti,” I say, “I do not.”

“We all thought you did it,” he says.

Play procedures:

• If you wanted to search the room, record what you found. If that’s too easy, and you want a challenge of some kind, roll an investigation check. Success reveals one clue or item; massive success reveals one of each or two of one kind.
• If you want to accuse me of the murder, you may do so at any time during the mystery. If you’re wrong, of course, you lose.
• Should you have a tarot deck, pull a card for the next clue. No tarot? Use a playing card deck and interpret it like a tarot card.
• If I didn’t ask Estienne something you wanted to, you can ask him before we leave.

Story path:

Wendy 1 < 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 6 > 7 > 8 > 9 > 10