Coming Back (12 page)

Dean

That was a scary phone call for a second there.  I put the handset down in the cradle and leaned back in my chair, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.

It was hard to know what was too fast and what was too slow with Christie, but hopefully I was still walking that razor’s edge.  The love of my life was at stake, so no pressure or anything.

I called Rusty and let him know that I wouldn’t need him to cover for me after all.  He took it well.  I was just about to pick up where I left off on the endless paperwork when the phone rang again.  The little display said the call was coming from Captain Lewin’s office.

“Hello, Captain?  Dean speaking.”

“My office. 
Now
.”

The line clicked and went dead while I was still inhaling for a response.  I pulled it away from my ear and looked at it incredulously.  He wasn’t prone to long speeches, but that was short even for him.

“What now?” I said quietly.

The door to his office was open just a crack, and when I knocked, it opened further so that I could see him sitting there behind his desk.  He motioned for me to come in.

“Close the door behind you,” he said and then gestured to one of the chairs.

Captain Lewin’s desk was immaculately tidy and well-organized, he had only a single piece of paper in front of him.  I could see a few bullet points, and the first line was punctuated with a huge exclamation point, but I couldn’t read his upside down writing before I took the offered seat.

“Sir?” I asked.

He didn’t answer for an uncomfortably long time, seeming to be having a frustrating conversation in his own head while he looked at me, occasionally shaking his head in what looked like exasperation.  I was just about to prompt him again when he broke the uncomfortable silence.

“Do you like having a job?” he asked.

“Um… yes… sir?”

“Then you tell me why I’ve received a complaint from a member of the public about you desecrating a grave.  That’s not what somebody who likes being employed does.”

The color drained from my face as I recalled the critical look I’d received from Liam Ashworth, the groundskeeper at the cemetery the previous day.  I hadn’t thought about what the official process might be for the removal of the marble slab placed there in memory of Christie.

“Sir, I didn’t mean… I mean, surely it can’t be desecrating a grave if it isn’t a grave?”

“So it
was
you.  I was holding on to this slim hope that Mr. Ashworth’s eyesight had sufficiently deteriorated and he made a mistake.  What in the holy blue hell were you thinking?”

“I j-just… uh… I mean, it
belongs
to Christabelle Jayne, doesn’t it?  And it’s
not
a grave, so it can’t be desecrated…” I stammered.

“That’s just what the complaint is.  The real misdemeanor here is vandalism.  I ought to suspend you.”

The color returned to my cheeks in the form of a hot flush, and I leaned forward to look down at my shoes.  Losing my job was not something I could afford.

“Please don’t…”

“What did you do with it?” he asked.

“I gave it to Christie.”

“What in the blazes did
she
do with it?”

“She smashed it into a million pieces.  I thought it might help her,” I said.

Captain Lewin paused for a moment.  “Well, did it?”

I looked up and saw some of the edge had come off his expression.  “Yes.  I think so.”

He sat back in his chair and tented his fingers together, having a slightly different internal conversation with himself as he looked at me.  At long last, he sighed.

“Look, I’m not going to suspend you.  Nothing’s going to come of this, it’s not like her family is going to press charges.  It’s not often that the owner of a grave, or headstone or whatever, turns out to be alive, but she’s not going to press charges either by the sounds of things, if she asked you to do it.”

I gulped and tried to keep a poker face, seeing as Christie hadn’t actually requested it.  My heart was pounding in my chest at the thought of what might have happened if Christie had reacted differently.

“I hear you’ve really managed to bring her out of her shell lately,” he continued.  “That’s good.  I don’t know her very well, personally, but everybody who does speaks so highly of her.  It broke a lot of hearts when she went away, it broke a few more when they saw the state she was in when she came back.  You’re lucky Warfields is small enough that we can sweep this under the rug.  Your heart was in the right place, just try not to be an idiot, OK?”

“Yes, sir!”

I stood, as eager to get out of his office as a lobster was to get out of the pot.  He waved me off and I didn’t need to be asked twice.

A couple minutes later, I was back in my chair, wiping a cold sweat off my brow and faced with the same pile of paperwork that no Good Samaritan had made a dent in while I was away.  Coffee, I needed coffee.

The scent of the hot drink helped calm my nerves before I’d even tasted it.  That was an emotional rollercoaster of a half-hour, it wasn’t every day I offered to take my girlfriend out to the one kind of restaurant that might remind her of true evil and also got accused of desecration of a grave.

I frowned as I poured my coffee, some quiet thought worrying at the back of my mind.  What was it she’d said about the Chinese food?  What was it?  Bad Kung Pao chicken?  What did
that
matter?

Back at my desk, I tried to put pen to paper but found myself still distracted beyond the reach of cheap coffee.  After frowning at the forms on my desk and my computer screen for a while, I tracked down the files on Christie’s case, the parts that the Feds let us have anyway.

Seeing as Christie was a local, they said they wanted us to have all the information in case the person who abducted her was from around here and any of the statements or evidence brought anybody we knew to mind.  I’d been over it all somewhere around a million times and hadn’t had any kind of eureka moment.

I wasn’t sure why I had this urge to look over it again, but I’d learned over the years on the job to follow my gut instinct sometimes.  However, by the time I waded my way through to Christie’s official statements, the original stack of paperwork was taunting me from the corner of my eye and I was beginning to think I’d led myself on a wild goose chase.

That notion was blown away as I re-read those last few pages of Christie’s interview transcripts with a mounting heart rate.  Nowhere in there did she ever mention anything about food from a Chinese restaurant making her sick.

“Holy shit,” I echoed the statement I’d made when I first saw her on that breaking news bulletin.

This was potentially a whole new line of inquiry to follow.  For all I knew, it could lead us directly to that sick son of a bitch that took her.  I picked up one of the business cards paper-clipped to the file and dialed the number on it.

“
This is Agent Wade of the FBI, I can’t answer the call right now.  If this is an emergency dial 911, otherwise please leave your name and number and... “

I hung up and grabbed the other card, dialing
that
number.

“Hello?  Agent Spencer speaking.”

“Hi there, it’s Dean Hawking here from Warfields Police.”

“Warfields… ah!  The Christabelle Jayne case?  How can I help you, Officer Hawking?”

“Yeah, Christabelle Jayne.  Listen, I’ve had the… uh… opportunity to talk with Ms. Jayne over the past several months, and today she said something to me that I thought might be of interest.  Of importance, actually.”

“Oh?  Just a moment.”

The background noise on Agent Spencer’s end slowly decreased and then stopped altogether after what sounded like a door clicking shut.

“Sorry, go ahead.”

“Well, basically, today she’s told me that on the last day of her captivity, she was given some Kung Pao Chicken from a Chinese restaurant that gave her food poisoning,” I said.

“OK.  What else?”

“Um… that’s it.”

“Right.”  Agent Spencer drew out the ‘r’ sound, and I heard him take a breath while he formulated some diplomatic words.

I stopped him before he could say another word.  “It’s just that there’s no mention of this in Christie… uh… Christabelle’s statements.  Were you already aware of this or something?”

“No.  Look, I’ll have to come by and go through all this with Ms. Jayne directly, update the records.  I can be in Warfields… let me think… early next month.  There’s nothing else?”

“Next month?” I asked, ignoring his question.  “Shouldn’t you be getting on this right now?  It would do Christie, this whole town, some good to see some progress, hell, maybe get some
resolution
on everything.”

“With all due respect, Officer, it’s already been several months since this all happened, the trail can’t really get any colder by the time I get there, and there are a lot of people looking for resolution on a lot of things, not just Ms. Jayne and Warfields.”

I tried to force my white-knuckled grip on the handset to relax a bit and did my best to stay civil.  “I see.  Good to know.  Would you mind if
I
made some inquiries about this myself in the meantime?  I wouldn’t want to step on the skilled toes of the FBI.”

“By all means, but if you get any information, please tell Agent Wade or myself straight away.”

“See you next month,” I said and hung up the phone.

Christie

The single item on my to-do list for life kept me company in my room overnight and was one of the first things I saw on my bedside table when I sat up in the morning.  It was so small that it technically didn’t even qualify as a list, but the failure made it feel big.

When I entered the kitchen, my mom was just lifting the lid on some waffles.  She turned her head and gave me a smile even more wonderful than the homely smell of breakfast she was producing.

“I’ll never get tired of seeing that,” she said.

“My messed-up hair?” I asked.

“You can have your hair any way you like, even shaven right down the middle, as long as you keep on showing up for breakfast.”

“Been there, done that,” I said.

“Well, you’re just in time to take one of these out to your sister.  She’s on the swing seat.” My mom looked around conspiratorially before speaking in a loud whisper.  “I think she’s hungover.”

I peeked out the window and saw Amber nursing a cup of some steaming liquid as Mom slid two of her secret-recipe waffles on to a big plate and buttered them.  From my own past experience, I knew they were a great melt-in-your-mouth hangover cure.

Armed with the plate to share and a glass of orange juice for myself, I picked my way across the paving stones to avoid getting my feet wet on the dewy grass.  When I sat next to Amber, she looked none too pleased about the swinging motion that resulted.

“The head of the department challenged you a tequila drinking contest to get back into college?” I asked.

“Don’t even say that word.”

“What?  College?”

I broke a section of waffle off and popped it into my mouth with an appreciative sigh.  Amber went through the same motions, moving very carefully.

“Meeting went almost as well as the party afterwards.  She gave me a sort of assignment that I’ll have to turn in as part of my application, just to make sure I’m not too rusty on everything, but if that’s all fine, then I’m in and they’ll transfer the credit from my old papers across to the new accreditation system they’re using.  It’ll save me a couple of years anyway.”

I cast my eyes down at the plate.  “You mean not cost you any more years than I already have.”

“Aw, Christie. 
You
didn’t cost me anything.” She reached over and put her hand on my knee.  “I wish you wouldn’t feel guilty about it.  I learned a lot about myself when you went missing and when you came back.”

I put my hand on hers, squeezed my eyes shut, and gave a tight-lipped smile that bordered on a wince.  The realization struck me that this was the first time I’d sat on this seat since I’d been here with Nick, who I still felt like I was betraying despite what he’d told me in this very spot.

“I feel guilty about a lot of things,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like Dean.  For a second there I forgot myself and I was happy, then I got a text from Nick and all this
stuff
comes flooding back, drowning me.  The past won’t let me go, Am.”

My sister was quiet for a solid minute, one hand still on my leg and the other curled around her cup of coffee, which she was staring into.  I saw her glance up towards the house before she turned back to me.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked.

“Shoot.”

“It’s not the past that has to let go of us,
we’re
the ones that have to let go of it.  You know who taught me that?”

“Ugh, please don’t say it was me.”

“Well, it was.  You didn’t teach it to me all at once, you may have dropped a few more f-bombs along the way and a lot of it you just showed me without words, but it was you.  Maybe I didn’t say it quite right, maybe it’s more like ‘accept the truth, get even, and
then
let go of the past,’ but it was still you.”

I laughed.  “I never saw myself as much of a role model.”

Amber paused and then spoke so quietly I could barely hear her. “Trent cheated on me.  A lot.”

“Am!  I’m so sorry… that piece of shit…”

“Yeah, you said it.  He’s the only boyfriend I ever had, the only guy who ever said he loved me.  I was this close to taking him back.” Amber’s hand slipped out from under mine to show her finger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart before dropping to my knee again.  “But then I thought about you.”

I couldn’t look her in the eye, I focused on her hand instead as she continued.

“I thought that there was no way
you
would ever put up with that.  I’d seen the way you and Nick were together and I thought that even if I wasn’t as pretty or popular as you, I still deserved somebody who treated me like that, who looked at me like that.”

“Am…”

I never knew she thought of herself that way.  I’d always thought of her as the pretty one, that she was simply above the popularity game and being very particular about whom she dated.  She perhaps scared a few off with her less than ladylike jokes too.  Either way, she waved off my protest before I could even formulate it.

“So I accepted the truth, and I let go.”

That weight around my neck felt heavier than ever, but as Amber’s words sank in, they seemed to offer a pair of scissors to cut myself free.  Accept the truth, and let go of the past.  I frowned.

“You accepted the truth and let go, but what about getting even?”

Amber smirked.  “Well, I told him that all was well and then he had this big important presentation he had to do for work.  Bless him, he’d prepared speech cards for himself too and had them tucked in the inside pocket of his suit, which he left unguarded while he was in the shower.”

“You took them?”

“I did, but I replaced them,” Amber said, as if it was a fair trade.

“With what?”

“I only wish,” Amber said, “that I could have been there to see his face when he stood up in front of everybody and pulled out his cards only to find that instead of prompts for his speech, there was simply a cartoon drawing of a cock and balls.”

I stared at her for a moment and then threw my head back with laughter, giggling and shaking until Amber joined me and my stomach hurt with it all.  Still holding my juice because there was nowhere convenient to put it down, I did my best to wipe my watering eyes with my wrist without spilling my drink.

“Oh boy, that’s classic,” I said.

“I bet he didn’t flip through them, you know, to see the full animation.  My talents are wasted on assholes like him.”

I doubled over with renewed laughter, my juice slopping over my hand and dripping on the ground.  By the time I was reduced to manageable snorts and chuckles, I felt closer to my sister than ever before.

“Dean looks at you in that… special way, Christie.  And you look at him like that too.  If you can do it, you should take your own advice… uh… as interpreted by me.”

She was right… or I was right.  Whoever it was didn’t really require a response, so I was just happy to share a plate of waffles with my sister for a while and feel the sun on our faces.

After sitting in silent thought for a long time, it became apparent that following that advice was easier said than done, but I wanted to tick that item off my list for real.  I wanted to love all the way.

To get there, as far as I could see, there were two things I needed to do first.  Two things that would tear me apart and risk everything all over again.