by David Bell
Nora tried to get Sierra to sit in the back of the car with her, to get out of the night air, as she put it, but Sierra refused. She kept her eyes glued to Hayden’s car, her focus singular and intense.
The trunk opened, and Olsen leaned over, shining his flashlight inside.
“I’m going,” Sierra said.
“No,” Jason said. “Wait here.”
“I’m not a baby,” Sierra said. “That’s my mother there.”
But Nora continued to gently hold on to Sierra, and Jason placed his arm out in front of her, although she didn’t make any real attempt to break away from them. She wanted to know, but she didn’t want to see. Jason felt the same way. It was no real struggle for him to stay back.
Even though morning had almost fully broken, the police officers—including Olsen and the crime scene technician—had their flashlights out and were sweeping them around the inside of the trunk of Hayden’s car. Olsen had pulled on rubber surgical gloves—they all wore them at that point—and occasionally he pointed to something inside the trunk that only the officers could see. But none of them reached in, and none of them touched anything.
As he watched, Jason felt hope creeping back into his body. Would they be so calm, so casual, if they were staring at the dead body of his sister? Then again, they were police officers, professionals who were trained to handle those kinds of moments. Maybe they simply treated the discovery of a dead body in the trunk of a car that way. Coldly detached, clinical. The same as dusting a door handle for a fingerprint.
Olsen straightened up and looked over at them. He pulled the surgical gloves off his hands and dropped them to the pavement. He said something to his colleagues, and received nods in response. Then he started back over toward Jason.
The day wasn’t yet warm. The sun hadn’t come anywhere close to rising all the way into the sky and burning off the night air. Despite that, Jason felt hot. His clothes felt confining and heavy, as though he were wearing a winter coat instead of a T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
“This is bad,” Sierra said. “Look at the look on his face.”
“He always looks like that,” Nora said. “He’s a cop. They try to be neutral and stoic.”
Olsen reached them and said, “I was wondering if any of you would be able to identify personal items belonging to Hayden. There are some in the trunk.”
“Is she in there?” Jason asked. “Is there a body?”
“Excuse me?” Olsen said. Then he seemed to understand. “No, there’s no body in the trunk. But there are personal items. We want to see if they belong to Hayden, or if they indicate that someone else left things in the car. Would one of you be able to identify these items?”
A watery looseness passed through Jason’s body. His joints slackened, and he felt his shoulders sag with relief. Hayden wasn’t in there. There was no body. He flexed his hands, realizing how tense his body had been while they waited. Helpless.
Detective Olsen looked at Sierra, and Jason thought it might be too much for her. He spoke up and said, “I can do it.”
“Will you really recognize her things?” Olsen asked. “You hadn’t seen her in five years.”
“I can do it,” Sierra said. She looked at Nora and Jason. “Really. I know everything she owns.”
“Are you sure?” Nora asked.
“I’m not identifying a body,” Sierra said. She turned to Olsen. “Right? You’re sure there’s no body?”
“I’m sure,” Olsen said.
“Let’s go, then,” Sierra said, stepping forward.
“Do you want me to go with you?” Nora asked.
“I’m fine,” Sierra said. She didn’t say anything else. She went with Olsen, and Jason heard him starting to give her instructions.
“You can’t touch or remove anything. Nothing at all . . .”
Then they were out of earshot.
* * *
Jason and Nora stood next to each other, alone. Nora’s hands kept moving. They worked against each other, rubbing and kneading. She didn’t look at Jason. She kept her eyes forward on the activity around Hayden’s car.
“Are you relieved?” Nora asked.
Jason thought he knew what she meant. “Yes.”
Nora looked over at him. “I could tell by the look on your face you thought Hayden was going to be in that trunk. To be honest, I did too. I was standing there thinking I didn’t know what we were going to do for Sierra if her mother was dead. I couldn’t even imagine it.”
“We’re not out of the woods yet. We don’t know where she is. And there’s the blood in the car.”
“I’m trying not to think about that,” Nora said. “I’m just going to keep focusing on supporting Sierra and helping her.”
“Makes sense,” Jason said. “I’m not sure there’s much else we can do.”
Sierra stood with the police. She looked young and small next to them. Olsen pointed into the trunk, just as he had before, and Sierra nodded her head slowly, almost fearfully. Olsen pointed at a couple of other things, and every time, Sierra nodded in the same way. After a few minutes, Olsen pointed to one more thing, and Sierra shook her head back and forth. Olsen seemed to ask her if she was certain and she nodded her head again. Then they straightened up from the trunk, and Olsen stood facing Sierra. He seemed to be instructing her about something else. He talked, and she listened. Finally, he pointed toward Jason and Nora, and Sierra walked back over.
Chapter Twenty
“They want us to wait a little longer,” Sierra said. “They have more questions.”
“Are you okay?” Jason asked.
“Yes.” She shivered a little. “I just want to go.”
“What was in there?” Jason asked. “What did they show you?”
It took Sierra close to a minute to answer. She said, “Her shoes were in there. The shoes she was wearing when she dropped me off at your house. I think it’s the only pair she brought with her.”
She paused, and Jason asked, “Is that all?”
“Some clothes. They were hers. I think she brought them to change into while she was here or doing whatever she planned on doing. That seemed normal, I guess.”
“Was that it?”
“That’s all that belonged to her.”
“You shook your head about something at the end,” Jason said. “What was that?”
Sierra shivered again, but her voice sounded matter-of-fact. “There was a pair of gloves in there I’d never seen before. Black leather. And there were a couple more spots of blood.”
No one said anything. Nora reached out and took Sierra’s hand, but the girl barely registered the gesture.
Finally, Sierra said, “I’m sorry about taking it. I know I messed up.”
“Taking what?” Jason asked.
“The car. I know I shouldn’t have.”
She and Nora leaned in closer to each other, huddling for warmth and comfort. Jason stepped forward and placed his hand on Sierra’s shoulder. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s just a car.”
When Jason was young, he found it easy to imagine that Hayden would die at an early age. She was simply too wild, too reckless, too much inclined to find trouble. In those days, he could imagine Hayden meeting her end in a car accident or from alcohol poisoning. She might drown or injure herself in some other way while intoxicated. Or she might try a new or exotic drug, something someone handed to her at a party, and overdose. But he never imagined her being murdered or injured by someone else’s hand, even though she ran with a rough crowd. Hayden knew how to take care of herself. She was nobody’s fool—and she knew how to read and manage people.
Jason understood that Sierra lived under that same cloud. When she cried after Colton came to the house, Jason knew exactly what the girl was feeling. It was a horrible thing for a teenager to have to live with—the looming threat of the end
of someone she dearly loved. Jason had spent his teenage years with the same fears.
Jason laughed a little, and Nora looked at him.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“I said, ‘It’s just a car.’ My dad said that once when Hayden scraped up one of our cars. He could be so calm in a crisis sometimes. ‘It’s just a car.’”
“I wanted to find Mom.”
“We know,” Nora said.
Sierra chewed on her fingernail. She seemed to be finished with talking, but then she said, “It just felt like no one was interested in finding her. You wanted to keep waiting.”
“We were just doing what your mom wanted us to do. She said give her forty-eight hours, and we were,” Jason said. “There are no right or wrong answers in a situation like this. I guess we’ve never been in a situation quite like this.”
“I wanted to find her so you could know she wasn’t the same as she used to be,” Sierra said.
“I understand why you did it,” Jason said. “Believe me, I want her back, and I want to know that she isn’t the same as she used to be. I think we all want that.”
“And I guess I wanted you to know I wasn’t just like her. I didn’t just take the car for the hell of it. I’m not like her, but I love her.”
“Of course. That makes sense.”
“She said you wouldn’t trust her. Or me, I guess. It didn’t seem fair.”
“We have things to talk about,” Jason said. “The police went into your room. They found some weed.”
“You let them go into my room?” Sierra asked.
“You don’t have much choice when the police want to search something,” Jason said. “Besides, we wanted to know where you were. We thought if they looked through your things, it might help us find you.”
“That’s true, honey,” Nora said. “We didn’t want to invade your privacy, but Jason thought—”
“I didn’t think anything,” he said. “It was the police.”
“So I know what this is about, right?” Sierra said. “I guess it wouldn’t do any good for me to say those drugs belonged to someone else. I know that’s what every kid in the universe says when they get caught with something like that. They say, ‘They belong to someone else.’ But they do. I’m not involved with that stuff.”
“Do they belong to your mom?” Jason asked.
“See?” Sierra said, although she seemed to be speaking to no one in particular. “You can’t—won’t—change your mind about Mom.”
“You scared us, Sierra,” Nora said. “That’s all. We don’t care about the car . . . or anything else. But we were worried about you. That’s why Jason is asking about these things, even though it’s probably better left for another time.”
“It’s a good thing you two didn’t have kids,” Sierra said. “You’d drive them nuts.”
“Hey,” Jason said. “You don’t have to talk to us like that.”
“Excuse me?” another voice said.
Jason stopped and turned. It was Detective Olsen. He approached them in the growing light. He either didn’t notice the family squabble or chose to ignore it.
“I understand you’ve had a long night,” he said. “Will you be home later?”
“Sure,” Jason said.
“There’s no reason for you to stay here now,” he said. “I can come by and find you at the house later today. We’re going to be working here for a while. We’re processing the scene carefully. That’s lab work, fingerprints and the blood. It could take a couple of days if they’re backed up.” He looked at Sierra again. “Did you go to your house recently? The house in Redman County you live in with your mom?”
“I did. Of course. I was looking for Mom. I thought she might be there.”
“Did you break in?” Olsen asked.
“Break in? I have a key. Did someone break in?”
“They did. They smashed a window. Was it like that when you went there? I’m talking about the little window next to the back door.”
“No,” Sierra said. “I would have noticed that.”
“When were you there last?”
“Yesterday. I was there for a couple of hours. I took a nap in my bed.”
Olsen nodded. “I think you should go home. Wait for news there.”
“What else is there to do here?” Jason asked.
Olsen pointed to the trees that surrounded them. “We have some searching to do,” he said. “We’ll probably have to call in some help from the county, maybe even the state. It’s a Saturday, so it might be a little harder to round up the troops. But now that the sun’s coming up, we intend to search through these woods for any other evidence we can find.”
“Do you mean you’re looking for Hayden?” Jason asked.
“We’re trying to find out what happened to her,” Olsen said. “If anything.”
“But the blood,” Jason said. “Doesn’t that say something happened to her?”
“If it’s hers,” Olsen said. “We’ll be checking on that as well. We’re certainly worried about your sister’s safety, given the blood. Maybe if we look around here a little more, we’ll have a better grasp on things. If you hear from your sister, let me know immediately. Okay?”
“We will,” Jason said.
He waited for Olsen to say something else, to tell him that the police felt confident that Hayden would quickly be found unharmed and returned to her life with her daughter. But Olsen didn’t say anything like that. He turned on his heel and walked back to his work.
Chapter Twenty-one
Jason was hungry, and Nora offered to cook something for everyone. Sierra agreed, saying that she had barely eaten the past two days. She sat at the kitchen table while Nora brought out eggs and cracked them into a pan. Jason made coffee and toast and laid out dishes and silverware until the food was ready.
Sierra ate quickly, greedily. Jason expected her to pick, as he and Nora were, but Sierra dug in. In the streaming daylight of the kitchen, she looked unwashed, her hair greasy and matted. Had she been sleeping in the car rather than stopping in a hotel? She had the money Hayden had given her. Then he realized the fallacy of what he was thinking. Sierra wasn’t old enough to rent a hotel room, at least not the kind of hotel room he would want his niece to be staying in. Maybe she was better off sleeping in the car, if that was what she did.
Sierra neared the end of her plate of food. Nora offered to make more, but Sierra shook her head. “No, thanks,” she said. “This is good.”
“You probably want a shower and nap,” Nora said.
“I do.” She took a bite of her second piece of toast. “And don’t worry. I’m not going to run off again. I did that once. I know I fucked up—or messed up. Okay? I mean, I know I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Jason and Nora said at the same time.
“I guess Mom and I have worn out our car privileges with you guys.”
Jason couldn’t help himself. He laughed at Sierra’s comment. When he started laughing, Nora did as well. They all did. It felt good to have that release for a change.
“Remember, it’s just a car,” Jason said.
Sierra looked at him, smiling a little. “Thanks, Uncle Jason.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You know,” Sierra said, “I didn’t find anything out there. Nothing except the car. I don’t know what I thought I would discover. I thought it would be easy, looking for her. She’s my mom after all. I guess I just didn’t think she would be so far away I couldn’t find her. Even when she was bad off, I knew how to reach her. I talked to her sometimes on the phone, if I was with Dad or Grandma. But now . . .”
Nora reached out and squeezed Sierra’s hand. “We’ll let the police do their work,” she said. “That’s about all we can do, honey.”
Jason knew Nora was right. He didn’t lik
e it, but she was right. The three of them were completely powerless.
* * *
The house grew quiet after an hour or so. Nora and Sierra went upstairs to sleep, with Sierra once again promising that she wasn’t going to “fly the coop.” Jason promised himself he would stay vigilant. He listened for opening doors or windows, the sound of scurrying feet on the steps or the roof. He sat downstairs in the kitchen with his laptop, trying to catch up on work e-mails that had come through during the week, but he found his eyelids growing heavy, his chin dropping toward his chest. His phone jerked him awake, and he grabbed for it, expecting to be hearing from the police.
“Hey.”
“Regan?”
“Did I wake you?” she asked.
“No. Kind of. It’s been a long day already.”
“Are you in the middle of something?”
“No,” he said. “I can talk a little.”
“I saw something on the news . . . and I was wondering if it was about Hayden.”
“It’s on the news? Already?”
“It’s on a reporter’s Twitter feed. They said there’s some kind of search going on at the Bluff, but they didn’t mention Hayden’s name. I put two and two together. They found her car there?”
Jason rubbed at his weary eyes. He told Regan what happened—Sierra finding Hayden’s car, the bloodstain, the opening of the trunk, and the items left behind. Regan didn’t say anything while he related the tale, but she did gasp a little when he mentioned the blood.
“I’m sorry, Jason,” she said. “Are you doing okay?”
“It’s fine. I’m worried about Sierra more than anyone else. This is her mother we’re talking about. Hayden wasn’t perfect by any means, but she and Sierra mean a lot to each other. I worry about what might happen to her if . . . I shouldn’t be thinking about that now. We don’t know anything yet.”
“Right,” Regan said. “But I’m sorry. Really.”
“Thanks.”