by Platt, Sean
He wasn’t sure what to say.
After a long silence she said, “They were religious, you know?”
“Who? Randy and Stacy?”
“Yeah, he forced me to read the Bible every morning. Said I was infected by the devil because I made him lust after me. It was my fault. I wasn’t godly enough.”
Again, the man didn’t know what to say. He looked over at the girl. Her eyes were still closed, though he could see her cheeks were wet with tears. She also seemed to be chewing the inside of her cheek.
Finally, the man found words.
“You know he was full of shit, right?”
The girl laughed, just slightly, and wiped at her nose. For the second time this morning, he found himself wanting to hug her tightly.
“Yeah,” she said, “besides, if I were infected by the devil, I would have killed him a long time ago.”
Further silence stretched between them. The TV’s din continued to ramble.
“But you took care of that for me. You, the angel who doesn’t believe in God.”
He let out a dry laugh. The sound bounced an alien echo against the dark motel room walls. Then their laughter mingled, and he discovered that he liked the sound of her giggle — raspy yet pleasant. Exactly like a child’s laugh should be.
“I’m not a real angel, you know?”
“I know,” she said, “I saw.”
“That I don’t have wings?”
“No, when we touched. I saw in your head.”
The man shot up from the mattress as if it carried a current. She flinched, her eyes flicking open, still wet with tears.
She’d seen inside his mind, just as he’d seen inside hers.
What did she see?
Oh, God, maybe she can help me remember!
The amnesiac tempered his mounting excitement. He couldn’t afford to scare her. He grabbed the edge of his mattress, a silent gesture promising he wouldn’t leap from the bed. She relaxed and sat up.
Their eyes met.
“What did you see?”
“I couldn’t make it all out,” she said, “but you were afraid of something. Very afraid.”
“Was it the coffin I was buried in?”
“No, I didn’t see that. There was something else, a woman. You loved her very much. You were holding hands at the beach, and you told her you’d never forget that moment.”
He stared at Abigail, helpless, wanting to draw deeper from her well, desperate to see what she’d seen. He remembered nothing, let alone a woman he loved.
“She loves you too.” She shook her right foot while speaking, her toes dangling inches above the carpet between their beds.
Her movement sent a current between them. Everything slowed. The TV flickered, each frame seeming to pause before lurching forward like a warped record spinning slowly.
The amnesiac had no hope of stopping whatever was about to happen.
Abigail moved forward, her bare feet hitting the carpet, inching closer to his scuffed leather boots. He looked up and saw her eyes staring straight at him. She slowly raised her hands and reached toward his face.
He tried to pull away but was paralyzed by the same unseen force controlling Abigail’s movements.
The air pulsated in visible waves of purple light surrounding her hands. He stared at them in awe and felt the rhythm writhe through his skin and burrow deep into his marrow. Abigail held out her hand, palm open, fingers splayed just inches from his face. Blue arcs of spiderweb-thin threads of light danced at her fingertips like icy fire, illuminating her face in a ghostly glow.
His body shook, his heart pounded, he wanted to cry “No,” but nothing beyond a cold gasp could flee the prison of his closing throat.
Her hand inched closer to his face. Sparks jumped from her fingers to the tiny hairs on his cheek. Any second now, they’d be locked in that deadly embrace until he robbed her of life, helplessly feeding like a parasite until she was an empty, smoldering husk.
He could only watch, her palm moving impossibly close to his face, just centimeters from his forehead.
His ears, head, and soul all pulsed. Abigail’s palm seemed to shoot a surge of arctic energy, sharp as a dagger, straight into his head, instantly freezing him.
The room went instantly black, replaced a half second later with a slow-to-focus image.
He was standing on a beach, staring at his love. A flood of tears as he whispered, “Oh my God.”
He reached out to touch the memory but couldn’t.
His body was frozen.
The amnesiac stared at her.
Christ, she’s like a painting.
Emerald eyes, dark auburn hair, lips that curled ever so slightly into a wry smile, familiar as it was heart-melting.
“Hope,” he called out in the duality of now and then.
She moved closer, whispered in his ear. “Promise, you’ll remember this day always?”
“Always.” He glanced around, soaking in the image. The setting sun, the cool ocean breeze whipping through her hair. The soft feel of her hands in his. He wanted to die right there in that moment so he could experience it for an eternity.
She looked at him with that familiar smile, those eyes that knew him like no other, and spoke again.
“Don’t say it unless you mean it, John.”
John!
His eyes shot open, and the bright sun over the horizon blinked away. Heaven was replaced by the claustrophobic motel room’s darkened reality. He stared at Abigail, standing before him, hands now dangling at her side.
“Did you see?” she asked, now crying openly but otherwise unharmed by the exchange.
“Yes,” John cried, too. “Thank you.”
Six
Caleb
7:14 p.m.
Caleb slipped back in the seat aboard his team’s mobile command unit, a forty-foot vehicle stationed two blocks from the crime scene. His right leg was needles and nerves; his left, the recipient of a bouncing pencil.
He sat stone-faced, staring at the bank of monitors flickering with more than a dozen local and national reporters updating viewers with wafers of information on the murders and a missing child for whom they had no name.
For all the coverage, there had been precious little news since that morning. The case was already cold, well on its way to ice.
After darting his eyes around the cabin to make sure no one was watching, Caleb reached into his jacket, retrieved a bottle of Oxycontin, popped three in his mouth, and peered inside the bottle.
Five left. Fuck.
Caleb perked his ears toward the back of the truck, trying to untangle the sounds, separating the various agents, each on the phone with their sources, trying to mine nuggets of information from a barren shaft. He’d already spent five hours on the phone blistering the ears of every local agency in a vain attempt to light fires under their asses.
The murderer’s face shot across network feeds on the monitors like an America’s Most Wanted version of dominoes. Caleb squeezed his eyes and fished in his other pocket for his personal cell. Eyes still closed, his fingers danced across the keys in a well-rehearsed routine they’d performed several times a day for the past three years.
He held the phone to his ear, waited for the mechanized direction, then hit 1, then 1 again and waited.
Same as always, the first note of her voice sent an ice slick down his spine.
“Hi, honey, I’m running late. Carol and I stopped for coffee. Let me know if you want me to bring you anything. Oh, who am I kidding, you’re probably still at work. I love you. See you around eight — if you’re home. Bye.”
His heart shattered at the tiny laugh before, “If you’re home,” same as always.
Such a routine message, one of hundreds over the movement of their marriage, which were routinely listened to, sometimes fast forwarded through, and then deleted. As hard as it was for Caleb to believe, this message was the sole survivor. His lone recording of a voice that would never vibrate again.
With the bottomless sorrow that follows regret, Caleb thought of the countless messages, vanished like the call of a bird flown to another sky.
He’d seen her the night of those final words, but he had come home too late. She was asleep. His mind burned at the memories of all the times he’d ignored her, putting work before her. How he wished he could rewind time and go home to spend a few more hours together.
Two days later, she’d be dead.
Heavy eyelids still draped the pupils that would’ve been wet if he’d had any tears left to cry. Sadness had eroded to something numb over time. Nowadays, he felt little at all.
He turned his phone off, returned it to his pocket, and was about to reach for the pills again when he heard someone coming: Agent Luis Alvarez.
“Cops in Westchester found the car,” Alvarez said.
Caleb shot to attention — Alvarez had the look of a man about to bear bad news.
“What?”
“Cop on the scene broke protocol,” Alvarez said. “He approached the car on his own. And then shit hit the fan.”
Caleb’s eyes narrowed to two even slits. In a harsh whisper, he said, “What the fuck?”
Seven
John
6:42 p.m.
A half hour earlier
John rose from his sleep to the smell of soap and the bottled sound of television. Abigail sat on the other bed, knees folded to her chest, hair wet, wearing one of the dead woman’s black long-sleeve shirts.
Silent, Abigail pointed to the screen.
His image was plastered on the screen over the word SUSPECT. Beside it, a photograph of the girl with the word MISSING in bold letters, sheet white.
“They think you took me.”
John could only stare.
The inevitable was unfolding before him. John’s eyes followed the reporter, running his hand through his hair as the reporter broadcast their vehicle’s make and model, the license plate number like a cherry on top. “Requesting that anyone with information call 1-800-93 … ”
The car!
John jumped from bed and ran to the drawn curtains.
“Is it still light out?”
“Yeah,” Abigail said. “I just looked outside to see if any cops were here.”
He glanced at the clock on the TV’s cable box: 6:42 p.m. John wasn’t sure how he knew, but figured he probably had another twenty minutes before nightfall.
“Can you drive?” he asked.
Eight
Abigail
Abigail tried to cloak her fear, but a hammering heart and quivering limbs gave lie to the guise as she stepped from the motel room’s safety into a smeared tangerine sunset.
Clad in an hooded indigo jacket draping down nearly to her knees, Abigail hoped to adopt the look of a wee woman on her way to the car.
Nothing to see here, folks, no siree.
A simple request from John, to move the car. But he may as well have asked her to initiate a space shuttle launch. She’d never driven before and hadn’t been a willing passenger since before her parents died, back when she was seven, memories of driving with her father hazy enough to make Abigail wonder if they were of her own invention.
Yet when John requested she move the car, she’d agreed without a flinch. What else could she say? She had to be brave for the angel who saved her from the monster’s closet. Before she left the motel room, John explained the basics of driving a car, which she committed to memory and wrote down on a piece of motel stationery — just in case.
The parking lot was fuller than it had been when they arrived in the morning. That was probably a good thing. She was far less likely to be recognized among others. But it also increased the odds that she’d run into someone who had seen the news of her “abduction.”
Whatever happened, she didn’t want to fall into the hands of the authorities or anyone assigned to protect her interests. Previous failures had already left her with plenty of scars that had no hopes of healing.
How could a child drop off the radar these days? How could she be pulled from school, sold to someone, locked in a dungeon, and held prisoner for three years without anybody noticing?
The agencies designed to protect her had failed, and Abigail would never trust them again.
She felt safe with John. Safer than she’d felt in years, even though she knew a brush from his skin could kill her just as it had done to Randy and Stacy. Abigail wasn’t sure why she trusted John so much. Maybe because she’d dreamed of him — or an angel that looked like him — saving her.
Or maybe it was something else.
Something happened when they touched, something reason couldn’t explain. A bridge had connected them. Though it hardly seemed possible, Abigail felt as if she’d known John a lifetime already. She seen only glimpses of his memories, but it was enough to trust him. He would protect her no matter what.
And she would do the same for him.
As Abigail neared their vehicle, parked about ninety yards from their room, a family of four spilled out from a dusty minivan.
A boy and girl, both younger than six, first looked at her with passing glances before they locked their glimpses into stares. Their mother, a heavyset woman with a skittish expression, also stared. Then the woman rushed the kids to grab their stuff and slid the minivan’s door closed. She stole a second glance at Abigail, but Abigail broke the stare, pointed her nose at the concrete, and kept walking toward the car.
She thought the woman was still looking at her, maybe wondering, Is that her?
Abigail’s heartbeat raced through the forever it took to reach the stolen car. She considered passing it, suddenly certain the family recognized her as The Missing Child, and was now scrutinizing her every move. But she reached the car’s bumper, turned right, opened the car door, and climbed inside.
She slid into the front seat, craned her neck, glanced in the rearview, and saw that the family wasn’t watching her after all. They were walking toward their room.
Abigail exhaled a bottomless breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
She retrieved the instructions from her pocket and read. Then she reached down and pulled the seat up as far as it would go, leaned close to the wheel, stretching her bare feet down to a gas pedal that felt half-frozen against her foot. She inserted the key into the ignition, whispered a silent prayer to a God she knew had long ago stopped listening (if He had ever lent an ear at all), and turned the key as her heart fell to the bottom of her chest.
The car lurched backward before her foot found the brake, then stopped with a sharp shudder and threw her like a rag doll against the cracked leather seat.
Her eyes flitted across the windshield, trying to determine if she’d gathered attention, but the parking lot was momentarily empty of people. She slowly backed up before sliding the car into drive, and the vehicle jerked toward the busy four lane road.
The street was surprisingly busy, and the cars seemed to be driving so fast. She waited for a lull in traffic, praying no one would idle behind her in the parking lot, or worse, that a cop would drive past.
She spotted a break in traffic, just enough to get out quickly and make a sharp right.
Turning the wheel rapidly in her hands, Abigail misjudged her speed ,and the car veered violently onto the road, sweeping into oncoming traffic.
She looked up in time to see a red truck barreling toward her in the same lane.
Abigail was helpless, spinning the steering wheel faster until the car corrected, then overcorrected, bouncing up on the sidewalk then back to the road with a thud. A horn blasted as the red truck jerked left and into the far lane, missing her by barely a breath.
Once in the correct lane, Abigail slowed the car to a crawl. Adrenaline tasted like copper on h
er tongue. Her stomach churned. She was supposed to leave the car in a shopping center, barely a block away, with nothing between it and her beyond a gas station. She’d turn right, park the car, and run back to the motel as fast as she could.
Abigail passed the station and heard the unmistakable sound of a siren. She looked up and saw the flash of the cop car’s light bar.
She froze, her foot still on the pedal, driving slowly, hoping the cop was only wanting her to clear the way so he could chase someone else.
But the siren blurted in a hiccup, followed by a man’s voice crackling gravel through a speaker.
“Pull over.”
Nine
John
John raced around the room, tossing their scant belongings into the two suitcases they’d stolen from the house. They would leave the second the sun’s light had left the horizon. They’d have to find a new car, of course. How they’d do that, John had no idea. He may not have known who he was, but he was fairly certain his latent memories didn’t include the ability to hotwire cars.
They’d also need to swap plates from another car. He hoped that would keep them off the radar until he could figure out how to secure another vehicle. He scanned the room, hoping to see a knife or something he could use as a screwdriver to remove the plates.
Finding nothing, John collapsed on the bed, acutely aware that his looming fate now rested in the tiny hands of a little girl.
Abigail had agreed to moving the car without blinking, though he knew she had zero driving experience. Still, John figured, it wasn’t too hard to drive a few thousand feet. One of the things he could remember was how to drive, though not of what kind of car he drove, if any. Driving seemed easy enough that a kid could do it. Parking, on the other hand, could present a problem. He imagined her crashing the car and inviting the attention of nearby police.