Girl Found: A Detective Kaitlyn Carr Mystery Page 5

I don't know exactly what happened that afternoon. My memories of that day are hazy and have only gotten hazier since. I thought that, at some point, memories would flood in, but they never did. I even went to have hypnosis and a few therapists to bring them out, all to no avail.

  It was late in the afternoon and when the sun started to set, we knew we had to go back home. We had to go back to land. I remember I was talking about it while both of us were lying flat on our backs.

  We hadn't talked about our kiss that happened only the day before. I was waiting for him to bring it up, but he never did and I never did. It was this big elephant in the room separating us.

  The sun started to beat down hard. It gets into the nineties here in the summers, but with the thin air, it can feel even hotter, stronger, and more intense.

  My eyelids started to feel heavy and I just let myself drift off. I knew that I'd probably wake up soon. I’d slept like that, taking little catnaps a thousand times before, but on that particular afternoon, it was a mistake.

  When I finally opened my eyes, Nicky wasn't there.

  The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, Nicky’s favorite book, lay open flat with the highlighted pages and underlined sentences toward the fiberglass.

  Still feeling woozy from opening my eyes, my heart jumped into my throat. I didn’t know what to do.

  I looked around everywhere, but the boat was barely fifteen feet long. There was literally nowhere to go.

  There was a driver's seat, passenger seat, the front, and the back. That was it.

  I looked around, I climbed out front, peering into the blue water. It was a little bit murky, it was a lake after all, and quite deep.

  I didn’t see anyone or anything. I had no idea when this could have happened or where he had gone.

  What if another boat came by and he jumped in? I wondered.

  Looking out into the distance, 360 degrees all around me, and there were no boats in sight.

  Our friends had come and gone, but if someone had pulled up, the sound of the engine and their voices would have definitely woken me up. I knew that for sure.

  I was asleep, but I wasn't deeply asleep. Besides, I was lying on the outside of the boat and it wasn’t the most comfortable bed.

  I picked up the intercom and called for help. I didn’t know what to do.

  I wanted to drive the boat back to dock, but I was afraid of leaving him.

  While I waited for help to arrive, I jumped into the frigid water, put on my snorkeling mask, held my breath, and dove down over and over again, until I was spent and exhausted.

  The visibility was less than a foot, but I plunged myself into the darkness just in case he was somewhere near.

  The rest of what happened was even more of a blur.

  The divers looked for his body for two days, eventually finding it about half a mile away from where we were.

  There was an underground current that must have pulled him under and carried him away.

  The officials had called it a drowning, but even now all of these years later, I'm not sure what it was.

  That's what happened to Nicky and that was the beginning of all of the other bad things that happened in my life.

  8

  I haven't thought about Nicky in a long time and I'm still afraid to let my mind go there, but this place, this beautiful town on the lake, haunts me whenever I visit.

  If I ever do get a cabin in the woods, it probably won't be here. There are too many memories. Too many bad things have happened here. I try to put him out of my mind, but as I get back to my car, start the engine, and drive down the dark road with nothing but headlights in my field of vision, all I see is his face.

  When it first happened, I was obsessed with reading his online journal. There was a popular journaling website called LiveJournal, where you can make a screen name or use your real name and write about your life.

  This was before social media or anything like that. Nicky had an account and one day when we had too much Mountain Dew and sat around giggling and laughing, watching the movie Scream, he told me about it.

  He just came right out and said that he started a journal and that he didn't want me to read it, but maybe I will someday.

  He made me promise that I would never read it, not as long as he was alive and I now wonder whether he had any premonitions that he would not live long.

  I wondered a lot about that, but now I think that's just one of those things that teenagers say. You like to think of people around you and what they would do and say about you if you weren't around anymore.

  Nicky and I were very macabre in that way. That's why when I went to his funeral, I felt a spirit there, watching, hanging around, seeing who showed up and who didn't. It made me smile. I missed him so much.

  Knowing that about him, I felt his presence there.

  What did I find on his LiveJournal? Not too much.

  It had the expected musings about fights with his parents, and how much he missed his dog who ran away and was later found dead after being hit by a car.

  I had promised him that I wouldn’t read his journal and I managed to keep my promise for a year. After that, I couldn’t hold on much longer.

  I needed his words to be with me. I needed to feel his presence.

  The last entry mentioned me. Well, there were plenty that mentioned me in passing, as his best friend.

  Kaitlyn did this and Kaitlyn said that. Kaitlyn is obsessed with Scream, but I don't like it as much. I prefer The Crow. We like to think of ourselves as emo-goth kids without all the black makeup and the black hair comb overs. We listened to metal, we watched 90s horror movies, and we thought that we were deeper than everyone else who wore their highlighter green outfits and sparkles in their hair.

  The last journal entry was written the day before his death, the night of, to be more specific.

  He mentions me.

  He mentions our kiss, describing it in detail.

  Sunlight beamed against her tan skin. Her pouty lips opened slightly and I couldn't stay away.

  Her big green eyes smiled at me and our fingers intertwined in that way that they never have before. There was a moment right before our lips touched when our childhood seemed to have melted away, just like that.

  We were not yet thirteen, but we were no longer children. We had feelings for each other that we couldn't explain, but we could only express when I kissed her.

  She tasted of summer, Jolly Ranchers, sunshine, and the big blue lake where we grew up.

  Tomorrow I'm going to kiss her again, if she'll let me, and I will ask her to be mine.

  I swallow hard, going over the words in my mind. I have read that journal entry thousands of times and the words have imprinted on me.

  He wanted to be a writer. He loved writing about his life. He loved putting himself onto paper.

  I loved that about him. He would read me excerpts from Wordsworth and Yeats, poems that made my hair stand up on end.

  We never talked about it in public, not at school or anything like that. I mean, people knew that he liked to write.

  He worked on the newspaper with me and he edited the literary journal, but his interest in poetry was something that he shared only with me.

  As I pull up to my mom's house, I wonder what the world missed out on when it lost Nicholas Bender: how much beauty, love, and sorrow.

  I also wonder about how much I have lost as the girl who loved him.

  I see Luke’s rental car in my mom's driveway. I'm both excited and a little bit anxious.

  Why is he here?

  I park on the street and walk up to the front door, knocking once.

  Luke answers the door. He smiles at me and I immediately relax. If they found her body, found something, or even had bad news of any kind, his face would be different.

  Luke has big, kind eyes and a casual demeanor that makes him look comfortable in a suit as well as sweatpants. His shoulders are broad and strong.

  His hair is getting a little long, but in t
hat attractive, sexy way along with that five o'clock shadow that's really probably three days old. I haven't known him for too long, but I've noticed that he can't really grow a beard.

  He gives me a warm hug and I embrace him back.

  This is the first time that we have touched since our fight. Mom comes out of the kitchen holding a tray of cookies, freshly baked from the oven.

  "Well, this is unusual," I say, giving her a brief hug.

  She's a thin-lipped woman who likes to wear her hair pressed tightly to her head.

  She's not one to show her emotions around strangers, but recently, around me, she hasn't been able to hold them back much at all. Mom has always been a very put-together kind of woman with strict rules about what should and shouldn't happen.

  Curse words were allowed in books as long as they were used appropriately, not gratuitously, and worked with the particular characters, but the number of books which had profanity that she approved of were limited to probably four or five.

  She was always partial to fiction written in third person and loved Hawthorne and Faulkner with their elaborate language thick with metaphors.

  She did not like the teenage vampire romance trend, but she was happy that it was making kids come into the library and read. At the end, she was a librarian and any reading was better than none as far as she was concerned.

  I grab a cookie, take a bite, and am pleasantly surprised. I don't know if it's a result of her love for books and literature in general, but she was never the type to take homemaking very seriously.

  She didn't really like to cook or clean, let alone bake.

  "Wow, these are delicious," I say, swallowing one and then quickly grabbing another.

  "Thank you. Your friend Luke helped me with them."

  "You did?" I ask.

  He nods.

  The jacket from his suit is draped over the wooden chair in the makeshift dining room/office. My mom cleaned up most of her papers and put them in a big pile on one of the bookshelves, but they're not exactly out of the way.

  The house is small and every time I come back, it feels smaller than I remember. Ever since Violet had disappeared, something about it has become completely minuscule.

  "I had some time," Luke says, "waiting for you to get here and I wanted to ask your mom some questions about Violet anyway, so..."

  "So, you figured that you'd come here and bake cookies?" I ask, reaching for my third.

  Mom winks at me and says, "Why don't you have a seat? I'll get some tea."

  She doesn't offer me dinner and I don't expect it, as it looks like they've already had some.

  There's an empty pizza box on the counter that she folds up and stashes next to the recycling bin. Recycling has always been taken very seriously in our household.

  My mom carefully sorts all the food and makes sure that the right type of plastic goes into the recycling bin because, as you know, only plastics labeled with a number one and two are easily recyclable, while others, four through seven, are generally not.

  The ones listed with a number three, like PVC pipes and children's and pets' toys as well as clamshell containers that are common with takeout food, contain toxins and thus cannot be recycled.

  "You know, your friend Luke here is quite an expert on baking cookies," Mom says.

  "Yeah, I would say so," I agree. "These oatmeal chocolate chip ones are to die for."

  He winks at me while admitting, "My mom is a great baker. She bakes for any reason whatsoever. Christmas, birthdays, Valentine's Day, Presidents’ Day."

  "Really?"

  "Yep. One year when I was in school, I brought in cookies for the whole day for Martin Luther King Day."

  "What grade?" I laugh.

  He laughs, too, and says, "Fifth. It made me quite popular with the girls if I may say so myself."

  I can just imagine, with a lot of cringe, what it would be like for the ten-year-old me to bring in cookies for the whole class. I remember I was embarrassed to even give out Valentine's Day cards, but Luke doesn't seem bothered.

  "She actually started up her own bakery," Luke says.

  "Where is that?" Mom asks.

  “Wichita, Kansas, where I'm from. She was an accountant and she retired, but didn't really like being retired, so she decided to rent this little space on Main Street and started a bakery. It’s doing well. They're totally booked up. Birthday parties, wedding cakes, that kind of thing. She has to expand, probably to another location and hire more help, but she just loves doing all the work herself. Kind of a control freak, but in a good way," he jokes.

  I give him a smile. This is the first time he's ever talked about his family or anything personal like that and I really appreciate it.

  I take another bite of my cookie and revel in the sweet oatmeal goodness. Mom pours us some tea and then says that she's had a long day and is going to go to bed.

  "I have the room all set up for you. New sheets, new everything,” she says to me. Then she turns to Luke. “It was nice to meet you. Thank you for stopping by, Agent Luke Gavinson."

  "No, thank you," he says.

  She gives us each a hug and then walks away down the small corridor to the first bedroom on the left.

  The floorboards creak in the living room as the house settles all around, but as soon as she steps on the shaggy caramel carpet in the corridor, the house seems to settle and everything's all right again.

  Luke and I sit across from each other in the dining room, each holding our cup of tea and occasionally sneaking glances. This is probably the best time to talk about the fight that we had before I left here last time, but neither of us wants to bring it up.

  I play with the string of the ginger lemongrass teabag, pulling it in and out of the mug before finally looking up at Luke and asking him about his date.

  "That wasn't a real date. I told you that," he says, narrowing his eyes. His voice is quiet but stern. "My cousin set it up. She was there, introducing me to her friend. I promised to go before we met."

  "I know. I'm just joking," I say with a casual shrug.

  "I don't know why you're getting so upset. It's not like we're dating anyway," he says.

  I nod. That part is true.

  "I'd like to."

  His words catch me by surprise. I look up and he stares deep into my eyes and I can't look away.

  "What are you talking about?" I ask, not quite certain if he's joking although everything about his body language says that he's not.

  9

  I don't really want to talk about this, but I don't have much of a choice. Luke stares at me, waiting for an answer.

  "Do you really want to be exclusive?" I ask. "I mean, didn't we just meet not too long ago?"

  "Yes, but when you know, you know, right?"

  I nod.

  "I guess not," he mumbles.

  I look up at him, our eyes meet, and I feel like I have done something wrong.

  The truth is that I do want to be with him. I do want to call him my boyfriend, but for some reason, I can't. I can't make myself nor do I really want to force it.

  "What about your date?" I ask. "It didn't go well?"

  "It was a blind date arranged by someone who doesn't really know me."

  "She's your cousin, right?"

  "Why are you trying to make this something that it's not?" he asks. "You know that it was just a social obligation."

  "Why are you coming back here and asking me to be your girlfriend all of a sudden?"

  "I thought that we had a good time. I thought that we got along well and I like being with you. Is that a crime?"

  "No, of course not." I back down. "I just don't think that I'm ready. I don't think we are ready."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I ran into my old boyfriend and we had dinner, drinks."

  "Dinner or drinks?" he pushes me, narrowing his eyes.

  "Drinks, okay?"

  "So, what does that mean?"

  "Nothing except that I went out with him be
cause I was angry with you and I'm just not sure that's a great foundation for a relationship."

  "It's not."

  Neither of us say anything for a while, until the silence becomes almost unbearable.

  I'm not sure where to go from here and neither is he, but I'm also a little bit annoyed, angry.

  We had a fight, but we had a good thing going.

  We got along. We had fun and I haven't had fun for a long time.

  "Can we just rewind?" I finally ask.

  "Rewind to what?"

  "Rewind this whole thing. This whole cascade of events. I just want to go back to how things were. Like how we meet up in your motel room, had a good time, and had a few laughs. Why can't we go back to that? Why do we have to put this relationship into a box?"

  "We don't," Luke says. "We don't have to do anything."

  "So, can we go back?"

  "No," he says, shaking his head.

  "I don't think I can do that either."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. We don't even know each other. I mean, not even as friends, not as anything. So I just can't. I'm just not ready. With everything else that's going on in my personal life, with Violet missing, I just can't take it any further right now."

  "Okay, I understand," he says with a nod, but it feels like he doesn't. "Well, it was nice to see you again, Kaitlyn." He pauses for a little bit before saying my first name and I almost feel like he's thinking about whether or not he should call me Detective Carr.

  "Don't leave. Don't leave us like this," I plead, but he gets up from behind the table, grabs his coat, and walks out.

  I follow him out onto the porch and call out his name again.

  "Listen, I'm not taking anything personally," Luke says, turning around right before opening his car door. "Let's just be friends, okay? This is me rewinding things, starting new."

  "Okay," I say, holding myself by my shoulders, uncertain as to whether or not I believe him. "Okay, I'll see you tomorrow."

  He gets into the car and pulls out. A little bit of snow has fallen since I got here and the driveway's slick.

  He's not used to driving in these conditions and he turns against the ice when he should be letting go of the brake and driving with it.