Page 40 of Last Seen
He opens the passenger door, and Halley sees the file sitting upside down on the floorboard, looking for all the world like it toppled right out of her bag. Aaron reaches down and picks up a shiny object from the gravel. “These your keys?”
Halley heaves a sigh of relief. “My God, I am losing my mind. I was in a hurry, I must have dropped them when I got out. Gosh, now I’m starting to think I’m crazy. I wouldn’t have left the file here, it must have fallen out of my bag. Thanks for finding them, you guys. I’m just being absent minded, I guess.”
“You want me to go home with you?” Kater asks.
“No, no, that’s fine. I’m sure it was my mistake.”
Aaron looks less than convinced, but they get her into the Jeep, and she waves as she drives off.
Halley berates herself all the way home. She can’t afford to be careless like this anymore. She’s seeing ghosts everywhere. She really thought she had the file and the keys when she went into Joe’s, but maybe she was mistaken. And that sense of dislocation is the worst feeling of all.
The house looks almost menacing tonight, and she wishes she’d taken Kater up on the offer of spending the night. Though it feels ridiculous to be a grown woman and ask your old babysitter to stay over because you’re being spooky.
Still, she makes a point of locking and bolting the front door, and double-checks the back door is locked, too. Everything secure, she makes a cup of chamomile tea and lets Ailuros climb in her lap. She has no choice; she needs to go through her mom’s file. Even though Occam’s razor says it just spilled out of her bag as she hurried in to Taco Joe’s, for her to do that and drop her keys, too? It feels off.
But she is admittedly distracted. Anything is possible.
She steels herself, then pulls everything out of the file and stacks it according to category. Crime scene photos, autopsy photos, reports. Three stacks. Answers in all, and more questions, too.
She takes a deep breath and starts with the crime scene. The first few photos are of the exterior of the house and get progressively closer, like a camera is zooming in. The front door with the big wreath, the hallway, shoes lined up under the foyer table. A pink backpack.
The living room, the white carpet, the fingerprints. Her mother’s body lying so still, eyes open and staring, a trickle of tear coming down her face.
I’m sorry, Mama. I’ll clean it up. I didn’t mean to make a mess.
Scrubbing and scrubbing the floor but it only gets worse. Small footprints leading from the kitchen to the living room—she is barefoot, and cold.
Wake up, Mama. Wake up.
Then darkness, that slate slamming across her mind.
Halley sips the tea. These flashbacks are starting to be unnerving. And how they end, so abruptly ... Will that wall ever come down?
She flips through the stack slowly, processing, but remembers nothing more. The photos are horrifying, and she feels her heart ripping apart as she sees her mother’s body, but there is also a strange remove, as if she is looking through a veil. The echoes.
She remembers waking up in the hospital, a woman’s voice saying “You’re going to be okay”—one of the nurses? Then her dad crying by her bedside. There’s not much after that until Marchburg, standing outside the elementary school in Jasper, the sense of panic she felt looking at all the kids streaming inside, and a warm, gentle hand on her shoulder. Her dad’s voice saying “You don’t have to, jellybean. Let’s go home.”
All these memories, ricocheting off the one moment she doesn’t remember, a moment she didn’t realize she had no recall of. Her ability to remember has always been unassailable, and now? She’s starting to doubt everything.
Everything, and everyone.
Chapter Sixteen
Theo FaceTimes as she’s going to bed. She debates not answering, texting back that she needs some space, but she also wants to tell him about the weirdness that’s happened, the stranger, leaving the file in the car, how her memories—or whatever they are—seem to be coming back in flashes. How disconcerting it is not being able to remember everything. How right he was about the sense of madness chasing her.
She swipes open her phone.
“You called earlier?”
“Uh, force of habit,” she lies. “I admit, I’m still getting used to us not being ... us.”
“I’m not thrilled with that, either.”
“Can we just ... not? I’ve had a very long day.”
“All right. What made your day so long?”
She tells him. All of it, while silently cursing herself for using him as a crutch when she knows things are over. It’s not fair to either of them. And yet ...
