Wherever She Goes (ARC)

by Kelley Armstrong

  “There is no sign of a child with the woman on that CCTV footage. Which was taken two blocks away . . . and almost an hour after you reported the supposed kidnapping.”

  “Then . . .” I struggle for an explanation. “Then they grabbed the boy first.”

  She crosses her arms. “So why wasn’t he with his mom? Why wasn’t she in the park with him?”

  “I . . . I don’t know, but there must be an explanation. What I do know is that this is, beyond any doubt, the woman I saw Sunday afternoon.”

  “Sure, okay, this woman matches the description you provided. The very, very vague description.”

  “I can give you more. On Sunday, she wore no makeup except thick black eyeliner. She had what looked like track marks on her arms. Old ones.”

  Her brows shoot up. “You know what track marks look like, Ms. Finch? I thought you were a librarian.”

  “I have seen track marks before. Now, when I was talking to her on Sunday, she took a call. She sounded very upset. She was speaking in another language. I don’t know exactly, but I’m guessing Slavic.”

  “And your linguistic experience comes from . . . ?”

  I walk farther into the room, taking a moment to relax. Don’t get my temper up. Don’t take offense.

  “I’m not claiming any expertise, Officer. They may have been pockmarks, not track marks. She may have been speaking Portuguese. I’m taking wild guesses, the upshot being that this woman has marks on her arms and speaks a second language.”

  “You may say you’re not positioning yourself as an expert, Ms. Finch, but there is a name for what you are doing. It’s called attention seeking. Officer Cooper believes you did see a boy pulled into an SUV. I’m not so sure, and I think this proves I’m right. You invented a kidnapping story, and when that failed, you jumped on this tragedy to insinuate yourself into a real investigation.”

  “I don’t want to insinuate myself into anything. I just want you to take my information and do your damned job.”

  Her eyes flash. “We are trying to do our job, Ms. Finch. That job right now is solving a murder. Please do not make that any more difficult than it already is.”

  She opens the door for me to leave.

  “I’d like to speak to Officer Cooper, please,” I say, with as much dignity as I can muster.

  “You’ve wasted enough of his time.”

  I straighten and walk out, head high. I get three steps when a woman says, “Ms. Finch?”

  I turn too eagerly, as if in the last three seconds Jackson has realized her mistake. Instead, I’m facing a woman with a microphone, a cameraman behind her.

  “Ms. Finch? Aubrey Finch? Is that right?”

  I look at the camera. I see that recording light on again. I see the call letters again, too, with two words I’d missed: Live News.

  LIVE.

  The reporter continues, “Did you say you know the woman whose body was found in Harris Park this morning?”

  Live. I am on live TV.

  My face. My name. On the news.

  I back away slowly. “No, I’m sorry. I need to—”

  “You said her son was kidnapped? You saw him taken the same day she was murdered?”

  My face is on live television.

  That’s all I can process, her words barely penetrating.

  “N-no. I’m sorry. It—it was a mistake.”

  I try to stop the babbling denials. I should not retract my words. I know the dead woman is the young mom. I know her son was taken.

  I want to say yes. State my case. If the police aren’t paying attention, well, maybe they will when I explain the situation on live television, and they’re flooded with calls demanding that they investigate.

  That is what I want to do. The heroic thing.

  Instead I babble something unintelligible, and then hurry off down the hall. I take the coward’s path, but it is already too late.

  My name is in the news. My face is on television, connected to a major crime case.

  What have I done?

  I spend the rest of the morning obsessively watching the footage of me on the local news channel. It’s there before I get back to my apartment. I stand at my laptop, newly bought fan belt abandoned on the counter as I watch and rewatch the video.

  I could remove the segment. I know how. But that’s as pointless as pulling a risqué photo uploaded by a pissed-off ex. Believe me—I know that from experience. The guy has the original, and by removing the copy, you only show him that it’s upsetting you, which is the point. If I remove this, the news station will just replace the video and then wonder what made it hackworthy.

  My footage is short. Mercifully so. I tell myself I don’t look that bad in it. Yes, I appear to have just rolled out of bed, but I don’t look crazy.

  Is that what it’s come to? I don’t look crazy?

  I don’t sound crazy either. That’s even more important. On the way home, I kept replaying those moment, and with each iteration, I imagined myself falling deeper into raving-maniac territory. But what I see is a just harried-looking woman explaining an admittedly wild theory.

  My five seconds of infamy is buried in a longer clip of raw footage shot as they’d been coming into the station and caught me trying to talk to Officer Jackson. There’s already a polished version of the live broadcast, which I have been left out of. Discarded on the editing room floor.

  I should be grateful for that. This raw footage will be removed soon, and I will disappear. That’s what I want. Let me fade back into anonymity again. My fear is not that the police will come after me. The statute of limitations has already run out on my crimes. But if my past catches up, it’ll give Paul so much ammunition that I might as well sign Charlotte over to him now.

  I’m glad that I’ve been cut from the official news clip. The problem is it means my claim is being ignored. There’s even a brief note under the raw footage, reassuring the viewer that no child is missing.

  No child is missing.

  Not even “no child has been reported missing.” My claim has been red-stamped with the absolute certainty of a veto.

  Please ignore this woman. No child was harmed in the making of this murder.

  I don’t need to hack into the police department email server now. I know what they’ve decided. No child has been reported missing, and so my claim is being ignored. Understandably ignored. I must admit that. This isn’t a case of incompetent policing. Officer Cooper, at least, has been fair and patient with me. The fact remains, though, that three days have passed with no evidence of a missing child.

  Because his mother is dead.

  That makes perfect sense to me, but I can see how it sounded to Officer Jackson, considering that she already thought I was attention-seeking. There’s nothing to tie this boy to the dead woman.

  Over and over, I refresh the news page and pray that I will see more. An update. That the woman has been identified, and the police have discovered she did have a child, who is now missing. Once that’s out, the authorities will throw all their resources into the hunt, and the child will be found, frightened but safe, the killer caught, the young mother avenged.

  And they all lived happily ever after.

  Except they don’t, do they?

  His mother is still dead. And her son will live with that forever.

  I know what that will be like. I know exactly what it will be like.

  I tell people my mother died when I was “just a baby.” I’m parroting the words I heard growing up. People often presume that means she died in childbirth, and I don’t correct them. The truth . . .

  The truth is the sickening crunch of metal. The world spinning, flipping upside down. Me, screaming, wordlessly screaming in absolute terror. Then my mother’s voice, weak and whispery.

  “Bree?”

  Her fingers finding my arm. Clutching it. Her hand wet and sticky.

  “It’s going to be okay, Bree. Someone will come.”

  Someone will come.

  Night
fell, and the car went dark. My mother told me she loved me. Over and over, she told me. And then, after a while, everything went quiet.

  Once I admitted to my father what I remember.

  “Stop that.”

  “But I—”

  “You couldn’t remember that. You were just a baby.”

  Except I wasn’t a baby, not in any more than the colloquial sense. I’d been two years old, and I do remember. I remember waiting for someone to come and save us. I remember hearing cars passing on the country highway. I remember that no one stopped, not until the next day, morning sun glinting off the car, and by then it was too late.

  People saw the car. They must have. Whoever hit us knew what they did, and they just kept going, driving away as fast as they could. Then others passed, and they saw a damaged vehicle in the field, and they told themselves there was no one in it. Just a crashed car waiting for a tow truck. Or kids abandoning a wreck after a joy ride.

  I’m sure no one’s in it, and really, I don’t have time to stop and check.

  My mom died when I was a baby.

  I was not a baby. I was old enough to have toddled to that road and gotten help.

  “Stop that, Bree. You were trapped in a car seat.”

  “Maybe if—”

  “You were a baby.”

  I was not a baby.

  My phone rings. I jump. It isn’t a number I recognize, so I wait to see if they’ll leave a message. When they don’t, I stare at my list of received calls, and see Paul’s number, from yesterday.

  I’ve thought of calling him. Twice, I’ve gotten as far as pulling up his number, my finger hovering over the Call icon.

  Hey, Paul. Sorry to bother you at work, but I, uh, need to tell you something. So there’s this news clip . . .

  Is that really necessary?

  This is the question that stops me. The video clip will probably be removed. My name doesn’t appear in the article. Paul is the kind of guy who flips through his headline feed once a day and assimilates the data based on that. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN MURDERED IN GRANT PARK. Check. CITY HALL ARGUING OVER INFRASTRUCTURE BUDGET. Check. TENSIONS RISE IN MIDDLE EAST. Check.

  There, I have a basic idea of what’s going on in the world, now let’s get back to work.

  When we were dating, I learned that if I mentioned current events I’d get a long pause followed by him saying, “Tell me more about that.” He was happy to get the information; he just felt no need to seek it out on his own. If I wanted that kind of conversation with Paul, I was far better off delving into the background of the news. Let’s talk about the issues surrounding murdered women. Let’s talk about the city’s infrastructure problems. Let’s talk about the history of the conflict in the Middle East. That’s what interested him, and I remember how exciting it was to be able to talk to someone who wanted a conversation deeper than news bites, a guy who knew the history behind those news bites, who actually enjoyed talking about it, having a real conversation.

  Except, for us, that’s what passed for real conversation. An in-depth discussion of Middle Eastern politics.

  Paul, I need to talk to you. There are things I need to explain. Things about me . . .

  I put my phone aside. I’m going to roll these dice and play the odds and wager on Paul never seeing the video clip. If he does, I can explain it.

  As for who else might view it, I won’t worry about that either. It’s five seconds in an unedited segment from a suburban news station. No one outside of Oxford will see it, and very few inside will.

  I’m safe.

  Which is more than I can say for that little boy.

  * * *

  It’s six o’clock Thursday evening. I’ve been out for a couple of hours, getting groceries after replacing the fan belt in my car. It doesn’t take me that long to shop for myself, but before I go, I always check on a few less-mobile neighbors to “see if they need anything from the store.”

  In truth, I didn’t need anything myself today. I was conducting a test. If I go out in public, will anyone recognize me? While I caught a few looks, no one said anything, and I suspect I was just being paranoid about those looks. I will presume that if anyone saw me on the news this morning, they didn’t recognize me. Given how I looked in that video, I’d hope they wouldn’t recognize me.

  I return to my building, drop off bags for my neighbors, and bask in a few moments of Zen calm. There’s been no fallout from the video clip, and now I have done good deeds. I have made people smile. I feel good about myself.

  Then I climb the stairs to my floor and hear someone banging at a door. I pause, groceries in hand, and I consider withdrawing.

  I consider fleeing.

  Because I hear someone knocking at a door? It’s probably not even mine.

  I glance around the corner to see someone standing in front of my door, hand rising to knock again.

  Paul.

  I pull back and ponder sneaking down the stairs, tossing the groceries in my car, and going for coffee. Wait it out.

  That would be cowardly. Also, pointless. If Paul wants to talk to me, he’s going to find a way, even if it involves skywriting “Pick up the damned phone, Bree.”

  I step from the stairwell. He turns, and I expect he’ll wait there, not saying a word until we’re safely ensconced in the privacy of my apartment.

  Instead, he bears down on me, and on his face there’s an expression I don’t think I’ve ever seen. Barely contained rage.

  “What the hell is this?” He waves around the hall. “I didn’t even have to ring up. There’s no damned lock on the front door.”

  “There is. It’s broken.”

  And has been since I moved in.

  “This place reeks of pot,” he says.

  I stare at him. “Are you accusing me of smoking pot, Paul?”

  “Well, that might explain a few things.”

  He knows about the news clip.

  I fix him with a level stare. “You know I don’t drink. I certainly don’t do drugs. If you are accusing me of that, I will take a test. Just say the word.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Aubrey. I’m saying people here are smoking pot.”

  I sputter a laugh. “If you think you can find any building—uptown or downtown—that doesn’t have at least one resident smoking pot, you need a reality check, Counselor.”

  “Don’t—” He bites it off and advances on me, voice lowering. “This is about embarrassing me, isn’t it? I keep offering you money, but you’ve made it clear that you’re fine. And then I see this.”

  I pass him to open my door. I step inside and hold it open. He follows.

  “My apartment isn’t fancy—” I begin.

  “It’s a dump.”

  “The fact that you can even say that proves you need to get out of midtown Chicago a little more often. Go see how people live when they aren’t born with an Ivy League education fund. This isn’t skid row. It’s working-class America, and I’m fine with it, and I think it’s fine for our daughter to see a little bit of it, too. Broaden her horizons.”

  “My daughter’s horizons don’t include walking past that junkie parked on the front step.”

  I wheel on him. “That is a military veteran who lost his damned leg. Show a little respect.”

  He steps back. Rubs his hands over his face. “All right. I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. But I don’t understand what you’re doing here, Aubrey.”

  “Not trying to embarrass you or punish you.”

  “Punish yourself, then.” He meets my gaze. “That’s it, isn’t it? This is about punishing yourself. You had an affair, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  He walks into the apartment, still talking, his back to me. “That was the first thing I thought when you left. You’d met someone. I expected you’d wait a few weeks after leaving and then drop the bomb. When you didn’t, I thought that must not be the answer. But it was, wasn’t it? Not that you left me for another man. That you met someone and h
ad an affair. A fling. Then you left out of guilt, and now you won’t take anything from me because you’re punishing yourself.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. The sound startles him, and he turns.

  “Seriously, Paul? I was home with a toddler. How the hell would I find time to meet someone, let alone have an affair?” I walk into the kitchen. “Now, if you’d like coffee—”

  “I saw the video clips,” he says. “Someone spotted you on the news and told me. I watched it and . . . and I don’t know what to say.”

  I stop. Then I turn to face him. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you. If this causes you any embarrassment—”

  “Christ, Bree. No. I’m worried about you. You saw something in the park.”

  “I didn’t see ‘something.’ I saw a boy get taken. Kidnapped.”

  “Putting aside what you think you saw—”

  “What I think I saw? A boy was taken, and now his mother is dead, and the police are ignoring me.”

  He goes quiet. Then he says, carefully, “I know you wanted more children—”

  “What?”

  He runs a hand through his hair. “You said that had nothing to do with you leaving, but you left shortly after I told you I wanted to wait.”

  “What does this have to do with me seeing a child abducted?”

  “You want more kids, so when you thought you saw a child in danger—”

  “You think I’m hallucinating a kidnapped kid because, what? I feel like my future babies have been stolen from me? That is the most messed-up amateur psychobabble I have ever heard.”

  His lips compress. “Don’t mock me, Aubrey. I’m trying to help.”

  “You know what help sounds like, Paul? ‘Aubrey, I saw that clip on the news, and I can’t believe the police are brushing you off. Let me see what I can do—I have contacts in the department.’ ”

  He opens his mouth.

  “No,” I say. “Those aren’t the words coming out of your mouth, so I don’t want to hear the ones that are. Get out.”