Blake Pierce: Once Gone

Riley smiled broadly. It was obvious that she knew perfectly well what he was really here for.

“Show me,” she said, then added, glancing nervously over at April, “Come on, let’s go out back. I don’t want her to see it.”

Riley took off her slippers and walked into the backyard barefoot ahead of Bill. They sat at a weathered wooden picnic table that had been there since well before Riley moved here, and Bill gazed around the small yard with its single tree. There were woods on all sides. It made him forget he was even near a city.

Too isolated, he thought.

He’d never felt that this place was right for Riley. The little ranch-style house was fifteen miles out of town, rundown, and very ordinary. It was just off a secondary road, with nothing else but forests and pastures in sight. Not that he’d ever thought suburban life was right for her either. He had a hard time picturing her doing the cocktail party circuit. She could still, at least, drive into Fredericksburg and take the Amtrak to Quantico when she came back to work. When she still could work.

“Show me what you’ve got,” she said.

He spread the reports and photographs across the table.

“Remember the Daggett case?” he asked. “You were right. The killer wasn’t through.”

He saw her eyes widen as she pored over the pictures. A long silence fell as she studied the files intensely, and he wondered if this might be what she needed to come back – or if it would set her back.

“So what do you think?” he finally asked.

Another silence. She still did not look up from the file.

Finally, she looked up, and when she did, he was shocked to see tears well up in her eyes. He had never seen her cry before, not even on the worst cases, up close to a corpse. This was definitely not the Riley he knew. That killer had done something to her, more than he knew.

She choked back a sob.

“I’m scared, Bill,” she said. “I’m so scared. All the time. Of everything.”

Bill felt his heart drop seeing her like this. He wondered where the old Riley had gone, the one person he could always rely on to be tougher than him, the rock he could always turn to in times of trouble. He missed her more than he could say.

“He’s dead , Riley,” he said, in the most confident tone he could muster. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”

She shook her head.

“You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do,” he answered. “They found his body after the explosion.”

“They couldn’t identify it,” she said.

“You know it was him.”

Her face fell forward and she covered it with one hand as she wept. He held her other hand across the table.

“This is a new case,” he said. “It’s got nothing to do with what happened to you.”

She shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Slowly, as she wept, she reached up and handed him the file, looking away.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down, holding it out with a trembling hand. “I think you should go,” she added.

Bill, shocked, saddened, reached out and took the file back. Never in a million years would he have expected this outcome.

Bill sat there for a moment, struggling against his own tears. Finally, he gently patted her hand, got up from the table, and made his way back through the house. April was still sitting in the living room, her eyes closed, nodding her head to her music.

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.”