All That Remains (A Missing and Exploited Suspense Novel Book 1)

by Hannah Holborn

  He lugs the grocery bags over to the trailer’s kitchen counter. After a morning of nothing to eat except chips, Willard slices open a package of marinated beef kabobs with his pocketknife. He purchased a propane camp stove, but the process of going out to the car and following the stove’s instructions for set-up puts him off. He takes an exploratory bite. The raw meat is tough to chew, but tastes better than expected.

  He sits on the floor, chewing and considering the trailer’s appearance. The upsetting wallpaper with its bottles of nutmeg, cinnamon and graffiti is the same as his mother had in her kitchen. There is a porcelain figurine perched on an open shelf; the Victorian bride with her yellow gown could have belonged to his mother who loved such doodads.

  Willard considers a new thought, that the bride and wallpaper might scare Terrance if he has bad memories of the past. Willard turns the bride to face the wall. He carries the sauce and blood-covered Styrofoam packaging from the meat over to the wall. Using wide swiping motions, he paints a grouping of spice bottles and is disappointed when the bloody sauce doesn’t cover enough.

  When he’s done eating, he carries his garbage outside to whip it into a pond, silencing the croaking frogs. The throwing motion tears stitches, forcing him into a protective hunch, and the only sound he hears in the moment after the splash is his own whimpering. By the time the pain eases enough for movement, the frogs are singing again. Willard looks and the expected red seep of blood floods through the last of his clean bandages.

  Willard picks up his car keys. Despite his pain, he has a good feeling about the day.

  «67»

  Chase wakes with a hangover and a bad case of morning breath. She listens to Gabriel banging around the motel suite’s kitchen and can’t believe she’s still in Fenny. It’s an effort to open her stuck lashes, the reason she doesn’t normally sleep in mascara.

  She rolls off the motel’s pullout sofa, being careful to support her tender head as she considers the buttery-yellow morning. She’s still wearing her too-tight jeans, underwire bra and blouse with homicidal sleeves that tried to strangle her all night. Despite her hangover, packing is a breeze; all she needs to do is gather her toothbrush and makeup bag from the bathroom and toss those last few items into a carryall.

  The wild state of her hair, as well as the bag in her hand, tips Gabriel off. His blue eyes and Radar’s doggy brown ones warily consider her approach. Radar gives a tentative thump with his tail.

  Gabriel’s arms form a protective barrier around his plate as she crosses the kitchen. Chase gets that eating is serious business for someone who hasn’t had access to pizza and banana sundaes for months, but it’s still irritating to witness his over-protectiveness.

  The racket he made has resulted in the most nauseating breakfast Chase has ever encountered. For each of them, there are bowls of dry puffed cereal. Not so bad, but there are also plates heaped with cold pork and beans and fish sticks. Gabriel’s busy munching, so Chase sets about looking for coffee filters in the cupboard without success. She’s stuck with using instant. When the water’s boiled and the crystals dissolved into slurry, she carries the mug to the table. Using the prongs of a fork, she moves the repulsive food toward the center of the table, leaving only the cereal in place.

  Gabriel pushes aside his empty bowl. He centers a plate of fish sticks and beans and digs in.

  Whatever else happens, Chase has firm plans for the day: she’s taking her dog and her van and burning through a couple of tanks of gas by nightfall. She pops one puff into her mouth and waits to see if she’ll gag before swallowing. Her stomach, though displeased, holds steady, so she fills the spoon. “What’s on your agenda for today?” she says.

  “Can I go to school?” Gabriel asks.

  Chase has a pretty good clue about how things will go down for Gabriel; the powers that be will do psychiatric tests on him, probably for weeks, before they’ll let him rejoin his classmates. To convict Willard they will need to know every sordid thing the creep did to the kid.

  “It’s summer vacation,” Chase says. “School will have to wait until fall. So here’s what I’m thinking. Are you brave enough to stay here alone for a few hours?” She waits for Gabriel’s nod. “Good. Hang out and watch TV. When the cleaning staff comes to clean the room, tell them who you are. They’ll call the police for you. And do me a big favor. Don’t let the police send you back to Celine. Tell them what she’s like. Say you don’t feel safe.”

  Gabriel keeps his gaze down. “Where will you be?”

  “Rolling down the dusty road of life.” Chase pushes the bowl of cereal away as her stomach rebels. “We’ve talked about this. You can’t stay with me, kid.”

  Gabriel pulls his plate of fish sticks so close they almost land on his lap. He has issues it’ll take a team of PhDs to sort out. Nothing a fugitive who flunked out in grade eight can fix. She tries to soften her booze and cigarette roughened voice. “It’s going to be okay. Trust me.”

  Gabriel adds a bite of fish to his mouthful of cereal.

  Chase averts her eyes and talks her nauseated stomach down as she reaches for her bag. “Okay,” she says, “that’s me out of here. Be seeing you in the news, kiddo.”

  Gabriel refuses to look up, but Chase lacks the energy to force a decent goodbye.

  The sign on the outskirts of town hopes Chase had a fun-filled time in Fenny just as she realizes Radar’s not in the van. She keeps driving. If it took everything she had to leave, it would take even more to turn back. And the boy needs a dog.

  «68»

  For the long drive east, Celine puts the top down on her LeBaron. She’s left the packing of her apartment up to a bitch she can’t trust. She’s also left behind her slate of regular customers and her thriving escort business.

  She’ll have to start fresh in the city. The phrase makes her laugh out loud. Fresh fuck—that would make a great slogan for internet promotion. Get your fresh fuck here.

  It would be false advertising. Last night aged her more than a decade of prostitution, drinking and drugs. When the dead come haunting, it isn’t for the joy of it, it’s for revenge.

  Francois came to lord it over her, forgetting he was nothing but a drugged-up inmate of a psychiatric institution, one with grounds nice enough to be the private estate of some wealthy prick, until you got close enough to see the walking dead.

  Gabriel saw horrors when he visited his father; Celine was sure he did. Yet all the ankle-biter wanted to talk about was how cute the bunnies on the lawn were. He didn’t care that one of them scratched the hell out of his beautiful face.

  Celine is taking back roads rather than the boring highway and the LeBaron hugs the first in a long series of tight turns that loop around the base of a hillside. Celine’s fearless, powering into the curve. The metallic scarf wrapped around her neck billows out behind, a parachute that might slow her escape from Fenny. She tosses the expensive accessory, which becomes a cloud of silver in the rear-view mirror.

  The lunatic Francois believed he could see the future. Celine stopped visiting him when he predicted a short life for Gabriel and a long, wasted one for her. If his ability to read the future was a gift, Francois should have wrapped a warning about the school play in pretty paper and stuck a bow on it. Then she would have made damned sure Gabriel didn’t go.

  She’d been a god-dammed decent mother, far better than her own ever was. It wasn’t Francois who’d abstained from drugs for five long months. It wasn’t Francois who turned down the bottle. It was Celine and Celine alone who Gabe had to thank for not coming into this world drug-addicted or with fetal alcohol syndrome. And it’s Celine and Celine alone who Gabriel had to thank for his beauty. Plenty of mothers she knew hadn’t done as much for their offspring.

  She never wanted motherhood. Their son was a surprise Francois pressured her to keep. If the man was here now, she’d throw the truth in his face—it’s better to have a nameless fetus haunt you than the ghost of an eight-year-old boy who won’t leave you the fuck alon
e all night, even if you beg.

  «69»

  Gabriel sits on the motel room floor watching Radar finish the last of the meal in his doggy dish. Chase forgot to leave the cans of dog food so Gabriel invented a special mix of fish sticks, Cocoa Puffs, beans, sugar, and coffee crystals, all mashed together and made extra soft with the last of the milk, for the dog’s old teeth.

  Gabriel is packed up and ready to go, the way Chase told him he should be. He has his sunscreen, headache pills, Jughead comics, little bottles of soap and shampoo from the motel bathroom, all of the food Chase left behind, and the Fenny Fun Facts brochure. Everything is stuffed in the Superman backpack Chase bought him to use when he goes back to school. The gambling dog picture is leaning against the wall behind the backpack.

  It’s one hour and five minutes after checkout time when someone uses a key to open the door. A cart comes in, followed by a small lady with gray hair. She jumps when she sees Gabriel and Radar. Then, just like the lady at the apartment, she speaks in a language Gabriel does not understand.

  Gabriel’s whole body feels as though it has a fever again. He wishes more than anything that Chase would come back and take him and Radar away again in the van. He doesn’t understand why he has to go to the police when they scare Chase and Celine.

  The woman has a big, white smile. She gestures for Gabriel to leave. “Clean room,” she says.

  Gabriel’s voice comes out so small he can barely hear it himself. “I’m Gabriel Wheeler.”

  “You go,” the woman says. “Find mommy.” Instead of listening when Gabriel tells her he can’t, the woman pushes the cart into the bedroom then pulls the sheets off the bed even though they aren’t dirty.

  When Gabriel is sure the lady isn’t going to call the police, he stands up on wobbly legs. He picks up Radar’s leash and tucks the gambling dogs under his arm. Outside the motel room the sky is empty. He looks through the big lobby window at an empty desk. In the parking lot, there aren’t any people and hardly any cars.

  Gabriel walks over to one of the cement tables where people can eat their lunches. He takes a bag of cereal out of his Superman backpack and the Fenny Fun Facts brochure. He likes the bright colors of the paper Fenny better than the real town.

  His finger touches Aureole Lake, Fenny’s most popular natural attraction where Celine and an Elvis bought him ice cream once when he was little. He remembers the lake’s circle shape and bright green color. It was hot and Gabriel wanted to splash in the lake with the other kids. Elvis wouldn’t let him because he’d get sand in the car. When Gabriel cried, Celine knocked the cone from his hand.

  Fenny Elementary and the library are on the map. One is colored pink and the other yellow like a daffodil. There are other bright buildings; some drawn to look like gingerbread houses. The museum even has a covered wagon in the parking lot. Gabriel traces a finger from the motel to the police station on the bottom right corner. It’s a dark gray square with one window. A sad cartoon person is stuck inside the prison because the window has bars.

  He can’t find Celine because he doesn’t know where to look. And even though the police station is only four blocks away from the motel, he doesn’t want to go there because, except for the windows, it looks like Willard’s basement.

  Miss Granger’s phone doesn’t work, but Gabriel knows which house on Yellow Flicker Avenue belongs to his teacher. Hers is the pretty white house with pink shutters, a pink front door and lots of roses. He traces the route on the map with a finger. It’s on the edge of town, but not too far for him or Radar to walk if they go slow.

  «70»

  Afternoon light sneaking through a slit in the partially opened curtains hurts Chase’s alcohol-poached eyeballs. She opens one eye and then the other before the reality of her situation confronts her. She’s nowhere near far enough away from Fenny. Worse, she’s suffering the mother of all hangovers.

  As if the situation isn’t ironic enough, the TV’s playing a church service. A preacher with big hair and a beer belly demands to know if Chase believes. Three beautiful girls sway behind him to repeat the refrain in song as though they have nothing better to do with their youth than badger people with useless questions.

  “I believe I drank a shit-load of tequila last night,” Chase says. It’s hard to deny the evidence of an empty bottle on the floor or the jackhammer pounding apart her brain. “I also believe I’d better haul my ass across the country.”

  Instead, she stays put as the preacher changes tack. “God’s waiting to receive your call right now.”

  If by god, the preacher means the police, he can go blow. Chase forces her body off the couch. The jackhammer follows her across the room. She changes the channel, seeking news. Yet another politician was caught with his pants unzipped and the world maintained its usual quota of wars. No mention of Gabriel’s miraculous return, but it’s still early hours. If Gabriel turned himself in as instructed, the cops might have reason for sitting on the news.

  She’s about to flick the TV off when a headline flashes Amber Alert. Breaking news. There it is, the name Gabriel Wheeler. There’s also the picture Chase took of Creepy Crawley’s ride and, something she hadn’t noticed in her snap-happy mood; the back of her van, complete with the full license plate.

  “Fuck,” Chase says, “fuck, fuck, fuck.” She calls Radar to her side, needing his calm presence to deal with the knowledge she accidentally turned evidence on herself. When he doesn’t come, she remembers why and is devastated anew.

  A smarmy news reporter interviews the lead in the case, Detective Harvey Sam. The short, earnest man unloads a pack of lies. Somehow Chase was supposed to have snatched eight-year-old Gabriel from his school’s auditorium on a day she was at work in Trenton. There’s a tour of Chase’s rental house and an interview with a neighbor who claims he never trusted her. The screen morphs into two side-by-side pictures. One is of Gabriel in angel wings. The other Chase took with the intention of capturing evidence against Willard; Chase’s good deed come back to bite her.

  The reporter interviews a forensic specialist who glows with pride because he knows exactly what makes Chase tick without the need to meet her. He reveals a shocker; female abductors rarely abduct for sexual gratification or profit, but do get off on emotional satisfaction. The bastard even has a name for what he claims Chase must be: a childless psychotic.

  If that’s not bad enough, Detective Sam comes back on to implicate Chase in the murder of an old woman, the disappearance of Creepy Crawley, and the theft of a late-model car.

  Chase packs her carryall. The idiot detective doesn’t suspect Willard, still out there probably zoning in on Gabriel who obviously hasn’t turned himself in as instructed. The kid has the survival skills of a gnat.

  Chase flips a mental coin. Heads is back and tails is forward. “Fuck,” she says. The coin came up heads.

  «71»

  Having seen Willard Crawley’s pigsty of a home, Harvey shouldn’t be surprised at the state of the man’s rural property. There are disturbing statues at the bottom of the gravel driveway, barbed-wire fencing and multiple Trespassers Will Be Shot signs. A green-tinged cherub lies face-down at the feet of a Grecian goddess, while frowning gnomes guard the property from the tree line.

  Harvey obeys his instinct to park on the road. He cocks his gun, then approaches the cabin on foot, passing a meadow bright with orange poppies and purple lupine. The rugged cabin with its sagging porch and small window seems uninhabited. The only vehicle parked out front is the rusted shell of a Ford truck. If this was Crawley’s destination he isn’t currently at home.

  Harvey’s request to open up is met with the expected silence. The door isn’t locked and he enters the claustrophobic space with his gun drawn. Light from a second small window spills into the center of the room illuminating a bucket beside a roll of toilet paper. There is a table and two chairs, a cold fireplace, and two narrow bunks made of wood.

  Harvey skirts the room, keeping an eye on the door. He uses a stick
to lift a tattered blanket from the lower bunk. It’s stiff in the middle with what he suspects is blood. The fluid in the bucket appears to be urine, but he finds a second dented bucket of water on a counter. He wets a small section of the blanket and the water runs red, confirming his suspicion.

  Harvey needs to secure the scene for the forensic team he’ll summon. But first he works his way back through the door and across the rotted porch where there are signs of a recent fire to the west of the cabin. He edges closer to what once must have been a small structure.

  In the ashes he sees bones.

  «72»

  There isn’t enough space in the car for Willard to swing a cat. Not that he has one or wants to swing anything. He should have stayed at the trailer to rest rather than listening to his belly’s demands. Instead, he’s parked at the side of a country road, lifting his shirt to peel away the bandage from the incision. Blood has leaked through his shirt again.

  He takes a look and sees black skin with red streaks around the stitches. Pus oozes from an open section of the wound. He rustles through plastic grocery bags filled with chips and chocolate bars searching for the newly purchased bandages, tape and scissors. His hands tremble as he covers the scary mess with gauze, a bandage and tape. He should have bought rubbing alcohol for the infection; instead he left it on the store’s shelf, unable to face self-inflicted pain.

  “Terrance,” he moans. More than ever, Willard needs his little brother. Soon, he promises himself. Soon he’ll I’ll find Terrance and stop Gabriel.

  Saying his brother’s name acts like a charm and the little traitor appears on the side of the road with a dog. His startled eyes meet Willard’s through the windshield.