Once Gone (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #1)

  *

  Riley sat crying alone at the picnic table after Bill left.

  I thought I was okay, she thought.

  She’d really wanted to be okay, for Bill. And she’d thought she could actually carry it off. Sitting in the kitchen talking about trivialities had been all right. Then they had gone outside and when she had seen the file, she’d thought she’d be okay, too. Better than okay, really. She was getting caught up in it. Her old lust for the job was rekindled, she wanted to get back in the field. She was compartmentalizing, of course, thinking of those nearly identical murders as a puzzle to solve, almost in the abstract, an intellectual game. That too was fine. Her therapist had told her she would have to do that if she ever hoped to go back to work.

  But then for some reason, the intellectual puzzle became what it really and truly was—a monstrous human tragedy in which two innocent women had died in the throes of immeasurable pain and terror. And she’d suddenly wondered: Was it as bad for them as it was for me?

  Her body was now flooded with panic and fear. And embarrassment, shame. Bill was her partner and her best friend. She owed him so much. He’d stood by her during the last weeks when nobody else would. She couldn’t have survived her time in the hospital without him. The last thing she wanted was for him to see her reduced to a state of helplessness.

  She heard April yell from the back screen door.

  “Mom, we gotta eat now or I’ll be late.”

  She felt an urge to yell back, “Fix your own breakfast!”

  But she didn’t. She was long since exhausted from her battles with April. She’d given up fighting.

  She got up from the table and walked back to the kitchen. She pulled a paper towel off the roll and used it to wipe her tears and blow her nose, then braced herself to cook. She tried to recall her therapist’s words: Even routine tasks will take a lot of conscious effort, at least for a while. She had to settle for doing things one baby step at a time.

  First came taking things out of the refrigerator—the carton of eggs, the package of bacon, the butter dish, the jar of jam, because April liked jam even if she didn’t. And so it went until she laid six strips of bacon in a pan on the stovetop, and she turned on the gas range under the pan.

  She staggered backward at the sight of the yellow-blue flame. She shut her eyes, and it all came flooding back to her.

  Riley lay in a tight crawlspace, under a house, in a little makeshift cage. The propane torch was the only light she ever saw. The rest of the time was spent in complete darkness. The floor of the crawlspace was dirt. The floorboards above her were so low that she could barely even crouch.

  The darkness was total, even when he opened a small door and crept into the crawlspace with her. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him breathing and grunting. He’d unlock the cage and snap it open and climb inside.

  And then he’d light that torch. She could see his cruel and ugly face by its light. He’d taunt her with a plate of wretched food. If she reached for it, he’d thrust the flame at her. She couldn’t eat without getting burned …

  She opened her eyes. The images were less vivid with her eyes open, but she couldn’t shake the stream of memories. She continued to make breakfast robotically, her whole body surging with adrenaline. She was just setting the table when her daughter’s voice yelled out again.

  “Mom, how long’s it going to be?”

  She jumped, and her plate slipped out of her hand and fell to the floor and shattered.

  “What happened?” April yelled, appearing beside her.

  “Nothing,” Riley said.

  She cleaned up the mess, and as she and April sat eating together, the silent hostility was palpable as usual. Riley wanted to end the cycle, to break through to April, to say, April, it’s me, your mom, and I love you. But she had tried so many times, and it only made it worse. Her daughter hated her, and she couldn’t understand why—or how to end it.

  “What are you going to do today?” she asked April.

  “What do you think?” April snapped. “Go to class.”

  “I mean after that,” Riley said, keeping her voice calm, compassionate. “I’m your mother. I want to know. It’s normal.”

  “Nothing about our lives is normal.”

  They ate silently for a few moments.

  “You never tell me anything,” Riley said.

  “Neither do you.”

  That stopped any hope for conversation once and for all.

  That’s fair, Riley thought bitterly. It was truer than April even knew. Riley had never told her about her job, her cases; she had never told her about her captivity, or her time in the hospital, or why she was “on vacation” now. All April knew was that she’d had to live with her father during much of that time, and she hated him even more than she hated Riley. But as much as she wanted to tell her, Riley thought it best that April have no idea what her mother had been through.

  Riley got dressed and drove April to school, and they didn’t say a word to each other during the drive. When she let April out of the car, she called after her, “I’ll see you at ten.”

  April gave her a careless wave as she walked away.

  Riley drove to a nearby coffee shop. It had become a routine for her. It was hard for her to spend any time in a public place, and she knew that was exactly why she had to do it. The coffee shop was small and never busy, even in the mornings like this, so she found it relatively unthreatening.

  As she sat there, sipping on a cappuccino, she remembered again Bill’s entreaty. It had been six weeks, damn it. This had to change. She had to change. She didn’t know how she was going to do that.

  But an idea was forming. She knew exactly what she needed to do first.