The Last Night (The Last Series Book 2)

by Harvey Church

  So while it seemed that Raleigh and Hyatt hadn’t quite played in the same sandbox, they had definitely played in the same playground. In terms that Ethan could understand, it was a lot like saying fast-food’s McDonald’s and the Chicago’s high-end Maison Marcel were both restaurants (their playground), but they were in vastly different leagues.

  Midway into his tenth lap around the cross trainer’s digital track, Ethan noticed the black Ford Taurus roll to a stop out front, just outside his range of vision, followed by the doorbell. Just nineteen minutes into his forty-minute workout, but he decided that it was probably better for his mental health to walk away from all of this speculation about a dead man and his missing and likely-dead wife, and answer the door.

  Human interaction was always a wise thing for Ethan.

  Using a towel to pat his forehead and neck dry, he jogged downstairs to the front door. Given the nondescript, black Taurus he’d just seen, Ethan expected Detective Tate at the door, an evidence box in his hands or, at the very least, some kind of news. But then Ethan opened the front door to the familiar face of Special Agent Mike Klein from the FBI’s Chicago field office.

  “Ethan,” he said, making eye contact and holding out his hand. No smile on his leathery, aging face, and no hint that it might be a pleasure to see Ethan again, after all of these years. “Been awhile.” He stepped into the house without an invitation.

  “Yeah.” Ethan closed the door and watched the federal agent kick off his glossy, leather shoes. Unlike Detective Tate, the federal agent had a richer taste in suits. Maybe not tailor-cut, but high-end—Hugo Boss? Armani?—and it was obvious, at least to Ethan’s eyes. “Haven’t seen you in ages, Agent Klein.”

  Klein, who had to be pushing fifty-five by now, with the athletic build of Daniel Craig as James Bond, walked deeper into the house, headed to the kitchen at the back. His head turned from side to side as Ethan followed him down the main hallway, as if he might be searching the walls and ceiling for clues.

  “Right around the time Raleigh disappeared,” Klein said, half-quiet, half speaking to himself. “You know why they called me in, right?”

  “Yeah, because she was kidnapped.”

  Klein didn’t acknowledge that. “Lake Forest PD called about an incident at a funeral home two days after a detective at the CPD sent me an email. Seems like you’re back in my life whether I want you here or not.”

  “Hyatt’s one of the abductors from that night, Agent Klein.” His tone was defensive, maybe forcibly so judging from the heat in his cheeks. “And he was killed in a traffic accident.”

  That time, Klein grunted. Once he reached the kitchen, he pulled out a stool at the island and sat down. “I saw the photo of Hyatt. Pretty impressive how it shares similarities with the composite rendered by the CPD. Even the scar.” He motioned along the length of his jaw, the right side, which was also the wrong side. That shotty attention to detail had Ethan wondering whether the feds had truly given Raleigh’s disappearance the resources it deserved.

  “All due respect, agent Klein, but that photo isn’t a similarity. It’s an exact replica of the composite.” He started to motion to the left side of his jaw, but thought better of it. No point in correcting Klein. Not yet.

  The federal agent glanced down at the countertop, inspecting his hands. If he was bothered by something, it didn’t show in his expression, even as he raised his attention to Ethan and stared him down for an incredibly long time. “You have any water, Ethan?”

  Ethan nodded, maybe a little too eagerly. “Sure, I’ve got spring water, Sanpell—”

  A grin tickled the edge of Klein’s lips before he began shaking his head and cut him off. “Nah, not for me, I’m good. The water’s for you.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I want to hear it again, Ethan. Everything you remember from that night they took her— I mean,” he cut himself off, allowed a subtle smirk curl the edge of his lips upward, “the night you suggest that Paul Hyatt took her away in an ambulance that didn’t exist.”

  Turning to the refrigerator, Ethan took a deep breath and wondered if he could survive another wrestling match with the memories from that night, the days that followed. He knew every detail by heart, though; he’d replayed the incident nearly every day since he last saw Raleigh. But speaking them out loud…he wasn’t quite sure.

  “Ethan?”

  Snapping back to reality, he pulled open the refrigerator and decided on the spring water. Save the Sanpellegrino for a more pleasant visit.

  Chapter Seven

  The night it happened, Klein had said. Yes, the federal agent wanted Ethan to retell his version of the night his life changed forever and he lost the only woman he would ever love.

  To tell the story Ethan decided to sit in a stool. Just like Klein, except he didn’t take the seat immediately next to him.

  Ethan glanced over and noticed the agent paying a lot of attention to his hands again. He wasn’t married or, if he was, he didn’t wear a wedding band. His hands were tanned, his nails showing a classy amount of white at their tips, just enough to let you know that even at his age, he took care of himself.

  “Ready when you are,” Klein said, looking over at Ethan. It was impossible to read past the stoic expression on the federal agent’s face.

  “Okay.” Deep breath. Sip of water.

  And then Ethan got started.

  Sometime around four in the morning, Raleigh got out of bed. Wasn’t unusual for her to need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But that night, it was pretty late for a bathroom break. When she rolled out of bed, Ethan remembered that the whole mattress seemed to shake; the old Sealy was getting old and couldn’t absorb the motion transfer like it had when it was new, so her movement traveled through the springs like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

  Ethan heard her footsteps as she wandered to the master bathroom; the door was on his side of the bed, so he’d rolled over to shield his face from the light, should she happen to turn it on. Even with the door closed, the light leaking through the seams of the door was enough to wake him up.

  But that night, Ethan remembered, she hadn’t turned on the light or shut the door, and Ethan was right back asleep as soon as he’d rolled over. And then he heard the water—she’d left the bathroom door open, so the noise hit him fresh and raw, waking him as if she’d splashed it on his face—just before she started making a strange sound. It was primal, best described as a deep moan, or a guttural growl, but not aggressive in any way; it sounded more like surrender.

  “Raleigh?” Ethan was out of bed so fast that even in the moonlit darkness of his master bathroom, he managed to watch her legs buckle and her entire body collapse underneath her. “Raleigh?”

  She dropped onto the floor as neatly as a bathrobe or as gracefully as a ballerina, and then she lay still, her body twisted in a grotesque exhibit. And there was enough natural light hitting her face that Ethan saw her eyes, although wide, had rolled all the way back into her head, her mouth open, and she was drooling.

  At first, Ethan recalled, he didn’t want to touch her—he honestly thought she’d died, the way she’d landed, and how her neck was twisted—so he lowered himself to his knees and listened for breathing instead.

  Silence.

  With no signs of vitals, he’d choked back his tears, and then reached out to brush her curled, light brown hair away from her face, as if that might be holding her back from breathing. That was when he noticed that she was sweating. Profusely. The glow of perspiration rendered her complexion glassy, like one of those porcelain dolls from the eighties, all shiny and radiant.

  “I thought you said you were afraid to touch her,” Klein said, breaking the spell of Ethan’s storytelling. “But you reached out to move the hair out of her face?”

  Ethan took a sip of water. “Yeah. I didn’t want to touch her, but I guess I did.”

  Klein didn’t seem all that impressed. He nodded for him to continue.

  After a
deep breath and another sip of water, Ethan explained that Raleigh always slept with her cell phone on the table next to her side of the bed. She preferred the iPhone’s softer alarm with the volume that got progressively louder the longer you ignored it over the brash siren from the alarm clock. Plus, with the phone nearby, she could catch up on work email in the morning before getting out of bed.

  Once Ethan heard Raleigh breathing again, the panic started to deflate from his chest, and he left her on the bathroom floor—not wanting to move her in case she was injured from the fall, and she sure looked like she might be—and hurtled across their bed to the other side.

  Grabbing her phone, he’d tried inputting her password, the last one he remembered anyway, which was the anniversary of the date they’d taken possession of the house. But it was a work device and the password had to be changed every sixty days or something. She’d obviously changed it recently and hadn’t thought to tell him.

  He didn’t know her new password.

  Ethan remembered screaming and wanting to throw the phone; too afraid that if he left her alone and ran downstairs to make a call from the landline, or even to collect his own phone from where it was charging on the kitchen counter, something worse might happen to Raleigh, and he didn’t want to not be there.

  As the panic mounted and left him feeling incompetent, useless, and a bad husband, Ethan remembered the emergency link on the iPhone screen’s bottom left corner. He knew that if he pressed that button, it would call 9-1-1.

  Fumbling with his shaking fingers, he managed to press that button.

  Emergency.

  Two or three rings later, a woman answered. She had the kind of voice that belonged to an emergency service dispatcher—calm, authoritative, and annoyed, all rolled into one—and she walked through her script expertly while Ethan began to lose his grip.

  Nature of your emergency.

  What’s your address, sir?

  All right, I’ve just dispatched an ambulance, it’s on its way.

  Sir, please calm down, and tell me: Is your wife responsive?

  How long has she been like this?

  Can you tell me your zip code, sir?

  Sir, are you sitting next to her now? Is she warm? Cold? Still breathing?

  Such inconsequential questions kept him focused, kept him sane until the ambulance finally arrived, and then Ethan just didn’t know what do. The woman on the phone, she said to leave the phone and attend to the door, or the first responders would use force to gain entry.

  Since Ethan knew just how much Raleigh loved the house, the door getting kicked in wasn’t an option because it would mean some of the sketchy people next door could access the place while they were at the hospital. So, as he was told to do, Ethan left the phone on the floor, right next to Raleigh’s face, and hurried downstairs to let them in.

  “Them?” Klein’s question once again shattered the storytelling spell. “How many were there?”

  Three. Paul Hyatt and two others that looked like him.

  “Looked like him, how?”

  Ethan explained their EMS uniforms, the walkie-talkies strapped to their shoulder, their belts with flashlights, band aids and whatever else EMTs carry. They were all in great shape, too, all men that probably cycled together on the weekend or ran triathlons over Thanksgiving, card-carrying members of the two-percent body fat society.

  “Uh huh. And then what happened, Ethan?”

  Stepping past Ethan, the trio of medics left their stretcher at the bottom of the stairs and marched up to the bedroom like they knew exactly where they were headed. One guy, it wasn’t Paul Hyatt, carried a portable machine that measured vital signs or something.

  By the time they’d arrived upstairs, Raleigh was sitting up, her back against the vanity. She was pale, clammy, and disoriented. Her pajama top was soaked right through. While the medics asked their questions and took her vitals, Ethan watched, his eyes drawn to his wife’s chest. And that was when he realized that something didn’t feel right. Something was off, way off.

  Whenever Ethan offered input into the details of Raleigh’s fall, the moments leading up to it, the way she hadn’t been breathing, one of the medics shushed him and asked the question again, directing it specifically to Raleigh.

  They didn’t want to hear much from him, and he’d been panicked about that because his wife had been unconscious, she didn’t know, she didn’t—

  “In case she was a battered wife,” Klein said.

  Ethan knew that, now. He’d come to that conclusion on his own over the years, but he nodded at Klein like he appreciated his explanation anyway before continuing with the story.

  Since Raleigh’s vitals were all fine according to the machine they’d strapped onto her, the guys said it was optional whether she came to the hospital with them. At first, Raleigh said she’d follow up with her family doctor in the morning, even though Ethan knew she’d never make the trip to the doctor who’d been taking care of her since she was an infant. Said it was easier that way, which meant her mother wouldn’t condone a trip to an ER where the common folk went for cheap treatment. Plus she was tired and had some work she needed to get done, first thing in the morning. One of the medics agreed with her, and then the team started to leave.

  Ethan remembered sighing for some reason, relieved.

  By then, when Raleigh groaned and seemed a little light-headed, one of the medics—not Paul Hyatt, Ethan would’ve remembered if it had been him—stopped and said, “The ambulance is here, Mrs. Vernon. Whether we bring you to the hospital or not, your insurance is paying for this visit.”

  It seemed odd to Ethan that he would say something like that. Again, it wasn’t Paul, but one of the other guys, the youngest of the group in fact.

  “This kind of thing,” that young EMT had said, and by that point he sounded nervous enough that Paul and the third EMT had returned to the room, “I’d hate for us to get halfway back to the yard when you have another episode.”

  Ethan remembered thinking it sounded strange—a yard? Ambulances were kept in an ambulance terminal, he’d thought.

  “Nah, some of the medics I’ve worked with, they call it a yard.” Klein wasn’t helping. “But continue. Please.”

  When Paul Hyatt turned to him, Ethan noticed that the man’s face had that magical five-o’clock growth, his scar cutting through the darkness and making it more visible, and his hair was slicked back like Andy Garcia’s. “Mr. Vernon, you’re sure your wife hasn’t had seizures in the past?”

  Ethan nodded and said, “Yeah, I’ve never even witnessed one until tonight,” and then he pulled Raleigh closer. Still soaking wet, still trembling a little from the fear, she seemed to resist his supportive gesture. “Have you, baby?”

  She confirmed that she’d never had a seizure before, shaking her head, but her eyes were distant, staring off into the land of uncertainty, or even farther.

  But she was trembling, Ethan had been thinking, and the fact that the EMT crew seemed unwilling or unsure about leaving, it got him curious. Because maybe they were right, he thought, maybe she should go with them.

  “Maybe you should get checked out at the hospital,” he’d said, taking Raleigh’s trembling face in his hands and forcing the eye contact. He told her they’d get to ride in the ambulance, which was better than their rusting Corolla, whose engine may or may not turn over. “I know it’s not the horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park, but—”

  “Actually, sir,” Paul Hyatt had said, interrupting the moment, “for insurance purposes, we can only transport the patient unless she’s a minor. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to follow in your personal vehicle.”

  Sounded legitimate and, even though Ethan had his doubts, he encouraged Raleigh to go with them, promising he would be right behind her, following the entire way.

  “I’m allergic to horses anyway,” he’d added, hoping to rouse a smile, but she simply stared back, blankly. Almost like she knew, like she was fully aware that this was goodbye and
he was sending her off.

  But that wasn’t the case. She’d never collapsed before. Her father had died of an aneurism before Ethan had met Raleigh in college, and now Ethan was scared. She was clearly scared, too. So once the medics stepped out of the room, Ethan helped her get changed into a fresh bra and shirt, zipped her into a pair of jeans and a jacket, and then helped her downstairs where she climbed onto the stretcher, making sure she had her purse and a pair of shoes.

  Her purse.

  That damn bag.

  “What’s the significance with the purse, Ethan?”

  The car keys were in her purse; she’d been driving the Corolla the night before, a grocery run, a trip to the bank, and a gas fill-up. Once Raleigh was gone, the ambulance no longer visible on their street, Ethan hadn’t been able to find those car keys. Panic set in, and he didn’t know what to do. The panic intensified. He ran out to the street again, but the ambulance was long gone, its flashing lights not even an echo in the treetops anymore.

  By the time he thought of calling a cab, it was too late.

  He never saw her again.

  Chapter Eight

  Agent Mike Klein shot him the type of glance that suggested he thought Ethan was a big pussy.

  Hunching his shoulders, Ethan buried his face and struggled to keep himself together. Grown men don’t cry and all that.

  Oh, Raleigh, I’ve missed you from the moment you walked down those front steps and climbed onto the waiting stretcher.

  Klein snapped his fingers repetitively. “Then what? Once you got into the cab…?”

  Ethan lifted his face and met Klein’s stare. He wiped his forearm across his upper lip, drying the mucus that had oozed from his nose during his little sob-a-thon. Ethan knew from experience that his eyes were puffy, red from the momentary breakdown over a story he hadn’t told in such detail for over seven years.