My Friend Junie

The Death Trilogy #3

Mark Bryce

1. A Phone Call

My friend Junie was arrested last night as she grappled with a shop mannequin in the window of a local apartment store. The police called me after they had tried to process her at the station, and this is what they told me: after her arrest Junie wouldn’t call anyone; Junie wouldn’t speak or respond.

Junie and I hadn’t really talked for a while but it is possible that mine was the only number on her phone. Junie is a ‘loner’, a word of my mother’s. She was fond of using it against me when I was twenty-two because I hadn’t yet dated a boy. But when she met Junie she stopped saying it. Junie was turned like a wilting flower against the sun. My mother’s questions, dancing around the very thing she wanted most to know but dare not ask – if Junie was a lover or a friend (the horror of a lesbian daughter! where will the grandchildren come from?!?!) – were enough to send Junie deep into herself.

So, yeah. Junie. Arrested. With a mannequin. A dummy. I’m not going to judge that, I thought, as the cop explained what had happened through the phone.

When I arrived at the station I was greeted by a uniformed police officer, well-groomed and handsome. He was tall, so it wasn’t any effort for him to lean over the counter and place his mouth near my ear as though he had some intimacy he wished to share. He told me that Junie hadn’t spoken to anyone all night. She had no identification. They hadn’t known her name until they spoke with me on the phone. ‘Junie’ I told them. Her name was Junie. But that was all I could remember. How soon people slip from our minds! They’d put her in a holding cell to start with, with another woman brought in on some misdemeanour, but they’d taken her out not long after.

“We placed her in the sergeant’s office back there,” the officer said, indicating with a motion of his head an open door behind him. I could see Junie at a desk in the office, unmoving.

“Did she ask for me specifically?” I asked, trying to catch Junie’s eye through the doorway.

“No,” the cop said. “She’s said nothing. Hasn’t asked for anyone. We read her her rights but she didn’t respond. We suggested she call someone but she showed no interest. We did a search and found her phone. It didn’t even have a password.”

The officer paused to gauge my reaction, but I was merely a little confused.

“We’re concerned about Junie,” he said.

A friend from school had introduced us. Junie seemed okay at first, if just a little too withdrawn. But I hadn’t seen Junie for so long – six months? – and I had assumed that she’d faded from my life.

“It felt like she was imploding,” the officer told me: a rather mannered expression, I thought, for a cop. There must have been something in my expression that prompted him to explain: that he’d watched a documentary about the universe and singularities – black holes – and that’s how he described the feeling of looking at Junie. That she sat in the cell, non-verbal (that sounded more like cop speak to me), and he swore that he never saw her blink at all; began to wonder if she was breathing.

Even now, Junie seemed to draw everything inward: the light in the room dimmed, the warmth in the air faded and the regular sounds of traffic dulled, as though the station had been slowly immersed in a deep tank of water.

“The Senior Detective suggested I speak to you first,” he explained. “She wasn’t sure what to make of the whole situation.” I briefly considered the young Constable. Good looking. Possibly university educated. He seemed out of his element, but his possible appeal was obvious. No doubt he was considered a better candidate to speak to a young woman coming in late on a Friday night. But something seemed weird. The whole station was too quiet, as though the sound had been eaten from the room. Maybe it was that the few staff working around the office were really poor actors in a pantomime awaiting their cue.

My last evening with Junie was eerily quiet, too. She’d gone to the toilet and she’d been there so long that I started nosing through her bookshelf, bored. I opened the book before I realised it was her diary. When she returned, that’s what she saw. She changed, as though something had gone off quietly inside her, like a switch or by the sound of a clap. The light blinked from her eyes and the warm room froze between us.

* * *

2. Held in a room

“We thought we could keep a better eye on her there,” the Constable said, gesturing towards the sergeant’s office. “We were afraid she might hurt herself.”

The Constable’s tone was ingratiating, but I think we both felt the awkwardness of its paternalism. If I’d had my thoughts together I might have said something. But I felt vulnerable and concerned, and this young cop seemed like a decent enough guy. Well meaning. Perhaps even genuinely compassionate.

The office where Junie sat was a small box with a door set aside from the common work area. It had a small window at chest height – not too useful for peering through, I thought – but its door remained wide open. She still hadn’t moved even though she must have heard my voice. I figured she must have been here for hours and she probably needed to pee. But she wouldn’t ask. She was a closed shop. Apart from that last night when she seemed to take forever, I don’t remember her ever going to the bathroom.

“And there’s this other thing,” the cop was saying as I stood wondering how long Junie could hold on: how contained she really was.

“Yes?”

“Can I show you? It’s in here? The detective wanted me to ask if you knew anything about it. It’s really why we asked you here. We were hoping you could explain.”

“Sure,” I replied. He asked me to wait for a moment and left me at the counter while he disappeared through a door at the back of the station. He returned with a woman in plain clothes, possibly in her fifties, whom he introduced as Senior Detective Smith. The young cop lifted the counter to allow me through. Detective Smith offered me her hand and I shook it.

“And the name’s Constable Jones, by the way,” the young cop interjected. It made him seem clumsy and inexperienced. “Should have introduced myself before. Sorry.” He offered his hand, awkwardly, and I shook it limply, a little embarrassed now and uncertain.

“Thanks for coming,” Detective Smith said. She ushered me towards another door and the three of us passed into a room at the back of the station. There was no-one there. The Constable turned on the light. The room was dominated by a large conference table. Worn chairs. An old tube television was suspended by a bracket. An overhead projector sat dejectedly on a trolley, its knotted cord trailing somewhere behind a cabinet. Near the ceiling in the corner of the room was a surveillance camera, its red light on. The detective gestured to the table where a bulky wad of paper, possibly two feet wide, had been folded unevenly: large sheets of butcher’s paper, it seemed, held together by masking tape, forming a network of untidy trails across its under-surface, holding it together. It had a vaguely triangular shape, with one side peaked, pointing off the table like a compass.

Detective Smith nodded at the bulk of paper. “Your friend had this with her when she was arrested.” She paused and thought for a moment. “Actually, the report says it wasn’t with her when she was arrested. Hard to carry, I guess.”

“It was the only time she said anything the whole night,” Constable Jones explained. “When she realised we were taking her she got real anxious and told us to look for it near the outer door where she’d left it. She wouldn’t settle until we showed her we had it. After that she just seemed to . . . to turn off. Hasn’t said a word since.”

I nodded. I stared at the lump of paper, left there like laundry. It was large but it still felt intimate. Junie’s hands touching it. Pressing down that tape against each of the large sheets. Smoothing it down like clothing. Like a dress. Stroking it like a dress and finding unexpectedness there. A taught nub of uncertainty beneath that dress.

* * *

3. Junie’s room

“So, you’re Constance?” Detective Smith asked. She didn’t have the same manner as her younger counterpart. The question seemed less personal. More like she was establishing facts.

“We really should have introduced ourselves properly,” Constable Jones intervened apologetically.

“This is what we need you to look at,” Detective Smith said, ploughing on, regardless. The tone set by the Constable’s intimate manner when I first entered the station had now devolved towards the more officious and colder spectrum of the human heart. Both Smith and Jones took gloves from a dispensing box and flexed them onto their hands.

I looked down at the wad of paper on the table. It is something about cops, I thought, that makes it easy to feel guilty about absolutely nothing in their presence. So I tried to look interested – felt I had to act interested even though I was bursting to know what this was all about – just to placate them.

Constable Jones reached past me and pulled the mass of paper towards himself. Then he carefully flipped one side, then another, then moved around the table to further unfold the paper. The detective took the other side and between them they performed a careful reveal. I saw lines on the exposed surface of the paper; long straight lines. Then, here and there, a word or two. It wasn’t a picture – not a scene or a portrait – but its details seemed familiar. I scanned the edges of this vast representation as it unfolded, spanning the length and breadth of the conference table. Some of it even trailed onto the floor at the far end of the room because it simply wouldn’t all fit.

Then I realised. I couldn’t help it. Detective Smith heard the intake of my breath.

“You know what this is?” she asked, staring at me intently now.

It wasn’t as I remembered. Not the way you remember these things when you wonder over them at night. Not this top-down kind of looking. There was her bed and that must be the top of her wardrobe. But from this top elevation it appeared only as a large rectangle with a label too small and distant for me to read immediately.

“This is Junie’s room,” I said quietly. “It’s her bedroom. It even looks the same size.”

And roughly two feet from the edge of the drawing where it had tumbled out as the paper was unfolded, lay the book that had set her against me: her diary.

* * *

4. The map

They didn’t say anything straight away. They left me to examine the unfolded paper, but as I looked I was acutely aware of their eyes upon me, as though there would be a report to write soon and every detail of my reaction would be recorded. In the corner of the room the tiny red light of the surveillance camera still pulsed.

“We’ve read through the diary,” Detective Smith informed me. She reached across the table and pulled it towards us and then offered it to me. I looked at it. I didn’t want to touch it. She placed it back on the table between us.

I stared at its cover. Not wanting to look at what Junie had drawn. Not wanting to meet their eyes again.

“I didn’t understand it, personally. My partner’s not much of a reader, either. Your name’s in it, though. You’re aware, I assume, of Junie’s state of mind? We have certain reasons for concern. We thought . . . Have you . . . ?”

I allowed the intended question to die in the air between us. My eyes still averted, I began to look once again at the details on the edge of Junie’s drawing.

“It’s a plan drawing,” I murmured. There was Junie’s dressing table, there the side table next to her bed. But there were more details you wouldn’t expect to see on a plan. Not the type drawn by architects. On her side table was drawn a reading light, I guessed, looking top down, and her phone as well. On her desk sat her laptop computer. The details were insane. She had included the representation of a book, formalised into the topography of her bedroom map that would otherwise have casually sat upon her desk, along with all the details of its cover. There was her shoe rack with each individual shoe meticulously rendered, and each laced shoe had its laces recorded on this plan, too, whether they were bundled within the shoe itself, or snaked untidily onto the floor. There was a hair brush. There was hair. There were hair clips. The closer I leaned into this enormous image the more details it revealed to me of Junie’s room.

The Constable shifted his weight and I was again aware of their presence.

“I don’t understand,” I finally said. I was supposed to explain this. I was supposed to know. “Why was she stealing a mannequin?”

The Constable started.

“She wasn’t stealing it,” he said. “At least we don’t think so. She had all this with her.” Waving at the map. The diary. “Like she was on her way somewhere. It might have been planned. Like a ceremony.” He shrugged, looking at Detective Smith, knowing he had gone beyond his bounds. “It might have been an impulse,” he finished lamely. But by the way he was looking I could tell he thought it was no impulse. His manner, his doubtful tone, suggested he thought Junie was purposeful.

“She was trying to take its clothes. Too large for her, though,” Detective Smith offered. She gave me an appraising look. “More your size, maybe.”

I looked across the terrain of Junie’s bedroom. Like the representations of contours in a map, its folding and unfolding had left edges and peaks, valleys and crumpled segments in the paper. The light fell on it unevenly and there were sections that were difficult to clearly discern across the width of the conference table, given the dimness of the light. I began to edge around the map, looking for new details that had formerly been hidden or had not been clear.

That’s when I saw it. The final most salient detail that I had either confused, or had refused to consider . . .

“This is not just a plan of Junie’s room,” Detective Smith said, sensing my discovery. “You know that.”

. . . It was more than a detail. It was a feature. It was large enough that my observing it last of all must have seemed peculiar to a cop. There in the middle of Junie’s room was the one feature that was out of character with the precision and detail of the rest of the drawing. Laying there, drawn just like the chalk outlines from a former era, was the outline of a body and a stain.

“We’re not sure what it’s meant to be,” the young Constable conceded, forgetting himself again. “Something for a ritual?” He gave a nervous laugh. “Like bringing something to life. Or maybe just a map? Do you know what it means?” he asked, his tone suddenly more serious. I examined the surface of these sheets of taped paper, made for a butcher, my silence tracing awkward moments in time between us. Suddenly, the Constable’s voice was more urgent: imploring, “Constance?” Too intimate. Demanding a response.

But the detective had lost patience, too. She cut him off as he was about to press me again. Her tone was suddenly harsh, jolting me from my dark reverie. “What was Junie doing, Constance? What do you know about this? Surely you know what this means! Tell us where she lives. Where do you think she has put it?”

I felt urgency, fear and panic mount as her voice became more strident. Her demands short-circuited my thinking – I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know! The small light, still glowering red in the corner of the ceiling, was watching . . . was watching me. Detective Smith was close. Too close. At my side. I couldn’t look at her. I turned to Constable Jones, instead, vainly hoping for some sign of understanding from him. But his eyes no longer contained the warmth I was seeking, only a deep need.

I realised I was collapsing against the table. The map slid along its edge as I leaned into it, creating new peaks and valleys across its surface. Part of it tore. Constable Jones moved instinctively to protect it. I felt constrained though no hand touched me. Only their words. This room. Only this expanse of paper with its dark stain and thoughts growing like a strangling vine. I tried to move towards the door, stumbled. I felt my tears. Now hands were under my arms, holding me up.

“Why was Junie really arrested?” I gasped.

© Mark Bryce, 2024

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