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

by L. T. Vargus

  His speech ended then, and she did manage to catch the last sentence, her mind suddenly seeming to snap to attention.

  “He’s stable for now, but if his condition worsens…”

  As the doctor turned to go, the nurse reached out and squeezed Charlie’s arm.

  “The lights will be on for another few minutes. Take your time.”

  Charlie hovered there before the window, frozen. The chicken wire embedded in the glass divided Frank and the room into tiny squares, like a mosaic.

  Her phone buzzed. Without even looking to see who it was, Charlie reached into her pocket and turned the phone off. People had been calling and texting regularly since she got here, wanting updates on Frank. But she couldn’t deal with that just now. Didn’t want the responsibility of either delivering bad news or trying to bolster someone else’s hopes.

  Movement caught her eye through the glass. Frank’s eyelids lurched. The skin shifting.

  Dreaming, Charlie thought. He must be dreaming. That was good, wasn’t it? But somehow, she didn’t want to get her hopes up.

  As if on cue, the lights in the hall snapped off. All the bulbs up and down the corridor blinking out one after another.

  That was it, then. There was nothing left to do but go sit in the waiting room and… wait.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Charlie wound her way down the darkened hallways, the distant glow of the nursing station lighting her path. Familiar faces occupied the waiting room, three of Frank’s neighbors. Betty Humphrey from next door, Linda Markowitz from down the street, and the one Charlie had only ever known as Tootsie.

  She flinched as she came around the corner and saw them there, and words flung at her from all sides, buffeting her like a strong wind. How is he? What did the doctor say? Do they know what’s wrong?

  They meant well, she knew, but it didn’t help. Not here and now. Her shoulders hunched out of reflex, head angled down to stare at the floor. Like maybe she could flinch back from all of this human contact.

  Instead one of the women pulled her into a hug, arms coiling and flexing around her like constricting snakes.

  Panicky feelings churned inside of her. Too many people. Too much stimulation. All of the contact made her feel separate. Strange and numb.

  She withdrew then into herself like a snail retracting into its shell. Some defense mechanism overtaking her. Keeping her distant from the physical world. All the nerves deadened. Semi-catatonic.

  The camera looking out from her eyes zoomed out, shifted its angle, pointed itself inward. Like she was looking at reality out of the corner of her eye now, never straight on.

  Someone steered her onto a cushioned bench. They held her hand, talking right in her face. But it sounded like they were underwater. The words all muffled and swirling. Meaningless.

  Charlie tried to focus on the face before her, but her body tingled with alienation, the throb of pins and needles rippling over her skin, until she could feel the sweat sliming her shirt under her arms. A slick membrane of dampness. It made her shudder.

  And the words catapulted at her. All the faces pointed at her, jabbering away. Conversations she couldn’t quite keep up with, even if she was a participant in many of them.

  She didn’t dwell on it. Didn’t focus on it. Detached from the present. Let the time drift past. Her mind going all the way blank, eyeballs staring out at the TV on the wall or the beige ceramic tiles beneath her feet.

  It felt, in many ways, like she was floating above this scene. Looking down on the waiting room from afar, from above. Apart from it. Apart from all the people. Focusing, somehow, on her two black shoes resting on that khaki floor.

  She drifted like that for what felt like a long time. Gliding. Apart. Alone again, even in the crowd.

  She remembered feeling this way at Allie’s funeral. Empty and separate from everything. She wondered sometimes if she would have stayed that way, in a semi-catatonic state, had Allie’s voice not beamed into her head and jolted her back to reality.

  “This is going to sound egotistical, complaining about my own funeral,” her sister had said, “but I kind of thought there’d be a better turnout, if I’m being honest. The demographics alone… lotta white hairs, am I right? We’re like a couple boxes of wine away from a full-blown lemon party in here.”

  “They did a thing at school. For the kids,” Charlie had explained. “Mom wanted to keep the actual ceremony to blood relatives, not have it, you know, overrun with a bunch of kids. Her words.”

  “Nice. Better for my funeral to look like a Cialis commercial or something, I guess. There are twelve guys here who look exactly like Mitt Romney. And those are the youngsters, relatively speaking.”

  Charlie had laughed at that. Gotten a few dirty looks from the geriatric funeral crowd.

  “I wonder if the mortician was disappointed.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “I mean, there wasn’t much for him to do, right? Usually there’s a whole procedure. Draining the blood and pumping in the pink embalming goo. Reconstructing any broken bits with various epoxies and putties. It’d take quite a bit of putty to reconstruct this one, I’m afraid.” Allie sighed. “One closed casket to go, thank you very much. It’s really a shame they don’t make shoe-box-sized coffins, now that I think about it. All that wasted space. You think they put the foot up on the pillow, where my head should be? Or is it down at the bottom, where my feet would normally go?”

  When Charlie hadn’t answered, Allie continued her monologue.

  “I feel like that’s probably an underserved market. Single-serving caskets. Someone should get on that. Make a bundle.”

  Something jarred Charlie out of the daydream and back into the hospital. She was somewhat startled to find herself in a different seat than she remembered originally sitting down in. Now she was hunched in a remarkably uncomfortable chair—a wood-framed thing with tacky upholstery that reminded her of a school photo backdrop option called “Laser.” And she faced a TV screen with the sound turned off, half-watching a seemingly endless stream of renovation projects on HGTV.

  Allie’s absence jabbed at her like the tip of a knife. Her sister hadn’t said a word since Charlie found Amber’s body, and she didn’t understand why.

  Allie? Are you there? Charlie thought, shaping the words in her mind.

  Silence.

  Worse than silence. A void. Like a piece of her was missing. A gaping wound.

  She swallowed, struggling to get the saliva over the lump in her throat. Her neck constricted. Didn’t want to obey.

  It wasn’t simply that Allie didn’t speak or respond.

  Allie was gone.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Hours had passed—at least Charlie thought it had been hours. Between the artificial lighting in the waiting room and the endless loop of HGTV shows flickering on the screen in front of her, it was hard to tell.

  She glanced around and noticed that Linda Markowitz and Tootsie had gone. It was now just Charlie and Betty Humphrey, the one who’d found Frank.

  “I was bringing him a tuna casserole. That’s how it happened,” she said.

  Her eyes locked onto Charlie’s when she spoke, cornflower-blue and bulging with strange stimulation, pupils all swollen in a way that Charlie associated with drug use. She seriously doubted, however, that the seventy-five-year-old woman with white hair and a flower-print dress had snorted any rails of crank of late.

  “Did I already tell you?” Betty said. “How it happened, I mean.”

  Charlie shook her head. She had a feeling that she had heard the story already, but the night was mostly a blur of murmuring voices and a series of kitchen renovations on TV that all seemed to morph together into one gargantuan kitchen.

  Betty’s eyes burned brighter still once Charlie gave her the go-ahead to launch into her spiel again. Must have been a big night for her.

  “So I was bringing him a tuna casserole—Frank’s the kind of man who loves home cookin’, and I know h
e can’t do as much for himself these days, so I try to get over there a couple times a week with some grub.”

  Her hands clutched in front of her chest as she spoke, twitching there like squirrel paws, fingers wrapping over and over each other. The wrinkled skin rasped like sandpaper.

  “I knocked on the door. No answer. Thought that was funny, because the lights were on. Whole mess of lights, you understand. Now, I wasn’t worried. Not at first. But I felt like I should check to make sure because of, you know, Frank’s condition.”

  She cleared her throat. Two little thrusts of air forced through the gullet. The strange sound of phlegm shifting scraped out of there, like something slimy and crackling at the same time.

  “I started around the garage to the deck, you know? Figured I’d take a peek through the sliding door. And I’m bein’ all careful, seein’ as it’s icy out, and I’m luggin’ a pipin’-hot casserole pan. About halfway across the deck, I seen him through the window. Frank. Poor Frank. Lyin’ there on the kitchen floor. Face down. And I just thought he was dead. Straight away. That was my gut reaction. Oh, God. Frank just dropped dead in his kitchen.”

  Charlie noted the remnants of some accent creeping out as the story heated up—“his kitchen” coming out closer to “hees keetchen.”

  “So I gasp. Just about drop the casserole then and there. I hustle to the sliding door. Try it. Locked. And I see his cat there, perched on the arm of the sofa, and I remember wishing the darn cat could come unlock the door.”

  Marlowe. With Frank laid low, Charlie would have to remember to stop by and feed him.

  Two more thrusts of air shot through the woman’s throat, more mucus stirring inside.

  “So I set the casserole pan down on the wooden bench there, and I called it in. Felt like the ambulance took forever to get there. And I’m just standing on my tiptoes, peeking inside, trying to get a better look at the body and what have you.”

  Body. That pushed Charlie over the edge. This old woman was talking about all of this like an exciting thing that had happened to her, a juicy piece of gossip she could prattle on about to all of her friends, like she’d found a dead body—just like a scene in one of her Agatha Christie novels or something.

  But she wasn’t talking about some bullshit whodunit here. She was talking about Frank, her uncle Frank. The man laid out just down the hall, looking gray and gaunt and just barely hanging in there.

  And Allie was gone. And the case was careening away from her.

  And now this old bag just wanted to talk about herself, about her thrilling experience. Brag. Dish about the big scandal, the big scoop.

  Charlie gritted her teeth. Tried to stop herself from saying something cruel.

  Betty went on.

  “It was a lot of commotion, you know. Really rattled the neighborhood. The ambulance coming down the street, lights spinning, siren blaring. Everyone—all the neighbors—come out on their stoops to see what was going on. That’s because of Frank, though, you understand. We all love Frank. Everybody. He’s just adored by the whole neighborhood.”

  Charlie swallowed, the mean words seeming to disappear down her throat unspoken.

  Betty’s eyes didn’t look quite so bright when she spoke again. A kind of sadness softened the skin around them, that excited bulge dying back, a wetness rising to take its place.

  “Guess he just feels like a protector, you know? A watcher. Looking out for all of us, all our families, for all these years and years. It’s like he’s the police without the politics of all that. Maybe better than the police in a lot of ways. More pure, somehow, if that makes sense.”

  Charlie swallowed again. Throat going tight. Her guilt swelled some for insulting the woman, even internally.

  Betty stared off into the middle distance, her voice getting quieter.

  “I always wondered why he never started a family of his own, but maybe that’s how it has to be for a watcher like him. They’re so busy taking care of everyone else, they can’t do all the domestic stuff for themselves. It’s like a price he had to pay, maybe. For us. For all of us.” Then Betty aimed a smile at her. “Of course, he always had you girls. Talks about you like you’re his own.”

  Charlie burst into tears. All of the hurt rushing to the surface. Face going hot.

  The water in her eyes blurred the room around her, and the hospital felt more and more distant. Like she was sinking into herself again. Drowning in the depths.

  Betty clenched Charlie’s hand in hers. She spoke comforting words, even if Charlie couldn’t make them out specifically. She could hear the soothing tone, the reassuring lilt in the soft coos and mutters, and it helped, she thought, if only a little.

  Chapter Seventy

  Charlie woke just after sunrise, the first rays beaming through the windows of the waiting room and sweeping her eyelids. She squinted against the bright light. It took several seconds of rapid blinking before she could fully open her eyes and look at the clock.

  It was still too early for visiting hours, but Charlie slipped down the hallway to peer through Frank’s window. He looked the same. Frail. Ashen. Much older than his sixty-two years.

  Charlie put her hand on the glass and tried to beam a thought into her uncle’s head the same way she’d sought out Allie last night.

  Hold on, Frank. Hold on, and don’t you dare give up.

  She spun on her heel, heading back the way she’d come. She needed to go home. Needed to feed Marlowe and take a shower and maybe sleep for a few hours in an actual bed. She’d be back, though. This afternoon, she’d return during visiting hours, and she’d finally have a chance to hold Frank’s hand and tell him to his face that she expected him to put up one hell of a fight.

  She pushed through the back door, stepping into the hush of Frank’s house. The weight of his keys tugged at Charlie’s hand as she pulled them from the deadbolt. Somehow it already seemed so vacant with him gone, even as she took just one step into the kitchen.

  The quiet was unsettling. It made her chest go tight, made her eyes open a little wider, seemed to still her thoughts. She suddenly found herself conscious of the void, the sense of empty space that always accompanied silence, surrounded it.

  Shadows shrouded the room, not a light on in the house, and Charlie couldn’t help but wonder if it was Betty Humphrey or the EMTs who had turned them off. Probably Betty, she thought. It seemed like the kind of detail she’d consider, even in a crisis.

  She flicked on the lights, and the sudden flare stung her eyes. The bulbs gleamed off the counter and the tile floor. Maybe her eyes were tired—a flash of the scene in the waiting room replayed in her head, the tears, Betty Humphrey squeezing her hands, cooing at her.

  Something thumped in the next room. Charlie stared into the dark doorway beyond the kitchen. Held her breath. Listened.

  A tiny patter pelted over the wood floor. Different from the earlier sound. Getting closer.

  The black cat came trotting out of the darkness, crossed the threshold into the bright light of the kitchen. Marlowe. Already purring. Making eye contact with her. Tail curled at the top like a furry question mark extending from the cat’s body.

  Charlie couldn’t help but smile at the creature. He seemed to be smiling back. Lips turning up. The tips of his top fangs exposed as always.

  Frank always said Marlowe only came out like that for a small, small group of people. Always knew who was in the house, even several rooms away—by smell or by sound, he wasn’t sure. That he was affectionate but very shy, and mostly hid from guests.

  Charlie couldn’t help but feel proud—a little special, even—to have curried the cat’s favor. Of course, maybe he was just hungry.

  He trotted over to his bowl and sat down, like a gentleman at a fancy restaurant, waiting patiently for his meal to be served.

  Charlie dug in the cupboard. Plucked out a can of food. Read the label.

  “Looks like our special this morning is turkey and giblets served in a light gravy of congealed fat,�
� she said, eyeballing the can and then the cat. “I hope that’s acceptable.”

  She popped the can open, dug about half of it out with a butter knife, presenting it to the beast in a stainless-steel bowl.

  He sniffed it a couple times, head bobbing over it. Then his tongue flicked out, cupped a morsel of the pâté. He began to eat.

  Charlie knelt and stroked the top of Marlowe’s head a few times.

  He closed his eyes, pleased. Though not pleased enough to stop eating, which Charlie was fine with.

  She pictured Frank again, laid out in the hospital bed, body almost motionless. His eyes swiveled again beneath his eyelids, that protruding lens wandering, searching for something, pointing everywhere and nowhere.

  And she couldn’t help but wonder if Marlowe would be hers before long. Made her responsibility. A cat, a living being, inherited like a prized pocket watch being handed down to the next of kin.

  Wasn’t that the most likely outcome here? And how long would it be?

  She teared up a little at the thought.

  Soon. Too soon.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  While Marlowe continued mowing down his turkey and giblets, Charlie slid her phone from her pocket and turned it on. There were fourteen missed calls and five messages waiting for her.

  She stared at the screen, and part of her wanted to turn the phone back off immediately. It had been refreshing to detach from everything for a while. To not be bothered with the concerns of other people’s lives.

  She waited, thinking this would be a perfect moment for Allie to interject with some snarky comment about Charlie’s antisocial tendencies, but the only things she heard were the tiny wet noises of the cat eating.

  Charlie wondered how long Allie would stay away. On the heels of that thought, a second question, worse than the first: what if she never came back?