First Girl Gone: An absolutely addictive crime thriller with a twist (Detective Charlotte Winters Book 1)

by L. T. Vargus

Her mouth dropped open. Frank’s prescriptions. She’d forgotten to pick them up from the pharmacy.

  A surge of guilt welled in her belly as she realized that she’d been so wrapped up in the case that she hadn’t even checked in with Frank for several days.

  Hurrying to the door, Charlie slid her shoes on and grabbed her coat. There was still time to drop off Frank’s meds before her other plans for tonight. The hard part would be not telling him what she intended to do.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Frank’s face looked drawn and tired when he answered the door. Charlie had hoped the fried chicken she brought along with his freshly refilled prescriptions would perk him up, but after making a show of eating one drumstick and half a biscuit, he pushed the rest away. This would have been a sacrilege to the old Frank. He didn’t believe in leftovers.

  Charlie spotted a pan of brownies on the kitchen counter as she put away the uneaten food.

  “Who made the brownies?”

  “Oh, those are from Tootsie,” Frank said, lowering himself into his trusty recliner with a groan. “You know, from down the street? You should have one. They’re a delight.”

  Mouth watering, Charlie helped herself to one of the fudgy squares. She chewed, studying her uncle. His posture seemed especially stiff today, and he kept reaching up to massage his neck.

  “Are you feeling OK?” she asked.

  “Eh, just my neck. Must have slept wrong or something. It’s so stiff I can barely turn it.”

  Charlie grabbed a paper towel to use as a makeshift plate and went over to sit on the couch.

  “You fell asleep in that chair again, didn’t you?”

  “I can’t help it. Half the time I can’t sleep for shit because of the chemo. But when I do doze off, I’m out,” he said. “Dead to the world.”

  He watched her take a bite of brownie.

  “I ever tell you about the time I accidentally ate half a pan of magic brownies?”

  Charlie laughed.

  “Explain to me how someone ‘accidentally’ eats half a pan of brownies.”

  “Well, OK. The eating of the brownies was intentional.” He held up a finger. “I didn’t know they were pot brownies, though. That was the accidental part.”

  “How’d that work out for you?”

  “I was high for a good twenty-four hours. Extremely high. Practically hallucinating. And I had the worst case of cotton mouth. At one point my throat felt so dry, I actually started to think I might die from it.”

  That got Charlie giggling.

  “It’s funny now, but back then? Harrowing.”

  She finished off the brownie then licked the crumbs from her fingers.

  “How’s the case going?” Frank asked then. “Your missing girls.”

  Charlie had skirted the topic, hoping to avoid the subject altogether. She should have known better. Frank had a sharp mind. Gears always turning. She wondered if he sensed that she was holding something back.

  “I’ve got a few leads,” she said. “Avenues I haven’t explored yet.”

  Even though she had no intention of telling him about her plot to snoop around the Gibbs property, she hadn’t planned on withholding the information about finding Amber Spadafore’s body. But now, seeing how tired and frail he looked today, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. It was too much. Too connected to the past, to what happened to Allie. He was fighting his own battle with the leukemia, and this seemed like too great a burden to put on him now.

  When Charlie looked up at her uncle again, his head was tilted back against the chair, and he was snoring quietly. She figured that was her cue to leave.

  The springs of the old plaid couch squeaked as she pushed to her feet, but Frank didn’t stir. She gave him a light peck on the cheek, let herself out through the front door, and locked it behind her.

  On her drive back home from Frank’s, the sky began to darken, and with nightfall came a steady flurry of snow. A cloud of flakes followed Charlie inside when she unlocked the door to her apartment and pushed it open.

  She hovered there on the doormat for a moment, feeling a sense of unease that she couldn’t pinpoint. Her eyes scanned the space, landing on where her laptop sat open on the counter. Her gaze moved on to the bed, rumpled and unmade. Nothing new there.

  The lamp on the bedside table caught her attention next. It was on. Had she left it that way?

  She took a step toward it, tripping over the duffel bag of gear she’d left near the door. She caught herself on the corner of the bed, narrowly avoiding falling flat on her face. She waited for some comment from Allie—a quip about Charlie’s natural grace and poise—but there was nothing.

  In any case, her stumble had jarred her out of her previously paranoid thoughts. In approximately half an hour, she’d be trespassing on the property of one Leroy Gibbs. That was enough to make anyone jumpy.

  She snatched the duffel bag by the handle and took it down to the car, skittering over the ice to where she’d parked. She tossed the bag in the backseat and climbed the stairs again to get the rest of her stuff. Back in the apartment, she took down a lockbox and holster from a shelf in the closet and strapped on her Glock 43. Next, she slid her phone from her pocket and turned it off. It was probably an overly cautious move, but phones could only be tracked when they were on. Should things go south on her little excursion onto the Gibbs property, she’d be better off not offering up evidence that could prove she’d been there.

  Finally, Charlie tugged on a hat and gloves and gave one last look around the apartment to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything. Satisfied, she pulled the door shut behind her.

  She took a breath. It was time.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  The snow picked up as Charlie drove out toward the Gibbs house. The flakes glittered in the glow of the headlights, twisting into spirals here and there like the wind was trying to braid it on the way down.

  How many times had she driven this route for no other reason but to drive by the home of Leroy Gibbs, dreaming of getting a peek behind that darkened door, behind all those windows with the shades drawn tight? She’d wondered countless times what might lie inside the ramshackle farmhouse, wondered whether or not the man who lived there had been the one who killed her sister.

  Now, after all these years, she was about to peel the place open like prying the top off a can. She was about to get her look inside. It didn’t feel real.

  She rounded a curve in the road, taking it slow because of the snow, but also because she was close. And there it was, a dark, huddled shape in the distance, partially hidden by overgrown shrubs and some rough-looking pine trees. She closed in on it. Almost surprised to find no additional twinge of nerves coming over her.

  She pulled into the driveway. Wheeling her head around, she glanced back down the drive. The pines blocked her view of the pavement, and she figured that would work both ways, hopefully keeping her car hidden.

  She let the headlights shine on the Gibbs place for a few seconds. The run-down farmhouse looked like it would surely drop into a heap of rubble before another decade passed. Everything about the structure sagged, dipped, bulged, slumped, or drooped. Green paint peeled everywhere along the home’s exterior, the exposed bits of weather-stained wood looking like rotting flesh somehow just now. Gray and bare. Gleaming some in the glow of her lights.

  She swiveled in her seat, wanting to take in all of her surroundings before she made her move. The fields beyond the house, once producing crops, were now largely overgrown and wooded. It’d been a generation since any of this was farmed. Maybe two.

  Finally, she killed the engine and cut out the lights. Her scalp prickled in the quiet.

  She reached into the back and unzipped the duffel. Her fingers felt around for the knit material of the ski mask. Found it. The acrylic fabric scratched as she pulled it over her head. Leaning so she could see her reflection in the rearview mirror, she straightened up the eyes in the strange green glow of the dash lights.

&n
bsp; Next, she reached back into the bag again. Pulled out the lock pick kit.

  Her mind was strangely blank. Some hyper-focus whittled her thoughts down to just the next step and rendered it in images rather than language, omitting all those needless words that usually flowed through her skull.

  With the lock picks stowed in her coat pocket, Charlie zipped the duffel up. She climbed out of the car, feet trampling through the crusty snow in the driveway, and hauled the bag out of the back. She didn’t really want to tromp around to the back door, leaving prints in the snow, but it’d be better than trying to unlock the front, where a passing driver might see her.

  The snow squeaked and cracked under her feet, and she moved out of the area lit by a distant streetlight and made her way around the side of the farmhouse. The shadows swallowed her little by little, and she was glad for the darkness that wrapped around her like a cloak.

  A narrow walk led from the back door to a pile of firewood. It had been shoveled recently. Probably how Gibbs heated the place. Chopping wood all year round to get through the winters. He’d never had steady employment, as far as she knew, certainly nothing since Allie went missing. He’d mostly kept to himself in the years since. Perhaps he always had.

  She pictured him again as he’d looked in the interrogation room: a bewildered man who seemed out of place under the bright lights. Frail and old. On the other hand, she’d seen the way he’d manhandled the two men at the Lakeside Tavern a few days ago. He hadn’t seemed nearly so feeble then.

  Her boots pounded up a set of concrete steps as she made her way to the door, footsteps echoing funny in the quiet. She squatted and brought her tension wrench to the deadbolt. With that in place and providing torque to the plug, she raked the tumblers with the tool in the opposite hand, slowly getting all the pins out of the way.

  When Charlie felt the last pin give up, she twisted the tension wrench, and the bolt snicked out of the way. She pulled on a pair of gloves and wrapped her fingers around the doorknob. The warped door resisted slightly as it released from the jamb and then swung inward. This was it.

  Pushing to her feet, she felt woozy, as if reality was just catching up with her. Now that she stood staring through the doorway into the dimly lit kitchen, her heart began to race. She swallowed hard and braced herself to cross the threshold. Hands and arms tingling. This time she couldn’t push the feelings away so easily.

  She hung there for a moment, waiting. It seemed like the perfect time for Allie to return, to squeal with delight at the dangerous, illegal thing Charlie was doing. Instead, there was only the silence of the empty house laid out before her. Eerie.

  Duffel bag dangling from her outstretched arm, legs feeling strangely numb, Charlie stepped through the open door.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The hinges on the door squealed as Charlie shut it behind herself. She hesitated there on the rubber mat, taking in her surroundings while her heart chugged away in her chest.

  She swept her flashlight across the kitchen, the circular glow revealing the room’s details a little at a time. Junk covered every surface. Dishes and cereal boxes and catalogues clustered on the counters. An overflowing garbage bin huddled near the sink.

  She knew she should get started, but the stillness made her chest flutter, made her nerves twitch. It felt like being at church or at a funeral, some hushed space. Reverent and strange.

  Finally she willed herself to take one step, and then another. Even though she was moving lightly, the sounds echoed in the space.

  She checked the cabinets—the upper ones first and then the lower. Opening doors and peeking inside, she found the standard stuff: Ajax under the sink. Cans of Hormel chili and Campbell’s condensed soup in the cabinets. Drawers full of mismatched silverware and ancient coupon mailers. Nothing suspicious here.

  Something screeched in the dark to Charlie’s right. Shrill and wavering.

  She froze. Listened. Chills rippling up her spine.

  When it screeched a second time, she understood. The wind was scraping a tree branch against the window, that was all. She took a breath, gathered her nerves, and moved on.

  She stepped into a formal dining room, though Leroy Gibbs seemed to use it for junk storage exclusively. Stacks of paperback books intermingled with rows of empty beer cans on the old farm table.

  On her way to the living room beyond, she paused in front of a series of family photos hung on the wall. Judging from the hairstyles, they were from the seventies or eighties. In the half-light, the faces looked strange. Ghostly. Milky-white. Charlie aimed her flashlight at the nearest photograph, noting the haze of dust coating the glass.

  There was just enough space cleared on an ancient, floral-print sofa in the living room to seat one person. The rest was piled high with a mishmash of dirty clothes, board game boxes, and more books. Across the room, an old CRT model TV squatted beside a tower of VHS tapes. The machine was bulky and huge, the likes of which Charlie hadn’t seen in decades.

  She used her flashlight to nudge the door leading to the small half-bath. She took one look and decided to let the beam of her light do the searching here. There was no way she was stepping inside the filthy space. Every surface had either yellowed with grime or been splotched black with mildew. Missing tiles stood out from the wall like knocked-out teeth. Water stains mottled the floor around the toilet. An inch or so of murky water sat in the clogged sink basin.

  With a shudder, she moved to a stairway ascending to the second floor, her sense of dread only intensifying. Halfway up, one of the stairs let out a groan as she stepped on it, and she stopped dead. Waited. Let the silence fall around her again. Her breathing seemed impossibly loud as it heaved in and out, hitching funny in her throat.

  Even though she knew she was alone here, every sound felt wrong in the hushed space. She couldn’t get used to the quiet.

  Finally, she pressed on. Though she stepped lightly the rest of the way up, the wood still moaned in protest, every sound making her wince.

  The first door at the top of the steps led to another disgusting bathroom and two garbage-cluttered bedrooms. She peered into closets and trained her flashlight on the few swaths of dingy carpet that lay bare, hoping for something obvious like a bloodstain or a hidden wall panel leading to a secret dungeon. The kind of trace evidence she’d fantasized about on her way here would be nearly impossible to find among this mess, at least by herself.

  The door to the last bedroom stood slightly ajar. Charlie elbowed her way in, eyes scanning all around her.

  A shape stood there. A silhouette backlit by the moonlight filtering in through the open curtains.

  Someone was in the room.

  Charlie choked. Breath caught in her throat.

  She stumbled backward, bashing into the wall behind her. Shoulder blades jabbing into the wood paneling.

  She fumbled with her flashlight. Brought it up to illuminate the person before her.

  The shape lost its detail. Morphing to a blankness under the light’s touch. Then it lost its menace.

  A mannequin was propped in front of the window. Probably used by a dressmaker in the Gibbs family decades ago. Tattered gray fabric showed the thing’s age.

  Charlie let out a shaky breath. The tightness in her chest wouldn’t quite recede.

  She tried to laugh it off as she pressed back into the room, but she couldn’t deny the fact that the Gibbs house was doing a number on her nerves. She didn’t like the quiet. Couldn’t shake the feeling that she shouldn’t be here. The way the house was frozen in time made her feel like a trespasser in an arcane realm.

  She made her way back to the ground floor, wondering if anything in the place had been updated in twenty or thirty years. The wallpaper looked like it was from the sixties, the appliances the eighties. The most technologically advanced thing in the whole place was probably an electric razor she’d seen in the upstairs bathroom. Gibbs didn’t even seem to have a computer.

  Back downstairs, Charlie returned to
a door off the kitchen she’d decided to save for last. The basement.

  If she was honest with herself, she didn’t want to go down there. She couldn’t stop imagining the door slamming shut behind her the moment she entered the stairwell. But she had to be thorough. Had to make sure she checked every square inch of this house.

  Charlie’s heart thudded again as she took the first step down. Breathing seemed difficult in this moment. Her chest wanted to race through the motions, fluttering like a moth adhered to a screen door, the breaths coming too shallow to count for much. She had to concentrate to draw full breaths, fight the pulsating muscles along her ribcage, hold each lungful of air for a beat before she breathed out again.

  The stairs creaked beneath her. The old wood straining and moaning.

  Her flashlight shone down into the dark below. One lone spotlight surrounded by shadows. The glowing circle twitched on the concrete floor as she struggled to still her trembling hands.

  Could this be where he hid the girls? Could Allie’s remains be down here even now? Her bones tucked in some cobwebbed corner, sprawled on the floor. Waiting. Waiting for all these years.

  As she reached the bottom of the steps, her light caught on a string hanging down from the ceiling. She pulled it. An overhead fluorescent bulb flickered to life.

  The room seemed a little less scary once illuminated. It looked like a normal basement with poured concrete walls painted a pale gray, same as the floor, quite smooth in texture. More junk cluttered much of the floor space down here. Milk crates full of odd collections—old glass bottles, yarn, hundreds of warped records. Charlie flipped through a few of the albums. Big band stuff from the forties, mostly. Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. They must have belonged to Gibbs’ parents. Maybe even his grandparents.

  She waded through the narrow path between the stacks of milk crates and found more rubbish still. A heap of empty beer cans crowded one corner. A few boxes of clothes even older than those she’d found in Gibbs’ room. An old stove, crusted with grease.