by J. D. Heath
She’d stolen the kitchen sink, literally the kitchen sink that sat in their van, something Crane still made jokes about.
“I’ll make sure she knows better. Just give me some time alone with her. She’s good and I could use the help. If we could find a big crowd I could get us some money and it would be nice to figure out a plan to get double what I usually get from the stores. She can do it. I know she can.” She didn’t dare look away from his face.
Jana, her step slow and unhurried, came out of the store and toward the van. Little bursts of color danced on the edges of Mandy’s vision. Jana had dreams of going to LA to be an actress. She’d never get there. She’d taken the wrong ride that day she’d climbed into their van.
Hard on the heels of those thoughts came the one that scared Mandy the most. Crane was never going to let her just walk away from him. No way. Would she even know it was coming? Would she sense it and be able to run before he killed her so she couldn’t tell his secrets?
Crane said, “I hope she got that muffin.”
Mandy couldn’t breathe. Would Crane use something as simple as a muffin as an excuse to kill Jana?
Yes.
Yes, he would.
Jana climbed in the van. She began emptying her pockets, shedding packages of smokes for her and Crane, bags of beef jerky, small cans of ravioli, and not one, not two, but three blueberry muffins.
And two different types of Danish.
Crane grabbed Jana’s ponytail and dragged her face toward his. “Good girl,” he said.
Jana held out two dollars, the change from her shopping trip, as she smiled at him. “I try.”
You better try harder. Mandy sat, limp and wordless, as Crane got out and started pumping the gas. You better try a lot harder or he’s going to kill you and you will be just one more name in the book.
The book Crane didn’t know that she knew about.
The Dead Book.
The book that held the names of the stepmoms he’d killed. He’d kept their IDs, if they had any, and he’d mapped out where he’d left their bodies. It was all there, every dead girl and woman’s death written out in horrific detail, right down to the last word they’d ever uttered.
How had she not known? How had she not known he was killing them?
One day, if he didn’t kill her first, she was going to leave him and she was going to take that book of his with her. It wouldn’t change it, what had happened. It wouldn’t take away the guilt that had been eating at her ever since she’d understood what he’d done to Kate, it wouldn’t change the fact that she’d known he was a killer and she’d said nothing about that when Jana, who was the first one he’d picked up since Kate, had come into the van. She hadn’t tried to warn Jana, hadn’t told her a single thing.
She hadn’t warned Jana, and by the time Jana had come aboard Mandy had already found the Dead Book, and her suspicions about what had happened to Kate—no. Not suspicion. She’d known. No sense in lying to herself. She’d known and said nothing.
And Jana was going to die because of that, because of her.
Tears burned at her eyes again. Guilt made her gut cramp and ache. Her fingers clenched together to form fists. She said, “Jana?”
Jana, busy putting away the pilfered goods, asked, “What?”
“He saw a chap stick you forgot. It rolled off the counter. You have to do better. I mean you have to.”
Jana’s big blue eyes widened. She whimpered, “Damn! Did he know it was mine?”
“Of course he did.”
Jana took a deep breath. Her gaze went to Mandy’s face. And Mandy knew. Jana was planning on running, and soon. She was smiling her way through the good girls and the slaps to her face and the punches and the constant drilling into her of the Code but she was not in it, not really. She was going to run.
I have to help her. I have to. I told Crane I would and I will. I’m going to help her get away, even if he kills me for it. Her stomach flopped. Queasiness rose on her throat. She said, just as Crane got back into the driver’s seat. “Later, when we get somewhere that we can stop, I’m going to help you Jana. Promise.”
Did Jana know what she really meant? Mandy didn’t dare look back at Jana again. Crane cranked up the van. His voice was jovial. “Fix me another coffee and warm one of the muffins Mandy.”
She moved, her body wooden and weak. Everything was wrong, they’d been on the road too long. She was going soft, getting too attached to a stepmom that wasn’t going to, as Crane out it, ‘work out after all’. She was about to break the first rule of Crane’s Code, and she would probably die for it.
Never forget where your loyalty lies, and it always lies with me.
CHAPTER 2:
The lights on the front porch of the house were off. Blake swore under his breath as he fumbled for the doorknob. His fingers found it and turned it. It wasn’t locked. It was never locked. His mother, Caron, had decreed that they could not, would not, ever lock the door, just in case Sarah came home. If she came home and found it locked she might just go away again.
He followed the flickering blue light down the short hallway to the living room. The kitchen and living area were one big space and back in the day they’d been pretty, filled with light and air. Laughter and happiness.
His hand found light switches and flipped them, flooding the room with an amber glow. “Mom?”
He went to the wing-backed velvet chair. Caron Lewis didn’t even look up. Her head was bowed and her hands clutched at something. He didn’t need to look at it to know what it was.
Sarah’s diary.
Caron had read it so much that the pages had fallen out and apart. She just kept gluing and taping it back together in a mad attempt to hold onto her missing daughter.
Goddamn you Sarah. The anger in his heart and thought was weak, tempered by the long years between the day Sarah had become just one more of the missing, and the present one.
Sarah, his beautiful, brilliant and sixteen-year old sister, had left the house that day with her blonde hair flowing across her shoulders and a smile on her face. She’d been headed to her best friend, Jamie’s, house to work on some cheers for the upcoming tryouts. She’d said she’d be back in an hour.
Nearly ten years later, she had yet to show up.
She’d never made it to Jamie’s house. Her cell phone had been found days later, shattered and busted to hell and back, alongside the narrow band of the two-lane highway that she’d been walking on to get to Jamie’s house. An hour later, the searchers had discovered her red sweater, tangled into a ball and submerged in a high stand of weeds, about a hundred and fifty yards from where they’d found her phone.
They’d found those things, but they’d never found Sarah.
Nobody knew what had become of her. If she was alive. If she was dead.
They knew exactly nothing.
There’d been a few leads over the years. Early on, when the search had been a massive and vital thing, there’d been plenty of leads to follow.
Of course there had been. Twining Falls was a small town. Three thousand or so souls. The core of town, where the Lewis’ lived, was compact and filled with people who’d lived there forever. They’d seen Sarah that day but then she’d headed out and along the highway toward Jamie’s, where the houses were still pretty far apart and anyone just travelling through could have stopped to pick her up.
“Mom?”
Caron looked up. Her face, a soft blur of white skin and eyes that had gotten larger as she had lost more and more weight, held no expression at all. “Oh. You’re home.” Her eyelids, traced with thin blue veins, slammed shut. Her breath went fast and shallow. She opened her eyes again. Her lips shook. “I want so much to say those words.”
Yeah, but not to me. To Sarah. More useless and tired ire slid through his body. “I brought dinner.”
She just blinked at him. He went to the kitchen, took out the fast food chicken, biscuits, mashed potatoes, and coleslaw then put it all on plates. He took
one to her and sat down on the sofa, his plate over his knees.
Caron stared down at her plate. “It’s her birthday.”
“I know.” He did know. How could he not have known it? Caron went into massive and dark depressions every year on Sarah’s birthday. On Christmas. On Thanksgiving. On Mother’s Day.
“I cleaned her room.” Caron’s fingers worked against her chest. The plate fell to the floor with a sharp clatter of china against silverware, making Blake jerk. Caron sighed, her thin shoulders lifting and falling. “I need some money. There’s a guy, I met him in one of my groups. He said he heard something about a girl that sounds a lot like Sarah, but the guy he heard it from isn’t going to talk unless he has a reason to do it.”
Goddammit! Not this again! Blake managed to swallow the potatoes in his mouth but they stuck in his throat. “I don’t have any money.”
He didn’t. He’d had a trust fund, thirty-thousand dollars that had been left to him by his grandmother. Caron had looted it. His father had never even thought to have her removed as trustee of the fund during their divorce since it had been her mother who’d died, and Blake was her son.
Caron had used every dollar of it, bankrupting the trust to try to find Sarah. She’d wasted his trust fund, his college education money, on P.Is, on psychics, on one fruitless thing after another.
By the time his dad had discovered what Caron was doing it had been way too late. The money was as vanished and gone as Sarah. Blake, who’d blown out a knee in his junior year and lost his chances at a football scholarship in the wake of that injury, found himself trying to cobble together enough grant and small scholarship money to attend the local community college instead of the university he’d had his heart set on.
Part of him knew it was probably for the best. No way could he leave Caron alone while he went away to college.
Another part of him wondered if she would even notice that he had gone.
Caron launched herself out of the chair. Her bare feet smashed food into the hardwood of the floor. “This is a sure thing. I know it. I feel it.” her hands went to her heart. Her eyes bored into his. “I don’t feel her…she’s not dead. I know she’s not dead. I would know if she was. I’d feel it. I have to find her.”
His voice held every ounce of the weariness that nine years of Sarah’s absence from their lives had leveled upon them. “Mom, I don’t have any money.”
“I didn’t ask you for money,” she snapped. “I’m thinking out loud.”
He watched her carefully, his meal forgotten and cooling on his lap. Caron still worked, when her frequent depressions and manic attempts to find Sarah ebbed off for a little while, but she made maybe a fifth of what she used to earn. They were barely hanging on, even with him working forty hours a week at the saw mill to help with the bills.
The house, which had also once belonged to his grandmother, had been paid off when they’d moved into it. Caron had mortgaged the house, twice, since then. That money had also gone to the endless search for Sarah.
She’d maxed out every credit card, taken out every loan she could. She’d sold things that had belonged to his grandmother. There was nothing left. No way to get whatever money she needed to be lied to yet again by one more con artist out to make a fast buck on her misery.
Blake wanted to cry. He wanted to just break down, bury his face in his hands, and weep for it all. Sarah was most likely dead, had probably died not long after leaving home. That was just the simplest, most unvarnished conclusion.
It was a conclusion that Caron would never reach. She’d never come to the end of this, to the long and awful thing that had begun the day that Sarah walked out that front door, and vanished.
Caron bent down began to clear away the mess. She moved in fits and starts, her body coiled tense as a spring the entire time. She left the living room and he heard the plate hit the trash can, heard the front door open and close.
Blake knew she’d be stay out there on the porch, smoking and pacing the old boards in long swinging steps, for hours while she worked out a way to beg, borrow, or outright steal money to give to yet another scammer.
Goddammit, why couldn’t she just stop? Just admit Sarah was dead and gone? Just stop the hunt and stop living for someone who’d never come back?
Blake stuck the plastic utensil back into the potatoes, stirred them and ate them all as well as the oily, cold chicken and the slightly soured slaw. The biscuit choked him but he ate it anyway.
His phone rang. He answered it with a gruff, “yeah?”
His father’s familiar voice came across the distance. “I just thought I’d check in with you.”
Blake leaned back and into the cushions. That wanting to weep came back. His throat worked. His eyes stung. “I’m all good.”
A long silence rung out. Mack Lewis hadn’t been able to stand the constant loss, the daily reminder that was Sarah’s room. Caron’s refusal to believe that maybe, just maybe, it was time to stop looking. He’d left five years ago, moving a mere twenty miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand.
Mack cleared his throat. “How’s your mom?”
Blake’s teeth ground together. “How do you think? She’s a zombie.” She was. Caron Lewis had somehow managed to move past being one of the walking but living wounded and land right in the land of the walking dead.
Mack sighed. “I was hoping this year’d be different.”
“I don’t know why.”
“Me either.”
“She’s found some guy who swears he knows someone who knows something.” The tension in Blake’s voice was palpable.
“Jesus Christ. There’s nothing left to sell or mortgage or borrow.”
“I know.” Misery flattened his spirits yet again. “I think she needs some real help Dad. I can’t do…” Don’t say it. Just don’t. He tried to clamp his teeth over the words that he knew he should never say but that came anyway. “I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. I can’t live like this.”
His stomach went taut and then it dropped into some space far below his feet. His eyes stung again and that time tears rolled down his cheeks. He was betraying her and he knew it, but he was also speaking to a man who’d already done that exact same thing, and who was the only person in the world who understood.
Mack’s voice was soft. “I think it’s time to start talking about some kind of inpatient care.”
Blake’s stomach rolled. His fingers clutched at the phone. The single word, fraught with betrayal, breathed out of his mouth. “Yeah.”
Mack sighed. “I’m coming that way tomorrow. You still at the saw mill?”
“Yeah.”
There were bills to pay, bills Caron kept jacking up with her endless searching and desperation. Blake brushed a tear off his cheek with one finger. “I get lunch around eleven.”
“I can be there. I’ll meet you right out front.”
The sound of the door swinging open made little tendrils of fear roll over his body. Blake, used to living with a constant nagging apprehension, barely registered that feeling. He was numb to it.
Caron’s footsteps went down the hall, to Sarah’s room. There was a creaking sound as the door swung open and then closed. Blake sat there, hunched and stricken mute as the raw sounds of Caron’s grief filled the otherwise silent house.