Hayden's Timbre

by Thia Finn

  I shook my head back and forth. Maybe keeping my mouth shut was the better plan. I leaned as far away from her realizing my hands were now tied behind my back.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” She turned to Krissy. “She doesn’t want to play with us. What a shame. This knife and I are good friends. I can do all kinds of fun stuff with it. She put the blade against my cheek. “Starting with a little plastic surgery right here, doll. I can fuck you up so fast, no man or woman will ever want this little piece of ass. What about that, Krissy?”

  “No, we are not hurting her like that. We just need to get her out of the picture so I can have my family back.”

  She actually thought Hayden would allow her around Crew? She woman was a special kind of crazy. He would never allow it, but I kept that to myself.

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “Damn straight you will do whatever we say, or someone’s gonna get fucked up for sure,” the bigger woman said.

  Krissy leaned over beside me and got in my personal space again.

  “This, you little man-stealing piece of shit, is what you’re going to do. You are going to fucking vanish. Completely leave this area… hell, leave Texas altogether. Go anywhere that’s not in a thousand-mile radius of Austin. We are going to put you on a fucking bus to bum-fuck nowhere, and you’re going to go. If I ever see or hear you’re back in Austin or Texas, I’ll do something to that little shit that caused all of my problems and his little bastard. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, but how will I live with nothing?” I had to think hard about this. I’d started over before and I could do it again. I couldn’t let anything happen to Crew and Hayden. These two were psycho enough to do it too.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll figure out a way. You’re not without ho skills. So you’ll have to spread your legs for others to make it. Shouldn’t be a problem. You did it here in Austin, you can do it other places.

  “I’m not a prostitute. I’ve never had sex for money.” That much I knew would never happen.

  “Then starve to death. Freeze to death. We don’t give a shit. Just get the hell out of Texas. Go somewhere that someone cares.”

  She had me there. I had nowhere to go. My family never wanted me.

  “Wait, I can go to L.A. I have some money saved. Let me get it, and I’ll go to L.A.” I started thinking how I would find Caylor. He’d take me in for a while until I could get on my feet.

  The big woman sat down on the other side of me and put the knife to my throat this time. “I say we give her a few little marks to help her remember. She’d look good with some scarred skin.”

  She pulled her sleeve up. Letters were carved into her skin leaving big standing scars. “You see this bitch? This is how scarring looks on your body when it’s done right.”

  “D-d-did you do that to yourself?” The raised ugly skin looked horrid.

  “Hell no. My old lady did when we were in the same cell there in Huntsville.”

  “You were in prison?” Why was I not surprised at this admission? I turned to Krissy. “You’ve been in prison, too?”

  Krissy immediately stood up and turned away from me. “Don’t worry about me, bitch. Doesn’t matter. What matters is how quick we can get you out of here. Can you get your money fast?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Just one letter. She’ll remember it the rest of her miserable little life and know why she can’t come back here or warn them. We can carve something across that kid’s forehead.”

  “Nooo,” I pleaded. “Don’t hurt Crew. He’s an innocent child. He didn’t ask to be born.”

  “You keep that in mind, ho bag. You return or get in touch, and we’ll give him something he’ll wear forever.”

  “Oh, my God, please don’t let them hurt them,” I prayed inside my head. “Okay, I can leave today. Just get me to a bank or ATM,” I told the two.

  “I think she’s got the plan,” the big woman said. She moved the knife point down my robe sleeve. When she got to the end of it, she moved it across to the opening at the front sliding it down between my breasts. The sharp blade barely penetrated the skin, just enough to draw a line of blood but not deep enough to do any real damage. When she could go no further, she stuck it in me enough to cause real pain.

  “Owww,” I cried out.

  “Stop. Dammit. I told you no marks. Now she’s bleeding, and you went deep enough to leave a mark.” Krissy came with a towel wiping the blood away.

  “What a pussy. It barely hurt at all.” She stood and walked away.

  Krissy looked me in the eye. “If you don’t want any more of that shit to go down, I suggest you do what the fuck we say.”

  I nodded my head and left it hanging down. I never wanted to get my guys hurt the way they have me.

  So not long later I climbed on the bus with the two of them watching me. They planned to follow in the car until it was well outside the city limits, and I knew they meant it.

  This was a nightmare, and surely I would wake up any minute now.

  The phone woke me from a dead sleep. “Yeah?”

  “Did Timbre change her mind and come to your house last night?” I heard a little bit of something strange in Peri’s voice causing me to sit straight up.

  “No, why?”

  “Well, she didn’t come out to the car like she always does so I went back there thinking she’d overslept, but she’s not here.”

  I climbed out and pulled my jeans on immediately.

  “Did you go in? Maybe she’s hurt or sleeping hard.” I snapped the snaps down my shirt. “Crew, are you up?”

  “Yeah, Pops. What about you?” His light hearted answer told me things were normal in his little world.

  I spoke into the phone. “I’ll be there in ten.”

  “Get your stuff. We’ve gotta get to Peri’s.”

  “We’re not late, Pops. She’ll still be there when we get there.” He thought my desperation to see Timbre was from need not necessity. When he saw my face, he knew differently.

  “Get in the car, son.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I pulled the back door shut and remotely started my truck as the bay door rose. Some of my tires were now permanently left on my road.

  I think I jumped out before the truck completely stopped. “Did you find her?” I asked Peri who stood just inside the door of the pool house.

  “We need to call the police,” Ryan offered.

  “They won’t do anything for twenty-four hours,” Peri told him. She turned back to me. “Did you two have a problem? I mean, do you think she would up and leave for any reason?”

  “Hell, no. Everything was fine when I left here. She was tired so I didn’t text her when I got home. Said she needed a bath and bed, and so did I.” I walked around looking.

  “Don’t touch anything, Hayden. Let’s close the door and leave everything just like it is.”

  “Dammit, we have to do something.” Patience wasn’t my strong suit.

  “I know, but if the police get involved, they’ll want to dust and stuff for fingerprints or something. Let’s go to the house.”

  Peri wrapped around Ryan and buried her face in his chest. I knew she was scared.

  We walked in the door where the kids all stood.

  “Nanny, can you take the kids to school, please?”

  “No.” Crew immediately voiced his opinion. “I want to be here when she gets back.”

  “Son, you need to go to school. I’ll text you when we know something.”

  “No, Dad. I’m not going. She left us, remember? Me, too.”

  Oh man, the kid cut straight to my heart. “We don’t know that, Crew. Maybe she needed to do something and forgot to tell us.”

  “I’m not going, and you’re not making me.” Shit, this was bad.

  “Okay.” I pulled the kid in for a hug. “It’s going to be fine. I promise.”

  “You don’t know that, Dad.” He hugged me back.

  We called the police as
soon as the other children were loaded into the SUV to leave. They came right away. Like it or not, sometimes being a celebrity helped our situation. Kidnappings happened all the time, but they were all asleep with the alarms set and behind a gate. They kept security to a minimum for the family’s sake.

  “Let us take a look around inside her house, Mr. Powell.” The policeman nodded toward the pool house.

  “Sure.” He led two police toward Timbre’s door while the other two stayed in with Peri.

  “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Right. We need to get moving on this as quickly as possible,” I told her as we sat at the island.

  The policeman ran through a list of standard questions they ask in a missing person’s case. Before she finished, Ryan came back through the door.

  “You need to go out there.”

  “What’s wrong?” He sounded in a panic.

  “Hopefully nothing, but I don’t know if anything’s missing or not.”

  “Yeah, right. Let me take a look.”

  I walked in and looked around again just as I had earlier. It all appeared so normal like she should be at work, and I’m hanging out here waiting for her.

  “We need to know if you see anything missing. A bag, clothes, shoes. The kinds of things she would take if she were leaving for a while.”

  “Right. Let me take a look.” I made my way to the bedroom where the bed hadn’t been slept in with the policeman in tow. “Well, she obviously didn’t sleep here.”

  “Right.” He wrote on his tablet.

  I opened the closet and looked around. Her overnight bag from the night before was on the floor with the dirty things still inside.

  “She planning on going somewhere?” he asked looking at the bag.

  “No, she’d been at my house night before last. The clothes are still in here from that night. This is the only bag she has to take stuff in as far as I know. I’d say she didn’t pack anything to leave. Even her shoes are here.”

  “Yeah? So you’re saying she left barefooted?”

  “I’m saying she’d never leave here barefooted. It’s too chilly outside.” I didn’t like how this looked. I stared around the bedroom with my eyes ending at the nightstand where her phone was still plugged in, and her birth control packet lay opened.

  “Someone’s taken her.” My anguished voice had a hard time getting the words out.

  “Now we don’t know that yet, Mr. Devillier.”

  “We sure as fuck do. Her clothes and shoes are here. Her phone’s here still plugged in. Her pills are here. She’d never leave this stuff behind.” I looked him in the eyes. “Never.”

  He nodded his head. “Yeah, those are pretty good indicators unless she left in a hurry and forgot them. Did you two have a fight?”

  “What? No.” I laced my fingers behind my neck to try to relieve some of the tension building there. “Everything was great. We had just expressed our love for each other. We’d had a perfect evening with our friends in the hot tub before my son and I went home.”

  “So you think she was happy about you living there and her here?”

  “Yes, absolutely. We were all good, officer. Taking things slowly because my kid is part of this package. She wanted it that way, too.” I didn’t want to get angry because I knew he was doing his job, but these questions sounded accusatory.

  “Okay. Let’s head back in the main house. I want to get a crew over here to look around for some fingerprints.”

  “Good idea. You think it, too, don’t you?” I knew the pain strained my throat from the sound coming out of me.

  “It’s possible, but we need to look around some more. We don’t want to jump to conclusions.” This guy’s calm didn’t rub off on me at all. I wanted to call out the National Guard, and he wanted to ask questions.

  We made our way into the family room where Ryan, Peri, and Crew sat talking to the other team of police. Crew jumped up when he saw me.

  “Did y’all find anything, Dad?”

  “No, son, not yet.” I knew he wanted something to hang onto, but I had nothing, and there was no way I would share my suspicions.

  The female officer stood and spoke up as she seemed to take the lead on the investigation. She motioned for the officer who’d been with me to step outside. Before we could open our mouths, they came through the doorway.

  “Mr. Devillier, do you know of anyone who she might call or go to if she left?”

  I leaned back in the chair and tried to think. “She didn’t have too many friends. She used to work at The Bar on Congress. Her friend, Jenna, still works there and Ford, her boss. She had a roommate who moved to L.A. months ago that I know she still talks to once in awhile. His number is in her phone, I’m sure. That’s all the people I know.”

  I felt so useless. I knew nothing. Where was her family? Who did she depend on when she was needy? We needed to talk more about her life before me.

  “What about family?”

  “She’s from a town around El Paso. Broken Star or something like that. I think her parents still live there. They were estranged. She said they didn’t speak to each other at all.” Maybe she decided to go home. Maybe they came and took her. She made more than ever before. Maybe they wanted the little bit she’d saved.

  “Well, folks, we have all we need for now. The team is on its way. We’ll wait and see what they turn up.” We all nodded at the officers. “If you think of anything or anyone who she might have contacted, please let us know. We’ll get her phone and start going through it for numbers.” He shut the door behind him.

  “Son of a bitch.” I stood and paced around the room. I rarely ever talked like that in front of Crew, but this was extraordinary circumstances.

  “Dad, it’s going to be okay. She’ll be back, I promise.” He walked in front of me. Damn, he had a way of humbling me in a hurry.

  “I know, son. We’ll find her.”

  “I hope so, Dad. We can’t lose another one.”

  I looked over the top of his head at Peri and Ryan. They knew where my head was. I never wanted to bring his mom’s leaving up to him, but he’d skipped straight to it.

  “Son, we didn’t lose the first one, she lost us.” I hugged him to me hard.

  I cried. I tried hard not to, but I couldn’t help myself when the tears slipped down my cheeks. I cried for myself, a love I wanted, lost. I cried for my guys. I never wanted to hurt them. The older lady sitting across the aisle from me handed me a tissue when she saw me wiping my nose on my shirt sleeve. I had nothing in my purse to help me.

  “I’m sure it’s going to be okay. You going home to Mom and Dad?” She assumed I was leaving my husband. If only.

  “No, going to a friend’s to live.”

  “Didn’t you want to go?”

  “No, I mean yes. I’m happy to go,” I lied.

  “Hmph. You don’t seem too happy to me.” She went back to the book she held in her hands. “It’s a long ride to nowhere, you know.”

  If she only knew. This bus took me West when what I wanted stood somewhere in Austin. Did he know yet? Did he worry? What about Crew? Oh, God. Poor Crew. The tears poured harder when I thought about that kid. I loved that boy. He might not be mine, but he sure wasn’t that horrible crazy woman’s either. He would never be hers. Hayden would make sure of it. I hated myself for my part in this ordeal. He only wanted his dad to be happy and maybe a mother for himself.

  That was it! I needed a plan. How could I get a message to him without alerting the two crazy women? Those two took most of my savings from me, they bought my ticket to L.A. and gave me a few bucks for food. I’d be dependent on Caylor once again. I couldn’t do this—not to any of the people who loved me. I would not be that person again in my life.

  The forensic people came in and dusted for prints. Lots were found, but we had no idea whose they were yet. I’m sure Timbre’s, mine, and Crew’s were in there. Two different ones were on the pack of pills, which seemed weird. I hadn’t touched the pa
ckaging, but maybe the people at the pharmacy had. None of us would be in any type of database.

  They took pictures and sent them back to the lab to run through their systems hours ago. I needed to know something, but all I could do was sit around and wait. The doorbell rang, and we all waited as Nanny let in the visitor. It was the same officer from earlier.

  “Mr. Devillier,” he greeted me and nodded at everyone else.

  “Please tell me you have something for us.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We did find some prints in her house that got a hit.”

  “Great. Who is it?” I prayed someone who could shed some light.

  He took out his notepad. “A one Krissy Thompson.”

  “Holy shit. You’ve got to be kidding me.” Peri, Ryan, and Crew all gathered beside me. We all knew her, but Crew didn’t have any idea. I’d never told him his mother’s name. I never wanted him to hear it if I could help it.

  “I take it you know her?” The officer looked at the adults.

  “Crew, I need you to go to Tucker’s room, please.”

  “No, Dad. Who is she and what does she want with Timbre?” I pulled him to me, and Peri stood on the other side of him. He looked between the three of us.

  “Son, it’s your mother.”

  “What? My mother?” His voice broke as he said the words. “Why would she be here and not see me? What would she want with Timbre?”

  “I don’t know Crew, but we’re going to find out.” I turned to the officer. “Why is Krissy in the database? She’s been arrested?”

  The officer read from his pad and looked from Crew to me with a question on his face. I’m sure what he needed to tell us was bad.

  “She’s been arrested a number of times.”

  “For what?” Peri spoke up before I could.

  “Check fraud, shoplifting, prescription fraud, breaking and entering, and…” he looked at me again, and I nodded giving him permission, “… prostitution.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me. There is no way she would stoop that low,” Ryan said. He’d brought that woman into our lives, and she’d caused nothing but constant trouble.