Блейк Пирс - Cause to Dread

She peeked inside the box, hoping to find her iPod. She had not labeled anything when she had left her Boston apartment. She’d hastily thrown everything into a series of boxes and moved out in the course of a day. That was three weeks ago and she still had yet to finish unpacking. In fact, her sheets were jumbled up somewhere in these boxes but she had elected to sleep on the couch for the last three weeks.

The current box did not contain her iPod, but it did hold the few bottles of liquor she had nearly forgotten about. She pulled a tumbler out of the box, filled it with a healthy dose of bourbon, and walked out onto the front porch. She squinted at the bright morning light and took a pull from her bourbon. After enjoying the burn of it, she took another. She then checked her watch and saw that it was barely after ten in the morning.

She shrugged and plopped down in the old rocking chair that had been on the porch when she’d brought the place. She looked out at her new surroundings and was warmly reassured that she could live out the rest of her life here quite comfortably.

The house wasn’t quite a cabin but had that sort of rustic feel to it. It was a simple one-story place with a modern interior. In terms of a mailing address, she was close to Walden Pond but just far enough off the beaten track to also be considered “in the middle of nowhere.” Her nearest neighbor was half a mile away and all she could see beyond her front porch and the rear kitchen window were trees.

No horns blaring. No busy pedestrians in a hurry while glaring at their phones. No traffic. No constant smell of gasoline and exhaust or the droning of engines.

She downed another gulp of her morning bourbon and listened to her surroundings. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. She could hear two birds calling back and forth and the slight creaking of the trees as a chilly late-fall breeze passed through.

She’d tried her best to get Rose to come out here with her. Her daughter had been through a lot and God only knew that staying in the city was not going to help her heal. But Rose had refused. Rose had actually vehemently refused. After the smoke of the last case had cleared, Rose had needed somewhere to place the blame for the death of her father. And, as usual, that blame had fallen at Avery’s feet.

As much as it hurt, Avery understood it; she would have behaved the same way if the roles had been reversed. During the move out into the woods, Rose had accused her of running away from her problems. And Avery had no qualms about admitting that. She’d come here to escape the memories of the last case – of the last several months of her life, if she was being totally honest.

They had come so close to recovering the relationship they’d once had. But when Rose’s father had died – as well as Ramirez, a man she had started to tolerate as her mother’s love interest – that had all come to a screeching halt. Rose fully blamed Avery for her father’s death, and Avery was slowly starting to blame herself, too.

Avery closed her eyes and finished off the tumbler of bourbon. She listened to the quiet sounds of the forest and let the warmth of the bourbon comfort her. She’d let similar warmth comfort her over the course of the last three weeks, getting drunk a handful of times, so much so one time that she blacked out for several hours. She’d spent that night hunched over a toilet and moaning over Ramirez and the future they had come so close to having.

Looking back on that, Avery was embarrassed. It made her want to swear off drinking for good. She’d never been a huge drinker but the last three weeks, liquor and wine had helped float her through.

Through to what, though? she wondered as she got up out of the rocking chair and headed back inside.

She eyed the bourbon, tempted to go ahead and obliterate herself by noon just to get through another day. But she knew that was cowardice. She had to get through this on her own, with a clear head. So she put the bourbon and the other liquor bottles up in a cabinet in the kitchen. She then went to the next box in her piles, still looking for the iPod.

A stack of photo albums sat at the top of the box. Because her mind had been on Rose while on the porch, Avery fished them out quickly. There were three in all, one of which was filled with pictures from her college days. She ignored this one completely and flipped open the second one.

Rose stared up at her right away. She was twelve, on a sled with her hat covered in snow. Underneath this picture, Rose was still twelve. In this one, she was painting what looked like a field of sunflowers on an easel in her old bedroom. Avery flipped through them all until about halfway through the book, she came to a picture that had been taken only three Christmases ago. Rose and Jack, Rose’s father, were dancing comically in front of a Christmas tree. They were both smiling to the point of giddiness. Jack’s Santa hat was crooked on his head and the ornaments gleamed in the background.

It was like a knife to the heart, piercing and twisting and turning. The need to cry came on like a bomb. She’d not felt the urge a single time since moving here, as she had gotten quite good at stifling such things over the course of her career. But it hit her then, out of nowhere, and before she could fight it off, her mouth opened and an agonized moan came out. She grabbed at her heart as if that imagined knife really was there, and sank to the floor.

She tried to get up, but her body seemed to revolt. No, it seemed to say. You’re going to allow yourself this moment and you’re going to cry. You’re going to weep. You’re going to grieve. And who knows? You might actually be better for it.

She clung to the photo album, pressing it against her chest. She cried hard, letting herself be vulnerable for just a moment. She hated that it felt so good to get it out, to let herself break down. She moaned and cried, saying nothing – not calling out to anyone, not questioning God or offering prayer. She simply grieved .

And it felt good. It damn near felt like an exorcism of sorts.

She didn’t know how long she sat there on the floor among the boxes. All she knew was that when she got to her feet, she no longer wanted to numb herself with something from a bottle. She needed to get her head clear, needed to get her thoughts in order.

She felt a familiar ache in her hands, something even stronger than the need to drink away her emotions. She clenched her fingers into loose fists and thought of paper targets and the long expanses of indoor firing ranges.

Her heart then started to lift a bit as she thought about the few items she had in the bedroom that she would eventually arrange and decorate one of these days. There wasn’t much in there, but there was one certain thing that she had nearly forgotten about in the haze of the last few days. Slowly, trying to encourage herself as she walked through the living room full of boxes, Avery entered the bedroom.

She stood in the doorway for a moment and studied the gun that was propped up in the corner.

The rifle was a Remington 700 that she’d had ever since she’d graduated college. During her senior year, she’d had big plans of moving somewhere remote in order to hunt deer in the winters. It was something her father had always done and, while she had not been particularly good at it, she had enjoyed it. She’d often been ribbed about it by her girlfriends and she had probably scared a boyfriend or two away in high school because of her affection for the sport. When her father passed away, her mother had begged her to take the gun, thinking her father would have wanted her to have it.

It had been passed around, from move to move, usually stowed away in a closet or under a bed. Two days after moving into this house, she’d taken it to a local gun dealership and had them clean it. When she picked it up, she also purchased three boxes of cartridges for it.