by Britney King
When I scan the row of screens and locate the kitchen, my breath catches and hitches in my throat. Warren is not slumped over on the floor in the place that I left him.
Frantically, I scan the screens for movement. I see nothing. My knees grow weak and threaten to buckle.
Taking the fire iron from the dresser, I realize I have to make a decision. I have to take one or the other, but not both. The knife is too large, the blade too dangerous, to be stuffed into my pants.
I search the screens once more. There’s no sign of him. Not in any of the shots. I consider that my mind could be playing tricks on me. Ultimately, I know better. Likely, there’s a delay, and also, he would know how to avoid the cameras. I scan the images, going from room to room, trying to spot trails of blood. I’m just about to give up when I see it. In a bedroom down the hall, behind the door, a foot. He looks directly at the camera and flips the bird. Next thing I know, there are footsteps behind me. I can feel his breath on my neck. I catch a momentary glimpse of a handgun, almost as though he knew it would come to this. I swing at him, his fleshy barren face, lurching backward, his teeth bared. His eyeballs bulge, mere tissue in their sockets. They stare directly at me like an unspoken challenge.
Chapter Thirty-One
Charlotte
I swing the fire iron as he fires the gun. I don’t immediately realize that I have been hit—I am too busy swinging. I make contact with his head, landing a blow to his left temple. He goes down clutching the gun, but I do not give him a chance to aim or fire. Relentlessly, I strike him in the head again and again, until the walls are splattered with his blood and tufts of brain matter, reminiscent of the inside of a pumpkin, sticks to my arms and legs, and tiny bits of his skull are littered among the fibers of the carpet.
I don’t stop for a long time, until there’s almost nothing left of his head. My arms feel heavy and tired when I finally stop. They feel like jelly.
Nothing has ever felt more right than seeing his body there, his head obliterated. The nothingness in what’s left of his eyes.
It’s hard to know at first whose blood is whose, since I’m covered in it from head to toe. Adrenaline floods my system, and for the first time in days, I feel no pain.
This, as it turns out, is not a good thing. The fire iron falls to the floor, and I begin to feel lightheaded. The room feels a little off kilter, and suddenly I start to panic, shedding myself of the bloody clothes. It’s then that I see it: a small hole in my lower abdomen pumps out blood. I slink forward, bending over, clutching my waist. If I don’t do something, I very well could bleed out right here on this floor, next to this corpse. This is not how I want to die, not after everything.
I stumble to the bathroom, clutching my side, walking like the hunchback of Notre Dame. I search under the cabinets for a first aid kit, something with which to stop the bleeding, but find nothing save for a couple of towels and a roll of toilet paper.
Back to the bedroom I go, where I grab a shirt from his dresser and fold it, pressing it to the wound. All of a sudden, I am very cold, ceaselessly shivering, but also naked. In any case, it isn’t good.
Using a T-shirt and a roll of duct tape, I fix a makeshift bandage. I throw on another set of clothes and rummage through the kitchen, ultimately grabbing a handful of bottles of water, a loaf of bread, and a bunch of bananas.
The bananas are the last thing I remember before my whole world goes black.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Charlotte
When I come to, I am sprawled out on the marble floor. My head aches, and my vision is blurry. I’m certain I have suffered a concussion as a result of passing out and hitting the floor.
Terribly slowly, I pull myself over to a chair and slothfully manage to get myself to a seated position. From there, after several failed and painful attempts, I manage to stand.
It takes me an eternity, but eventually I stumble from the kitchen out to the garage, where I attempt to hot wire the Bronco. It takes the better part of two hours before I am forced to give up. I am too tired and too cold to go on.
If I’m going to die, there are worse places I can think of to do it.
Still, I know better than to fall asleep. I can’t be sure it won’t be a permanent situation. Fumbling through the sack of items from the kitchen, I open the loaf of bread and remove a slice, tearing the tiniest pieces, slipping them onto my tongue. I am not particularly hungry, but I’ll do whatever it takes to keep me from losing consciousness. I need all of the energy and strength I can get. It’s then that I think of the IV back in the bedroom. If Warren had those supplies, he is bound to have others. Unfortunately, it’s too late to go back. I know I cannot summon the strength it would take to stumble back to the house and up those stairs. I would die trying. And I refuse to die in that house.
I hear a motor running, and I think I must be dreaming. When I open my eyes, beacons of light filter in through the garage door. When I look down, I can see that I have bled through the T-shirt.
“Hello?” I hear a voice call. “Warren?”
There’s a knocking sound, followed by a car door opening and shutting. I don’t have the energy to make it to the garage door opener attached to the wall on time. I hear the truck shift into reverse. I let my eyes close and drift off toward darkness. Suddenly, I am sitting in my father’s pickup truck in front of the county feed store. “I’ll just be a minute, peanut,” he says to me. “If anyone tries to get in, you just lay on the horn.”
My eyes shoot open, and I give everything left in me to pressing down on that horn.
My eyelids are heavy, but I force them open. It takes several tries before I’m able to get a grip on what I’m seeing. Everything is a blur. My fist is tightly wrapped around a white sheet. I flex my toes. Overhead, bright lights whiz by. A woman leans down. She has the face of an angel. “You’re going into surgery. You’re going to be just fine.”
She can’t obviously know that I am going to be just fine, I think. But I like it that she lies. How terrible it would be for anything else to be the final words I hear.
I don’t know if I will be fine. But at this point, I have nothing left in me with which to care.
I drift off and dream of my dad. I think of what he said to me the day I came home from my waitressing shift to find a crib up in the spare bedroom. I told him I didn’t intend to live in his house forever. That I was sorry. I had never meant to add more to his plate. I told him I knew I’d messed up. He looked me straight in the eye and he said, “It’s not about the falling down, Charlotte. It’s about the staying down. And I know you. You won’t stay down for long. ”
I wake up in recovery. I don’t feel pain. I don’t feel anything. “It went well,” a steady voice says. I can’t see the face that belongs to the voice that speaks to me, but I can smell her perfume. Something delicate. She stands at the head of my bed, pressing buttons on a monitor. “We were able to stop the bleeding.”
She doesn’t offer any further information, and I don’t ask. I watch as she moves purposefully around the room, checking and rechecking her work. Eventually she pushes something through my IV line, and before I know it, I once again drift off into oblivion.
The next time I open my eyes, there are police officers standing at my bedside. I close my eyes and pretend to be too tired and too traumatized to talk. I’m heavily drugged, and I’m afraid of what I might say.
Michael stands next to me. So does the FBI. My husband’s face looks serious, if not sympathetic. On instinct I start to cry. He places his hand on mine. It’s large and cold and very familiar. Full, chest-heaving, snot-bubbling sobs spill out of me. Eventually, the men offer to leave and give us privacy, and the nurse asks if I’d like something to help calm me. “You don’t have to tell them anything you don’t want to, Charlotte,” Michael says when we’re finally alone. “You know that.”
He’s right. I do know that.
I’m aware that I cannot tell them everything. But I can tell them a lot.
“I’m sorry,�
�� he tells me, spooning ice chips into my mouth. He doesn’t elaborate on what he’s apologizing for, and I do my best to look like I don’t know.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I reply, surprised at how easily the lie slips off my tongue. “You told me I needed to cut back on work. I should have listened. Now—”
“This isn’t your fault.” He places the cup of ice on the table and smooths the matted hair away from my face. His lies, too, flow effortlessly. His expression, his demeanor, is the same as it ever was. As long as we’ve lived together, as long as I’ve known him, nearly two decades now, I thought I could tell when he was being dishonest. But here in this hospital bed, in God knows where, I can see that this isn’t true.
My life hangs precariously in his hands. I know. I watched JC Warren’s footage. Which is why I do my best to pretend.
He leans down and kisses my face. “We don’t have to do that thing where we pretend anymore, darling.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you’ve been through a lot.”
I look away toward the window. It’s dark out.
“I’m just so glad you got out of that house.”
I think of the cabin. Of the abundance of evidence contained inside. Who knew what JC Warren had hidden there? He knew an awful lot about my life. Or at least he pretended to.
As though he is reading my thoughts, Michael walks over to the door, and then back toward the bed. “They thought you were inside. They thought you were gone. I thought I lost you.”
“I was inside.”
Michael cocks his head. “Do you remember anything about what happened before you were found?”
I feign ignorance. “Not really.”
“The fire, Charlotte. It was bad.”
“The fire.”
His face remains neutral. “The girls have been so worried. They wanted to come, but I took the first flight out. I didn’t know what condition I’d find you in. They wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“And now? Are they okay? Do they know I’m fine?”
“They’re with my mom.”
“Good,” I say. “I think they should stay there.”
“For a bit, yes. I agree.” That’s what he says. But it’s what he doesn’t say that really counts. He doesn’t say that I’ve been nothing more than a tool for him, all these years, all this time. He doesn’t say that he sought me out, that he’s been lying to me all along. He doesn’t say that his architecture firm is a front, that he’s been heading the agency all along.
He doesn’t tell me any of the things I heard watching and listening to JC Warren’s recordings from inside our home. He simply says, “The press is all over this. As you can imagine.”
He doesn’t know what I know. He doesn’t know if I know anything at all. So, he doesn’t explain why he’s used me to take out his competition—he doesn’t say it’s because he is the biggest pedophile of all.
I don’t say it either.
There’s time for that.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Charlotte
Michael was right. The media is all over this. It is apparently a story worth chasing. All the way to Alaska, and of course, they are geared up and waiting back home. The cost of fame, violence against women—whether or not my profession, flight attending as a whole, is sexist. It’s all laid out there, to be pored over, discussed ceaselessly, my life examined under a microscope.
This does not make for a good situation. My husband doesn’t say it but I can tell. He wishes I’d died in that fire. Most likely that was his intention when he had it set. He hadn’t known, couldn’t have known— that I was in the garage—that a kind neighbor seeing the log cabin go up in flames would rush over to make sure everyone got out okay.
After my surgery, I am not allowed to travel for several weeks.
After five days, Michael returns to Texas.
Although they will remain in his mother’s care, he wants to check on the girls. I have FaceTimed them every day. They are eager for me to get home. But I am certain they are nowhere near as eager as I am.
Three weeks after I was rescued, I am finally able to return home to my own bed. Despite the physical therapy and sheer determination, I am still fairly reliant on Michael to do most things for me.
The press once again has rained down on us, on our street, on our neighborhood. I even supposedly have best friends I’ve never even met. Everyone talks like they have something new to say, something that has never been said before. A group of “Justice Warriors” were detained last week, and from what I learn online, most groups have started to fizzle out. Hard crime is a bit much for your average homemaker, I suppose. It isn’t all a disappointment. It’s not all a waste. There are well-wishers, flowers, cards, meals, and an overflowing Fund Me account.
Michael excels at playing the concerned and caring husband, and I am more than happy to let him.
So long as we have all of this attention on us, it will be difficult for him to do anything drastic where I am concerned. The girls are safe and moderately happy at his mother’s, and this buys me time to come up with a plan.
“I don’t know if you should return to work, you know, after…” he says one morning over coffee. “We have enough money in the Fund Me account…I was thinking you could take some time and…I don’t know…relax. Or maybe write that book you’ve always talked about.”
The sentiment makes me smile. “We’ll see.”
It’s funny how different he looks now that I don’t care about him anymore. Now, I can see how ordinary he is, how it was my love that made him special, that made it seem like he was a good husband and father—that placed him on a pedestal.
But in all honesty, it was more than love that made me fall for Michael. Our relationship started out as transactional in nature, and it will end that way too.
My father used to say that about police work. The way things end are often the way they start. I never really gave much thought to what he meant, but it makes sense.
Earlier this week, I had a long conversation with Hayley over FaceTime. She is having problems with the same boy I nearly dosed with laxatives. If only. “There is a fundamental truth I have learned,” I said to her. “If you aren’t certain of who you are and what you want, you will attract people all too eager to guide you into finding those answers.”
“Speak English,” she huffed.
“I am. Hayley, there are endless people,” I told her. “People with endless opinions, rules, requirements, and suggestions for how you should live your life, for how you should behave, but none of them are able to take into consideration the only thing that matters: they cannot truly understand, nor do they care about your desires in the way you do, so they are not in any way equipped to guide you.”
“Elliot isn’t trying to guide me, mom. He’s trying to date me.”
“No, Hayley. He’s trying to manipulate you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
“Because you asked.”
“Look,” I said. “Even when people have the very best of intentions, and even if they’re attempting to be unselfish, it is never possible for them to separate their desire for you from their own desire for themselves. That’s why—if you listen—if you give in— if you allow yourself to be led, without asking what it is they want from you, or who and what it is they want you to be, you will always be playing a losing game.”
One night, the same week as that conversation with Hayley, I am in bed when Michael gets in. Although I’m not yet fully asleep, I’m not in the mood for playing nice, for make-believe, and so I pretend. I listen as he climbs into bed. It makes my skin crawl to have to sleep next to a man who would harm my child, but life is full of hard things.
He rolls over and kisses my cheek, and whispers, “Tell me, Charlotte. What are you supposed to do when you can’t let something go, but you can’t kill it either?” And just for a moment, I can’t be sure I�
�m not dreaming.
I am home for six days when Michael’s mom brings the girls home. I have learned a lot in that time. A thorough search of my husband’s computer tells me many things that I need to know, but not everything. I will need to talk with Sophie about her father. And it will need to happen soon. I refuse to let him near my children, but prison time, while perhaps the simplest solution, does not feel like enough. Furthermore, it will further thrust my family into the spotlight; having to give a deposition, and possibly testify, will only further damage my daughter. She has already suffered enough. She does not need to lose her anonymity, too.
Plus, I could never live with myself, knowing I’ve killed other men for less. Rotting in a prison cell is not enough.
A scan of Michael’s computer tells me that JC Warren was right about most of what he said. Michael is trading and selling girls and has been for some time. While he doesn’t do the heavy lifting, so to speak, encrypted emails prove that he is definitely involved. He is the mastermind.
He has a lot of money in offshore accounts, some of which he hides in real estate. Under various aliases. But there’s more. Michael has other children. Multiple children with multiple women, most of them born to young women who are either incarcerated for prostitution, drugs, or who are missing or dead. Four daughters and a son, all younger than Hayley. It is unclear where they reside. But he provides for them monetarily.
How is it possible to live with a stranger, when all along you thought it was you who had all the secrets? A question I have asked myself endlessly. Maybe that was a part of the scam. It’s hard to see truth about others when you’re so busy trying to conceal it yourself. When I look in the mirror, I look like a shell of who I used to be. My life today compared to six weeks ago is nearly unrecognizable.