Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  When she was sixteen, Katherine saw the official police report from the Chad Wiltshire incident for the first time.

  That she shouldn’t be so interested in something that was “over and done with” had been pointed out to her early on, but that didn’t change the fact that she wanted to know. It just meant that she went about looking in a subtler fashion. There was nothing altogether surprising in the sequence of events or the outline of what all Mr. Wiltshire had been doing (although she had found herself staring a little longer than necessary at the photographs of the “message” that had been left in her house that Caleb had found that night and glossed over the details of).

  The part of the report that caught her attention and set all of the wheels in her brain turning was the attached medical report from where Wiltshire had been treated at the county hospital. It would seem (based on the lack of any additional notations) that no one at the department had done much in the way of looking any deeper into it. The man was, clearly, unstable and dangerous; Caleb was a local kid (and a good one at that) who had ended up in the middle of a situation where someone’s life was being threatened and done what he needed to do to try to extricate her safely from it. It was an open and shut case of self-defense being required, and no one was going to pry too closely if the details seemed to be a little fuzzy (what teenage boy, after all, was going to be clear headed enough to remember each and every detail about a traumatic situation like that).

  It wasn’t that Katherine objected to Caleb’s intervention (or even found it excessive for that matter). The man was trying to kill her; that did put up some roadblocks in the path of her looking at the matter from a completely neutral perspective (but she did the best that she could). There were several things that nagged at her as she compared the different pages of the report with each other, and it had taken her more than a few minutes to realize what exactly it was that was drawing her attention and holding it.

  It finally dawned on her that it was Wiltshire’s broken wrist that was doing the attention grabbing. It was fractured (as if he had used it to hit something that didn’t have much give to it), but there was no listing of abrasions on his knuckles like she would expect to find if he had hit a wall (that had been a part of Caleb’s statement “I’m not sure; I think he might have hit the wall when he missed me”). She took in that information, noted the bruised ribs (one cracked) as they were listed, let her eyes pass over the mention of the broken nose and dislocated shoulder, and let her mind wander through the possibilities (as she often did when it came to all things Caleb that were not explained to her satisfaction). She thought back to the memories of sitting next to her best friend on her front steps the day after and wondering why the fact that his hands hadn’t been bruised, swollen, or scraped had never jumped out at her so clearly before.

  The medical report might have left off abrasions for some reason or another. She might be completely out of bounds expecting them to be there in the first place. There were any given number of logical reasons for the things that weren’t making sense to her to be as they were, and there were a significant chunk of not so logical reasons that they could be the way that they appeared to be as well. Her memory might be faulty. There had been things said and unsaid between her and Caleb that day that took up a great deal of her attention.

  She did what she always did on such occasions. She made her way to the top shelf of her closet, pulled down her notebook, scribbled out another entry, and let her thoughts wander as far into the nonsensical as they cared to go. Then, she put it away, put the thoughts behind her for the moment, and let herself pause to be pleased that she had never witnessed Caleb being truly angry and grateful that he was so willing to protect her.

  She focused, instead, on Chad Wiltshire and why it was that he had chosen to come after her. She dug and pieced; she tried to put information together as though it was a collection of individual shots that she was turning into a cohesive mural. She wasn’t an expert at digging up information. She hadn’t spent her adolescence learning the right way to go about finding back doors to get at what she wanted when the means of going through the front had been locked up tight, but she learned as she went (and while she would never be brilliant at it, she was passably good at finding what she was looking for once she figured out which direction it was she needed to go).

  Chad Wiltshire had had a daughter just barely older than her just like they had told her in the beginning when they tried to explain away all of his actions as the demented grabbing at of straws of someone whose brain couldn’t function along normal lines. He had been married to a woman who had died from a congenital heart condition, and (or so what she was able to get her hands on claimed) he had crumbled under the grief and stress of trying to raise their adopted child alone. He was unstable and delusional -- paranoid even and had been deemed a danger at least to himself if not to others and committed.

  He hadn’t seen his daughter since she had been eight.

  That seemed enough for the powers that be to decide that it made perfect sense (from a mental patient of his level of confusion and compulsion) to fixate on a replacement for what he would perceive as his missing child. No more questions had been asked; no more answers had been sought. He was found, he was stopped, he was heavily medicated in a more secure facility, and no one need ever bother themselves about him again.

  Even through her bias, Katherine found herself finding it sad how easy it was to dismiss someone’s life. She didn’t spend much time on the thought, however, because the facts as laid out for everyone else’s approval did not meet with hers. There were still too many things that didn’t make sense to her (even though she knew that trying to make sense of the logic of the mentally ill could prove to be a nearly impossible process for her). She wasn’t ready to let it go. It wasn’t that simple or that easy to dismiss for her. It never would be until she could find some sort of answer to two distinct questions. Why her? Why had he wanted so badly to get caught at what he was doing?

  The second question would have sounded silly to anyone who hadn’t been there that night listening to the way he talked to her as if trying to explain that while he really was going to kill her, he wanted it to be as easy as possible for her. The half-understood apologies for scaring her as if it had all been for the benefit of someone else were stuck fast in her brain, and she needed to know what they meant.

  It had become her pattern (almost as if it was some sort of morbid hobby). When she had time (or she learned a new way of getting information and added another piece to the mural she was building), she took advantage and tried to make it make sense. She gave up on trying to make sense out of it all after a bit, stepped back, and let the mural become what it was becoming without her interference. Then, she tried to take in what it was telling her instead.

  There was never any indication that Chad Wiltshire had gone after anyone else in the five months between when he had originally disappeared from where he had been institutionalized and when he had cornered her at the school. If he was as unhinged as they claimed, then there was no reason for that. There was no way he would have flown under the radar and failed to attract attention for as long as he had without there being more to the story.

  Therefore, she could only conclude (although a part of her still cringed with the seeming arrogant quality of the thought each time that it passed through her brain) that she hadn’t been just a random dark haired girl of the proper age that had happened to draw the man’s attention.

  There were so many questions. Why not an eight year old? If he was as delusional as they claimed, then why would he have been calculating the passing of time? Why not the first dark haired girl he had stumbled across? There had to have been hundreds if not thousands of them on his way from point A to point B. Why go to the trouble of learning about her? Why watch her and make the phone calls? Why set up the whole scene?

  It had been personal, but she had decided as she stepped
back and took in the mural of her thoughts as a whole that it hadn’t been personally about her. That, she decided, was what the words that he had offered to her when they had been face to face had meant. Those earlier statements had been meant for someone else. She had been meant as a message or a punishment to someone else. That was why he had made and left the tape of his taunting over the intercom that night (because there was no other reason for that to exist). It had been meant for someone else’s ears.

  There were very few people who would be personally traumatized by something happening to her. There was her father, of course, and her Vance grandparents. There was Caleb and the Twists, but all of them seemed like such unlikely targets that she had herself half convinced that her logical plotting out of Wiltshire’s motives was all the result of some sort of post stress paranoia disorder on her part.

  What could her unassuming, hard-working father have ever done to make someone that angry? It wasn’t like her grandparents seemed to be swimming in a pool of potential enemies either. The Twists (she had long noted) seemed to do their level best to be as entirely unnoticeable as possible. Besides, why go after the son’s friend if someone wanted to shake up the Twists? It didn’t seem a very practical avenue. She reminded herself repeatedly that she was dealing with the thought processes of someone not right in the head, but she still couldn’t shake the way that the pieces were fitting together. She also couldn’t completely discount the possibility that Chad Wiltshire’s mental instability had merely been a convenient avenue that someone else had channeled in her direction.

  It would certainly fit with the common agreement on his level of functionality that someone else had been helping him (and talking him into going after her) during the time that he had been missing. That seemed a rather complicated and conspiracy theorist route to go down though, and the more she looked at the dribbles and drabbles of information that she uncovered, the more she came away with the decided impression that the man wasn’t quite as out of it as everyone had convinced themselves that he was.

  It was the day that she found the name of the institution that had taken custody of little Devon Wiltshire in the aftermath of her mother’s death and father’s committal that Katherine really felt like the whole thing finally made some semblance of sense.

  She had been so focused on those she knew she was important to that it had never occurred to her to bother to think about the people an outsider might think would value her safety. She couldn’t prove anything. It didn’t actually occur to her to try. No one else was thinking about it. No one else still wondered about the whys and the hows. This was her personal curiosity, and she had sated it to her personal satisfaction. The answers of why her and why had he wanted to get caught were sitting in front of her in a nice little package complete with a neat little bow on top.

  He had said so often that it had to be her during those phone calls and even on the night that it all came to a head. It did have to be her (from his perspective) because taking her would be an equal extraction of payment for what he considered to have been taken from him. It was, in his mind most likely, an exercise in justice.

  He hadn’t really wanted her to be frightened; he had probably felt guilty about that the entire time even as he was plotting how best to kill her. The tape of the taunting and even the phone calls themselves hadn’t been about scaring her; they had been meant to inflict pain on someone by making them frightened for her. He had wanted someone to catch him; he had wanted someone to know that it was him that had taken her because he had known that his target would understand his gesture for what it was -- the loss of a daughter for the loss of a daughter.

  All that talk about how she didn’t look much like her but it not really mattering in the end made perfect sense when you had the proper context within which to apply it. He had been fixated on someone, but that someone hadn’t been the daughter that he had lost. It wasn’t Devon that he was so focused on her not looking much like; it was Katherine’s mother.

  It was ironically funny (in that incredibly dark humor sort of way that she found creeping up on her at odd moments) that someone who was labeled as so far out of the boundaries of competently dealing with reality that he had to be kept locked away hadn’t even had the thought occur to him that her mother could be anything other than devastated by her loss. She supposed that meant that even patients under heavy psychiatric care had clearer notions of what being a parent was supposed to entail than Cecilia Murray did.

  That same strain of dark humor had her clucking her tongue to herself at the thought of that poor man and how his plan would have utterly failed at its purpose even if he had successfully completed it. She was caught up in the morbidness of the thought for a moment before she bothered to shake it. Would her mother have even bothered to make an appearance for the funeral, she wondered? She guessed the answer was probably not. Her dad wouldn’t have wanted her there in any case, and if she remembered anything with clarity about the days when her mother had (at least ostensibly) still lived with them, it was how much she detested public scenes.

  All that careful planning on Chad Wiltshire’s part -- all the trouble of finding out about the employees of the place where his daughter resided and tracking down a usable (for his purposes) connection was pointless. The level of focus that he had to have had to keep himself functional and unnoticed in the time he had been working toward his goal was astronomical, and it all would have been wasted because it had never occurred (to even a complete stranger) that her mother simply would not have cared.

  Katherine told herself that was quite enough morbidness. She gave her head a small shake with which she dismissed both the thoughts and the rather absurd compulsion she found herself having to laugh. She knew now. She didn’t have to wonder why her; she didn’t have to figure out the gaping holes in the way that Wiltshire had operated that had stood out so clearly to her even if everyone else pretended not to (or maybe did not in fact) see them.

  It made sense in a twisted sort of a way. She found the mystery of why he had selected her mother specifically out of all of her coworkers as the focus for his revenge/vindication/justice seeking (whatever he had thought of it as) less bothersome to her than the why her of the first place had been. Maybe that was because she knew how very unlikely it was that she would ever be able to piece that part together. Maybe it was because she found trying to dig out new information surrounding her mother to be a task that she could not manage to summon any enthusiasm for; she didn’t really care.

  She knew the things that she had wanted to know, and even if no one else ever knew them, then that was okay. It hadn’t ever been about anything but her thoughts and questions in the first place, and she had put those to rest. There were, of course, related Caleb questions that she still had no answers for, but that was her natural state of being when it came to Caleb questions.

  It would be a few years before the Wiltshires were brought forcibly to her attention again, and it wouldn’t be because she had gone looking for any more information or trying to find any answers to questions for herself. She would be enmeshed in trying to help Caleb find some answers of his own and stumble on some things that made her incomplete but understandable picture of what had been behind Chad Wiltshire’s elaborately staged plot both clearer and darker and uglier than she had already imagined it to be.

  She would learn that her instincts on one of the matters pertaining thereto had been spot on -- Chad Wiltshire wasn’t anywhere near as delusional and nonfunctional as they had claimed. At least, he hadn’t been until her mother’s compatriots had seen an opportunity to take Devon back from him.

  At sixteen, she hadn’t known any of that. She hadn’t thought or imagined that it was anything so convoluted and strangely interrelated as it all was. She had been happy to have her answers (and happy to know that she hadn’t been dwelling and overblowing things in her head until she was creating things to chase after that weren’t really there). She had stopped
her digging on Wiltshire (although she would be grateful for the skills she had learned in the process often enough over the years), let her Caleb observations sit on their pages in the top of her closet (as she always did), and gone back to the business of being sixteen -- taking her pictures, babysitting, looking after her dad, and spending time with her best friend who (even if she never figured out what all of the oddities and strangeness of meant) she would always know was special.

  If she might have smiled at him a little more fondly here and there with the knowledge of just how determined to protect her (and frightened that he might have lost her) that he had been given the knowledge that the medical report on her attacker had given her, then it didn’t matter much because Caleb was Caleb. He was good at a good many things (more than he ever let on), but noticing things about teenage girls was never one of his skills.

  She could smile all she liked (and she did even when she caught herself with some silly, soppy expression on her face and mentally rolled her eyes at her own antics), and they went on as they always had -- the best of friends from nearly the instant they met. If his mother occasionally looked at her like she had noticed, well, she was a mom and Katherine couldn’t begrudge her that. Besides, Ruby would never say anything especially if all she did was suspect (and never ask for clarification for which Katherine was eternally grateful). It just added to the things that Katherine chose to let herself be happy over instead of dwelling on the downside of that it didn’t much matter even if her mother likely wouldn’t have noticed if she died. She didn’t need her biological mother. She had her dad, and she had Ruby Twist. Between the two of them, she was left far better off than any attention from Cecilia Murray could ever have gotten her.