Rosemary Run Box Set

by Kelly Utt

  “I know you want to do something to help,” James continued. “I get that. But it’s best if you let us handle things now. Besides, I know you folks have a resort to run. And I don’t know if you’ve heard, but forecasters are saying we’re going to get snow tomorrow night. It may make a real mess for business around here if the highway shuts down.”

  “We heard,” Holden confirmed. “Our employees know about the storm and are working to prepare.”

  “But frankly,” Wilder said, jumping in. “Nothing at the resort matters right now. We need to find them. Eve…”

  James leaned back, thoughtful. He rested his hand on his belt like he had earlier. “Look, family members often bungle police investigations and cause more harm than they do good, but I realize this situation with Eve is… different.”

  “Yes?” Phoebe asked, hopeful again.

  “I’d like you folks to come in and meet the detectives right away. We’ll take formal statements from each of you. Once that’s done, if you want to conduct your own search for Eve and Tim… Go ahead. Just keep us informed. I want you to let us know if you find anything at all that might be helpful. Understood?”

  “Yes!” the group said in unison.

  “Thank you,” Holden said to James, leaning forward and slapping him enthusiastically on the knee. “It feels better to do something. Anything…”

  “I really do get it,” James replied. “When my brother-in-law died suddenly, I couldn’t just sit on my hands and wait.”

  Phoebe let out an audible moan at the mention of death.

  “I’m sorry, Phoebe,” James said. “I didn’t mean to imply… I was…”

  “It’s okay,” Wilder said. “We know you’re trying to comfort us, James. We’re just a little jumpy right now. Truly, it’s okay.”

  Phoebe closed her eyes, leaning in to her husband.

  James nodded, hesitant to say another word.

  “Thank you, James,” Holden affirmed. “We’ll follow you to the station.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Ty said. “You know… In case they come home. One of you come switch with me when you’re done giving your statement.”

  James walked to Ty and put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We’ve got this. The Rosemary Run Police Department is here for you. An officer will be here around the clock in case they come home. Be with your family, Ty. You need each other right now.”

  Wiping tears, the Blackburns nodded their agreement and appreciation. They piled into their vehicles along with Victoria, then followed James’ squad car to the police station downtown, tail lights gleaming against the darkness.

  Although no one said it out loud, the procession reminded them of a funeral. They silently prayed to everything holy that they wouldn’t be attending a funeral for Eve or Tim anytime soon.

  13

  The police station was bustling when the Blackburns arrived. Its position on a hill overlooking the valley gave it an air of authority. Inside, lamps shone on crisp brown file folders as officers scribbled notes, and phones rang urgently. It looked like every desk and station was occupied.

  It wasn’t often that one of Rosemary Run’s own went missing. The fact that a husband and wife were both missing made those on the force even more eager to get to the bottom of what had happened and bring them home safe. Not to mention, Eve’s particular vulnerabilities warranted extra attention.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn,” Neil Fredericks began as he reached a hand out to shake theirs. He had been waiting at the front of the building to greet them. “I’m sorry we’re seeing each other under these circumstances, but I want you to know you’re in good hands. My team and I are going to do everything possible to find Eve and Tim.”

  “Thank you, Neil,” Wilder said as he shook the investigator’s hand. “Like I said to James a while ago, I’m sure you’re usually home with your family by this time of night.”

  “Usually,” Neil replied. “But Cate and the kids don’t mind. They’d rather I was here helping find your kiddo.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “We all know they’re our babies, no matter how old they get.”

  Phoebe smiled. It was her first smile in hours. “You’re a good one,” she said softly to Neil.

  “I second that,” Wilder added. “We appreciate you being here.”

  Neil introduced himself to the others, shaking hands and offering words of comfort. When everyone was familiar, he led them back to a conference room where they could meet his partner, Luke Hemming. Officers stopped what they were doing to bow their heads and show their respect as the Blackburns walked past. It was a small kindness. One that was greatly appreciated. Although the treatment they received made the family realize just how serious Eve and Tim’s situation was. It was sobering.

  “Hello, folks,” Luke said as they shuffled into the conference room.

  The room was stark and unattractive, a far cry from the posh, glass-walled conference room at Brambleberry Fields.

  A heavy set Asian lady wearing a tight-fitting uniform stuck her head in the door. “Margaret Fischer is on her way from Phoenix,” she announced, glancing at her smartwatch. “Her flight is scheduled to arrive at our local airfield around eleven o’clock tonight.” The woman’s name tag read Officer Woo.

  “Thank you, Pamela,” Luke replied. “Keep me posted.”

  It was nice that Luke used the woman’s first name. Every little thing that felt informal was welcome, as far as the Blackburns were concerned.

  “One of us can pick Margaret up when she arrives,” Holden offered. “We met her at Eve and Tim’s wedding.”

  “If you’d like,” Luke said. “I’ll leave that up to you.”

  “She and Tim aren’t close from what I understand,” Holden continued. “But it’s the right thing to do. She’s still family. She must be distraught over all of this. I know I would be. Hell, I am.”

  “I agree,” Wilder said. “Margaret’s husband died years ago, and she never remarried. I imagine it would be especially difficult to face a situation like this alone. We’ll take care of her as best we can.”

  Wilder looked at his sons as he spoke, a directive. They received the message loud and clear. Then Wilder took his wife’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Phoebe had been uncharacteristically quiet for hours now. Wilder was beginning to worry about her.

  “Good,” Luke confirmed. “We’ve got some time until Margaret arrives. We’ll try to get your statements and get you out of here by then.”

  It felt strange to the Blackburns to think about getting out of the police station. Where would they go? What would they do with themselves? James had said they could help search for Eve and Tim, but they weren’t sure how.

  Holden intended to take the lead to make it easier on his parents. Even though he wasn’t sure yet how he would do so. He hoped the right words would come to him when it was time. He stared at the stains on the old hardwood planks on the station’s floor as he thought about his responsibility to the others. He knew full well that being a leader meant more than taking credit when things were going well. He knew it was even more important that he came through for them now, when they needed him most. He also knew that he had to protect his dad’s secret and his fragile heart. The burden weighed heavily on him.

  Neil closed the door to the room and smiled sympathetically. “Can I get you folks anything to drink? Or to eat?”

  “We can’t eat,” Phoebe mumbled.

  “My wife brought us some burgers a while ago,” Holden added. “But we couldn’t get much down.”

  “I understand,” Neil replied. “But it’s important that you keep your strength up. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

  They looked at each other, reluctantly agreeing.

  “Do it for Eve and Tim?” Neil tried. “How about I get some pasta dishes ordered in? Nothing too spicy. Maybe some grilled chicken on top? Pasta noodles should be bland enough to go down easy and settle your stomachs. Not to get all technical on you, but I’m a nutrition junkie
and have studied up on this. Carbs like pasta actually help to increase serotonin, and in this case, may help you cope with what you’re facing. And you need the energy.”

  “Okay, okay,” Phoebe replied, taking her credit card out of her purse. “Use my card. Pasta for the room. We’ll eat together. Order from that noodle place on Sixth Street if they’ll still deliver this time of night.”

  “Done,” Neil said, winking to thank her then scurrying out to place the order. “I know that place. It’s near my house. I’ll send someone for pickup if they won’t deliver.”

  “You guys sure are taking good care of us,” Wilder said to Luke once the door closed behind Neil. “I hope that doesn’t mean anything we should be alarmed about...”

  Luke sighed heavily and pursed his large, pink lips. He leaned forward over the table and laced his fingers together in front of him. “The situation is worrisome, I won’t make light of that. Let us be as good as we can to you. Consider it a perk of living in a small town.”

  Wilder nodded. “I hear you.” He shot a knowing glance at his wife as he spoke. The two of them knew the stakes. They were trying to hold it together for their kids, but they were terrified.

  “We just can’t thank you enough,” Holden added. “You guys are the best.”

  “We do what we can,” Luke replied. “Now, I want to go over a few things before we take your statements.”

  The group nodded, eager to get the process started.

  “First of all,” Luke continued. “None of you are suspects. We don’t think you’ve done anything to harm Eve or Tim. But there are protocols we are required to follow. Part of that will include asking each of you about the last time you saw or talked to them, your whereabouts the last few days, and other questions that might be uncomfortable. Try not to take it too personally.”

  “We understand,” Holden said.

  Luke’s face was serious as he spoke. “We never know when what may have seemed like a minor detail will be the clue that helps us find them. We have to be thorough.” He felt bad to put the family through any more trauma. But it had to be done.

  “Okay,” Phoebe said. “But I can tell you right now, we didn’t have anything to do with this. Our failure is not watching over Eve more closely… We thought…” She broke into tears and got too choked up to finish.

  Holden was sitting beside his mom. He reached out a hand and placed it on her outstretched forearm. “We thought Tim would watch over her,” he said, finishing his mom’s sentence.

  “Let’s talk about Eve’s condition for a minute,” Luke prompted. “I understand she’s been diagnosed as bipolar I?”

  “That’s right,” Holden replied.

  “Is she medicated? Officer Tatum mentioned something about her possibly being off her medication?”

  “Yes,” Holden confirmed. “We know that she and Tim were trying to conceive. So, Mom thinks maybe she stopped taking her medicine for that reason.”

  “I can feel it,” Phoebe said. “And besides, I can’t imagine this situation happening otherwise. She… has a history.”

  Luke thumbed through the folder placed nearby on the table, looking at Eve’s record. “I see here that she had a brush with authorities when she was a teenager. That was before I arrived in Rosemary Run from Reno. Do you mind telling me about that? I’d rather hear it from you.”

  Holden, Wilder, and Phoebe looked at each other sheepishly, then at the rest of the group. They had tried for so long to keep what happened under wraps. It was embarrassing for the whole family. They didn’t want the family’s good reputation around town blemished. Most of all, they didn’t want Eve labeled as crazy. Bipolar disorder was misunderstood as it was. The Blackburns didn’t want Eve to carry a stigma that might keep her from making friends, holding jobs, and more. She was theirs. They wanted to protect her.

  “I’ll tell it,” Holden offered, ever the good son, willing to take a stand for the family.

  Wilder raised a hand to stop him. “It’s not your responsibility, son. I’ll tell the story. She’s my daughter.”

  Luke smiled at Wilder, impressed by his fathering. “Go ahead.”

  Wilder took a deep breath, fidgeting in his seat.

  “It’s okay,” Luke said softly. “We’re all friends here, Wilder. People who are mentally or physically impaired or in need of medical attention are in more danger the longer they are missing. It sounds like Eve needs us badly. We want to understand what she is dealing with so we can get her home safe.”

  “I know,” Wilder said. “It’s just… hard… But you’re exactly right. It’s important that you know everything so you can find our girl.”

  “And Tim,” Holden added.

  “Yes, and Tim.” Wilder jerked his neck to one side, then cracked his knuckles as he prepared to open up. “Okay, so... When our daughter was a teenager, symptoms of her disease were hard for us to recognize. She was really irritable. I mean, really irritable. And she had mood swings that were scary bad. Extreme sadness would sideline her for days at a time. She’d miss school. And we felt her slipping away from us. We’d only had boys until Eve, so we thought maybe it was just teenage girl hormones.”

  “But it wasn’t?” Luke asked, listening closely.

  “Unfortunately not,” Wilder continued. He patted his wife’s hand as he talked, soothing her along with himself. “When Eve was at school, she had trouble focusing. And some nights she couldn’t sleep. Yet she’d say she didn’t feel tired the next day. Other nights, we could barely wake her in the morning. She’d tell us she was exhausted and had no energy. She’d complain of stomach aches, headaches… all sorts of aches and pains.”

  “You have to realize,” Phoebe inserted. “Eve was doted on growing up. We loved her… we love her... dearly. Wilder and I, along with her three big brothers, showered Eve with attention and positive reinforcement. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong when she started acting strange… Or I guess I should say… exhibiting symptoms.”

  “I get that,” Luke confirmed. “You don’t have to convince me, folks. I can see the love in this family. It’s obvious.”

  That reassurance gave them all a measure of comfort, one that they sorely needed.

  “Keep going,” Luke said to Wilder, flattening one of his big, brown hands on the table. “This is very helpful. You’re doing great. And listen, I have daughters myself. Twin daughters, actually. I get it. We’d do anything for our kids.”

  “Okay,” Wilder responded, cracking a couple of knuckles again. The motion seemed to help him gather his thoughts, and his courage. “Going on… Her senior year at East Valley High, Eve started acting impulsively. The first thing that happened that was way out of character for her was shoplifting. She stole more than a hundred dollar’s worth of clothes from Decker’s even though she had plenty of money to pay for them. It was like she wanted the thrill of the risk.”

  “She was promptly caught, thankfully,” Phoebe added. “The department store called us rather than the police since Eve was underage and it was her first offense.”

  “Yeah,” Wilder continued. “That much was good, but it was only the beginning. Next up was stealing our checkbook and writing checks all over town. And I don’t mean writing checks for things she needed to buy like clothes or groceries. She was writing checks to strangers we didn’t know. We finally figured out she was buying alcohol in a roundabout way. It didn’t even make sense. She would write a check to some stranger who would then go buy the alcohol for her. But like… why a check? She could have easily used cash. It was like she wanted us to catch her.”

  “That’s what we thought…” Phoebe filled in. “Except I’m still not sure whether it was a cry for help. She had so much trouble making decisions, or even thinking straight at all.”

  “Right,” Wilder said. “All of that quickly led to more bad decisions including drinking and driving, unprotected sex with scary people, and…” He choked up and couldn’t get the words out.

  Phoebe leaned towards her
husband and gripped his hand tightly. She tried to speak, but couldn’t do it either.

  Holden placed a hand on each of his parents, then gave breath to what they hadn’t mentioned since the day it happened.

  Luke lowered his eyebrows, hurting with the Blackburns as he listened. He’d read the file. He knew what was coming.

  “And then, she attempted suicide…” Holden’s face contorted. He struggled to keep his composure. “She did it in such dramatic fashion... An innocent young man lost his life...”

  14

  Eve woke up groggy. She wasn’t sure how long she had been out… Asleep… or unconscious. The uncertainty scared her.

  For a moment, Eve remembered being a young child and waking up in bed beside her mother. She remembered the pink gingham print on her favorite childhood pajamas. They were the footed kind with a long white zipper up the front and a hood. She remembered her favorite stuffed animal, a penguin named Polly her parents had gotten her on a trip to the zoo in Portland. Eve had slept with that penguin until she was nearly a teenager. She remembered the cool slosh of her parents’ king-size waterbed, a holdout from the eighties. They had kept the thing long after waterbeds were out of style.

  It felt like Eve might be a child again, right there with her mother and Polly, if only she closed her eyes tightly and wished hard enough. Eve longed for that feeling of safety and security. She needed it now more than ever.

  It took her a while to get her bearings.

  Slowly, she remembered Saul. And their house party. But she was terribly confused. Furniture and windows whizzed by in a blur as her eyes struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. A TV blared a laugh track from somewhere in the distance.

  It was still dark outside. That much was clear. Although Eve wasn’t sure it was the same night. Time felt strange, like perhaps this was an entirely different night. She couldn’t say with certainty how long she had been out. This, too, scared her.