Off the Deep End (4)
He waited another beat before clearing his throat and continuing, “While Dr. Stephens is with Mrs. Hart and we’re monitoring the phones for any activity, I thought the three of us might be able to follow up on a few things.” I didn’t like the way his tone of voice shifted or that he wanted me to sit down for whatever he wanted to discuss. I crossed my arms against my chest and waited for him to continue. He was silent for another second just to make sure I wasn’t going to sit. “Our agents received clearance to start going through Isaac’s phone, and they’ve noticed something interesting that I wanted to talk to the two of you about.”
Mark immediately came alive like he’d been sleeping and suddenly jolted awake. He jumped off the couch and hurried to join us. He was in the same sweatpants and T-shirt he’d been in for the past five days. He smelled like it too. “What is it? What’d you find?” He ran his hands through his greasy dark hair.
Detective Hawkins pretended not to notice his smell or his disheveled appearance. “It’s not so much what they found as to what they didn’t find.” He gave us both a knowing look, but I had no idea what he was talking about. From the look on Mark’s face, he didn’t either.
Thankfully, I’d sent our younger daughter, Katie, to my mom’s house for a few days even though I hadn’t wanted to let her go at first. None of us had been separated since it had happened, but I was glad my mom had talked me into it. Katie needed a break from all the intensity, and I wasn’t sure I wanted her to hear whatever Detective Hawkins was about to say. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it, either, by the grave expression stamped on his face.
“I don’t have teenagers myself, but I’ve been through enough of their phones over the years to know that they’re always packed full of stuff. Everything they’re doing. What they’re getting into. You want to know what’s going on in a teenager’s life?” He cocked his head to the side and raised his eyebrows. “Look in their phone.”
What’d they found in Isaac’s phone? My knees weakened. I eyed the couch, wishing I’d taken Detective Hawkins up on his offer to sit. Of course, I looked in both of my kids’ phones. That had been part of the deal when we got them for them. We’d made that clear from day one: These are not your phones, they’re ours, and as such, we have a right to them whenever we choose. They’d both kicked and screamed, but faced with the prospect of having us monitor their phones or no phones at all, they’d each chosen the latter and begrudgingly consented to the rules. But I hadn’t been through Isaac’s phone in weeks. He never left it alone, and I was too afraid he’d get upset if I asked him if I could go through it. I wasn’t usually like that, but the slightest provocation could set him off into one of his rage fits, and once he’d crossed over that line, there wasn’t any getting him back until he’d spiraled through it, ending in the same awful pit of shame he always did.
He never used to be that way. He was my calm and steady one. Katie was the one whose emotions bounced around and skyrocketed all over the place. She could laugh with you in one breath and hiss at you in the next. But Isaac? He was a rock. He’d come out of the womb that way. Steady. Strong. Consistent. Unbothered by anything happening around him.
Not now.
I felt like I didn’t know who he was, and honestly, that scared me more than anything else. In the same way, Detective Hawkins’s expression scared me as he explained, “Isaac doesn’t have any activity on his phone from the past three weeks. He hasn’t called or texted anyone. He—”
Relief flooded my body, and I interrupted before he could go any further. “That’s because he never goes anywhere or talks to anyone anymore. I keep telling his therapist that, but she doesn’t listen. We can barely get him to leave the house. The only thing that got him outside was walking Duke. We always made him walk Duke—” My throat caught, and my eyes darted to Mark. That look. The other one.
Mark narrowed his eyes to slits. “Yes, Isaac never went anywhere, and she made him walk Duke every night to get out of the house.” There was no mistaking the venom in the word she.
He blamed me for this. That had been clear since the beginning of this nightmare. He blamed me for this in the same way he blamed me for Isaac having been in the car with the Harts that terrible night, as if it was my fault that Katie’s dance rehearsal had run late and I’d had to ask Jules to pick up Isaac for me. I glared back at him. I wouldn’t have had to call another mom to help me with pickup if I had a husband who ever lifted a hand to help with them when I needed it the most.
“Yes, well, regardless of that, there isn’t any activity on his phone whatsoever. It’s more than just not texting or FaceTiming anyone. He hasn’t played any video games. Hasn’t watched any YouTube. His Snapchat history is empty. All his streaks are gone. He hasn’t been on TikTok. No Instagram. I mean, there’s nothing there. It’s the cleanest teenager’s phone I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been at this for a long time. It’s almost like he hadn’t touched the thing.”
“But that’s impossible. I saw him on it,” Mark said, shaking his head in disbelief. I’d seen him on his phone plenty of times in the past few weeks, too, and it was the same phone they’d found on Clarks’ Road yesterday. Exactly a mile and a half from our house.