Finding Claire Fletcher (A Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Book 1)

by Lisa Regan

  “It wasn’t as simple as me walking away,” I tried. “He threatened to kill all of you. You don’t know the things he did.”

  “Then tell us,” Brianna said.

  “Claire,” my mother said again. “You do not have to do this.”

  “He killed a girl in front of me. Seventeen years old. She was …” I couldn’t go on. I had only dredged up that memory aloud once to give my statement to the police. I could not do it again, not even for my sister. I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my fists. I concentrated on my breathing, counting to five, and visualizing each number in my mind.

  When the hysteria inside me receded, I opened my eyes and looked at Brianna again. I swallowed and tried once more to give her some explanation for why I had stayed missing. At that moment, I saw myself as she must have seen me—inexplicable and absurd. Tiffany had arrived three years into my captivity. My brain filled with all the times I could have left. There were countless days he’d left us alone. I could have escaped. I doubt Tiffany would have tried to stop me, as she was so intent on being the sole focus of his attention.

  All those opportunities.

  Squandered by fear and shame. I had sat in a room I called prison or on a porch I felt invisibly chained to like a dog, paralyzed by the memory of violations that were not my fault. I let years pass by outside the realm of my abductor’s clapboard wilderness kingdom, and for what?

  “I couldn’t face you,” I said. “I was so ashamed of what he did to me.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” my mother said. She tried to get my attention, but my eyes were locked on my older sister whose face had now gone from incredulous disbelief to a cross between pity and horror.

  “You don’t know all the things that he did to me. It was so disgusting. All those years.” I shuddered and Brianna winced. Her throat worked as if she was going to say something, but no words came.

  “I didn’t want anyone to see me. I felt so dirty. I didn’t think—I don’t know what I was thinking,” I added.

  Tears streamed freely, my composure leaving me with each one. I felt nauseated.

  Brianna moved to touch my arm, but I swatted her away. I didn’t want anyone to touch me while I talked about it. How could I make her understand that what had happened to me had changed who I was irrevocably? Every disgusting, hurtful thing my abductor had ever done to me had changed me. The vicious assaults chipped away at my sense of self, at my soul. There was no return to a former state once something like that happened. I was irreparably damaged in my soft places. Whatever that made me, the transformation was permanent.

  “I feel sick,” I mumbled.

  “Goddammit, Brianna,” my mother said.

  I turned and ran back down the hallway, reaching the toilet just in time for my lunch to come up. A moment later, my mother knocked on the bathroom door, calling my name.

  “Go away,” I said, instantly feeling guilty for sending her away.

  “Claire, please. Let me in, sweetheart.”

  My mother’s voice cut me. I was thirteen again, locked in my room, crying over something trivial that had happened at school, and she wanted to come in so she could hold me, soothe me, and mother me.

  I had never been like Tiffany who had no one to look for her, no one to worry about her, no one to care whether she was alive or dead, safe or suffering. I had always had my mother, and she was on the other side of the door now as she had been my whole life—even while I was missing. I knew what she had done after I was abducted. Connor had told me. My mother had turned her life into a search for me, finding hope in the small nooks and crannies of lackluster evidence, and the family was torn apart in my absence. She hadn’t given up the search because there was not a single thing that could change the fact that I was her child, and she loved me absolutely and without conditions. Nothing I had seen or suffered could come near her love for me.

  My mother had endured my absence while I squandered years of my life, ashamed of what my abductor had done to me. Too afraid that the family I had known would never accept me after the disgusting acts he had forced me to engage in. My mother took the pain of all those years, and she did that for me. But in my hell, I could not perform a single act of love for myself, least of all the most important one—leaving.

  Her voice came again. “Claire, honey. Please let me in.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. How could I have doubted the love of my family for so long? Wasted were the years I had spent in the trailer, and before that, across the road, avoiding Tiffany’s snipes and taunts while the days slipped silently by.

  Each day I stayed instead of ending both my and my family’s pain was a sin. I had accumulated a lot of them. I felt condemned. I did not deserve their love. If I had only believed in the strength of their love for me, if I had only been strong enough to bear the burden of all I had been through in their presence, I could have returned home years earlier.

  The idea of staying captive in order to keep my sordid secrets and protect my family from the truth of my experiences seemed ridiculous, just as my explanation to Brianna had sounded when I tried to share why I’d slept with Rudy, Martin, and Jim. Still, there were all of my abductor’s threats and the reality of the murders he had committed in my fictitious name. The landscape of my mind had turned to rubble. I could hardly muddle through the mass of conflicting feelings and contradictory thoughts.

  My mother’s gentle knock came again.

  “Mom, I’m sorry. I can’t. Please, not right now.”

  She stood on the other side of the door for several minutes before turning away with a sigh. The bathroom was too small. In fact, the entire house suddenly seemed too small. I needed to get out. I waited a few minutes, and then I slipped into the bedroom where I kept my things and fished my cell phone out of one of my bags. My family had insisted that I have it even though I had no one to call. They had been with me daily since my return, and although their numbers were programmed into it, I had no need to call any of them. There was one other number that I had programmed into the phone myself. I dialed it.

  Connor picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “Connor? Can you come get me?”

  “Claire? Is everything okay?”

  I swallowed. “Yeah. I just really need to get out of the house. Can you please come?”

  “Sure. I’ll be there in twenty.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  True to his word, Connor pulled up in his car twenty minutes later. I waited for him at the edge of Mitch’s long driveway. He got out and smiled at me. His head had healed entirely except for a gnarly strip of scar tissue, surrounded by hair that was still shorter than the rest. He still walked with a limp from the stab wound, but he moved around much faster, with far fewer grimaces.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  I passed my cell phone back and forth between my hands and bit my lower lip. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

  “Hungry?”

  I wasn’t, but I nodded. I wasn’t used to social interactions, and as I climbed into the car with Connor, I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. We pulled away, and as we drove, my nervousness took on a life of its own, filling up the car until the air felt thick around me. I realized I hadn’t really been alone with him since the night we had met. Sure, we had been alone in my hospital room, or in the kitchen at Mitch’s house, but there had always been other people around. I knew I had nothing to worry about—that Connor would never harm me—but still my feet drummed against the car floor, my knees bobbing up and down at breakneck speed. Connor pulled over. My heart raced.

  He put the car in park and undid his seat belt. “Why don’t you drive?” he said.

  I stared at him. “What? I don’t have my license yet.”

  “Your dad says you have your permit, though. You can drive with that as long as I’m in the car with you.”

  “Oh. Okay. But I don’t know—
”

  “I’ll tell you how to get there,” Connor said before I could finish. His relaxed demeanor was in stark contrast to my near panic.

  We switched seats. After driving for a few minutes, my heartbeat slowed. I began to feel more relaxed. Connor gave directions to a diner outside of Sacramento. We seated ourselves and looked over our menus in silence. The noise of the diner—plates clinking, the door opening and closing, patrons talking—overwhelmed me. I hadn’t been out to eat since I was fifteen years old. It was just one more thing in a long line of mundane activities that I had been denied during my captivity. Anger boiled up from the pit of my stomach. It was astounding how much my abductor had taken from me—from my innocence to the simple pleasure of eating out.

  I decided in that moment that even though I wasn’t hungry I was going to enjoy the experience. I was free. I could go where I wanted when I wanted—as long as I kept my family apprised of my whereabouts at all times. I could eat in a diner with a friend because I felt like it. I could order whatever I wanted. Even though it was dinnertime, I chose Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Connor ordered a cheeseburger.

  After the waitress took our menus away, Connor met my eyes. “I had to shake a few members of the press before I came to get you,” he said. “They’re still wise to the fact that I am in contact with you and your family.”

  “Thank God they don’t have my photo,” I said. “I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.”

  “Yeah, at least you still have some anonymity. Your mom said you guys had managed to visit your house without being photographed, though.”

  I swallowed. “I couldn’t go in.”

  “Into the house?”

  “No. Into my room. I couldn’t. She said she kept it exactly the way I left it. Exactly. That the pajamas I’d changed out of that day were still on my floor.”

  “I know,” Connor said softly.

  “That room in your house—your wife’s room—why did you keep it that way after she left?”

  The corner of Connor’s mouth dimpled. “I cleaned it out after I met you,” he said. “Turned it into the Claire Fletcher task-force headquarters. Ask Mitch, he’ll tell you.”

  From somewhere, I found the strength to smile. Connor looked away momentarily, a shy lilt to his eyes. His face and neck turned light pink.

  “But why did you keep it that way—before?” I asked.

  His eyebrows drew together. The blue of his eyes seemed startling even though I had gazed into them many times in the last month. He looked as though it pained him to say what came next. “Because I was hoping she would come back. I hadn’t—I hadn’t accepted it yet—the fact that she was gone. I couldn’t even go in there. Before you came over that night, I hadn’t been in there in almost two years.”

  It was a strange admission from a man who’d killed someone. A small fragment of the tension that bound me whenever I was near men melted away.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Connor looked up from the spot on the table his eyes had been fixed on. “Why what?”

  I shrugged, not even sure what part of his reasoning I wanted explained. “Just why?”

  Connor laughed. Then he said, “I loved my wife very much. I didn’t want her to leave.”

  “Even though she met someone else?”

  He sighed and gave me a helpless look. “Yeah.”

  He waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, he said, “It was a little different for me. You know, your mother knew you were alive all those years. I think keeping your room like that was her way of saying she wouldn’t give up.”

  “But what if I never came back? What if he had just killed me?”

  Slowly, Connor shook his head. “I don’t know, Claire. People do what they have to do in order to survive.”

  That I knew.

  “You don’t have to go back into that room,” Connor added.

  Hesitantly, he reached across the table and placed a hand over mine. I stared at it, feeling the warmth of his skin against mine. I had a sudden flash of the night we’d spent together—the feel of his hands on my bare skin, the smell of him, his lips trailing along my neck, the safety of his long, warm body against mine, shielding me. I had felt safe.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How is your hand?”

  I shrugged. “Okay. I finished physical therapy. I just have to do home exercises. It feels fine.”

  “Do you want to talk about today?”

  I shook my head and smiled weakly. “No. Yes. My family—my sister—she wanted to know what happened. She wanted to know why I didn’t come home before.”

  Connor frowned.

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  Connor’s eyes darkened. “I was there when you gave your statement. I know what happened to you, Claire,” he murmured.

  “But don’t you wonder why I didn’t come back sooner?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  He gave my hand a squeeze before releasing it. The waitress brought our food, but we didn’t eat right away.

  “When I was fourteen, a friend of mine—Dell—was abducted,” Connor said. “He was my age. A neighbor kind of went nuts and took off with him. I guess the guy had been molesting Dell for a while but decided now and then wasn’t enough. So he kidnapped Dell, and they were gone for about a month. The FBI found them at a motel in Nevada.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, when Dell came home he had it pretty rough. His dad couldn’t look at him. Said he couldn’t understand why he didn’t fight the guy off. He came back to school, but the other kids made fun of him. He went from being Dell to being the kid who took it up the ass. Kids made slurping sounds when he passed in the hallways. It was really brutal.”

  “How awful.”

  Connor grimaced. “He shot himself. He was home for about six months before he couldn’t take it anymore. He got his dad’s gun and shot himself. So no, I don’t wonder why you didn’t come home.”

  “Is that why you became a cop?”

  Connor chuckled. “No. I just didn’t want to go into plumbing with my dad, and being a police officer seemed like a lot of fun.”

  “Is it?”

  Connor shook his head and sighed. “Some days are better than others.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes. I was surprised to find that I was actually hungry. Looking across the table at Connor, I realized that a great deal of the anxiety that made me call him was gone.

  He glanced up from his cheeseburger and said, “What else is on your mind?”

  “I still can’t sleep at night,” I confessed. “It’s not over.”

  “We’re going to catch him, Claire.”

  “He’s going to do it to someone else. He’s going to take another girl. He won’t stop.”

  “Claire.” Connor’s eyes were steeped in concern. “No matter what it takes, we are going to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone again. We will find him.”

  I swallowed over a thickening glob of saliva in my throat. I studied him for a while. I wanted to hold his hand again, but I couldn’t bring myself to initiate it.

  The night we’d met, physical intimacy was easy for me because I had trained myself to think of it merely as a means to an end. I had learned to use my body. It was something apart from me. A tool. I had slept with those other men to get them to do what I wanted.

  Now everything about my life had changed. The armor of my anonymity and narrow existence had been stripped away, leaving a woman who was made up of wreckage more than anything else. Often, even in the safety of my family’s company, I felt more exposed, more vulnerable than I had when my abductor had tied me naked to the bed in that first blackened room.

  Love was an exiled emotion, an amputee from my inner body—the wound staunched and cauterized with cruelty and privation. During the ten years I spent under the watchful, cloying eyes of my abductor, never once had I fantasize
d about love. Not with any man.

  But now I was free. There was Connor, and the way he looked at me—not just with desire but with a sort of shy adoration that was completely at odds with his masculine demeanor. My mind and body writhed away from the possibility of love or romance. I had disbelieved it for so long, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. What would I do with it?

  “Claire?” Connor said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “I said we will find the man who took you.”

  I nodded.

  A long moment passed in silence. Then Connor said, “Did you want to go right back to Mitch’s after this?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Why?”

  He smiled. “I have an idea.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  It was almost ten o’clock by the time Connor dropped me off. I bounded into Mitch’s living room where my parents sat, trying unsuccessfully to hide their anxiety. My father flipped through the channels on the television while my mother pretended to read a magazine. I had told my parents I was going somewhere with Connor. They knew I would be safe with him—but still, they were afraid to let me out of their sight. I saw the relief flood both of their frames when I walked in. I had come back. I had come home.

  “Hi, sweetie,” my mother said, trying to sound calm, even.

  My father muted the television. He studied me for a moment. “You look happy,” he said. He uttered the word happy like it was some rare disease that I was unlikely to contract. I suppose in my case it was.

  I grinned. “Connor took me shooting.”

  My father frowned. “Shooting? You mean with a gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  His frown deepened. “That’s …” He searched for the right word, finally settling on “odd.”

  My mother made a sound that was half laughter, half a scoff. “Why is that odd?”