by L V Gaudet
Jason bristles at this, unsure what he is accusing him of. Does he think I’m that kind of monster?
“None. I was going to send him packing, but he’s just a kid on the street. He’s a problem and I don’t want any problems, not that kind. Every person in that house can get sent back to jail for harbouring him.”
Anderson nods. “Good. Your problem is gone.”
Jason flinches. “Wait, what do you mean?”
“You aren’t as smart as you think you are. The boy is spoken for, claimed property. Someone else already had their eye on the boy.”
Jason pales, feeling sickened. He knows what that means. The white van.
The image of David the same age as the kid swims before him.
“Do they have to take that boy? There are so many others.”
Anderson’s hard stony expression doesn’t change, although he is sickened too by it. It’s not my place to decide these things. Besides, I’m too old to get involved. Too old to be involved now.
“The boy is gone by now. Don’t bother going after him. You won’t find him. The boy is better off. Is he dead? Probably, by now.”
Jason feels the world closing in on him. The boy, who is so much like David was at that age.
“Why are you here, Anderson? Just to tell me about some street rat?”
“I know you. You are too soft, too sentimental. Something inside you is broken too. I came to warn you. You keep messing up and one of these times it’s going to hurt people.
You just brought a big pile of crap on your family and I don’t know if I can protect them. We can’t control everyone, and a few of those we can’t are asking too many questions and digging too deep. They are asking about their Jane Doe and Katherine Kingslow. But that is just an excuse. They are really chasing down the larger beast.”
“That’s David’s doing.”
“David nothing. He’s your mistake, your responsibility.”
There is a heavy pause, the silence hanging between them like a heavy shroud.
“Management knows. They’re watching and when it comes down it’s going to come down hard. That detective and the reporter are going to talk to your mother. You have to fix this before things go bad. Management will clean it up if you don’t.”
An icy sweat drenches Jason and he feels like a blast of freezing air is washing through him. He wavers on his feet, dizzy. He blinks, trying to straighten out his suddenly blurred vision. He closes his eyes.
“Anderson . . ..” He opens his eyes. Anderson is gone.
Panic floods Jason, sending uncontrollable shivering through him.
“Come on, get it together.” He tries to stop shaking, to slow his breathing that’s suddenly coming in ragged gasps. “What the hell, I’m too old for panic attacks. Think about something else.”
“Oh no, the kid.”
Worry pushes everything else out of his mind and he bolts.
The trip home is painfully slow, jogging and running, bus, train, and the bus again. Jason is humming with nervous energy, bringing odd looks his way, anxious to get home fast.
They took him. He’s just a bloody kid. Why him? Why did they have to take him? It’s my fault. No. Anderson said someone already had their eye on the kid. Who?
These thoughts plague him all the way home.
Finally, Jason gets off a city bus a block from the corner of his street. His feet barely touch concrete and he’s sprinting for the corner, head down and focused on one thing only, getting home. He reaches the corner and charges down the street, feet pounding the sidewalk.
It’s a race against the past, knowing he was already too late when Anderson stopped him.
Jason is out of breath, gasping in great whooping breaths of air by the time he reaches the rooming house.
Staggering up the front steps, he digs out his key to the front door. He kept that key since the boy was already getting in and out of the house somehow.
His first try misses and the key strikes home on the second, turning it and opening the door with trembling hands.
Still gasping for air, he staggers up the stairs, moving down the hall past the ever-present country music coming from the Cowboy’s room. Gripping his door knob, he tries to turn it. It is locked.
He grips the knob with both fists, leaning his shoulder into the door, legs pushing out, and pushes against the door. There is a little give, but it holds. He throws his weight against it harder, and again, harder, in a hurry to get in.
“It’s not that good of a door,” he mutters.
He steps back and gives the door a kick just below the knob.
The door pops open with the dull sound of crunching wood.
The room is empty. No boy.
“Did you really expect him to be here, even without Anderson’s warning?”
Emptiness fills him like the day he discovered David ran away, a feeling of hopeless loss and helplessness.
He looks around, immediately spotting the bag on the bed.
“Did he even come in here? Did he touch the stuff at all?”
Jason moves to the bed, picking up the note on the bag.
“If I’m not here the white van people got me.” The printing is a jagged scrawl, done in a hurry. It reeks of terror.
Jason’s muscles tense into angry knots.
“Does Anderson have anything to do with this? My father?” he snarls. He is enraged. He paces the room, thinking.
“I have to find out who took him. Did they hurt him? They’d better not have.”
He checks himself with visible effort, taking deep breaths, getting control. He calms down.
“It’s not my problem. Not my kid.”
The words are a lie meant to be obeyed. Even as he utters them he knows it will keep nagging at him.
30Donald Downey
Lawrence is chewing over the missing person file of the woman and two kids who vanished years ago, quite literally. His jaw works as he thinks. He can’t let it go. He feels driven. There is something about this particular file.
He is sitting in his car outside a house. It is an average looking house in an aging average middle-income neighbourhood, older and well-kept.
The investigating officer was a bust. He died years ago. There were some news articles, but no leads. The articles ran the gamut from pointing accusatory fingers at the wife’s husband, blowing up in a thither over rumours of an affair, to accusing the wife. All other avenues of investigation came to dead ends. There is only one left.
“Ah, there he is.”
A car pulls into the driveway of the house, the driver looking at him curiously as he turns past him. Lawrence gets out, his long legs bringing him to the car as the man is getting out.
He’s an older man, approaching retirement age.
Older than Jason McAllister, he thinks. The age is right.
The man watches him approach curiously.
Lawrence has his hand out as he reaches him, offering a handshake.
“Are you Mr. Donald Downey?”
A flash of instinctive alarm crosses Donald’s eyes and he stiffens, wondering how this odd looking man knows him. He hesitates to answer, taking the handshake awkwardly.
“Forgive me, I’m Lawrence Hawkworth.” Lawrence sizes the man up, gauging his reaction.
I will get nothing if he knows he’s talking to a reporter, he thinks. From the articles I read, the news raked Mr. Downey over the coals pretty good when his wife and children went missing.
Lawrence tries to give him his best disarming smile, but it comes off predatory. He does not do disarming well.
“Mr. Donald Downey, I’m investigating a cold case involving the disappearance of a Mrs. Madelaine Downey and her two children. Are you the same Mr. Donald Downey who was married to her?”
Donald stands there staring at him in stunned shock. It takes long moments for those words to sink in.
Lawrence gives him time.
Donald visibly sags with it when it finally does. He looks shaken.
“Yes sir, it was. The case was never closed.” Lawrence lets that hang between them, letting him take from it what he will.
Donald tenses, going on the defensive.
“I had nothing to do with it. They tried pretty hard to prove I did and couldn’t then. Madelaine took the kids and disappeared. Now maybe I deserved that, she was angry, hurt. I did not kill my wife and kids.”
Lawrence looks up and down the street, making the gesture obvious.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk out here. Can I come inside? We can sit down. I think we have a lot to talk about.”
Donald glances around quickly, spotting a neighbour watching them curiously from his yard.
“I have nothing to say. I think you should leave.”
He’s still got a lot of anger. I don’t blame him. The press found him guilty without proof and the notes on the interviews with the police looks like they didn’t take him seriously at first. I’m going to have to break him. He deserves to know the truth.
“You want to hear what I have to say,” Lawrence insists, “and I don’t think you are going to want the neighbours to watch.”
Donald shifts his stance, ready to be more forceful to get rid of this guy.
Who the hell does he think he is, digging up the past? That’s gone and buried years ago, Donald thinks angrily.
Lawrence sighs, acting defeated. He’s grinning on the inside.
“Your wife didn’t take your kids. I know who did.”
Donald almost falls over.
31Ryan’s Trip
Ryan is packing a bag for another trip. Elaine watches him unhappily. By now she knows not to beg him to stay or let her go with him. She is quietly resigned to yet another lonely absence with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
“Have you thought about getting a T.V. so I can at least have that?” she asks.
Ryan doesn’t look up from packing. How do I tell her? It’s not safe to have a T.V. She’s not going to buy that. We would have to get a satellite or cable connection, and that means having a record of us. It’s to keep us, her, safe.
“I’ll see what I can figure out,” he says, putting off dealing with it for now.
She is crestfallen. She knows that means no. Another absence alone with nothing but the walls, a bird in a cage and nothing at all to keep her from going crazy.
“Hey, cheer up,” Ryan says, looking at her with concern. “I won’t be gone long.”
Elaine just nods. She has nothing to say. Don’t go. Let me come. At least let me get a job or get involved with something local, something. None of it will do any good. They’ve had that discussion too many times already.
She follows him to the door, accepting his kiss and barely reciprocating, and watches him leave in silence. She watches his truck drive away through the front window and the moment it is out of sight feels deflated. She blinks away tears.
“There has to be something I can do. I don’t think I can take this much longer. All I do is sit here waiting for him to come home.”
It’s too early to do anything, so she starts dusting, although the place doesn’t need dusting. She stops before she finishes, sitting on the couch and fighting back tears. By afternoon she is restless and feeling trapped. She has been feeling this more and more, even when Ryan is not gone on one of his trips.
Feeling braver and daring, she decides to go for a walk around town.
“Ryan won’t like it, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
She spends the next few hours walking and just checking out the town. It is the first time she has been able to do this. She hasn’t gone anywhere except the laundromat and grocery store. She walks aimlessly up and down different streets, absorbing everything.
Elaine feels invigorated by her daring adventure by the time she returns home.
She is barely home when there is a knock at the door.
She flushes with guilt, opening the door. “Ryan?”
Trevor is on the other side smiling down at her. “You look different, kind of glowing,” he says.
Elaine blushes, deepening her flush, and he smiles larger.
“Ryan wasn’t at work today. I guessed he’s gone on another of his trips?”
“Yes, he left this morning.”
Trevor shakes his head regretfully, but his grin is anything but. “If I had a lady like you waiting for me at home, I wouldn’t be taking off all the time.”
The compliment makes her feel awkward, but at the same time it feels good.
“Do you want to come in?”
“You aren’t expecting him back right away?”
“Not for a few days.”
Trevor grins and bows himself in.
“Have you eaten?” he asks.
“No.”
He smiles disarmingly. “How about we go out to eat?”
Elaine frowns doubtfully. As much as she wants to, it would be wrong.
“I can’t. Ryan wouldn’t like it.”
Trevor’s grin turns mischievous. “We will be discrete. He will never know. We can get something to take out, or go to the next town.”
“No” is on Elaine’s lips. It’s the right answer. But her desperate loneliness makes her reckless.
She nods hesitantly.
“Let’s go,” Trevor ushers her out before she has a chance to change her mind.
They sit in one-sided awkward silence in his truck as he drives to the next town. He’s grinning hugely, while she is wracked with guilt.
Trevor glances over at her and sees her unhappy frown. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s not a date or anything. Just friends. Totally casual.”
“I guess. It just feels different this time. Before, we just sat in the house. This time we’re going out somewhere.”
Ryan has finished the transfer of the package and he and Mr. Miller have gone separate ways. This time he has to meet his Anderson before he can dispose of the package.
He pulls into the truck stop, parking by the garbage bins behind the building. The barrels in the truck box are airtight, so he isn’t worried about the smell. But the package was ripe and if anyone does detect an odour, they’ll assume it’s coming from the large garbage bins next to the truck.
Ryan sits there for a moment, just watching the parking lot.
He jumps when the back door of the building suddenly bangs open.
A man comes out dragging a wheeled cart with garbage bags piled on it. He blocks the door open with a cinder block before wheeling the cart across the concrete to the garbage bins.
Ryan sits motionless. Any movement will draw the man’s attention to him. He can see only a straight hallway inside the door.
The man roughly manhandles the bags, tossing them into the bin furthest from Ryan, and wheels the cart back. Shoving the cart through the door ahead of him, he pushes the block away with his foot and lets the door close behind him.
Ryan waits another ten minutes before he moves.
Getting out of the truck, he walks around to the front, scoping the lot out as he goes.
Entering the restaurant by the front, Ryan takes a moment looking around before he spots Anderson.
He meets the waitress halfway to the table, ordering a coffee and apple pie and sending her on her way.
Anderson nods a greeting as he slides into the seat across from him.
“No problems?” Anderson asks.
“None. Everything went smoothly.”
“I didn’t think there should be any problems on this one. The customer is a long time customer.”
Ryan is surprised. “You didn’t set him up with his usual guy?”
“Unfortunately, we had a double booking.”
The waitress comes with the pie and coffee pot, filling Ryan’s cup and topping up Anderson’s.
“Anything else I can get you gentlemen?”
“No thanks, we’re good for now,” Anderson smiles at her. They wait for her to be out of earshot.
> “How are things at home Ryan? Are you and Elaine settling in nicely? No problems on the home front that I should be aware of?”
Ryan bristles at the use of their names. They are not supposed to use names. He tries to control it, keep his expression calm, no reaction.
Why is he asking if there are problems at home? What does he know? No. He’s testing me, trying to push my buttons, see how I react.
“Everything is great.”
“If there are any problems, I trust you will let me know.”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. I’ll be in touch when there is another job for you.”
It is a dismissal. Ryan puts money on the table for his coffee and leaves.
He gets in his truck and puts it in gear, pulling out of the parking lot onto the highway.
“The bastard still doesn’t trust me. Well, I’m not giving him anything to prove him right. I still have the package to dispose of, and then home.”
Trevor is just being a friend. He has no ulterior motives, Elaine tells herself again. So, why do I feel guilty? I’m not cheating on Ryan.
She is pulled out of her thoughts with an electric jolt when Trevor touches her hand.
They are sitting beneath a tree on the bank of a creek, watching the sunset where no one is likely to see them. Not that anyone would know Elaine. She has no friends and they haven’t so much as talked to a single neighbour.
“You are deep in thought,” Trevor says.
She looks up at him and her heart quickens.
When did he get so close?
The thought startles her a little. She can feel his presence like a physical force. She is so alone in the world that she can’t deny the feeling rushing through her; the craving to be touched, for a physical connection pulling her back into the world that she has felt so detached from for the past months.
It brings with it unwanted physical attraction.
He’s a nice enough man, funny and kind, and nice to look at. But, he isn’t Ryan. Ryan, who is at work for long hours, then away on these trips for days doing jobs, leaving me alone.
The loneliness wells up in her, empty and painful.
When Ryan is away, Trevor is here, and he’s really here. He’s not distracted or always talking to someone who isn’t there. He’s never shown anger. Ryan is so quick to get angry. Like Ronnie. No, don’t compare the two, they’re nothing alike. Ryan would never hurt me.