Janice is Missing

by Rod Kackley

  Janice is Missing: A Crime and Suspense Thriller

  Rod Kackley

  Published by Rod Kackley, 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  JANICE IS MISSING: A CRIME AND SUSPENSE THRILLER

  First edition. May 8, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 Rod Kackley.

  ISBN: 978-1386929413

  Written by Rod Kackley.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  Twenty Five

  Twenty Six

  Twenty Seven

  Twenty Eight

  Twenty Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

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  Further Reading: A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection

  Also By Rod Kackley

  About the Author

  We will be free.

  And we will make them pay.

  —Janice

  One

  It was another morning in the paradise known as Joy Ellis’ life.

  She was dragging herself through her apartment, literally falling out of bed and hitting the floor after the simultaneous experience of the piercing tones of her iPhone alarm clock app assaulting her ears and the claws of her cat, Clark, piercing the skin of her belly.

  Joy wound up on her hands and knees, crawling the first few feet to the bathroom of her tiny, 600-square-foot apartment. Joy could hear the water in her neighbor’s apartment running, which made her bladder squeeze just a little bit tighter and she got up onto her feet, which felt like 16-pound bowling balls hooked on to her ankles, for the rest of the journey.

  Joy had never been a morning person, and was less of one after spending more than eight hours —after a ten-hour work day — listening to the drones of the St. Isidore City Council drone on about one zoning code after another.

  To make the night even tougher, Joy had to go back to the Chronicle newsroom after the meeting and try to make some sense out of the eight hours of boredom. More perplexing yet; Joy had to somehow make the dry sand of local development attractive to the eyes and mind of the average St. Isidorian.

  However, her drive to make the story interesting was motivated by more than the men and women who would read it in the Chronicle the next day.

  Actually, Joy didn’t give much more than half a fried rat’s ass about the loving people of this town that screamed average so loudly her head hurt.

  Joy covered the meeting for the clips, for the links, for the chance to add one more 32-inch bylined story to her resume that she hoped would eventually turn into a passport to a brighter — major market — life.

  “If this doesn’t better soon, it might be ‘Welcome to Walmart,’ time,” she muttered to her reflection in the mirror.

  Seeing her face smile back at her didn’t make Joy any happier.

  She had been compared to the actress, Janeane Garofalo one more time than her twenty-six-year-old soul could handle. Ever since she and her friends had rented the movie, The Truth About Cats and Dogs when they were in middle school, everyone Joy hung out with had compared her to Garofalo. Worse yet, they had all compared her best friend Linda to the Uma Thurman character.

  Well, at least I know where I stack up, Joy thought as she had a flashback of her friends screaming as one when they all saw the resemblance.

  And Joy couldn’t deny it.

  She and Garofalo were both about 5’1”, had thick dark hair — which resulted in a wispy dark mustache that Joy never was able to completely remove — and wore glasses.

  Joy did have a curvy body, but she felt like her legs were getting stumpier every day.

  “The women in our family, you could swap their ankles for table legs any day of the week,” her father would always say to get a laugh after a few beers before Thanksgiving dinner.

  Looking down at the bathroom floor that morning, she saw the wisdom behind his joke.

  Another alarm woke her from that nightmare. But this was a welcome alarm.

  “Beep, beep, the coffee is done,” she said.

  Three years living alone and now Joy talked to herself without embarrassment. The first few months she had laughed at herself when she did that. The next three months Joy worried about herself. Was she becoming one of those cat ladies?

  Looking around and realizing she had no cats, Joy moved on.

  She had more important thing to worry about, like getting out of St. Isidore.

  Joy poured herself a mug of motivation from the Mr. Coffee and flipped open her laptop.

  There was the city council story, the front page of the local section.

  Joy sent a link to her high school journalism teacher, George Lyons.

  “This is how boring this town is, Mr. Lyons,” she wrote. “Even this story makes the front page.”

  Then Joy made the mistake she made every morning. After fixing a plate of bacon, eggs, and frozen hash browns that browned nicely in the toaster, she sat down, starting eating and clicked on Facebook.

  None of her breakfast was bad. She had grown up believing that breakfast was the move important meal of the day. And, Joy was one of those people who could happily eat some variation of the typical American breakfast three times a day, and maybe once more if she’d spend the night in a bar.

  No, it wasn’t the breakfast that turned her stomach.

  It was Facebook.

  And it wasn’t even the social networking app that caused pinched her bowels.

  It was the people, the college friends, she followed.

  They were so goddamn happy, all the fucking time.

  And doing so well, as her mother might have said.

  Joy had an IQ of 126. She knew it was true. It had been tested. Her mother had insisted.

  “So why are they working for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and even the fucking Wall Street Journal, while I am stuck in St. Isidore?” she had asked herself again, this morning.

  She had always, always been one of the smarter kids in class, if not the smartest. And she hadn’t been shy about making that clear.

  What else could she do?

  If the other children weren’t moving fast enough, she took over and did it herself. That had been true in grade school, middle school, college, and journalism school.

  And it was true at the good, old St. Isidore Chronicle, too.

  Joy had to admit she might have gone too far at the Chronicle in her first year when the editors weren’t moving as quickly as she would have liked and she let them know.

  Then there was the time they rejected three out of four of her story ideas — they said the readers weren’t interested in crime stories — and moved her back to the city council beat.

  Maybe the truth was she had pissed them off one time too many.

  Okay. Joy admitted she had ruffled some feathers, stepped on some toes, and rubbed some fur — no, a lot of fur — the wrong way.

  But goddamn it, she was too good for St.Isidore.

  Something has to change and I mean know, Joy vowed as she finished dressing. She looked i
n the mirror.

  “Good enough for who it’s for,” she decided aloud.

  Joy marched from the kitchen area, which was just big enough for one average person — not two — to cook dinner, then turn around and wash dishes without taking a single step, to the living room.

  She grabbed her shoulder strap purse off the one sofa, next to the one overstuffed chair she could cram into what passed for a living room, and slammed the apartment door shut behind her, only then realizing the door was locked, and her keys were where she had left them, on the kitchen table.

  “Damn,” Joy whispered as she leaned her forehead against the cold metal of her apartment door.

  Two

  Tim slammed the basement door closed. Everything was ready. The basement had been empty for far too long, and Tim was not happy about that.

  But that would soon end.

  He was taking action. More was lost by indecision than the wrong decision, Tim was fond of telling his high school classes, and he meant it, even though it had almost never proved right for him.

  So many things had gone wrong in his life.

  Returning to St. Isidore had been a major defeat as far as Tim was concerned.

  Even though a lot of people seemed to be glad to see his 6’2” angular frame gliding through the halls of St. Isidore High School again, coming back as an adult didn't make him happy.

  Tim was disgusted with himself.

  He would stare in the mirror every morning and practice squinting his steel gray eyes that could be warm and friendly when he wanted to be charming. He would, get all bashful, look down at his feet, then glance back up with those eyes, and the women would just melt.

  It had even worked on his grade school teachers.

  Tim had always been the boy the other kids wanted to be, and the boy that all the girls wanted.

  But when he was angered, his eyes would squeeze tight, nearly shut, veins would bulge in his neck, his brow furrowed and his hairline dropped down to his eyebrows.

  Tim was a strong, athletic teenager.

  He became used to getting his way.

  Usually.

  But something had always gone wrong with the girls. Somehow it never worked out the way Tim thought it would, and certainly didn't end the way the girls imagined it would.

  Everything had gotten worse in college and was at a crisis point now that Tim had reached middle age.

  Tim had to admit it to himself as he sat down at the desk in the room he had turned into an office in his five-bedroom home.

  His life was not going the way he dreamed it would in college.

  What a disappointment. Teaching biology at St. Isidore High School. Tim had never imagined, even in his wildest nightmares, he would be here in his early forties.

  His house didn’t make Tim feel any better about his station in life, especially on a winter morning like this when the wind howled outside and crept through the cracks and crevices in the old windows and walls.

  He’d only bought the damn thing, this house because everyone was talking about the new Medical Mile in St. Isidore boosting land prices and home values in just a couple of years.

  So Tim had picked up this hulking beast with five bedroom and four bathrooms, a real monstrosity — it had been owned by some rich guy way back when in the nineteenth century — figuring he could flip the bitch whenever he wanted.

  Hell, it had all the original interior woodwork. It was like a museum. Old style wooden floor, all scraped and nicked from the boots that had tramped over it in the early day, the real estate agent had told Tim.

  “This is such a deal,” Melody stage whispered. “You know one the Mile is finished everything is going to go up in price. Your profits are going to be in the five or maybe even six figures.”

  It made sense to him. And Melody was so hot, how could Tim say no?

  Lots of repairs were needed. The ceiling was cracked and crumbling. The pipes were moaning. Some of the windows were painted shut. Others would swell on a hot, humid day so tightly they couldn’t be lowered.

  He would have to replace the sagging wooden floor.

  But what the fuck, figured Tim. I’ll get out from under this white elephant with a huge profit, and slide out of this pop stand of a town.

  To his displeasure, the white elephant was shitting on his head.

  But there was an upside to the deal almost immediately.

  Melody. She was hot and had asked Tim if he’d like to go out for drinks.

  Now there’s a bonus, Tim thought.

  Unfortunately, Tim wasn’t on his game that night. He drank more than he should, woke up with a hangover that could kill a horse, and had to go home from school sick the next day.

  Tim tried to call Melody. But she must have moved or something. Even the people she worked with were surprised how quickly Melody had vanished.

  Must have been more there than I realized, Tim thought.

  There were a few women after Melody.

  But it didn’t go well with them. Sometimes Tim got so tense when he was with a woman or a girl that he would black out.

  It was the strangest thing. One minute Tim was holding a girl, the next he was knocking mud off his boots or shoes, and washing up in the bathroom at home, or sometimes at a gas station.

  A couple of times Tim woke up, so to speak, in St. Isidore Park, a vast forest preserve that was in the center of the city.

  This morning though, Tim had other problems to worry about.

  He was in trouble at St. Isidore High School where he had been working as a biology teacher since flaming out a few years after college.

  One of his students, Heather, had accused him of nearly raping her.

  What a bitch, Tim thought as he clicked on his laptop.

  Dumb bitch, God I hate her.

  A couple of months ago, Tim would have been worried about striking out so often, but now he was picking up women on the internet. They were so much better than any of the women he was meeting at the Lamplighter or the grocery store.

  It was how Tim always saved his morning. Cup of coffee, bagel, and his laptop.

  This morning he could hardly wait to start surfing.

  Luckily his MacBook Air warmed up quickly, and Tim was soon on his favorite website looking for a message from Janice.

  Now she is a woman I could fall in love with Tim had thought more than once. “She’s not a kid like Heather, that bitch. Janice is a woman. College graduate and everything, and God is she hot,” Tim had told his best friend, Paul, a couple of nights before at the Lamplighter.

  Looking through the dead soldiers on the table in front of him, and lifting beer number five to his lips, Tim paused, winked at Paul, and said, “She just might be the one for me, this Janice.”

  Tim nearly spilled his coffee on the MacBook this morning, which would have been a tragedy, when he saw the message from Janice.

  It put a smile on Tim's face and a tent in his jeans.

  They were on for tonight.

  “Good God, my dream has come true,” Tim whispered.

  It was going to be a long day in school. But it would all be worth it.

  Tim gently closed the laptop, and walked out of his home office, over the new laminate wood floors he and Paul had put in two months ago, to the kitchen.

  Before he opened the side door to go to his car, Tim paused to tap on the basement door.

  “Soon, real soon,” he whispered.

  Three

  Joy decided it was now or never. After the embarrassment of having to walk into the apartment manager’s office and ask for the master key to get into her apartment, she couldn’t stomach another shot across the bow of her ego.

  “Well, look who’s back,” the manager said.

  Russ' voice made Joy cringe. But she didn’t let it show.

  She and this manager—Russ was his name, but Joy could never remember it—knew what was coming next.

  It was like a play that never stopped running Monday through Saturday with two sh
ows on Wednesday.

  “Could I please have the master key?” said Joy

  “I have locked myself out, again,” chimed in Russ, the manager, in a falsetto that was supposed to sound like a girl. Instead, it reminded her of a fat man in an atrocious movie trying to look feminine.

  He smiled. Joy didn’t.

  Joy stared at Russ. She didn’t let her eyes leave his beady little excuse for windows to his soul.

  I will bet those eyes have never seen a real life vagina, Joy thought. But even though she enjoyed the joke, Joy wouldn’t let herself laugh or even smile.

  She didn't blink. Joy simply used the super powers that those with a higher intellect have at their disposal to control those in the world with IQs under 100 and personalities even lower than that.

  Finally, Russ cracked. It happened every time.

  Somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind, Joy knew Russ was just trying to win her over with his sense of humor. If she had ever agreed to go to a movie or dinner with him, Joy was sure Russ would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  And in another part of her mind, Joy knew that if Russ ever worked up the courage to ask, she would have said, “Yes.” It’s not that she saw him as some diamond in the rough that a real woman could make better.

  It was just that Joy was that lonely.

  For a few moments, they played the game. But, eventually, Russ grudgingly got out from behind his desk with the key and walked with Joy to her apartment, opened the door, and waited while she retrieved her keys.

  For a moment, Joy thought he was going to say something intelligent, something smart and witty, and ask her out.

  But Russ swallowed whatever he was close to spewing out. Joy decided not to press. The moment passed.

  In what would have been a total ad-lib from their usual script, Joy had almost asked Russ out.

  Good God would that have been a disaster to my ego, Joy thought to herself.

  Still, she had to admit the poor guy seemed sorry to see her go when she walked to her car.

  After Russ was out of sight, Joy decided not to drive, but to walk to work. Whenever she did that, Joy always walked through the edge of St. Isidore Park. The huge trees with branches forming a canopy over the sidewalk gave her shelter.