Hey, baby girl—How’s it hanging? Low and to the left, I always say. I have a little news, but it’s not about the piece of scum that took you. It’s about your dad. Hold on to your butt. I’m pretty sure he’s alive.
I slammed down the screen of my laptop, an involuntary reaction to the first part of my mother’s email.
She was “pretty sure” my father was alive? The man who had disappeared when I was a child, the man my mother had become obsessed with finding until a new man had come into our lives—the piece of scum who had taken me and kept me in his van for three days.
Though I always thought it a remote possibility that my father wasn’t dead, my mother’s note made me think she’d finally come upon some proof, and if that was the case, this was big news. I might not have acknowledged the fact that deep down I was sure my father was dead, but that was, in fact, what I’d come to believe.
The man who had taken me was still on the run, in hiding. For a time, I thought—was convinced—his name was Levi Brooks, but that had only been a name on an envelope I’d seen inside his van. I’d remembered that envelope on the same day the man’s body had been found on the shoreline near where the Glacier Bay tourist ships docked, the body that Randy had just asked me about, the dead man in the white dress shirt.
I had to tell myself that though this was potentially big news from my mother, it was nothing to be concerned about. My go-to reaction to almost anything “new” had become panic; I thought it must be a post-traumatic-stress reaction, but I wasn’t sure. Yet another deep breath was in order, and a silent reminder to myself that I was safe, that this wasn’t bad news. I was far away from danger. I was fine. I lifted the screen again and it lit to life, the email still there.
So, if he’s alive, that’s the good news. Or maybe it’s the bad news, hard to know for sure at this point. Fucker. It’s good he might not have been murdered, killed, torn apart limb by limb, whatever. Maybe you can tell I’m having a hard time figuring out how to feel about all of this. What are we supposed to make of the fact that he might have left us on purpose? Hang on, though—I don’t know all the details. Not yet, at least. I’m going to get them. I’m going to get him. I don’t know what I’ll do with him, but if he is alive, he will have to answer for leaving us.
Just wanted you to know the latest. I’ll keep on keeping on and let you know if I find anything t’all about the scumbags in our lives. So you don’t worry, I’m going to talk to Detective Majors about this too. I won’t run off half-cocked. I’d rather be well armed with information and then cock-up all the way.
LURVE you so much.
Mom.
“Oh, Mom,” I said when I finished reading the email. “Oh, Mill.”
Millicent Rivers, my mother, would always be a force of nature. I loved her, but she could be exhausting.
I decided to try to look on a bright side, however dim it might be. The man who’d taken me—I’d been calling him my “unsub,” for “unidentified subject”—was still out there, and I knew my mother would kill him if she found him. But if she was distracted by my father’s possible whereabouts, then her priority was no longer killing the guy who had terrorized me. I wanted him dead, but I didn’t want my mother to pay for the crime.
A surprise—though it shouldn’t have been—twinge of pain suddenly ran along the side of my head, right next to the scar from my brain surgery. I stopped everything, stopped thinking, and sat back in my chair. I closed my eyes, placed my palms on my thighs, and did even more deep breathing as I tried to meditate, think about things that wouldn’t take me back to either those three days I’d been held captive or when my father had disappeared—my two most traumatic experiences—and the resulting feelings that had just been stirred up.
Learning to rein in and control uncontrollable feelings made for hard work. I was determined to rise above everything that had tried to bring me down, but to do that, I had to learn to control not only my reactive panic but the blinding pain, the strange “spells” that sometimes came on during moments of stress.
Dr. Genero, my brain surgeon, told me the pain would subside over time. It had, a little. But when I talked to her about it, I lied and said it was getting much better. I don’t know why I lied; maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her more than I already had when I’d left the hospital without being properly discharged. She and I had talked some over the phone, but she hoped I could find someone local to help me. She said it would still take time for the pain to go away completely, but she thought a therapist of some sort might help with it as well as the unreasonable panic, too.
I still hadn’t found a doctor or a therapist I could trust. I didn’t want to talk to anyone in Benedict about the abduction—about who I truly was—except Gril. I didn’t trust anything online, either, but I was still looking.
I was working on it.
The pain in my head rode an upward wave, but not for long. I was able to relax so that the threat of a sharp knifelike stab didn’t come, and I was left with a low, dull ache. I could work with a dull ache.
I hoped to get to the point where memories were just normal thoughts, not things that sent me to places I didn’t want to go back to.
Not long ago, I had a memory of my father rehearsing his sales pitch to me. He’d sold cleaning supplies—he’d “made women’s lives easier and better.” But there had been a moment in that memory when my father had seemed bothered by something he might have done, some wrong he hadn’t righted. Maybe there was something more to those moments, but I couldn’t be sure. I opened my eyes, dull ache and all, and decided that now wasn’t the time to try to remember anything else. I should just get to work.
I had a newspaper to put together, and a thriller to write, which you’d think would have gotten easier after living one of my very own terrifying plotlines. No such luck. Writing books was still a one-word-at-a-time job that would never be easy. At least it hadn’t become more difficult.
My office, the shed where the now deceased Bobby Reardon had created the Benedict Petition, was small. Bobby had written on well-used typewriters and used a newfangled copy machine as his printing press. Along with the two old desks in the place, he’d adorned the walls with old movie posters and kept a bottle of whiskey in a bottom desk drawer. I’d become accustomed to my visitors and their expectations of a drink and some friendly conversation. I still couldn’t bring myself to leave the door unlocked, but most everyone knew to knock.
I’d kept Bobby’s typewriters and added one of my own, an ancient Olympia I’d found years earlier in a Missouri Ozarks antiques shop. I always wrote my first drafts on the typewriter. I’d been working on my latest thriller for two months now. The first draft was almost done. I’d gone with medical technology this time, a mix between Robin Cook’s early book Coma and the 2001 movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. It had been going well, and my editor had been pleased with updates I’d sent.
I’d considered writing about, re-creating, what I remembered going through with my unsub, but I wasn’t ready to do that to myself; also, sometimes truth just really was way too off the rails to be accepted as fiction. If I could find a way to make the story therapeutic, then maybe. But not now.
My head was clear enough to get to work, but just as I threaded a clean sheet of paper into my typewriter, a knock sounded on the door. The locked door wasn’t just because I was paranoid; it also gave me a chance to hide my work before I let anyone in, since Gril was the only person who knew I was also the novelist Elizabeth Fairchild.
I hadn’t typed anything for either the newspaper or the novel yet, but I sat frozen for a moment, hoping whoever was on the other side of the door would announce themselves. They knocked again.
“Who’s there?” I said.
A series of knocks, this time rapid-fire.
“Shit.” I pushed away from the desk and walked the three steps to the door.
“Who is it?” I asked, one hand on the doorknob.
There was no answer, so I asked again. Still no answer.
Another set of quick knocks startled me back a step or two. The calm I’d gathered was gone. Why wouldn’t they tell me who they were?
“I need to know who it is before I open the door,” I said as I approached again.
I had no weapon. I looked around the shed. The most lethal things were a lamp and the typewriters. I could heave a lamp better. I took a step to grab it.
Then I heard something: a garbled noise that verged on an airy scream. Randy had said something about hearing something like a scream, something that was a mix between animal and human. Was I hearing the same thing?
If I could have put myself outside that moment and observed it, I would have yelled at myself not to open the door, but I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop my shaking fingers from turning the lock and then the doorknob.