Log: Nish and Conrad - searching for answers Who: Nish and Conrad What: Nish finally finds who she’s looking for, but instead ends up with more questions. Where: Local coffee shop When: Monday, February 12, 2018
Nish spent last night at the B&B in a drunken haze, flipping through pictures of James on her phone and feeling her heart break all over again. The weeks she’d spent in Repose had begun to weigh on her, making her feel she might never find out what had really happened the night he died, never find closure. This morning, a little hung over, she left the B&B just after noon in search of food, and found her way to a coffee shop on the town’s main street. It had the usual breakfast and brunch items, and since it was after noon she decided on a sandwich and a latte.
But things looked a little brighter for her today. She had direction now. Eddie pulled some strings for her, and now she finally had one clue. The name and a description of the witness who had called for help. Conrad. And today was the day she tracked him down.
She had just finished her sandwich and was slowly sipping her coffee when she saw him walk in, or who she assumed was him. Her eyes widened just a bit and followed him around the room, taking in little details and holding them up against what she’d been told - tall, short brown hair, athletic build, young - perhaps a teenager or young adult, and strong. That last word had been said by the EMTs with something approaching awe that she didn’t at all understand, but she added it to the list of things to look for. And, when the EMTs had asked him where he’d come from, he’d simply said ‘Repose’.
Her eyes remained locked on him as he ordered his drink and turned to find a seat. Without thinking, without hesitation, Nish got up, brought her coffee with her, and approached his table. “Excuse me,” she said, to get his attention. “This is a long shot, but were you in Newport Beach three months ago?” She didn't want to start out right away with ‘did you save my life two months ago,’ but she'd get to that.
Con liked Repose in the winter time. It was his first winter, and while at first the bland whiteout of the world had been more scary than it had been beautiful, now he was used to it, and the reindeer, sleigh bells and New Year sparkle was in his eye, just like everyone else. He felt the downward pull of the New Year too, the weight of reality settling in and the magic of December fading away behind, and he was thinking about that as he stared out the window of the coffee shop early on a Monday morning.
Like the newest resident, Con lived in the motel (an unfortunate situation for someone with hearing as good as his) but unlike her, he had an established routine when he was in town. He collected a hot drink at the shop, answered phones and carried suitcases at the B&B, and in the evenings he would go to the arcade or one of the many places around town to watch sports with the other men of the town. It was Con's first football season, and he was enjoying that immensely too.
A new voice stepped out from the buzz of the crowd. Con's hearing was such that he had to deliberately zone everyone out, but her deliberate interruption brought his eyes back from the window. He turned to look at her. Con had a blatant, unblinking stare. He was new to the world, and the world was new to him. He didn't know to be surreptitious about looking someone over and weighing them in his mind. He just did it. He didn't recognize her, but the question put him on edge.
Newport Beach had not been part of Con's routine. That had been one of the places the military men had sent him (as opposed to the science men), on one of those missions he wasn't supposed to tell anyone about. He'd gotten into big trouble when he'd made them stop for the horrific car accident, and he knew he'd probably be in worse trouble if any of them found out he'd not only been seen, he'd told somebody where he lived. It had been a blurry, scary situation, and the EMT had said where did you come from and Con had just answered without thinking.
Con stared at her and tried to decide if he was going to lie. The silence became awkward fast. Finally he said, "Have we met?"
Nish hesitated. She wasn't accustomed to feeling so out of place, so lacking in confidence, but it was a result of being in an unfamiliar town, searching for something she wasn't sure she'd ever find. But Eddie had seemed certain, and despite his history (or perhaps because of theirs), she trusted him.
“I don't think so,” she said, “but I think you can help me.” She pulled out the chair in front of him, sitting across from him at the table without being invited. “You...fit a description. I'm looking for a witness to a car crash…” she said, watching his features carefully for signs of recognition.
Con waited through her hesitation, feeling more and more guilty as it went on, even if it was only seconds. He had a large paper cup in front of him, a peppermint mocha with extra whip cream and those chocolate chip thingies, and he shifted it a little as his eyes darted past her and around the shop. No one was paying the slightest attention to them.
He put his elbows on the table and pulled his knees and his chair a little closer to the conversation. He was very young but he was big, football frontline across the shoulders and long in the leg. His knees practically scraped the table. "Yeah?" It was a cautious inquiry, and also a kind of affirmation.
Nish nipped at her lip, looking down into her mug of coffee for a second, and then back up at him. “I was in the car,” she said, deciding that she might as well come out with it. She was almost certain this was who she was looking for, and she hoped adding details would encourage some from him in return. “With my fiance,” she added, a frown now creasing her brow. “He didn’t make it.” She managed to say it without tearing up, pleased with herself and the unexpected control over her current yo-yo emotions. She swallowed the lump in her throat, her fingers tightening on her mug. “I just...I was hoping you could tell me what you saw that night,” she said finally. “The police have very little to go on, but I need to find out who did this. Anything you remember could help…”
Con's eyes whipped around the room, scanning quickly for anyone who might be listening, then came back to her. They were his most defining feature, other than the cheekbones he (cough) inherited. Ice blue, and he didn't blink much, so their attention was almost severe. His mouth was different, however. His lips softened as he watched her emotion and reacted with his own. "I know," he said, of her fiance. The guy had been gone, he knew. He wouldn't have been so quick to leave if there had been much he could do once the EMTs got there.
His expression turned guarded. "What do you want to know?"
She would have smiled at those words, confirming for her that he was definitely who she was looking for, if not for the roller coaster in her belly. Instead her expression shifted into one of eagerness, maybe hope. “Like I said, the police don’t have much to go on. The driver of the other car got away, and they can’t prosecute who they can’t find. They couldn’t even find you, and I only did because of a...favour.” She honestly didn’t know what she would have done if she hadn’t run into Eddie. Probably spent months here fruitlessly searching for him.
“I was hoping...maybe you saw something that might help. A plate, or a description of the car that hit us, maybe a face? Anything would be more than what I have right now.” Her eyes searched his imploringly. She had given her own description of the car to the police, but given her concussion and other injuries, she didn’t quite trust what she remembered. She had a faint memory of the car...seeming to rip in half around her, after the crash, and it was so strange it made her doubt anything she remembered from that night. She was sure that hadn’t been real...despite the state the car had been in when her brother showed her a picture of it after the fact. ‘Total loss’ didn’t seem to quite cover it.
Con's expression turned into one of alarm. No one was supposed to know exactly what he was or where he was, not even the people who sent him on the missions. "What favor?"
Con chewed on his upper lip, working it over with white, perfectly straight teeth. They were almost new after all, and as superficially perfect as the rest of him. He was young and uncertain, sitting there, and not as perfect as any of his makers would have liked. One thing he did not do was fidget; no turning of the cup in his hands, no tapping of his feet. After a moment of more indecision, he pulled his chair a little closer to the table and lowered his voice. "I didn't see the crash, exactly. Some headlights… It was a truck, but the lights were different." Con lifted his head and tried to see into his memory.
He shook his head. "It's hard to remember. was too worried about the people--you--inside."
Nish noticed immediately that he seemed worried, even downright scared, about who might have told her about him, even without the usual tells. She frowned a little, evading. “A friend in town pulled a few strings and got a look at the traffic cameras,” she said, though she hadn’t seen the footage herself. She didn’t think she could handle seeing the moment James had died on a traffic camera feed. “He said he thought he recognized you, so he gave me your name.” Her legal training had her hold back Eddie’s name as habit, to protect his privacy, but she wondered if they actually knew each other.
Nish frowned along with him as he went back in his memory. A truck…”Was it a big truck?” she asked, “the state of the car after...it looked like it had been hit by something huge," she said, with something approaching awe. After seeing it, she was sure it was a miracle that they didn’t both die in the crash.
"Your friend in town recognized me?" Con was only a little mollified by that, as he didn't think he was memorable enough for very many people in town to recognize him. Unless (this just occurred to him, and his expression eased) it was the Wainrights, quite a vigilante family themselves. Then again (he looked worried once more) they didn't reveal their own identities much. They were extra careful about that. Most masks were. Con focused on her once more. "Who?"
"It was… yeah. It was an expensive one. A truck or maybe an SUV. It was big." He frowned. "Not a semi, nothing like that." A blink of confusion, and then she realized it was talking about the state of the vehicle. He turned red. "What do you mean?"
Nish shifted uncomfortably, again not wanting to reveal who had pointed her in his direction, but thinking there wasn’t any way out of this. “Eddie,” she said with a wince, “we were friends a while back, and he did me a favour.”
She thought back to what had been left of her car after the accident. She hadn’t been in any state after the crash to deal with insurance or police or anything, so her brother had handled most of it for her, but he’d (proudly) shown her a picture of what her car looked like after. “It was...well, not so much crumpled, as...it looked torn, like the other car had somehow ripped it open like a sardine can,” she said with a little bit of a chuckle. “Crazy, right? I just can’t imagine how I survived it, if he…” she stopped, biting back talk of James, nipping at her lip and falling silent.
Con blinked, obviously surprised by this revelation. He barely knew Eddie. It was more that he knew of Eddie. He hadn't the slightest idea that the man could name him on sight, or would, for that matter. It didn't occur to Con to be threatened by this particular revelation. He was more perplexed. He dismissed it as something loose family units did without telling each other.
After a moment, Con's fingers fluttered over the edge of the table and then tucked together under his palm. "That was just us getting you out," he said finally, not liking the idea someone else might be blamed for damage that he had done. It would have been a lot easier to pretend it wasn't him, and he edged out that wariness by saying "us" instead of "me."
Nish nodded, immediately seeing his explanation as plausible. Of course emergency services would find a way to get her out of the car, and sometimes that meant destroying the already damaged car in order to do it. She imagined him as a kind bystander, first investigating the crash, and then calling for help, and then assisting as they got her out of the ruined vehicle. And she also imagined James. She had a flash of memory of him directly after the crash, just before she’d blacked out. He was bloodied and unconscious, still strapped in his seat next to her, though his whole side of the car had been crumpled in. For all she knew, he was already dead at that point, but that image was burned into the back of her eyelids, and she saw it almost every night when she tried to sleep.
She blinked and shook her head slightly, as if trying to dismiss the image in her head. She looked across at the man - just a kid, really - in front of her, who had saved her life that night. “Thank you,” she said finally, a hint of a smile on her lips. “If you hadn’t been there to help, I might not be here now,” she said. Not being on the side of the impact, her injuries had been relatively minor, but she had come away with internal injuries, including several broken ribs from the steering wheel. If she hadn’t been found so quickly, she could have bled out internally.
She paused for a moment, hesitating. “And you’re sure there’s nothing else? Any detail you can remember could help,” she said. She was desperate, and a little disappointed that beyond thanking her rescuer, this had been pretty well a dead end for her investigation. She couldn’t let it go without making sure.
When she blinked out of her memories, Con was watching her, the steady brightness of his almost inhumanly blue eyes unrelenting. He was troubled by the idea that she was sitting here hoping that he could help her. Con hadn't done much to begin with; he remembered the man in the seat next to her, and the voice where his heartbeat was supposed to be. He hadn't managed to get it going again, and he couldn't help but think that even with dragging them both out of the mangled wreckage, there could have been something.
Con looked guilty. "I just remember the weird red lights on the back of the SUV. I was looking at you stuck in there and I didn't think about anything else." His mouth twitched from side to side as he tried to say something that might make it better. "...I'm really sorry about your… the other guy."
Nish dipped her head just slightly, just barely a nod. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “The doctors said...he died almost instantly, that the impact stopped his heart. That’s some comfort, at least. He didn’t suffer.” But she had. For days in the hospital, and weeks afterwards recovering at home. Her ribs were still tender, aching like a deep bruise when she moved or laughed or breathed. But she was alive. Thanks to the kid sitting across from her. She found a smile for him, even though tears had glazed her eyes with emotion.
“You saved my life,” she said, holding those startling blue eyes with hers. “There was nothing you could have done for him...but if you hadn’t been there…” she swallowed the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she said again. After the crash, she might have wished he’d left her there to die, but now...now she was grateful to be alive.
Con was left feeling like he had somehow made the situation worse for her, and all he'd done that morning was get coffee and tell her the truth. Most of the truth. Con had never been a fidgeter. He just sat very still, unblinking, the coffee in the cradle of his palms. "I'm really sorry," he said, for lack of anything better to say. He wasn't sure he'd really done anything for her, nothing that really helped her. Here she was, all messed up still, and he couldn't do anything. "I'm… I'm Con. I don't think I said before." He looked down, finally breaking their gaze. His name was on his coffee cup, scribbled by the barista, and then he looked back up at her. "I work at the B&B, at the reception desk. If you… need something. You can call me there."
Nish nodded and gave him a slight smile. “I’m staying there right now,” she said, “I will. If I need,” she said, looking down at her hands and then back up at him. “Thank you,” she said again, feeling that she couldn’t say it enough. The words would never express how grateful she was to this kid sitting across from her. After a moment, she looked down into her empty coffee cup and then stood, picking it up. She hesitated by the table, and then turned to look at him once more. “You’re a good person, Con,” she said, “I owe you.” And then she turned to leave, tossing her empty cup as she went.