David Silva - The Disappeared

The man took an unsteady step forward, still clutching his belly.

Teri didn’t wait for him to draw closer. She went first for the knife drawer on her left and when she realized she wouldn’t have enough time to get the drawer open and a knife out, she instinctively grabbed for the freezer door at the top of the refrigerator. The door popped open in a surprisingly fluid motion, swung on its hinges with Teri’s weight behind it, and landed flush against the man’s forehead.

The impact sent him reeling back several steps, and toppled him over. The back of his head slammed heavily into the linoleum floor. He groaned, semi-consciously.

Teri moved forward, stepped on the wrist of the hand that was holding the knife, and tried unsuccessfully to force the knife free. Every breath was deep and heavy, the air barely enough to fill her lungs. Tears began to fill her eyes.

“Come on, you bastard, just let go of it!”

He groaned again, then his eyes—which had been clamped shut in a grimace that she didn’t think she would ever forget—suddenly shot open again. He reached up to grab her leg.

Teri pulled back and landed a kick to the left side of his face. The man’s head slammed into the linoleum floor again, then bounced back up and Teri delivered a second solid kick, this one landing flush against the man’s nose. The tears that had been collecting in her eyes suddenly broke free and poured down her face. She pulled back a third time, preparing to deliver one last kick, then slowly became aware that the man was no longer moving.

The stillness of the night, long and breathy, hot and weary, settled onerously over her.

Teri balanced her weight evenly between the foot that continued to rest firmly against the man’s wrist and the other foot, which was planted solidly on the linoleum floor now. She choked back the next wave of tears without moving, too frightened to disturb the strange, dreamlike stillness that had taken her under its spell.

For a long time, shapeless ghosts became her thoughts and she gave herself to them freely. When she was finally able to go to the neighbor’s for help, she was only distantly aware that she was still in her robe and panties and that the morning sun was only a few short hours away.

Sleep, as fitful as it was, did not come until late in the morning, long after the police had left and Teri had found herself once again alone in the apartment. She curled up in Walt’s bed, staring through the thin curtains at the orange-red colors pushing their way above the horizon, and tried unsuccessfully to expose the photographs in her mind to enough light so they would fade from her memory.

The man’s name had been Richard Boyle, and she had killed him. The back of Boyle’s head had struck the floor one too many times, harder than Teri had imagined possible, and in the end he had been left with a pool of thick, dark blood circling him like an angry aura.

“Just desserts,” an older officer had muttered somewhere in the tangle of distant conversations that had taken place afterwards. Teri had nodded numbly, suffering a chill that had entered her body and held her in its cold hands since shortly after she had gone to the neighbors. She was lucky to be alive; she knew that. And maybe a Bible-thumping, eye-for-an-eye brand of justice had taken place just the way the good Lord would have wanted it. But then why did she feel so damn horrible inside?

“We’d be happy to give you a ride if you’d like to stay somewhere else tonight,” another officer had said. This was long after the body had been removed, long after all the photographs had been taken and the events of the evening had been recounted time and time again. The chill had not let go of her still, and it was the only tie keeping her from drifting away completely. So easy it would have been to simply close her eyes and sail off on the cloud of melancholy that was surrounding her.

“I’ll be all right,” she had heard herself say from faraway.

I’ve already done my running, Teri thought now. She closed her eyes against the sunrise taking place just outside the bedroom window, and the sleep came and took her far, far away this time. She would not wake again, until early evening.

Walt parked near the picnic tables not far from where the youngest children were swinging on swings and building castles out of sand. Across the park, near the baseball diamond, Childs sat in the bleachers, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. In his company this afternoon was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late thirties, her hair cut short in front. She was wearing a modest, gray pants suit that seemed oddly out of place here at the park on a sunny day.

Walt climbed out of the car and moved over to sit at one of the tables. An old oak tree provided a canopy of branches and leaves, blocking out all but a few tiny patches of sunlight. Behind him, a little girl screamed with delight as she came down the slide and was caught at the bottom by her mother. This was the way it was supposed to be, he thought. Children building their sand castles, delighting in their rides, not a care in the world. Children weren’t supposed to have cares. Those were for the adults, for the ones who had forgotten what it was like to be children.

He noticed a pair of initials carved into the corner of the picnic table. D.E. Nothing else. No postscript about love. No misshapen heart. No giant plus sign connecting the initials to another pair of initials. Not even a hint as to whether a boy or a girl had done the carving, though Walt assumed it had been a boy. It seemed like the kind of thing a boy would do without thinking. Some hot summer afternoon when nothing was going on and no one else seemed to be around, the knife had come out almost unconsciously an hour had passed.

He looked up and watched Childs nudge the woman next to him and point across the park to the snack bar. A piece of plywood had been set into place over the window, like a storm shutter, and painted in crude white lettering across the front was the announcement: CLOSED FOR WINTER. Congregating near the building was a small group of teenagers, just hanging out as kids were prone to do. A girl with beautiful brown hair, an oversized sweatshirt and a nose ring, laughed loud enough that Walt could hear her from across the park. The boy next to her reached into his shirt pocket and offered her a cigarette. She nodded and they passed it back and forth for awhile.

It was the group of teenagers that had apparently piqued Childs’s interest.

In the bleachers, the woman asked the doctor a question. He nodded and offered her a hand as she climbed to her feet. She made her way down the stands one cautious step at a time, still curiously out of place, then strolled across the park toward a small grassy area near the restrooms.

Two of the kids broke off from the group. They backpedaled off the gravel and onto the grass, talking casually, then turned and started in Walt’s direction. Another kid, wearing a plaid shirt over a black tee-shirt and looking to be no more than thirteen or fourteen, broke away. He raised his hand and pointed apologetically toward the restrooms, nodded and started in that direction.

Almost immediately, the woman appeared to take notice.

She tucked her hands into her pockets and moved across the grass toward the walkway. It was an angle designed to take her directly across the path of the young man.

Whatever it was, it was going down.

Walt stood and stretched and wandered over to the barbecue pit. The two kids, who had been the first to leave the group, passed in front of him, one of them rattling on zealously about some group called the Cranes .

The woman stepped onto the walkway, turned and brushed past the boy. It was a snap of the fingers, just like that, and then it was over. As near as Walt could tell, all she had done was put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and whisper something. What she had whispered was anyone’s guess.