Next Day Gone

by J C Wing

  “How was your day?”

  Edie steered her Blazer through the pick up line at Blue Ridge Elementary. She was careful to follow the rules. Parents, she’d learned, could be a scary bunch. They tended to rear up and want to rumble at the least provocation. She felt the same way, but she was a little more low-key about it.

  “It was good,” Dean told her, the lenses of his glasses spotted with rain. “I got eight of my spelling words right.”

  “Ah, let me guess. Arithmetic and glacier?”

  He groaned. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Darn it. I thought we had those two.”

  “I thought we did, too.”

  She pulled the truck out of the line and settled into traffic. Although this Blazer was only ten years old, she still yearned for the one she had driven in high school.

  “How much homework do you have?”

  “Social studies and reading. Grampa said he would help me.”

  Edie smiled. “So, the two of you have been making plans behind my back again?”

  Dean managed to keep a straight face. “Maybe?”

  Edie speed-dialed her dad, then hit the speaker button. When he answered, she glanced over at Dean again.

  “So, I hear you and your grandson have big homework plans tonight.”

  Martin chuckled. “You told me you were tired when we talked yesterday. I kinda figured that I knew why.”

  “Yes, sir,” Edie said, trying to keep her voice light.

  “Wednesday still your short day?”

  Martin already knew that it was, but the question made her smile.

  “It’s all wrapped up. Oh, I heard about the new burger restaurant by the house.” She glanced over at Dean who was looking up at her from the corner of his eye. He couldn’t hide the grin any longer, and the sight of his gap-toothed smile warmed her heart.

  “I mighta heard somethin’ about that, too.”

  “I figured. So, buddy, is your overnight bag in the back?” Dean nodded his red head. “Man, the two of you are quite the team.”

  “I think I’ll try the onion rings tonight.”

  “Whooee, I’m glad I’m not spending the night!” Dean started giggling. “It’ll be good and stinky in that house. I’m glad I’ll be with Rosie. At least she goes outside before passing gas.”

  “You almost here?” Martin asked.

  “What’s our ETA, co-pilot?” Edie asked.

  Dean hadn’t stopped giggling yet. He turned and surveyed their surroundings. “Two minutes!”

  “Prepare for landing!”

  When Edie pulled the Blazer into her dad’s driveway, he was waiting for them on the porch. She’d seen the house a million times since she’d come back from Georgia, but dust from the past had been kicked up so much in the last couple of weeks that she was no longer seeing it through her adult eyes. She’d been brought back to her high school days, and it was almost as if she could climb those stairs past all the framed pictures of her mom and plop herself belly side down on her old twin sized bed. She almost believed that if she waited there long enough, she’d hear the front door slam, then the pounding of feet on the stairs before Willow, with her long blonde ponytail swinging, would show up in her doorway.

  “Mom?”

  Dean’s voice brought Edie back to the present and she blinked the memories away. She turned and smiled at her son.

  “Seriously,” she told him. “Watch out for onion rings. And don’t forget your homework.” She reached over and felt for the overnight back she knew she’d find on the floor behind the passenger’s seat. She grabbed it while Dean climbed out.

  “Love you, Mom.”

  She blew him a handful of kisses before he and his bag turned and bounced up the walk toward the porch. She rolled her window down.

  “I love you, too!” she hollered, and both Dean and her dad waved at her before they disappeared into the house.

  Edie had decided she should make good use of the afternoon and run some errands. She picked up some food and treats for Rosie, then swung by the drycleaners. She made a mental inventory of her fridge and pantry and found it to be lacking, so she stopped and filled a cart full of groceries. By the time she’d gotten all the bags packed in the back of the Blazer, she decided she was too tired to cook, so she ordered Chinese food and picked it up on her way home.

  The sun was setting earlier in the day. It was not even six o’clock, but the sky had grown dark as Edie pulled up into her driveway. She pulled the keys from the ignition, then stared up at the pair of lights that sat on either side of the garage door.

  “Great list building, Doc,” she told herself with a shake of her head. The bulbs had been burned out in the outside lights for weeks, yet she never seemed to remember to buy new ones.

  She had remembered to put a lamp in the living room on a timer, and it burned warmly through the blinds covering the windows at the front of the house. It didn’t reach much farther than that, though, and the front of the house was deep in shadow. She slid out of the seat and cradled the bag of Chinese food in the crook of one arm. She dropped the keys in her pocket and heard the rustling of the bag, then the slam of the truck’s door. She took two steps forward before she was hit hard from the side.

  The sound in her head swelled big, then diminished and she felt like she been submerged under water. She bounced off the Blazer and lost her balance. All she could think about was the pain that had ignited like a match inside her brain. The flame erupted and seemed to consume her. In another second, she collapsed on the driveway. She felt a searing pain in her left arm, and the two paper boxes split open upon impact, spilling Chicken Chow Mein and white rice all over the cement.

  CONFESSION

  “She should have listened to you.”

  Edie’s head was pounding. She thought she’d heard somebody speak, but everything felt fuzzy. She was sitting. She brought her hands down but only the right one seemed to work. She felt around her and decided she was sitting in a camping chair. The kind that folded up and hid in the back of a truck for long periods of time between uses.

  She wasn’t inside. She could feel how cold the air was, and she couldn’t remember if she’d worn a jacket. She reached over and patted her left arm. Yes. Jacket.

  It was dark. She blinked her eyes, looked around. It felt like something was squeezing her head and she could feel her heartbeat pulse between her ears.

  Her legs were unsteady when she tried to stand. She took a deep breath, could smell mountain air. She tried to remember how she had gotten there, but no matter how hard she pushed, the memory wouldn’t come.

  “Hello?”

  “There you are.”

  Edie spun at the sound of the voice. Her body stopped after half a rotation, but her head kept going.

  “What? Where am I?”

  “I guess you’re just now comin’ in on the conversation. Let me catch you up. I started by saying that Willow should have listened to you.”

  Edie knew that voice. She hadn’t heard it in a long time, but there was a still familiarity to it.

  “All those years ago … I thought you were gonna be a good influence. You were, I guess. She was on her way to becomin’ somethin’ maybe, but I’d had enough of the whole thing by then. I just couldn’t wait any longer. There was a good chance she was gonna fuck up again.”

  Edie suddenly felt nauseous. Some psychologist she’d turned out to be. Willow’s killer had been in front of her the whole time and she’d never even caught a glimmer of him.

  “Oh my god …” It felt like she was going to pass out. She reached for the chair, then felt movement near her. He kicked the chair out of her reach and she gasped. The sound of the fragile wood breaking and scattering in the dark forced her backward.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “What a boring question. I thought you of all people might be more creative than that.”

  She took another step backward. Then another. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the dark, but her head still felt l
ike it was going to explode. There was pain in her left arm. A deep ache that flared hot and sharp when she moved it.

  “Did you kill them all?” He laughed and the sound sent chills up her spine. “Paige, too?”

  “Well, I didn’t actually kill Paige. Hank did that for me. He made mistake after mistake after mistake. He was a better spy than a killer, but he still got the job done.”

  “I need to understand …” Edie continued to move away from his voice. “I need to know why.”

  “Because I didn’t like them.”

  Edie stopped moving. “What?”

  She heard pebbles crunching beneath the soles of his work boots, a twig snapping beneath his weight, a shift in the jacket she pictured him wearing.

  “Don’t you get tired of watching people cause the ones that they claim to love pain? I mean, in your profession, you must hear the most amazing sob stories. Don’t you ever just wanna tell a patient to shut the fuck up? To stop making things hard on themselves and everyone around them? My god, I can’t imagine sitting there and listening to all the crap people must dish out to you every single day.”

  Edie was floored. She’d heard a lot of hypocritical bullshit in her day, but this heap he was serving her was just too big for her to choke down.

  He was moving forward. Edie kept moving away.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What was it? Tell me what Jocelyn did wrong. And Diana.” Edie’s voice broke but she tried to keep it steady.

  “Jocelyn was a thief. She lifted shit off shelves in every single store in Redwood. And Diana. Did you know that she had an eating disorder? Her mom had her in every doctor’s office in Asheville tryin’ to get her straightened out.”

  Edie remembered seeing Diana in her cheerleading uniform. She had always been skinny, but she didn’t recall ever thinking that she’d been underweight. Had she missed that somehow? Had Diana been struggling with something that Edie might have been able to help her with? Had Edie been so self-absorbed that she hadn’t even noticed?

  “And then there was Emma Jones.”

  Edie’s eyes had adjusted a bit more. She could see the shape of him. He was about six feet away and suddenly he seemed bigger to her than he ever had before.

  “You know what Emma did to bring in extra money? She found herself a little side job at a gentlemen’s club and performed lap dances for big tips. She was underaged, just seventeen, and her daddy was the pastor over at Greenlawn Church. How uncomfortable do you think Sunday dinners were in the Joneses house?”

  Edie ignored the question. She had her professional diagnosis ready, but she wasn’t about to share it with him. “And Willow?” she asked, a tremor in her voice. She felt pine needles and dirt beneath her feet.

  “What did Willow do? Why did she deserve to die?”

  He didn’t speak right away, but she could feel him. He was moving closer. Edie’s eyes darted around like a panicked bird trying to flee its cage. It felt like her heart was being squeezed inside her chest, and she was afraid she’d pass out again, this time from pure fear.

  “Willow was the biggest culprit of them all,” he said moving closer. “No matter how much Mom begged, Willow refused to be the daughter my parents wanted her to be. She could have made them so happy, but she was selfish. Then she went and got herself pregnant. At sixteen. She broke Dad’s heart.”

  “It wasn’t Willow that broke your dad’s heart, Elias. That was you. You broke his heart and your mom’s, too, the night you killed your sister.”

  Elias spit on the ground. It was either take a chance, take off and trip, or run into a tree … or run right into him. It was so cold. She could barely feel her fingers. She shoved her right hand into her jacket pocket, trying to draw in any heat that she could find. She felt something with the tips of her fingers. About as long as a pencil, but thicker. She fumbled with it, tried to grasp it in her fist.

  “You’re the Sleeping Beauty Strangler?” she asked, still dumbfounded by the news. “It’s been you the whole time?”

  She heard him laugh. “Gotcha!”

  Suddenly, Elias was illuminated in a wide, shaky stream of light. Seeing his startled face made Edie’s anger grow. She finally had the answer. Or she thought she did.

  “Stop!”

  Another familiar voice, but Edie didn’t listen to the command yelled loudly into the cold, dark night. Instead, she lunged forward and sunk the glass cutting tool she held in her right fist into the flesh beneath Elias’s left eye.

  Elias screamed and brought his hands up to his face. The sound exploded in Edie’s thumping head, and she heard a wet sound when he pulled the sharp tool from the soft tissue. Then he screamed again.

  “Run!” Edie knew the command was meant for her, and she followed it, turning and sprinting forward, this time not as afraid to run into a tree if it allowed her some distance from Elias.

  She saw the light move again. It swerved, hitting several trees, their trunks lit in a ghostly blue for a moment, and the light swept across them. There was the sound of feet scrambling on dirt and leaves, then the loud retort of a gun. After that, the night was filled with an agonized screaming even worse than she’d heard before she’d run the other way, and Edie knew that sound would never leave her head.

  “Edie! Where are you? Are you hurt?”

  Edie heard the voice and was confused. She stopped running, hushing the noise of all the leaves covering the forest floor. She could still hear Elias as he screamed. It was the sound of intense pain, and even greater anger.

  “Edie!”

  “Holy shit …”

  She struggled to pull her cell phone out of her back pocket. Her fingers were so cold that they burned. It took several moments to find the flashlight icon on the screen, and she nearly dropped the phone twice before she was able to activate it.

  “Edie?” The voice was strong, and it carried over the sound of Elias’s howls.

  She began walking the way she’d come, her phone held out in front of her. She aimed her phone along the ground. Elias was there, hunched over himself in a mess of leaves and other dying foliage. His knee had been taken out by the bullet, and it was obvious that he wouldn’t be moving on his own again for quite some time. He sounded like an angry wolf as he moved around, in far too much pain to sit still.

  It was right about then that she heard a shout coming from the trees. “Police!”

  “Edie, are you okay?” the voice asked again. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  Edie let the light move upward until she caught sight of a man holding a gun.

  “Zac?”

  “Drew called me. He told me to meet him here.”

  “Drew?” Edie asked, confused. “How did Drew get your number?”

  Elias roared and Edie’s light jumped. The roar turned into a maniacal laugh that seemed to have no end. “He’s not here,” he said, enjoying the predicament Zac and Edie found themselves in even though the gunshot had thrown a red curtain over his eyes and all he could feel was fury and pain.

  “Where is he, you sonofabitch,” Edie hissed, moving closer to him.

  “Edie, no!” Zac yelled.

  “Where is he?” This time she yelled as loudly as she could.

  Zac moved forward, his gun aimed at Elias’s face. “Edie, stop!”

  There were streams of light dancing everywhere, and four officers burst through the trees. “Police! Everyone stay where you are!”

  “He’s the Sleeping Beauty Strangler!” Edie yelled as the officers swarmed around them. “Elias Larsen. Willow’s brother.”

  “Drop the gun!”

  Zac did as he was told. “Detective Cabot?” he called.

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, ain’t that nice?” Elias said through clenched teeth. “Best save your bullets, cowboys. I ain’t your biggest problem right now. Drew got an emergency phone call. His G-Ma needed his help. None of that was true, by the way. She’s just fine. Drew ain’t alone, though, and the person who’s got ahold of him ain�
�t gonna give him up easy.”

  “Detective Cabot, I have to go find Drew,” Edie pleaded.

  The detective only took a moment, then Edie heard him on his radio. “I have reason to believe that Drew Larsen and possibly his grandmother are in danger. I need officers there at the house immediately.”

  “Please, I need to get to him.”

  “Mr. Roth, have you fired your gun in the last twelve hours?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll need you to leave it right where you left it then.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ll deal with the formalities tomorrow. Go. Both of you.”

  And they went.

  BEST LAID PLANS

  “Are you hurt?” Zac asked for maybe the tenth time.

  “My arm isn’t workin’ real well, and it hurts like hell.” Edie looked over at the speedometer, happy to see he was pushing the needle steadily upward. “How in the world did you know where I was?”

  “Promise not to get mad if I tell you?”

  Edie scoffed. “I think we’re long past that point, don’t you?”

  Zac fought to keep the truck on the road as his speed increased. “I was parked at your house. Okay, across the street from your house. I didn’t like the way we’d left things at the coffeehouse. I was hoping you’d give me another chance to talk to you. I saw Elias come around the back of your truck and knock you out. One punch, and you were down. I followed him into the forest. And just because I think you’re the kind of person to ask this question, yes, I have a permit for the gun.”

  “Excellent.” Edie’s arm throbbed, and her head wasn’t feeling so good, either. “You went and talked to Drew.”

  Zac maneuvered around a slow-moving truck, swerving into the opposite lane and then back again. “I did.”

  “I asked you not to.”

  “Well, I’ve always known I wasn’t the killer, and I knew he was safe with me. I made a judgement call. Be pissed if you want, Edie, but I’m just trying to help. I would’ve called the cops sooner tonight, but I didn’t know where the hell Elias was taking you. I wanted to make sure I had a good location so they’d know where to find us.”