Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  The text could also have been total bullshit, I knew. I’d given my number to FBA and her catty friends, none of whom gave two shits about January, and any one of them could be fucking with me for a few vindictive laughs. It could be Anson, too, having found one more way to amuse himself at the expense of his stepsister’s unknown fate.

  It could have been anything—and there was only one way I’d know.

  My heart thudding like the blades of a helicopter, I began to creep around the side of the barn, each step a demonstration of masterful self-control. The overgrown weeds were all dying now, desiccating quickly as winter approached, and they tangled around my ankles as I slogged through them, grasping at me like hands bursting from the earth. I stopped, started, stopped, and started again, feeling breathless and stupid—wondering if I really had either the fortitude to see this through, or the brains to abort safely while I still could. And then I had reached the point of no return, the back of my neck clammy with sweat, and electricity buzzed and snapped to life in my veins. Now or never.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped out behind the barn, tensed and prepared for anything—a corpse, an attack, a barrage of ridicule from Anson, the miraculous sight of a girl who was supposed to be dead—and found myself staring into darkness.

  The moon hovered on the other side of the barn, and the forlorn outbuilding cast an inky shadow over the wedge of earth in back of it, rendering it a black void. I stood, frozen, my eyes wide as I waited for them to adjust—as I waited for something, anything, to happen. I could hear no movement, no breathing; I felt utterly alone and completely surrounded at the same time, every inch of my skin bristling with awareness.

  After what felt like an eternity, familiar forms began at last to distinguish themselves from the stygian gloom before me: weeds and grasses drooping heavily, a tendril of mist slithering its way toward the bordering trees … and then something small, rounded, and pale as ivory propped against the back wall of the barn. My heart dove and then launched upward, throbbing with such agony I was afraid I’d pass out; my vision weaved and shimmied, and then refocused, and I emitted a sound somewhere between a sigh and a whimper as I finally made sense of what I was looking at.

  Swallowing my heart back to its rightful place, I struggled to steady my breathing. It was not a skull I had found—it was a rock. Looking like a half-melted bowling ball, it sat in a jumble of weeds at the base of the barn and, aside from myself, it was the only thing back there that wasn’t undisturbed vegetation. There were no suspicious mounds of freshly turned earth, no tarp-covered heaps or vats of lye or snickering pranksters—just a swath of wild plants and a domed gray boulder braced against the wall.

  Doubtfully, I checked my phone again, wondering if a second set of instructions might be forthcoming; but no new messages had come in, and it was clear that I was on my own. I glanced around anyway, feeling eyes on me, all over me, and wondered again what the hell I was doing out there. Had the text been meaningless? A joke?

  I gave the rock a skeptical and almost irritated look, feeling mocked by its inscrutability. And then, as I gazed at it, a memory came to me, the skin across my shoulders contracting with goose bumps as the image crystallized in my mind: Micah and I turning over stones in his garden, looking for a hidden key. Was it possible?

  Wading closer to the back wall of the barn through the sea of damp weeds, I tried not to get too hopeful. What did I really expect to find if I lifted the thing up? A note saying Now go to the Dumas theater and check under seat 121, like I’d stumbled into the world’s worst episode of The Amazing Race? All I could think, though, was that the day we’d searched these fields, even if I had thought to check behind the barn, I’d have overlooked that boulder—and the police would have, too. We’d been looking for a body … not a secret message.

  The rock wasn’t heavy, but it was cumbersome, and with only one good hand at my disposal, it took considerable effort to drag it loose from its resting place. When I finally managed to shove it aside, the muscles in my left shoulder sore from the effort, my pulse quickened anew as I saw what I’d uncovered: a strange gap in the earth, about seven inches long and maybe two inches wide, that ran along the base of the building. It looked like the entrance to a den some animal had carved out underneath the floor of the old barn; it was, to my indescribable relief, obviously too small to accommodate a body.

  Hunkering down, I pulled out my phone and activated the flashlight app, aiming its glow into the opening and wondering what I would find. At first I could see nothing but the gouged, uneven dirt walls of the burrow, shadows echoing themselves and overlapping into pitch black as the cavity became wider and deeper; but when I angled my phone a different way, I caught a glimpse of something white and shiny. Gingerly, I reached into the hole, silently praying that any snakes or biting insects that might have taken up residence for the coming cold months were already well and duly asleep; on the third try I managed to snag my finger through something that felt like a loop of tissue-thin plastic.

  With little difficulty, I tugged the object free and found that my surmise had been correct; I was holding a common grocery bag, its handles tied in a tight knot. It felt almost disappointingly light in weight as it dangled from my pinkie. My bewilderment was growing by the second as I carried my find out into the moonlight, groping the bag with curious fingers, something rubbery rebounding against the pressure while a larger item made the telltale crinkle of starchy plastic, moving and flexing under my touch. Teasing the knot open with care, fighting every instinct to simply rip the bag apart, I looked at what was inside.

  An instant later, my world inverted. A precipitous rush of blood thundered into my head, making the night sway around me, and I dropped onto my ass. The bag landed in the grass at my feet and I stared forward in a blank daze, mists roiling turbulently around me and then settling to form a cold and clammy film on my exposed skin. I sucked the frigid vapor into my lungs, numbed and supercharged all at once.

  As clearly as if I had been there when it happened—as clearly as if January had taken me into her confidence from the beginning—I could suddenly see how it had all happened. Everything made sense.

  Tammy’s over-the-top anguish and wish that the baby had been mine; Eddie’s proclamation that January had been a “scandal waiting to happen”; Anson’s lascivious sneer—she was fucking around behind your back—had they known all along that January was pregnant? Could they possibly have even known it was the result of a rape? It seemed almost impossible to consider, and yet …

  As a minor, January couldn’t have gotten an abortion without parental consent, and Jonathan, with a U.S. Senate seat in arm’s reach, could never have afforded to allow it. A fifteen-year-old girl who also happened to be a national candidate’s stepdaughter seeking to terminate a pregnancy would be the kind of thing that would turn up on blogs, newspapers, magazines, and talk shows all over the place. Special interest groups would turn her into a Cause, and her trauma would be broadcast to every home in the country. If, however, the Walkers said no, then sooner or later January’s condition would become obvious, and Jonathan would be compelled to explain on the same public platforms why he’d chosen to force his underage stepdaughter to carry her rapist’s baby to term. No matter what the decision was, Jonathan would lose enough voter support to cost the election that mattered more to him than even his own family. And trying to get it taken care of on the sly would’ve been a fool’s gamble; the story would be too explosive, too irresistible, for someone in the know not to eventually sell the information to the media.

  Damned if they did and damned if they didn’t, the Walkers would have had only one choice: to bury the scandal before it could erupt and bury them—to listen to Eddie after all, and send January somewhere that she’d no longer be able to “fuck things up” anymore. Probably before she could start to show, they’d have shipped her off, made some lame excuse and sent her to live with a distant relative out of state, or even out of the country. She’d have been forced to
bear Cedric’s child in secret, to give it up for adoption and lie to everyone she knew about where she’d gone and why, and to swear that she would never, ever reveal the truth. And all for Jonathan’s senate seat.

  It would have been intolerable to her—her own personal hell.

  Just like that, I realized that night in the barn had been more than merely a desperate attempt to obscure the cause of her pregnancy, more even than just a desire to reclaim control over her body by choosing sex with someone she cared about—though it might have been both those things as well. By convincing me that I was the father of her unborn child, she’d have drawn me and my parents into the loop, stretching Jonathan’s sphere of influence to its breaking point. He could control Tammy, and therefore to a certain extent her daughter, but not the Doherty family. My parents would probably have gone along with almost any scenario that saw me free from the shackles of teenage fatherhood, but my mother would have been rankled by any attempt to remove January of her agency in the matter, and would have been thrilled to tell Mr. Walker so to his face; either way, whatever happened, the issue would have irretrievably spread beyond the confines of the man’s personal fiefdom. His word would no longer be absolute, and January’s chances of prevailing would have increased, even if only marginally.

  A strategic maneuver, then, and one worthy of my brilliant girlfriend, January McConville, who wasn’t afraid of anything. I took another look at the contents of the bag I’d fished out from the hole underneath the barn—at the torn, plastic pouch with a narrow-gauge rubber hose escaping from a valve on one end, its insides darkened here and there by a crusty black residue. Even if I hadn’t been able to immediately recognize what it was that I’d uncovered, the dark matter that gathered in the corners and folds told me the whole story.

  It was a blood donor bag.

  January, who had volunteered at the Red Cross one day a week all summer long—at Jonathan’s insistence—would have known exactly how to draw her own blood, how much she could afford to part with on a daily basis, and where to get the necessary supplies. Given the chilly autumn temperatures, she might even have been able to store her reservoir right there under the barn, adding to it bit by bit, taking the risk that it wouldn’t congeal or spoil before she needed it. She could have been planning her escape for a week or even longer, making the awful choice to give up her friends and her future as an astronomer in exchange for control over her own destiny. Our interlude in the barn may have been her last-ditch attempt at creating a situation that might have allowed her to stay.

  But it hadn’t worked out. And as I looked at the neat slit cut into the bottom of the pouch that had once been filled with blood, I could easily imagine January emptying it out over her clothes—drenching her hoodie and jeans, and then leaving them somewhere she knew they’d eventually be found. Maybe she’d wanted her parents to suffer for failing to support her when she needed them. Maybe she even figured the fact of her pregnancy would be uncovered through the tests run by the medical examiner, and hoped it would ultimately lead to Cedric’s exposure as a serial rapist, hoped he might become a suspect in her apparent death; it would explain, after all, why her backpack had been tossed into the Dumpster at his apartment complex.

  The discovery of her bag, ever since it had been announced, had been bothering me; why would a man so obsessed that he saved January’s hair and drink lids in airtight, moisture-proof plastic bags, literally converting her trash into his treasure, summarily throw out her backpack and everything inside of it? That portrait he’d taken from Reiko and had framed proved that he lacked either the willpower or the basic common sense to dispose of incriminating trophies. If her bloodstained bag had been discovered somewhere near Cedric’s apartment, it would have looked bad—but, found at the dump and mixed in with the man’s garbage as though he’d tried ineptly to get rid of it, the thing was positively damning, an elegant and diabolical nail that had sealed his coffin shut in the eyes of the public.

  Suddenly I was certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I had solved the riddle of January’s still-missing body—as certain as I was that the area code of the number that had texted me with instructions to look behind the barn was local to Los Angeles.

  With trembling fingers, I pulled out my phone and wrote another text, blinking away tears that distorted the letters on my keypad. It was only one word, but it was all that I could manage: January?

  An eternity passed, the night growing colder as the stars hardened and the icy mist began to make my teeth chatter, but I finally received an answer. It was one word, but it was all I’d been hoping for.

  Good-bye.

  EPILOGUE

  I HELD MY glass up to the light, one last mouthful of sparkling grape juice swirling at the bottom, and watched a rainbow splinter into fragments through bevels and bubbles. My parents were not averse to allowing me a sip of actual champagne on certain special occasions, but for semi-special ones, I got the training-wheel stuff. To be honest, despite the supposed sophistication, I kind of disliked both versions; sharp and sour, they were like thin jackets that left you freezing and miserable but made you look good. At least the real stuff gave you a buzz.

  “Can I help you with the dishes, Mrs. Doherty?” Kaz asked deferentially as he half rose from his seat, hands already reaching for his plate and mine, and my mother—to her credit—rolled her eyes at him.

  “Relax, I like you already,” she said with a dismissive wave. “Besides, you two better get going or you’ll miss your movie.” He beamed back at her, proud of the compliment in a way that made me melt a little inside, and I set my glass on the table again so I could lead the way back to my room. As we started up the short hallway to the front of the house, my mom called out, “And can the ‘Mrs. Doherty’ stuff—it’s Kate!”

  Two weeks had passed since the night of my discovery behind the barn, and while my life hadn’t exactly returned to “normal,” it was finally achieving a sense of equilibrium—a new kind of normal, I guess, and one that felt good. It was the first night that Kaz had eaten dinner with my family, for instance, and instead of watching us with frozen smiles as if afraid to say something wrong and offend us both, my parents had actually teased us about our furtive looks and flirtatious nudges under the table. I liked it.

  Also, I was something of a living legend at Riverside. Coming out, dating a college guy, getting embroiled in a murder investigation, and facing down a gun-wielding killer had taken me from nondescript to noteworthy in the space of two weeks, and suddenly I was one of the popular kids. The only person who seemed to bear me any ill will, actually, was Mason Collier, who resented my sudden fame and groused nastily to anyone who would listen that I shouldn’t be allowed to use the men’s locker room anymore, because I “couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Do you really think they like me?” Kaz asked in a doubtful undertone once we reached my bedroom. “Your mom isn’t just saying that?”

  “Believe me, my mom doesn’t say stuff she doesn’t mean,” I promised, shrugging—with some difficulty—into a sweater, the bulky cast that made a club out of my right hand still turning every change of clothes into a magic trick. “And she’s really polite to people she doesn’t like. Like, one time, my dad’s boss came over for drinks? And he made all these obnoxious, sexist jokes, and the whole night my mom’s saying stuff like, ‘Well, isn’t that interesting?’ and ‘Can I freshen anyone’s coffee?’ while giving him this huge smile that was all teeth, like a velociraptor.”

  “Got it. Dinosaur smile equals no likey.”

  He was still nervous, I could tell, and not for lack of reason, either; we were about to meet Micah and Tiana for our first official double date. We’d gotten coffee together once already, just so they could all meet each other, but I had sort of monopolized the conversation with my retelling of The Big Showdown With Cedric—much, I believe, to everyone’s mutual relief. So tonight was going to be Kind of a Big Deal, and while Micah had relaxed a lot, he still had problems talking to me about Kaz with
out looking like a student driver trying to merge lanes on a crowded freeway.

  But even if there were still the occasional awkward or embarrassing moments as my friends and family adjusted to the idea of my dating a guy, it still meant a ton to me that all of them put effort into getting to know Kaz—that all of them wanted him to feel welcome. For his part, he had steeled his nerves and made a point of telling his parents about me; I wouldn’t be getting to meet them anytime soon, but he had been ecstatic to report back that they had actually acknowledged my existence. Even if his mother apparently referred to me exclusively as Kaz’s “good friend.”

  At the front door, my dad performed a cursory check of our preparedness. After ascertaining that we both had working cell phones and cash in case of an emergency, he said, “Okay, well, have fun. Text when you get there. And when the movie’s over. And … come home right after?”

  I nodded, fighting off an eye roll. The night I’d gone to leave that photograph at January’s memorial, I hadn’t returned to the house until late—well after my curfew—having lost all track of time while I sat thinking in her favorite meadow. It had triggered every paranoid instinct my parents ordinarily suppressed, and even now it was sort of a miracle they were letting me out of the house without a police escort. I was pretty sure they would calm back down eventually; the bad guy was gone, the intrigues were settled, and I had every intention of regaining my nondescript status.

  In the days that had passed, I’d received no further communication from the mysterious California number; by the time I screwed up the courage I needed to dial it and see what happened, it was already out of service. A disposable cell, most likely, and one that was probably already on its way to a landfill somewhere.