Conviction (15 page)

There was more security on campus now after the window incident. And while I was sure they were happy for the overtime, I wanted to crawl out of my skin with nerves. I kept my head down while I walked down the sidewalks, desperate to move quickly and not bring attention to myself. The double standard seemed to be working in my favor; from what I could tell, campus police were keeping an eye on the guys, and my talent for being quiet was working in my favor.

I passed by dorm housing, looking at windows dark and lit alike. It was easy to picture classmates pulling all-nighters trying to get their GPAs up, girls like Melinda comparing dates, video games, and drinking, job interviews and breakouts. Something slightly closer to average. And if I was a different person, in a different place, I might consider being friends with cute frat boys, with letting Melinda arrange dates for me. If I had never been kidnapped, it might have been easier to be friends with Cora and the rest of the girls, but I wasn’t a different person, and I was only in the present.

And whether I realized it then or not, I had belonged to Charlie the moment I laid eyes on him.

The cab ride was exhaustingly painful, but at least I was smart enough to have the driver leave me in the town square instead of dropping me off directly at the house. From there, I walked, looking over my shoulder every eight to ten seconds to make sure no one was behind me, and though I was confident no one was, I couldn’t escape the dread that followed as I walked along the growing fields and ashen roads. It was like I already knew what I would find, and my body was preparing itself for the blowback. My stomach began cramping, my ankles swelled, my skin itched. By causing me pain, my body was trying to protect my mind from the worst of it.

If only it could.

I used my key when I got there. Unafraid of the dark, I reached around on the wall for the light switch, finding it after a few seconds of clumsiness. Once my eyes adjusted, I realized the lush living room I saw not too long ago was the same except for one vital element: its occupants were gone.

“Charlie? Elise! Tyler?”

I called their names, not forgetting that Tyler didn’t exactly have the verbal skill to yet answer back, yet half hoping his laugh would drift down to me from upstairs as I tore my way from room to room, searching.

It was clear they had left in a hurry. Every piece of furniture remained, every painting on the wall, the food in the cupboard, even the toys in the hallway were there, as though they had never left, a mausoleum to the people who used to occupy the place, but it was becoming clearer as I went from room to room that they had vanished, not out for the evening like I had originally hoped, but gone; perhaps for a long haul as I saw both SUVs absent from the garage and the safe in Elise and Ben’s bedroom cleared out, it’s door half open.

Still, I waited. I waited on the couch that I had watched so many movies on, and where I had stolen so many glances at Charlie. I waited, staring out the window at the pool Tyler had nearly fallen in once, and that we had gone swimming in on New Year’s in our clothes…tempting each other to a breaking point.

No, I wouldn’t let this be the end. I refused to let it be.

I went back to searching, only this time instead of looking for people, I was looking for information. I shuffled through drawers, the organized ones and the junk ones. I looked through notebooks, read old grocery lists, and turned over envelopes, all in an effort for something, anything that would tell me where they had gone. An hour went by before I gave up on the kitchen and the living room and went upstairs, beginning the search in the library. I paged through books and unlocked file cabinets, the garbage can, and even looked through Tyler’s coloring books for something in my desperation. The modem for the desktop was gone, so that hope left with it. I collapsed in the twirling desk chair and folded my head in my hands. Where would something else be? An address, a name? A number? Anything? I considered going to the Healdsburg airport and asking questions there, though I figured if they did know anything, Ben would more than likely have paid them off to keep quiet like he always did. I remembered the name of Ben’s attorney, but I already knew attorney-client privilege would only lead me to a dead-end.

I had to think. Think, think, think,
think
. A headache was threatening to set in and I was feeling desperate enough to consider searching for Elise and Tyler’s friends from the Mommy and Me class when I looked at the whiteboard on the floor. It had been taken off the wall, its contents erased, but as I picked it up and peered closer, the old shadows indicated a set of numbers there. I squinted at them under the light making sure I had them right before jotting them down.

And then I searched some more.

I wandered into the west wing as I had so many times before, but the light switch didn’t work. I reached up and tried to twist the gauge manually, only it wasn’t there. I felt my way across the wall like a blind woman until I reached an open room. At least there the light switch was working. Once the light flickered on I could see the damage clearly enough: every other fixture had been ripped directly from the wall, fist shaped imprints were ingrained into the wall, one after the other, smaller onto themselves until wire slipped out of the wall. A putter in the middle of the room also suggested a worthy colleague. At the sight my heart began dancing in my throat. Clearly it was the work of Charlie in his rage.

Only too clearly could I see the ghost of him just hours before, a human hulk slamming his way down the hall, taking out anything and everything in his way. I wondered what his goal was. I was too afraid to know.

Then I saw it.

At first it was difficult to tell what his method of destruction was, but as my eyes adjusted to the dark it became obvious that it wasn’t a single method but many.

The dresser drawers were ripped from their foundation, then slammed into the adjacent wall. The shelves planked just above the garden of blue roses were ripped from their home, breaking the glass in the windows, though not shattering them all the way.

The mattress took the most damage. Every blanket was torn to shreds, the pillow-top destroyed, and finally the plastic springs damaged until they no longer bounced. It took a moment for it to sink in what had happened, the inlay of the transfixed wrath from kicked in walls to ripped out doorknobs.

I kept myself from crying only because it was still fixable. They were probably at a safe house somewhere or even in a hotel down the street for all I knew. In all likelihood, the damage of Charlie’s rage had frightened Ben into sending Elise and Tyler away as a precaution while the boys took him to cool off somewhere. I told myself this over and over even as I pointlessly attempted to clean up my sort-of-room. I chanted it in my head even as I called the number I’d found on the whiteboard. No one answered. But I wasn’t done yet.

I searched the house for two more hours, only pausing to try and reach Charlie. But when my search of the rest of the house and the garage turned up nothing, I waited for as long as I possibly could and walked down the field before calling a taxi. It cost me the rest of the cash I had left, but I gave the driver Charlie’s address and silently prayed; prayed that at the little trailer I would find some kind of an answer.

***

The door was unlocked, as I expected, and I felt slightly relieved. I braced myself before walking inside though, half expecting to see a sight as bad as the one I just came from, but Charlie’s place seemed to be exactly as he had left it. Empty bottles from a local brewery were in the sink, shirts half-strung over the table with sketchbooks and pencils alike, with the bed as unmade as we had left it. A typical bachelor’s mess, but nothing more.

Chapter 11

Class the next morning was a fog of words and facts. Professors lectured on the importance of studying for finals, but many of the students were already in the early throes of summer, preoccupied with how much leg their shorts were showing off or what they were doing when the weekend came. I wrote things down, but they were blurred just like the rest of me. I had also tried to call the phone number from the whiteboard, but again, no answer. Searching for its owner on the internet had also proved to be fruitless.

I had spent a sleepless night worrying, tossing in my blankets and reliving the destruction. If Charlie had been that reckless, I didn’t want to imagine what he might have done if he knew Adam was still on-campus. Or did he know Adam was still around?
Oh God
, could he really have thought that I would betray him like that?

I suddenly couldn’t think, couldn’t remember if I had ever mentioned whether or not Adam and I e-mail regularly. What would Charlie think when he saw our correspondence? Would he know they were innocent, or would he, like always, assume the worst?  I knew he was all ready jealous, but not telling him about e-mailing Adam might suggest untrustworthiness anyway, and if Charlie had been looking through my things for indicators of my imaginary infidelity then it probably would take much.

I thought I had made it clear I only cared about Adam as a friend. Still, all my convincing wouldn’t do any good if Charlie thought I lied to him and Adam was still in town for me…
No
, I decided. No, that didn’t make any sense. Charlie was the only one for me and he knew that. Besides,
I
didn’t even know Adam was still in town, how would Charlie?

The images popped up on the TVs in the library. One by one, they came on each of the flat screens, gradually taking over as each station interrupted their broadcast with the bulletin. The only TV that didn’t seem to give in was the sports channel, though that never caught my attention to begin with.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye, at first seeing, but not
really
seeing classmates who were nudging each other, then pointing in my direction. My mind was with Charlie in every possible capacity, wondering, hoping, and worrying. I was actually so enamored that I scarcely acknowledged people gathering around the larger television behind the librarian’s desk, the sets of eyes on me, one pair after the other, and the flash from camera phones.

Staring out the window, I watched the sun play peek-a-boo with the clouds. If Charlie wasn’t okay, I didn’t know what I’d do.

Then he was there. Not in the flesh, but still, in image at the very least. I focused on the reflection at the window panel, and sure enough, more than one television screen showed his picture, his mug shot, to be more specific. Old and sterilized in black and white, I had seen it before, though I hardly saw it as the Charlie I knew. And then it was everywhere, like every pair of eyes was everywhere, watching me as I stood up. Their owners parted, making a path for me as I went from one TV to the next, my brain refusing to process what I was seeing. The anchors on the news were talking
about
Charlie, using words like ‘counterfeiting’ and ‘murder,’ phrases like ‘arms trafficking,’ and ‘ties to terrorism.’ And every now and then, there was my name and the term ‘suspected kidnapping.’

I think I must have asked for the volume to be raised because one of the TAs I recognized stared at me and stood on a stool to hit the volume button. I saw my picture on the screen; one of my family taken after Mom’s diagnosis, zoomed in on my profile. But then the anchorman came back on, he was yelling into his headset and the cameraman at the same time. Other news people were talking around him, though their own camera people struggled to focus.

“It’s difficult to know
exactly
what took place, Cindy. Right now, all we
can
confirm is that Charles Hays has, in fact, been captured, I’ll repeat that, Cindy, Charles Hays
has
been captured alive by authorities here in Newark, New Jersey—”

Cindy talked to the anchorman, the anchorman talked to Cindy, and somewhere in between someone tried to talk to me, except that I couldn’t hear them as I swam in that denial Charlie once teased me about. This was some kind of mistake, an inconceivable misunderstanding that I’d laugh about years from now, with Charlie when we were in bed, wrapped up in one another. If I closed my eyes and imaged it hard enough, I could make this all  untrue, I could make it unreal.

“—our viewers at home may remember Charles Hays as the primary suspect from last summer’s Battes kidnapping, where he is seen here just moments before the honor student’s disappearance.”

Everything started to come in and out, almost like that noise a computer makes when it overheats. Yet even as it was happening, I thought it was almost funny that I was self-aware of my reaction. I tried to think of the name, searched my mental database, but got distracted trying to think of whether or not Psych 101 was one of the textbooks Charlie had destroyed.

“Local police have taken custody and we have confirmation that they will be brings Hays here for questioning.”

Noises went off in my head, when the camera panned out to show off Northern State Prison, a facility that I recognized only because Adam had mentioned it once. The realization that they weren’t even bothering to book him in a county jail boggled me, making little painful bursts go off just behind my ears. I heard the words repeatedly; they were taking him away, locking him up and throwing away the key. My body didn’t know how to understand the concept, and compensated by alternating it with sounds.

Instead of hearing the news there were deafening explosions.

“…when approached, did not resist arrest.”

Walls crumbled.

“And I believe—yes, Cindy, it looks like they are bringing him in right now. I understand that last cruiser in line there—ah, yes, we can see the suspect from here—”

Bombs dropped.

With police officers on each side of him, hands cuffed behind his back and lights flashing from greedy cameras, there was no way to argue mistaken identity. Charlie’s profile couldn’t be mistaken. I recognized the lines of his neck tattoo, the scar above his eyebrow, and though the camera lights dulled them, his kaleidoscope eyes. Other than that, it was difficult to tell whether or not the cops were trying to keep the reporters at bay or if they were clearing space for them. My mind registered that words were shouted but little else. I only had eyes for Charlie.

“What’s going on down there, Chet?”

“Well, as you can see, Hays is completely unresponsive to the situation around him. It’s as though he’s indifferent to his own arrest. Frankly, Cindy, his behavior is downright chilling.”

The background noise in my own head became so intense I covered my ears. I couldn’t look away as they pushed him through the crowd, arms and legs shackled separately, while armed officers remained diligent behind him and at the prison gates.

“I believe apathetic behavior is typical of sociopaths, Chet.”

Then he was gone, barred behind a steel door and there was nothing left but replays of the scene and more speculation. In those few seconds, however, all I kept seeing was his face and hearing the popping in my head. His expression was as blank as the anchors had described. Once I had seen something similar in him, once when he had lied and tried to make me believe he didn’t love me. But this was entirely different, this person they walked through the prison walls only wore the features and body of my Charlie, everything else was different. As if his soul had never even been there at all. 

“
Truly
horrifying, Cindy.”

I don’t remember the shallow breathing or the dizziness. Moreover, I can’t recall exactly when I became deaf to the sounds of the room or how everything melted away. All I really remember is the screaming, the silent screaming that vibrated in my head and made me see colors. I sent a message to my brain to make the scream vocal, but it didn’t come.

I was trapped in my own post-apocalyptic world.

I was later told that my hyperventilating scared those around me to hear it. The librarian, who thought I was having an asthma attack, called emergency services. Then there was a nurse at the medical station asking me questions, wanting to know what I had taken, wanting to know what I was allergic to. How had I gotten there? What was my name? Did I suffer from any chronic conditions? The distances between point A and B were lost to me; instead the moments flickered with reminiscent things that didn’t make sense: someone putting a paper bag in my hand, a blood pressure cuff on my arm, a nurse looking at my wrists for a medical ID bracelet.

“I’ll call her roommate, she might know…”

Inside, I kept screaming. I was shouting these incoherent words that didn’t even make sense to me, but I couldn’t get them out, couldn’t set them free.

“We should call an ambulance,” someone said.

Then the screaming stopped and there was nothing.

Melinda came, said something about my neurotic nature, making the nurse smile.

“There’s at least one or two this time of the year.”

Knocks came from outside the exam room and maybe Melinda made a joke about campus rent-a-cops when she opened it…quiet whispers were exchanged for a long time.

The smiles went away after that.

Shock is a funny thing. For those first few hours with the phone calls and questions, I was outside of myself, letting everyone talk about me as though I wasn’t there. Normally, that would have annoyed me; the academic advisor I’d never met making arrangements for me to take my finals at home, not to mention the associate dean and head of security huddled in the corner talking about college publicity. Except, the shock wraps you up in a warm cocoon and keeps you at a pleasant distance from everyone and everything, so that while your body is there, the rest of you just sort of floats on.

“Addie, what do you want to do?”

I stared out at the hedges from the window. Could Charlie see shrubbery where he was? Did he even have a window?

“Addie?”

“Huh?”

“What do you want to do?” Melinda insistently tried to drag me back down to Earth.

“About what?”

“About what’s going on? There’s already a bunch of reporters on campus and it’s probably going to get worse.”

I turned back to the hedges.

“Your Dad wants to come and get you. Is that—”

“No.”

“No to your Dad?”

“No to leaving.”

Without realizing it entirely, I meant what I said. I suspected that why Charlie turned himself in had something to do with him taking my phones and laptop. If I could figure out why he did that, then maybe I would know what to do about it. And though I was supposed to go home in a two weeks anyway, I didn’t have the patience to tolerate Dad just then. Plus, what about the others? Though Elise and the guys had cleared out of the house, there was the slight possibility they might come back, or that they might try to get in touch with me before I left for New Jersey. I only had a few days, but they might have been enough to figure out what in the hell was going on.

Until then, I wouldn’t allow myself to think of Charlie caged up like an animal. He had just been with me less than a week ago and we would be together soon. I had to continue to believe that for the sake of my own sanity. There was simply nothing else to it.

I continued to go to class, weighed down by police escorts and the stares of classmates. If nothing else, however,
Othello
opened successfully, and Melinda was relieved that the role would act as her final for the majority of her classes. Admittedly, I struggled to even live through her happiness. Sounds and motions went past me, over me, through me, and I was oblivious to it all, trapped in the wake of the awful plague I had brought upon myself. I studied, ate only enough to prevent stomach pains, and continued to call the numbers I had. Feeling helpless, I even enlisted Cora’s help and asked her to call the prison, but they told her information about that ‘particular inmate’ was unavailable and hung up. Originally, I had just been glad she didn’t seem to tell anyone about my inquiry, but with each passing day, I became even more despaired at the prospect, feeling a new blackness inching along my insides. It started out as a speck, and I often imagined it like a parasite, a dark little thing, that may not have been entirely noticeable to anyone on the outside but was growing, growing, growing…

I imagined the little, black parasite as it morphed with my muscles, transcending with my movements until it was with everything I did and said, closing out my vocal cords until I forgot the sound of my own voice. The black parasite had whitewashed away all feeling of both subpar human enjoyment and disgust. By the time the black parasite had made its way into my bones, I was no longer a complete person.

Suspect Confesses Murder, Kidnapping

(US NIGHTLY)—California

This past Tuesday, police in Newark, New Jersey received an anonymous phone call about a possible fugitive sighting. Upon investigating the drinking establishing, Continental, police were confronted by Charles Hays, parolee offender, and main suspect in the murder of Spenser Hanson and the kidnapping of Adeline Battes.