Mistaken Hope

by Sarah Elizabeth

  “W-W-What?” No. Fuck, no. He can’t be serious here. My mouth is dry, my heart’s about ready to explode, and I stumble backward. “No. NO!” From the corner of my eye, I see Rach heading back through the doorway and into the hallway. She reaches out and grabs a hold of me. She’s trying to pull me to her. She’s trying to calm me, but there’s no way that she’s gonna be able to calm me now. My head’s spinning and I feel like I’m gonna hurl. No. No, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t have. No. I can’t. I won’t accept this.

  “Brandon, it is with the upmost regret that I will need to ask you to accompany us to the morgue. We will need you to be present, so that you can help us to identify the body.”

  “I ... It isn’t … No.” No. He didn’t. No. “It isn’t hers.” I whisper, because I’m not able to make any other sound. “It isn’t Alexis. It isn’t. What makes you think that it’s her, huh? No. No, there’s gotta be some kinda mistake here. I mean …” They’re wrong. They must be. No. No, they have to be wrong here.

  The detective heads inside the living room and we both follow in behind him. Once the four of us are inside the room, I hear Rach pushing the door closed behind her.

  “We are ninety-nine percent certain that the body found by our search team during the night is that of your wife, Mrs. Taylor.” Detective Nicolson speaks with regret.

  “No. Please. No. No. NO!” I shake my head and close my eyes as a dull ache slowly spreads its way throughout my entire body, its intensity growing as each silent moment passes by. “W-What makes you so sure?” Please don’t let it be Alexis’. Please, God. She … no.

  I keep my pleading eyes on hers, my knees buckling beneath me as I wait expectantly for her to tell me that it isn’t true. That he didn’t do what he’s been setting out to do right from the very beginning of all of this. That he hasn’t just ripped my whole word apart and destroyed me by taking away one of the two most important people in my life.

  “A woman’s body was discovered in a remote area two miles away from the same phone booth that your wife used to make her call yesterday.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you have?” That’s it? That’s what they’re relying on? Hell! People are going missing every fucking day, but that doesn’t mean to say that it’s her. It can’t be her. It can’t be. “Tell me something. Help me out here because … okay, listen. It’s gonna be really easy to establish that it isn’t her, alright? She has a tattoo.” My hands are shaking so bad that I’m struggling to unfasten the buttons on my shirt. When I can’t get my shirt open, I grab a hold of the fabric and rip it away from my body until the tattoo on my chest is visible for the both of them to see. “Look, see? This. She has one of these. We have matching ones, alright? Alexis’ is on her—”

  “Left shoulder,” she answers for me. “We know.”

  “Brandon? Brandon, are you okay in there?”

  I’ve got my head over the bowl, I’m gasping to catch my breaths, and my stomach is still twisting in the tightest knot imaginable from having seen what I saw back there.

  Tell me something. How do you go about unseeing something? Is it possible? Yeah, just as I thought. It isn’t, is it? You can’t. It’s an impossibility. It doesn’t matter if I have my eyes open or if they’re closed, it doesn’t make any difference at all. All I keep seeing is her lying there. Her cold, lifeless body on the other side of the screen, laid out on a silver table.

  “Brandon?”

  When I hear Rach calling out to me again, I rest my hands on the side of the bowl, pushing myself up and back onto my feet, my whole body weak, “I’ll … I’ll be right out.” I tell her, my voice hoarse as I stumble across the bathroom, resting my left hand against the wall as I try and make it over to the sink before I fall down onto my knees, again.

  Twisting the cold water tap on, I place my hands underneath the running water, cleaning them off before splashing it over my face a couple of times, hoping that somehow it’ll make the visions that keep trying to invade my mind fade away into nothing.

  Once I’ve ducked down and swilled some water around in my mouth, I ball my fists together tight in an attempt to try and fight away the urge I have to hurl again. Then, I reach out and grab a hold of one of the hand towels, dabbing it over my face before letting it fall to the floor. I rest the both of my hands on the side of the sink while bringing my face higher, until my gaze zones in on the person who’s staring directly back at me.

  My eyes are bloodshot, my face drawn, my skin pale. I’m almost unable to recognize myself. The deep, dark purple rings underneath my eyes have doubled in size over this past day alone, my face is gaunt. Hell! I look like shit. But, was I really expecting to be looking any different? No. No, I guess that I wasn’t. This is what happens when one of your worst fears starts to play out in front of your very eyes. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. You can’t focus on anything. Oh, you try. You try and focus only on the positives, but the negatives are starting to slowly eat away at all of the remaining hope that I have left.

  I arrived back home approximately two hours ago, from a place that I hope I’ll never have to ever visit again for as long as I’ll live. You know just as well as I do that today isn’t the first time that I’ve had to see something like this, and it brought it all back. All of the painful memories and feelings that I experienced on the night I had to watch Holly as she slowly faded away in my arms. The day that I had to say goodbye to somebody, who at the time, meant the world to me.

  On our way over there, they told me that I had to prepare myself for what was about to come. I couldn’t. I refused to believe what they were trying to tell me. In that moment, they were trying to tell me that I was on my way over there to go and see my wife; my dead wife’s body.

  Switching off the water, I turn around and start making my way slowly toward the door. When I swing it open, I see Rach standing right in front of me, her concern clearly displaying over her face and in her eyes.

  “It’s Alyssa,” she tells me, her voice a faint whisper, her face solemn.

  I nod at her the one time, bringing the handset that she’s just passed over to me up by my left ear, “Alyssa.”

  “Brandon, he’s a mess,” Alyssa says. “He’s devastated.”

  “Because they’re only an hour or so away from confirming his involvement?”

  “What? No! Brandon, I know this is hard. I know that you are frustrated, and worried, and going out of your mind here, but he isn’t involved in this. He isn’t!” She sounds angry, hurt, upset. Yeah, well. So the hell am I.

  “He had us all fooled.” I say, my voice cold. “Including you.”

  I thought that I could trust him. I thought that he was one of the good guys, but I was wrong. Just like I was wrong about Neil. Rye’s betrayed me. He’s betrayed all of us.

  “I know this is hard for you, okay? It is hard for all of us. She is my best friend, Brandon. I know her and I know that she would be crushed if she knew that you were turning against everybody who loves you because of him. He is doing it again, don’t you see that? He is playing you. He is trying to play all of us and you cannot let him do that!”

  I run my hand though my hair and let out an exasperated breath, “Are you done?”

  There’s a pause, “He wants to come over.” When she whispers those words, I immediately shake my head, with only one word leaving my lips when she tells me this.

  “No.” With that, I end the call and pass the phone back over to Rach. She’s looking at me in the same way she did the last time we talked about this.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I turn away from her and make my way toward the stairs.

  I have questions. I have so many goddamn questions to ask them and they’re gonna have to give me something. I need answers, and I need them today.

  When I reach the bottom step, I turn to the right and see that they’re both seated at the dining table. As soon as they see me approaching them, they both move back in their seats to stand, “Mr. Taylor.” Detective Nicolson addres
ses me.

  “Have you found her family yet?” I ask them, thinking back to only a few hours ago, when I was told to expect the worst. “I mean, do you even know who she is?” My voice grows louder.

  The girl. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Alexis’ body that they found out there. I don’t think that I really need to explain to you just how fucking relieved and thankful I was when I saw that it wasn’t my wife lying there with a hole right in the middle of her forehead. Yeah. Yeah, you heard me right just then. She’d been shot in the head, and from what they’ve been able to tell me so far, they believe that she was shot from point-blank range.

  I was standing there, staring at somebody’s lifeless body and I actually smiled for a second. Do you have any idea how bad that makes me fucking feel? Knowing that I was smiling at somebody’s dead daughter lying right there in front of me? Or maybe even their girlfriend? Or their wife, sister, or aunt? Fuck! What if she was a mom? I was smiling when there might be a kid out there someplace who’s just lost their mom. I couldn’t handle it. I had to get outta there. I couldn’t be in that place for a moment longer. I stumbled out of the building and out onto the street, barely able to breathe.

  I didn’t start to think about anything else until I was on my way back over here, but then it hit me. It hit me and I broke down. I slowed my pace when I was halfway down the sidewalk, slid down one of the back walls until I was sitting on the ground, and then I started to cry so fucking hard. I broke down because of what I’d just had to go through, but at the same time, I was crying from the relief I was feeling because some of the hope that I thought I’d lost started to come back. I began to feel hopeful again that we’ll be able to bring my beautiful Alexis back home to us unscathed.

  But, then my mind began to race and my thoughts started spiraling out of control. Things weren’t and still aren’t adding up here. It still doesn’t make any sense.

  The girl? She looked just like her. She did. She looked almost identical to Alexis. She had the same long dark hair and she had the same fucking tattoo in the same place as Alexis’. Without question, Neil’s involved in that young person’s death; for her loss of life. He’s gotta be. There’s no other way to explain any of this.

  “You don’t, do you?” I ask when I see the both of them exchange brief glances with each other. “You don’t have anything.” They don’t. They don’t have any idea who she is … was.

  “The body found is that of a Miss. Hannah Wyatt.” Detective Land begins to explain at the same time that he pulls out one of the dining chairs, gesturing for me to take a seat. Detective Nicolson comes to stand behind me as I sit down, placing a file down on the table in front of me.

  Inside is a photograph of a blonde girl. I dunno, I guess that she’s maybe around twenty or twenty-one? I lean in closer, my eyes scanning over her face. She has bright green eyes and she’s smiling, but I don’t recognize her. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen her before in my life.

  “Who is this?” I ask, twisting in my seat to face the both of them.

  “That, Mr. Taylor, is Miss. Wyatt.” When Detective Land answers me, I look back toward the photograph and feel my eyebrows instantly furrow. This is the same girl that I saw over at the morgue? But, it can’t be. She—“As you are already aware, we were unable to find any form of identification on the deceased or within a one mile radius during our initial search, and once you had confirmed to us that the body the team found in the outbuilding was not that of your wife, our team extended their search of the area and were able to find something that helped us to identify the victim. It was found two miles away, in the opposite direction.”

  “Why are you telling me this? I don’t understand what this has got to do with—”

  “You will most likely be questioning how this find is in any way connected to your wife’s disappearance.” They think? “Allow us to explain.”

  Chapter Ten

  “They got it wrong?” I nod when she asks me that question, my breathing still ragged. That’s one thing about Neil. He should never be underestimated. Oh, I knew he was good. But, this time? This time he’s upped his game; exceeded all of my expectations. “So, he didn’t have an accomplice, after all?”

  “No. No, he did,” I pause in the center of the living room, resting my hands on my waist while tapping my left foot impatiently on the floor beneath me. “Only, his accomplice wasn’t aware that she was actually his accomplice.”

  The detectives now believe that by the time he got let out of jail, Neil already had his plan firmly set in place. That he’d spent most of his time on the inside conspiring against us, while waiting for the day of his release to put those plans in motion.

  While he was on the inside and plotting his revenge, we were living on the outside, living our forever, the both of us completely unaware of what was to come. Well, now we know, don’t we?

  “That poor girl,” Rach says, her voice quiet. I see her close her eyes and she starts to slowly shake her head. “That poor, poor girl.”

  The cops told me that the item they found didn’t seem relevant to the search at the time, but when they paid closer attention to what was actually on the receipt, they started to look into things right away. Yeah. Yeah, that’s all it was. They found a piece of paper lying on the ground, which in turn helped for them to make the link. They could’ve missed it, but fortunately for us, the search team did their job well.

  The receipt they found had the name and address of the store along the top, with the items purchased printed directly underneath. We’re not talking about just any items here. We’re talking about calla lilies. Three wreaths of calla lilies, to be exact.

  They told me that they’d sent some of their guys straight over to the store and asked to speak with the person who’d put the sale through. The employee confirmed to them that a guy went in there to place his order at roughly four thirty yesterday afternoon. She told them that he paid for them using a checking card, and that he wanted the flowers to be delivered to an address in the suburbs the following morning, at eight thirty on the dot. Sound familiar? Yeah, sure it does, but were you paying attention?

  She said … the guy.

  Before they interviewed the woman at the store, they carried out a couple of additional checks on the card. With doing that, the cops were able to find a name and address of the person the card belonged to. It wasn’t Neil’s card. Oh, it was him who went in there. It was him who placed the order. It was him who handed over the card. But, the card didn’t belong to him. Nope. It belonged to a Miss. Hannah Wyatt. The deceased.

  At first, I thought that that was all they were gonna tell me, that that was where the story ended, but no. It didn’t. It didn’t because that’s not Neil’s style, is it? What? You honestly thought that he would kill somebody just to get a hold of their cash? Nu-uh. Nope. It runs deeper than that.

  Much much deeper.

  They said that they initially went around to her home to speak with her and ask her a few questions, but what they found out next was completely unexpected. At the time, all they had was a name. They hadn’t been expecting to show up at her house and find out that the card belonged to the dead girl. The same dead girl whose body was found only hours earlier in the day. The same body that they originally thought was Alexis’.

  Once her body had been formally identified, they told me that they’d dropped her mom back home, showed her a picture of Neil, and then began to ask her numerous questions. As it turns out, she knew her daughter’s killer well. In fact, she told them that she’d met him many times before.

  He was her daughter’s boyfriend. Oh, I know. Sick.

  According to her mom, her daughter had been acting weird for the past few weeks. She was only twenty-one years old, still living at home while she attended college, but then she started to skip classes. She changed her hair color. She got a tattoo. She started spending more and more time away from the house, and she wasn’t coming home until the early hours of each morning; on some nights she
didn’t make it home at all. This was something that her mom claimed to be completely out of character for her daughter, and that she had only started acting differently since the day she met him.

  When her mother noticed some dramatic changes in her daughter’s behavior, she told the cops that she’d confronted her about it. She said that she’d sat her down and demanded to know what was going on. She then went on to explain that her daughter had told her something. Something that, even after seeing what I had to witness earlier today, makes my skin crawl and shivers run all the way down my spine. She told her mom that she had fallen in love. That she couldn’t live a day without him by her side. That he was kind, generous, and thoughtful. That she was planning to move out of their family home as soon as college was over so that she could go and live with him in the suburbs, because he’d asked her to.

  Are you ready for the next part? Well, here it is.

  He told her that he wanted to have his forever with her.

  The worst thing? She believed him.

  Her mom told the detectives that she’d tried to stop her from seeing him; that she could see that he was manipulating her, but her daughter wouldn’t listen. In the end they had a fight, ending with her daughter packing her bags on that same day and leaving home. She told the cops that that was the last contact she’d had with her. That she hadn’t seen her for approximately one week since the day she walked out of the front door of her home. At least, she hadn’t seen her up until today, when she had to go and confirm that her daughter was, in fact, dead.

  While the detectives were interviewing her mom, a couple of the others headed over to the gun store and showed them a picture of the girl. The sales person immediately recognized her, minus the blonde hair, of course.