The One That Got Away

by Joe Clifford

  “Cousins,” Linda muttered.

  Alex pounded the shot, followed with a chaser, and bolted for the door. From the corner of her eye, she saw Mikey try to stand and Tommy plant a big bear claw, keeping him in place.

  In the cold parking lot, the whiskey and beer hit at once, eyes momentarily unable to focus, ears ringing, ground shaky beneath her feet. She scoured her surroundings trying to remember where she’d parked her car.

  “Don’t mind Mikey,” Linda said, coming up behind. “He’s a dumb shit.”

  Alex waited for the rest of an apology she knew wasn’t coming. Linda had never been good with words. The harder her cousin tried to think, the more confused she looked. Then again, she had a point. What was Alex doing up here? Still seeking cues from the Universe?

  “You all right?” Linda asked.

  “I’m fine.” Alex spotted her Civic. “I should get going.”

  “You just got here,” Linda said, feigning enthusiasm. Alex knew her cousin would be glad to see her leave, but blood dictated she at least make the effort. “Come on, I haven’t seen you in, like, what? Four years? You haven’t made a dent in your beer. Is it Nick and Mikey? I’ll have Tommy tell them to take a hike.”

  “I couldn’t care less about those two. Been a weird day, weird night. Weird life.” Times like this Alex could use a friend but it had been a while since she could call Linda that. It had been a while since she could call anyone that. “Don’t pretend you’re happy to see me.”

  Her cousin huffed, wriggling her fat fists into tight jean pockets. “Why did you come back? You hate this place. No way you’re relocating for a job.”

  “A reporter called me. For an interview.”

  Took a second to click. “Because of what happened? Back with Parsons?”

  Linda wrenched free a bright pink hand, holding it out for a smoke.

  Alex passed along a lit Parliament. “Anyone got anything?”

  “Up? Down?”

  “Weed? Something to take the edge off?” At this point, Alex would take anywhere but sober.

  Linda nodded back at the bar. “Come inside. Let me ask around. You know the Fireside. Someone’s always holding something.”

  Alex considered the likelihood that any of those frat boys had anything worthwhile, and more importantly what she’d have to do to get it, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. “I think I’m going to hit the road. Got a long drive.”

  Linda tried to act disappointed. Unable to hide the relief, she reached in for an awkward embrace. “Don’t stay away so long next time, okay?”

  Over Linda’s shoulder, a man exited the bar. He brushed up the sidewalk, close enough for Alex to catch a glimpse of his face, before angling through the parking lot to his truck, where he stopped, turned around, and stared right at her. A chill cut to the marrow. It was the same man who’d come to her motel room earlier, the one claiming to have turned off headlights that hadn’t been on.

  Alex disentangled from Linda, motioning at the man, who’d already climbed into his cab. “You recognize that guy?”

  Her cousin squinted. “I think that’s Dan Brudzienski. Benny Brudzienski’s younger brother. Remember him? Retard that killed Kira Shanks? Or it might be the other one, the middle brother, Wren.”

  Alex had taken a step toward the truck when the Fireside doors burst open, sounds of celebration erupting. At the mouth of the bar, Tommy dragged Nick Graves by the scruff of his neck, his buddy, Mikey, running alongside, trying to break them up, onlookers egging them on. With all the effort of taking out the trash, Tommy flung the smaller man into the dirt lining the walkway. Nick scrambled to his feet, lowering his head and charging to pile drive, but Tommy swatted him back down.

  Tommy dropped to a knee and pressed Nick’s head into the pebbled sidewalk, his beet-red face turning redder. Nick squirmed, sputtered, arms flailing wild. Sweet, good-natured Tommy who’d sooner trap a mouse under a salad bowl before breaking its neck. Alex had never seen him riled like that.

  Mikey pulled at Tommy’s arm, shouting for him to stop, Nick couldn’t breathe, but Tommy was too big to budge. Mikey kept grappling, tugging Tommy’s shirt, which earned an elbow to the gut. Mikey doubled up, gasping for air.

  By now Linda had hoofed over, demanding Tommy let Nick go. Tommy wasn’t letting go. The cheering crowd grew in size. The Fireside wasn’t a sports bar anymore. This was a return to the old days when nights ended with black eyes and broken bones, a gash in somebody’s head, a pair of drunk and disorderlies stuffed in the back seat of a cruiser.

  In the darkness behind them, a truck sped out of the gravel lot, kicking up dust in the moonlight.

  When Alex turned around the barman had managed to break up the fight. Linda had hold of Tommy, whose head drooped in shame, a misbehaving mutt caught peeing on the rug. Nick and Mikey limped off in defeat in the other direction. Nick glanced back, blood smeared across his battered face.

  “What were you thinking?” Linda said to Tommy. “What would your PO say?”

  Parole officer?

  Tommy didn’t offer an excuse, no matter how much Linda badgered him. Not that you needed a reason to get into it if you were that loaded. Alex had seen fights break out at the Rat and Raven, the bar she tended in the city, over nothing more than dirty looks and misunderstood song lyrics.

  Alex snuck off. There wasn’t anything worse than getting stuck in the middle of a couple fighting, especially when alcohol was involved.

  Even after Alex got in her car and shut the door, she could still hear her cousin berating Tommy in the parking lot. What happened to make him flip out like that?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alex got back to the Royal Motel a little after two. The lobby door was locked but a fuzzy gray light flickered around the corner. She tapped her key card off the glass door until the night clerk popped his head out. Acting irritated, he didn’t look like he’d been sleeping. He cracked open the door.

  “I need to use the computer.”

  He turned over his shoulder, toward the desktop sitting atop the small table. “You can’t. I mean, it’s for daytime use only.”

  “Why?”

  The clerk hadn’t thought that one through. When he couldn’t come up with an adequate response, he let Alex in.

  Settling in the folding metal chair, she wiggled the mouse until the screen fizzled to life.

  “Hey,” Alex called out. “I need a password or something?” The clerk didn’t respond. She muttered “asshole” under her breath as she opened a search engine, typing with one finger. Was that one of Benny Brudzienski’s brothers at the Fireside tonight? Linda thought so. Why would Dan or Wren Brudzienski be following her? She didn’t know much about the two brothers or the rest of the Brudzienski clan, other than what you learn about any family in a small town.

  The Brudzienskis owned a large farm on the outskirts, which they inherited after their folks died. The family liked their privacy. Even when Mom and Dad were alive, you rarely saw the whole brood together, probably due to Benny’s condition. Considering the circumstances surrounding Alex’s return, what were the odds he’d picked her motel room at random? Less. None. Maybe she just had the misfortune of coincidence in a small town where people liked to drink. No, the timing was strange. Then again, what hadn’t been strange since she’d been back? It was two in the morning and she was sitting at the Royal Motel, a roadside dump she’d passed countless times and never imagined herself in, no matter how dark days with Denise got—and they got pretty dark—rooting around newswire archives, looking for what exactly? A draining day had morphed into an exhausting night, dragging Alex past the point of delirium. Something danced beyond the fringes of her mind’s eye, taunting, gnawing, clawing the back of her brain like mice scurrying beneath floorboards, which rounded out the recipe for another sleepless night.

  There were countless webpages and newspaper sites dedicated to the Kira Shanks disappearance. Most of the details Alex already
knew, small bits lodged into her subconscious, so even the parts that appeared foreign created a fleeting sense of déjà vu.

  What had Riley meant about the media not reporting the whole story? Why was Noah Lee so amped to write this piece in the first place? Why did she care about any of this? What did she hope to gain rubbing dirt in old wounds? When Noah launched his pitch, preaching about collusion and injustice, she thought he was just another white college kid calling for equality from his privileged perch. Alex knew Riley better than that. A cop through and through, Riley would never advocate for the release of a killer. After his chilly reception at the Double Y, maybe she’d gotten it wrong. Like Tommy’s hothead act back at the Fireside—how well did she know the guy? People change. Maybe Riley had waylaid concerns, lied to make her feel safe. He insisted Parsons acted alone. Benny and Kira had nothing to do with her. No killers roamed free. Or maybe Alex only heard what she wanted to hear.

  Truth was, by the time Kira went missing, Alex had already checked out of Reine, cutting most ties, the big one being Riley, but Linda too, and anyone else who reminded her of the past. Which was everyone. Alex followed the case. With one eye on the door. Denise was still alive then, but that wasn’t reason enough to stick around. Ever since Alex was a kid, their roles had been reversed. And the child had grown sick to death of taking care of the parent. Kira Shanks didn’t force Alex to leave. She just made the decision easier.

  Goddamn Noah. Posing his bullshit questions, suggesting a lunatic was still on the loose, asking Alex if she thought her abduction contributed to a curse on this town, the idea laughable. She knew what he really wanted: someone to do his homework for him. Entitled jerks like that think everyone is for sale. Alex didn’t get to go to college. Why should she help someone else earn his degree? For a few hundred bucks? Not that she couldn’t use it.

  But there was no denying Noah Lee had rented space in her head, because here she was doing his homework for him.

  No one knew what happened to Kira Shanks, except that she was certainly dead. The only question was whether Benny Brudzienski raped her first before he buried her somewhere in the deep, dark wood. Whatever Benny had done to her body, wherever he’d hidden it, her end was not a pleasant one. Alex didn’t know Kira. Not personally. She may’ve been aware of her presence, the way everyone knows everyone in a small town. But they weren’t friends. Answering these questions now wouldn’t make any difference.

  If this sudden preoccupation with the missing girl was an effort to establish community with the suffering, Alex could’ve picked any of the half dozen girls whose bodies were dug up beneath Parsons’ lake house property, all of which showed signs of sexual abuse, over long periods of time, enduring hells unknown. Their bones had been found, damage measured, quantifiable, evidence tangible. That was supposed to be where she ended up. In the cold, cold ground. Alex had something in common with those girls. She shared nothing in common with the perky cheerleader who’d gotten too close to the village idiot.

  Alex skimmed the headlines, brushing up on details, digging deeper, curiosity and coincidence too formidable an opponent to ignore. She avoided the conspiratorial, shock-jock blogger bullshit. Every mainstream source offered the same version.

  Kira Shanks hadn’t been seen for several days when her parents reported her missing. Now not seen in seven years, she’d been declared dead, foul play strongly suspected if unproven. Papers mentioned Kira’s friends as having been questioned but they’d all been cleared. The names of these friends didn’t sound familiar. One name, however, Sharn DiDonna, stood out, but that was only because it was so odd. Alex was older, not part of that scene. Blood found at the motel, along with semen and additional samples, put Benny Brudzienski in the room with her, guilt preserved on bedsheets. No other serious suspects were even hinted at. One day a hard rain would unearth Kira’s earthly remains in the forest behind the motel. Depending on how deep Benny dug that hole. Clear-cut as it gets. The only thing better would’ve been a confession.

  Which they’d never get.

  A week or so after Kira went missing, authorities had found Benny Brudzienski in a ditch, barely breathing, run off the road by a lynch mob, thrashed to a pulp. The timeline didn’t exactly match up. The police speculated Benny had most likely been hiding out in the vast woods behind the Idlewild Motel.

  The papers quoted Wren Brudzienski as saying Benny never returned home, and that he and his brother, Dan, had been looking for him for days. If a man knows enough to hide, he knows what he did was wrong. Good enough for Alex. Already brain damaged, Benny was rendered nearly comatose by the assault. The men who’d run Benny Brudzienski down had never been identified. No one had looked that hard to find them. And since Benny wasn’t talking, the case was effectively closed. Benny had been sent away. Problem solved. So why the renewed interest?

  In the back room, the volume cranked louder. The clerk cleared his throat, coughing. Alex got the hint and headed up to her second-floor room.

  Turning on her TV for the background noise, Alex stripped out of her jeans and slipped beneath the top blanket. As usual she left the lights on. Bathroom fan, too. Not that it helped. The terror came back; it always did.

  Alex’s nightmares weren’t the outright horrific kind with lakes of fire, horns, and snarling teeth. The devils that haunted her sleep were suggested rather than fully realized, subtle, implied, the haunting gray-scape of unease preferred to straight-up hellfire. Faces without eyes, words without sound, the shiver beneath flesh that can never be warmed. She could still see the dirty light, the way it tried to negotiate basement cracks. But the threshold was impenetrable, blocks of kaleidoscopic ice blunted through the bottom of a Coke bottle, reality distorted beyond horizons. The memory still tormented. Three days locked underground in a tomb isn’t easily shaken.

  No one had thrown her into the car; she’d gotten in of her own accord. He hadn’t been that good looking or charming. Parsons’ greatest trick? He’d been willing to pay attention, listen to her, pretend what she said mattered. How pathetic was that? And so like a foolish child chasing the promise of magic beans, she’d allowed herself to be taken. And that’s how it should’ve ended. No one would miss her. Oh, Denise would fall apart, because that’s what Denise did. Her mother’s entire life had been a desperate search to justify the misery. Alex should’ve been laid to rest in the hogweed and ox-eye with the others.

  Except Riley got to her first.

  Bright, cold sunlight raked through the blinds breaking the morning in two. Even when the knocking on the door stopped, the thumping inside her skull hammered on. She didn’t remember drinking that much, or even falling asleep. Her mouth parched, body sapped of hydration, no different than a three-day bender. Except this wasn’t a hangover, this was something else, a judgment cast. This was a reckoning.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she slid on her jeans as the knocking started back up.

  “Hold on! I’m coming!”

  Had she slept past checkout? What was their deal? How bad did maids need to clean this hellhole?

  She jerked open the door, and blinding, bitter sunshine slapped her in the face, casting an unflattering light.

  Riley looked like he’d been up for hours, black hair combed, parted, short beard neatly trimmed without a speck of grey. Alex could feel the rat’s nest atop her head, the sleep in the corners of her eyes, that filmy, white paste gumming her mouth, and she resented him for the power play.

  “If you wanted to grab coffee, you could’ve warned me first.” Alex shielded her eyes and covered her body with the door as if she were naked, even though she was fully clothed. “What time is it?”

  “Have you been harassing the Brudzienskis?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Never mind. Have you been following Benny’s brothers?”

  “Following them?” Alex tried an exaggerated laugh, but morning breath aborted efforts midway. The result came out as an awkward snort. Disheveled and
unprepared, she felt like a little girl.

  Anyone else she would’ve told to get lost. For Riley, she let go the door. He caught it with his foot before it closed. She needed a cigarette. She swiped her pack off the table, shaking the hair out of her eyes, leaning against the dresser, trying to appear relaxed, feeling her whole body go rigid. Riley took a step in the room, then backed out, like testing the waters in a cold pool. Good. Let him be the one to feel uncomfortable for a change.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  “Since when did you become such a Benny Brudzienski supporter?”

  “You don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “I might not be living here, but I know what he did to that girl. Everyone does. It was in all the papers, all over the news, across the internet.” She struck a match. “Maybe you should spend more time at home with your wife and daughter and less time helping killers.” That was the best she had in the bag.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave the Brudzienskis alone. They’ve been through enough.”

  “They’ve been through enough. What happened to you? I thought cops cared about the victims? Why are you defending a murderer, Sean?” She never used his first name. That had been the first thing he said to her in the back of his patrol car twelve years ago. “My friends call me Riley.” So she’d call him Sean. “Well, what is it? Can’t have it both ways.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Riley looked off to the side, the bored detective tired of explaining rudimentary basics to someone below his pay grade. He wound a hand to speed things along, a gesture that grated on Alex’s nerves endlessly.