Finding Claire Fletcher (33 page)

I remembered waking earlier when Connor was in the room. My family’s faces had floated above me, seeming disembodied, trying not to look too shocked at the sight of my injuries. Even in my drug-induced haze, I had momentarily wished that they would leave and come back later, when I looked less like a set of tire tracks and was alert enough to greet them. But perhaps it was better to be reunited with them while I was still in a semi-comatose state.

I was frightened of their faces, their arms, the tears they would shed, and the questions they would surely ask. I had always been afraid to return—afraid my family would see me the way I saw me. Dirty, used up, and weak. Like I was covered in a filth that could never be washed away. I felt branded by all the years of rape and abuse. And as long as I stayed with him, in the small, carefully controlled world he’d made for me, those memories were at rest, silent, and existed only to me.

I always believed that if I returned, my family would demand that I share those memories, and then every sordid thing that had been done to me would become a part of them as well. My ordeal would become like another family member, shared by everyone, ever present, a constant reminder of who I had become.

“Claire?” my brother’s voice startled me out of my reverie. I turned my head in his direction, the shift causing my mother to stir and sit up.

“Tom?” I croaked.

The three of them were inches from me then and as I struggled to sit up, my mother’s able hands guided my upper body forward. Tears streamed down Tom’s face, and his body shook with sobs. He leaned over the side of the bed and gathered me in an awkward hug.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” he whispered.

He made room for Brianna but her hug was stiff and awkward. “I can’t believe it’s you,” she said, stepping quickly away from me.

I felt her distance like a knife in my heart. I could see the questions in her mind, crowding out everything else. It wasn’t the time to ask questions, but Brianna had never been very patient. Still, she held them back and I had a feeling that things between us would never be easy again until I answered them.

“How do you feel, sweetheart?” my mother asked.

I started to answer her but was interrupted by a sharp knock at the door. We all turned toward it as it opened. I expected Connor or Stryker, but instead a man I hardly recognized stepped into the room.

“Rick,” my mother said.

He had aged considerably, his hair a salt and pepper mix where it had once been a lustrous brown. He was still handsome, but I estimated forty pounds lighter than when I’d last seen him a decade ago. His gray suit hung on him, making him look much smaller than I remembered.

He twitched like a walking epileptic, fidgeting, and trembling. His eyes were wide and undone as he stared at me, his body going utterly still. He swallowed two or three times and strode over to the bed, Brianna and Tom quickly making way for him. He leaned in and touched my face. His fingers moved along the contours of skin and bone, like a blind person searching for something.

“Daddy?” I said.

He tugged my good hand from my mother’s grip and pressed it to his cheek. He closed his eyes and took several long, deep breaths. Without opening his eyes, he said, “It’s really you.”

Tears burned my eyes. I watched him breathing in my existence as if I truly had returned from the dead, and I felt the last years I’d spent in the trailer—too afraid, too ashamed to come home. They felt heavy and wrong. Had I done this to my own father? Turned him into an old man withered away to a loose sack of bones?

A terrible wave of guilt, tempered with shame, a new kind of shame, engulfed me. Why hadn’t I trusted him or my mother—my family—to receive me once more with love and relief? I was fifteen when my abductor smashed my head in and stole me from them. I was old enough to realize that my parents loved me unconditionally—that all I’d seen and endured would mean nothing to them just so long as they could hold their child again.

My experience had overwhelmed me, it had become the sum of my parts, who I was, and I hadn’t deemed myself fit to return to those who loved me.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I squeaked.

His eyes snapped open. He looked at me, shock and alarm dancing in his eyes. “No, no, no,” he said. “No, honey. I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m so sorry, Claire.”

With that, he broke, dissolving into a weeping mass, his body draped over the side of the bed, head in my lap. Hesitantly, I placed my right palm on his scalp.

He shook. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” he said.

I breathed.

“Me too, Daddy. I’m sorry I doubted me too,” I said.

At five a.m. Stryker called the hospital to give Connor an update and check on Claire’s status. Connor took the call at the nurses’ station down the hall from Claire’s room. As he listened to Stryker, he watched the uniformed guard continue his even pace back and forth in front of the door. The man was like a metronome. He had only been interrupted once by the arrival of Rick Fletcher. Farrell was dozing in a chair next to Claire’s door, watching the officer walk to and fro.

“Nothing,” Stryker said into the phone. “We been lookin’ all night. Even got an FBI helicopter up here with fucking floodlights and everything. We got Feds, Staties, locals, and division people combing half a county and we got nothing. It’s like this guy just vanished into a puff of smoke or something.”

“Any sign of the girl he had with him?” Connor asked.

“Nope. Everything shut down about an hour ago. We’re chasing our tails out here in the goddamn dark. We’re gonna recharge and start again at first light. We got technicians dusting for prints at the car and the house. I’d like to get an ID on this guy but it may take a few days.” Stryker sounded as bone-tired and weary as Connor felt.

A nurse rounded the other side of the station counter and set a Styrofoam cup in front of Connor. The smell of coffee wafted up to his nostrils. He gave her what he hoped was a smile, and she winked back at him. She pointed down the hall toward Claire’s room where one of her colleagues stood handing a second cup of coffee to the uniformed officer. The nurse peeked into Claire’s room, glanced at Mitch and set a carrier in the chair next to him with two additional cups.

Connor almost forgot he was on the phone. Stryker’s voice faded out and then back in loudly. “Parks? You there?”

Connor blinked and picked up his coffee. “Yeah, yeah. I’m here.”

“I said what’s the fucking deal with this guy?”

Connor’s brow puckered as he sipped the burning liquid. He thought about the day he’d stood outside Strakowski’s house and pieced together the abduction and how the guy had managed to pull it off in broad daylight during a busy morning with the police crawling all over the place five minutes later.

Connor sighed. “I’m sure he planned for this. He probably had a couple of escape routes picked out in case something like this happened,” he told Stryker. “Keep me posted.”

“Will do. I’ll be stopping by within the hour to check on you guys.”

Connor watched as Jen emerged sleepy-eyed from Claire’s room. She shook Mitch awake and spoke softly to him. A moment later, Brianna and Tom followed.

“Stryke,” Connor said.

There was a long silence on the other line, then he answered, “Yeah, I’m here.”

“We have to find this guy. We just—we just have to.”

Between the drugs they gave me to soothe my anxiety and the ones to ease the pain of my injuries, I slept through most of the next three days. My sleep was broken up by faces and voices—nurses, doctors, my parents, Tom, Brianna, Mitch, and Connor, who stayed faithfully outside my room most of the time. I wanted to ask him questions, but I couldn’t get my mind or my mouth to work. He said nothing, occasionally sitting in the chair beside my bed with his leg elevated and a big strip of gauze wrapped round his head.

When my mother was there, she lifted the covers and snuggled beneath them, cradling me in her arms the way she had when I was a small child. I shrunk in her arms, filling my lungs with the scent of her, which was still familiar to me after so many years. With each breath I grew smaller and smaller until I was compact against her, an infant again, secure in the comfort of her body. A body I’d longed to curl into for ten long years. A body of love, denied to me by a monster whose sick appetite superseded all else.

Her unconditional acceptance was as much a salve to me as the drugs the doctors gave me to heal my wounds. She was a sort of buffer against the rest of my family, all of whom sat by my bedside for hours each day but were still tentative with me, unsure how to approach me or talk to me. I sensed in her that nothing I could tell her about the ten years I’d been gone would matter. I need not tell her at all if I chose, and she would continue to hold me each day as long as I needed it. This fact consumed me and birthed a great guilt in my core. So many years I had been afraid, ashamed to return home. Even as I drove back to my life with Alison clinging to my side, I dreaded facing my family again, yet here was my mother, deep lines etched around her eyes from my absence, welcoming me without caution or reserve.

She did not ask me questions, for which I was grateful. Sometimes she talked, filling in the last ten years in a soothing voice that lulled me back into the dark oblivion of sleep brought on by painkillers. She talked about things that had happened after my resignation to my role as Lynn, after Tiffany arrived and spent her days locked in front of the television, after I moved into the trailer and took a job at the animal hospital—when I could watch the news or read the paper.

I knew about the Twin Towers, 9-11, the tsunami, the war in Iraq, and the lives of United States soldiers still being lost there years later. The news—the world—was beset with unmitigated tragedies that had made my own bleak existence and the violations I endured seem trivial, silly even, in comparison.

On 9-11, I had been in the back of the animal hospital, surrounded by whining animals when one of my coworkers rushed in and flipped on the small TV we kept there. We stood for hours, frozen in place, watching the footage. The woman next to me cried, sometimes turning her face into my bony shoulder as I watched images that looked like the interior of my soul.

My mother talked about things that had happened during the first years of my captivity—time spent mostly in darkness and a terror that blotted everything else out. The things that had happened outside of my infinitesimal world. Things which seemed far worse as I listened to my mother recap those years as the rest of society had known them—the Oklahoma City bombing, the shootings at Columbine, the genocide in Rwanda, and the gruesome murders of Matthew Wayne Shephard and James Byrd, Jr. one because of his sexual preference and the other because of his race.

I had also missed the White House sex scandal, the OJ Simpson trial, and the election of a new president. My mother promised to get me history books so I could read about those years for myself. I drifted in and out of sleep as she spoke, feeling suddenly grateful to be alive and lying in a hospital bed with my mother by my side.

On the fourth day, I woke alone for the first time. My door was propped open, and I heard men’s voices talking. I recognized Mitch and Connor’s voices. The other voices sounded like detectives Boggs and Stryker.

“Man, you look terrible. You give new meaning to the expression hammered shit.”

“Thanks, Stryke. I appreciate that. So anything on this guy?”

“No, but we’ve got the whole damn state looking for him.”

“The press is all over this. Jenny and Rick want to take her home, but they’re camped right outside the house.”

“We’re going to need a statement from her soon. You’ll have to bring her down to the division.”

“Shit. All right. Well, they’re discharging her tomorrow. I’ll talk to Jenny and Rick. See what they want to do. There was talk of them staying at Mitch’s house for a while to avoid all the press.”

I opened my eyes and shifted in the bed. I felt like a newborn in this sudden world of freedom, of my return to the role of Claire Fletcher. The weight of all the things to come made me heavy and exhausted. I still had many things to tell Connor, but it looked as though he wouldn’t be the only person.

The thought of my captor on the loose chilled me. Connor had reminded me that he’d been wounded and that his escape attempt may have been thwarted by an untimely death, but I knew better. The man who’d stolen my life was invincible. In my mind he loomed large, his voice whispering in my ear, calling me by the name he’d given me, reminding me that he could go anywhere, do anything, and walk away unscathed—free.

I knew I would have to tell them about the bodies beneath my old bedroom window, even if it meant that I might go to prison for not coming forward sooner. Part of me needed to convince them of the depravity of my captor, the lengths that he would go to perfect his manmade universe. As long as he was free, I did not feel safe.

My left eye had opened again. I blinked painfully, losing track of the voices beyond my door, tuning in only to the timber of Connor’s words as they came, hearing the sound but not the meaning. I found the remote control to the television built into the bedrail and flipped it on, keeping the volume low.