Next Day Gone

by J C Wing

  “Crabtree Falls was a special place for Willow,” she told Drew. “I’ve always believed that whoever it was that killed her knew her well. Leaving her near the bridge, right in front of the falls, was intentional as hell.”

  Drew picked his bottle of Cheerwine up but held it in his fingers without taking a drink. A few seconds later, he put the bottle back down.

  “You said you don’t know who my dad is.”

  Edie answered quickly. “Not from lack of trying, believe me. I really wish I did.” She turned in her chair so she could see his face better. “I tried to figure it out for such a long time. I even thought maybe she hadn’t told me the truth about Zac, that he had raped her …” The word was so ugly, but everything about this conversation had been. “It fit with the time frame, but she swore that hadn’t happened, and I walked in on the tail end of that whole mess.” She took a deep breath and brought the heels of her feet to rest on the edge of her stool, wrapping her arms around her legs and leaning against the back rest. She was seeking comfort. Her psychologist brain told her so.

  “Willow said that she had a one night stand the weekend after her birthday. Your grandfather was a guest speaker at the Biltmore Hotel, and your mom and G-Ma went with him.”

  “I read about the conference, and that’s the consensus at home. The one-night stand theory.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Edie said.

  Drew narrowed his eyes. “You don’t? Why?”

  Edie watched him. “That wasn’t Willow. She was a flirt. I won’t lie. She had something goin’ on with just about every one of her Boys of Summer, but that’s why Zac was mad at her in the first place. She wouldn’t go all the way.”

  “’Boys of Summer’?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I always called them. It’s a baseball reference. Marcus, Josh, Tyler, Austin.” She sighed. “Zac, too. She fooled around with them.” Drew blushed and Edie was amused to see it. “The normal stuff teenagers do,” she added. “There was nothing wrong with that, but then she got pregnant.”

  Drew ran his fingers through his hair. “God, I can’t imagine having a kid right now. I don’t know what I want to study in college yet. Hell, I don’t even know what movie I want to see next weekend.”

  “Crazy, huh?” Edie hugged her legs a little tighter. “I think she was seeing someone. She told me about everything except that. This guy was her biggest secret, and I still haven’t figured it out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, there were times when Willow would disappear. It started the summer before our sophomore year. Your mom was serious about her grades. She didn’t get the 4.0 your grandma wanted, but she was close. She didn’t have a problem with skipping class, though. She also hitchhiked. Your grandma knew about it, too. I think that’s why she gave in and let Elias and your grandfather give her that Mustang.”

  “I have it now. The Mustang.”

  Edie smiled. “I’m glad. Your mom would be happy you’re driving it.”

  He was thoughtful again. “You think she was skipping so she could go see a guy?”

  Edie nodded. “I do. She’d disappear on Friday nights once in a while. Sometimes on Saturdays. We spent a lot of time together, but I was a cheerleader. That and homework kept me busy. She was always smarter than me. She didn’t have to work as hard as I did to get good grades. I would have never passed geometry without her.”

  Drew made a face. “I hate geometry.”

  Edie couldn’t help but laugh. “Me, too.” She sighed. “Willow was my best friend. I covered for her on occasion, but she never asked me to. Somehow she did all of her sneaking around under the radar.”

  Rosie pushed herself back through the doggy door. She looked first at Edie, watching her for a moment. Then her mismatched eyes moved over to Drew. She decided which human most needed her, then fell quietly to the floor near Drew’s stool.

  “They checked her cell phone records.”

  “They checked everything,” Edie agreed.

  “She called and received calls from one number for a while.”

  “The one they traced back to the grocery store? Harris Teeter. They tracked down a name for that one, but they couldn’t make a connection. The guy said he’d lost that phone at least a year before the murder. He had no idea who Willow was, and there was nothing to tie him to her.”

  Drew began to swing his legs from the stool. Ever so slightly. Rosie moved her eyes up and Edie continued to watch him. He was beginning to realize there wasn’t much about his mom that he didn’t already know.

  “There was one more number,” he said. “Lots of calls to and from.”

  “That’s who she was seeing,” Edie said with conviction. “That’s the number I wish they could trace.” The police had done their work on that one, too, but the number had been attached to a pre-paid phone. Whoever owned it had paid cash every month, and the information taken from his ID by the clerk he made the initial purchase from claimed the cardholder had died back in the winter of 1979.

  “You think that phone belonged to my dad.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I can’t prove it, but yeah,” Edie told him. “I do.”

  “Do you think my dad killed her?”

  Edie gave him a shrug. “He’s a definite maybe. The only thing I know about him for sure is that he didn’t want anyone to know who he was. Willow was intelligent. I’d like to think she knew better than to get mixed up with someone who had reasons to keep himself hidden. I’d like to think he was a good guy. I don’t know. Like I said before, I believe that Willow knew the person who killed her. Until something happens to change my mind, I’m afraid he’s pretty high on the list.”

  Drew sighed. “Dead end.”

  “And now we have to figure out how Hank Mills plays into all of this. You need to know something, Drew.” He looked up and found her eyes. “Willow was a good person. She was my most favorite person in all the world. She was young and scared but she was trying to figure things out. She’d gotten her GED, she was thinking about college. She was making plans. She wanted to do right by you. She loved you so very much. Don’t you ever doubt that for a second.”

  She saw tears well up in Drew’s eyes and she dropped her feet down, hopping off the stool. Rosie popped up, her eyes on her owner. When Edie wrapped her arms around Drew, Rosie moved and sat as close to him as she could, her body pressed against his leg.

  “You look so much like her,” Edie whispered. “So much it hurts.”

  Drew couldn’t hold back. He’d finally found the one person who knew exactly who his mother was, the one person who believed in her and continued to love her unconditionally.

  “I’m sorry that you lost her, too.” He said it so softly as he cried that Edie almost didn’t hear him. She hugged him even tighter, and in doing so, felt somehow closer to Willow. Her heart broke for this boy who had lost so much in his short seventeen years.

  “Willow, Paige, I don’t know if you can hear me,” Edie called out silently. “I’ve got your boy, and I’m gonna do my best to keep him safe.”

  She closed her eyes, held on to Drew, and hoped she hadn’t just sent a lie out to universe.

  LIKE A BAD PENNY

  Asheville Citizen-Times

  November 10, 2016

  HAS THE SLEEPING BEAUTY STRANGLER RETURNED?

  Tragedy struck the well-known Winston School on Friday, October 30 when high school junior Paige Riley Barlow disappeared from her dorm room after attending the Ghostly Gala, Winston’s yearly Halloween dance. No one on campus knew Miss Barlow was missing until Saturday morning when she failed to attend field hockey practice. When Miss Barlow’s dorm room, located in Mitchell Hall, which houses all female students at the school, was searched, it was determined that a struggle had taken place.

  In the early morning hours of November 5, suspected killer, Henry Jonah Mills, was found by school instructor Randall Kennedy. Mills was with Miss Barlow’s body on school grounds. The Asheville Police Department has obtained a
signed confession from Mr. Mills, however the suspect claims that while he was the one who killed Paige Barlow, he did not act alone, and that the Sleeping Beauty Killer helped plan the kidnapping and murder of Miss Barlow.

  While the police aren’t willing to concede that The Sleeping Beauty Strangler, who is suspected in the slaying of four young women between November 1998 and August 1999 in the Asheville/Redwood area, has returned, they do note that Andrew Larsen, the son of one of the serial killer’s victims, Miss Willow Larsen, also attends Winstonl, and had been dating Miss Paige Barlow for two years.

  Further evidence in this case suggests the strong possibility that The Sleeping Beauty Strangler, or someone who is well researched in the cases in which The Sleeping Beauty Strangler is allegedly connected to, is witnessed by this drawing of victim Paige Barlow. Suspected killer Henry Mills claims he was the artist that rendered the picture, and that he delivered this drawing to Andrew Larsen’s dorm room the night he was arrested for the murder of Paige Barlow. It has been confirmed by Detective Maxwell Cabot that it was indeed Andrew Larsen who brought this evidence to the Asheville Police Department, and that fingerprints on the drawing match those of Henry Mills.

  Edie sat at her normal table at The Jumping Bean coffeehouse, her eyes scanning the headlines in the daily news on the screen of her laptop. This hadn’t been the first article she’d read about Paige’s death. They’d been printed daily since the day of the girl’s disappearance. It was bad enough that a seventeen year old student had been brutally murdered, but the fact that she was involved with the son of a previous victim, and she was strangled in the same way Willow had been was enough to stir panic in those residents who remembered that time of terror. Now that it had been reported that the killer had stated in no uncertain terms that The Sleeping Beauty Killer was back, something very close to panic had settled into the city.

  And Drew was right in the center of it all.

  They were still leaving some details of Drew’s involvement out of the press, although Edie knew everything would come to light eventually. She studied the drawing included with the article and felt tears come to her eyes. The girl depicted in the drawing was so young and beautiful. It was easy to see that she’d also been out of her mind terrified.

  “You poor thing,” Edie muttered, wiping her nose with a napkin.

  She was a psychologist and new bad things happened to people all the time. Some of the tragedy they experienced was the result of bad decisions, of substance abuse or other horrific things humans do to make their lives unbelievably difficult. So many times, tragic things happened to people who were just going about the normal business of living their lives.

  Tears spilled over her lower lashes when she thought of Willow and all that she’d lost that night in the parking lot at Mars Hill. She’d been so young; her whole world laid out in front of her with a son and the prospect of a possibly hard but rewarding future. One she never got to see because someone snatched it all away from her.

  They’d all lost everything. Jocelyn. Diana. Emma. Willow. Paige. Her heart tightened at the thought of Diana. She took a deep breath and drummed her fingers on the table. Everyone who loved each one of those girls had lost so much.

  Edie was a smart woman, and she knew the concept of fair was just that; a concept. Still, the injustice of it all suddenly hit her, and she pushed her laptop away, knocking over her coffee and sending the creamy brew splashing over the table.

  “Damn it!” she cursed out loud, standing up so abruptly that her chair tipped and landed noisily on the tile floor behind her.

  “Here,” she heard someone say. “Let me help.”

  Edie and the stranger pulled as many napkins as they could from the dispenser and tried to sop up the mess. She moved her laptop, which fortunately hadn’t gotten wet, and threw two large handfuls of sticky dripping napkins in the trash.

  “Thanks,” she said, finally looking up to see the kind man who had helped her clean up the mess. “That was really nice of—” The words got stuck in her throat.

  The man standing in front of her was none other than Zac Roth.

  “Well, now I know the universe has got to be kidding. What in the fuck are you doing here?” The coffeehouse was not very full, and Edie hadn’t cursed loudly, but she still stopped and looked around before moving her eyes back to Zac again.

  He was still blond and looked much the same as the day they graduated high school. His face had matured, and he carried a few more lines and creases than he’d had back then. His hairstyle was a lot less Backstreet Boys, but he still wore it a bit long on top. His body had softened a little, but he looked nice in the dress shirt and tie that he had on. None of that was enough to cool Edie’s temper.

  “And by the way,” she told him, “you have no right coming in here and being nice to me. I still haven’t forgiven you yet.”

  “Okay,” Zac said, raising his palms in surrender. “It has been eighteen years, though. We used to be friends. You sure you won’t just sit down and talk to me for a few minutes?”

  “What in the world would you and I have to talk about, Zac?”

  Zac pointed to Edie’s laptop. “Willow,” he said. “And her son.”

  Edie narrowed her eyes at him. “Why?”

  “You don’t find it at all suspicious that Drew’s girlfriend was killed in the exact same way that his mother was?”

  Edie bit the inside of her cheek. “Oh, I do,” she told him. “I’m still not convinced you didn’t have something to do with Willow’s death. And how weird is it that you would show up now right when the killer has resurfaced?”

  “Edie,” Zac sighed. “I just told you that’s why I was here. And I live in Raleigh. I never really went that far away.”

  “You came home just to talk to me about Willow?”

  “Articles keep popping up. It was like I was reliving the past. I felt like I needed to come, like I owe it to Willow for being such an asshole back then. Someone needs to help her kid.”

  Edie’s stomach was in knots. She hadn’t trusted Zac back in high school. The scene she’d come upon that night in the pool house played like a loop in her mind as she stood in front of him. Too much shit had gone down, and his reappearance in town after eighteen years didn’t sit well with her.

  “I want you to stay away from Drew.”

  “Edie, I was an asshole kid. What I did to Willow was horrible, and if I could take it back, I would. Remember on her birthday when you caught me in her room? I was trying to leave her a note. I was trying to apologize.” He paused. “I got smacked around as a kid, and even though I knew that wasn’t the way to deal with things, I’d lose my temper and then feel awful afterwards. I went into the military right out of high school. Then therapy, too. I figured my shit out. It’s too late for me tell Willow all of that, but I wanted you to know.”

  Edie shook her head. “This is too much. All of this. It doesn’t feel right. Nothing about any of this is right. Drew doesn’t need all of that dumped on him right now. He doesn’t need you. You need to turn around, head back to Raleigh and leave all of this alone, you hear me?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with Willow’s death.”

  “And yet someone else attached to Drew is dead, and here you are turning up like a bad penny.”

  Zac shook his head and began to walk backward. “Okay, Edie,” he told her. “You win.”

  He turned and Edie watched him push through the door. He didn’t look back once as he walked through the parking lot toward his car.

  Edie laced her fingers and pressed her palms together in a tight ball. She pressed them against her mouth and focused on her breathing. She counted to ten before making her way to the counter.

  “Hey,” she called to the barista behind the counter. “I made a real mess over here. Can y’all direct me to a mop?”

  THE GATHERING

  Drew had been doing a lot of research.

  He didn’t know anything about the other girls who had been kil
led before his mom. He knew basic information like their names, where they’d lived, that they all went to same high school. What he couldn’t figure out is why they’d been targeted, or what they could have done to deserve to die the way they had.

  And the only thing he could find to tie Paige to any of the other girls was him.

  He sighed.

  The library was quiet, which was exactly why he’d decided to bring his laptop and do his research there. G-Ma had been hovering since he came home from the hospital. He didn’t hold it against her, but he was feeling a bit claustrophobic. She wanted to know where he was every second. He didn’t fault her for that, either. She hadn’t been happy about him going to see Edie. She hadn’t seemed nearly so upset about his trip to Redwood Library.

  Everyday the Asheville Citizen-Times printed a new article, and everyday someone who knew Willow all those years ago seemed to show up to tell him how sorry they were … how scary that time had been … how horrible it was the way she had died. And now Paige’s life had ended in the same way, and it must be true, all the things the media was saying about how the Sleeping Beauty Strangler had come back because of Drew.

  His phone began vibrating on the table next to his laptop. At least he’d remembered to silence it. That was one less thing for someone to be upset with him about.

  Glancing at the screen, he recognized the caller.

  Emergency! Get back to the house. G-Ma needs you.

  Drew packed up his computer and was in the Mustang heading towards his house in under a minute.