“I can’t help it!” she shouted. Julie Andrews’s face was red from frustration as she yelled into her cellphone. The sound echoed off the windows of her parked car and bounced around her like a rubber ball. “I can’t help it. I haven’t had any luck!”
“I know, I know,” said the voice on the other end. It was Danny Tremaine, the only person she considered a friend at the Bureau of Investigation. “Thompson’s just a dick. He knows that we’re doing the best we can, but brass is barking down his neck. He’s just looking for someone to take the blame.”
Julie felt tears make their way towards the corners of her eyes and pulled a white handkerchief from the pocket of her sport coat. It was neat, unstained and pressed to perfection. “I can’t lose this job.”
“What makes you think you’ll get cut? You’re just in your own head. You haven’t had any worse luck than the rest of us.”
“Oh bullshift. Six agents in the task force and I am the only one who hasn’t found anything,” said Julie. Her heart pounded in her throat as she spoke. It seemed to pulse in time with the thrum of the car’s engine. “No way I’m not first on the cutting block.”
Even though Julie didn’t hear half of it, they talked for a moment about her options, but when Danny tried to bring up her ex as a possible comfort, Julie cut the conversation short. She grabbed her bag and stepped out of the rental into the parking lot of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. The heels of her shoes clacked onto the sun-soaked asphalt for a half dozen steps before she almost rolled her ankle in a hole the size of a softball. One of many in the half-ruined lot.
She adjusted her coat, the pressed lines framing her like neat window panes, and checked the heel of her shoe to make sure it hadn’t broken. “God damn this city,” she said, a lifetime of resentment pouring out of her mouth and into the aether of Jackson. She watched the ground with a careful eye as she started toward the front doors of the concrete tower. The heavy Mississippi humidity hung over her, heat lines casting a mirage-like glow around the old streets. As she made her way towards Corinth Tower, she found herself wondering, as she often had in the days when Jackson was her home, why the capital city always seemed caught between ancient and rebuilding.
When she walked through the doors, the director of the MBI, Tony Fultcher, met her with a wide, genuine grin. He wrapped her in a hug almost as soon as she stepped in. “Hey now Julie Anne! God, how long has it been? Six years?”
Julie patted Tony on the back and wriggled free of his hug. “Yeah, something like that,” she said and gave a half-hearted grin. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her handkerchief. “Haven’t missed this heat. Quantico is in the middle of a swamp, but somehow it always feels hotter here.”
“Well, you’re dressed like you’ve got a meeting with the Governor, that’s most of your problem.” Tony was wearing a plain white dress shirt and black slacks, no tie. His collar was loose and Julie could see the elastic collar of his undershirt beneath it. His sleeves were rolled up in a half-hearted, wrinkled way that made him look more like a farmer than the director of the largest paramilitary agency in Mississippi. As Julie looked at him over, she couldn’t help but be reminded of their time together. His round, kind face still smiled at her the same way it always had. A row of crooked bottom teeth accenting his smile in just the right way. Honest, never trite.“You ain’t in D.C. anymore. Nobody here but old friends and ex-cops.”
Julie smiled at him, a real smile this time. “Well, where are they?” she asked and pulled out a flip-top notebook. “I’m supposed to be taking statements from a Mister Morgan and a Mister Donalds.”
“Aw yeah they’re in interrogation room four up on the fourth. You remember your way around?”
Julie nodded. “I’ll let you know when I’ve finished up.”
“You just holler if you need anything. I’ve kept my calendar clear today in case anything comes up with this federal business.”
Julie nodded and walked to the elevator on the other end of the lobby, smiling at the old-but-unfamiliar security guard as she did. She heard Tony strike up a conversation with him behind her, and felt both grateful and disappointed she was alone again. The elevator, with its wood paneling and bright golden accents, looked like it was built sometime between 1960 and 1977. It whined and chugged as it crawled up three floors, taking five seconds before the doors groaned open and the fluorescent light spilled in. As the familiar shadows of government-office lighting danced on the paneling behind her, she found the sign near the top of the far wall which read INTERROGATION ROOMS 1-4 and hurried across the busy cluster of cubicle offices. MBI agents hurried back and forth, papers and case files in hand, the drone of muttering and teleconference meetings filled the air. The steady click of her heels drove into her ears, and for a moment she missed the awkward feeling of seeing Tony again. She thought to herself that she’d do anything to alleviate this feeling of unfriendliness, or perhaps disinterest, that radiated from the unfamiliar faces around her. She made her way, weaving between unfocused workers, to the interrogation rooms where she found a familiar face sitting at a desk along the wall.
“Carly?” Julie asked.
The thin, older blonde, somewhere north of sixty, sitting at the desk looked up from her computer. “Julie Anne?” the woman asked and threw her arms into the air as she shot up from her chair. Carly Smiths exuberated a bubbly energy that Julie remembered being both comforting and irritating, depending on the stresses of the day.
“How’ve you been?” she asked, surprised by how happy she was to see the tall, pudgy-faced woman again.
“I’ve been good! What about you?”
“Good. Loving the job.”
“What’s got you back here?”
Julie pulled out her notepad again. “I am supposed to be taking statements from Morgan and Donalds.” She flipped the notepad closed and slid it back into her bag. Names had always gone in one ear and out the other, so there were at least a hundred scribbled over the handful of pages in her frantic, indecipherable handwriting.
“Oh boy,” said Carly. Her disposition changed from happiness to exasperation, and she pulled a key out of her right pocket. “You’ve got your hands full, sweet-heart. I don’t know why you went off and got yourself involved in all of this.”
“Oh, I enjoy it,” said Julie. A half-hearted smile crept across her face.
Carly just shook her head as she unlocked the door that led to the interrogation rooms. “Good luck.”
Julie walked down the short, half-lit hallway to the fourth door and opened it. At the small, stainless steel table sat two middle aged men, both in the familiar uniform of recreational saltwater fishermen. The faint smell of the Gulf Coast seemed to emanate from them, and it looked like it had been days since they bathed. Julie sat down in the cold steel chair across from them and opened her bag. She took out her flip top notebook, one black pen, one blue pen, a stack of three legal pads, and a small, digital tape recorder.
She flipped her notebook open, sat it in its home to her left, placed a legal pad in front of her, and grabbed the black pen. From the outside, the process might have seemed like a ritual. Julie would have called it a superstition. In her line of work, one did not make light of rituals. “All right, let’s go ahead and get started. Mister David Morgan?”
The man on the left side of the table nodded. His hair was sandy brown and his eyes flickered blue in the incandescent light that filled the room. He looked so nervous that he might crawl out of his own skin. Julie jotted down a few notes on the pad.
“And Mister Steven Donalds?”
The other man nodded and said, “Yes ‘um.” His hair was gray, nearing white, and his eyes were a deep, chocolate brown. He seemed more nervous than the other man, jittery. Julie jotted down a few more notes, her handwriting bobbing in and out of the lines of the page without any obvious purpose. She took a deep breath and fought to keep what was on the line out of her mind.
She took the tape recorder, looking at the two men as little as possible, and pressed record. “This is Special Agent on Assignment Julie Anne Andrews in Jackson, Mississippi. The date is October 11th, 2017, and I am here taking the statements of one David Morgan and one Steven Donalds, who have agreed to a joint interview. Mister Morgan can you please state for the recording that you understand why you are here?”
“Yes ma’am,” said Morgan. “I understand just fine.” His accent was so thick his words seemed to slide out of his mouth. In a strange flash it made Julie think of black bottomed pie. She held back a smile and nodded.
“And Mister Donalds, can you do the same?”
“Yes,” said Donalds. “I understand.” His voice seemed much stiffer than Morgan’s. He shifted in his seat and glanced around the room with nervous eyes.
Julie gave a gentle smile. “All right, Mister Morgan, if it is alright with you, we will go ahead and let you tell us what happened last week. Before we start, please confirm for the tape that the date of this event was October 4th of this year.”
“That’s right,” said Morgan.
“All right then, Mister Morgan. Go ahead and tell me what happened from your point of view. Leave nothing out that you believe might be relevant to your statement.”
Morgan shifted in his seat and watched as Julie picked up her pen and looked at him. “Alrighty,” he said. “Me and Stevie was down on the Coast doin’ a little fishin’. We’d been down in the marshes, you know, the brackish, in Vancleave near ‘bout all day, and it was starting to get good n’ dark. We wasn’t ready to call it quits yet, so I was leaned over in the boat grabbin’ up the lights. We both live over in McLaurin, and getting back up here was gonna take more’n a little while.” Morgan wiped at a line of sweat beads forming on his face and leaned forward against the table. “When I was bent over the whole marsh seemed to light up, and I just about fell right out the boat.”
“And what was producing the light?” asked Julie.
Morgan rested his dirty elbows on the table and stared at Julie. For a moment she thought he might cry, but instead he took a deep, ragged breath. “Ma’am, I ain’t one for all of that sci-fi stuff. My oldest boy is, and I got some of it by association, I guess, but I’ve never seen more’n a quarter an episode of that Star Trek. But I swear to our Lord above that they was aliens right out there over that marsh.”
Julie raised her eyes and scrambled to write down almost a paragraph of chicken scratch. She underlined the final lines of the paragraph, which read “direct use of word ‘aliens’” six times. “Continue,” she said. She watched Morgan with a renewed intensity and made special note of every breath and movement that he made. Her heart started to pound again, and it was everything she could do to keep a nervous grin from creeping onto her face. “What was the makeup of the lights? Color, size, etcetera.”
“Oh the lights were all reds and greens it seemed to me, but I…well,” he said and gave a short chuckle, “I was so shocked by the sight of it all I went off and fell out the boat anyway and hit my head on somethin’ in the water. Thank the Lord we were in the shallows. Otherwise it’d be a wake today instead of talkin’ to you. I woke up about an hour or so later, and Stevie was sittin’ on the bank with his head ‘tween his knees.”
“And you didn’t see what happened to Mister Donalds?”
“No ma’am,” said Morgan. He glanced over to Donalds who was staring down at his hands, knees bobbing in a nervous rhythm. “No ma’am, I didn’t. Last thing I remember was hearing some kind of wild screeching sound as I fell. Something like a trollin’ motor pulled out the water too early, or, I guess, like someone had stepped on a cat’s tail.”
“Can you tell me a little more about what you mean by ‘aliens’? Did you see any figures?”
“No ma’am. All I saw was a bunch of crazy lights, bobbing all over the place around this thing that looked like ah’ egg just above the water. Then I hit my head, didn’t see nothin’ else.”
Julie jotted a few more things down in her notebook. A feeling of wild, electrifying excitement washed over her, and she became nervous that the men, tired and filthy in their distress, would notice her reactions. She collected herself and cleared her throat. “Thank you very much, Mister Morgan. If you will both excuse me, I am going to step into the hallway for just a moment, and then I’ll be right back to take Mister Donalds’s statement.”
She reached out to the center of the table and stopped the recorder before she stood up. She walked into the hallway and to the door that led back into the main room. She opened the door, leaned outside, and saw that Carly was still at her desk.
“Hey, can you see if Tony can run up here real quick? Just let him know I need to ask him a couple questions.”
“You got it,” said Carly, her voice just as bubbly as before.
Julie stepped back into the hallway, pulled out her cellphone, and dialed the third number on her speed dial. She listened to the ring for just a couple of seconds before someone picked up and a voice came through the phone’s receiver.
“Jack Thompson here.” The voice was gruff and irritated.
“Mister Thompson, this is Agent Julie Andrews.” She spoke in a meek tone, a streak of nervousness running through her.
“What is it, Andrews?” said Thompson.
“I believe I have something substantial.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes sir, the Mister Morgan I was sent to take a statement from in Jackson, Mississippi has claimed on statement that he had a direct encounter with extraterrestrial life.”
There was silence on the line. To Julie, it seemed like it would go on forever.
“Sir?”
“Is that it, Andrews?”
Julie stood in the small hallway, dumbfounded. She was sure that this was important. Something real, something substantial that could save her career. “Sir, he has made direct mention of aliens. This is what we’ve been looking for.” She had to stop herself from saying what I’ve been looking for.
“And I suppose you’ve already spoken to the other man as well?” Julie started to respond, but Thompson cut her off. “And the toxicology report has come back, correct? Is that right Andrews? You’ve done all of this and corroborated the report with locals on the coast, some odd 160 miles away, if I remember my high school geography right, in the 17 hours you’ve been gone? My god you might be the finest agent we’ve got. I’m going to suggest you for a promotion immediately. Hell they should give you my job, Agent Scully. Solved the case of the Vancleave Lights in a one-hour block, commercial breaks included.”
Julie said nothing, the thick sarcasm cutting deep. She could feel him tearing down her thin veneer of hope, the way Thompson had always done since her appointment to the task force, and tried to push the oncoming sense of hopelessness away. Her breath hitched as she started to defend herself, to defend her process, but before she could, Thompson hung up without saying another word. She felt light the tears that had welled in her eyes and took the handkerchief from her coat pocket. She blotted at them as Tony walked through the door into the hallway.
“You needed something?” he asked as he let the door close behind him with a delicate click.
Julie slid the handkerchief back into her pocket and turned to him. “Hey, yeah.” She tried to find her head in the fog that Thompson had put her in. “Look, do you know anything about these two guys? Are they trustworthy?”
Tony shrugged and crossed his arms. “No prior convictions, but I don’t know them personally.” His face became transfixed in a careful mode of consideration. “They’re both construction guys. They work for a firm out of Brandon, or it might be Flowood. One way or the other, they don’t have any record to account for.”
“You ordered a toxicology report, right?”
“Yep, just like you said when we talked yesterday. Considering that this is federal, we sent it to the in-house to search for the big stuff: cocaine, heroin, LSD. For the finer notes like fent and salvia it’ll have to go to the state crime lab. That might take a week or more.”
“I need you to rush the in-house. Next few hours.”
Tony grinned and gave a boyish thumbs-up. “You got it, I’ll have it to you by end of business.” He started back towards the door but stopped just before he opened it. “You okay?”
Julie didn’t say anything and walked back into the interrogation room, unable to say anything about Thompson without breaking down. She sat down at the table and turned to a new page in her legal pad, got the blue pen, and turned the recorder back on. “All right Mister Donalds, can you please state for the tape that the date of this event was October 4th of this year?”
“Yes, it was,” he answered.
“In your own words, please describe the events as they happened.” Her mind reeled and she fought to stay calm.
“Well,” said Donalds. He was uncomfortable and seemed aware of every sound around him as his eyes darted from one place to the next, never meeting Julie’s. “I had fallen asleep in the boat for about thirty minutes when I heard a big crash. The boat was shaking, I guess that must’ve been David falling out, and when I came to the sky was all filled with lights and he was in the water.” Donalds looked down at his hands, and his fingers drummed on the table with frantic anxiety.
“Continue,” said Julie as she jotted notes.
Donalds looked at Morgan, who gave an understanding, but somber, smile. “The lights were wild and moving up and down so much it made me feel sick. They looked like…hell I don’t know, drunk christmas lights big as baseballs. I blacked out for a moment I guess, and when I woke up, I was on a cold table.”
Julie raised her brows. “Continue.”
“There were these…things standing all around me, and little metal tools were in…me.” Donalds’s face held a grave expression. His mouth twitched.
“Mr. Donalds, I understand this might be difficult for you, but can you describe what these creatures looked like and what they were doing to you?”
“Some were five feet tall and some were fifty. Little hands, big heads, and colors that didn’t make any sense. Their bodies moved and swayed like they was made outta water or somethin’. They sounded like they were talking Mexican backwards.” He never looked up at Julie.
“And what were they doing to you?”
Donalds didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry, but I must be thorough.” Julie could feel the pain radiate from Donalds, but her mind was on her job. Her future.
“Everything.” Donalds seemed to have forced the word out, and it carried the weight of trauma with it. “They were doing…everything to me. I’m not a young man, you understand. I’ve spent time at the doctor for a lot of things. That’s what it was like. Involun’try doctorin’.”
Julie gave him a solemn look and jotted down a few more notes. She tried to push it further, but Donalds said nothing else. Instead only gritted his teeth, his eyes clenched shut. Julie relented and sat the pen down on top of her pad. “All right, gentlemen. I thank you for your participation in this. Can you both just verify for the tape that everything you have said here is the truth in your own words?”
“It is,” said Donalds.
“Yes ma’am, it is,” said Morgan.
“Thank you for your cooperation today. Please understand that, as part of this investigation, neither of you are currently suspected of any wrong doing. However, your contact information will be maintained, and you might be contacted in the future for further questions regarding this investigation. You may exit back the way you came, and Missus Carly will point you to the elevators.”
The two men told Julie goodbye and walked out of the room without any real conversation. That was fine with her, she was unsure how much longer she would be able to hold herself together. She took her belongings and placed them back in her bag, trying as she did not to think too much on what the men had told her. She grabbed for her phone to call Thompson but thought of the toxicology report and decided against it. She stopped at Carly’s desk on the way out and gave a shy, tired grin.
“Heading back?” asked Carly.
“No, going down to the coast to take a few more statements from community members tomorrow,” she answered. “Can you tell Tony I’m at the Old Capitol Inn? Ask him to bring that report by as soon as he has it.”
“No need, Julie Ann,” said Tony as he walked up behind her. “I’ll bring it by as soon as it comes up.”
“Thanks Tony, and, look, I know you’re Director here, but this is federal business, so I have to ask—”
Tony put his hands up and nodded. “I know, I know. Don’t open it.”
Julie nodded and patted him on the shoulder before she headed towards the elevators. As she made her way towards her rental, her mind ebbed between hope and nauseating despair. When she sat down in the car, she drove towards her hotel in a nervous fog. Though she had always been prone to losing herself in daydreams, she thought of nothing on the short trip to her hotel. She marched up the steps to her room where she paced the floor nonstop, her mind spiraling as she thought of the possibilities and her hopes on repeat. She read the stack of local newspapers she had collected in the airport as she paced, each one with headlines across the front page like “Aliens on the Gulf” or “Redneck Abduction.” None of them had any additional information, at least not any she could rely on. The “Redneck Abduction” story, from some local rag called the Vancleave Surveyor was some of the worst journalism she had ever read. The writer, a crackpot conspiracist if she had ever read one, blamed the entire thing on a recent nuclear power plant that had opened on the far opposite end of the coast. She read on like that, pacing back and forth as she did, and the sharp shuffling of her bare feet had almost worn marks into the carpet by the time three sharp knocks came to the wooden door.
“Julie Ann?” said Tony.
Julie held the handle for almost ten seconds, too terrified to open it.
“You in there?” he called again and broke her from her fog.
She opened the door and Tony stepped in. “Got the report?”
Tony waved a yellow envelope in front of her. “You look it over, I’ve gotta’ see a man about a horse.”
Julie snatched the envelope from him as he stepped into the restroom, her hands shook so bad she almost couldn’t open it. As she swallowed down her anxiety, she tore the envelope open and scanned the page. She noted the negative results for marijuana, cocaine, and heroin with an increasing feeling of hope, of serenity. Her eyes were drawn to the end of the test results, where it read:
MORGAN, DAVID—POSITIVE—LYSERGIC ACID DIETHYLAMIDE (LSD)
DONALDS, STEVEN—POSITIVE—LYSERGIC ACID DIETHYLAMIDE (LSD)
Julie’s face fell, her mind raced, and she could feel total, undeniable fury in her heart. Without a thought, she balled the results up and threw them towards the trash can beside her bed. They bounced off the wall and tumbled to the floor, rolling halfway across the room.Tony walked out of the bathroom, and his eyes wandered toward the ball of paper.
“Not good news?” he asked.
Julie said nothing and sat down on the bed. Tony nodded, sat down beside her, and placed his arm around her shoulder. She let her head rest on his shoulder, her mind searching for options. Her cell phone rang, and Julie sat up.
“Hello?”
“Andrews, this is Thompson. A faxed copy of the toxicology report from the Vancleave case just came across my desk.”
Julie said nothing, but a thin line of tears started down her cheeks.
“Don’t worry with the locals. Be on the first flight back.”
Thompson hung up and Julie tossed her phone across the room.
#
