by A J Rivers
He opens the file, and I notice the first page looks like a schedule. He points to it.
"A day in the life of Xavier Renton."
I get a closer look at the page and notice the standard schedule has been modified in what I can only imagine is Xavier's handwriting. He's squeezed in several additional activities and a few notes. But it's an item typed at the top of the schedule that catches my eye.
"Morning vitamins, supplement magnesium?" I ask. "Do all the inmates get that?"
He glances at the schedule from the drawer he's opened and is digging through.
"All the inmates receive vitamins as part of our health initiative. Some also receive additional supplements or medications depending on their needs. Xavier takes extra magnesium every day on the recommendation of his doctor. Something with his heart."
"Oh," I say.
For some reason, that hits me. It doesn't take long before another knock on the office door makes the warden release the automatic lock and call for the person to enter. A guard walks in with Xavier handcuffed and chained beside him. Warden Light asks for his permission to release the recordings, and he promptly signs the form put in front of him.
As he's being led away, I reach out to touch his arm. The guard pulls him away to prevent the touch, but Xavier looks at me.
"Your heart," I say. "Is it alright?"
Xavier nods. "It's fine. Just floppy."
They leave, and I see the warden shaking his head, leaning back in his chair as he rolls the paperweight around in his hand again.
Twenty minutes later, I'm walking out of the facility with a flash drive of all of Xavier's messages from the last six months. My phone was held along with my gun and wallet while I was inside, so I check it to see if Dean has called me. There's a message saying he might be longer than he thought, so I tell him to meet me in my room when he gets to the hotel.
The sun is working its way down toward setting as I get inside and pull out my computer.
Chapter Forty
Raymond James
Anderson Whitley
Brad Coleman
Ashley Teiger
Van Carlton
Presley Hanson
The list of names written in the notebook sitting on my bed keeps growing as I pace back and forth, listening to the messages. I'm not surprised that nearly all of them come from Lakyn Monroe. Hearing her voice is an odd experience. I’d heard it before when I was listening to videos she posted, but it's different when it comes through a phone. She's being more personal, more real when she talks to Xavier than she was when she was performing.
When I started listening to the messages, I was expecting something different. I'm not exactly sure what I thought she was going to say, but I figured it would be like listening to voicemails left for anybody else. Instead, the messages sound more like she's dictating notes.
Every message starts the same. She greets Xavier, confirms that it's her, then starts listing things. Sometimes it's names, and she makes notes about them, like locations or dates. Sometimes it's places she went during the day. Sometimes it's things she did, errands or projects. They come with brief commentary, but it's hard to string it all together.
It's not the same as listening to Xavier. Lakyn's words don't seem to have a consistent flow. They aren't a continuous collection of thoughts or jumbled, tangled ideas presented to the filter of her mind. Instead, it's as if she's speaking to him in a form of code that doesn't rely on confusion or misdirection. She's saying exactly what she means to say, only she's leaving out the part other people would need to understand the point of It.
But Xavier understood. He knew exactly what she was talking about with every message. And I'm taking notes of everything I hear so I can try to understand them, too.
There's something in here. I know there is, I just don't know exactly what.
My phone rings, and I pause the message I'm listening to so I can answer it.
“Hey, honey,” I answer with a long sigh.
“That doesn't sound like a voice of someone who is making tremendous strides in her case,” Sam chuckles.
“Honestly, I don't know. I might be.”
I tell him about everything that happened at the jail.
“He said his heart is… floppy?” Sam asks.
“I like that, of everything, that's what you got out of that,” I say.
“I mean, that's an odd thing for him to say.”
“Actually, not really. It's an odd thing for somebody else to say. It's fairly pedestrian for Xavier.”
“What about these messages? Have you gotten through all of them?”
“Not all of them,” I say, letting out a breath as I drop down to sit on the bed beside my computer. “I'm taking notes, but it feels like the day at college when I walked into the wrong class and had no idea what was going on, but frantically took notes anyway because I figured I needed to know those things. That's what I'm doing now. Just kind of writing everything down, and I'll sort through it later.”
“At least it's something,” he says. “I mean, it could be worse.”
“Worse?”
“Like that time in high school where you thought it was a Saturday, but it was actually Friday, and you nearly missed an exam. If I hadn’t called you, you’d have slept right through it. You barely had enough time to tumble out of bed and get to class about three seconds before it began.”
“If I recall correctly, the reason I overslept that morning was because somebody decided to come sneak through my window the night before and kept me up late ‘studying’,” I fire back with a grin.
“He must have been a really handsome guy.”
“Oh, he wasn’t so bad. Kind of a huge dork, though.”
“You got me there,” Sam chuckles. “But anyway, I know you’ve got this.”
“Yeah, it's something. And I'll figure it out.”
“I know you will,” he says. “If anybody can, it's going to be you. You haven't stopped amazing me yet, and I don't think you’ll stop any time soon.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I miss you so much.”
“You'll be home soon. Then it's just a few more months until our vacation,” he says.
“I am very much looking forward to that,” I tell him.
We get off the phone, and I start the messages up again. As soon as I hear the person speaking, I flip to a new page in the notebook. It's one of the few messages that isn’t from Lakyn. This one is a man's voice telling Xavier to remember Andrew’s birthday. It makes me shudder, and I quickly move to the next message.
The next message starts the same as all the other ones, with a member of the jail staff noting the date and time the message was listened to. I jot the information down, but it's the next comment that catches my attention.
"Note. Not delivered to inmate. Unintentional call."
The message begins, and I strain to listen. For the first several seconds, it is just noise. Not static or interference, but ambient noise of fabric, things rustling around, and a sound I recognize after a little bit is traffic rushing past. It does sound like someone accidentally called, but before I can skip the message, I hear a voice.
"I thought you said you were taking me home."
It's Lakyn Monroe. The voice is muffled, but it's unmistakably her.
"You took a wrong turn back there. You should have turned right to go to my house, but you turned left."
There's some sort of response, but it's too muffled to understand.
"Oh. Well, that's fine. It's easy to make mistakes out here with all these twisty back roads. I should have listened to my sister. She told me to always have a snack in my purse. I'm getting really hungry, and I'm probably an hour away from home."
There's another response I can't hear.
"Do you think the farmers ever get confused about which farm is theirs? Everything looks so similar out here. We just went by four separate wheat fields and two cornfields before these tracks. Don't you think that gets confusing someti
mes? Why are you turning left again? You should be turning right to go to my house, not left."
My heart is pounding harder now. Her voice is sure, slightly louder now than when the message began. She's speaking slowly and carefully, enunciating each word so it can be fully understood. She's not talking to the person in the car. She's leaving this message intentionally.
I look down at the notebook to check the date. As I continue to listen to the message, I pick up my phone and search for Lakyn’s disappearance. This message was left the day after the last time she was seen in public.
"Where are we? I don't think I've ever been out this far. I'd like to come back sometime when there's more light so I can see it better. We passed by a sign two roads ago. Did you see what it said?"
Lakyn's voice rings in my ears as I rush around the hotel room, getting dressed.
"When I agreed to speak with the judge, I didn't think I was going to get a leisurely drive out of it, too. This really has been lovely, but I need to get home now."
I shove my feet into my black combat boots and tie them tight. Sweeping my hair up into a ponytail, I cross the room to the dresser.
"Why are you stopping? I don't want to be out here with you. Where are we? Who's in that car?"
I pull my gun out of the drawer and put it together, pushing the magazine into place.
"No. I don't want to take a walk. I'm not going into that cornfield. I've never liked mazes. You need to bring me home. I don't want to be here. Take me home, Laurence."
The sound of a car door slamming pops in the message. A breath. Another rustle of movement and the message ends.
I strap the gun to my hip, grab my computer, and run out of the room.
"What do you mean you're following her directions?" Sam demands five minutes later.
"The last message to Xavier is from Lakyn, the day after the last time she was seen in public. It was never given to Xavier because the staff member who listened to it thought it was left accidentally. She's in a car, describing where they're going. This was intentional. She wanted him to hear it."
"Why him?" Sam asks. "If she could manage to call somebody, why would she call him and not the police?"
“She probably thought whoever had her would be able to hear the dispatcher answer the phone. She likely had Xavier's message line programmed into her phone. All she had to do was hit a single button and it would call him. She knew if she could talk over the message machine answering, then she could talk without anybody interrupting or the person driving hearing them. She would be able to record this information. She knew he would understand the significance.”
“But he never got the message,” Sam notes.
"No. Which means no one ever got her instructions. Until me.”
“You don't even know that's where they're holding her,” Sam says. “You don't know what happened after the phone cut off.”
“No, I don't. Which is why I have to go. At the beginning of this, you told me I have to follow my heart. I have to do what it tells me to do. And this is what it tells me to do. This is the last evidence of Lakyn Monroe before she fell off the face of the planet. She wanted somebody to hear this, and now I have. I have to follow these directions, Sam. I have to see what's out there. I didn't call to ask for your permission. I called so you would know what I'm doing,” I say.
“I would never try to give you permission,” he says. “But I hate that you're out there alone. This isn't safe, Emma.”
“I know,” I say. “I love you.”
Ending the call, I start the message and let Lakyn’s voice guide me into the darkness of the farmland surrounding Harlan.
Chapter Forty-One
I test the timing of my drive based on what Lakyn says. I'm driving faster than whoever had her when she left the message, and hit milestones before she mentions them, so I skip ahead in the recording, and let it catch up. Knowing her house is in Salt Valley, I find the road leading to it and turn the opposite direction. From there, I start to count crop fields. She mentioned tracks, and I'm not sure what she means until I see a row of old, abandoned train tracks cutting across the land like a row of stitches holding the wound of the split crop fields together.
I look for signs, count roads, and finally, I think I have gotten to the place where she mentioned the car stopped. I turn off my engine and sit there a few seconds, taking in the feeling of my surroundings. It's dark. Sitting at the edge of a sea of cornstalks, there's only the moonlight to provide any illumination. Everything around me is quiet.
I want to get out and search, but something holds me back. The voice in the back of my head has always guided me. It's always pushed me to run straight ahead. I've always listened to it. But this time, I stop myself. Dean has called me three times since I started driving, and now I call him back.
"Where are you? I thought I was supposed to meet you in your hotel room," he says.
"You know how to access the GPS tracking program Sam has attached to my phone, right?" I ask.
"Yes," he says. "What's going on?"
"I need you to access the tracker and follow it to me. Come as quickly as you can. But be careful, it's dark and twisty out here."
"Are you alright?"
"I'm fine. But I need you here as fast as you can get here. Please just trust me."
"I'm on my way."
I hang up but keep my hand wrapped around the phone in my lap. Even though I want to read the notes I wrote from the other messages, I keep the lights inside my car turned off. Now isn't the moment to call attention to myself. Sitting there in the silence, I do something I haven't done in a long time. My fingers slide over the inside of the door and touch the lock. I check it to make sure the door is secure.
Setting the notebook on the steering wheel, I try to read my writing in the dim moonlight. I read through the notes a few times, hoping something will sink in. Out of the corner of my eye, something moves. The corn stalks shift and bend. My heart squeezes in my chest, and my breath catches in my throat. My hand tightens around my phone, squeezing the button, so the screen pops on and sends a beam of light up through the glass.
I use it to look out toward where I saw the movement, but the corn is still. I watch, waiting, and a few seconds later, a flash of white stands out against the corn a few yards away. It's not moving toward me but seems to disappear deeper into the stalks. It was probably the tail of a deer out to enjoy the easy meal. But I keep watching.
The sweep of headlights behind me snaps my attention away from the corn and to the rearview mirror. I brace myself, knowing it might not be Dean. But when I see him get out of the driver's side door, relief washes over me. I wait until he's close to unlock my doors. He climbs inside and looks at me with expectation.
“You need to hear something,” I tell him.
I play the first part of Lakyn’s message for him.
“Where did you get that?” he asks.
“She left it on the messaging system at the jail where Xavier is being kept. She intended for him to hear it, but they never gave it to him. They thought it was left unintentionally. I'm assuming they didn't even listen to the entire thing. But this is where it led me.”
“Do you realize how close we are to where we drove off the road when we were following Millie Haynes?” he asks. “We're just on the other side of the field.”
I nod. "I know."
"No coincidences."
"No coincidences," I repeat. "Come on."
We get out of the car and meet at the front of it.
“Which way do we go?” he asks. “We don't know where they might have taken her.”
I look at either side of the dirt road where we are parked. On one side is the expansive field of corn stalks. On the other is a thicket of trees separating the fields.
"At the end of the message, she says, ‘I don't want to go into the cornfield with you’. It also mentioned that there was another car. So, there was one person in the car with her, and then another car that had more people in it. May
be she saw the people get out of the car and move toward the field, and that's how she knew that's where they intended to take her," I suggest.
Dean nods, and we move cautiously into the corn.
Somehow the world is even quieter, even more still when we're among the crops. The tall stalks and long leaves seem to create insulation around us that separates us from the rest of the world.
"This field is huge. How are we going to search through the entire thing?" he asks. "We don't even know how far they drove down the road before stopping."
I keep walking but then look at him.
"Yes, we do. She said she isn't good at mazes. She didn't want to go into the corn because she isn't good at mazes. She disappeared in February. There wouldn't have been corn like this out here, and there wouldn't have been a maze."
"Then why did she mention it?" Dean asks.
I'm heading back toward the car. "Because she could see where it was supposed to be. Come on."
We climb back into the car and drive up the dirt road slowly until we see a small, hand-painted sign nailed to a tree pointing to a maze down another road. I stop beside the sign, and we get back out. As I'm turning around, I see the flicker of white again. It's solid, moving the cornstalks around it as it moves. From this perspective, I can also see it's far larger than the back of a deer's tail.
Dean and I head into the corn, and I brace myself for the eerie feeling to close in around me. I don't worry about creeping through the stalks or being quiet. At this point, if someone's out here with us, there's nothing I can do to conceal our presence. There’ll be a confrontation one way or another. So I might as well beckon them toward me.
Besides, I don't have the time to be discreet.