The Prettiest One: A Thriller

by James Hankins

  “I found a car,” she said.

  “The one out front? Whose is it?”

  “I have no idea. But I found the key in my pocket, and when—” A terrible thought came to her. Her hands shook and she nearly dropped the hot tea in her lap. “Do you think . . . do you think the blood came from whoever’s car that is?”

  “Caitlin . . .”

  “Do you think I could have—”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Of course not. Not you, Caitlin. No way.”

  “But—”

  “Not you, honey. I don’t believe it. I just don’t. So let’s forget about the car for a second. You got in it; that’s all we need to know right now. What then?”

  “I saw a sign for I-91 and drove home.”

  “Where were you? What town?”

  “I’m not sure. I . . . don’t remember. I feel like I might have known when I started driving, like I’d seen some signs, but somehow I’ve forgotten them already. My mind is . . . not really clear yet. I know I drove north, though.”

  He nodded. “Okay, but what about before you found the car? What’s the last thing you remember?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “Caitlin,” Josh said gently, “you remembered where you live. You remembered me. Anything else?”

  She nodded. She wasn’t thinking straight at all. Of course she remembered things. She remembered almost everything from before, actually. She remembered her mother’s singing voice and the fact that her father was never without a roll of peppermint Life Savers in his pocket. She could easily recall various Christmas mornings over the years. She remembered her first and only cigarette, and high school dances, and losing her virginity to Charlie Granger, and getting her driver’s license, and meeting her college roommate, and listening to her college boyfriend’s horrible rock band. She remembered the terrible day she learned that her parents had died in a car wreck when she was twenty. She remembered meeting Josh at a Starbucks, and him asking her out when they ran into each other two weeks later at a different Starbucks. She had no trouble remembering their first date, their first night in bed, their wedding. She remembered her job in the real-estate office and Josh trying in vain to talk her into buying a spectacularly ugly bulldog puppy when they moved into this house.

  She remembered all of that. But the last seven months were apparently just . . . gone. It was as though someone had taken the story of her life and torn out an entire chapter.

  “What’s the very last thing you remember?” Josh asked. “The absolute last thing before you found the car?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I bought a new purse. A yellow one.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You showed it to me. That was a week before you went missing.”

  She closed her eyes again. He was right. She remembered now. She bought the purse on a Wednesday. She’d gone to the gym after work and on the way home stopped at a little boutique she had been meaning to check out. “I remember having an argument with Frank at work. I thought he was trying to get a bit too cozy with one of my clients.”

  “You told me about that. It was a couple of days before you disappeared.”

  She kept her eyes closed and concentrated. “I remember falling on a run and cutting my ankle on a rock.”

  “Yeah, that was a pretty bad cut. I patched you up when you got home. That was the night before you . . . left.”

  She looked down at her bare ankle and saw a faint scar, all healed. “I remember . . . I remember fighting with you.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “That’s right,” he said somberly, nodding. “We argued and you left. You were mad and you left and then you just . . . didn’t come home.”

  “I can’t remember what we were fighting about,” she said.

  He shrugged, smiling sadly. “It was so long ago now. But whatever it was, it got out of hand. I remember that. And when you didn’t come home, I had to wonder if . . . if something terrible had happened to you. You were just . . . gone.” He shook his head.

  He looked so sad that she put down her mug and kissed him. Then she rested her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and felt the night begin to fade from her mind.

  Where does seven months go?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HE WAS LITERALLY TWICE CAITLIN’S size and smelled like rotting garbage. His skin was the pale white of a fish’s belly. His bald head was bumpy and scarred. His dark little eyes were too far apart. His hands were freakishly strong. He was the Bogeyman. And he grabbed at her and clawed at her, trying to drag her down into the ground. “I’ve got you, my pretty Caitlin,” he said, and his breath stank like dead things.

  It was the same nightmare she’d had since she was little. Only this time, when she awoke, he didn’t disappear right away as he always did, as he had for more than two decades. No, this time, though she was awake, she could still see his eyes, feel his hands on her, smell the fetid odors that clung to him.

  But morning had come and those things began to fade.

  She’d had the nightmare so many times over the years, so very many times, but its frequency didn’t diminish its power one iota. His eyes . . . his hands . . . his rotting smell. Pretty Caitlin.

  She was lying on the living room sofa. She disentangled herself from the furry throw blanket Josh had evidently draped over her sometime during the night, and which she had apparently twisted around herself during her nightmare flight from the Bogeyman. She took a few calm, steadying breaths.

  She felt foolish. She felt like a child. But she couldn’t deny the terror the dream had instilled in her.

  As the last vestiges of the nightmare faded, as the rotting-garbage smell left her nose, Caitlin became aware of a new smell. A fantastic one. Because after all, what smells better than bacon? She rarely ate it but loved it when she did. She also smelled coffee. She’d have been willing to bet there were eggs somewhere nearby, too.

  After a quick trip to the bathroom, she followed the wonderful aromas to the kitchen, where she found Josh sliding an omelet out of a frying pan and onto a plate.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “Bacon is the devil, but it’s a special day.”

  “I love bacon,” she said. “It’s evil, but I love it.”

  She sat at the table and he slid the plate in front of her, placed a mug of tea beside it, then sat across from her with a plate of his own.

  “This is good,” she said.

  “No, it’s not,” he said, smiling. “We both know I’m clueless in the kitchen.”

  She laughed softly. He was right. The omelet was underdone, and there was too much ham and not enough cheese in it. Seven months on his own hadn’t made him a better cook.

  “The bacon’s good, at least,” she said.

  Caitlin took a few more bites because, even if the omelet wasn’t too terrific, Josh had made it for her. And besides, she was hungry.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said between bites.

  “When? You’ve been sound asleep for hours. You barely moved once you closed your eyes.”

  “How do you know I was so sound asleep?”

  “I checked on you a few times.”

  She looked him in the eye.

  “Okay,” he added, “more than a few times. You were dead to the world until two minutes ago.” He winced as though regretting his choice of words.

  “I was thinking in the bathroom just now.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I want to go back.”

  “Go back where?”

  “Wherever I was . . . you know, lately.”

  Josh put down his fork. “How? You said you didn’t know where you were.”

  “I think I can retrace my route back to where I first realized where I was. Then I would . . . figure it out from there. I’m sure I’ll recognize something.”

  Josh hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”

  “I have to.”

  “Caitlin .
. . we don’t know where you’ve been or what happened to you, but you’ve clearly been through something serious, something traumatic. We need to get you to a hospital, get you checked out—”

  “I feel fine,” she said.

  “You may feel fine, but something’s not right if you can’t remember seven months of your life.”

  That was a good point. “I think going there might help me remember.”

  Josh took a deep breath. “Honey . . . you came home covered in blood, remember? It could be dangerous to go back.”

  “It wasn’t my blood,” she reminded him.

  “I’m not sure that makes it any less dangerous. Something sure as hell happened to you, and it can’t have been good. Maybe . . .”

  “What?”

  “If whatever happened to you was bad enough to make you forget seven months, maybe you shouldn’t remember.”

  Caitlin didn’t know how to make him understand, but she needed to know what happened, whatever it was. Good or bad, she needed to know . . . where she’d been, what she’d done, whose blood it was. “What if I committed a crime?”

  “If you did,” he began carefully, “it’s over now.”

  It was her turn to put down her fork. “Seriously? What if I hurt someone?”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “How do we know that? Apparently, we don’t know me very well. We didn’t think I’d go running off somewhere for seven months, but I did. So I don’t think we really know what I would do. If I hurt someone, Josh, I need to know.”

  Josh stared down into his unfinished eggs. “What if the police there are looking for you?”

  “If they are, then they should find me. I have no desire to get away with anything. If I did something terrible, I should be punished for it.”

  “Wait a second. If you did do something—and I’m not saying you did—but if you did, you obviously weren’t in your right mind. It’s not your fault.”

  “That would be for a jury to decide, not us.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I am.”

  He looked away from her, out the window. When he looked back, she held his eyes with her own.

  “I have to know,” she said. “I couldn’t live with not knowing where I was, what I did, and whether I did something . . . bad. Just a few days to see what we can find out. After that, I’ll go to a doctor and let him run every test known to medical science. Unless I’m in prison, of course.”

  Josh winced at that, but after a moment, he said, “Just a few days?”

  “I promise.”

  He stared down at his half-eaten omelet before meeting her eyes again. “You did a lot of thinking during thirty seconds in the bathroom.”

  After breakfast, Caitlin washed up and got dressed. Her clothes were a tiny bit looser on her than they used to be. Nothing drastic, but she felt it.

  As she brushed her teeth, she ran things through in her mind. She thought Josh was probably doing the same thing. She could hear him putting away the dishes downstairs, a little more loudly than necessary. It didn’t sound like angry dish-doing—rather, more like distracted dish-doing.

  She went downstairs and met him as he walked into the living room, drying his hands on the legs of his pants.

  “We have so much to talk about,” he said.

  “We can talk in the car on the way. Are you sure you can get away from work for a few days?” Caitlin herself certainly didn’t have to worry about asking for time off. Her employer and coworkers no doubt thought she had run off with another man or was dead. She doubted her desk was waiting for her, with her notepads all stacked and her pencils sharpened, just the way she always left them at the end of every day.

  “They won’t even know I’m gone,” Josh said. “They didn’t fire me after you went missing, but with everything that was going on . . . They said they were looking out for me, giving me a little time, but they started sending out other reps to my clients, forcing me to split the commissions. We rolled out a new data-storage product and I wasn’t even invited to the prerelease meetings. So yeah, I think I can get away without the office falling apart.”

  “God, Josh, I’m so sorry, really—”

  He waved off her apology. “Where are we even going?” he asked. “Do you have any idea?”

  “I think I can remember where I got on the highway. We’ll head there. You look terrible.”

  “See, that’s why I missed you.”

  She smiled. “I mean, you don’t look like you slept well.”

  “I didn’t. There are so many questions. Like I said, so much to talk about.”

  “And like I said, we can talk in the car.”

  “Caitlin . . .” His grim expression gave her pause.

  “What is it?”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Everyone thought you were dead.” He paused. “And when a wife disappears, who does everyone suspect?”

  Then she understood. Oh, God.

  “Josh, I’m so, so sorry. I can’t believe people would . . . Anyone who knows us . . .”

  “They thought I killed you, hon.”

  “Who would think that?”

  “Everyone. The police. Strangers. Friends. Everyone.”

  “But I’m alive. They’ll see that and everyone will know they were wrong. Which friends?”

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Which of our friends thought you killed me?”

  “None of them actually said so, but I could tell they were all thinking it, especially when the first few weeks went by and you didn’t come home and you weren’t . . . found. At first they stood by me. They were there for me. Soon enough, though, they stopped dropping by. Then they stopped calling. Then they stopped returning my calls.”

  “Oh, Josh.”

  “The cops didn’t help things any. Or the media.”

  “The media?”

  “They might as well have come right out and said that I killed you.”

  Tears were threatening. It crushed her to hear what he’d gone through, to imagine how it had been for him. “Well, we’ll go to the police right now. Show them I’m alive. Hold a press conference. You can blow kisses to all the jerks who didn’t believe you, including our so-called friends.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. He was wrestling with something. She could see it in his eyes.

  “Caitlin,” he finally said, “if we do that, there will be questions. Ones you can’t answer.”

  “Like where I’ve been.”

  “For starters. They’ll question the hell out of you, for a long time. And they won’t just question you. They’ll evaluate you. Maybe admit you to a hospital or . . .”

  “Or some kind of psychiatric unit.”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. All I know is that when we make this public, the police will want answers about where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. And God, the media. They’ll be all over you. You were a hot story for a few months, at least locally. And there was a little national coverage.”

  “National coverage? Seriously?”

  He nodded. “So if we go public now, you’ll be tied up for a long time. And if you are . . . you won’t get your answers.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me looking for answers.”

  “I’m just worried that you might not like what you’ll find. Or even worse, that you’ll get hurt looking. But I want you whole. And I think you need answers to be whole. So if we have to go back there to get them, to wherever you were, then that’s what we’ll do.”

  “Okay,” she said. “For just long enough to figure out what I was doing all that time, then we come home and go right to the police, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She looked at him. “You’re a good man.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I love you. And I just thought of something.” He crossed the living room and picked up the black gym bag from the armchair. “Yo
u had this with you in the car. You brought it back from . . . wherever. I figure it’s probably just a change of clothes, but maybe something in here can tell us . . . something.”

  He put the bag on the sofa and sat next to it. Caitlin sat on the other side of it. He nodded to the bag.

  “Well?”

  She took a breath and zipped open the bag. Immediately, she wished she hadn’t.

  “Oh shit, Caitlin, is that a gun?”

  It sure was.

  “And what are those? Are those . . . human hands?”

  It sure looked like they were.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  INSIDE THE GYM BAG THAT Caitlin had brought back with her from wherever, a black handgun lay on top of what looked for all the world like half a dozen human hands. Five of them had light skin and one was dark brown. There was no blood. The hands were fake, Caitlin realized after a closer look. Prosthetic. She could even see the glint of metal at the wrist opening of one of them.

  She did the math, and it wasn’t exactly college-level calculus. She had returned home with a gun, covered in blood. Without even factoring the fake hands into the equation, she knew what she must have done.

  “I killed someone,” she said, getting to her feet. She started pacing.

  “Now hold on,” Josh said. “We don’t know that.”

  “Okay, even if I didn’t kill anyone, I sure as heck shot someone. And why? For a bag of fake hands?” She ran her own hand through hair that was shorter than it should have been, hair she didn’t remember cutting . . . or dyeing, for that matter.

  “We don’t even know that you shot anyone, Caitlin. Try to calm down.”

  She slid her hand through her hair again and something felt wrong. “Where are my rings?” she asked, looking at her naked third finger.

  “They’re gone?”

  A wave of emotion rippled through her. She remembered Josh holding the engagement ring, down on one knee in the middle of yet another Starbucks—it seemed only fitting, after all—telling her that she’d make him the happiest man in New Hampshire if she agreed to marry him. When she’d asked why just New Hampshire, he’d replied, “Well, I don’t know many guys in other states. I have no idea how happy they are.” Then he’d winked at her and she had accepted right then. And the Starbucks manager bought them each a caramel macchiato, which weren’t cheap.