Missing Without A Trace

by Rider, Tanya

  Tanya soon discovered that Tom didn’t live in a “good world.” The party was in a rundown apartment where two guys lived, not what she expected for a first date. On their second date, Tom asked her to marry him and run off into the sunset together. But he lived with his dad in a shoddy house and didn’t have a car. Besides, Tanya didn’t trust men or marriage.

  Still, she felt a very strong attraction to Tom and felt comfortable around him. She liked how Tom made her feel—and she had never felt this way before. Even though he wore dirty sweat pants, he seemed like a gentleman. Tanya was into looking hot and wearing Nordstrom make-up. Her grandparents had bought her a nice car, a white Honda Civic, so she wound up driving Tom around. When they’d get off work, she’d go to his house.

  They’d hug in his driveway for hours, while chaos swirled around them. She lived with her volatile mom. Tom lived with his alcoholic dad. After three months, they became intimate. Tom was her first lover. “I was afraid of intimacy because of the situations I saw my mother in with men,” Tanya explains. Tom had stopped his amorous advances when she needed him to, so she’d felt safe enough with him to be intimate.

  Spellbound by Tom, Tanya missed a week of college and her mother jumped at the chance to tell Grandma that the young woman wasn’t a perfect little princess, after all. For the first time, Tanya’s grandmother became furious with her. “What are you doing with Tom? He’s going nowhere,” her grandmother argued. “I had high hopes for you, but you’re just like your mother—dating losers!” Tanya could only say that she liked the way Tom made her feel, but that wasn’t good enough. From then on, Tanya’s grandmother stopped helping her pay for school, and she never forgave Tanya for shattering her illusion.

  One night, Tanya went to visit Tom and found out he was at a party. She went to that address. When the door opened, Tanya saw Tom in the midst of people doing drugs and partying along with them. She was shocked and created a big scene. It hit Tanya hard when she discovered that Tom was into drugs because it reminded her of her mother’s parties and her father’s addiction. “Drugs took my father away from me,” she says. “I learned to view drugs as the enemy.” She was deeply hurt that Tom hadn’t told her about the drugs, so she broke up with him.

  When they broke up, Tanya began dating other men and even became intimate with a few of them but, in an effort to be honest, she told them about having left her heart with Tom. Lost in oblivion because of missing him, she shoved the other men aside. Ultimately, like a moth to a flame, Tanya couldn’t resist going back to Tom. She saw the little boy underneath Tom’s ‘bad boy’ persona, who needed rescuing from his dangerous and disappointing life. Unconsciously, she was drawn to him because she had been abandoned by her father, and was looking for a man who needed her nurturing and would, therefore, be least likely to abandon her.

  Tom knew she was seeing other men. He didn’t have money or a job—since telemarketing wasn’t working out for him. “He was into a lot of under-the-table, bad, bad things,” Tanya admits. And she’d made a pact with herself that she was never going to let alcohol or drugs become a part of her life. Tom told her that he wanted to leave his “bad” life behind and be with her, so she gave him an ultimatum. She told him that she was going to go back to her mother’s apartment, and if he was serious about leaving everything behind, she wanted him to come to her that night. She returned to her mom’s and slept outside in her car. But Tom never came.

  The next day, he told her that the reason he hadn’t come was that he’d needed to clean up some unfinished business because he didn’t want anyone to hurt his dad. They headed to her mother’s apartment. They had plans to get an apartment together. Meanwhile, Tom planned to sleep in his car. But, then a neighbor saw him and told the landlord, who told Tanya’s mom. Nancy promptly changed the locks and ran to Grandma with this latest bit of dirt.

  So, one-and-a-half years after they met, Tom and Tanya moved together into a cheap apartment in a terrible neighborhood. They didn’t have much furniture, but they had each other. Tom felt bad about the way he had treated Tanya—being rude, not taking her on real dates, always making her come to him, and bringing her into his sordid life. So he tried to be a gentleman by encouraging Tanya to sleep comfortably on the daybed her grandmother had bought her years ago, while he slept on the floor.

  Nancy was angry that Tanya had left her, and that she could no longer receive half the rent that the state had been paying for Tanya. She was also jealous of Tanya’s brand new car. So Nancy—or Tanya’s grandmother—told the state about the car. As a result, the state cut off payments to Tanya and wanted her to sell her CRX before they would help pay for her medication. Tanya didn’t want to give up her car, so she stopped taking her medicine. Since then, she’s tried to handle her depression on her own with health food, supplements and exercise.

  Tanya got Tom a job at the telemarketing place where she was currently working, but they both decided to leave and then shifted through several other jobs—Tanya mostly working in telemarketing and Tom mostly in construction. Eventually, they were able to move into a better apartment where they lived day-by-day and paycheck-to-paycheck, trying to pay their bills and to escape the chaos of their earlier lives.

  Tom’s background is similar to Tanya’s. His parents divorced when he was a baby. When his mother was three-quarters of the way through her daily gallon of burgundy wine, “She wished I was never born!” he recalls. Tom’s mother remarried several times. When Tom was a little boy, his mother caught his stepfather at a whorehouse. When they got home, his stepfather started beating his mom. Tom pleaded with him to stop. His stepfather ignored his cries and threw him across the room. Tom grabbed the leg of the kitchen table and jumped on his back, bringing the table leg crashing down on his stepfather’s head and splitting it open. His mother called 911, packed up their stuff, grabbed the kids and left. His stepfather didn’t die, but this incident left scars on both of them. The insidious scars on Tom’s psyche were just as painful as his stepfather’s head injury.

  Tom lived with his mother until he was about ten years old. It was then that she walked in on him and his twin sister trying to make pancakes. When she saw flour all over the kitchen, Tom’s mother had a “breakdown” of sorts and called Tom’s father to take him. Tom calls himself an “airplane baby” because he then began yearly flights between his parents, spending his summer with his mom and the rest of the year with his dad.

  Fitting in with kids at school was rough. He remembers being called “Tubby Tommy,” being picked on and getting into fights. When Tom got old enough to date, he had bad luck with girls. His dysfunctional relationship with his mom and his low self-esteem got in the way. Several girls played him for what they could get from him but then told him that they wanted to be “just friends,” not his girlfriend. So when he met Tanya, and she looked at him with a smile in her eyes that told him she thought he was her knight in shining armor, it made him feel special.

  Around the time that Tanya met and moved in with Tom, Tanya’s dad and stepmom had adopted a little girl. Tanya felt replaced. Now some other little girl would get her father’s love—the love he hadn’t given to her. Tanya was Tom’s princess now, and she demanded that he become a better person and leave “bad Tom” behind. They struggled with tough times, but they were determined that their love would see them through. Tanya had separated Tom from the unsavory life he’d led before, and Tom tried to separate Tanya from her depression by making her laugh a lot and working to replace her negative thoughts with positive ones. He soon convinced Tanya to adopt a bushy Karelian bear dog, whom they named Lady. A gentle companion and good listener, Lady quickly became Tanya’s best friend.

  In 1998, Tom and Tanya ran off and got married in Nevada, just as he’d asked her to do on their second date. She’d made him wait six years. She knew she loved him but she had trust issues, his background made her hesitant, and people warned her that men can become abusive after marriage. But, after Tanya had tested Tom—and she was conv
inced he’d proven his love—she decided it was time.

  Tom bought the rings. They drove to Nevada and got a license after they arrived. When they married, in front of the courthouse, only Tom’s mother and sister were there. After the ceremony, Tanya called her father, mother and grandmother. She knew they wouldn’t come to the wedding because they still didn’t like Tom. She was right. No one in her family was excited or happy for her.

  Tom and Tanya moved around, trying to find a place where they felt loved and where they could attain the stability that kept eluding them. They tried moving to be close to Tom’s family, but his mother and little sister became aggressively competitive with Tanya, whom they saw as a rival for his attention and affection. Their stay at his mom’s house ended with her tossing his belongings on her porch. The message was clear: Tom’s mother had crushed his long-harbored hopes that, one day, she would welcome and appreciate him.

  When Tom and Tanya moved back to Washington, they started a siding and construction business, aptly named Lazarus Siding. They nurtured it, and did fairly well for five years, until some homeowners took advantage of their good hearts. Worn out, emotionally and physically, they closed their business, leaving a void in their lives.

  Despite his wife’s protestations, Tanya’s father had come to Washington for a couple of visits and had been calling Tanya to chat. He seemed to be making an effort to make up for past mistakes. Randy tried to persuade Tanya and Tom to move near him and he offered to hire them to work for his painting company. But Tanya was afraid of becoming a victim of her father’s emotional abuse and controlling behavior again. Nonetheless, they decided to visit him and check it out.

  Randy bought plane tickets for them. But the visit got off to a bad start when their cell phone died and they had no way to let him know that their plane was going to be delayed. When they landed, instead of the loving greeting Tanya had looked forward to, her father was angry that they hadn’t called. He remained in a sullen and hostile mood until he dropped them off at their motel. His parting words, “You’re in my town now!” transformed Tanya into the scared little girl she had been when she was under his control. Tom glared at Randy and took a threatening stance as Randy sped out of the parking lot, leaving burned rubber in his tracks.

  At that moment, Tanya realized that her father was probably never going to be the loving dad that she had always dreamed he would become. The next morning, they checked out of the rundown motel where Randy had left them and boarded a bus to Disney World. Randy didn’t connect with them until early that evening, and it seemed to Tanya that it was more to regain control than to express his apologies and love.

  Tanya called her late twenties to early thirties her “dark period.” During these years, they lost their business and she lost her health, her father’s love and her dog, Lady. Tanya sunk into depression again. She stopped taking care of herself and stopped eating right because the depression and their dire financial straits cast a dark cloud over her life. Eventually, she tried treating the depression on her own, with her regimen of health food, supplements and exercise, and she seemed to be gradually extricating herself from the darkness.

  Then Tom’s grandmother died, leaving them an inheritance. She’d wanted Tom and Tanya to have a house. They thought about opening up a health-food store, where Tom would do massage and Tanya would become a nutritionist, but they decided that such a venture was too risky. Investing in land to build a house seemed safer, so they began looking for a dream property. It took them a couple of years, but Tanya finally found one in Shelton, Washington that they really liked. They also bought a new RV, which they would put on the property to live in during construction.

  Tom and Tanya began negotiations to buy a new tract house in Maple Valley, where they would live temporarily. The plan was to sell it after awhile and use the money to finish the house they were building. Ironically, right before Tanya went missing, they had bought Tanya a new Honda Element SUV, had gotten a mortgage for their tract home in Maple Valley, and they had picked up the building permit for their dream home in Shelton. The Shelton property overlooked a beautiful inlet with whales and eagles. It seemed perfect.

  Would life mirror what had happened to her as a little girl? Spoiled at times by her father and her grandparents, Tanya’s happy moments almost always meant that some form of pain was coming. No sooner would something good happen, than something awful would jump out at her, like a coiled rattlesnake waiting for her to let down her guard. Whenever her father spoiled her, it meant she was in danger of being controlled by him and treated harshly by her ‘evil stepmother.’ Whenever her grandparents spoiled her, it meant she was in danger of being beaten by her enraged and jealous mother. Now, finally, life was good. But was it the calm before the storm?

  “I’ve always thought about the brighter picture. I believe that, in life, people use alcohol, relationships, sex and other distractions as a way to choose to drown out hurtful aspects of their lives. And, when people have had bad things happen to them—or they’ve had bad parents or suffered depression or whatever—they make bad choices. I’ve had a hard life and faced many challenges, but I’ve tried to deal with them by choosing positive things—like health foods, exercise, supplements and positive thoughts—to use as my crutches. This is how I fuel my strength to fight off my weaknesses. I may have been diagnosed with depression, but I do not let it rule how I live my life. This works for me. I think it makes me a stronger person. Through these choices, and other choices that I make every day, I face my problems and have been able to break the cycle of my family history.”

  —Tanya Rider

  CHAPTER ONE

  8 Days

  Tiny puffs of air squeeze up through my left nostril. My chest… My chest is constricted. What’s wrong with me? I fight to expand my lungs, to suck in a breath. Something is pressing into my chest, holding me down. My lungs! I can’t breathe! It feels like small, sandwich-bag sacks of air are hanging in my lungs. I cling to them but my body collapses forward, against my captor.

  Bound on one side, I beg for release. “Let me go, you monster!” I gasp. “Where are you? I can feel you but I don’t hear you! Still, I know you are there!”

  I can’t talk anymore. My chest is gagging, half-silencing my breathing. Everything hurts. I slow myself to suck in precious air—air for battle.

  “Help me!” I scream. “Someone? Can’t you hear me? Help me!”

  My eyes flutter open and it seems as if all of my long dark hair is in my face. My eyelashes flutter against the tangled mess. My head is killing me and I can’t hold my eyes open. They slam shut, but the images linger.

  Where am I? Why is my head hanging at this weird angle? I am sideways, I can tell. And I feel an awful, constant pressure digging into my body. God, it hurts. I struggle again to take a breath. I can only take in a tiny wisp of air but it is filled with pain that shoots through every fiber of my body. Still, I need more air. With a weak exhale, I feel a little cloud of steam drift onto my cheek as I hang there, strangled by my captor. Sweet drool runs out of the corner of my mouth.

  With my right arm, I reach out blindly. I want to feel my surroundings. I feel hard curves, twisted forms, raw edges, and a strange, soft pillow—all of it dotted with bits of broken glass. I cannot tell what these shapes represent, but it is a mess. Where am I? Right against my chest, my hand runs into something, an object, an arc, like a hard, circle shaped hose. I run my fingers slowly across it. Can it be? A steering wheel? Each breath cuts through my breastbone and I strain to pull in air. I run my hand along the thing, try to assure myself that it really is a car’s steering wheel.

  Tom Rider was tired, always tired. He and Tanya worked hard, and that’s about all they did. Like ships in the night, they didn’t even see each other much. He barely had time to nap, let alone spend much time with Tanya, because she worked two jobs herself and her shifts were opposite his. Pretty much, they only got to see each other when their days off coincided. Their lifestyle was kind of lonely, b
ut they were determined. They had set their sights on their goal—their dream home—and they were working hard to get it.

  They’d had a quick conversation the night before. Tanya had called after ten on Wednesday night, before she started her nightshift. Tom had to work late so he was spending the night at work, and he’d already crashed. When Tanya called, she woke him up.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Sleeping,” he grumbled.

  Tanya knew his sleep was precious so she immediately hung up, and then she worked the night shift at Fred Meyer, up in Bellevue. She would have gotten home after Tom was a few hours into his day.

  Open your eyes, Tanya! I squint. Everything is blurry. Where are my glasses? My head hurts so much and I am so tired. All I want to do is to close my eyes, go back to sleep. But I don’t know where I am. Where am I? What is that flashing light in front of me? I open my eyes to let in a bit more light, and I see the dashboard with its yellow and orange car controls. I reach my hand to the fluorescent image, but it is beyond my reach. I turn my head to the left and I can see the black molding inside my side window. I see glimpses of the color of my car, the beautiful blue of my wonderful new car.

  My eyes snap shut again as I erupt with a cough, dislodging saliva and blood from a corner of my mouth. Oh, it hurts so much! I spit out the oily blood, not knowing how precious those drops of moisture would become.

  I try to breathe, but my chest feels stuck. It won’t expand and I can’t get air. I don’t understand. I exercise all the time and I’m in such great shape, why can’t I breathe? I pull my eyes open again. I reach up to my face to brush the messy mop of hair aside, and then I see that my fingertips are bloody. I touch my forehead again and it stings. It is raw. I check my fingers. More blood.