Hard Landing by Lynne Heitman Page A

also because it didn't belong in the place where she'd died.
    I carried the box and the running log to the bottom of the staircase and went back up to get the lights. Dan had not only left every light burning in every room he'd searched, he'd also left a couple of drawers open in Ellen's desk along with the cassette door on the answering machine. Dan was right. Both of the tapes were missing. I had closed everything up and reached over to turn off the desk lamp when I noticed the red light on the fax machine. It was out of paper. According to the message window, there was a fax stored in memory. I knew Ellen would have paper nearby, and it didn't take long to find it. I dropped it in the tray and waited. After a few beeps, the machine sprang to life, sucked one of the pages into the feeder, and started to turn it around, spitting it out, bit by tiny bit. With a surge of nervous anticipation I plucked it out. A second one started right behind it.
    It was written in cutout letters like a ransom note. It wasn't addressed to me. It wasn't meant for me, but it still made me shaky enough that I had to sit down. It said, "Ellen Shepard is proof that dogs fuck monkeys." I sat in her chair and stared at it. It had to be from someone at the airport, from one of her employees, and how sick was that? Having to show up at work every day knowing that you might be glancing at or talking to or brushing past the person who wrote this? Thinking about harassment in the abstract was one thing. Holding it in your hands was another.
    Probably because I knew what was coming, the second one seemed to take even longer. This one was handwritten, the message scrawled diagonally. "Mind your own business, cunt."
    And they kept coming, one after another, each more crude and disgusting than the last. As they rolled off, I checked the time and date stamps and the return fax number. They'd all been sent in the middle of the night from the fax machine in the admin office-my office. But at least they were old. At least there wasn't someone at the other end right this minute feeding the stuff in as fast as I could pull it off. Real-time torment-that was a thought that made my stomach lurch, and it occurred to me that maybe she had left the paper tray empty for a reason.
    The last one to roll off was another one-liner, this one typed. "Regular place, regular time on Tuesday" was all it said. There was no name and no signature. According to the time stamp it had been sent at 2307 hours on Saturday, January 3-two days before she died-from a Sir Speedy in someplace called Nahant. It was from the snitch. Had to be. I put it in the pile, turned off the light, and was into the hallway when I heard it. It was so sudden and unexpected in the mostly dark, empty house that it was like an electric shock to my heart. It took a moment for me to calm down and realize that it was only the sound of the phone ringing. Ellen's phone. It was a perfectly ordinary, everyday sound and it scared me stiff. That it rang only once and stopped was even more chilling. Right behind it came the sound of the fax machine powering up again in the dark office. It was a sound that was so common, so mundane, and it was one of the most frightening things I'd ever heard.
    I called for Dan. No answer. He could have been anywhere in the huge old house. The fax began to print and my pulse rate began to climb. I called again and then realized that even if he came, he wasn't going to do anything for me that I couldn't do for myself, right? It was just a fax machine, for God's sake.
    I turned on the light and went back into the office, creeping up to the machine as if it was a rattlesnake. The page scrolled out slowly, leaving me to read it one word at a time. "We're"… the machine seemed louder than before… "watch"… and slower… "ing"… and it took everything I had not to just rip it out before it was finished… "We're watching you" is what it said and below that the number 1018.
    At first I