Running Scared (Letters From Morgantown Book 1)

by Tracie Puckett

  The dark started to weigh heavy on my chest, and I hated how quickly my head spun.

  I stumbled backward trying to find the stairs again, only to run into a wall. I’d turned myself around and gotten too far from where I’d come in. I couldn’t find my way back. Feeling around, my hand grazed a shelf, and I followed it, hoping to work my way to where I’d started. I stumbled over a box on the floor, unable to throw my arms forward to break the fall. My face slammed against the concrete.

  And she’s down!

  My father’s words echoed in my ears, his laugh ringing through my memory.

  Tears stung the corner of my eyes as I tried to pull myself to my feet, but the fall had knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t catch my breath. With the taste of blood on my lips and my cheek throbbing on the floor, I started to cry. I was exhausted, and I was so tired of pretending like this was supposed to be the way my life was meant to turn out.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted him back.

  I wanted out of that basement, out of Morgantown, and back to the life I’d had before it all went up in smoke. We were so happy!

  Still flat against the cold, concrete floor, I buried my head into my arms. Tears trailed down my pounding cheek, over a laceration. The salt stung the fresh wound.

  There was another laugh—Dad’s laugh, and I tried to drown out the sounds.

  And she’s down. It’s too easy.

  I closed my eyes, seeing him saunter away as I struggled to pick myself up off the ground.

  Oh, you’re dead. You are so dead!

  I’d give anything to take it back. I couldn’t believe I’d said those words. I prayed it wasn’t the last thing he’d heard when he’d disappeared around the corner that night.

  My silent tears turned to heavy sobs.

  “I’m so sorry,” I cried, tears soaking my arms as I lay on the floor. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sydney?” Chris’s voice fought to pull me back, but my mind wouldn’t allow the intrusion. You are so dead. “Syd, are you down there?”

  I buried my face deeper into my arms. I didn’t want Chris.

  I wanted my father. I needed him. Chris coming to the rescue meant that all of this was real, and I wanted to close my eyes and pretend it’d all been one horrid nightmare. I wanted to wake up. I needed to wake up.

  “Syd?” Chris said, rushing down the stairs. Each one of his quick steps grew louder, and his phone lit a path in front of him. He dropped it to the floor as he surged to my side, kneeling next to me. He scooped me up and my head fell in his lap as he settled himself against a wall.

  “I couldn’t find you,” I sobbed, struggling for breath between each word.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t find the boxes. I went out to the shed—”

  “I miss him,” I cried harder, and his arms tightened around me. “I miss him so much, Chris. He’s gone, and I can’t do this.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, you can,” he whispered.

  “I need him,” I said. “I need to go home.”

  Chris fell silent, holding me tighter the longer I cried. I laid against his legs, sobbing and gasping for breath, but he never loosened his hold on me. He didn’t try to hush my whimpers. He didn’t tell me to dry my tears. He let me cry, and I needed that.

  He was there. He didn’t tell me to cheer up. He didn’t give me the speech Gary had given me all along—that tears wouldn’t bring my father back, and that I needed to stay strong. He didn’t even give me the same speech Theo had offered, promising the benefit of time, love, and food.

  Instead, Chris stayed quiet, slowly running his fingers through my hair.

  I nestled into him, feeling safer than I’d felt in weeks. I didn’t know what had overcome me, or why I suddenly felt so strongly that I could I trust him. But it was in my gut, my intuition screaming out to me that he could help, and I had to give into that. I needed to let go, to let someone take my hand, because I couldn’t keep trying to save myself; I was killing myself a little more every day.

  I wasn’t Sydney Easterling anymore. My life, Dad’s life, his death . . . they were covered under a blanket of lies that I couldn’t expose. Theo wouldn’t listen. Gary didn’t care, and I’d had little time and no place to mourn the greatest loss of my life. I couldn’t talk to Carrie. Rosa wasn’t an option. I felt trapped, and I wanted out. I needed out. All of this pain had to go somewhere, because I couldn’t keep holding it in.

  It would kill me, and I needed to live. Living was my only option. And now there was someone who could help me, even if he didn’t know it. Chris embodied the safety I’d needed for weeks—a gentle compassion, an understanding, a pillar of support. He wasn’t the distraction I was afraid he was. He was the potential I needed to thrust myself forward.

  My gut told me to trust him, and I had to do that. I had to try.

  No one can help you now.

  “Shut up,” I cried, silencing the mockery in my head, and I turned my teary eyes up to Chris. “I don’t want to do this alone anymore.”

  “You don’t have to, Syd,” he said. “I’m here. As long as you’ll let me be.” He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, letting his lips linger there for a few minutes. “I’ll stay with you.”

  ***

  Sunday, November 22

  “I’ll stay with you,” Rosa said, her arm around my waist, hand planted on my hip. We walked up the stairs together, taking the steps up to the front door. “Take your time.”

  I’d lived in that house my whole life. I’d walked up those stairs more times than I could count. It was our porch, the place where all of our summer memories were made. And I looked to the door that separated our life from the outside world—a door my father would never walk through again.

  He was gone, and I was numb. Shocked. I’d spent the morning sick, dry-heaving for hours at a time. I couldn’t eat. The simple thought of even trying made me ill. Over and over my body tried to purge itself, but there was nothing left to lose. Painful convulsing was all I was left with.

  He was gone, and he was never coming back.

  “I can’t breathe,” I kept saying, over and over throughout those hours in Dad’s hospital room, holding his hand, knowing that a favorable outcome wasn’t likely. The bullet to his chest had obliterated his torso, entering close to his heart. Surgery was the only option to save his life, but it was also a likely option to kill him, too. The doctors tried all they could, but at the end of the day, there was little they could do to save him. He’d only lived for three hours after entry to the ICU, and it was at 11:58 that night they pronounced him dead.

  Had it not been for Rosa at my side, I doubt I would’ve made it through the night. She held my hand and sang to me, lullabies from my childhood. She held onto me, promising that we’d make it through this together.

  “I’ll stay with you,” she promised, and I needed to believe her.

  She was all I had left, and she was the only one I wanted there, holding my hand as I held my father’s—in life, and in the moment he took his last breath.

  As devastating and awful as our future would be without him, she alone would get us through it.

  And now here we were, all of these impossible hours later, back at the house, forced to start thinking of arrangements for his funeral.

  “What’s this?” Rosa asked, reaching up to pull a small envelope from the front door. We both knew what it was: another condolence.

  Dad’s murder had ripped through our small community like wildfire, and neighbors and friends from all over the town had called to express their regrets. They’d sent flowers and cards, chocolates and food. They were pulling together, doing anything they could to make life a little easier at this difficult time. “Would you like to open it?”

  “No.” One-word answers were all I could manage. Life wasn’t worth the effort anymore; I felt like I’d died back there at the hospital with Dad. My heart was shattered. My soul was black. Without him,
there was nothing left to live for.

  Except that wasn’t true. I had to live for him. I had to do everything I could to help find the man who’d done this to our family.

  “Sydney, honey,” Rosa said, her Spanish accent sounding thicker with sadness. “You must try. Your friends and family, your whole community, they’re reaching out to you. They’re here for you. Try, sweet baby.”

  She passed me the square envelope, the one that was left there on the door—in a place I was certain to find it. The back was closed with a sticker of a broken heart, and my name was scrawled haphazardly across the front.

  I didn’t want to read another letter, but at Rosa’s urging, I had to try. I had to go through the motions. I had to pretend to care.

  I opened the red envelope, pulling a small piece of stationery from inside. Scribbled on the white card stock on the center of the page, the words mocked me: come out, come out, wherever you are.

  I stopped, feeling the note fall from my hands.

  “Sydney?” Rosa asked, but I hadn’t registered a single word she’d said after speaking my name. She kept talking, droning on in the background, and I heard the words all over again.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are . . .

  Those were the last sing-song words I’d said in the park before the gun fired. I knew that. Dad knew that. But no one else could’ve possibly known except for . . .

  I turned to Rosa, her plump face wrinkling with concern.

  “He was here,” I said, choking out the words.

  After killing my father and sparing my life, he’d come back.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are.

  It was the start of his game, a psychological torture.

  Swirls of white and black turned to a haze of gray, and my head felt light. I started to lose consciousness there on the porch, and as I faded, I prayed that if I fell, I would fall hard and fast, and that I would never have to wake again.

  But Rosa caught me before I crashed.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she said, caressing my back. “I’m here. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Little Bird?”

  A large shadow loomed over me, and I sat up in bed, drenched in sweat.

  “How are you feeling this morning?” Theo asked.

  Standing at the edge of my bed, he looked down on me. Fighting through the replay of my nightmares, I tried to put all the pieces of the previous night back together.

  I’d fallen, sometime later passing out after a long hour of crying. I had no idea how I’d gotten into bed, because the last thing I remembered was falling asleep as Chris cradled me on the basement floor. But sometime between being wrapped in his arms and waking, I’d ended up in my room. Hours later, I jolted from my mattress, the daylight piercing my eyes.

  “How did I get here?” I asked.

  “Chris called last night,” he said. “He was worried about you. I brought you up, got you settled.”

  I looked down to realize that I was still dressed in the same outfit I’d worn yesterday, thankful that neither Theo or Chris had tried to change me out of my clothes.

  “What happened down there?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” I closed my eyes, remembering how quickly the night had transitioned. One minute I was talking decorations with Chris, and the next thing I know I’m lying on the cold basement floor, begging for all of this to be a dream.

  “I brought you breakfast,” he said, nodding over to a tray of food on my nightstand.

  “Thank you.”

  “And your money arrived this morning,” he said, keeping his voice low.

  “My money?”

  I specifically remembered Gary telling me that the government stipend for my survival on location was minimal, and even then, I would have to get a job if I wanted to generate any kind of livable income. Since the full amount of my stipend was left with Theo to pay for my room and board at the B&B, I was left with nothing. But it didn’t matter; I didn’t need a penny. There was no point in seeking employment when I could be on a plane home at a moment’s notice. Any day could be the day, and I would be on my way back to the life I’d left behind.

  “You had a bank account back home,” Theo said.

  “Yes. Dad and I opened a joint account when I was fifteen, but that’s not spending money. I’m saving that.”

  And for a good reason. I’d struck up a deal with my dad on my fifteenth birthday. I wanted a car and driver’s license when I turned sixteen, but Dad wanted me to prove my responsibility first. So we came up with an agreement: I could get my license at sixteen. If, by the time I turned eighteen, I’d proven my responsibility, he would take me to buy my first car, and he would match the exact dollar amount I’d saved. That meant I needed income.

  I took a seasonal job at the local Dairy Bar, serving ice cream at minimum wage. Working at least twenty-five hours each week through the summer, I saved every penny I earned. And with every paycheck, I went straight to the bank to make a deposit. One day, that money, combined with Dad’s contribution, would turn into my dream car.

  “You must’ve been saving for something important to have seven thousand dollars,” he said.

  “I worked for three summers for that,” I said. “I’m buying a car on my birthday.”

  “Have your priorities changed at all?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Is a car the most practical purchase you can make right now, given the situation? Sometimes you have to adjust your plans as life changes.”

  “Three years,” I said again. “That was the plan.”

  “I have your money,” he said. “Legally, I’m obligated to hand you this check. Regardless of the fact that you’re in the program, you’re an emancipated citizen now, and that puts you in charge of your own finances. You have to take it, but what you choose to do with it is entirely up to you. A trip to the bank may be in order, if you’d feel better putting it in an account.”

  “It was already safe where it was,” I said. “I don’t understand why it was taken out in the first place.”

  “Because you’ll need it.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I don’t need it. As soon as all of this is over, I’m going home.”

  “And in the meantime?” he asked. “How will you afford the things you need?”

  “Like what? This isn’t long-term. What could I need?”

  “For one, clothing,” he said, looking to my faded sweater. “I’m not saying you have to spend it all, and you don’t have to spend it frivolously. But a safety net’s important, and having that money will give you some peace of mind. You need to start taking control of your life again, one piece at a time.”

  “What about my dad’s money?” I asked. “Where’s that?”

  “Rosa was the beneficiary of his life insurance and his financial accounts until you reached eighteen, at which point the money was meant for you.”

  “So Rosa has it,” I said. “Rosa has Dad’s money?” I prayed that was the case.

  “No,” he said. “It’s frozen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rosa Reyes is a person of interest in your father’s death, Sydney,” he reminded me, not that he’d needed to. It was impossible to forget. “Until her innocence is proven and there’s a conviction in his murder, or until you turn eighteen, whichever happens first, your father’s money stays in limbo.”

  I buried my head in my hands. “They still haven’t cleared her?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” he said, looking to my closed bedroom door. Lowering his voice, he continued, “She has motive—”

  “She never cared about his money.”

  “Opportunity,” he challenged. “What if she’s an accomplice?”

  “She’s not.”

  “She has an alibi but refuses to disclose it. She’s withheld crucial information about your case from the detectives. They have to consider every possible angle—whether she pulled the trigger, aided in the crime, or ne
ither of the two.”

  “She loved him. She would’ve never hurt him. They don’t have to treat her like a suspect.”

  “She is a suspect.”

  “Is she in jail?”

  “No,” he said. “Right now it’s circumstantial. Without conclusive evidence, they can’t hold her.”

  “And they shouldn’t,” I said. “She didn’t do this. She had nothing to do with this.”

  “I know you want to believe that.”

  “I do believe that,” I said. “You don’t know her like I do.”

  Theo’s eyes softened as he looked back to the tray, knowing that if he didn’t change the subject, he’d send me spiraling right back down to where I was last night.

  “Your food’s getting cold.”

  “I’m not hungry.” I threw the blankets off my legs and pulled myself out of bed.

  With Theo still hovering over me, I felt suffocated—trapped. He wouldn’t let me talk about Rosa when I wanted to talk about her, when I was reminiscing and missing her. He wouldn’t let me mention my father, and God forbid I say my own last name. But when he wanted to talk about it—the money, the suspects, the case, then I was expected to sit there and listen? To hear him talk about someone I loved like she’d somehow conspired to kill my dad? Forget it.

  I needed air. I needed space. I needed some kind of opportunity to escape this emotional hell and get away from Theo. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t let any kind of distractions get in the way, but after last night and now this conversation, I couldn’t keep myself holed up any longer. I needed a different focus, if for only a few hours—an escape, a chance to breathe. A change of scenery.

  I needed a way out.

  ***

  “Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas!”

  Even from the back of the house and through the privacy door, Danielle’s loud voice cut through my thoughts. I looked to the clock on the nightstand, trying to ignore the tray of food Theo had left when he turned out of my room a half hour ago.

  It was nine a.m., and she was here right on schedule.

  “Nope, no, turn around,” Chris said. “Get that thing out of here.”