by Conell, Zach
That month had been the happiest in Cillian’s life. He had enjoyed his new job, and he absolutely loved his fiancée. She was stunning to him, with the most dazzling eyes he’d ever seen—his nickname for her was “Almond” after the shape of her eyes—but more importantly she was sweet, loving, understanding, and so intelligent that he sometimes struggled not to feel intimidated. Despite the flawed education Amanda had been subjected to—her mother had homeschooled her, but it seemed that she hadn’t been anything close to a qualified teacher, as she’d failed to cover many basic subjects including history, religious studies, and the natural sciences—she excelled at English, knew everything about literature and geography, and she had such a profound knowledge of biology that Cillian reckoned she would make an excellent doctor or botanist. Since she didn’t have a college degree, he had actively encouraged her to think about enrolling in a university in Chicago or Indianapolis to study medicine, biology, or any other field that interested her. To him it was obvious that she would enjoy studying, for she was generally a fast and highly motivated learner, and she seemed to be able to study just about any subject with ease. In fact, Cillian had so completely adored his little Almond that he was convinced she was capable of learning and doing anything, including becoming the first female president of the United States, winning gold medals for all alpine skiing disciplines at the Winter Olympics, and inventing time travel.
The idea about Amanda traveling in time had been more of a metaphor, inspired by the only thing that had bothered Cillian, which was how incredibly reserved his fiancée was when it came to talking about her past. During their first bus-station-coffeehouse-chat, he had rightly guessed from her accent that she was from somewhere in Illinois. She had mentioned a rural town in the south, where her mother had raised and homeschooled her on a little farm. Later she had told him that she had no knowledge whatsoever about her father, who had left her mother before she was born. Amanda had been twenty-four when they met, the same age as Cillian, but unlike him she had not attended college because her mother had been diagnosed with cancer when she was sixteen and Amanda had stayed with her mother to take care of her and the farm. After a long sickbed, her mother had passed away about a year before Amanda’s arrival in Riverside. Her mother’s death meant that Amanda no longer had any known relatives because she had been an only child, as had her mom, and her mother’s parents, had been dead for years. After her mother’s passing, Amanda sold the farm and everything in it and moved to Chicago where she’d found a housekeeping job at a small motel. That was more or less all Cillian had ever learned about Amanda’s life before she met him. As disappointing as that was, he had been hopeful about the future, thinking that she would eventually open up to him.
What had been more important to him at that time was the fact that he loved being with her, talking to her, philosophizing, chatting, joking, teasing, playing, and discussing basically all their thoughts and feelings. He had even grown to like the ridiculous nickname she had given him: “Sea” which was derived from the “C” of Cillian. But his optimism had not been rewarded, for two days before their planned wedding, disaster had struck and instead of lowering her mask and exposing her true self to him, she had vanished behind a puff of smoke. Almost literally.
After work, Cillian had gone to pick her up for a planned, relaxing “pre-wedding craze” walk in the park. He had been waiting at a traffic light only a few blocks from her apartment, in the car with the radio on, happily singing along with a classic rock ballad that he had always considered to be overly sentimental, when he suddenly noticed a big column of black smoke in the distance, curling up from what had to be Amanda’s neighborhood. He turned the radio off, which helped him become aware of sirens blaring in the distance. A fire! He panicked. God, no. She has to be safe, she has to be fine. Despite the red light, he pulled away like a drag racer on steroids, and miraculously managed to evade all the cars crossing the intersection, while simultaneously dialing her number on his cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. Dammit! Let it be okay, let it be okay. Within a minute he pulled up in her street, about a hundred meters from her apartment, in front of a crowd of people standing behind a line of the firefighter tape that marked off the part of the street where Amanda lived. There had been fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances all over the place. He nearly knocked one of the spectators unconscious when he threw open his car door and jumped out to see which apartment was the source of the fire.
While making his way to the barricade tape, he heard sounds of shock and anguish coming from many of the onlookers in front of him. He pushed his way through the crowd, effectively using his shoulder as a battering ram until he reached the yellow-black tape reading “FIRE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” Peering through the smoke, he had known right away what had upset the spectators; two firefighters were carrying the seemingly lifeless body of what appeared to be a woman with long brown hair away from the fire, while two ambulance workers were rushing toward them with a stretcher. Cillian’s heart had stopped, for an instant, until he noticed the skirt of the woman, long and black. That can’t be Amanda, he thought as a feeling of relief washed over him. She never wears black. But his relief had been short-lived, because it was only then that he had finally looked at the fire itself, behind the woman and the firefighters, and had realized the gravity of what was happening. It had been her home, Amanda’s very apartment, that was engulfed in flames.
During the nerve-wrecking hours following Cillian’s horrifying discovery that the house of his fiancée was on fire, he had only barely managed to suppress a feeling of paralyzing fear by focusing all his energy on trying to obtain information about Amanda from the fire brigade and the police. He had also kept trying her cell phone every five minutes, but it went straight to voice mail every time. Within the first half hour, Cillian had managed to get the attention of a policewoman to explain to her his relation to the tenant of the burning apartment. The officer had escorted him to a police SUV standing a few meters behind the barricade tape. Several minutes after, a fire marshal had come to inform Cillian that the fire had probably broken out in Amanda’s apartment and spread to the neighboring apartments afterward, but that it was impossible to say if she had been home at the time the fire had started because by the time the first fire truck had arrived at the scene, the fire had already been too fierce for an attempt to enter the apartment. So far, there were no known fatalities. A few neighbors had been hospitalized with smoke inhalation, including the woman in the black skirt, but no one had been seriously injured as far as they could tell. Unfortunately, they would not be able to conduct a search in Amanda’s apartment until after the fire had been fully extinguished and the rubble had cooled down, which could take all night. Therefore both the fireman and the police officer had recommended Cillian to go home and get some sleep. He categorically refused and made it crystal clear to them that the only way the authorities would be able to get him to leave, was by forcefully dragging him from the scene. They chuckled and reassured him that this was not going to be necessary and that he could stay where he was under condition that he wouldn’t interfere with their efforts. And so he had waited, in a state of complete mental distress, for hours.
The next morning, after the break of dawn, the first firefighters had entered what remained of Amanda’s apartment. They had found no trace of her, nor any tangible evidence of arson. The fire had probably started in her kitchen, in an oily frying pan that was left on a lit gas burner on the stove. Cillian had been relieved at first, but soon a new feeling of intense confusion and concern had taken hold of him. If she wasn’t home at the time the fire started, why didn’t she return later? Why had she left in the first place? And why didn’t she show up at her apartment afterward, for an entire night? Where could she possibly be? Why hadn’t she called? Was her cell phone not working? Why? None of it made sense to him then. It still didn’t now, two and a half years later, for Cillian had never found answers to any of the questions he had asked himself that mornin
g in March, when he discovered that Amanda Greenfield, the woman he planned to grow old with, had disappeared.
Chapter Three
As Cillian got up from the sofa to brush his teeth and get ready for bed, he kept going over his history with Amanda, as he did most nights that he spend in his apartment. Therefore Cillian normally didn’t mind the occasional nightly stakeout, as it was a nice distraction from his usual night routine of brooding over his lost love and his failure to find any trace of her. But his recent two-day stakeout—his longest one yet—had been a little too much even for him, especially because the battery of his phone had not survived past the first twenty-four hours, after which he had no longer had anything to entertain himself with and his thoughts had inevitably turned to his missing fiancée.
And yet now, when he lay down on the rock-hard mattress of his single bed, he was sure there wouldn’t be any rest for him that night either, not despite the fact that he was so dog-tired, but precisely because of it. He was simply too bone-weary and tuckered out to fall asleep. So instead he began recalling how the police had opened an investigation into Amanda’s whereabouts after the fire in her apartment, and how the case had gone cold within a few months as there were no reliable leads to go on. It had seemed that Amanda had not merely vanished from Cillian’s life, but from the very face of the earth.
Cillian had made up his mind from the beginning that he was going to do whatever he could, whatever it took, to find her, so when the police investigation was put on hold, he decided that it was time for him to take over. To the great surprise and even greater disappointment of his parents, he had quit his job at the Riverside Inquirer and moved to Chicago, Amanda’s last alleged hometown and the city where her passport had been issued. He had initially planned to apply for a private investigator license there, but since he lacked the relevant experience and educational background to qualify, he had ultimately decided to operate outside the law. For the last two years he had been working on Amanda’s case alone, taking on other cases only when he needed the money. Usually he looked for clients on classified ads websites, but a few cases had come to him through references from previous clients. So far he had managed to stay under the radar of the Illinois law enforcement authorities, or maybe they just hadn’t cared to interfere in his illegal detective activities. Either way, he could do as he please. To no avail though, for he had gotten nowhere with Amanda’s case.
There were no official records of his fiancée anywhere in Chicago, so it seemed likely that her passport had been a fake. Moreover, all the hotels, motels, and other lodging establishments in town claimed never to have hired someone by her name or appearance. He had also undertaken fruitless efforts to uncover new leads by distributing her picture on social media—he had used one of the few pictures he had been able to take of her without her knowledge, as she had typically shied away from cameras like a bat shies away from light. Thus it seemed that, after two years of amateurish, futile detective work, Cillian had reached a dead end in the Windy City, in more ways than one.
He had recently been thinking about relocating and continuing his search for Amanda somewhere else, but he had no idea where to go, or if there would be any point to it. He was considering Vermont for a while, as she had initially been planning to go there until she decided to stay in Riverside with him. But Cillian couldn’t think of a reason why she would have disappeared in this manner just to travel there. Once she had moved into her apartment in Riverside, she had no longer expressed any desire to go to Vermont. Besides, there would be nothing for her there. Like with Vermont, Amanda had not shown any interest in going back to her hometown either. Quite the contrary. She had repeatedly spoken of it as a place she never wanted to revisit for the rest of her life. Naturally, Cillian would have liked to visit the town she grew up in either way, if only to check out her old farm and ask around about her. The problem was, however, that she had never given him any specifics regarding the name or location, and there were too many rural villages and towns in Illinois for him to cover in a lifetime.
The lack of details and evidence that Amanda had provided regarding her life story had only struck Cillian as more than odd—suspicious even—in hindsight, after her disappearance. While Amanda had been eager to see photo albums from Cillian’s youth, she had refused to show any pictures of her younger self. She had mentioned that she found it too painful to look at photographs of her past life ever since her mother’s passing, as they brought back so many unpleasant memories of the difficult years of her mother’s illness. And because she had been brought to tears almost immediately on the few occasions Cillian had mentioned her old pictures, he had not pushed her on the subject. But she had not produced pictures of her time in Chicago either, except for the ID photo in her passport, which had been issued in Chicago in June of that year, that is, in the month they met. When asked, she had not given Cillian a proper explanation for the lack of photographs of her Chicago time, other than more tears and the insistence that this topic was “too sensitive” as well, somehow. Once more, Cillian had let it go, hoping that if he would just give her more time, she would eventually open up to him about her past and share with him all the awful memories and dark secrets that seemed to torment her at times.
Despite the fact that Cillian had left the heating on when he went to bed, and subsequently wrapped himself in three layers of blankets, a shiver ran down his spine as he lay there, recalling the terrible nightmares Amanda used to have. In her sleep, Amanda had occasionally had fits that resembled seizures, as her arms and legs would start jerking uncontrollably in different directions, while she would utter screams in a strange language resembling some ancient European language—Latin, Cillian had guessed—before waking up with a start, all covered in sweat and with a terrified expression on her face. She was never able to remember her bad dreams—at least that was what she had claimed. Initially he had chosen to accept these disconcerting nightly episodes as one more relic of her mysterious past, and determined to wait for her to take him into her confidence on the subject.
However, when the nightmares had started getting more frequent and intense in the last week before their planned wedding, Cillian tried to address the issue. Amanda had been unusually evasive even by her standards, and when asked by her fiancé about the foreign language she used in her sleep, she had been unwilling to believe him.
“That’s impossible,” she had insisted, “I don’t speak any other language than English, neither did my mom. It can’t have been anything other than English or gibberish.”
But Cillian had known that to be false. What he had heard her scream on multiple occasions, it had nothing whatsoever to do with English, and it was too well structured and articulated to be mere drivel. He had planned to record a video of her next episode with his smartphone, but he had not witnessed any more of her nightmares before her disappearance, because she had proposed for them to spent the last nights before their wedding apart, she at her apartment and he at his parents’ house, so that the wedding night would be “extra special.” He hadn’t been very excited about this scheme but agreed nonetheless, because he had been wanting her to stamp her mark on their wedding celebration in one way or another for longer. Until then it had seemed that everything was going to be dominated by aspects of his life, as the wedding would take place in his hometown, be attended exclusively by his family, and documented by a photographer of the Riverside Inquirer who was his colleague. He had been glad they would now at least follow her pre-wedding sleeping preferences, even if he disliked the specific arrangement she had picked.
Cillian had often racked his brain, trying to recall a single, specific word or even a syllable Amanda had uttered in that alien tongue during one of her nightmares, for he supposed that determining the meaning or the language of her screams might provide him with some sort of clue about her past or presence. But it had led to nothing. It was as if all Amanda’s unsettling cries and shrieks had mingled together in Cillian’s mind to form a cacophonous
mess of unintelligible, disturbing noises that would provide the perfect soundtrack to the story of his fall from grace with the universe. Within three years, he had transformed from a promising young journalist with a beautiful fiancée in a green, quiet town, to an unlawful, insomniac detective chasing figments of his imagination in the back alleys of a city plagued by rampant crime.
Forget it, Cillian thought, as he got out of bed. I am never going to fall asleep to night, so I might as well work. He knew he was still far more likely to fall asleep than to uncover anything that would faintly resemble a break in Amanda’s case, but even after months of experiencing disappointment after disappointment, he still couldn’t help hoping, or more accurately, he didn’t want to allow himself to stop hoping. He knew that his ongoing search for Amanda had become so important to his vision of who he was and wanted to be, that it almost defined him at this point. Without it, he would be lost entirely, he feared. And so he sat down at the coffee-stained desk left by the former tenant of his apartment, took up a pen covered with unknown bite marks, tore a few pages out of an old notebook he had found lying around, and for the umpteenth time began writing down everything that had happened in the weeks leading up to Amanda’s disappearance and which now seemed suspect to Cillian.