Off the Deep End (69)

“He deleted everything from the last three weeks on his phone, too, remember . . .” I let my words trail off. I didn’t know how to complete the sentence, or maybe I didn’t want to. Mark didn’t either. We sat in silence, staring at the empty screen.

He finally broke the silence—his voice was barely above a whisper, but I heard every word as he spoke my greatest fear out loud: “He has something to do with this.”

“Is that why you dumped out the detergent?”

He gave the most reluctant nod. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

“I just don’t understand what’s happening right now.” My voice was as low as his without even trying. I was suddenly acutely aware of the police presence downstairs. Could they hear us upstairs? Were they listening? If you let police inside your house, were they allowed to put up cameras or other listening devices? Had they suspected us all along? My head swirled. I needed to sit down. I walked over to Isaac’s bed and took a seat on the end of it. “I don’t understand,” I repeated myself, trying to stop my thoughts from spinning.

“I meant what I said earlier about being convinced it was the Dog Snatcher. But as soon as Detective Hawkins said that about the laundry detergent, everything shifted in me. Like I knew immediately Isaac had something to do with it, and I don’t even know what any of that means, but I just felt like getting rid of it was protecting him. And all I want to do is protect him. I’m sorry, it’s probably wrong. I’m sure it’s wrong, but I can’t help it.”

“But he hasn’t actually done anything wrong, has he? Adults do crap like this all the time. Remember that runaway bride all those years ago? Or that other woman in Washington? Everyone thought they’d disappeared and something awful had happened to them, but it wasn’t like once they came home, they were arrested or anything. If there are no charges for adults, then I’m pretty sure it’s got to be okay for kids, wouldn’t you think?” My brain scrambled to make sense of things.

“I have no clue.” He lifted his hands up. “I have no idea what to do. I’ve never been so lost in my life . . .”

I hadn’t been either. I took a few steps back, leaning against Isaac’s bed for support. I still hadn’t made it. Mark twirled around in the chair so he was facing me, and the magnitude of everything we were up against washed over me, leaving me drained. I felt like I could sleep for days, but that was the biggest lie. If I lay down on this bed and even tried, my eyelids would stay open like they’d been stapled that way. Tears wet my cheeks as I searched Mark’s eyes for some form of moral compass in all this.

“Can I just be honest with you?” he asked after a few more minutes had passed. He didn’t wait for the obvious yes. “I hope he just ran away, and that’s all this is. I really do, because at least then he’s alive and still has a chance. I just want him to be happy.”

Isaac was fifteen, and fifteen-year-olds ran away from home all the time, especially when they hated their lives, which there was no mistaking Isaac did. “But why go through all the trouble to make it look like he got kidnapped? Why not just take off and run away?”

“I totally get where you’re coming from, and I’ve thought about that, too, but he had to know that if he didn’t come home, we’d set out to look for him, and maybe for some reason, he thought making it look like the Dog Snatcher took him would give him more of a head start?”

Or maybe he’d wanted to be dead in fourteen days, too, and he didn’t want people to think he’d taken his own life. Maybe he was trying to spare us. As soon as the thought popped into my head, I shoved it down, burying it deep.

“Where would he go?” I asked. The thought of him out there on his own when he couldn’t even keep his room clean was frightening, but it was frightening in a silly, childish way in comparison to all the other potential horrors we’d been imagining. Out on the streets somewhere meant that he was alive. That was all that mattered to me. And if he was alive, maybe once he’d gotten some time away, some perspective, he’d come back home. At least reach out. He couldn’t run away from us forever, could he? That wasn’t possible. He loved us. He adored Katie.

“He’s not going to get very far without money,” Mark said, practical to a default.

“Are you sure about that?” I asked.

“That he doesn’t have any money?”

I nodded.

“He only gets money from us, and he hasn’t asked for any, so there’s that. Plus, there haven’t been any unusual withdrawals from any of his or our accounts.” He said it with such confidence and conviction, but who knew what Isaac had been up to. If he was behind his own disappearance, then this wasn’t impulsive. It was thought out and planned.

“Jules might have given him money,” I pointed out. She was always my go-to, even now; I couldn’t help it. “She doesn’t have access to her funds because of the conservatorship, but we don’t know how that financial arrangement works. I’m sure she gets a certain amount of money every month, like an allowance or something. They can’t give her nothing. Maybe she gave it to Isaac. If anyone is helping him, it’s got to be her.”

“Totally,” he agreed, nodding and rubbing his hands on his sweatpants. His palms always got sweaty when he was nervous.