Debbie hated her job. She was smart, eager to learn, but her parents couldn’t afford to send her to college and she wasn’t able to secure much in the way of financial aid. So she ended up at this damn old rundown County Courthouse where her father had been a janitor for 25 years. He got her the job by talking up her typing skills one day while cleaning up a coffee spill on the D.A.’s carpet. As he scrubbed up the coffee that day, the janitor miraculously found a segué to talk about his daughter’s secretarial skills. "Thanks a lot, Dad," she thought often as she performed the ever-increasing menial tasks of her workday.
At least she didn’t have to work at the shopping center like many of her high school classmates. But, nevertheless, sitting at that large steel desk in a blank room with no windows, no art and dirty white paint on the walls, Debbie got angrier every day. Angrier at her parents for not being able to get her out of this town, angrier at the town for being what it was, angrier at the other, older, satisfied people who worked contentedly at the Courthouse and angrier at her boss.
He wasn’t that bad a boss, she knew, except for the way he called her "sweetheart," "toots," "dear," "darling," and every other minorly offensive name you could call a female subordinate. He wasn’t all that demanding in terms of work. He didn’t edit and triple-check her memos, for example, like the Voter’s Registrar did to his secretaries down the hall. In fact, this easy-goings was one of the reasons she got angrier with him with each passing day. Like almost everybody else in this town, he seemed overly content with the mediocrity of this place. He didn’t excel at what he did, she thought, and he didn’t mind. He had been D.A. for 10 years now, and he didn’t seem to aspire to anything higher. How like this town he was. Debbie wasn’t. She wanted to be different.
If she was stuck in this place for now, Debbie had been thinking recently; at least she might as well make the most of it. She wanted to conquer her tendency to focus on the negative parts of her home county. So, she had decided in the last few days to pay more attention at the office – that cursed office – and learn something. It’d be good experience if she majored in law when she finally went off to college, she thought. Maybe she’d show these imbeciles at the Courthouse a little about how they should do things.
She sat down in the high-backed leather chair in front of Brookman’s desk and crossed her legs. As she’d sat down the moment before, she thought she’d noticed her tight pink skirt riding up her thigh, but a quick glance down gave her relief as she saw it was in the proper professional position. She looked up. "Yes, sir." She said, flashing her sparkling white teeth.
Brookman started dictating this pissy little memo about the importance of staff keeping the coffee break area spotless and tidy. He always did this when some big case was breaking, she had noticed. He procrastinated … avoided thinking about the thing until the last possible moment he could get away with it. "What a loser," she thought. But, she caught herself. "No," she countered. "Be positive, damnit. Positive!"
"Mr. Brookman," Debbie said, smiling, "how are we going to organize ourselves to deal with this Barbie case?" She smiled again as punctuation at the end of the question. There, she had said it; her first attempt at substantive conversation with the boss.
Brookman looked surprised. He chuckled. "Well, it’s more complex than that, ‘cakes. The police have a lot of work to do themselves yet. We’re still waiting for a lot of preliminary reports from the Homicide department." He stood up and walked around his big oak desk to the chair where she was sitting. He placed himself behind her and put his big hands on her pink suit, on her shoulder-padded shoulders. She tensed up, still looking forward. "You see, Debbie," he said, (patronizingly, she thought to her self) "there are really two separate, but equally important groups that get involved here: the police, who investigate the crimes, and us. We prosecute, you see. We’ve got to depend on them to do their part right now, collecting crucial crime scene evidence and the like. Our work will begin in earnest soon." He squeezed her shoulders. "Do you understand that?" He asked.
"Fuck you," her cynical side wanted to say. "You’ve just never had a case this big and you’re scared of fucking it up." But she resisted the temptation again. "Positive!" she thought.
"I was thinking, sir." She turned around and looked up at him, her eyes focusing squarely on the knot in his blue and white striped tie. "I was thinking maybe you could give me some different assignments around the office; more important stuff like some of the law interns do. I mean, I’m smart and you know I work hard."
Brookman patted her right shoulder and started walking back around his desk to his chair. Once again, he chuckled. "Well, you never know Deb, you never know."
She slammed her car door – not out of anger or anything, but just because that’s what it took to close the damn thing. Debbie couldn’t wait to get inside to take her shoes off. Those shoes that her mother had bought for her – those black high heels – simply had to go. They looked good, sure; confident, professional, stylish. But they cut into her feet. They had even caused her feet to bleed earlier in the month.
She opened the screen door to her family’s littered porch. Her sister’s new red bicycle rested on the side of the house to her left as Debbie approached the front door. She fumbled around in her purse, which she carried on her right shoulder, for her keys. She couldn’t find them amidst the gum, tampons, credit cards and scraps of paper in her bag. Hoping against hope, she reached out for the brass knob anyway. She turned it, and it opened. She pushed open the door and saw her father on the couch at the far end of the living room, his arms wrapped around her younger sister Tonya. They were crying.
She didn’t close the door, but she walked across the room anyway. She noticed how little noise she was making as she walked each step in those uncomfortable heels. Perhaps she was just walking softly, or perhaps the thick faux Oriental area rug was cushioning the impact of her heels against the hardwood floor. Finally, her right foot stepped off the rug. A noticeable click of shoe hitting wood echoed throughout the old high-ceilinged room during a lull in the crying. Dad and Tonya looked up. Tonya started crying again as Dad’s eyes fixed on Debbie. "Honey," he said, "your mother was killed. We just heard."
News of the latest murders hit Brookman like a kick in the gut. With his reelection campaign just swinging into high gear, he now would have to devote the entirety of his attentions to a high profile multiple murder case. First, the Barbie killing, and then this afternoon, the murders of the two funeral home secretaries, Debbie’s mother and another young girl just out of high school.
Looking out his window into the Town Square, Brookman noticed something weird. The Square, center of the downtown’s vibrant shopping district, was empty. Ordinarily it would be bustling with activity at 5:05 p.m., full of kids celebrating the end of another school day, full of moms crowding into the grocery store. But today, it was deserted. Word of the afternoon (or late morning) murders must have spread around the town like an electric current. Thinking about the fear gripping his native town, Brookman momentarily felt fear himself. He turned around suddenly, thinking he had heard a noise near his office door. He saw no one though, and smiled just the same. "Keep it calm, J.J. Stay cool," he said aloud.
He walked across the room to the antique sofa near the suspicious door, sat down on the edge and picked up the phone. Quickly, from memory, he dialed the number. "Nina Franklin," he said matter-of-factly. A brief period of music followed as the prosecutor thought of what he would say to the television anchorwoman.
"Nina," he said quietly, surprised she got on the line so soon. "Yeah, it’s me. Look’s like I’ve got a big one, huh?"
"Get down here at 6 and I’ll give you an exclusive."
Debbie and her mother had never really gotten along. When she was a kid, Debbie frequently threw tantrums when her mother, Betty, criticized her grammar or manner of speech. Then, as she entered school, Debbie gained weight, and her mother criticized her for that too. Later, as she entered her teenage years, her clothes were the subjects of frequent carping. "That’s too short!" "That’s too tight!" "You’re not a slut, are you? Why do you want to dress like one?"
Debbie could hear those complaints from the past echoing through her brain as she cried in her bedroom alone. After her father told her the news, she had just stood there in the middle of the living room for several moments. She didn’t cry, but she watched as her father and sister wept uncontrollably – tears streaming down their faces, their eyes soaked and blood shot, their chin muscles quivering with emotion. Debbie wasn’t sure why she didn’t cry right then and there. Maybe, she thought now with the emotional distance that 30 minutes brings, she was just too shocked to react. That was probably the reason, she knew. Anyway, she thought, I’m crying now, so it’s okay. She had left her door open, in fact, so Dad and Tonya could hear her. She wanted them to know she was reacting as a daughter should react to this news. With appropriate grief.
Suddenly, a wave of realization hit her. She was the woman in charge now; the woman who would have to cook, clean, iron, dress her sister, help her with homework. She would be the wife now – subservient at home, just as she was at work.
Debbie knew at that very moment that she couldn’t do this. She couldn’t fill her mother’s shoes. She was not a Mom. Something would have to give. Debbie wanted so much. She still had so much to do, so many places to go. She knew she just couldn’t – couldn’t – get trapped here. She thought to herself how callous it sounded – just a few hours after her mother’s murder – for her to be thinking so selfishly. She had to get out of the house now, or events would trap her here for a very long time. Sitting alone on her bed, Debbie resolved to take control of her life.