by JB Dutton
* * * * *
The next morning Cruz was really in the shit with his mom. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight, but I needed to go back to the Warrington. Maybe if the other Temple of Truth Embodied were there, they could help somehow.
I stopped off at my apartment first, just in case. The door was open. For a second, hope welled up in my chest. Then it dissolved as I saw a police detective come out of the kitchen.
“Hey, kid – you’re Kari Marriner?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m detective McGuire. This was the last place you saw your mother?”
“Yeah... no. We were in Florida. At my grandparents.”
“Right. And you told my colleague that she left Fort Lauderdale on...” he checked his notepad, “on December 26th.”
I nodded. It felt so strange to be back home and it not feel like home anymore.
“Did she talk to you about anything or anyone before she left? Was she acting strange?”
“I answered the same questions last night.”
“Yeah, I know.” He flipped back a few pages. “Let me see... she was dating a man called Bob and you don’t know his family name, right?”
“Uh-huh. And he was flying her to Paris. At least that’s what he told her.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem. There’s no record of her leaving the country. But about a dozen police officers saw her – I’m sorry, honey – saw her... on the bridge last night.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. Tears of sadness and frustration. What were the police supposed to think, anyway?
“There’s no sign of anyone having been here for a few days,” he continued. “There’s no evidence of any crime, so you can come back here whenever you like.”
He put a consoling hand on my shoulder, but I moved away coldly.
“I know it ain’t easy, honey,” he mumbled. “The social worker will check in on you this afternoon.”
He closed his notebook, handed me my set of keys, then left in silence without closing the door.
I walked into the kitchen, a lump in my throat. The truth was closing in on me: Mom was gone. There were only three leads. The tunnel, the ToT apartment and her office. I knelt down at the cupboard, took a deep breath and opened the door. I leaned inside and pushed the back wall. It wouldn’t budge. I pushed harder. The flap had been closed. I thought about the tunnel. It split off at one point and I had never taken the other pathway. Did it lead to another apartment where the Rebel Embodied hatched their plans? Is that where the Persian cat came from? They could take on any organic form... It was one of them, wasn’t it?
I ran out, slamming the front door behind me, and up the stairs. I was panting by the time I reached the door of the ToT apartment. I rang the bell, waited for about half a second, then hammered on the door as hard as I could. The only sound was my breathing and my heart beating so loud I could hear it through the bones at the base of my skull.
I hammered on it again. The hope drained as I waited and waited. And waited. Finally I slumped down, sobbing, with my hands around my knees and my back against the bottom of the door.
I must have cried myself to sleep sitting there, because an old lady swaddled in fur who had just exited the elevator prodded me with her cane, clearly convinced I was a drug addict. I stood up, wiped my tear-stained eyes, and trudged despondently back down the stairs. Was there any point trying to sneak into Mom’s office? The Temple of Truth was being investigated. For sure the Embodied had vanished. No way would they leave any trace for me or the cops to find.
I emerged, blinking, into the bright winter sunlight. It was January 1st – half the city was still asleep. I needed to think. But I also needed to stop thinking.
Chelsea Market was only fifteen minutes away. I had grown to love that place, so I took a deep breath of the icy air and headed down 9th Avenue, past the buildings and businesses I had come to know over the past four months: the Cocoa V chocolate shop, shuttered and silent; Les Bons Grains café, bustling and warm; the Barking Zoo, where we used to buy cat food. Poor Flash, what happened to you?
I felt like I’d lost everything. My mother, my pet and Noon, the man I... loved? The “man” I loved? I stopped and scuffed at a frozen patch on the sidewalk. Did I really love him? Was it all just the Dark Energy influencing me? Maybe it was the romance, the adventure, the weirdness, that had attracted me to him? But what had Noon ever really done for me, for my own benefit, rather than for the benefit of the ToT project?
Cruz cared about me and Cruz was real and Cruz was right there for me when I needed him. He was willing to take a bullet for me. Literally.
By the time I got to the market, I knew what I had to do. Call the only people I could really, truly count on – my grandparents. I wandered into the Anthropologie store and dialed their number while absent-mindedly checking out the clothes, jewelry and bags.
“Pops?”
“Kari! Happy New Year!”
I swallowed and forced back the tears. This was going to be hard.
“Pops... I’m really sorry.”
