by Ranae Rose
Grey’s heart sank lower than he’d known it could possibly go. A sense of dread made the back of his neck prickle and his mouth taste like a sock full of moldy coffee grounds. “Is it about Kerry?”
“She never showed up at work today. The sheriff’s department found her car in a ditch. She wasn’t in it.”
It took a split second for Henry’s words to settle in, and then, all of a sudden, the anger Grey had experienced at work that day seemed pale and weak. This was the most devastating thing he’d ever heard.
“Nobody knows where she is,” Henry said. “You haven’t heard from her since before she left for work?”
“No.”
The silence that came next was deafening. Grey had questions – so many fucking questions – and had to fight to decide which one to ask first.
“She wrecked her car, but she wasn’t at the scene?” He needed to hear it again, needed to make sure he had the story straight. He didn’t want to believe it, but if it was true, he needed to.
“Yeah. Sasha thinks you and Kerry have been spending a lot of time together lately.”
“We have. I need to talk to Jeremy.”
“He’s at my place right now, talking to Sasha. Apparently she and Alicia are the closest thing Kerry has around here to family. The police don’t have anyone else to ask, besides them and her co-workers.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell Jeremy not to leave.”
He climbed back into his car, and the scent of the steamed shrimp made him feel nauseated. He drove to Henry’s place, wondering how he could possibly have gone through his day completely oblivious when something terrible had happened to Kerry.
* * * * *
The chair wedged beneath the door handle might as well have been the Great Wall of China. Kerry struggled with it for a second, then another – a lifetime as Brad came at her, flying when he wasn’t stumbling.
His face full of shattered whiskey bottle pieces was horrifying, even to her. Already, he wore his own blood like a mask, his short beard matted to his jaw. The worst part was that she knew he’d get her back a thousand times over if she didn’t get past the fucking chair and out the door.
She bent over, feeling unbearably vulnerable, and seized it by its legs, pulling with all her might.
It came free, taking her by surprise as its momentum threatened to topple her. She twisted, flinging it behind her to compensate.
She heard the heavy wood collide with Brad, but she couldn’t look back, only had eyes for the chain latch as she tore it free with bloody, trembling hands.
When she forced the door open she didn’t know where she was, not even what state she was in. She hadn’t had a chance to look at a clock, but she could see that there were mountains, and that the sun was dipping behind them. She ran out into the dusky, alien place screaming like a banshee.
She didn’t scream for help – she knew better.
“Fire!” She screamed that there was fire, over and over as she ran, taking a flight of stairs three at a time.
Like something out of a horror movie, undead and unstoppable, Brad was right behind her.
* * * * *
Grey sprinted to Henry’s front door. There wasn’t much of a reason to do so, but urgency had ahold of him, making him burn to do something, anything. He ran into Jeremy about six feet past the door, in the living room.
“Whoa.” They both stumbled a little, and while Jeremy braced himself with a hand against the couch, Grey mumbled a halfhearted apology under his breath.
Wolf, Henry’s German Shepherd, jumped up from where he’d been lying on the floorboards but didn’t make a sound. Henry and Sasha sat on the couch together.
“If Kerry never made it to work,” Grey said, “I was the last one to see her. What do you need to know – what can I tell you that’ll help?”
“Hold on just a minute.” Jeremy looked like this was all news to him. “You were with her this morning?”
“I spent the night at her house.”
Sasha made some sort of noise in the background, but Grey barely heard it, couldn’t identify its meaning.
“Okay. I’ll need you to tell me everything about this morning – what she did, what she said, what she was wearing. Normally we’d wait 24 hours to call this a missing persons case, but in light of recent events, plus the fact that she might be injured—”
“How bad was the crash?” Grey tried his best to steel himself. He had to know.
“She hit a ditch, but it could’ve been worse. She was probably driving more slowly than usual because of the rain. The ditch stopped her car, did some damage to the vehicle, but didn’t flip it. As to the extent of any injuries she may have sustained, it’s impossible to say without seeing her.”
Grey nodded as his brow beaded with sweat. “You’re looking for her ex-husband, right? That son of a bitch… She was so afraid of him. Afraid something would happen.”
“Her vehicle was the only one found at the scene of the crash, and there’s no evidence of a hit and run. It looks like she may have hydroplaned.”
Grey’s temper had already been through the wringer today. Now, it snapped. “Then where is she?” He was yelling. “Where the hell is she, if it was just an accident?”
Jeremy’s uniform had started to crease, and as he met Grey’s eyes, the skin around his mouth creased too. “We don’t know where she is.” His frown was deep, and he shook his head. “That’s why I need to talk to you. Come on, down to the station with me. We’ll leave Henry and Sasha in peace.”
Henry stood suddenly, left Sasha alone on the couch. “Grey didn’t have anything to do with her disappearing, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was at work all day, and our shift starts earlier than hers. He was already behind prison walls by the time of the accident. I can vouch for that, and so can Liam and dozens of other officers.”
Jeremy shook his head. “He’s not a suspect in her disappearance. We don’t even have any evidence that she was abducted.” He met Grey’s eyes again. “It’s just that stuff like this is hard to deal with, hard to talk about. And we want to get all the information we can, so we have our best chance of finding her. This might take a while.”
Sasha was crying. Had been for some time. Grey realized that now.
His own eyes were dry, but he’d never wanted to punch something so badly.
Since it wasn’t his house, he kept his fists to himself and followed Jeremy outside.
* * * * *
He’d left Kerry’s house for work at 7:30 am. She’d been planning to leave at 8. She’d been wearing navy blue capri pants and a white blouse. She hadn’t indicated that there’d be anything unusual about her day, but she’d still been nervous about the vandalism and her ex-husband. They were looking for her ex-husband, right?
Grey answered the same questions over and over, kept making it a point to bring up Kerry’s ex. Though Jeremy was patient and thorough with his questions, a part of Grey was terrified that he was the only one who took Kerry’s worries about her ex seriously, that the police weren’t looking for Bradley Sawyer.
Grey clung to the theory and kept shoving it in their faces because he was sure it was what Kerry would want. He and Jeremy were the only ones she’d confided in, and they had to do something. He didn’t know what else he could do, besides make sure that her ex-husband wasn’t forgotten.
“Listen, I hear you,” Jeremy said. “And I want to find her just as badly as you do. No—” He grimaced at the look on Grey’s face “—I do. Believe me, after this summer, I can’t stand the thought of another person being lost on my watch. Especially not her.”
“What are you doing to make it happen?” Frustration broiled inside Grey’s stomach, making him feel sick – too sick and too mad to drink the soda that Jeremy had just brought him.
“I contacted her parents back in Kentucky a few hours ago, asked if they had a picture of her ex. They just got back to us.”
“Did they give you a picture?”
&nb
sp; Jeremy laid what Grey had assumed to be a piece of paperwork on the table.
It was a photograph – a print-out on office paper, slightly grainy. It set Grey’s teeth on edge to look at.
Here was the past Kerry had tried so hard to hide from everyone in her new life. In a white dress, she looked young – unbelievably young. If Grey had seen her on the street, he would’ve assumed she was a child. She didn’t even look 18.
Her dark hair was shorter than it was now and styled in wide curls that made her face look smaller, whiter – almost as pale as her wedding dress. She held onto the arm of a man in a tuxedo – her ex-husband.
He was nearly a foot taller than her and twice as wide. He looked young in the photo, but not nearly as young as her. His hair was sandy and his face was one Grey would’ve liked to punch. As he stared at the print-out, he wished he could step into the picture and tear him away from Kerry, hurt him before he had a chance to hurt her.
“That’s him,” Jeremy said. “About ten years ago, but it’s all we’ve got right now. All our officers are gonna see this picture. We’ll all be looking for him, and for her.”
Grey nodded. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the photograph.
Maybe Jeremy sensed that. He picked up the picture, tucked it away in the folder he’d used to carry it in.
Grey didn’t know what to say now that Jeremy had showed him the photo. Sitting there across the desk from him, it felt like his role in finding her had been pulled out from underneath him like a rug. He should be glad Jeremy was being so proactive and taking Kerry’s fears about her ex seriously. And he was, but at the same time, he felt useless now.
“I’m gonna look for her around the area where she crashed,” Grey said. “There are woods there. Just in case she got hurt and wandered off confused or something.”
It was all he could think of to do, and doing nothing wasn’t an option.
“We already looked,” Jeremy said. “She wasn’t there.”
Grey was about to say he was going to search again anyway when the office door swung inward, creaking a little on its hinges.
Another uniformed officer stood in the doorway. “Conner,” he said, tipping his head toward Jeremy, “you’re gonna want to hear this. We just got a call from the Mercer County Sheriff’s Department.”
Jeremy frowned. “Mercer County? Where’s that?”
“West Virginia. They have that woman – Kerry Harlow.”
* * * * *
“You know, it won’t be any help to Kerry if we don’t make it to her alive,” Grey said as Sasha passed a couple of cars that had to be pushing 80.
Sasha looked away from the road for a second, just long enough to raise one of her eyebrows at him. “It’s eleven o’clock already. I’m not going to let her be alone in a strange place any longer than she has to be.”
They’d spent the first four hours of their trip in the fast lane. Grey was fine with that – he wanted to get there as quickly as possible too. But if someone had to drive like a maniac, he’d rather it be him than Sasha.
At first, they’d argued about who would go to Kerry’s rescue. Jeremy had called Sasha to let her know Kerry had been found almost as soon as he’d told Grey, and Sasha – apparently anticipating Grey’s plans to go rescue her – had immediately called him.
Sasha had been like a dog with a bone: she’d refused to stay home while Grey made the six hour drive to Mercer County, West Virginia. Burning with anger and desperate to see Kerry, who was in the hospital, Grey hadn’t wanted company. But Henry had asked Grey to let Sasha go with him, because Brad Sawyer was still on the loose and Henry had used up all his vacation days and sick time that summer, when he’d been shot and Sasha had been in the hospital, too.
Grey had spent every mile wishing he was alone. A half hour ago, he’d stopped to fill up on gas and had finally given in to Sasha’s constant requests to ‘help’ by taking on some of the driving.
“Want me to turn the radio on?” Sasha asked.
Grey stared out the window at the cars blurring past, the mountains that’d risen up out of the earth as they’d left the coast and the Piedmont area behind, crossing into Appalachia. “Yeah.”
The radio was probably as close to silence as he was going to get. He’d take it.
As they drove farther into the night, he thought of the wedding photograph, of Kerry in her white dress, holding onto the man who’d dragged her across state lines and put her in the hospital.
He didn’t know the whole story yet, just that she’d been taken from the scene of the wreck in Riley County and that she’d been found in a small town along the route to Kentucky, a couple hours away from her old hometown. He didn’t know the details of what Brad had done to her during their marriage, but he knew that it had been bad enough to make her flee. And he could imagine the sort of things that had probably happened. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t stop it. That was the worst part.
CHAPTER 18
Hospital rooms always seemed strange and impersonal, but this one was worse because Kerry knew the place beyond the window was unfamiliar, a strange town she’d woken up in, caught in the throes of a nightmare.
Or, what had seemed like a nightmare at first. She remembered now how she’d managed to sleep for a solid six hours in Brad’s truck after being taken from the scene of the wreck: she hadn’t.
She’d drifted in and out of fuzzy consciousness, had heard his voice once or twice, and let herself think it was all a bad dream. She’d wanted to believe that so badly that she hadn’t even opened her eyes. The truck’s movement had lulled her back into a deep, dragging sleep and she hadn’t had to face the reality of her situation until she’d fully come-to in that motel room.
Her heart sped and her mouth dried out every time she thought about it, even though it was over. She stared at the two police officers at the foot of her bed – a man and a woman, both in black and grey uniforms.
“I don’t know what else I can tell you,” she said, thinking of how the uniforms she saw so often at home were different: dark blue for the prison officers, solid black for the local sheriff’s department. Still, she was glad she wasn’t talking to anyone from Riley County. It was humiliating enough, explaining to strangers what had happened. It would be even worse when her friends and acquaintances found out.
“I’ve told you everything,” she said, taking a drink of water from the Styrofoam cup on her wheeled bedside stand. She used her good hand, the one that wasn’t stitched and bandaged from where she’d picked up a handful of broken glass.
If she had to guess, she’d say she’d hurt herself almost as badly as she’d hurt Brad when she’d done that. It had been worth it, though.
“You’re sure you didn’t see what direction he drove in when he left the motel parking lot?” the female officer asked.
“No. I didn’t even realize he’d gotten in his truck. I was running through the lot beside the motel, then into the parking lot of the liquor store in the next lot over. I had a sort of tunnel vision; I thought he was right behind me the whole time. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything else.”
Apparently the motel Brad had chosen was either too broke or too seedy for a security system. There was no video of him running out of the room, getting into his truck and driving away. There was no video of anything until Kerry appeared, alone, on the liquor store’s security footage.
A knock came at the door. It was a nurse, and she wasn’t alone.
“You have visitors.”
When Grey and Sasha stepped out from behind the nurse and into the room, Kerry’s heart skipped a beat, and her mouth went dry all over again.
For a small eternity, she just stared. An officer had told her a friend would be coming, but they hadn’t said when or who. Without her phone, Kerry hadn’t been able to easily call or text her friends, whose numbers she’d never memorized. She hadn’t expected two people, or for them to get there that soon. It was one o’clock in the morning.
It
was Sasha who rushed to the side of her bed first, her blonde hair streaming behind her. “Kerry! Oh my God, are you okay?”
Grey was behind her, but he hung back a little. He stood with his arms crossed, his jaw tight, looking tired and angrier than she’d ever seen him.
Something inside her shriveled up at the sight of his expression, shrinking beneath the weight of shame and fear. Shame that he’d seen her like this, that he now knew just what kind of price she was paying for her past mistakes. And fear that he’d start to see her as she saw herself: as someone who’d irreparably damaged her life with bad decisions, someone who couldn’t shake her past.
Lately, thanks to Grey, she’d started to see herself differently, but it was hard to feel anything other than pathetic sitting there in a strange hospital bed like some sort of half-mummy, with her head, one hand and part of an arm wrapped in bandages. Not because she’d been in an accident, but because she’d been deliberately hurt by someone she’d once been stupid enough to marry.
And it wasn’t like Brad was behind bars now and she could just start over. He was God knew where by now and despite having hit her head in the car crash, she was keenly aware that no one had witnessed what he’d done to her – the kidnapping, or the blows.
The person who’d rented out the motel room to him had positively identified him from a photo, but even if he was caught, there’d only be Kerry’s word against his.
“I’m fine,” Kerry said as Sasha squeezed her good hand. “Thanks so much for coming. I can’t believe you two drove all this way.” They were far from the North Carolina coast – Brad had made it to within a couple hours of Kentucky before stopping.
Sasha tossed her hair, making a sound of disgust. “You really thought that after finding out that you’d been in a car wreck and abducted, we weren’t going to come?”