Find Her (Detective D.D. Warren #8)(24)

She’s in the kitchen, bent over the oven, checking her project when I walk in. The police haven’t given me back my real clothes after the night’s misadventure. Did they even find them? I have no idea. If they did, the items would be kept as evidence. In the meantime, the district detective rustled up oversize gray sweatpants and a navy-blue Boston Police hoodie, most likely extra clothes stashed in the back of some officer’s vehicle. Both items are huge. I have to hold up the elastic waistband of the sweatpants as I walk. My feet remain bare, meaning I don’t make much noise as I pad across the hardwood.

I chose this unit for several reasons. One, being on the third story, it’s harder for an intruder to access. Two, the old brownstones are famous for their high ceilings, bull’s-eye molding, and bay windows. My unit is small but flooded with light from the old windows, and charming with its battered oak floors and beautiful wooden trim. Is there water damage on the ceiling? Sure. Peeling linoleum in the kitchen, not one of the owner’s better renovation ideas? Yep. A shower that only yields hot water after three or four strategic whacks? Well, a girl like me can hardly afford the best.

Besides, I like my unit’s flaws. It’s scarred. Like me. We belong together, not to mention the elderly couple who are my landlords know my story and charge me only a fraction of the going rate for rent. Having turned down the requisite book deal and movie rights, reduced rent is as close to a postabduction perk as I’m going to get. And given that I’ve never returned to college and still have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, money is an issue. For the past few months, I’ve been working down the street at a pizza parlor popular with college students and local families. My hourly wage is miserly, the tips only slightly better. But the work is mindless, and I appreciate that.

Is this the life I thought I’d be living at twenty-seven? No. But then, when I first left my mother’s farm for college in the big city, what did I know? I enrolled to study French, for God’s sake, mostly because I liked the idea of going to Paris. Maybe I would’ve become a teacher. Or returned to Maine and set up a small farm of my own, involving goats. I’d sell goat milk, goat cheese, maybe even goat-milk lotions and goat-milk soaps. All with labels in French. I was happy enough, naive enough back then, to have those kinds of dreams.

But everyone’s dreams change, not just the dreams of girls who wind up kidnapped for four hundred and seventy-two days.

At least I’m not dealing with kids. Because that happens too. Held captive long enough, pregnancy, babies, can ensue. Jacob, however, was adamant on that subject. Once a month, he forced me to swallow some god-awful homemade brew he swore would prevent pregnancy. It tasted like turpentine and led to immediate, excruciating stomach cramps. The sexual assault nurse who performed my initial exam had been curious about the potion. Though, in her professional opinion, it was my extreme emaciation and total lack of body fat that probably truly did the job. Frankly, I didn’t even have a period through most of my captivity; I was that thin.

Now, I watch my mother straighten in front of the stove, muffin tin clutched in an oven-mitten hand. She turns, spots me, and immediately stills. Her gaze takes in the oversize sweats that obviously aren’t mine, then the garbage smeared across my cheek, my hair.

She doesn’t speak. I watch her chest fill, a conscious inhale. Then the slow exhale as no doubt she counts to ten. Wondering yet again how to survive a daughter like me.

At her throat is a necklace with a single silver charm. A dainty but perfectly rendered fox.

She bought that after I went missing. When the FBI prepped her for the first press conference by dismissing her usual attire of wide-legged yoga pants and flowing handwoven wraps such as the kind favored by Afghan tribal elders. No more bohemian, organic potato farmer from Maine. Her goal was to look like Mom, with a capital M. An instantly recognizable and relatable maternal figure who would appeal to my captor’s kinder sentiments, assuming he had any.

They stuck her in jeans and a button-up white shirt. Probably the plainest outfit she’d ever worn in her life, not to mention the real shoes versus her usual Birkenstocks.

I didn’t see that first press conference. Or the second. I think I caught the third, when things were truly heating up. Even then, spying her, my mom, on the TV, standing in front of the microphone, flanked by suited FBI agents, wearing a light blue button-up shirt, more jeans . . .

My mom, but not my mom. A surreal moment in a life that had already taken a completely, horrifically surreal turn. I would’ve shut the TV off, wasted my rare privilege, rather than see this mom-but-not-my-mom. Except then I spotted the fox charm. Nestled in the hollow of her throat.

I never heard her words that day. But I knelt on the floor of that cheap hotel room and placed my finger against the charm around her neck, my finger so large, her form so diminutive on the small TV, that the tip of my index finger obliterated most of her head.

I might have cried. I don’t really remember. I’d already been gone months by that point. I don’t know if I had any tears left.

But I tried to touch her, this mom-but-not-my-mom. And for one moment, I was a child again, running wild on the farm, throwing golf balls for the fox kits and laughing as they batted them across the tall grass.

Now, she sets down the muffin tin on top of the stove. Her hands are shaking slightly.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, her voice almost normal. Her farm is three and a half hours north of Boston. Assuming Samuel called her the minute after I contacted him, she got into her truck immediately and has been driving since the crack of dawn.