Since She Went Away

by David Bell

  He laid Mark Twain aside and stared at the book Tabitha had returned to his mom. He hoped the book would carry some piece of Tabitha with it. Maybe a strand of her hair that fell into the pages, or maybe a lingering whiff of the flowery shampoo he loved to take deep breaths of when they were close. But the book smelled kind of gross, as if it had sat in a dirty kitchen where someone fried a greasy hamburger. He didn’t have any other mementoes of her. No articles of clothing, no real gifts.

  He received a text from Mike, asking him to provide a refresher on the book during lunch the next day. Mike never read anything, never even tried. Jared wrote back, promising the information in exchange for a dessert or a chocolate milk. Mike agreed, and Jared decided he needed to start raising his prices.

  And then his mom pushed the door to his room open.

  She always knocked. The only time she didn’t was the day she found Tabitha on top of him, her hand doing things he could only fantasize about with her gone.

  Jared sat up because his mom looked scared, the book sliding off his chest and onto the bed. His mom’s cheeks were pale, her eyes nervous and darting.

  “What is it, Mom?”

  “I need you to come and look at something.” It sounded more like an order than a request. His mother didn’t usually bark orders, even when she was at her most pissed. She made it seem as if it were his choice to do something, even when it clearly wasn’t. She added, “Now.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  He followed her across the house to the little office she kept in a spare bedroom. She pointed to the chair in front of her laptop, indicating he should sit down, and she stayed back, just behind him, while he looked at the news story she had open on the screen.

  None of it made sense at first. A picture of Tabitha’s dad appeared on the screen. Next to it a photo of Tabitha. Why? Was it some social media site he’d never heard of but his mom had?

  Then he saw it was a news site.

  “What is this?” he asked, although he wasn’t directing the question at anyone in particular. He was talking to himself.

  He studied the screen more, and as he did, he felt his legs becoming weaker, felt a cold stain of fear spread from the center of his body to the tips of his fingers and toes.

  Tabitha’s picture. But with a different name underneath it.

  It said she was from Grand Junction, Nebraska. Not Florida.

  Tabitha and her father. In the newspaper.

  And a headline with the word “murder” in it.

  The wheels in his head moved slowly, like a car stuck in the mud. He couldn’t seem to keep up, to process everything he was meant to process. It was like a dream he didn’t understand even as he was having it.

  His body started to shake.

  “Is that Tabitha’s father?” his mom asked. “Is it?”

  “It is. But his name’s not William Rose. What is this?”

  He saw the headline. SUSPECT IN MURDER SPOTTED IN LOUISVILLE.

  Louisville. Not far away. Not far away at all.

  His mom had her phone out, pressing the buttons. “Somebody saw him in a store up there. We have to call the police. You said the school reported something, so they’re already looking to some extent. I’m calling Detective Poole.”

  While she dialed, Jared scanned the story. The words didn’t make sense. They might as well have been a jumble, like those puzzles in the newspaper. But he caught certain things. “The man was alone when spotted . . . no sign of his wife or daughter . . . believed to be dead, a victim of Mr. Rose . . .”

  But Tabitha wasn’t dead. Not a few days ago.

  “No one saw her?” Jared asked, his voice faint.

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  He saw the darkened house in his mind, the closed doors and pulled shades. He’d been right there, knocking and looking around.

  Had Tabitha been inside while he spoke to the neighbor?

  Could she have been in the house dead?

  He was up, brushing past his mother.

  “No,” she said, her voice harsh and authoritative. “You need to stay here. The police need to talk to you.”

  “But Tabitha—”

  “No. They need the address. It’s dangerous. What if that man is back?”

  But Jared was gone, out the front door without a coat, without a plan.

  For the second time, he ran to Tabitha’s house, hoping to save her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The house still looked shut up and dark. Abandoned. Devoid of hope and life.

  Jared glanced at the neighbor’s house and saw no sign of Mr. Fifties, his cigarette or his beer.

  He remembered the news story they saw on the Web, the one with Tabitha’s—Natalie’s?—picture. A witness saw her dad. A cop. But they didn’t see her. And the authorities thought he’d killed her mother. . . .

  Where was she if she wasn’t with her dad?

  Maybe she was in the bathroom of the store, and that was why the witness missed her. Maybe she was hunched down in the back of the car. Maybe she’d blended into the crowd.

  Or maybe . . .

  He stared at the house, its locked doors and drawn blinds. It looked like a place that held its secrets close and tight, as impenetrable as a bank vault.

  But maybe it all made sense—the curfew, the isolation, the restricted texting and calling. Tabitha and her dad were on the run, living under different names. Her father was a murderer, someone who had killed her mother and then taken Tabitha away from her home to live there in Hawks Mill. And they were on the run again.

  Maybe. If Tabitha or Natalie or whoever she was really had gone with him.

  He checked the back door, hoping for something with a large window he could break. He wanted to smash the glass and just reach in and undo the lock, assuming it wasn’t a dead bolt. Or he could crawl through the window.

  And look for what? Tabitha’s dead body?

  Jared shook the thought out of his mind. No time for that. He just wanted to concentrate on getting inside.

  The back door was locked and made out of wood. No window, no opening. He pushed against it and it didn’t budge.

  He went back down the steps to the side of the house and stood under the window he had previously broken. The cardboard still covered the opening, but the window was too high to reach or boost his body through. Above the roof, low clouds started to build, blotting out the stars and the rising moon. It was getting tougher to see.

  Jared scrambled around on the ground again, searching with his hands. He found a large stone, one that someone had once used to create a border around the landscaping. The stones were scattered now, the flower bed overgrown with dead weeds and grasses. He clutched the rock in his hand. It was bigger than a softball, filling his palm and then some.

  He spotted a basement window, small but still big enough for him to squeeze through if he knocked all the glass out. He didn’t try to disguise the noise. He pulled his hand back, making sure to keep his fingers out of the way as best he could, and brought the rock forward. The window crunched, the shards of glass falling inside and making a sound like discordant music.

  He checked his hand. He didn’t see any blood in the dark, didn’t feel the stinging of any cuts. He used the rock to clear the rest of the glass out of the pane, swiping it away so there were no jagged edges sticking up, and then he tossed it away. He took off his sweatshirt, since he hadn’t bothered to grab a coat on his way out, and used it to line the pane, hoping for a little more protection against any pieces he’d missed.

  He looked around one more time, checking to see if anyone was watching him or had heard the glass breaking. But there was no one in sight. The night was quiet except for the soft creaking of tree limbs rubbing against one another when the faint breeze moved.

  Jared bent down and slithered through the opening
, not sure where he would land.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Nothing broke his fall but the cement.

  Jared managed to twist his body a bit before impact, allowing his shoulder to take most of the force instead of his head. It still hurt, and he lay on the floor for a moment, letting out a low groan that he quickly repressed. He doubted anyone was in the house, at least no one who was alive, but did he really want to telegraph his arrival by moaning and groaning?

  He yanked his sweatshirt in and shook it out, making sure no more glass was embedded in its material. A cool draft followed him through the broken window, and he pulled the sweatshirt back on as his eyes adjusted to the even darker space. When they began to acclimate, he looked around. He saw an old washer and dryer, some boxes, and a set of golf clubs that looked as though they hadn’t been touched since Jack Nicklaus was an infant. But the large open space was mostly empty.

  Across the room, a staircase, wooden and rickety, led to the next level of the house, so Jared headed that way, stepping lightly, hoping that when he reached the top the door wouldn’t be locked. He eased up the stairs, every creak amplified in the dark, quiet space. As he climbed, he wished he’d kept the rock he’d used to break the window. He possessed no weapon, no way to defend himself on the off chance someone was in there. But he also figured if someone was in there, someone who meant to do him harm, a rock wasn’t going to be much help.

  The door at the top of the stairs gave way when he turned the knob. He pushed it open slowly, and in the meager light saw he was in the kitchen.

  The smell hit him, a sickly stench that burned his nostrils. Like poop. Maybe a pipe had burst or a toilet had backed up. Or could it be something worse, some kind of decay from someone who had died.

  Jared’s will and determination took a hit. If someone was dead in the house. If Tabitha was dead in the house, did he really want to be the person to find her? Did he want to see her body and remember her that way for the rest of his life?

  But if she was there, if she’d been killed and abandoned by her father, Jared didn’t want to leave her there unattended. Her life had already been violent and shitty. No one, least of all the girl he really and truly loved, deserved to be left to die and rot alone.

  Or what if she was just hurt? Bleeding or injured?

  He moved through the kitchen, past the table where he had spied her dad planting that creepy kiss on Tabitha’s lips. He shivered at the memory, which had been enhanced and made even worse by the information he’d learned online. Again, he reminded himself not to dwell. There’d be time later to deal with those things. Hopefully there would be, he thought. Hopefully there would be.

  He reached a hallway that ran to the front of the house. The smell seemed to be coming from somewhere in that direction. He hadn’t adjusted to it, not at all. He took off his sweatshirt again, feeling the cold chill of the house against his bare arms, and pressed it against his nose, hoping to block out the odor.

  There were doors on either side of the hallway. One of them was open, and Jared peered inside. A bathroom. The sink was streaked with rust stains, the shower curtain torn and hanging loose. A pang of regret stabbed his heart, an aching sorrow he felt to his core. He hated to think Tabitha lived in these conditions in a dirty run-down house. She showered there in the crude little room. Went to the bathroom and combed her hair.

  Then he saw the door on the left, one that must have led to a bedroom. It hung open, but there was a hasp attached to the wood on the outside. No padlock was in sight, but it meant that someone had been kept locked inside there. The hasp was new, the metal clean and shiny in the dingy gloom.

  Tabitha.

  Had she been a prisoner in her own house? Held by her father?

  Jared rushed into the room. He saw a mattress on the floor and some cardboard boxes against the wall. The closet hung open but was empty.

  Jared saw scattered papers and a textbook he recognized from school. He also saw a notebook, one with scribbles on the front. He recognized Tabitha’s handwriting and bent down to pick it up. It was full of drawings. Flowers and horses and a unicorn. The kind of things lots of kids, especially girls, drew. Page after page of them.

  He flipped back and looked at the inside front cover. Someone had signed their name there in a large flowing script.

  Natalie Lynn Rose.

  And under the name, a photograph. Taped to the notebook. A beautiful woman who looked a lot like the girl he knew as Tabitha. But older, probably in her thirties.

  Her mother. Had to be.

  Jared gently peeled the photo off the notebook and slid it into his back pocket.

  He tucked the notebook under his arm and left the bedroom.

  He brought the sweatshirt back up to his face. As he moved down the hallway toward the front of the house, the smell grew stronger. Even through the thick material of the sweatshirt, the odor reached him. His eyes watered from the stinging stench.

  Faint light leaked into the front room through a small opening in the blinds. Jared saw two overstuffed and dirty chairs, a small out-of-date TV with an antenna sitting on a plastic milk crate. An inert lump, fat and bloated, lay sprawled on the floor.

  It was a man. Jared could see that. But not Tabitha’s dad. This man wore a business suit, the tie knotted against the thick folds of skin at his neck. A giant pool of blood spread around his head like a halo. The blood was thick and black, and Jared could tell no one could survive losing that much from his body. A few feet away from the body sat a small ceramic statue of Santa Claus, the weapon that was probably used to smack the fat man over the head.

  Jared stared a moment longer, making sure, really sure, the man was dead and beyond help. He clearly was. His mouth hung open, the jaw slack. His eyes behind half-closed lids were sunken. At the moment of his death, the man’s bowels had emptied, the main source of the nasty odor in the house.

  Jared backed away. He went down the hallway and through the kitchen. He saw the back door, the one he’d tried earlier. He turned the lock and pulled it open, stepping out onto the small back porch and letting the cool air wash over his face. He took the sweatshirt away, gulping in the mercifully clean and cold air of the late-winter night.

  He huffed in the air for a few moments. Then he called the police.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The first two police officers to arrive on the scene asked Jared a lot of questions. He couldn’t answer many of them. He told them who had lived in the house as of a few days ago, and he related the story online identifying Tabitha’s dad as a fugitive and a murderer. The officers—one of them young and stocky, the other middle-aged and wiry—made him go over that a few times before it was all clear, and once it was, they decided to go into the house.

  One of the officers, the stocky one who wore a name tag that said “Jones,” asked Jared if he knew the dead man inside. Jared shook his head. The image of the bloated, bloody body came back to him, and even though he stood outside, the rotten smell lingered in his nostrils. He wished for something pleasant to sniff—a bunch of flowers or a peppermint patty or a wet dog. Anything.

  “You broke into the house because you thought your girlfriend was in danger?” the older cop asked him. His name tag said “Bradford,” and he sounded a little suspicious. Jared understood what the whole thing looked like. He’d already confessed to the crime of breaking into the house. But considering what he’d found and how shitty the house was to begin with, he hoped they’d cut him some slack.

  “I thought she was dead,” Jared said, trying not to sound pathetic. “She still might be.”

  Another car approached, and the three of them watched it pull over to the curb. Jared knew who it was. He’d called his mom as soon as he contacted the police and she said she would be right over. She popped out of the car, her face worried. Jared knew she’d be freaked, but then again, what parent wouldn’t be? Her son had called her up a
nd said he’d just found a dead body in a house in a bad neighborhood a few months after her best friend disappeared. Yeah, she could be freaked out if she wanted.

  “Are you okay?” she asked when she came up to them. She placed her hand on his shoulder, and then she pulled him close into a hug.

  Even though the two cops watched, Jared didn’t mind. The hug felt good, warm, and safe. It made him feel like a little kid again.

  “You’re his mom,” Jones said.

  “I am. He called me.”

  “Do you know the people who live here?”

  “No, I don’t. Well, wait, I knew the girl who lived here. I met her a couple of times.”

  “This is your son’s girlfriend? The girl who might be the victim of a custodial kidnapping?”

  “I guess that’s what you call it,” his mom said, sounding a little impatient.

  “And your name is Jenna Barton, right?” Bradford asked.

  Jared saw the look cross his mom’s face, the tired one that always showed up when she was recognized simply because of her connection to Celia. It was as if some power drained from his mother every time that came up.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice short. “I know Detective Poole very well.”

  “But you don’t have any reason to believe the two things are related, do you?” Jones asked. “The dead body in there and . . .” For a moment, it seemed he wouldn’t even finish the thought, but then he said, “Mrs. Walters’s case.”

  His mom answered right away, her voice assured and confident. “No, I don’t think so. Do you?”

  The cops didn’t offer any opinion. Over the past few months of watching them up close, he’d learned they usually didn’t. They said as little as possible that might obligate them to something later. They liked to ask questions and then sit back and let the other person, the noncop, talk. Then they’d ask another question and another.