They're Gone

by E. A. Barres

  In a curious twist, a suspect has been apprehended in connection with the shootings. That suspect, a man named Seth Yates, was arrested in a nearby International House of Pancakes after attacking another customer. According to witnesses, Yates used a table knife to stab a female customer, a twenty-three year old Baltimore bartender named Cessy Castillo. Castillo stabbed him back, and other customers in the restaurant quickly overpowered Yates and held him down until authorities arrived.

  Yates and Castillo are both expected to recover from their injuries.

  A gun was found on Yates, and his car was spotted leaving the site where the bodies of District Attorney Temple and Price were found. Although experts have concluded that the gun was not used in the execution-style deaths of Temple and Price, Yates has since been linked to both men. And his checkered past with law enforcement and agitated state that morning raises substantial concerns, an investigator associated with the case said.

  Both local and state officials were stunned by the news.

  “Scott Temple was a champion of the rule of law,” the governor’s office said in a statement. “His initiatives, such as increased patrolmen in neighborhoods and his human trafficking task force, are representative of his passion and determination. He will be missed, and not easily replaced.”

  CHAPTER

  66

  KIM BLINKED WHEN she saw Cessy at the door.

  “Oh shit,” she said. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay. How are you? How’s your mom?”

  Kim gazed at Cessy for a long moment. Cessy couldn’t read anything in her expression.

  “You’ll have to see,” she said. “Come on in.”

  Kim led Cessy to the kitchen. Cessy walked slowly. The wound in her side throbbed, although the pain was only an echo of what it had been days earlier.

  Deb’s house was almost exactly what Cessy had imagined. Suburban classy, which meant the latest trends—hardwood floors covered with expensive rugs, walls removed for an open floor plan, rooms filled with light. The kitchen was all stainless steel appliances and led directly to a family room.

  Kim pulled out a chair at a table next to the bay window, overlooking the garden.

  “She’s outside,” Kim said. Cessy stood rather than trying to sit in the chair opposite her. Bending hurt. “And she’s not good.”

  Until now, Cessy hadn’t noticed the shadow around Kim’s eyes, exhaustion that seemed permanent, in contrast to her young, unlined skin.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think she’s depressed. I mean, I know she is. She barely comes out of her bedroom. And when she does, it’s to tell me she’s going to call the police.”

  “Really?”

  “And then she changes her mind. I’ve never seen her like this. Not even after Dad died.” She paused. “How are you?”

  “Recovering.”

  Another pause.

  “Should I talk to her?”

  Kim looked at Cessy doubtfully. “You really think you can help?”

  “Probably not.”

  Kim smiled at that.

  Cessy reached into her handbag, pulled out a small USB drive from the side pocket, put it on the table.

  Kim didn’t move to pick the drive up, just eyed it. “What’s that?”

  “These are some violent-ass pictures,” Cessy explained. “Don’t look at them. Just keep them in case you need them. They’re the pictures Hector took. I have another copy.”

  Kim took the USB drive, almost reluctantly. “Do we still need these?”

  Cessy saw the concern, the moment of fear, on her face.

  “We shouldn’t,” she assured Kim. “But just in case.”

  “Okay.”

  “How are you doing?” Cessy asked.

  “Me? Why?”

  “Your dad was murdered, you were kidnapped, your girlfriend dumped you, and now you have to take care of your mom. That seems like a lot to deal with.”

  Kim let out a small smile. “Well, when you put it like that …”

  “So how are you?”

  Kim traced the nail of her index finger over curved grains on the wooden table. “I still miss my dad, and I miss Rebecca. But I guess I’m okay. I guess I am. Nothing seems real. Then again, I didn’t get stabbed in an IHOP.”

  She kept tracing the curved grain.

  Cessy watched her.

  “I mean, it seems like this is all temporary, and we’re going to go back to the way things were. Or maybe not exactly back to the way things were. I know my dad is never coming back. All this stuff happened, and he wasn’t there for any of it. You know? If he wasn’t there for any of this, then he must really be gone.”

  Cessy nodded.

  Kim touched the tears starting in her eyes, turned away.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said, her voice small.

  “You sure?”

  Still turned, Kim nodded.

  Cessy left Kim in the kitchen, walked out into the garden.

  She saw Deb curled up on a bench, a blanket covering her, phone in her hand.

  Deb looked toward Cessy, unsteadily. And if Kim was roughened by everything that had happened, Deb was defeated. Her hair was a tangled mess, clothes worn, eyes red-rimmed.

  “Cessy. Are you okay?” Deb asked, noticing her limp.

  “I will be.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t visit you in the hospital.”

  “That’s okay. I wasn’t there long.”

  “Have you heard anything?” Deb asked.

  “About what?”

  “About what I did?”

  Cessy shook her head. “Just what they said. That Temple was mixed up with some bad people and ended up paying for it. Nothing beyond that.”

  “Bad people,” Deb repeated softly.

  “They pinned everything on Seth. Turns out he’s got a criminal record, and it’s not exactly helping him out.”

  “He didn’t kill Levi.”

  “But he killed my brother. And tried to kill me.” Cessy lowered herself to the bench, on the other side from Deb.

  “I want them to arrest me,” Deb said quietly. “Or I want a man with a gun to knock on the door and shoot me. Like I did to Levi.”

  “Do you?”

  Deb nodded, and the nod helplessly turned into a shrug. “Maybe? I think I do. But then I think about Kim, about leaving her the way her father left her, and I can’t do it.”

  Deb paused.

  “But if Kim wasn’t here, if it was just me, then I couldn’t keep all this a secret.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s eating me alive, Cessy. It really is. The guilt. I always feel so close to calling the cops and telling them what I did. I killed a … I need to be punished. I need to be punished.”

  “Why?”

  “I killed someone.”

  “He would have killed you. He killed others. You did it to protect yourself.”

  Cessy felt an uneasiness stir as she spoke. A sense that something inside her, some firm root that had taken hold, might be pulled loose.

  “You had to do it to keep Kim safe,” Cessy went on. “She’d be dead now if you hadn’t. Those three men needed to die. There was no other way. There wasn’t a chance for forgiveness.”

  She saw Deb’s fists clench, nails pressed into palms.

  “Did you tell Kim?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Deb stared forlornly down to the ground. “She was shocked. But she said she understood. She said what you said.”

  “Have you told anyone else?” Cessy asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s not good.”

  Cessy had thought Deb might be shaken, but not to this extent. Deb seemed on the verge of cracking, lost somewhere in a confusion of guilt and fear.

  “Do you really think they’ll blame it all on Seth?”

  “I think so.”

  Deb was ashen. “But it’s not his fault.”

  “And it’s not your fault eith
er. Those men killed my brother. They burned down my friend’s safe house. Killed her and three other people. And who knows how many others? The world’s better off with them in jail or dead.”

  “That’s what Kim said. But are we?”

  “Are we what?”

  “Are we better off?” Deb asked. “I think about Levi, and I think about Kim, and when she was a baby, and then a little girl, and how I used to fall asleep with her. I think how Levi had someone who held him that way, who comforted him when he cried, who loved looking into his big wide eyes. I killed that baby.”

  “You killed the man that baby became.”

  “There’s no difference between the two.”

  “Yes there is. That baby wasn’t hurting anyone. It didn’t make any choices. Levi made choices. Lots of them.” Cessy paused. “Mostly bad ones.”

  “I can’t rationalize this like you can. I did something unforgivable, something I can never come back from. I can never return. And I don’t think I can live with it.”

  Her words were sharp to Cessy, the suicidal warning she used to look for when talking to women in Rose’s halfway house. “What does that mean? What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Deb replied miserably. “I think I was someone before all this, and I don’t know if I can get that person back.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Because sometimes I’m glad he’s dead.”

  Cessy’s wound ached.

  “So am I,” Cessy told her. “And I’m glad you and Kim are alive.”

  Deb’s voice, still a whisper: “I’m not who I was and I’ll never be again.”

  “Mom?”

  Cessy and Deb turned, saw Kim standing at the entrance to the garden, her expression nothing but concern.

  “I love you,” Kim told her. “I love you no matter what. No matter who you are, no matter what you had to do.”

  “But I don’t want to be this person,” Deb said again. “I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want to be this person.”

  Deb sank to the ground, still repeating that small, simple line, the paved tiles on her knees and then her palms and then her forehead. She kept saying it until she cried. She kept saying it until shadows passed over her, and she kept saying it until her voice was hoarsened by tears, and she kept saying it until she felt Kim and Cessy holding her.

  Like Kim and Cessy were holding her on one side.

  Death on the other.

  Both holding her. Pulling her.

  CHAPTER

  67

  Ten Years Later

  KIM SLOWLY BACKED her Subaru down the driveway, mindful of the neighborhood children in the yard next to her house. For some reason, the boys in the neighborhood liked to dart behind cars, screaming as they ran, much to the chagrin of adults. The neighborhood’s social media group had recently been full of pleas for parents to break their children of the habit, along with articles posted of kids being hit by cars in other cities or states.

  Kim wasn’t worried about that happening to Diane. For one thing, her daughter was thirteen months old, so she wasn’t running anywhere, although she could crawl faster than Kim or her husband Sean expected. They’d sit her down in the kitchen, and before they knew it, Diane was in the living room, dangerously close to the stairway they desperately needed to block off. Sean was supposed to call a contractor to do that today, and Kim planned on texting him later to remind him. He’d forget, which Kim used to find ruefully amusing, but now, five years into marriage, exasperated her.

  She shifted the car from reverse to drive, glanced into the backseat at her daughter, the way she always did, worried she’d forgotten to put her daughter inside and the car seat was somewhere on the driveway or, terrifyingly, on top of the car. Of course Diane was always inside, but Kim couldn’t help her concern or paranoia. And didn’t really mind it.

  She drove through Fairfax Station, eyes constantly roving either side of the neighborhood’s streets, mindful of the remains of ice on the road. Funny how living in the suburbs had made Kim realize how much she didn’t like children. She liked her own, of course, just not any others. She loved Diane beyond all reason and understanding, especially now that those first hard months of sleeplessness had passed, and they were on a schedule. Those ruthless first months, coupled with exhaustion and a quick vicious wave of postpartum depression, had filled her days with tears. But the schedule helped, and so did the eventual full night of sleep, and so did Diane’s first smile and laugh. That baby laugh had softened everything inside Kim, filled her with the type of unimaginable love parents often tried and failed to describe. A helpless, consuming, necessary love.

  She’d made a video of her daughter laughing, sent it to Sean at his office. He’d replied with an lol but didn’t say anything else.

  But Kim watched that video a lot.

  She finally left the neighborhood, the snow-covered houses giving way to stores.

  She and Sean hadn’t expected to live in Fairfax. He’d grown up in Spokane, moved to Virginia for work after college, and they both had hopes of moving back to Washington state eventually. After the last vestiges of the pandemic had passed, the attractions of Northern Virginia’s congested area returned. Her mom and her best friend were here, and DC didn’t lack for attorneys, so Sean was almost always guaranteed to find work. And schools were a factor now that they had Diane, and the public schools in Fairfax County were among the best in the nation. Kim loved Spokane, thought it was so pretty and calm, but she’d begun to accept that she was going to spend the next phase of her life here. If not her entire life.

  She turned onto I-66, quickly glanced into the backseat again, headed toward the city.

  Diane was asleep. Riding in the car always made her drowsy. The heat circulating through the car helped.

  It still felt odd for Kim to be home weekdays. She’d worked her first few years out of college, but her marketing position had been eliminated. “Marketing is always the first to go,” her boss had told her sadly as he packed up his desk. Pregnant at the time, she hadn’t thought about looking for other work, and she and Sean were fine on his salary. Not forever, of course, and Kim had never pictured herself as a stay-at-home mom, but she actually ended up liking this first year. It was alternately fun and boring and tiring, but she’d been surprised at how little she missed corporate life.

  She reached the city of Falls Church. Kim parked on the side of the road, pulled out her phone to check her texts. A note from her mom, some college girlfriends asking about a dinner they’d been scheduling and rescheduling for weeks, a reminder about an upcoming grocery delivery.

  She put her phone away and stepped out into the chill. Opened the back car door, pulled out the heavy baby bag filled with diapers and toys and blankets and clothes and food and wipes and bottles and sippy cups and biodegradable waste bags and sunscreen and pacifiers and tissues and rash cream and hand sanitizer and a folded changing pad—and, despite all this, somehow something for the baby was probably still missing. Kim swung the bag over her shoulder, lifted her daughter to her chest in the crook of her other arm, and headed across the street.

  * * *

  Deb opened the door to her condominium, saw her daughter holding her granddaughter, and couldn’t help smiling.

  Impossible, really, for her to see the baby and not smile. Even that first month, when she’d temporarily moved into Kim and Sean’s house to help take care of the baby, and had dutifully helped out with the late-night awakenings, the horrific diapers, the exhausted strain between her daughter and son-in-law, she’d still felt joy at seeing or holding Diane. The kind of joy that could bring her to tears, that reminded her of when Kim had been her baby—a small, simple, untouched being; a warm ache of soul.

  Deb hadn’t realized how much she’d missed that.

  How long it had been since she’d loved something so simply, without reservation, without complication.

  She cleaned her hands and whisked baby Diane into her arms and carried her into her condo. Barely had
time for Kim to call out, “Hey, Mom.”

  “How’s my girl?” Deb asked, the question to both Kim and Diane.

  “She’s fine,” Kim said, setting the oversized bag on the floor next to a chair, then collapsing into another. “She just woke up and she’s chatty. Has a lot to say.”

  And Diane was gurgling happily, beaming up at Deb in a way that warmed her heart.

  “Definitely happy to see her grandmother,” Kim said with humor.

  “I told you not to say that word,” Deb said.

  “I keep forgetting.”

  “No, you don’t. Technically, fifty-two is too young to be a grandmother. Legally, you can’t be a grandmother until you’re in your sixties.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m just going by what the law says.” Deb held Diane up to the window leading out to her deck, let her look outside. She knew the baby liked that, found it mesmerizing to stare at cars on the street below.

  “How’s Nicole?” Kim asked.

  Deb frowned. “I barely hear from her ever since Jack. We’re supposed to get drinks sometime.”

  “Did they figure out a date yet?”

  “No, but I think they’re going to do it in Vegas or something. Nicole keeps saying she doesn’t want to spend much on her second wedding; that way she can really blow out the third.”

  Kim laughed. “Are you busy now?”

  “Not really. I was shutting down for lunch anyway. Told everyone I’d be back online in an hour or so.”

  “When is ADA going to know if they got funding?”

  “Tonight or tomorrow,” Deb said. “I sent the proposal out yesterday. Now we’re just waiting.”

  “I see. But that’s not what you were working on?”

  “No. Turns out everyone needs money. I’ve been juggling clients.” Deb set the baby in a jumper, let Diane bounce around in front of the window.

  “What if,” Kim asked, her voice hesitant, “someone needed money for part of their business? Like a security guard? Is that the kind of thing a grant could help out with?”