Read Online Sleeping Policemen by Dale Bailey - Free Book Online Page A

had no idea what fate awaited Gatsby and Daisy in the deep end of the novel, but he recognized the ominous portents. He wondered if Casey had been in school, and where. His stomach roiled. Again he watched the trickle of blood roll slowly across her breast.
    â€œVery good, Mr. Laymon. Glad you’re back with us.” Gillespie paced to the door and back to the lectern. “His arms outstretched, his longing like something palpable. That green light at the end of the Buchanan pier—it becomes symbolic of all that Gatsby dreams of and hopes for and devotes his life to. A green light as vibrant as life itself, as evasive and insubstantial as starlight. A symbol of elusiveness.” Gillespie smiled. “The green light,” he whispered, arms outstretched.
    He paused dramatically and then strolled to the far end of the classroom, his words running together in Nick’s mind. He thought back to something Sue had said last night. He must have nodded off because the next thing he knew Sue was in mid-sentence and the clock beside his bed read 3:11. Darkness cloaked the room, the moon behind heavy clouds. The clock bathed them in a red glow.
    Like radiation, Nick thought.
    â€œâ€”Carrie Witherspoon but everyone called her Spoon because she’d scoop up just about anything.” Sue talked as if in a trance, her voice low and thoughtful. “She wanted to come to the college but couldn’t afford it. I think her Mom works somewhere on campus, a janitor or something. Carrie worked down at the Duracell plant, but she spent most of her nights up here on campus. I ran into her a couple of times at the Torkelsons’ parties.” Sue shivered.
    Nick remembered her, a dark-haired, skinny girl. Not ugly, but not pretty either. A plain girl, just like the ones he’d known in Glory, girls desperate to scale the walls of their claustrophobic lives. All they walked and talked was deliverance—and most of them, including Carrie Witherspoon, attempted to earn it on their backs. Somewhere in the dimly lit recesses of his mind—behind the leering visage of the dead guy, just beyond the yawning maw of Casey’s pain—Nick seemed to remember something else about Carrie, something that stirred the campus.
    â€œWhat about her?” he asked Sue.
    â€œDon’t you remember?” Sue sat up and turned toward him. “She disappeared the fall of our sophomore year.” Nick remembered then. “Have you Seen Me?” fliers peppered the campus for a couple of weeks and once her mother—a hulking and bedraggled cafeteria lady, he recalled, not a janitor—showed up at one of the fall parties, asking questions. He could still see the haunted look in her eyes.
    After that, nothing, as if Carrie Witherspoon had fallen into an abyss. Everyone assumed she had finally made her escape, fleeing Ransom for better prospects. Nick hadn’t thought of her since.
    â€œWhat if,” Sue said, her voice clipped, as if she measured each word, “she was a number? Number ten or seven or even the very first.” She sounded, just for a second, eerily like the videotape’s voice.
    A cold rush—colder than that mountain stream—flowed through Nick. Casey filled his head, her face a rictus of terror. What’s it like, he thought, to be that scared? Sue lay down beside him and Nick wrapped his arms around her. “Oh, Nicky,” she said, breathing into the cup of his throat. He lay awake for a long time, watching shadows shift in the dark, nebulous phantoms that transmogrified into screaming mouths, the sleek curve of a crumpled fender, the silhouette of a dead man’s head.
    â€œMr. Laymon, have you left us again?”
    Nick jerked in his desk, spilling his books to the floor. A wavelet of laughter rippled through the class. Dr. Gillespie closed his eyes and solemnly shook his head.
    â€œAs I was saying,” he continued, “Fitzgerald ends the novel