by Ania Ahlborn
“Jack Winter,” she said. “Did you kill your parents?”
His heart drained of blood. For a half second he couldn’t catch his breath, sure he’d never breathe again. A spark of rage fired in the pit of his stomach, but it subsided quickly, and he managed to form a reply.
With his hand on the doorknob and his back to the woman who had destroyed his entire world, Jack eventually answered.
“I don’t know,” he croaked. “But I think I probably did.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jabbing the end of a stick into the soft earth, Charlie brooded as she paced the lawn. It was hot and she was bored, and Abby was just sitting there reading some stupid book. She narrowed her eyes. Had Abigail not been such a crybaby, they could have been at the animal shelter picking out a new dog. But instead they were stuck in front of the house with nothing to do. It was all Abigail’s fault.
Charlie threw the stick across the road as hard as she could. It spun through the air like a helicopter blade and disappeared into the trees that flanked the other side of the street. She exhaled a little gasp to garner her sister’s interest. It worked. Abby looked up from her book.
“Did you see that?” Charlie asked, wide-eyed with mock surprise.
“See what?”
“A possum!” Charlie said. Abby made a face. She looked less than impressed and looked back to her book a moment later. Charlie squeezed her hands into tight little fists at her sides. “It was across the street,” she continued. Her tone was animated with childlike excitement, but no expression touched her face. “I think it had babies on its back.”
That got Abby’s attention immediately. “Babies?” She blinked at the news. Closing her book, she dropped it beside the trunk of the tree and met her little sister next to the road. They both peered across the street, searching for a possum that didn’t exist.
“I bet Momma would let us adopt one,” Charlie said. “We just have to catch up to it.”
That made Abigail hesitate; she had read somewhere that possums were aggressive. Trying to steal a baby off a mother possum’s back was a dangerous proposition—but the risk was outweighed by the dazzling possibility of having a baby possum to call their own. It was such a weird idea that Abby was smitten by it. And even if they couldn’t get close enough, she at least wanted to see them before they disappeared into the woods.
Charlie smiled to herself while Abby toed the edge of that road. They stood there like lawn ornaments, searching the trees. Even the rumble of an old pickup didn’t distract them. A rusty red Ford approached, and Charlie’s fingers twitched. She gritted her teeth, her eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. The truck rambled closer, a good ten miles over the thirty mile per hour limit.
Charlie lifted a hand behind Abigail’s back. She pulled her arm backward, waiting for the perfect moment.
The truck grew louder as it approached, its engine sputtering beneath a peeling hood. It was close enough for Charlotte to make out the driver’s face—a bushy beard hung on to the driver’s chin, a tangle of hair stuffed beneath a brimmed cap.
The truck was screaming now, loud as a locomotive. Charlie reared back, but Abby turned toward her sister just as the pickup bounced by.
“Should we go look for it?” Abby asked. Life was trickling back into her face. For the first time since the accident, she looked genuinely excited.
Charlie’s arm dropped to her side just as Abby had turned, and while rage simmered in her veins, her expression was enthusiastic—an expression a normal child was expected to wear when adventure calls.
“Maybe we should go ask Mom,” Charlie suggested, but it was the last thing she meant to do; like she’d ask that bitch for permission to do anything. Abby shook her head at the idea.
“We’ve probably waited too long as it is,” she said. “If we wait any longer there’s no way we’ll ever catch up to it.” That’s when Abby grabbed her hand and pulled her across the street. Charlie dragged her feet, putting on a show of little sister jitters. Had Abby glanced over her shoulder, she would have spotted a sinister smile spread wide across Charlie’s mouth.
Jack sat in the car, engine off, windows rolled up. For a long while he considered disappearing the same way he had when he was fourteen. His entire body felt numb. If what Ginny had said was true, he should have remembered something—but all he could dredge up was running across the lawn, looking over his shoulder at their trailer, trying to outrun something unseen. He had always assumed he’d been running from his parents, but maybe it had been something else. Maybe he had seen something terrible. Maybe he was running because he had caught sight of himself.
It all began to run together. Details started to feel less and less important as exhaustion settled in. More powerful than hunger, more compelling than thirst, the need for sleep was more potent than the horror that swirled through his brain. He slouched in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes, wanting nothing more than an hour or two to doze, to recalibrate.
Less than ten minutes into his nap, his cell screamed as loud as a hurricane siren.
He didn’t get a chance to say hello. As soon as he picked up, Aimee’s frantic crying drummed against his ear. She was sobbing, choking on her words, trying to form sentences around the gasps catching in her throat. A sour sense of dread stirred in Jack’s stomach. He’d heard this panic before. This was his mother’s panic. This was the sound of Gilda trying to explain why Stephen needed to lock Jack away.
“Jack,” Aimee sobbed. “Jack, are you there?”
“I’m here,” he said, and she cried harder. He waited, knowing the news would leech out of her like a toxin.
“Abigail is gone,” she wept. “Jack, Charlie took her. Abigail is gone.”
Jack flew down the highway toward Louisiana. His foot mashed the gas pedal against the floorboard. The engine rumbled with a surprising amount of muscle, like a sleeping Formula One car that had been disguised as a boring family sedan its entire life. Jack was doing one hundred and ten along a two lane road, the double yellow line blurring into an arrow, pointing him in the right direction. Driving as fast as the Devil himself, he wondered how the car managed to stay on the road, how it hadn’t veered off onto an embankment where the police would find him, collapsed skull and ribs poking through his chest like the flayed bones of a fancy roast. The faster he drove the more clearly he could see the twists and turns ahead of him. It was like some sort of high-speed intuition, a racer’s third eye.
It was’t him. Jack was very aware that he wasn’t the one keeping that car on the road. He was just a passenger. Someone else was driving him home.
He made it back to Live Oak in five and a half hours instead of eight—all done without passing a single police officer or filling up the gas tank. When he pulled up to the house, the tank had been dry for a good thirty miles, but the Olds kept rolling. The street was lined with Louisiana State Troopers, their lights flashing red and blue in a surreal sort of silence.
Jack parked the Olds halfway on the lawn and left the driver door open, running up the porch steps and into the house. Aimee was on the couch, a box of tissues balanced on her knees. Her face was swollen, as though she’d just climbed out of the boxing ring. When she saw Jack step through the door, she abandoned the officer asking her questions and threw herself at him. Dismissing her anger, her betrayal, as soon as her arms were around him she exploded into a fit of choking sobs.
“They’re gone,” she shrieked. “She took her, I know she did!”
The police turned their attention to Jack. Spotting a calm, collected member of the family, they flocked to him like mosquitoes to stagnant water.
“Mister Winter?”
Jack pried Aimee off of himself despite her protests and led her back to the couch. She settled into quiet whimpering, fisting handfuls of tissues against her eyes.
“Mister Winter, are you aware of the situation?” the officer asked. His name was engraved on a shiny gold nametag clipped to the pocket of his starched shirt. Marvin.<
br />
“Yes.” Jack paused. “Sort of.”
“Mister Winter, your wife has informed us that both of your daughters are missing,” Marvin told him, shooting for a tone between sympathetic and professional. He wasn’t very good at it, and he looked a little unsure of himself as he stood there, rehashing what he knew. “It’s of my understanding that the girls are six and ten years of age, is that correct?”
“Yes,” Jack replied.
Cops wandered around the house, taking notes, chatting in low tones. Jack felt like a guy on a tiny island, sharks circling his little patch of land. His thoughts drifted to his own crime, worried that someone would recognize his first name. Why hadn’t the police found him? He had been a stupid kid, not hiding, not even knowing he had done anything wrong save for running away. It didn’t make sense.
It doesn’t have to make sense, he told himself. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.
“Your wife: she’s understandably beside herself,” Marvin said. “We’ve had a time getting her to cooperate with us.”
But maybe now they’d figure it out. They’d realize who he was—a murderer, a guy who hacked up his parents like cheap meat for a dog’s dinner. He was a psychopath. A lunatic. He’d be put away for life.
“Mister Winter?”
For life.
“Mister Winter, I understand this is a difficult situation, but the more information we get about your daughters, and the faster we do it-”
“Sorry.” Jack shook his head. “Sure, you’re right… I’m just a little freaked out.”
Marvin nodded, motioned for Jack to join him at the kitchen table. Jack took his usual seat while Marvin took Charlie’s chair: the chair that had skidded across the kitchen before tipping sideways, Mr. Scratch smiling a jagged smile, wearing Charlie’s face like a mask.
“Do you have any recent photos of the girls?” Marvin asked. There had been plenty of photos around the house when Jack had left—pictures of the girls playing in the yard, the girls sitting at the base of a Christmas tree at their grandparent’s house. His favorite had always rested atop his piano. It was photo of Charlie dressed in her rocker wear, singing ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ into a pink plastic microphone. Officer Marvin’s question told him that those pictures were no longer where they used to be.
“Give me a minute,” Jack said and excused himself, stepping into the master bedroom, assuming it was where Aimee had tossed all of those framed photos in a fit of panicky rage. But rather than finding a bed piled with family photographs, he found an empty shoe box instead. Beside it were the photos he’d been squirreling away over time, the photos he didn’t want Aimee to see. Those secret photos were scattered across the bed, mere shadows of what they had been, torn to shreds by an inconsolable mother who was spiraling into the depth of maternal despair.
Seeing his secret uncovered, rage boiled up within him. Aimee had crossed the line. She knows was all he could think. And Aimee knowing was against the rules.
Closing the door behind him, Jack returned to the kitchen table and drew out his wallet. He plucked a small photograph of the girls from the plastic sleeve that held his driver’s license and handed it over. Marvin hesitantly took it before posing another question.
“Anything bigger?” he asked, thumbing the tiny snapshot.
“We have plenty bigger,” Jack confessed. “But they all seem to be missing.”
Marvin looked confused and Jack nodded toward the living room, signaling that the whimpering woman in the opposite room was the culprit. Marvin had never come across such a reaction, but he nodded, placing the photo on the table next to his clipboard, resolving to make do with what he’d been given.
“Mister Winter, your wife… she’s in a bad way,” Marvin said, then paused, weighing his words. “She has, however, had her lucid moments.” Again he stalled, puckering his lips, searching for a delicate way to rephrase what Aimee had wailed at the police when they had arrived. “The first thing she said to us when we arrived was that your daughter, Abigail, had been abducted.”
Jack said nothing. He simply offered Marvin a faint nod of his head to continue.
“Then it turned out that it wasn’t just Abigail who was missing, but also your youngest, Charlotte.” Marvin was hitching like an old pickup with a bad spark plug. The words trickled out of him with painful reservation. Eventually, he exhaled a sigh and leveled his gaze on Jack, leaning forward, closing some of the distance between them to speak under his breath. “Mister Winter…”
“Jack.”
“…Jack, can I level with you?”
Jack nodded again, and Marvin glanced over his shoulder before proceeding.
“When we showed up, it appeared that from what your wife told us, she was convinced that Charlotte was the one who had abducted Abigail. Do you…” He shook his head, trying to make sense of it. “…do you have any idea why she would have come to that conclusion?”
Jack leaned back in his chair and sucked a breath in through his nose. For a flash of a second he considered tearing the seam on his dark secret, considered telling Marvin and his band of merry men that Charlie wasn’t Charlie anymore, just like he hadn’t been Jack on that fateful summer night in the nowhere town of Rosewood. He pictured Marvin’s face while calling out its names: Devil, Satan, Lucifer, demon. He imagined the officer’s expression twisting in silent disgust before his cheeks turned red like a drunk’s. That’s when Marvin would throw his head back and exhale a boom of laughter, dismissing the entire thing as a hoax.
“Officer Marvin,” Jack said, “Charlotte is six years old.”
Marvin nodded, and Jack sat there for a moment, staring at the cop across from him.
“She’s six years old,” he repeated himself. “She can’t even tie her own shoes.”
“I understand,” Marvin assured him. “But you also understand that, as it was said, it’s my job to question all possibilities.” When Jack didn’t respond, Marvin rose from his seat and tucked the tiny photo of the girls into his front shirt pocket. “Obviously, we’ll keep in touch. Would you like an officer to stay at the house with you while the situation pans out?”
“We’ll be fine,” Jack told him.
Marvin scissored a business card between his fingers, holding it out to Jack. “If you think of anything or if you find a larger photo… please call me.”
Jack took the card and offered the policeman a tight-lipped smile.
After the troopers had filtered out of the house, he was left listening to Aimee’s whimpering. It took all his strength to stay in the kitchen instead of storming into the living room, ending her then and there.
There was no sound save for the furious padding of his feet and his breath, which came in waves. Jack fled that trailer in the dead of night, and while he couldn’t remember how he had got out without being chased by his father, he knew he had to run as fast as he could. His lungs burned as he sprinted down route 17. Eventually he stopped, his hands pressed to his trembling knees, his head hanging limp between his shoulders. It was then, gasping for air, that he realized he wasn’t wearing any shoes.
His feet were bleeding. From what he could see in the pale Georgia moonlight, he’d somehow managed to get some of that blood on his hands. But that didn’t matter. After catching his breath, Jack took on a brisk pace toward Rosewood, where he’d jog out to the highway and hitch a ride out of Dodge. Stephen and Gilda would never see him again.
He bypassed Rosewood as much as he could, not wanting anyone to spot ‘the Winter boy’ stomping his way out of town. When he hit the highway he thrust his skinny arm out into the road and jutted his thumb into the sky. Childhood optimism assured him that someone would stop. Someone had to. Only a heartless bastard would pass up a scrawny barefooted kid. Violent psychopaths didn’t even enter Jack’s mind. In his head, he knew some nice couple would pull over, toss him in the back seat, and get him a fancy dinner at the Huddle House or Waffle King. They’d tuck him into a hotel bed and kiss him on the forehe
ad and swear they’d protect him forever. Jack was running away, but it wasn’t because he didn’t want parents. He just didn’t want his parents. Anyone who yanked him off the highway would be better than Stephen and Gilda. He was never going back to that run-down trailer on the outskirts of town.
“They’ll miss me,” he muttered as he marched ahead. His arm was growing tired but he kept it stuck out to the side even when there weren’t any cars coming, sure that as soon as he let it fall some phantom sedan would scream out of an invisible vortex and pass him by.
“They’ll be sorry when they find out,” he said. “They’ll see that I’m gone and they’ll be so sorry they won’t even know what to think. They’ll cry until they’re dead.”
A pair of headlights appeared in the distance. It was an old pickup, its rusted red hood rattling on the latch that held it down, threatening to release its grip and toss that metal sheet into the windshield like a drunk girl flashing her tits at Mardi Gras. Those headlights were cockeyed. The left one pointed too far to the left like it was searching for roadkill, while the right pointed down a bit too sharply. When the truck’s cross-eyed headlights caught Jack’s silhouette, it came to a stop dead center in the road.
Jack stood on the shoulder while the truck rumbled like a tyrannosaur. He kept his arm out and his thumb pointed up even after locking eyes with the giant inside the cab. The guy’s teeth gleamed in the darkness. He leaned across the bench seat and pushed the passenger side door open. The door hinges creaked.
“Hey there, chief, need a lift?”
Jack climbed into the truck without a word. The driver fell silent as well. Jack didn’t care where he ended up: he just wanted that big driver to drive. And the jolly green giant wearing the John Deere cap didn’t ask where the kid wanted to go, he just eyed the fourteen-year-old boy sitting next to him and grinned.