On her second attempt, the girl managed to squeeze her head beneath the bars. With a grunt, she got one shoulder through and then the next. That’s when she got stuck again, only this time when she tried to pull back, she couldn’t.
The girl lifted her head and stared at Chase, tears running down her filthy cheeks. She grunted, she groaned, she shifted and wiggled her hips, but she was still stuck. And then, the girl closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
As Chase watched, her face stricken with panic, the girl let all of the air out of her lungs and gave one final yank. An audible crack filled the dirt hallway, and the girl cried out.
But whatever she’d done seemed to have worked. The girl managed to crawl out military style, but then when she got to her feet, Chase saw that one of her legs was dragging behind.
Through tear streaked vision, Chase saw the girl reach down with considerable effort and retrieve the plate.
With a grunt, she tossed it between the bars. It landed on the floor beside Chase.
For a long moment, Chase only looked at the plate, then raised her eyes to the girl as she hobbled down the hall.
“You need to hurry. There’s not much time,” the girl whispered before she disappeared out of sight. “You need to hurry before they come back.”
Chapter 15
With tears in his eyes, Stitts left his mother’s bedroom. He found Belinda Torts standing a respective distance from the door, her hands clasped in front of her.
“Please, look after my mother,” Stitts said, despite knowing that his request was unfair. She was only a neighbor, someone who Stitts assumed had had only a handful of interactions with Maria prior to her stroke. He, on the other hand, was her only child and the onus was on him to look after her and not a near stranger.
But Stitts couldn’t stay.
Belinda must have seen something in her face, because she started nodding excessively.
“Yes, of course. But she keeps asking for her husband…”
Stitts’s mind turned to his father, the man’s stern expression, his no-nonsense way of raising his only child.
He offered Belinda a weak smile.
“Ex-husband. But… between you and me, I don’t think he’s going to be coming. You can tell her whatever you want, though. I promise I’ll be back as soon as I return from this case.” A thought suddenly crossed his mind. “Oh, and I’ll pay you. I can pay you whatever you want.”
Belinda shook her head.
“No, Mr. Stitts, that will not be necessary. It is my duty as one of God’s people to help those who need it.”
As she spoke, Belinda fondled a cross around her neck.
Fitting, Stitts thought. Fitting that a pragmatic woman such as my mother is left in the hands of a religious zealot.
“Thank you,” Stitts said before shaking the woman’s hand and heading toward the door. “Thank you so much for your kindness.”
He’d barely stepped out into the late afternoon light before his phone started buzzing.
“Hell—”
Stitts couldn’t even get a single word out.
“Agent Stitts, you and Agent Adams never got on the flight to Nashville,” Director Hampton barked.
Stitts pinched the bridge of his nose as he unlocked Chase’s BMW and slid inside.
“I’m sorry, Director Hampton, but something came up. We are working the case, though. I assure you.”
Hampton spoke as if Stitts hadn’t said anything at all.
“You guys asked for this case, now I expect you to solve the damn thing. But because you missed your flight, you better find your own way there. Oh, and I told Director Terrence Conway at TBI that you’d be there by morning.”
Stitts’s eyes widened.
“Tomorrow morning? It’s at least a ten hour—”
Stitts realized that he was talking into dead air and hung up the phone.
With a sigh, he started Chase’s car and pulled out his pack of cigarettes. He knew that she’d be pissed if he smoked in her car, but he did it anyways.
She owed him that much at least.
Chapter 16
Chase gasped and pulled her hand away from Louisa’s arm.
Her mouth was so dry that she couldn’t swallow.
“What? What was that?” she croaked.
But Louisa’s eyes were closed, and her head was turned to the side. She wasn’t going to be of any help.
Chase felt a headache starting to form behind her eyes, but that wasn’t the most alarming change. Her left arm was itching just inside the crook of her elbow. And this was no run of the mill irritation; it was so intense that Chase couldn’t help but scratch it.
She clawed at her thin blouse so vigorously that it only took a moment for dots of blood to appear on the fabric.
The urge to use was so strong then that she felt her entrails clench.
“What the fuck happened?” Chase asked.
This wasn’t the first time that she’d had visions, of course, but this was the first time that she saw something totally unrelated to a crime. Usually, her subconscious pieced together information from a crime scene and regurgitated it as a cohesive narrative.
But this… seeing through the eyes of Louisa as a young child, as a six- or seven- or eight-year-old girl trapped in a prison cell of sorts, this was… different.
But had it been through Louisa’s eyes? Didn’t Chase hear Georgina’s name come out of the girl’s mouth in her own voice?
Chase shook her head.
This wasn’t a subconscious vision, this was a lie. Plain and simple, a fantasy fabricated by her mind due to the stress of the last six months. That’s all it was.
But this conclusion did nothing to ease the itching or untie the knot that gripped her stomach.
“What the fuck is happening to me?” Chase whispered as she backed away from Louisa.
I forgot everything except the first time I met you…
Chase tried to swallow again, but her throat was still too dry. She reached for a glass of water on the table by Louisa’s bed, but only succeeded in knocking it to the floor. At that moment, the door behind her opened and somebody walked in.
“Are you okay?”
Chase was so startled that she gasped and whipped around. Her heart was pumping away so fast and the blood was rushing through her ears at such a torrid pace that she couldn’t even hear the doctor’s words. She could see his mouth moving but didn’t understand anything.
And then there was the smell… for some reason, Chase wasn’t smelling the antiseptic quality of a hospital, but the smell of dirt, that sweet, unmistakable odor of the earth.
What is happening to me?
Things were suddenly more confusing now than they had ever been when Chase was high. Everything that Dr. Matteo had told her about living in the present was thrown out the window. The present was a fucked up place, a place that Chase wanted no part of.
“What happened?” she finally heard the doctor say. “Are you okay?”
But even though she could hear him now, albeit it was as if he were shouting from the other end of an impossibly long straw, Chase couldn’t reply.
There was a lump in her throat the size of a watermelon.
Chase pushed by the doctor with the tired eyes and stumbled into the hallway. Several nurses had been drawn by the commotion, but Chase ignored them as she made her way down the hall. Twice, she had to brace herself against the wall to keep from falling and once an orderly had to actually help her straighten.
Eventually, however, Chase made it outside.
Gasping, she turned her eyes upward. As her vision started to tunnel, the sun slowly took on a familiar shape: the shape of a square window at the top of a dirt room, one that was just out of reach.
Was it a real vision? Something that happened to Georgina, maybe? Was she the girl with the plate?
Chase leaned against the entrance to the hospital waiting for the buzz of hornets in her head to move on to greener pastures.
&n
bsp; “Goddamn it,” she whispered, bringing the heel of her hand to her head. When this failed to stem the buzzing, she finally closed her eyes and blotted out the sun.
It was only then that Chase realized that the noise was actually her cell phone ringing.
She reached into her pocket and pulled it out.
“Hello?”
“Chase? It’s Stitts. Listen, I just spoke to Hampton. We missed our flight and now he wants us to drive to Nashville. Tonight.”
Chase swallowed; it felt as if a handful of rusty nails were sliding down her esophagus.
“Chase? You there?”
More images of the girl’s mud-streaked face and her mangled hands as she dug furiously at the soil beneath the bars, flashed in Chase’s mind.
Like the images of the man with the sunglasses and overalls offering them a ride all those years ago — Come on, it’s hot out there. I wouldn’t want you to get heat stroke. The van has air conditioning — Chase knew that there was only a handful of ways to make these visions disappear.
The easiest, of course, was to find a syringe filled with whatever -anyl laced heroin and mainline it directly into her circulatory system.
The other two options included satisfying her carnal urges, while the final one was to bury herself in a case.
Thankfully, Stitts offered her a way out.
“Yeah,” she finally managed. “I’m here. Come pick me up and let’s go somewhere warm. I’m driving.”
PART II – The Missing
ONE WEEK AGO
Chapter 17
“That’s not… that’s not my mommy,” the little girl said as she tugged on Rita Arnold’s pant leg.
Rita, who was busy checking the expiry dates on the milk cartons laid out in front of her, barely noticed the child. But when the girl pulled harder, she reluctantly took her eyes off of the printed numbers and looked down. She was about seven or eight years old, with a cute button nose and two pigtails that were tied up with blue ribbon. The girl’s eyes were large for her face, but this was true of all children. Except most girls her age didn’t have eyes filled with fear.
“What did you say, sweetheart?” Rita asked.
The little girl looked over her shoulder at a woman who was pushing a grocery cart not twenty paces from them. She was wearing a long white, matronly dress that dragged on the floor, which had dirtied the hem.
“That’s not my mommy,” the girl repeated.
Maternal instincts kicked in and Rita locked her eyes on the woman as she stepped away, guiding the girl with her.
“Are you… are you here with someone?” Rita asked, her brow furrowed.
The girl nodded.
“Uh-huh. I came with her,” the girl hooked a thumb at the woman in the long dress who had bent to collect a bag of frozen peas. “But she’s not my mommy.”
Rita calmly replaced the milk carton back on the shelf and then squatted so that she was at eye level with the little girl.
“Is she… your babysitter? A nanny?”
Again, the girl shook her head.
“No.”
“Then who is she? Is she—”
The girl reached out suddenly and grabbed Rita by the collar, pulling her close. Then she whispered in her ear.
“She took me.”
Rita’s blood suddenly went cold.
She rocketed to her feet and protectively grabbed a hold of the little girl’s shoulder. Her eyes whipped around, moving from the woman in the white dress to the row of cashiers at the front of the store.
The grocery store was oddly quiet for a Sunday afternoon, and Rita couldn’t find a pimply-faced stock boy let alone a security guard to help them out.
She took a few more steps away from the woman in the white dress.
“Do you know where your mommy is? Do you know your phone number? Did someone else come with you?” Rita’s questions came out fast and furious and confusion washed over the girl’s face. “I’m sorry.” Rita took a deep breath. “Do you know your mother’s phone number?”
The girl stared at Rita for a moment, before shaking her head hesitantly.
“We don’t have a phone.”
Rita’s brow furrowed.
“What about your address? Do you know your address? Where you live?”
Again, the girl shook her head. It was only then that Rita noticed the smears of dirt on the back of the girl's arms and framing her face. It looked as if someone had tried to wash her face but had been in a hurry and had done a poor job. This in itself wasn’t alarming; Rita’s own children were drawn to mud like ants to honey. But that, combined with what the girl had said — That’s not my mommy… she took me — caused Rita’s adrenaline to crank up another notch.
“Okay, that’s okay, not a problem. I want you to come with me and I’ll take you somewhere safe. Somewhere where—”
“Georgina!” Someone suddenly shouted, drawing Rita’s gaze.
There, at the end of the aisle, was a tall woman wearing a long white dress that matched that of the woman inspecting the peas — the woman who wasn’t the girl’s mommy. She had short curly hair, bright blue eyes, and a stern expression on her face.
“Georgina, get away from that woman and come over to me right now.”
The girl immediately started to move, but Rita held fast. Something about the situation wasn’t right, something was off.
“Georgina, I’m not going to ask you again,” the woman with the curly hair barked, taking two aggressive steps forward. They were still a good 15 or 20 meters apart, and Rita thought that she could scoop up the girl and turn and run if she had to.
“That’s my mommy,” the little girl said.
Rita looked down at the girl, eyebrows raised.
She was nodding vigorously and smiling a large, gap-tooth grin — she was missing one of her front teeth. But her eyes… her eyes were still wide and Rita would be damned if she didn’t still see fear in them.
“Are you—”
“That’s my mommy,” the girl repeated. The woman in the white dress called the girl’s name again and pointed at the floor in front of her.
Rita instinctively let go of the girl’s shoulders, but before she could fully grasp the situation, Georgina was off and running.
Still confused, Rita watched as Georgina embraced the woman she claimed to be her mother. The woman squeezed her once, then pushed her away.
Even though she spoke to her daughter next, the woman’s blue eyes remained locked on Rita’s the entire time.
“Don’t do that again, Georgina. I want you to stay close to me or someone else in the family. These people… these people aren’t like us. It isn’t safe.”
Chapter 18
The closer Chase got to Nashville, the faster her heart started to beat. It had been more than a decade since she’d been anywhere in the South, and nearly three since her parents decided to give up the search for Georgina and move to the North West.
But despite the time that had passed, just seeing the canopy of Sugar Maples, the sun that relentlessly beat down on them even during the early morning hours, and the rolling hills, was enough to incite a nearly crippling anxiety.
Stitts must’ve seen this look, as he took a break from chain-smoking cigarettes to look over at her.
“You sure you’re okay with this, Chase?”
His face twisted as soon as the words came out of his mouth, and Chase realized that Stitts must have finally realized how much she hated being asked that. She hated when anybody asked if she was ‘okay’ but hated it most when he asked. Stitts wasn’t her protector; they were colleagues, partners, friends. Sure, at face value it was a benign enough query, but she hated it nearly as much as when someone called her ‘ma’am’.
Oh, little woman can’t deal with her feelings? You need a hug? How about a tissue, ma’am?
“I mean, if—”
Chase smirked. Stitts was trying to remove his foot from his mouth so quickly that he was going to end up tripping over it. The tightn
ess in her chest loosened a little.
“I’ll be fine, daddy, don’t you worry about me. The only thing you should worry about is the tar building in your lungs.”
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