Off the Deep End (15)
“That must be so difficult.” He clasps his hands in front of himself. Concern lines his forehead.
“It’s not just that. There are people who are born to do hard things. They have a grit and determination on the inside of them. I’m not one of those people, Dr. Stephens.” I raise my head, locking eyes with his so he doesn’t miss my next point. “I’m a wimp. I have no fight in me. I give up when things are hard. Like you know how most kids struggle when they’re learning how to ride a bike?”
He nods.
“All kids fall when they first get on. They fall down and get up over and over again until they finally figure it out. Not me.” I shake my head. “When I was seven, I got a new bike with purple streamers for my birthday and was super excited to learn how to ride it. My dad was the one to teach me, and he did everything right. He held the back of my seat while we made our way down the street, timed it perfectly until the let-go spot, and then let go. I took off wobbling and tumbled on the asphalt within seconds. I skinned both knees pretty badly. Do you know what I did?” Another one of my questions that I don’t wait for him to answer. “I never rode my bike again. I put my new bike away and didn’t touch it after that. I still can’t ride a bike.”
His forehead wrinkles even deeper. I’m not what he expected. His supervisor must not have prepared him for this. Then, I quickly realize—he is the supervisor. Suddenly, I feel so old, and all I want to do is go back to my room and crawl into bed. This day has drained me. We’ve been here for hours.
“So, do you think we could circle back to Isaac? You still haven’t told me how the two of you grew close.” His eyes are red. He must be tired too. That’s how I used to feel when I had a day with back-to-back clients. Other people’s problems are exhausting.
I glance at the clock. “It’s almost ten o’clock, do you think we could get back to talking about Isaac tomorrow?”
He reluctantly agrees.
FOUR
AMBER GREER
I lay next to Mark in our bed even though it was barely after nine and still early. We’d done the same thing last night after our fight in the kitchen ended in a stalemate. We’d hardly spoken all day, like we had an unspoken agreement to go to our respective corners and cool down. He’d headed to our bedroom shortly after our fight last night, and I’d followed him here again tonight since I didn’t know what else to do. Sending Katie with my mom yesterday was definitely the right thing to do since my and Mark’s tension only added to the stress in the house. I’d never been so grateful to be surrounded by family as I had been through all of this. My mom had been wonderful, and my dad had shown up in surprising ways too.
It felt strange not having Katie in our bed. She had slept with us every night since Isaac disappeared. She’d been sleeping tucked in between us like a Katie sandwich. Normally, Mark would’ve made a big joke about it, but none of us had laughed since Isaac had gone missing. The house was quiet and still, like it was holding its breath too.
It was impossible not to think about the impact this was going to have on Katie. She’d come back from her swim meet the night Isaac went missing to find her driveway packed with emergency vehicles and her house swarming with police officers. She’d burst into tears immediately and had been terrified ever since. If someone had come for her brother, would they come for her too? How bad were they torturing him?
It wasn’t as hard on her during the daytime hours. The fact that her brother might potentially be the third boy to go missing in the last sixteen months had catapulted her into celebrity status. She was thirteen, so even though she was wrecked over her brother, the constant media frenzy and attention outside and playing out across the country provided a decent distraction. But none of that shut out the horrors of the night. Not from any of us.
She was as convinced as Mark that Isaac had been taken by the same man that took the two other local boys—Brady and Josh. Both of them were only fourteen—a year younger than Isaac—and they’d disappeared at night while they were out walking their dogs. The wandering dogs were the red flags that always ended up alerting people to the missing kids. Brady’s dog had been hit by a truck trying to dart across Interstate 90. Thankfully, it had only broken his leg. It could’ve been much worse. It was incomprehensibly worse for Brady.
Five days after Brady had gone missing, his cell phone was found ditched on a country road, and three days after that, the clothes he had been wearing when he went missing showed up at Windsor Park. They were freshly cleaned and neatly folded in a sealed cardboard box. Nobody had seen or noticed anything out of the ordinary. A biker found his body in a field halfway between Minneapolis and La Crosse six days later. It was exactly two weeks—fourteen days—from the day he had been grabbed to the day they found his body.
He disappeared from a large suburb right outside Minneapolis, and as horrific as it was, you still felt safe because you could blame it on the city. One of the terrible criminals living in the city was responsible for it.
But then three months later, in a small town four hours north of Saint Paul, Josh Hardy took his dog out for a walk and never came home. Unlike Brady’s dog, his dog ran straight back home, and Josh’s dad knew something was wrong immediately.
And it was.
We all watched in stunned horror as Josh’s story played out in the exact same sequence as Brady’s. A day-five phone drop at a gas station outside Lexington. Clothes neatly folded and washed in a sealed cardboard box at Campton Fields three days later. And then the body. Laid in a cornfield behind Loyola High School six days after that.