The Widow's Watcher

by Eliza Maxwell

  She tugged her earlobe but didn’t say no. He winked and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  Jenna did think about it. It was hard not to. Over the next week, the embers of that little flame smoldered, never quite catching nor completely burning out.

  It was the doll that sent the flames shooting up. The doll Sarah didn’t even play with anymore. Ethan conscripted the little thing with her blonde curls and empty smile to sacrifice to the velociraptors.

  “That’s mine!” shrieked her normally levelheaded middle child, tromping through her brother’s menagerie of dinosaurs and army men to rescue her doll. “You can’t take my stuff!”

  “No!” Ethan cried. “The raptors aren’t really gonna eat her, Sarah! It’s just pretend!”

  The two of them tugged on either end of the poor doll, screaming at each other.

  “Stop it already! I’m on the phone!” Cassie shouted before slamming her bedroom door.

  With a final, great tug, Sarah yanked her kidnapped possession from her brother’s grasp, and he fell backward onto the plastic Tyrannosaurus rex he’d gotten for his fifth birthday.

  With an ominous crunch, the cries escalated from mad to hurt.

  The final casualties included one ripped doll’s dress, a tyrannosaurus leg that needed to be reattached, and a purpling bruise on a little boy’s back.

  “Did you really mean it? About taking the kids to Alaska,” Jenna asked Matt that night. She knew the answer but needed the reassurance.

  He smiled. “I mean everything I say.”

  Shutting the door that final day, after her family was packed and prepared and hugged and kissed and loved and on their way, was a moment she savored.

  The relief was a real, physical thing. A palpable sensation of muscles relaxing in ripples and waves, beginning at her fingertips and rolling down her body.

  She smiled at Beckett as the golden retriever watched her. She bent down and hugged him, rubbing her hands up and down his soft coat.

  “Beckett, do you hear that?” she whispered.

  He licked her cheek.

  “That’s silence, Beck. How do you like that, huh? It’s been a while, buddy.”

  He padded off to ease himself into his favorite spot at the corner of the couch with a sigh that was strangely human.

  Jenna stood and stretched. She took a deep breath, pulling the peace around her into her lungs like incense. Serenity smoothed her features, leaving a Madonna’s faint smile on her face.

  One week later, the call came. She would never take a breath as full and weightless again.

  20

  Lars went through the motions of putting together a patchwork meal. The house, which had held only himself since Owen had moved out so many years back, was quiet. For once, too quiet.

  Jenna had gone to the spare room and shut the door. There was no crying, no wailing at the fate that had fallen on her shoulders, no tossing breakable things at the walls.

  He almost wished she would.

  Instead, he prepared food she wouldn’t feel like eating. He didn’t much either.

  He knocked on her door.

  “Dinner. If you want some,” he mumbled from the hallway.

  There was no reply. He stood there for a moment, worry niggling at him. Should he check on her, or give her some privacy? Woman’s earned a bit of privacy. He remembered the sound of her laughter just moments before she reached the thinnest part of the ice.

  He raised his hand to knock again, when he heard her muffled reply.

  “Thank you, but I’m not very hungry.”

  Lars stared at the closed door for a beat, then placed his hands into his pockets and shuffled back to the kitchen.

  For a while, he pushed cold pasta salad around on his plate before he sat back and set his fork down, giving up.

  Alone in the room, he gave in to the memories tugging at him. An indulgence he rarely allowed these days.

  It was Owen who’d pulled him back from the brink of losing himself for good. Only Owen, and nothing more.

  He picked his head up one day and looked, really looked, at his son. The son Audrey left behind.

  Owen was as lost as his sister and baby brother. He needed his father.

  So he did the only thing left to do. He gave in to time. He began to pack the past away, to accept there were things beyond his control, things he might never know. He forced himself to be present for his son.

  It was the most difficult thing he’d ever done.

  He’d never shaken the guilt of the choices he’d made. He still begged his missing children for forgiveness each and every night before he closed his eyes.

  Now he was an old man. Owen was grown, with a daughter of his own. Time had done its work. Not without pain. But Lars had learned to carry the pain in his heart instead of walking in its footsteps.

  Now the doctor said his heart was diseased. That it was only a matter of time.

  He wasn’t surprised. The weight of that kind of pain shoved into such a small space was destined to take a toll.

  It was a payment long overdue.

  Lars stared out the windows at one more winter coming in, whether they were ready for it or not.

  Jenna had no Owen. She had no one at all. There was only him.

  An old man with a broken heart.

  21

  When Jenna woke the following morning, she was alone in the tiny house. But her host had left a note. No opening salutation, only Lars Jorgensen getting straight to the point.

  If you want to know what happened to my wife and kids, you’ll find more in these boxes than you’ll ever find at the public library. I should warn you, there are no answers here, only more questions.

  Jenna stared at the man’s scratchy handwriting, then glanced at the two battered file boxes sitting on the kitchen table, their lids fitted poorly over the bulging contents.

  No answers, he’d written. Only more questions.

  But did she care enough to find out what those questions were?

  Whatever interest she’d briefly found in the history of the Jorgensen family yesterday had been a fleeting impulse. Inconsequential. And Lars’s dusty, faded tragedy was inconsequential too. Or so she told herself.

  Jenna didn’t have emotions to spare for other people’s pain.

  “So losing us has somehow transformed you into a different person entirely?” Cassie asked, but Jenna refused to be baited.

  The note slipped from her fingers and wafted to the tabletop. She rose and walked toward the phone, doing her best to ignore the boxes at her back.

  “Jorgensen’s Garage,” said the voice on the end of the line.

  “Owen, this is Jenna Shaw.”

  “Jenna, I’m glad you called, but I’m afraid I don’t have good news.”

  Jenna let out a sigh.

  “Owen, I could really use some right now.”

  “I know, I know. But the weather’s causing shipping delays. It’s really coming down out there. I just don’t see how that part’s going to make it in today.”

  She glanced behind her at the windows. In another time, another life, she might have appreciated the glory of the white washing down upon the world outside.

  “Okay, Owen. Thank you.” She hung up before he could apologize again.

  Jenna’s arms fell to her sides and she slowly pivoted, taking in the empty house around her.

  It was warm, secure, safe. Empty, but safe. And all she wanted to do was get out. She wanted to run from this place, from both the abrupt, unexpected kindness, and the ancient hurt she’d stumbled upon here.

  “Oh, stop being dramatic,” Cassie said. “Go read your book or make a cup of tea or make some snow angels or something. You don’t have to look in the boxes. No one’s forcing you if you don’t want to.”

  Jenna took a deep breath. With determined steps, she walked past the boxes on the table without a glance in their direction.

  Settling into Lars’s recliner, Jenna folded her legs beneath her and opened the book sh
e’d left on the side table. She found the place she’d bookmarked and tried to lose herself again in the thriller as it unfolded.

  She managed to get several paragraphs in before Cassie whispered, “But you know you want to.”

  Jenna forced herself to focus on the page in front of her.

  She angled her back to the boxes, blocking them from view, as if doing so would somehow block them from her thoughts. She persisted even as the character of the girl in the novel took on the image of the dark-haired daughter of Lars and Audrey Jorgensen.

  Jenna lost her place and traced back to the beginning of the page she’d reread twice already. Finally, her eyes fluttered closed and she hung her head with a sigh.

  “As impressive as your massive bout of denial has been,” Cassie said, “are you ready to face it now?”

  “What do you want from me, Cassie?” Jenna asked the empty house.

  There was no answer at first. Jenna’s gaze landed on the boxes lined up side by side, waiting patiently.

  “Nothing you can’t afford to give,” came the reply at last.

  22

  The bones of the story Jenna had glimpsed at the library were laid out in front of her. The boxes contained brittle yellowed clippings of articles she’d been hoping to find the previous day.

  Twenty-nine years before, in the summer of 1988, Audrey Jorgensen, wife and mother of three, disappeared one sunny afternoon. Also missing were her two youngest children, Francine and William Jorgensen. Francie, as she was called by her parents, was four years old. Her baby brother, Will, only eighteen months.

  It was presumed Audrey had taken the children. A natural assumption. Yet, three days later, a woman who turned out to be Audrey was found wandering along a street in a small town in Iowa. She was dirty and disheveled. She had no shoes on her feet.

  She had no children with her.

  Reports from eyewitnesses claimed Audrey was incoherent, that she rambled and spoke nonsense. But when questioned about the whereabouts of her children, she had nothing to say.

  Nothing at all.

  Reporters fed upon the sensationalist story until they’d wrung from it every drop of blood to be had. Neighbors were interviewed, old acquaintances, any and all witnesses in the Iowa town where Audrey was found.

  In the end, though there were plenty of words printed, the ink beneath the various bylines contained nothing more than speculation, each scenario as unlikely as the next.

  Could there have been an accident that affected Audrey Jorgensen’s memory? Reporters dug into her marriage to Lars. Was she perhaps running from him, secreting her children away from an abusive husband?

  There was no indication that was the case.

  Some intrepid soul suggested the most damning of possibilities. Had Audrey Jorgensen done the unthinkable?

  The authorities and the family were at a loss. Leads were followed that went nowhere. Tips were run down and eliminated. There was no map, no signpost to show which way to look next. There was nothing except an unstable woman who either couldn’t or wouldn’t say.

  Everyone had a theory, and the public waited with bated breath to see which would prove right.

  They were in for a very long wait.

  The press circled the Jorgensen family, what was left of it, feeding off the catastrophe. But when no additional facts came to light, they inevitably moved on to other calamities.

  Interest revived, for a time, a few months later when Audrey was charged with child endangerment, but hope that answers—or at the very least, an interesting spectacle—would be provided in court was soon dampened.

  Audrey Jorgensen was found incompetent to stand trial. She was remanded to the Minnesota State Secure Psychiatric Hospital until such a time as she was deemed of reasonably sound mind to do so. A day which never came.

  And that, as they say, was that.

  Only it wasn’t. Not for Lars.

  The bulging boxes were a testament to his unwillingness to let it go. They were filled with every scrap of information Jenna imagined he’d ever collected regarding what had happened to fracture his family.

  There were maps marking places witnesses had come forward claiming they’d seen either Audrey or the children during those missing three days. There were transcripts from court hearings, notes written in Lars’s hand about possible routes Audrey could have taken, logs of conversations with people he’d spoken to directly.

  There were bus schedules with certain departures circled in red. Photographs of people leaving small tokens and flowers at a makeshift memorial site Jenna recognized as the driveway to this very house. Close-ups of individuals, mostly men. Notes on Lars’s search to discover the identity of any he didn’t recognize, a desperate attempt to link any of them to his wife.

  Lars had spoken with Audrey’s friends, with her extended family. As far as Jenna could tell, he’d spoken with every person who had even the vaguest, most tangential link to what might have happened that day.

  Lars was a meticulous record keeper. Each note was dated in his scrawling penmanship. His search went on for years. It was thorough, comprehensive, fully documented, and well organized. In the end, it was useless.

  Then the monthly reports from a private investigative firm began.

  But throwing money at the problem yielded nothing more. In time, the monthly reports gave way to quarterly ones, then yearly.

  No additional facts or leads have been found to pursue, came the typed reports, destined to be filed away, one behind the other.

  The most recent was dated less than a year ago.

  Jenna could hardly comprehend what he must have been going through.

  What he must still be going through.

  She sat back and rubbed the heels of her palms against her eyes.

  The small part of her that had once been a reporter clamored for more. It was a hell of a story. The rest of her knew this wasn’t a story at all. It was just hell.

  Unable to help herself, yet dreading what she’d find, Jenna opened the lid to the second box. She’d been right to hesitate. Instead of pages filled with hand- and typewritten notes and reports, she found a different sort of record.

  The second box held photo albums Jenna dared not touch. She couldn’t bear to look at the faces of the children who were destined to disappear into the fog of the unknown. Her fingers moved past those, where she found mementos, keepsakes. A baby-blue rattle with marks along the edge where it had been chewed. A Christmas ornament with a footprint pressed into clay, dried and tied with a red ribbon. A christening gown, the white lace faded to yellow but wrapped in tissue all the same. A tiny pair of leather baby shoes, stiff with age.

  Jenna lifted a small tin, no larger than a half dollar. There was a tiny picture of a mallard duck on it. She removed the lid and caught her breath when she saw what was inside.

  A fine, silky lock of hair curled around the edges, twisting and turning back upon itself.

  Jenna’s hands trembled as she put the lid back on and placed the tin carefully into the box with the other scraps of memory.

  She was reaching for the cardboard covering to shut the box and its heartbreaking contents away when she noticed something she’d overlooked. Tucked between the photo albums was a spiral-bound notebook.

  Her hand stalled over the notebook, but it was too late for second thoughts.

  Jenna pulled it from the box and thumbed through the pages, by now familiar with Lars’s handwriting. The book was thick and heavy, its pages dog-eared from use. It appeared to be some sort of journal or diary, each entry dated and separated by a single blank line.

  Jenna opened the notebook to one of the middle pages and began to read.

  November 16, 1990

  Audrey recognized me today. A miracle, considering the amount of drugs they have her on. Spoke with Nurse Bennington about reducing the dosage, but without the Thorazine she gets agitated, and they’re afraid she’ll try to hurt herself again. Asked her about Francie and Will. I got the same blank sta
re.

  Jenna flipped the pages, skimming the contents as she went. Many of the entries were short, merely a date followed by the words, Audrey silent today. Asked her about Francie and Will. Nothing.

  Years upon years, Lars had visited his wife, logging each visit in his own hand. Years upon years, he asked the same question. Always, it seemed, he got the same answer. None at all.

  Jenna pushed the chair back from the table. The legs scraped the floor, echoing through the cocoon-like state she found herself in, breaking it apart at the seams. She stood and moved to the kitchen, grasping for the mundane to pull her back from the mess in her mind.

  Coffee. A shower. A change of clothes. Jenna deliberately laid out a list, hoping to separate from a past that wasn’t hers. A past that felt like a groping hand grasping her about the ankle all the same.

  “That’s it, then?” Cassie asked.

  “Well, what do you want me to do about it, Cass?” Jenna measured grounds into the filter for the coffee pot that was as old as everything else in the house.

  Had Audrey Jorgensen chosen the appliance herself? Jenna turned back from that line of thinking. It didn’t matter. A coffee pot didn’t hold Audrey’s secrets.

  “But something does,” Cassie said. “Something, somewhere is the key. And you’re not even going to bother to look for it?”

  Jenna took an empty cup from the cupboard and set it on the counter harder than she meant to. The emotions she had brushed against while sifting through the contents of those boxes had left her raw and aching.

  “Why, Cass? Why would I do that? I’ve got nothing to give this man! He’s a stranger with a sad story, and I’m full up with sad stories.”

  Jenna put her hands over her eyes and turned her back to the counter. It made no difference. Cassie wasn’t standing in front of her, a living, breathing person she could turn her back on. Cassie was her constant, her only, the one thing she couldn’t turn off or turn down or turn away from.

  And she was relentless.

  “You’re wallowing. You’re so full of guilt and self-pity that you’re using us as an excuse to give up and die!”