Chapter 13 - The Dayton Descent
Three days later, I touched down at Dayton International Airport aboard a private twin-engine turboprop leased through Apex logistics.
The Ohio sky hung low and gray, dumping a miserable, freezing drizzle over the endless concrete runways.
I didn't take a limousine.
I rented a standard, mud-spattered Ford Explorer from the terminal garage and drove directly toward the industrial outskirts of the city.
The neighborhood where Natalie had landed was a depressing cluster of faded aluminum siding and overgrown gravel parking lots.
Her building, the Westwood Manor Apartments, smelled permanently of damp carpet, industrial bleach, and cheap frying oil.
I parked the SUV beneath a flickering fluorescent security light that hummed an irritating D-flat chord.
Climbing out into the bitter Midwestern damp, I pulled my charcoal wool trench coat tight against my chest.
My leather boots crunched over frozen puddles as I walked up the cracked concrete steps toward apartment 4B.
The front door was dingy white, scarred by boot prints and old mounting tape from discarded delivery flyers.
I didn't bother knocking.
I reached out and turned the brass doorknob, finding it unlocked—a careless habit born of desperation or sheer exhaustion.
The interior of the apartment was suffocatingly hot, heated by a rattling baseboard unit that smelled of burning dust.
Natalie was sitting at a wobbly laminate kitchen table, surrounded by an overwhelming mountain of past-due bills and collection notices.
She looked unrecognizable compared to the golden girl who had once mocked my secondhand sweaters in our parents' kitchen.
Her blonde hair was unwashed, pulled back into a greasy, lopsided ponytail that hung limply against her neck.
She wore an oversized gray sweatshirt stained with coffee and dried soup, her fingernails bitten down to the raw quick.
As the door creaked open, she flinched violently, her head snapping up with eyes wide and bloodshot.
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For a second, she stared at me as if I were a ghost stepping straight out of a Midwestern urban legend.
Then, the terrible, humiliating truth of her reflection finally caught up with her throat.
