Blake Pierce - Once Gone

But why hadn’t she been able to find the store? Was she taking the wrong approach? Was she so stuck on a single idea that she couldn’t see any other clues? Was she just imagining a pattern that was leading her completely astray?

Riley scanned her map and sent it along to Bill with her notes.

“Breakfast is ready, Mom.”

As she sat down with her daughter, Riley found herself fighting back tears again.

“Thank you,” she said. She began to eat silently.

“Mom, what’s wrong?” April asked.

Riley was surprised at the question. Did she hear a note of concern in her daughter’s voice? The girl was still pretty taciturn with Riley most of the time, but at least she hadn’t been openly rude for a few days.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Riley said.

“That’s not true,” April said.

Riley said nothing in reply. She didn’t want to drag April into the horrible reality of the case. Her daughter was troubled enough already.

“Was that Bill on the phone?” April asked.

Riley nodded silently.

“What did he call about?” April asked.

“I can’t talk about it.”

A long silence fell between them. They both kept on eating.

Finally April said, “You keep trying to get me to talk to you. That cuts both ways, you know. You never talk to me, not really. Do you ever talk to anybody anymore?”

Riley stopped eating and stifled a sob as it rose up in her throat. It was a good question. And the answer was no. She didn’t talk to anybody at all, not anymore. But she couldn’t bring herself to say so.

She reminded herself that it was Saturday, and she wasn’t taking April to school. And she’d made no plans for April to stay with her father. And even though Riley wasn’t going to drive west in search of clues, there was still something she had to do.

“April, I’ve got to go somewhere,” she said. “Will you be okay here by yourself?”

“Sure,” April said. Then, in a truly sad voice, she asked, “Mom, could you at least tell me where you’re going?”

“I’m going to a funeral.”

Riley arrived at the parlor in Georgetown shortly before Marie’s service was scheduled to begin. She dreaded funerals. To her, they were worse than arriving at a crime scene with a freshly murdered body. They always got inside her gut in some terrible way. Yet Riley felt she still owed something – she wasn’t sure what – to Marie.

The funeral parlor had a facade of prefab brick panels and white columns on the front portico. She entered a carpeted, air-conditioned foyer that led into a hallway wallpapered in muted pastel colors gauged to be neither depressing nor cheery. The effect backfired on Riley, adding to her feeling of despair. She wondered why funeral homes couldn’t just be the gloomy and uninviting places they really ought to be, like mausoleums or morgues, with none of this phony sanitization.

She passed several rooms, some with caskets and visitors, others empty, until she arrived where Marie’s service was to be held. At the far end of the room she saw the open casket, made out of burnished wood with a long brass handle along the sides. Perhaps two dozen people had showed up, many of them seated, some of them mingling and whispering. Bland organ music was being pumped into the room. A small viewing line was passing the coffin.

She got in line and soon found herself standing beside the coffin, looking down at Marie. For all of Riley’s mental preparation, it still gave her a jolt. Marie’s face was unnaturally passive and serene, not twisted and agonized, as it had been when she was hanging from that light fixture. This face was not stressed and fearful, as it had been when they had talked in person. It seemed wrong. Actually, it seemed worse than wrong.

She quickly moved past the coffin, noticing a somewhat elderly couple sitting in the front row. She assumed that they were Marie’s parents. They were flanked by a man and woman closer to Riley’s age. She took them to be Marie’s brother and sister. Riley reached back into memories of conversations with Marie and recalled that their names were Trevor and Shannon. She had no idea what Marie’s parents’ names were.

Riley thought of stopping to offer the family her condolences. But how would she introduce herself? As the woman who rescued Marie from captivity, only to find her corpse later? No, surely she was the last person they wanted to see right now. It was best to leave them to grieve in peace.

As she made her way to the back of the room, Riley realized that she didn’t recognize a single person there. That seemed strange and terribly sad. After all their countless hours of video chatting and their single face-to-face meeting, they didn’t have one friend in common.

But they did have one terrible enemy in common – the psychopath who had held them both. Was he here today? Riley knew that killers commonly visited the funerals and graves of victims. Deep down, as much as she owed it to Marie, she also had to admit that that was the real reason she had come here today. To find Peterson. It was also why she was carrying a concealed weapon – her personal Glock that she normally kept boxed in her car trunk.

As she walked toward the back of the room, she scanned the faces of those already seated. She had glimpsed Peterson’s face in the glare of his torch, and she’d seen pictures of him. But she’d never gotten a really good look at him face to face. Would she recognize him?

Her heart pounded as she looked at all the faces suspiciously, searching for a murderer in each one. They all soon became a blur of grief-stricken faces, staring back puzzlingly at her.

Seeing no obvious suspects, Riley sat down in an aisle seat in the back row, separated from anyone else, where she could watch anyone who entered or exited.

A young minister stepped up to a podium. Riley knew that Marie hadn’t been religious, so the minister must have been her family’s idea. The stragglers sat down, and everybody became quiet.

In a hushed and rather professional-sounding voice, the minister began with familiar words.

“‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’”

The minister paused for a moment. In the brief silence, a single phrase echoed through Riley’s mind…

“I will fear no evil.”

Somehow, it struck Riley as a grotesquely inappropriate thing to say. What did it even mean to “fear no evil”? How could it possibly be a good idea? If Marie had been more fearful months ago, more wary, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into Peterson’s clutches at all.

This was definitely a time to be fearful of evil. There was plenty of it out there.

The minister began to speak again.

“My friends, we have gathered here to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Marie Sayles – daughter, sister, friend, and colleague…”

The minister then launched into a boilerplate homily about loss, friendship, and family. Although he described Marie’s “passing” as “untimely,” he made no mention of the violence and terror that had haunted the last weeks of her life.

Riley quickly tuned out his sermon. As she did, she remembered the words in Marie’s suicide note.

“This is the only way.”

Riley felt a knot of guilt swelling inside of her, growing so large that she almost couldn’t breathe. She wanted to rush up to the front of the room, push the minister aside, and confess to the congregation that this was all, all her own fault. She had failed Marie. She had failed everyone who loved Marie. She had failed herself.

Riley fought back the urge to confess, but her unease started to take on a brutal clarity. First there had been the funeral home’s prefab bricks, silly white columns, and pastel-colored wallpaper. Next had been Marie’s face, so unnatural and waxy in the coffin. And now here was the preacher, gesturing and talking like some kind of toy, a miniature automaton, and the congregation of little heads bobbing as he spoke to them.