Find Her (Detective D.D. Warren #8)(27)

But it’s all detached now. This is what I can’t tell her, can never completely explain. The memories don’t feel like mine. All of this, all of what was, feels like something that happened to someone else, home movies from somebody else’s life.

Jacob Ness wanted a completely compliant companion. So he broke me down, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Then, when I was nothing, just a raw, helpless mound of human clay, he remolded me into being exactly who he wanted me to be. He became my world, my center, my guiding star.

And then . . . That last day. Those final few moments.

The story I told once and will never repeat.

He’s gone now.

And I am lost. Forever untethered. Until my mother’s hug feels like the comfort of a stranger.

My own brother ran away from the person I’ve become. But my mom is more stubborn.

“You can come back home,” she says now, an old argument. Fosters dependency. She knows it, and hastily adds, “Just for a visit. A few days. We could make a girls’ weekend out of it.”

“I’m fine.”

“Going out alone to a bar on a Friday night?”

“I can take care of myself. Isn’t that the point?”

She draws back. She can’t talk to me when I’m in this mood, and she knows it. Again, the worry on her face, which I feel as a fist in my chest.

“Flora.”

“I know you don’t like my choices,” I hear myself say, “but they’re my choices to make.”

A winning argument in my mother’s world, and she knows it. I watch her inhale deeply. Exhale slowly.

“If you won’t come home this weekend,” she says presently, “then tell me when.”

I accept her compromise. We pick a date, two weeks from now. I need to rest now, I tell her, but she’s welcome to stay.

She shakes her head, though. A city apartment is no place for a Maine farmer. She prepares to leave, driving back another three and a half hours. A seven-hour round-trip to spend one hour with her daughter.

These are the things mothers do, she tells me as I watch her turn and walk downstairs.

When she’s gone from sight, I close my front door. I work my locks. I turn back to my sunny, charming, battle-scarred apartment.

And I do exactly what I told my mother I would do. I head to bed.


*

I SLEEP. I don’t always. Usually slumber comes fitfully for me. But now, fresh off my most recent kill . . .

I sleep like the dead.

When I wake up, the sun is gone, my room is dark, and I know immediately that I’m not alone. I can feel a draft against my cheek, the muted hush of an intruder’s shuffling footstep.

Then, from just outside my open bedroom door. A shadow, dark and menacing. I open my mouth to say, who’s there?

Except, of course, I already know.

The world is filled with monsters.

I need to move, leap out of bed, assume the defensive.

Instead, I make the mistake of inhaling.

Then, all I hear is the distant sound of laughter, right before the world goes dark again.





Chapter 12


THE HARDEST PART ABOUT BEING HELD CAPTIVE? You’d think it would be the starvation, punishment, degradation. The unbearable thirst for water, maybe. Or the relentless pain of a pine box pressing against your shoulder blades, flattening the back of your head.

Or perhaps the moment you realize you don’t know how long you’ve been gone anymore. The minutes, hours, days have become a blur, and you can’t remember now . . . Has it been a week, two, three? Is it still spring, or is it now summer? And what about Easter? Did Easter happen while you were gone? The annual brunch at your mother’s house? Did your brother eat your chocolate bunny?

You try to hang on to these thoughts because they connect you to a larger world, some piece of reality where you’re still a real person with a real life.

But the truth is, these moments are hard to remember, so inevitably you let them go. You think less and less of home and the person you used to be and the person you’ll never be again. You just are.

You’re bored.

Which becomes the toughest burden to bear. There’s no friendly conversation or polite chitchat. No places to go. No people to see. There’s no TV to entertain you with mindless blather, or a radio to engage you with a catchy song, or a smartphone to entice you with an exciting new text.

You exist in a sensory-deprived void, where you hum just for the sake of having something to hear. Where you take turns counting by twos and threes and fives just so your mind has something to do. Where you gnaw on your fingertips just to have something to feel. But even this can only kill an hour or two a day.

You sleep. Too much. You don’t mean to. You understand you probably shouldn’t; it would be better to remain alert. But you’re tired, you’re weak, and you’re bored. Oh so bored! Sleeping becomes the only thing left for you.

I told myself stories. Children’s books I remembered from school. Bible stories from church. In the beginning, I whispered them out loud. But my mouth was so dry and parched, the words got stuck in my throat. So after a while, I played the stories like movies in my mind. Not fantasies of my rescue, or images of my family and friends—that would hurt too much. Just fables, legends, fairy tales. Anything with a happy ending that would pass the time in my head.