A Person Could Disappear Here

by Terri George

They weren’t a sister’s. Jensen told me he was an only child.

  So how many other explanations could there be?

  I tried to block it from my mind, the realisation too terrifying to even contemplate, but truth will out and this one demanded to be known. It slammed into me, knocking the air from my lungs.

  I am not the first.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  CRISTINA

  It would be bad enough being a long-distance lorry driver at home, but here? According to the result of my Google search, it’s five-hundred and fifty miles from England’s south-westerly tip at Land’s End to its north-easterly point at Berwick-upon-Tweed. That’s as near as damn it the same as from Harrison at its north-west edge to Falls City in the south-east corner of Nebraska. And Nebraska’s not even one of the big states.

  Blimey, I couldn’t be a long-haul trucker, driving up to three-thousand miles over an eight-day week for around the same salary an administrator gets paid for sitting on his or her arse in an office. Bloody hell, that means, whether it’s from Seattle to Miami or San Diego to Lubec in Maine, a truck driver could, in theory, traverse the entire length of America in nine days. I can’t think of a worst way to earn a living. I’d go completely off my rocker with boredom.

  All I seem to have done since we got here is stare at the rear end of the car, SUV, truck or whatever’s in front, driving the American equivalent of our motorways. That’s when I’m not criss-crossing the streets, roads and dirt tracks of the towns along our route across western Nebraska searching for a red convertible.

  It’s just so mind-numbingly tedious: the constant drone of the engine, the same songs over and over from the limited number of CDs I bought at the rest stop back on the first day, the endless billboards. But it will all be worth it when we find Abbey. I believe many things, but not that our fortunes are at the mercy of fate. Still I won’t tempt it by thinking ‘if’, much less say it. We will find her.

  The question is, when?

  It’s been three days since I gave Shari those photos and Abbey’s video, but we’ve heard nothing. I know she said it would be a while, but how long much longer is it going to take to check through the records for a list of red convertible owners in western Nebraska? Or for her friend in the Omaha PD’s crime lab to enhance the photos?

  Alessandro says I’m being my usual impatient self, but I was so encouraged that we finally had someone in law enforcement helping us. I thought we’d get somewhere, get some sort of clue that would lead us to Jensen and where he has Abbey held. Instead it’s just been three days of what we’ve been doing since we got here. Driving from town to town and up and down streets peering at driveways.

  “Have you thought his car might not be parked outside his house when we drive past? He could be out somewhere. Or he might park it in the garage.”

  Yes, the thought had occurred, but I’ve been trying to ignore it, because that would mean everything we’ve done so far was a complete waste of time. “Not really helping.”

  “Just stating a fact, sis. Maybe we should have gone north when we crossed the border rather than east. Abbey’s obviously up that way so we would have found her quicker.”

  “Yeah well, everything’s always in the last place you look.”

  “That’s because you stop looking when you find it.”

  Alessandro can be so literal sometimes. “True, but that’s not really what that saying means, smartarse.”

  I know Shari said publicising Abbey’s disappearance could be counterproductive, in a way I don’t even want to think about, but I can’t help feeling we could be, should be, doing more. We could talk to people in each town we come to. Show them Abbey’s photo. Ask if they’ve seen her. But then why would they have? Whoever the house Jensen has taken her to belongs to or where it is, it’s unlikely he would have stopped anywhere public on the way. He wouldn’t risk them being seen together in Nebraska. Not with what he was planning to do.

  What I still don’t understand is why he’s doing this. And why he picked Abbey.

  He doesn’t seem the type. Doesn’t fit the profile.

  If you believe his Facebook timeline, Jensen isn’t short of female company. Reading some of the comments, there are plenty of American girls gagging to have sex with him. They’re not exactly coy about it. So why would he need to trap a girl in some remote spot and hold her captive? And why pick a British girl when there are so many home-grown ones only too willing to spend time in his bed?

  Although there is something not quite right about his timeline.

  Most of his posts are bragging about stuff in his swanky apartment, because obviously a person’s worth is judged by how much crap they own. Especially when it’s expensive crap like his ludicrous eighty-eight-inch TV, a flashy watch that cost five figures, his fridge filled with craft beer he has delivered because they don’t sell it in the supermarket, and his iPhone Xs, because a bog-standard iPhone like everyone else has isn’t good enough for him. Superficial crap, nothing really personal, which makes me wonder what he’s trying to hide.

  Selfies of him dressed up before going to a club or in snugly fitting Ralph Lauren boxer briefs are always taken in a mirror with the phone positioned so most of his face is obscured. Photos in nightclubs are always of his surroundings, bottles of Cristal or cocktails, never of him or the friends or girl he claims to be with.

  He wouldn’t be the first to create an online alter-ego. Is his Facebook persona just a fantasy? Oh, he definitely has a drool-worthy body and he obviously has money, (although he never lets on how he makes it) but maybe he’s not the social butterfly with an ‘in’ to every party he makes himself out to be. He may have a ton of female followers on Facebook, but what about real life? Do all those sexual conquests he alludes to happen only in his imagination?

  And then there’s his FB name: Double-J. I thought Facebook cracked down and made people use their real name, first and last – or at least something that sounds real.

  In reality, is he just a sad billy-no-mates who surrounds himself with expensive stuff to make him feel better about his life? A bloke who has to lure a girl thousands of miles just to get lucky?

  Even though kidnappers abuse their victims, physically and sexually, abduction isn’t about sex, just as rape isn’t. Snatching victims off the streets or luring them into a web of lies so they come willingly, abduction is about power and control. Exerting influence over another person. Driven by their need to hold total dominance over another, abductors become skilled in the art of manipulation. Their most monstrous abuse is psychological.

  Does Jensen’s online narcissism mask a social impotence, an inability to form and maintain normal relationships with the opposite sex?

  According to the many articles I found online, abductors were often victims of abuse themselves. Never having gained or having lost a sense of control growing up, they seek to exert it over others in adulthood, and so become no better than those who abused them. Just as the daughter who grows up equating a slap with love often ends up with a man equally as violent as her father. The son of a bullying philandering father who grows up to have the same sense of entitlement, just as misogynistic, seeing women as nothing more than things put on this earth purely to gratify his sexual needs, things to be used, abused and discarded. Or the child of an alcoholic who becomes a drunkard. Their childhoods coming full circle.

  I don’t know Jensen’s real identity. All I know of him is what I see online and who’s to say how much truth there is in that. So I’ve no way of knowing what his childhood was like, or if he was a victim of any kind of abuse as a boy. Not that this would excuse anything, but it might go some way to explain it.

  I’m shaken out of my musings by the bleeping of my phone indicating an incoming text. The turn off is coming up and I’m busy checking traffic before pulling over into the inside lane so Alessandro opens it.

  “Is it from Shari?”

  “Uh huh,” Alessandro mumbles, staring at the screen as he scrolls.

 
; “Well don’t just sit there reading it in your head. What does she say? Is it good news? Has she found out anything about Jensen?”

  “No.”

  “No it’s not good news? Or no she hasn’t found out anything?” Which, in and of itself, isn’t good news.

  “No she hasn’t found out who he is yet.”

  Now I’m off the interstate I’d pull over and read the text myself, but by attention is very much on the car behind that’s irritatingly right up my exhaust. Seriously, my gynaecologist doesn’t get that close. I’d open the window and wave him past, but I can’t be sure he’d see it as the recognised signal it is back home and wouldn’t misinterpret it as something rude. The last thing I want is to spark a road rage incident, especially here where the world and his bloody wife carry guns. The vision I have in my head of how my life will end is at a ridiculously old age, peacefully in my sleep, surrounded by my kids, grand and great-grandchildren. Not at twenty-five, in a bloody mess, slumped in the seat of a rental car.

  “Jesus, Al, just read the text out loud. Or at least tell me the gist.”

  “She’s still going through the list of convertible owners in western Nebraska and in and around Denver. No luck yet.”

  Damn. “What about the photos and video?”

  “She says her friend has enhanced them, plus other photos she copied from his Facebook timeline. Shari’s got electronic copies and is going through them looking for clues as to where they were taken.”

  “Does she sound hopeful of finding some?”

  “Yeah. She says there are ‘lots of shiny surfaces which could glean reflected images that could pinpoint the location of his apartment’.”

  So it is good news then. Well, sort of. If Shari can find out where the apartment is, she can find out who he is. She’d be allowed access to all sorts of official records I couldn’t hope to get into. Not unless I got Nathan to hack into them, but getting into Abbey’s Facebook account was one thing, I really couldn’t ask him to do that. What is the penalty for hacking over here, lock you up and throw away the key?

  “She says once she knows that, she’ll be able to ID him, then things will happen pretty fast, so we need to be ready.”

  If you see enough of something, nothing but it, you get sick of it. Even if you started out loving it.

  I love France. I mean seriously, let me count the ways. The art. The architecture. The food: the French and Italians are kindred spirits when it comes to food. The wine: the freshness of a Sancerre, like just mown grass and gooseberries, or the elegance of Pouilly-Fumé. So Abbey and me spending a week in the Loire valley a couple of years ago was a no-brainer.

  I remember there was a major boules championship in the area and everywhere decent was booked up. I suppose boules is the French version of our crown green bowling only they play it in town squares and parks on flattened earth rather than pristine greens of crew-cut grass. Played by all ages with metal balls, it’s rowdy and passionate (much like the French) rather than the sedate English game played by mature women in white pleated skirts and older men in white trousers.

  Anyway, you couldn’t get a hotel room for love nor money, so we ended up staying at a small place in Montbazon. I don’t know what you’d call it. It wasn’t a hotel or even a B&B. It was more like a restaurant with a handful of rooms upstairs. Our room wasn’t anything to write home about, just somewhere to sleep. It overlooked the brick and concrete back yard, empty except for large metal waste bins, but we didn’t care. The food more than made up for the lack of view.

  Oh, the food. A perfect egg of avocado mousse, shaped with two wetted spoons and placed carefully in the centre of an unsullied white china plate, a simple band of gold around its edge, followed by chicken chasseur with fluffy mashed potatoes. Then dessert. It’s miraculous what can result when you combine milk, eggs and sugar in just the right way. Crème brûlée, baked in the oven, sprinkled with sugar and blasted with a blowtorch. Delicious decadence in a ramekin. Slippery smooth crème caramel. Or the îles flottantes I had: frothy meringue floating in a sea of crème Anglaise.

  Oh, I shouldn’t think about food. It’s making me hungry.

  But even more than the famous wine and fabulous food, what the Loire valley has in abundance are châteaux.

  We have shed-loads of stately homes like Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard or the real-life Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, but there’s something about the grey-roofed, moated, white stone confections of the Loire valley. With their rigid planting in parterre gardens of boxed hedge and artful topiary, they’re every fairy tale castle come to life. You almost expect Rapunzel to let down her hair from an uppermost window. Well you would if she weren’t German.

  During the renaissance, French royalty and the nobility spent most of their time away from the ancient capital in the splendours of the Loire valley. In their châteaux. Hundreds of them. We didn’t of course, but in those few days it felt like we’d seen them all. As beautiful as they were, to be honest, if I never see another French castle it will be too soon. I was châteauxed-out.

  Which is sort of how I feel now. Only right now it’s not castles I’m sick of looking at. It’s boxes. Little boxes. Just like the ones in the theme song to that television programme on Netflix about a woman growing weed to pay the bills after her husband dies. It’s an American show but I’m pretty sure they got the idea from a British film with the same premise. I forget what that was called though.

  Little boxes. A blue one. A green one. There’s no pink one on this street, but it doesn’t matter what colour they are. Weather-boarded (or is it what Americans call aluminum siding?) with a square of lawn out the front they are all the same. But days of driving up and down streets staring at little boxes just might be about to pay off.

  A little kid, five, maybe six, his sneakered feet drawing circles in the air, cycles up and down the pavement. A man hauls a sack of barbecue charcoal from the pickup in his drive. He calls to the boy again not to go too far.

  The boy on the bike stares at us as he coasts past for a third time, probably wondering why that woman and man are parked in their car at the kerb opposite, looking at the cream-coloured house. The one with the red convertible parked in the drive.

  It’s not a BMW, but still. It’s the first red convertible we’ve seen since we started our search. Yes, I know. I’m clutching at straws.

  The sprinkler system in the front garden of the house we’re parked outside turns on; little rainbows of sunlight caught in the droplets.

  A UPS van parks two doors up. The brown-clad driver carries a large cardboard box with a red-ringed red dot logo on the side up the path, puts it on the doorstep and knocks on the door. Not having bothered to wait for an answer, he’s already climbing back into his van by the time the home owner retrieves her package.

  The man calls the boy inside, and all is still. Just another sunny morning in prefabricated paradise. No one would ever imagine the horrors that could be happening right next door. Things like that don’t happen in their neighbourhood. But the horrifying truth is, they do, and they could be happening right now in the house across the road.

  “We could go and knock on the door.”

  “And say what?”

  “I don’t know. You’d think of something.”

  “I’m flattered by your confidence in my ability to think on my feet, but I’m all out of ideas.”

  “So are you going to call Shari?”

  Oh, how much do I want to make that call and say those three little words that would change everything: we found him, but common sense kicks in. Knowing how they react over here we can’t have half of the Nebraska law enforcement swarming this quiet suburban street, surrounding the house, guns cocked and ready. How bad would that be if it turned out to be a false alarm? Can you imagine how terrified the innocent people inside the house would be?

  “Not yet. Better wait and be sure first.”

  Parking right outside the house was too risky, but (as rubbish as I am at judging dista
nces) from across the street I reckon the house is a good fifty maybe seventy feet away, so it’s impossible to see anything through the windows with any clarity. Despite the sun shining and the house having several windows it looks dark inside.

  There’s movement in what I assume is the living room. I can just make out the girl as she passes the window. She has shoulder length brown hair, like Abbey. And doesn’t Abbey have a tee shirt like that?

  Just as I’m willing my brain to think up something to say, an excuse to knock on the front door, it opens, and a fair-haired bloke comes out of the house. He pretty much looks like everything I think of when I imagine a twenty-something all-American male: grey tee shirt with “Nebraska Football” written in red on the front, grey knee-length baggy sweat shorts and red trainers.

  A moment after he gets in the car the soft-top lowers.

  He honks the horn; a long, irritated blast.

  The girl I’d glimpsed through the window leaves the house; hair now up in a high-top ponytail that sways as she walks to the car.

  “Okay, okay. Impatient much?”

  Hope deflates faster than a popped balloon.

  She isn’t Abbey.

  I watch as they drive past, some country song playing on the radio, then start the car.

  So, we must keep looking. More streets. More little boxes. More driveways.

  Life is a fickle bitch. She enjoys throwing us those proverbial lemons to see if we’ll juice them. On the other hand, she sometimes makes up for it, mercifully handing us renewed hope.

  About an hour later my phone buzzes. Something stirs inside me; a simmering anticipation pressing against my diaphragm inhibiting each intake and exhale of breath when Alessandro reads out Shari’s text:

  I know the address of his apartment in Denver.

  We are getting close. One step away from knowing everything.

  From his address Shari will get his name. From that she will find out all there is to know about him. And that will lead us to Abbey.