The Only One Left

by Pamela Beason

  Mia unwrapped her cheeseburger and bit into it, then grabbed a fry. “Is there ketchup?”

  He handed her a packet, and she ripped it open and drizzled it across her fries.

  “Slow down, darlin’.” He nudged the cooler closer with his foot, bent, and opened it, came up with two beers in his hand. “I brought brews, too.”

  After setting one bottle on the nightstand, he twisted the top from the other and held the bottle out to her.

  She stared at the label. Some brand she’d never heard of, with a long scratch through the paper label. She licked her lips uncertainly. “Oh, I don’t know, Dusty. I’m not sure I like this kind of beer. That one I drank last night really gave me a headache.” Or maybe even a hangover. Did anyone get hung over from one beer?

  “This is a different brand than we had before. And it’s all we’ve got.” He waggled the bottle in front of her. “Hair of the dog that bit you, my dad used to say.”

  That was a reference to drinking more alcohol to fix a hangover, she knew. She took the bottle from him. “Maybe just a sip.”

  It didn’t taste any better than the one she drank last night, but it was cold and it was liquid and made the fries and burger slide down easier. After a big swallow, she put the bottle on the nightstand next to his. “Is this your house, Dusty?”

  He chuckled and half choked on a bite of burger. “You think I live in a house with a dirt floor? This is my grandpa’s old barn. This was the tack room, where all the bridles and saddles and stuff like that were stored. I used to sleep here sometimes. I fixed it up some for you. I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to see you . . .” He hesitated, picked up his beer, and twisted the cap off, grinning as he turned back to her. “I mean, well, the way you were. Really out of it.”

  She felt her cheeks flush. “Thanks for looking out for me.” To cover her embarrassment, she quickly finished off her burger, snagged another fry, and gulped down three swallows of beer. Dusty was down to a couple of bites, too. “We really need to hit the road, Dusty.”

  “Soon, darlin’.” He chewed and downed half his beer in one long gulp, then wadded up the greasy papers on the bed and moved them to the nightstand. Leaning forward, he gently stroked her chin. “You’re so beautiful, Mia.” His breath smelled of beer as his lips brushed her cheek. “We’re going to be great together. Just one little kiss, okay?”

  His lips crushed into hers. She knew she should protest, but the beer was already starting to make her woozy.

  He pressed her back into the pillow, one hand gently rubbing her breast. She stared at his face, noticing for the first time that he had a hole in one earlobe where an earring should have been. Why wasn’t he wearing one now? He said he had been working. Maybe his boss didn’t like it. Closing her eyes, she hoped he would be gentle. After all, this was what she had wanted, wasn’t it? She’d just get it over with, and afterward he’d surely take her back to the campground. She’d never have to see him again, but she’d know what all the sex talk was about.

  The hand on her breast slipped inside her shirt. Wasn’t she supposed to feel something? If not love, then at least lust? Did she really want this? All she could think about was how much trouble she was going to be in if her parents found out she and Darcy had come down here. And if Darcy left her behind? She couldn’t even imagine that.

  His tongue wormed its way into her mouth, and his fingers rubbed across her nipple. She didn’t enjoy either sensation. Did she even like this guy? She didn’t even know his last name. And it didn’t seem like he intended to use a condom, either.

  As he moved his hand down and popped open the snap on her jeans, panic surged up from her gut, filling her chest. Twisting her head to the side, she said, “No, Dusty! I don’t want—”

  “Ah, honey, don’t be like that.” He slipped his fingers around her chin, tried to pull her face back under his.

  Those fingers hurt. How dare he treat her like that? “No! I said no!”

  He put a knee on either side of her hips and reached for her zipper. “You be sweet to me, Darcy, and I’ll be sweet to you.”

  “No! You have to stop!”

  At age fifteen, she’d grown to be only five feet tall. The last two years hadn’t added even a fraction of an inch. Nice boys saw her as some sort of cute blond pet, and the sleazebags regarded her as easy prey. She was determined not to be anyone’s toy poodle, and certainly not any boy’s prey. That was why when she’d discovered that Toshi, the Japanese boy she was tutoring, was a black belt, she’d made a deal to swap karate sessions for English lessons.

  Dusty wasn’t stopping. He ground his lips painfully into hers, and she could feel his hard-on digging into her abdomen.

  Toshi had taught her to fight back. Closing her fist, she whacked Dusty on the side of his head. When he rose to his knees, rearing back in shock, she brought her knee up between his legs as hard as she could.

  His cry of pain was choked off as he tumbled sideways onto the floor, both hands clutched around his crotch. He rolled back and forth in the dirt, groaning.

  She should run for the door. Basic rule of self-defense: get up and prepare for the next move! But her arms and legs felt like they were made of concrete. Just rolling to her side seemed nearly impossible, and she couldn’t shift her weight to move her feet to the floor.

  After a few terrifying moments of swearing and moaning, Dusty finally rose to his knees beside the bed. Spittle splattered her face as he snarled, “You’re gonna be so sorry you did that.”

  What was wrong with her? She was paralyzed. What was she going to do when he crawled back on top of her?

  He swayed to his feet, grabbed the flashlight and the cooler, and then staggered, bent over like an old man, to the door. Shining the light viciously into her eyes, he growled, “So damn sorry . . .”

  Behind him, the door lock snapped into place like an exclamation point. With the flashlight gone, the room was lit only by the fading streaks of sunlight that pierced the walls.

  What had she done? Why couldn’t she move? All she could do was stare at the ceiling as the room grew pitch black. She could practically hear her mother now.

  “Miracle Luisa Valdez.” How she hated that name; who wanted to be called Miracle? “You realize that riding off on a motorcycle with a perfect stranger is not only foolish, but also incredibly dangerous.”

  Dangerous. That’s what her parents always said about practically everything. Although sometimes they substituted the word “sketchy” if they thought she was proposing something that might eventually turn dangerous. Whatever. The upshot of it all was that she never got to do anything cool.

  “You’re our precious jewel,” her mom always told her. “Our little Miracle.” Yeah, she was precious all right, a jewel locked in a safety deposit box inside some bank vault. What good was being alive if you didn’t get to live?

  Jared, Justin, and Julie would be old now, probably with kids of their own, but in her imagination they were always joyful teenagers. Just like in the photos around the house, all proudly displayed in her mom’s artsy hand-crafted frames. Her sibs had been stars. Photos of Jared in his track uniform, proudly holding ribbons for races he’d won, decorated the mantel in the living room. In the hallway, Justin marched in his band uniform or played his trumpet in a brass ensemble. The dining room wall belonged to Julie in all her dance costumes, tapping in a spangled pink number, throwing long ribbon wands in the air while gracefully twirling, and even balancing on her toes in a pale lilac tutu. Always smiling, all three of her sibs, in those pictures.

  Would they be proud of their baby sister now?

  No way.

  Her memory of the crash was more audio than video, of all her sibs screaming so loud, over and over, as the car flipped around and around. Just like the walls were doing now. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to watch the nauseating movement.

  After the screaming and the horrific screech of metal, there’d been only the sounds of her own cries. Until finally there wer
e sirens and then so many people talking at her. She couldn’t see anything but red, and her left arm had hurt so bad. She still had a big scar between her elbow and shoulder where the bone had come through the skin, and a little one near her hairline above her right eyebrow. Any time she doubted the nightmare had actually happened, she looked at those scars to remind herself it had all been too real.

  Jared. Justin. Julie. Just . . . gone. Nothing left but pictures. And memories. She’d heard all the stories so many times that she felt like she remembered all the birthday parties and awards and adventures, when for most of them, she hadn’t even been born.

  She was so . . . nothing . . . by comparison. How had she made it to seventeen without ever accomplishing anything? It was no wonder there was only one photo in the house of her beyond the age of five, last year’s school picture, sitting on the table in the entry hall, in a cheap, gold-toned frame from a discount store.

  Stupid was not a strong enough word for what she’d done, riding off with a stranger. She should have died instead of her sibs.

  Now, maybe she would.

  Chapter 9

  Monday

  During his drive back to Evansburg, Finn’s hands-free phone system chimed. He pressed the button on the steering wheel. “Detective Finn.”

  “We were going to have dinner with Tony and Heather,” Grace reminded him.

  Damn. He knew she’d been counting on an outing. He slowed down, checked his watch. Quarter to eight. He was already too late, and he was still twenty minutes out of Evansburg.

  The hour didn’t really matter. He didn’t have time to do anything other than his job. He pulled over to the side of the road next to a power pole to give Grace his full attention. “Sorry. I totally forgot. I’m on my way back from the Gorge Amphitheatre.”

  “Okay.” After a brief hesitation, she added, “I’ll get that bone back from Kanoni. I’ll save it for you.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Silence reigned for a long minute between them.

  “Sorry,” Finn said again, trying to fill the void. “I found out there are two teenage girls missing.”

  “Oh, no. Those parents must be in agony.”

  “They are. All four of them are here. Well, in Quincy now, actually. I’ve got to go back to the station and file reports and make a hundred phone calls.”

  “I understand, Matt. Rain check. But since Z’s ape-sitting, I’m going, regardless. Who knows when I’ll get another chance? And I’ll be late if I don’t leave right now.” She hung up.

  He couldn’t blame her. After the novelty of working with gorillas wore off among the locals, Grace’s staff had dwindled down to only Jon Zyrnek—Z—who worked a full-time job in town and slept at his girlfriend’s house most nights. He showed up several evenings a week for a few hours, and occasionally a handful of her former volunteers stopped by to lend a hand. But most people were not willing to go through the training and stick with gorilla care for little to no money, so Grace was stuck at home with the gorillas most of the time these days. Which also meant that Finn was stuck there, too, if he wanted to spend time with her.

  The power pole in front of his car had three flyers stapled to it. LOST: SAMSON, a gray tabby cat, according to the photo. HAVE YOU SEEN KATIE? A goofy looking mixed breed dog grinned from that page, one ear up, one sticking straight out. MISSING. Another dog, this one some kind of spaniel.

  He sighed, pulled back onto the road. So many lost beings in the world. He hoped the dogs were off on an adventure together and the tabby was just out hunting. Grace had a missing cat, too. Snow. All the gorillas were complaining about that.

  There weren’t nearly enough notices labeled FOUND. Maybe he should post a flyer about the bone. FOUND: DO YOU KNOW WHO THIS FINGER BONE BELONGS TO?

  Grace’s disappointed tone haunted him all the way back to town.

  The Evansburg police station was switching to night shift by the time he arrived, lugging a grease-stained bag from the Burger Shack. He could feel the cholesterol clogging his veins as he munched his way through the cheeseburger and fries while typing his report. Thank God he managed to snag Micaela d’Allesandro, better known as Miki, the only clerical aide employed there, before she walked out the door. Miki was studying for her associate degree in criminal justice, and planned to go to the police academy as soon as she had her diploma in hand. She was always eager to win points with the officers. She agreed to stay late to scan the girls’ photos for Finn and type up a list of contacts from his notes.

  His first call was to Vaughn Boylan, the events coordinator at the Gorge. There was no answer. Finn left a voicemail identifying himself and listing what he needed: contact information for subcontractors, videos from all security cameras, names of everyone working during the concert. He closed by saying, “I’ll meet you at nine a.m. tomorrow, at the admin trailer. I asked the parents to come in at ten.”

  He uploaded the girls’ descriptions and details to the network and blasted them out to all the police and sheriffs and highway patrol computers in the state.

  The clock read 11:25 by the time he’d finished. When the door opened to the detectives’ shared office, Finn was surprised to see the bedraggled figure of Detective Sara Melendez limp in, accompanied by a stench of smoke.

  He eyed her smudged face and wild hair. “Have you been chasing cars again?”

  She collapsed into her chair at the next desk, grabbed a water bottle from a drawer and took a long pull. Sliding down in her chair, she rested her gaze on the ceiling. “Another arson.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  She shook her head and then took another swallow of water. “This is the third barn. Miller place this time. Not one hundred percent abandoned, though. The owner came running when he saw the flames, along with everyone else for miles around. No animals inside, thank God, but Miller claimed there was about five hundred dollars of hay stored there. Total loss. Plus at least a quarter acre of pasture burned before the volunteers managed to put it out. Shit, if that had really gotten started . . .” She made a clucking sound with her tongue.

  A grass fire was always a frightening thought in this dry country. He worried about Grace’s compound, surrounded by fields and forests.

  Arsonists had targeted two unused buildings so far, and now a barn that was used only for storage. The gorilla house was a remodeled barn. It did not exactly appear to be abandoned, but still . . . He didn’t want to think about the near-impossibility of evacuating three freaked-out apes during a conflagration. The volunteer fire department certainly hadn’t trained for that contingency. He snorted at his mental image of gorillas and firefighters racing around, each group terrified of the other. “Any clues who’s behind these fires?”

  Melendez sighed and closed her eyes. “I have my suspicions. A few of the local boys. I got film of the crowd and license numbers of all the vehicles. But since pretty much everyone in the vicinity shows up to watch the show, it’s kinda hard to separate possible dirtbags from excited bystanders. When the roof caved in, I thought they were all going to applaud.”

  She set the water bottle on her desk and slid upright again, swiveled in her chair to face her computer, and switched it on. “Anyhow, I’ll call Rodrigo and get him to rake through the debris after it cools off. Maybe we’ll find a clue of some kind.”

  “He’s not going to be happy. I just talked to him and he needs to be at the Gorge Amphitheatre first thing to check out a car and tent left there.”

  She turned toward him. “I heard Sarge sent you to the Gorge to check on an abandoned car. What’s up with that?”

  It was his turn to sigh. “Two missing girls. You’ll see the report in your inbox.”

  “Shit.”

  “Let’s hope they’re just out partying and come back on their own. In any case, I’ve got to be back out there first thing, too.” He pushed himself up from his chair.

  “Night, Matt. Better luck tomorrow.”

  “Same to you, Sara.”

  * * * *
*

  As he drove up to his house, a bulky figure rushed out from his front porch. He’d only begun to open the car door when Cargo leapt up on it, smacking Finn’s leg back into the car frame.

  “Good Lord, dog,” he complained, rubbing his shin. “Settle down. And how the heck did you get out of the back yard again?”

  The gigantic dog, some unholy mix of Newfie and God knew what else, pawed him and crisscrossed his path all the way to the front door, threatening to trip him. The canine antics were accompanied by loud groans and whimpers.

  “You are not starving,” Finn told him.

  The dog continued his whining chorus and leapt repeatedly against the front door as Finn twisted the key in the lock. “I’ll write down the number of the SPCA,” Finn told the beast, who regarded him woefully with one blue eye, one brown. “Feel free to call and tell them how badly abused you are.”

  The dog raced ahead of him through the dark house to the kitchen, where he frantically pawed a cabinet door that had long ago lost its finish to canine toenails. Opening the cabinet, Finn slid out a massive bag of dog chow and pulled the scoop out of the sack. When he bent to reach for the dog dish, Cargo jumped against the sack, knocking it over. A wave of kibble splashed across the tile floor.

  Cargo fell on it, inhaling bits and pieces, crunching and slobbering. Finn snorted. “Congratulations, mutt. Objective accomplished.” He leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms. “And slow the heck down—if there’s dog barf on the rug tonight, you’re going to the pound tomorrow.”

  Claws snagged his sleeve above his elbow. Finn turned toward Kee, an orange tabby sitting on the counter behind him. His brother Lok sat beside him, his expression equally annoyed. Maaow, complained Lok. Kee joined his more mellow meow to the refrain, but raised his paw to claw at Finn’s arm again.

  The menagerie had not been Finn’s idea. Shortly after she’d convinced him to move from Chicago, his ex-wife Wendy had left him the house, her pets, and all the bills. Evansburg is a great place to raise a family, she’d told him. Evansburg was an even better place to hook up again with her old flame, as it turned out. Now she was in Spokane with her new husband and their new baby, and Finn had somehow become hopelessly entangled with all these animals. Even with gorillas, for God’s sake.