“Dr. Ru,” said Hunter, “people need to know these stories. I don’t think most people have a clue how many kids are suffering.”
“I agree. Hunter, I know you don’t want to think about this now, but scientists would love the chance to figure out why this has happened to you.”
“Or use my ability for their own purposes,” said Hunter. “I’d rather help kids than be used for someone else’s benefit.”
“I can certainly understand,” said Ru. “Hunter, I need to tell you that I didn’t want to use shock therapy on you. I thought we were making progress during our talks, but—”
“I understand.” Hunter’s eyes shot daggers at Joe. “I’m sure Dad preferred erasing everything in my head. I’ll definitely talk to you again. Soon.”
“Please give Detective Collins my number. We need to talk about what he’s witnessed tonight. Goodbye, Hunter.”
Hunter disconnected and continued to stare at his father. “If I had died, you would’ve moved in with Stanley and not had to worry about your son discovering your secret, which wouldn’t have been that big a deal for Frankie and me had you made any attempt to talk to us. But what puzzles me is why you continued to stay away from Stanley and hate me more for keeping you from him? Why the stories about me raping Mom? Why did you have to feed that story to everyone?”
“Because,” said Jazz, “he didn’t want anyone to blame him for your mother’s death. He did not want to be blamed for his wife’s incest. In his story, Hunter, you were the cause of all the problems, and he was the dutiful father trying his best to help his psychotic son.”
The fire scene with Anthony jumped into Hunter’s mind. The boy’s father had blamed his son. That’s why Hunter had seen that memory, not because of the sex between the parents, which never took place. The truth was there, but he wasn’t ready at the time to understand it.
Stanley shook his head slowly at Joe then turned to Hunter. “You mentioned two girls in a cage? We need to find them.”
“Yes,” said Hunter. “All I know is that they’re in a house somewhere near the Nenana River south of here,” said Hunter, “but I’m not sure I can find it on my own. I need to persuade a friend to help me.”
“You can’t rescue them yourself. I can help you, Hunter.” He held up his phone so Hunter could type in his number. “Please call me when you have more information, and please don’t try to do this alone.”
Hunter entered the number into his contacts list. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll know something more tomorrow. And here’s Dr. Ru’s number.” He showed Stanley. Hunter opened a cabinet and pulled out two large garbage bags. “Jazz, help me get the rest of my clothes.”
“Sure.”
They walked back to his room and began stuffing the bags with items from his closet and dresser. After a few minutes they heard a car drive away. When they came back to the kitchen, they found Joe looking out a window.
“No matter what you want to blame on me,” he said bitterly, “you were the one who killed your brother.”
Hunter felt his stomach twist and bile rise into his throat. “It was my fault he chased the ball to the road. At the time I was angry with him for telling you about Mom and me. I was a jealous, confused 13-year-old, which is no excuse for what happened to Frankie. I’ll have to live with his death forever. But you knew that something bad was going on between Mom and me, and you did nothing about it. You could’ve admitted your feelings for Stanley to her. You could’ve taken her to a doctor. You could’ve gotten me real help instead of torturing me with your lies. But you didn’t. You chose to protect yourself instead, and where has that left you? Stanley’s gone, and I’m leaving. Enjoy the rest of your life, Dad.”
Hunter and Jazz stuffed the bags in the back seat of her truck and drove off.
“Are you ever going back?” asked Jazz.
“Not to him.” He looked at her. “I guess I should’ve asked you first. Sorry.”
“You don’t need to ask.” She cocked her eyebrows. “I’m not letting you go anywhere, Hunter.”
He smiled. “I guess you want to get rid of all your cutting memories first, huh?”
“Yes. I certainly want you to do that.”
“And after?”
“Make new memories with you, ones I never want to forget.” She reached over to him with her right hand. He grabbed it. “Am I your girlfriend, or was that label convenient for the conversation?”
Despite all the anguish he had experienced during the last hour, her touch filled him with warmth and hope. “I’d like you to be.”
Jazz bit her lip as she and Hunter stared at each other until she let her truck fade onto the rumble strips. “Woops.” She pulled the truck back into her lane. “You’re very distracting, Hunter.”
“Sorry. So will you?”
“Will I what?” she asked coyly. “You have to ask again, please.”
“Jeez. You gonna turn girly on me?”
“You don’t like girly?”
“No, I like the Jazz who carries a gun in her pack and uses it when necessary. Who’ll fight Eric or my father to protect me. Who won’t freak when she finds me naked on the floor screaming and crying about things she can’t see. Who has the softest, most luscious lips and the warmest body in the world.”
“You can’t know that,” she giggled. “In the world?”
“In the freakin’ world! Can you prove me wrong, Ms. Scientist?”
“No, and I wouldn’t want to. And to answer your question, yes, I want to be your girlfriend . . . and lover when the time is right. And I know it’s not right . . . yet.”
“Not yet.” He saw his mother staggering down the hall in her robe, then later opening it and begging his father to look at her. And all he did was tell her to kill herself. He tried to shake the image from his mind then scoffed at himself. Now that he had regained the memory, he didn’t want to see it.
But without it, he could not know himself, who he was, how he came to be the young man sitting next to Jazz whom he would follow anywhere. He remembered his father saying “one of us had to know who we were.” Until tonight, he hadn’t known who he was, and he was still struggling to find out.
She glanced at him and smiled. “How’s your head doing?”
“Like it just woke up. Like it’s been wandering in a fog without knowing why.”
“You need your memories to be fully conscious.”
He raised his brows at her as she glanced over.
“You can’t know who you are without context,” said Jazz. “Being conscious depends on having memories. You can’t think about what you’ve done or want to do in the future or why your life sucks or is wonderful if you can’t remember your past. We’re conscious beings who need to be grounded in context.”
“So I wasn’t fully conscious until tonight?”
“Not really.”
He leaned his back against the door, facing her. “Then what was I? Unconscious?”
“Hunter, we can’t even agree what consciousness is. Google it.” She glanced at him. “There are a hundred definitions. No one knows what it is or how we got it.” She turned her face back to the road. “But I think being conscious depends on our ability to connect to the other dimension, which holds our memories. When that connection is lost or broken, you can’t function. You go into a coma or get dementia. Maybe autism is caused by broken connections.”
“This is too complicated.”
“Yeah. There are just too many things we don’t understand about how our head works. And those who hypothesize about another dimension holding our memories are often ridiculed. How can science test that theory? Cutting up worms will not give us all the answers.”
“I’m sure some scientist would like to get hold of me.”
She shot him a sly smile. “Some scientist has already got hold of you and she won’t let go any time soon.”
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and gave it to Hunter. “Somebody texte
d.”
Hunter read the message. “Your mother. Reminding you she needs to be picked up by 10:00.”
“Text her back: Will pick you up at 10. And put the ‘you’ in caps.”
“OK.” He sent the message. “Why?”
“Because I think she wants to bring home the dude she got fired.”
Hunter dropped her phone on the seat then pulled out his phone. “I need to call Eric.” He punched in the numbers.
“Yeah,” said Eric.
“Have you thought of a way to rescue those girls?”
Clearly frustrated, he said, “No.”
“Have you tried?”
“Yeah, I’ve tried.”
“I know a detective who’s willing to help.”
“What have you told him?”
Hunter heard the fear in his voice “Nothing about you. Just about the girls. I’m not sure about the directions. I’d need your help to find the place.”
“Look, Hunter. No matter whether you send an army down there, he’s got videos of me, so I get busted. I can’t do that.”
“Then what happens to the girls, Eric?”
Hunter could hear Eric breathing. “They stay there . . . until they’re too old.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know, but the last time I was there he made a comment about needing to get new girls.”
“He won’t let them go. You know that.”
Eric paused, breathing into the phone. “No.”
“Eric, we have to get them out. Wesley needs to be put away.”
“Man, I don’t know what to do.”
“If we got them out, we could burn the house down and destroy all his hard drives or whatever he uses.”
“Wouldn’t matter. He uploads the stuff to the cloud. I’m not even sure he keeps any cards or flash drives at the house except for the ones he uses to record.”
“OK. Then we destroy his computer and take the cards in the cameras. Wesley won’t give the police access to his cloud files. How does he get internet?”
“Satellite dish.”
“Can’t we cut the wire going to the house to disable the feed to his phone?”
“Yeah, but not when he’s there.”
“Couldn’t you pretend to want to visit the girls and get inside? Then we could surprise him with guns?”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Jazz and me.”
“Are you kidding? You’re going to get us all killed. He carries a gun all the time.”
“I know. I saw it in his belt.”
“Wesley will not hesitate to shoot any of us. Think of something else, Hunter.”
“No! You think of something else. I’m calling the police tomorrow whether I hear from you or not. Maybe you don’t care that he’ll kill those girls, but I do.” He disconnected.
“Sounds like we need a SWAT team,” said Jazz as she turned into her driveway. “Home sweet home.”
She parked the car, and they each gathered items to bring inside. Jazz took one bag of clothes to her room. “Where do you want to put these?”
Hunter followed with another bag. “Do you have any empty drawers or room in your closet?”
“Some. We’ll make everything fit.”
They dumped the bags on the floor.
“How awkward is it going to be with me in here and your mother on the other side of that wall?”
“It would serve her right to feel awkward after all the times I had to listen to her and the asshole of the month screaming at each other or banging the bed against the wall.”
Hunter remembered the twelve-year-old Jazz listening to her mom and Micah outside their door.
“I guess we won’t be so noisy,” said Hunter. He reached out his arms for her. She ran to him and hugged. “Thank you for helping me. I’m sure my father never held me during all those years. I must’ve been a scared, confused kid who couldn’t get the bloody nightmares out of his mind with nobody to hold him.”
“You won’t have to worry about that anymore.” She pushed her fingers through his hair and wrinkled her nose. “You could use a shower. And a change of clothes.”
“I know. I feel dirty. But I’m a little nervous about being by myself in bathrooms.”
She played with his ears. “Take a shower, and I’ll sit in there with you. We’ll keep talking. You’ll be fine.”
“No peeking?”
“I won’t promise anything. Besides, I’ve already seen you naked. As you have me.”
“In very bad situations for both of us. Not very much fun.”
“Grab your clothes. I’ll get the water running.”
She left the room, and Hunter soon heard the shower spray against the plastic curtain. He found a pair of boxers and a t-shirt then stripped off his clothes except for his underwear.
Jazz met him at the door with a towel folded across her arm. In a lousy British accent, she said, “I trust the temperature will be satisfactory, sir.”
“I’ll come to expect this level of service from now on.”
“Cool. I’d be happy to oblige.”
She hung the towel on the curtain bar then sat on the toilet. Hunter put his clothes on the rod just outside the tub. Standing in his underwear in front of her, he felt awkward.
“How do I get in?”
She giggled. “I’ll close my eyes while you take off your underwear. Turn around and face the curtain. Butts aren’t that sexy anyway. OK. My eyes are closed.”
Hunter pulled down his pants then reached for the curtain.
“Hurry, Hunter. I’m not good at resisting temptation.”
Hunter stepped into the shower and closed the curtain. “You can open them now.”
“I already did, and forget what I said about butts. Yours is very cute.”
He stuck his head out of the curtain. “You didn’t!”
“You’ll never know. If I did, it wouldn’t be a bad memory, so you’d never see it.” She waved her hand at him. “Get back to showering. Tell me if you need help with anything.”
“Are you going to crack jokes the entire time I’m in here?”
“If it keeps your mind away from the past, then yes I will. So what are you washing now?”
“My chest.”
“OK. How about now?”
“My stomach.”
“Ooh! How about now?”
“Armpits.”
“Why’d you change direction? Don’t you have a pattern when you wash? People develop their cleaning habits when they’re young and rarely change them.”
“Really? By the way, you missed it.”
“What? Oh, damn!”
“Where’d you come up with this pattern theory?”
“I read it. What you wash first says a lot about you.”
“And your first part is?”
“My hair, of course. Why wash your body then let all the dirty stuff in your hair run down your skin?”
After a few more minutes, Hunter turned off the water. Jazz pulled the towel off the curtain bar.
“Jazz, I need my towel.”
“I’m holding it open for you in front of my eyes. Just open the curtain and I’ll wrap it around you. Trust me, Hunter.”
“Why do I feel like Charlie Brown?” He stuck his head around the curtain to see the towel spread wide, hiding Jazz’s face. He stepped out of the tub.
“By the way, my middle name is Lucille. Oops!” She dropped the towel. “Oh my, Hunter. You’re entirely naked.” She covered her eyes with her hand then opened her fingers, gawking at him. “I’m so embarrassed.” She turned around, laughing.
Hunter picked up the towel and quickly dried himself. He pulled on his boxers.
“Is it really?” He put on his t-shirt.
“Is what really?”
“Is Lucille your middle name?”
She turned around. “Actually, yes. Jasmine Lucille Williams. And your middle name?”
“Charles.”
She barked a laugh. “Really? No way!”
“Afraid so.”
“Well, this factoid will influence many future interactions.”
“OK. Your turn.”
“For what?”
“To take a shower. I’ll sit right there and behave. I promise.”
She put her elbows on his shoulders and played with his wet hair. “My spidey senses tell me you’re planning revenge.”
He squinted his eyes and gave her a wry grin. “As you speak.”
She kissed his forehead. “You are so amazing! I’ll be back in a second.”
Chapter Thirty
The next morning Hunter drove his truck through the hills east of Nenana under turquoise blue skies and a bright sun that teased of days in midsummer. But the bare birch stands were still guarding snow patches around their bases. By this time of the year, everyone in the Interior ached for the lushness of summer. The fact that winter would linger on for another few weeks was a reason for depressive thoughts even when relief seemed so close.
Hunter had felt so comfortable sleeping with Jazz, snuggling against her chest after the joy of playing with each other in the bathroom. They’d dabbled on the edges of sex, keeping it light and silly, knowing Hunter’s past was barely past, ready to slash him again. As proof, his dreams had been filled with worry about the girls in the cage, bloody images of his mother, and the lingering anger at his father for keeping the truth from him. The sound of his brother’s death woke him three times during the night.
He knew Jazz’s sleep was peaceful. Every time he’d jolted to awareness, she’d been snoring softly, almost smiling. He knew he would never sleep like that as long as the girls were trapped, waiting to be deleted like bad memories, only to be replaced by another preteen or two from Anchorage.
He needed to find a way to tell Claire her daughter no longer remembered Micah or the murder or the reason for abandoning Rosie. He didn’t want her saying anything that would put those memories back into Jazz’s mind.
They had drunk one shot each before sleeping last night. They’d both decided to stop using vodka, but knew that Jazz needed to ease off it. And they’d hidden the remaining bottles in the wall of Jazz’s closet behind a loose piece of paneling, which they’d taped closed in the back corner.
Someone To Kiss My Scars: A Teen Thriller Page 25