by Julia Derek
He should have known that had been too good to be true.
He can only hope there were no bullets in John’s gun when she took it.
“Do you think it was loaded?” he asks tensely, even though, deep inside, he knows it is a vain question.
“Yes. John always has it loaded in case of burglars.” Sue exhales with desperation. “You know how he is.”
A sense of dread seeps through Jason. Of course.
“Did you talk to the police?” Sue Ann asks.
“I was just about to head down to the station. I’ll go as soon as we hang up.”
After they disconnect, Jason rushes around the apartment and finds a few of photos of Lexi. They will be necessary for the cops to find her. He isn’t sure what must have triggered her relapse into depression this time, only that something must have and that he needs to find her before she can hurt herself. He doubts it can be something as trivial as he not giving her as much attention as usual lately.
With that gnawing on his mind, he dashes out of their apartment.
Chapter 21
The cop who is filing the missing person report is female and strong-looking. Her name is Officer Garcia and she moves and talks in a way that suggests she is very comfortable in her milk chocolate skin and with her tight bun of black hair. She motions for Jason to take a seat in the worn chair before the light wooden desk and takes a seat herself at the other side.
She steeples her hands and places her index fingers against her lips as she takes a long, piercing look at Jason. Lowering her hands, she gives him a close-lipped smile.
“So, Mr. Woods,” she says. “When was the last time you saw your wife? Alexandra Woods, was it?”
“Yes.” Jason watches Officer Garcia as she scribbles down something on a sheet of yellow papers. “Yesterday in the morning. We shared a cab to work together. We do that most weekday mornings since we both work downtown.”
She scribbles something else on the sheet. “Did you talk to her during the day?”
“We only communicated a couple of times via text. The last time I heard from her was at five yesterday afternoon.”
Officer Garcia turns her wrist and eyes her watch. Then her black gaze returns to Jason. “It’s only nine thirty. Is it possible that your wife is gone on purpose? What’s the state of your marriage?”
Jason knows exactly what the woman is getting at, even expected such intrusive questions, so he barely raises a brow and instead replies in a calm voice, “Except for the fact that I suspect Lexi might have been a little irritated with me for having worked too much lately, it’s as good as it has ever been. My wife and I are very happily married. From the moment we met almost a decade ago we’ve been in love and that has never changed.”
Jason feels a smile stretch his lips as he considers how much he and Lexi love each other. They truly do have a relationship to be envied, having stayed in love while most of their friends’ relationships either have ended or at least fizzled considerably.
Officer Garcia gives something between a smile and a smirk. “Really? Pardon my cynicism here, but that sounds like something taken out of a Disney movie. No one is that happy all of the time.”
“I never said we were always happy. I only said that we’re happily married and that we love each other deeply. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had problems. Our marriage has faced a lot of trials. I dare say more than most couples have over a lifetime of being married. But we dealt with our problems and in the end our relationship has gotten even stronger.”
At least this is what Jason has believed up until this morning. He and Lexi had a relationship that had only grown stronger with each tragedy. The fact that Jason continues to struggle with Lexi having lived with that other man, slept with him, is his own issue and he doesn’t talk about it with anyone, not even with Lexi. There is no point to pile on her guilt. Those images that keep popping up in his head, that haunt him on an almost daily basis, have nothing to do with the state of their actual relationship. He hopes that, one day, he will be able to stop thinking about them, stop having nightmares. Really, what she did with that man was only in an effort to punish herself for what she was guilty of. Well, that’s the word she likes to use—guilty. Jason hates it when she uses it in context with what happened and has never once used it himself. No one besides Lexi has. It wasn’t her fault, yet she continued to blame herself. But he had thought that she’d finally dealt with all those feelings of crippling guilt once and for all.
Apparently, this is not so.
The black-haired Latina cop nods slowly. “I see. So you are very happily married then…”
“Yes, we are,” Jason says, loathing the fact that he sounds like a defiant child who refuses to deal with the truth. His lips shrink back to a more somber expression. “But as I told you, our marriage has faced quite a few trials, so it hasn’t always been a smooth ride. Also, my wife suffers from depression.”
“Clinical depression?”
He sighs. “I don’t think so, but at this point I’m not sure. All I know is that she never showed any signs of depression before the death of our first child almost six years ago. A two-year-old girl.” Jason is suddenly gripped by an avalanche of emotion and needs to take a moment to regain control of himself before he continues. He clears his throat. “It took a couple of years for her to recover from that. She was very, very depressed. But after she recovered, she was back to normal more or less and even went back to work. She is an accountant with Ernst & Young and very good at what she does.”
There are no longer any traces of sarcasm on Officer Garcia’s face. “I’m so sorry about your loss. That cannot have been easy.”
“Thank you. No, it was a very hard time for both of us.”
Officer Garcia nods again and asks Jason if he would like some coffee. After he declines, she asks, “Do you think her depression might have something to do with her missing today?”
“Yes, it’s a pretty big chance that’s the case. That’s the reason she disappeared the last time.”
The police woman pulls in her chin in surprise. “The last time? Does your wife make it a habit of disappearing on you?”
“No, it has only happened once before. But it took eight months before she came back home that time.”
“I’m confused. Your wife disappeared for eight months? You mean she left you?”
Jason clasps his hands in his lap and his blue eyes find the pale wooden table top before him. He can feel his shoulders slump and that same mix of those strong emotions—sadness, fury, and helplessness—rushes through him, weighing him down just as they did the day he found out that Lexi was not in Miami like she had made him believe.
“I guess that is what she did,” he says finally, meeting the officer’s gaze again. “She just couldn’t handle seeing me any longer, so I had to let her go.”
Officer Garcia frowns, her strong brows turning into a unibrow, and looks perturbed. “She couldn’t handle seeing you any longer? Why? What did you do?”
He gazes off into the distance as he relives that terrible day once again, his chest aching with the same intensity. So many terrible days in his life. Again his eyes return to Garcia after some time. “It’s more about what she did. It didn’t matter that I forgave her, kept telling her that it could have happened to anyone. That it wasn’t her fault. It was just an accident. Everyone was in agreement of that. But she would have none of it. She couldn’t forgive herself.”
“I’m sorry, but you’ve totally lost me now. What did she do that was so bad?”
He tells her an abbreviated version of the toddler’s death. When he finishes, Officer Garcia’s eyes widen and the corners of her mouth go down. She opens and closes her mouth a couple of times like a fish before she says, “Again, I’m so sorry. That is truly… tragic.”
Jason gives a small nod and looks away. “Yes, I know.”
A conversation between him and Lexi sometime in the months after their daughter was buried replays in Jason’s min
d:
“You need to stop blaming yourself, Lexi,” he said while grabbing her shoulders. “Please stop crying like this. It’s not your fault. When are you going to finally see that?”
Lexi did stop crying momentarily and instead her features twisted in an ugly mask of fury. “If it’s not my fault, then whose fault is it, Jason? Tell me!” He could feel tiny droplets of spittle on his skin as she screamed at him. “Yours for leaving her with me? Don’t be so fucking stupid! Of course it was my fault. I’m a terrible mother and person.” She burst into tears again and buried her face in her hands, trying to turn away from him. But he wouldn’t let her. He needed to convince her once and for all that she wasn’t at fault. It had only been an accident.
When would she accept this and finally forgive herself? It had been several months now. What was done was done and Lexi beating herself up about it like this wouldn’t change what happened that fated day.
How could he make her see that?
He cupped her face with both his hands. “Do you know how often I wish I was the one in your place that day?” he asked softly while looking into her tear-swollen face, hoping saying this would make her listen to him. Besides, it was true. “It kills me to see you blaming yourself like this, Lexi.”
She did listen to him and she didn’t even look mad any longer. But she didn’t reply in the way that he had hoped. Instead she said, her voice as dead as her gaze now, “If she had been with you that day, Jason, she would still be alive today.”
The police woman clears her throat, interrupting his thoughts. The way she contemplates him makes him think that she must have done so for several seconds without saying anything, just let him be alone with his thoughts. “Do you think the accident might have something to do with your wife’s disappearance?”
Jason forces himself to focus on the here and now. This is not the time to ponder all those trying months; he needs to find Lexi before she can do something to herself. He unclasps his hands and sits up in the chair, takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. “Yes, I think it might. But I can’t think of how. The first time she disappeared—well, left me—I was well aware of the reason, and that was why I didn’t attempt to make her come back home in the beginning. Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t know where she was staying. I figured she needed space, some time on her own. I hoped that it would help her move on at last. So I let her go.”
“Move on? Are you saying you had to let her go so she would stop blaming herself for the death of your daughter?”
“Basically, yes. I truly thought that giving her this space would help her heal. But it turned out to be a huge mistake that nearly cost her life.” He lowers his gaze and shakes his head. “I should have insisted that her mother stay with her instead of letting her go on her own.”
Officer Garcia places her elbows on the desk and leans forward, closer to Jason. “You mentioned she couldn’t handle seeing you any longer. What exactly do you mean by that? Why couldn’t she see you?”
“Because I look just like our daughter.”
Officer Garcia jerks a little. “Oh.” She licks her fleshy lips in a way that makes her appear nervous. “I guess that makes sense.”
“Yes, I thought so too.” He smiles sadly. “She looked just like me. I could see how seeing me made Lexi think of her all the time. Finally she told me she couldn’t take it any longer, so she told me she needed to be away from me for a while in order to move on. Since she’d been so incredibly depressed for so long, I thought us being apart might make her feel better. It was worth a shot. We’d begun fighting more and more, and could both use a break from that. So she left for Florida a few days later. She was supposed to live in an apartment that we had rented for her down there. And I was not supposed to contact her for a while. We agreed that she would instead check in with her mother every night so I could be sure that she was okay.”
“And did she stay at the house?”
Jason is screwing around in his seat and the pain in his chest is replaced by the jealousy that so often haunts him. “She stayed there for a while. A few months from what I understand. We don’t really talk about it.”
“Why not?”
Jason doesn’t immediately answer. But finally he does, realizing that he doesn’t really have a choice. “I prefer not to talk about that time.”
“Oh.” Officer Garcia looks at Jason for a long, intense moment. Before she can speak again, Jason says, “She spent some of her time away from me in Brooklyn.”
“In Brooklyn? As in Brooklyn, New York?”
“Yes. She left Florida for Brooklyn.” The jealousy in his chest grows hotter, edgier. He does his best to push it away, but it remains.
“Why did she do that?”
He clenches his teeth. “Because she didn’t think she deserved to live in a nice apartment by the beach while her daughter was lying in a grave because of her.” He sucks in a sharp breath. “Remember, she was extremely depressed and wanted to punish herself. She wanted to die.”
“So she went to Brooklyn to die? Why Brooklyn?”
“Well, she’d really intended to go to Queens where our daughter is buried, but the closest Greyhound station is in Brooklyn, so she went there. One day in Florida she simply decided that she was going to drink herself to death. While doing so, her plan was to visit our daughter’s grave as much as possible. But she got stuck in Brooklyn instead.”
There is a nondescript expression on Officer Garcia’s face. “I see. I assume you didn’t know she was so close by?”
“No, I had no idea.”
“Where did she live while in Brooklyn?”
He knows he must answer—and give the whole truth—even if it’s tearing him apart. “First she lived on the streets. But then she lived with a man who took pity on her. I finally caught on to what she was up to.”
The police woman shakes her head, tsking. “Dios. That must have been so hard for you.”
One of the corners of Jason’s mouth goes up in a humorless little smile. “Extremely.”
“So you think she might have done something similar again?”
“Yes. It seems the death of our son proved to be too much for her after all.”
The Latina frowns at him. “The death of your daughter, you mean?”
“No, I did mean son. Last year Lexi got pregnant again, but our son was born dead. Unexplained stillbirth.” Jason pretends to check his cell that he has kept in his hand the entire time just in case Lexi contacts him finally. He blinks away the tears that have sprung to his eyes. He will not become emotional in front of this woman. His gaze returns to the policewoman shortly. “He was born about a week and five months ago.”
“Ay, dios mio…” she mutters. Then she clears her throat. “Well, your wife hasn’t been missing that long.” She throws a glance over Jason’s head. “It’s not even ten o’clock yet. It’s hard to drink yourself to death in a day, so she should be okay. You’re absolutely sure she isn’t just mad at you and spent the night at a friend’s house?”
“Yes, her mother and sister and I have already looked into that possibility. It really doesn’t look like it. Besides, if that were the case, she would have called me by now. Unless something has triggered her depression, she would never be so cruel and intentionally stay away for that long. She knows that it would drive me crazy with worry.”
“I understand. Unfortunately, there isn’t much the NYPD can do but to put out an APB for her across all five boroughs. We don’t have the resources to do a deeper investigation, especially since she is an adult and she might have left voluntarily.”
Jason stares at the policewoman. “Really? There is nothing else you can do? What if I tell you that it looks like she has her father’s loaded gun with her? She went to her mother’s house a few days ago and her parents just discovered that the gun is missing.”
She looks at him with a sober face. “I fully understand your concern, but nonetheless, there isn’t much the NYPD can do to find your wife except fo
r putting out an alert. And if she is found, you will only be notified of her whereabouts if she agrees to that. Unless a psychiatrist has deemed your wife incapable of taking care of herself, she has the right to disappear on you for as long as she wants to. Your wife has not been declared mentally incapacitated, correct?”
“No, she hasn’t. But, as I just told you, she was extremely depressed after the loss of our second child.”
Officer Garcia presses her lips into a thin line. “I got that, but so far she’s still in charge of herself. Unfortunately, she has the right to do whatever she wants.”
Jason can’t stop himself from glaring at the big policewoman now. He can almost not believe what it is that he is hearing.
“So that’s it?” he asks, his voice taut like a recently tightened guitar string. “Am I supposed to just sit around and wait for her to show up then? Or wait until it’s reported on the news that a thirty-year-old woman has”—-he can barely take the words into his mouth—“has killed herself?”
Officer Garcia inhales. “Let’s hope she doesn’t kill herself. If I were in your shoes, Mr. Woods, I would hire a private investigator to try to find your wife. That would be your best bet in addition to what we’ll be doing for you. I have the number to several good ones. Would you like them?”
“Yes, I do.”
Her hand disappears inside a drawer in her desk and returns with some business cards that she hands Jason. He takes them and then fills out the rest of the report on his own, not saying a word. Ten minutes later, he is on the phone with the first private investigator. This time around he isn’t going to take any chances by simply relying on himself to try to find her.
Not with Lexi having a gun on her.
Chapter 22
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
