Off the Deep End (28)

He drops his news into the room and waits to see what I’ll do with it. He doesn’t even try to pretend like he’s not watching my reaction. His eyes are locked on mine.

“What are you looking at me for?” I ask, batting my eyelashes at him. “I’ve been sitting here with you all day.”





EIGHT


AMBER GREER


I hadn’t been downstairs since Detective Hawkins left, and it had been over three hours. I’d been sitting cross legged in the center of Isaac’s room unmoving for the last two. At first, I’d wanted to crawl into his bed and throw all his blankets around me. Just lie there and inhale the smell of him, since he was all over his bedding. I’d flipped up the comforter and had been about to get in his bed when I’d suddenly stopped. If I buried myself underneath his covers, then my smell might replace his. That couldn’t happen. I’d quickly dropped the covers and sunk down to the floor. I’d been there ever since.

Hiding.

Nobody bothered me when I was in here, but I wasn’t sure who I was hiding from more—the investigators, Mark, or myself. Maybe all of us. I just wanted to cocoon myself in Isaac. Shut myself off from the rest of the world. The rest of the world was spinning too fast again, and I couldn’t keep up.

I spent so much time arguing with Isaac to clean his room and pick up his clothes, and now ironically, I was grateful he never listened. The combination of dirty socks, body odor, and leftover food that was rotting away somewhere undetected had overpowered the room since he was thirteen. But in the middle of all his teenage-boy smell, there was still the scent of him that was uniquely his. The one we all carried, as unique as our fingerprints—that was here too. I wanted to shut his door and lock every part of him inside.

I was avoiding the call to Katie and my mom, but we had to tell them about the clothes soon. They couldn’t find out about them on the news or social media, and it was only a matter of time until the story broke, but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. How did you crush your child’s world? That’s what it would do to Katie. She’d looked up to Isaac since the moment she was born. Her eyes searched for him in the room when she was an infant, and she’d done everything fast and early just to be able to keep up with him. He adored her right back, giving her piggyback rides around the house and letting her do sleepovers in his room. I’d always felt so lucky that I got kids who liked each other.

She was going to have just as many questions about what happened as Mark. It wouldn’t make any more sense to her than it did to him that somehow, even despite the surveillance, a person had snuck into one of our local parks and delivered Isaac’s clothes. According to Detective Hawkins, the park bench had been clear when the officers did their sweep at 2:30 p.m. They did full sweeps of the perimeter and the picnic areas every hour. By 3:30 p.m., the box was there, and they’d sealed the area immediately. It was the exact time that Jules was with Dr. Stephens, and there was no arguing that fact because they recorded all their sessions. She couldn’t have dumped Isaac’s clothes in the park. It wasn’t possible.

Still. It didn’t mean she wasn’t involved.

The Dog Snatcher didn’t have my boy. He just didn’t. Somehow, she was making it look like he did.

But why?

And how?

Clearly, she wasn’t doing it herself. She had to have help. Mark acted like I didn’t think about the problems with her being involved in something at this level, but I’d factored all those issues into it, and at the end of the day, that was one of the things I kept coming back to over and over again myself. How could she pull something like this off?

Despite Mark’s accusations, I’d thought through the logistics plenty of times. They didn’t make sense, but none of this made sense. Her involvement seemed impossible, but none of this was supposed to be possible. So we lived in an upside-down world now, and in this new upside-down world, anything went. You couldn’t try to make sense of it like you did in the old world. None of the regular rules applied, and everything was twisted, which meant that I wasn’t willing to let go of her being involved yet.

And then, suddenly, it dawned on me, and I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before: Jules lived in a home filled with a bunch of other people who were just as messed up as she was. Every single person at Samaritan House was diagnosed with some form of severe mental illness. You couldn’t even get in there without a court order.

There was no mistaking Jules was seriously mentally ill. Not anymore. That’d been up for debate at one point, but all that changed after she’d moved out of her family home. That was the first sign that anything was wrong—at least that’s what most people said, but I disagreed. Every time I saw Jules—which was super rare since she quit going anywhere—she looked terrible. She wasn’t coping well. Not that anyone who lost a child coped well, but I took one look at her while she was getting into her car a few weeks before she moved out, and there was no mistaking something was seriously wrong with her. She was carrying on a conversation, waving and flailing her arms around while she spoke animatedly, but there was nobody there. She was all by herself.

It would’ve been one thing if she’d moved out and gotten an apartment by herself, but she basically started living out of her car. It was like she left home and turned into a homeless person overnight. We didn’t have homeless people in Falcon Lake, and nobody lived out of their car in the open, so everyone took notice.