“That’s actually really interesting.” Greg sounded impressed or surprised, Bess couldn’t decide which. “Is there more?”
“There is, but it can take forever to really get into it, and I’m pretty tired.” She gave the sheepish smile of the person who admits they’re sleepy first. She’d purposely set their first date for a Wednesday night so she could easily use the excuse of getting to bed early for work the next day.
“Oh yeah, of course.” He squashed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I didn’t mean to keep you up. Thanks for a nice night, Bess.” Greg leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. He pointed to the table. “Is that notebook like Betty’s?” He was gesturing to a small green notebook with a cheap ink pen Bess stole from a motel lying across it.
“Oh, gosh. Yeah, I guess it is. I like to write down stuff sometimes. When I can’t sleep at night it helps me relax. I guess because it’s basically mindless. It’s like meditating. Instead of chanting or whatever, I write.”
Greg smiled. “That’s nice. I like that idea. I’ll call you later, okay?”
Bess was positive this was a lie. “Should I walk you back out now? You know, the Impaler… woooo,” she made a low key ghost noise and wiggled her fingers ominously.
“Nah—I’m safe as safe can be, Bess. You know old Vlad only likes the ladies.” Greg laughed. Bess gave a little smile to show she was a good sport, too well-mannered to let on that his comment unnerved her. She had never known a single one of Vlad the Impaler’s six victims, but sometimes she had nightmares about them. In her dreams the six heads sat on her kitchen counter, all talking at once. Sometimes they spoke in different languages. Sometimes they made screeching noises so loud Bess would have to cover her ears. As she tried to decipher what they were telling her, a large shadow would appear in the doorway. The heads would fall silent. She could never understand what they were saying.
Once Greg’s car had pulled away from her house, Bess changed into blue pajama pants and an old white tee shirt. There was a full six pack of Fat Tire waiting in the fridge. She opened one with the tulip-shaped bottle opener that hung from her wall and took a few swallows before retreating to the worn charcoal grey couch and turning on the television. She flipped through the channels too quickly to register what was on any of them, then scrolled through again, slower this time, trying to pay attention.
Bess stopped on the local news. She thought back to Greg telling her he’d better walk her in so Vlad didn’t get her. There hadn’t been a new victim in months. She didn’t know if she would be more relieved to hear nothing on the news, or to hear they’d found his next victim—head spiked onto a PVC pipe in some abandoned lot in Antioch, body never to be found. If they found someone else she could feel safe for a couple of months.
Bess shook her head and changed the channel, lingering on an old episode of MythBusters before giving up and switching it off entirely. Restless energy twitched through her limbs. The beer was on her coffee table and she plucked it up and gulped some down before replacing it and closing her eyes, allowing her mind to wander.
The repetitive caw of seagulls filled her ears. Bess pictured Amelia Earhart out there in the ocean with her injured navigator, Fred Noonan. Fred slipping in and out of lucidity, yelling for his wife and trying to run out of the plane and into the ocean. The rising tide lapping into the Lockheed Electra. She smelled the salt air and saw the black profile of the Norwich City like a hole punched into an already dark sky.
“This is Amelia Earhart.”
Frantic SOS signals sent out to possibly no one. Everything had gone so wrong and now her legacy would sink into this one tragic failure.
Where would she have gone? Bess wondered if she drowned straight away—her legs scraped and cut by jagged bits of coral, her muscles too exhausted to carry her to shore—or if she made it to the beach before dying of exposure, starvation, or dehydration. Giant coconut crabs would carry away her body bit by bit. The ocean would overtake her plane. Her existence would be erased.
Bess played each scenario out in her mind. Sometimes Noonan was with her, sometimes not. Sometimes she watched him drown as he raved and fought against the ocean.
Her eyes popped open. Her body was damp with sweat. She’d fallen asleep. At first she thought she’d been dreaming about Vlad but then it came back to her.
Amelia.
After Earhart’s disappearance, rumors started to spread that she’d been captured by the Japanese. At the time, any English-speaking women broadcasting Japanese propaganda were known as “Tokyo Rose”, and some theorized one of the women on the radio might be Earhart. Her husband, George Putnam, investigated these rumors diligently. He listened to hours of recordings, but he never heard his wife’s voice.
Bess breathed deep and reached for her beer. It was warm and a little flat, but Bess gulped it down as fast as she could. She stood and tried to stretch out the kink that had settled into her shoulders. For a second, she considered going to bed but knew she would never get back to sleep.
The garage always felt a little too warm for most people, but Bess thought the temperature was perfect. Dragging a folding chair over from the corner of the room, she settled herself at the card table. She clicked the radio on and slowly scanned through the channels, pausing here and there, moving backward, trying to pick up a strong signal.
With a meticulous hand she wrote the date at the top of a fresh page in her notebook. Jotting down bits and pieces she found interesting as she went, Bess began her nightly meditation. She switched between the upper and lower sideband setting to hear random voice communications. Sometimes she would linger over the beep-screeches of data signals, letting the noise overtake her, thinking about how it was so senseless to the ear—to someone who didn’t know better—but with the right programs it could be translated. The noises were her religious chants. She wrote down weather conditions being broadcast to pilots over the ocean, collected international news reports alongside song lyrics.
She closed her eyes and listened in awe to the foreign language broadcasts, the words like a prayer she couldn’t quite understand but found comfort in. From time to time she listened in on truckers and ham radio operators talking back and forth. She especially liked hearing people use Morse code. It was something she learned in her early twenties, and while she missed some things, she’d learned enough universal abbreviations that she could catch the drift of the secrets people were sharing. Women were referred to as “YL”, meaning Young Lady, and men were “OM”, Old Man—this was an old language, a gallant one. 88 meant “love and kisses”.
Then there was the Buzzer. Tonight seemed like a Buzzer kind of night. Bess tuned her receiver to frequency 4625 kHz. A dull endless hum filled the garage. It was legendary in the shortwave world, a Russian station that had been playing this same monotonous tone since the early 80’s, occasionally joined by a low deep foghorn-like sound. Maybe once a week there would be a word or two in Russian.
After about an hour of buzzing her nerves were calm and her mind was easy. Her eyelids began to droop but she didn’t want to leave the radio. To go into the quiet house would be to give her imagination free reign once again. The station drowned out her dreams.
This is Amelia Earhart
This is Amelia Earhart
Bess jerked awake. A page of her notebook was stuck to her cheek and came up with her head before gravity caught on to what was happening and yanked the book back to the table.
SOS
SOS
Bess observed the radio, unsure if the transmissions were real or following her out of her dreams.