Gone Forever

by Scott Blade

I finished my bottled water and Matlind drank the rest of his coffee. Maria came around and offered Matlind a refill and asked me if I’d like another bottle of water. I shook my head and Matlind stayed quiet, so she figured that he didn’t want any more coffee. Not that it mattered. He was so wound up that I doubted the extra caffeine would have made any difference.

  Matlind wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon.

  Still, I said, “We should go. You need some sleep.”

  Matlind asked, “Can you help us?”

  I heard the desperation in his voice. It tugged at me like that of a helpless child.

  I nodded, didn’t even think about it. I just reacted in the way that I guessed my mother would’ve predicted. She’d known that I’d help someone who needed it. In a way, when I look back on my life, all of the training and police work that she involved me in, I think that she had always known who I’d become. Crime scenes had been my classrooms. Chris and Faye Matlind’s nightmare would be my first case on my own.

  He paused, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he said, “Thank you! Thank you so much!”

  I said, “I’ll stay longer. We’ll sort this out and then I’m on my way.”

  He nodded and thanked me again.

  A glimpse of hope shot across his face like a meteor across the night sky.

  I said, “Don’t thank me yet. Let’s get her back first.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “So the last thing that happened was that you woke up and she was gone? Along with both of your cell phones, but she left her luggage?”

  He said, “That’s right. Those rednecks took her!”

  I shook my head.

  I said, “No. That doesn’t make any sense. Why did they take her while she slept and yet they left you alone only to try and kidnap you last night? They could’ve just gotten you both at the same time. No, I wouldn’t be so sure that they had anything to do with it.”

  “What about the way that they stared at us? And why did they try to take me anyway?”

  I stayed quiet.

  “Maybe they didn’t want to do it in front of their kids during the daytime?”

  “Maybe they weren’t trying to take you at all. Maybe they wanted to get rid of you. I still think that we need to look closer at the whole situation.”

  “You mean like an investigation?” he said.

  I said, “Someone should. If the sheriff is not going to help find her, then we’ll have to do it ourselves.”

  Maria brought me another bottled water and the check. It only had a charge for the coffee on it. I peeled out a five dollar bill and left it for her. And for the second time that day I left her a good tip.

  Matlind had walked out of the diner and I had stayed inside to say goodbye to Maria.

  I waited, standing up near the long counter and looked around the diner. The few others there paid no attention to me. They were all staring at the TV that hung near the real wall above a cracked mirror.

  The volume was low, but the closed caption was on. There was a news report showing a town in Texas called Crosscut. Most of the town was burned to rumble. A story ran about a drug kingpin who had his men burn their properties to the ground. The kingpin was Oskar Tega, the name that keeps popping up on the news lately.

  Suddenly, Maria burst out of the kitchen and walked over to me.

  She asked, “Do you need any change?”

  I said, “No. It’s yours. I didn’t want you to think that I wasn’t going to call you. I have your number still.”

  She said, “You left it on the table earlier.”

  I said, “I memorized it.”

  “You memorized it?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared back up passed her and watched another scene of burning rumble from the destroyed town of Crosscut.

  Maria turned and looked back at the TV as well. Then she said, “Crosscut. That whole thing is a mess. I’m from a different part of the state, but my family tells me Crosscut is all anyone can talk about. It’s just so hard to believe that a Mexican drug lord had a major operation right in a small town like that.”

  A moment passed and she smiled and then she asked, “So, you memorized my number? What are the last four digits?”

  I said, “1864.”

  She smiled and the she asked, “How do you remember that?

  I said, “Well, 1864 is the year before the end of the Civil War. In 1864, Lincoln implemented a strategy that would win him the war and crush the Confederacy.”

  “With what, more guns?”

  “No the victory wasn’t about guns or bullets. It was about economics.”

  Maria had a puzzled look on her face and honestly I wasn’t sure if it was out of genuine interest or because she couldn’t care less about the American Civil War.

  I said, “Old Abe and Grant used total war to win the Civil War. It means that they won by crushing both the armed forces and the economy of the South.”

  She nodded along and then she changed the subject. Apparently she wasn’t interested in American history. She said, “So you do know my number. You gonna call me?”

  I said, “Wait and see. I might.”

  I smiled at her and she looked up at me, stared into my eyes.

  She said, “You have nice eyes. They are the bluest eyes that I’ve ever seen.”

  I smiled bigger. That was something that I had heard from women before. It was one of my few traits that wasn’t so scary. I was proud of my eyes. Sometimes I felt like they were the only reason that another human being even knew that I was a human being too and not a deranged Sasquatch man.

  She leaned to the right-hand side and looked past me at Matlind, who stood outside.

  “That guy you’re with. He is so sad. I heard his wife left him. She disappeared.”

  I asked, “What do you know about him?”

  She said, “Well, he was in here the other day. He was claiming that he was looking for his wife. He went off on the manager. He was delirious.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “No. I was off. I only heard about it.”

  I asked, “Did any of the other waitresses?”

  She said, “The ones on the day shift are old ladies. They’ve lived here forever. Worked here forever and they love to gossip, but they only talked about how crazy he was. Never mentioned a wife. And I didn’t ask.”

  “Do you believe that she’s real?”

  She said, “A man like that, he’s bent out of shape about somebody. He’s not faking that part.”

  “Would you ask around for me? Don’t push the issue. Just casually?”

  “I can try, but I don’t really talk to the other girls. The only person here who ever talks to me is Andrew, the cook. And he’s kinda slow. Something wrong with him.”

  I nodded and said, “Can I ask you something else? Have you noticed that there aren’t any minorities here?”

  She said, “That was the first thing I noticed. I moved here a month ago. Came here by accident, trying to start a new life sort of thing. I’m from Texas and wanted to run away. So I drove until I found this place. I liked the lake and thought I had never lived in a small town, so why not?

  “I noticed right off the bat that because I’m Latina, people here treat me different. I mean sure the folks here have been nice to my face. And the fishermen who come through are friendly, but the store and bar owners didn’t seem to want to hire me. They smiled, took my application, but no interviews, and no one even looked at my application. At this one place, the electronics store, I even handed the guy a blank application. Didn’t even write on it just to see if he’d say anything. He never even looked down at it.

  “And finally I walked in here and demanded that the graveyard manager talk to me. He said that the people in this town were old and had an old way of thinking.

  “He said it wasn’t anything personal. He never said the word ‘racist,’ but he implied it. He said it like ‘they don’t like outsiders.’

 
“No one here has said anything inappropriate to me or anything, but I’m telling you, Reacher, that they are some of the most racist people. They keep it to themselves, but it’s there. Under the surface.

  “I mean there are no black people here. There are no Asians. No other Hispanics. There are gay people. I mean there must be. One out of four people are gay. So the odds say that there have to be some, but they stay closeted. No way are they going to risk coming out in this place. It’s like the land that time forgot.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what to say or to think. I had never in my wildest dreams imagined that a place like this still existed, even in the South.

  “I’m the only minority in this whole town.”

  I nodded and thanked her and turned to walk away.

  She said from over my shoulder, “Goodbye.”

  I stayed quiet, just walked out of the diner and stepped out onto the sidewalk and nodded at Matlind. We turned and walked along the streets in a kind of somber silence, headed back to the motel.

  Matlind had a kind of relief on his face. I guessed that having someone believe him had made him feel like there was hope.

  For the last eight days he had been on his own, scared and alone, and now he was no longer alone. Now, there were two of us.

  We made it back to the motel. He stopped outside in the parking lot and stared at his broken door frame.

  I saw the fear on his face.

  I said, “Take my room. I’ll sleep in yours. We can start looking in the morning. We aren’t going to be able to accomplish anything tonight and you need rest.

  “Right now rest is the best thing that you can do for yourself. Tomorrow I’ll look around.”

  “Can you find her?”

  “I’ll find her.”

  He paused and then he asked, “Do you think that she’s alive?”

  “She’s alive.”

  “What makes you think that we’ll find her?”

  I said, “They don’t know about me. No one does. Not really. Maybe the rednecks.”

  “What if they do have her?”

  I said, “They don’t.”

  He asked, “What if they do?”

  I said, “They don’t. And if it turns out that they do, at that point they’ll wish that they had never made such a grievous error.”

  He nodded, stayed quiet. He just looked down.

  I said, “Matlind, go to sleep. Take my room.”

  And he did. I waited and heard the lock click.

  I went into his room and pushed the splintered door as far closed as it would go.

  I went into the bathroom, past all the luggage and piles of dirty clothes in the corner.

  There were female items spread out all over the bathroom: makeup, mascara, a box of tampons, fragrances, one bottle of cologne, one razor, and two sets of toothbrushes.

  A pink razor, a nice foldable one, rested on the side of the tub. A bottle of girlie shaving cream sat on the ledge next to it. The lid was off. A dab of white residue that must have once been cream hung out of the tip of the can.

  On the bathroom shelf, near the sink were bottles of Midol, Aspirin, Motrin, some prescription bottles, and an asthmatic inhaler.

  I looked up from the countertop and stared at myself in the mirror. I looked tired and less threatening because of it.

  I rubbed my eyes.

  I used the bathroom, washed my hands, and dried them off on a towel that hung near the shower curtain. Then I walked over to the bed, left my clothes on, and fell on top of the covers.

  Lights out.

  Chapter 14

  I woke up late in the morning. I figured that the time was 10:35 a.m. I rolled over and looked at my cell phone. It read 10:34 a.m. but the four switched just as I looked at it. Now it was 10:35 a.m.

  Time was a funny thing. I could tell it by shadows on the ground, but that was a survival technique that my Marine and sheriff mother had taught me. That was a technique that could be taught to anyone.

  The real abnormality that I learned about myself early on was something that I couldn’t quite explain and still couldn’t always control. Whenever I needed to know what time it was all I had to do was just know. The really strange thing about the time in my head was that I had always had the ability to measure time. It was like there was a stopwatch in my head. I could measure distance and time down to seconds. The human brain is a powerful thing.

  When I was a kid, my mom and teachers realized how smart I was. They pulled me out of school at the age of six and tested me for quantitative and analytical thinking skills.

  I tested with perfect scores for someone three times my age in every category: advanced problem-solving, puzzles, and analyzing information. But I remained in a normal school. I never wanted to be different and my mom respected that.

  They said that I was a genius, a word which comes from ancient Rome. A genius was believed to be a spirit that guided a person in his or her intellectual endeavors like a kind of tutelary deity.

  The noun is linked to the Latin verb, gigno, gignere, genui, genitus, which means "to bring into being, create, and/or produce."

  Being that I had never created or produced anything I figured that I wasn’t a genius and I had no desire to be one. I never wanted to create art or write literature or design monuments or spend my days solving long math equations or cracking impossible codes for the NSA or even creating complex algorithms for large sums of money from private technology companies. And my mother respected that about me. She used to say, “Reacher, you can go anywhere and you can be anything that you want. If you want to be a genius, then be a genius.”

  For me, I thought of genius as best said by a little-known guy named David Hume, an old, Scottish philosopher. He had died in 1776, the year that our country was born, one of the reasons why I remembered him so well.

  Old David Hume had basically said that the way people see a genius is similar to the way people see the ignorant because a genius is looked at as a man who is estranged from society, as well as a man who exists in some lonely, remote, and distant place, far away from the rest of the world.

  I was—like that.

  From an early age, different organizations were always trying to recruit me.

  The Army had been one of them. I didn’t know until now that part of their interest was probably my last name. I’d always thought that it was because of my abilities. Now I feel foolish, but the Marines had shown interest in me as well and so did the Air Force.

  I never thought much of any of it. I thought it was something that they had done to all of the kids who were in ROTC with me, but they didn’t.

  No matter what the different branches tried, I never even considered a military career as an option. Of course, I never considered anything as an option for my future. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I guessed that I’d go into law enforcement, a family trade after all, and I liked helping people. I liked correcting injustices. If Matlind had told me the truth, then a great injustice had been perpetrated on him and his wife.

  I hoped that she was still out there, still alive, and that I would reach her in time.

  Chapter 15

  I checked in on Matlind. He was in a deep sleep. There was a bottle of Ambien next to his wallet on the nightstand.

  I backed out of his room and left him to sleep. No reason to wake him. He slept like the dead and he probably needed it. Besides, I needed to investigate alone. I was better alone.

  I locked the door from the inside and closed it behind me.

  The sun was high in the sky and the trees seemed to move. They creaked in the wind. The air was warm and the smell was that of fresh, clean air.

  For most fishermen, the day’s catch had already come and gone because fishing was an early morning sport, a very early morning sport best started before the sun comes up.

  I set out to explore the town and to search for Faye Matlind.

  I had no photograph of her because someone had taken Chris’s cell phone, where he
had kept all of his pictures. I had had no real clues except for the rednecks. They were my only lead.

  I walked and took out my phone. I unlocked it and skipped the missed messages, calls, emails, and voicemails. I pulled up the Internet and looked up the name, “Faye Matlind.”

  I figured that she’d probably have a social media account of some sort. Something with her picture on it. So, I searched all of the main search engines and social networks that I knew were popular. I found nothing for her. I had found a Facebook page for Chris Matlind, but it must’ve been ancient. Maybe only used once. He had no profile pictures. No photo albums. He had only a dozen friends and his last post was from four years ago.

  Some people didn’t use social media. I was one of them. I knew how to use it, but I didn’t have a page or a profile.

  I gave up this idea. I didn’t need her picture anyway. She was a young black woman in a town full of old white people. She would stick out with no trouble at all.

  I continued into town.

  I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before, but I decided to skip breakfast and I wasn’t interested in lunch.

  I wanted to find Faye. Enough time had already elapsed without anyone looking for her.

  I walked the roads and through the suburbs. I walked past the school, the post office, the public safety building, the people on the sidewalks, and the cars parked along the side of the streets. I saw a dismal public library with a parking lot that could’ve been a graveyard for old cars; the only cars that were in it were from the ‘70s or earlier. I continued walking through the town. There were more bait shops, a couple of gun stores, two hardware stores, a four-wheeler store, and then there was the other side of the diner. I had walked the long way around it from the night before.

  I walked past two gas stations, one with a liquor store attached, and one with a broken old carwash that probably hadn’t worked since 1980.

  I walked past another small grocery store. It was an old chain brand store that I recognized the name of, but thought went out of business over a decade ago.

  I took one more look at the Eckhart Medical Center and got a better look at the clinic attached to it. It was open for business and it was busy because the parking lot was full. Across the street from the clinic was a small plaza with another grocery store, this one smaller than the others that I’d seen, and it had a tiny drugstore attached to the corner.