Off the Deep End (8)
“That’s not why.”
His face is set. He doesn’t believe me at all. I don’t believe myself either. Talking about your son’s death never gets easier.
“Okay, well, I’m sure there’s a report about it written up somewhere, probably in multiple places, but I guess you need to hear it from me.” I give him an annoyed look so he doesn’t miss that I’m not a fan of where he’s leading, but that’s where they all go. I just hate this constant retelling and rehashing, but I live a life where my feelings no longer matter. “That night was a perfect combination of everything that could go wrong going wrong. You know what I mean?” We’ve all had those kinds of days. The ones where nothing goes right. A perfect storm? That’s what happened to us. “We were driving around the lake and rounding Paradise Point right before we were going to turn off at Chatsworth. It was really dark because it was super cloudy and the moon was barely a slit. And I was tired. Exhausted, really. I’d had eight clients that day.” How many times had I told Gabe that driving tired was the same as driving drunk? But what was I supposed to do? Not get the boys? That’s not how it works. I push the thoughts away. Bring my attention back to the present. “They were on their phones—Gabe in the back seat, Isaac on the passenger side. I was rounding the peak and then, suddenly, a deer jumped right out in front of me. He came out of nowhere, and I swerved to miss him. Both front tires caught on the black ice, sending us spinning and flying. The momentum pitched us straight over the edge and into the water.”
The memory flashes through me, unbidden, like it’s happening all over again.
I slammed on the brakes, and the car spun sideways. Then, it was as if a huge hand grabbed us and flung us into the frozen lake like our car was a Matchbox toy. It wasn’t anything like an amusement park ride right before the fall. It was silent and still. Nobody screamed. If they did, I didn’t hear it. Maybe the sound got turned off. The only thing I felt or experienced was sheer soul-sucking terror as we plunged.
I didn’t remember hitting the ice or crashing into the lake. My next memory was opening my eyes while the car sank down into the murky water. It was the annihilating cold that shocked me back to consciousness. A freezing on the inside that made my organs burn and my bones instantly brittle. There wasn’t a part of me that wasn’t painfully cold. I shiver unconsciously at the memory and rub my hands against my arms, trying to get warm, even though Dr. Stephens has the heat turned up in the room. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m always cold now.
He reaches down to his briefcase and pops it open, then pulls a folder out. He makes a dramatic production of thumbing through it before coming to a stop a few pages in. “It says here that you suffered a broken rib from Isaac doing CPR on you?” He raises his eyebrows, mystified as to how that came to be, except if he keeps going, the entire incident is probably spelled out right there in the following pages. He wants to hear it from me, though, and just as I predicted, he tilts his head to the side and asks, “Can you tell me a little bit more about that?”
TWO
AMBER GREER
I followed Mark into the kitchen. He wasn’t getting away from me that easily. Not after the stunt he’d just pulled with Detective Hawkins. “They were onto something with Isaac’s phone, and you know it. How dare you just shut it down like that?”
Detective Hawkins had quickly agreed with Mark that he was right. It didn’t matter all that much about the empty phone when there were other more pressing issues hanging over our head, like monitoring every single park within a five-mile radius of Falcon Lake because in another forty-eight hours, if all things followed the same pattern as the other boys, a package with the clothes Isaac had been wearing the night he went missing would be dropped in a tightly sealed cardboard box at a local park. The clothes inside would be freshly laundered and neatly folded. They’d left Brady’s box with his clothes on a picnic bench in Windsor Park. Josh’s was left behind the dugout at Campton Fields. At least Mark and I had a pattern. Some form of structure to this madness. Their parents never had a pattern.
Mark opened the cupboard above the sink and took out a glass like he wasn’t the least bit irritated or perturbed by what had just gone down in the family room. My question hung in the air for a few more seconds before falling unanswered.
“Isaac erased his phone, and that means something,” I said not willing to let him dismiss me like that. I couldn’t contain my anger. Our son was missing. It was our job to do everything we could to find him. Follow every lead. Examine each possibility even if it was unlikely. We couldn’t just lock our eyes on one lead and follow only that direction. We had to look everywhere. Uncover every stone. This was one of them. So was Jules.
He shrugged and didn’t bother turning around to look at me while he spoke. “Yes, I suppose it does. He might’ve erased everything on it, but I’m still going with the theory that he had another phone, so he just wasn’t using that one.”
“Okay, right? So, then something was going on. Just like Detective Hawkins hinted at. What was Isaac hiding? That’s where more of the investigative team’s energy needs to be focused.” Thankfully, they were going to be able to recover the deleted texts and the other stuff on his phone, but unfortunately, the red tape in front of that process was thick, and it wasn’t going to be done anytime soon. “Even if it’s going to be a while before they get his texts back, why don’t they circle back through his friends again or go through his computer?” I was grasping at straws, but I had to grab something.