Finding Claire Fletcher (37 page)

“Into the house?”

“No. Into my room. I couldn’t. She said she kept it exactly the way I left it. Exactly. That the pajamas I’d changed out of that day were still on my floor.”

“I know,” Connor said softly.

“That room in your house—your wife’s room—why did you keep it that way after she left?”

The corner of Connor’s mouth dimpled. “I cleaned it out after I met you,” he said. “Turned it into the Claire Fletcher taskforce headquarters. Ask Mitch, he’ll tell you.”

From somewhere, I found the strength to smile. Connor looked away momentarily, a shy lilt to his eyes. His face and neck turned light pink.

“But why did you keep it that way—before?” I asked.

His eyebrows drew together. The blue of his eyes seemed startling even though I had looked into them many times in the last month. He looked as though it pained him to say what came next. “Because I was hoping she would come back. I hadn’t—I hadn’t accepted it yet—the fact that she was gone. I couldn’t even go in there. Before you came over that night I hadn’t been in there in almost two years.”

It was a strange admission from a man who’d killed someone. A small fragment of the tension that bound me whenever I was near men melted away.

“Why?” I asked.

Connor looked up from the spot on the table his eyes had fixed on. “Why what?”

I shrugged, not even sure which part of his reasoning I wanted—needed explained. “Just why?”

Connor laughed. Then he said, “I loved my wife very much. I didn’t want her to leave.”

“Even though she met someone else?”

He sighed and gave me a helpless look. “Yeah.”

He waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, he said, “It was a little different for me. You know, your mother knew you were alive all those years. I think keeping your room like that was her way of saying she wouldn’t give up.”

“But what if I never came back? What if he had just killed me?”

Slowly, Connor shook his head. “I don’t know, Claire. People do what they have to do in order to survive.”

That I knew.

“You don’t have to go back into that room,” Connor added.

Hesitantly, he reached across the table and placed a hand over mine. I stared at it, feeling the warmth of his skin against mine. I had a sudden flash of the night we’d spent together—the feel of his hands on my bare skin, the smell of him, his lips trailing along my neck, the safety of his long, warm body against mine, shielding me. I had felt safe.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How is your hand?”

I shrugged. “Okay. I finished physical therapy. I just have to do home exercises. It feels fine.”

“Do you want to talk about today?”

I shook my head and smiled weakly. “No. Yes. My family—my sister—she wanted to know what happened. She wanted to know why I didn’t come home before.”

Connor frowned.

“Don’t you want to know?”

Connor’s eyes darkened. “I was there when you gave your statement. I know what happened to you, Claire,” he murmured.

“But don’t you wonder why I didn’t come back sooner?”

“No.”

“Really?”

He gave my hand a squeeze before releasing it. The waitress brought our food, but we didn’t eat right away.

“When I was fourteen, a friend of mine—Dell—was abducted,” Connor said. “He was my age. A neighbor kind of went nuts and took off with him. I guess the guy had been molesting Dell for a while but decided now and then wasn’t enough. So he kidnapped Dell, and they were gone for about a month. The FBI found them at a motel in Nevada.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“Yeah. Well, when Dell came home he had it pretty rough. His dad couldn’t look at him. Said he couldn’t understand why he didn’t fight the guy off. He came back to school, but the other kids made fun of him. He went from being Dell to being the kid who took it up the ass. Kids made slurping sounds when he passed in the hallways. It was really brutal.”

“How awful.”

Connor grimaced. “He shot himself. He was home for about six months before he couldn’t take it anymore. He got his dad’s gun and shot himself. So no, I don’t wonder why you didn’t come home.”

“Is that why you became a cop?”

Connor chuckled. “No. I just didn’t want to go into plumbing with my dad and being a police officer seemed like a lot of fun.”

“Is it?”

Connor shook his head and sighed. “Some days are better than others.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes. I was surprised to find that I was actually hungry. Looking across the table at Connor, I realized that a great deal of the anxiety that made me call him was gone.

He glanced up from his cheeseburger and said, “What else is on your mind?”

“
I still can’t sleep at night,” I confessed. “It’s not over.”

“We’re going to catch him, Claire.”

“He’s going to do it to someone else. He’s going to take another girl. He won’t stop.”

“Claire.” Connor’s eyes were steeped in concern. “No matter what it takes, we are going to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone again. We will find him.”

I swallowed over a thickening glob of saliva in my throat. I studied him for a long moment. I wanted to hold his hand again, but I couldn’t bring myself to initiate it.

The night we’d met, physical intimacy was easy for me because I had trained myself to think of it merely as a means to an end. I had learned to use my body. It was something apart from me. A tool. I had slept with those other men to get them to do what I wanted.

Now everything about my life had changed. The armor of my anonymity and narrow existence had been stripped away, leaving a woman who was made up of wreckage more than anything else. Often, even in the safety of my family’s company, I felt more exposed, more vulnerable than I had when my abductor had tied me naked to the bed in that first blackened room.

Love was an exiled emotion, an amputee from my inner body—the wound staunched and cauterized with cruelty and privation. During the ten years I spent under the watchful, cloying eyes of my abductor, never once had I fantasized about love. Not with any man.

But now I was free. There was Connor and the way he looked at me—not just with desire but with a sort of shy adoration that was completely at odds with his masculine demeanor. My mind and body writhed away from the possibility of love or romance. I had disbelieved it for so long, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. What would I do with it?

“Claire?” Connor said, interrupting my thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“I said we will find the man who took you.”

I nodded.

A long moment passed in silence. Then Connor said, “Did you want to go right back to Mitch’s after this?”

“It doesn’t matter. Why?”

He smiled. “I have an idea.”

It was almost ten o’clock by the time Connor dropped me off. I bounded into Mitch’s living room where my parents sat, trying unsuccessfully to hide their anxiety. My father flipped through the channels on the television while my mother pretended to read a magazine. I had told my parents I was going somewhere with Connor and they knew I would be safe with him but still, they were afraid to let me out of their sight. I saw the relief flood both their frames when I walked in. I had come back. I had come home.

“Hi sweetie,” my mother said, trying to sound calm, even.

My father muted the television. He studied me for a moment. “You look happy,” he said. He said the word happy like it was some rare disease that I was unlikely to contract. I suppose in my case it was.

I grinned. “Connor took me shooting.”

My father frowned. “Shooting? You mean with a gun?”

“Yeah.”

His frown deepened. “That’s…,” he searched for the right word, finally settling on, “odd.”

My mother made a sound that was half laughter, half a scoff. “Why is that odd?”

My father shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems odd. I don’t really think of shooting as a primarily feminine hobby.”

My mother raised an eyebrow at him. “Well I think if more women did it, more women would enjoy it.” She turned to me. “If you enjoyed it, maybe we could go together next time. I have a nice little Ruger .380 you might like.”

My father stared at my mother as if she had just landed on the couch in a spaceship. “Jenny,” my father began.

Her eyebrow arch grew even more pronounced. “After you left, a lot of things changed,” she said pointedly.

“I did enjoy it,” I said. “I mean it was scary and intimidating at first and I only got on the target a couple of times but it was great.”

My mother beamed. My father looked back at me openmouthed, a dumbfounded expression on his face.

“It’s been so long since I tried anything new,” I gushed. “You know, just for the sake of trying something new. Just because I could. It was exhilarating.”

When my father glanced at my feet, I realized I was rocking back and forth on my heels. When he looked back at my face, his eyes were wet.

“Dad? Are you okay?”

My mother smiled. “He’s crying, dear, because you sound like your old self.”

My body stilled. I looked from one parent to the other. “Really?”

Both my parents nodded.

I smiled. “I guess that’s good.”

“Yes,” my mother agreed. “Yes, it is.”

Brianna waited in the room I’d been sleeping in, curled up on the bed, reading a book. The sight of her made my stomach fall. The high I’d enjoyed a moment earlier dissipated completely. She jumped up when she saw me.

“Claire,” she said.

I didn’t look at her. “Can we do this another time?”

“I’m not here to…I don’t want to…,” she stammered, tossing her book onto the bed and putting her hands on her hips. “I’m sorry.”

Hesitantly, I met her eyes. She wore reading glasses, which she removed. Her usual hard exterior softened. She looked like the sister I had known ten years ago. I ached for the time we had lost. I saw now the way her bitterness had become like the hard outer shell of a tortoise. She used it to keep the world out—all of it.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated.

I sighed and sat at the foot of the bed. “Me too,” I muttered.

Brianna rounded the bed and stood before me. “I shouldn’t have come at you like that. I had so many questions. I was trying to understand. Mom said to think of the worst thing that had ever happened to me and to try to imagine how I’d feel if I had to discuss it with everyone and their brother ad nauseam.” She sighed and sat down next to me. A long moment passed. Brianna continued, “I’ve never been raped. Never been beaten. I’ve never even had a guy come on too strong. The only thing that came to mind was that a guy I was living with cheated on me once. The more I thought about it—about how humiliating it was—I realized I
never
wanted to talk about it or answer questions about it. I just wanted to forget.”

“Bree, you don’t have to explain.”

“I know it’s not even remotely comparable to what happened to you. I’m just trying to make a point. I am
trying
to understand what it must be like to be in your shoes. But in all honesty the worst thing that ever happened to me was you being abducted.”

I looked at her. My eyes stung with unshed tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, my throat thick.

“Were you scared?” she asked, her voice low and tentative.

I sniffed. “All the time,” I admitted, my voice cracking.

“I know that what happened to you was not your fault,” Brianna said, taking my hand. “I’m angry and bitter, but I know that what he did to you was not your fault. I wish…I…,” she struggled, looking away and then back at me, shoring herself up for what she would say next. All the years of anger had made it difficult for her to be vulnerable. “I wish I could somehow take on some of your pain, relieve you of some of it. I don’t care about what happened to you. I care that you are back with us. You’re my baby sister. I love you.”

I nodded, dropping my chin to my chest, squeezing Brianna’s hand. I couldn’t hold the tears back. They streamed silently from my tired eyes, a mixture of raw emotions that could not be tamed. Relief, guilt, shame, and happiness.

“One day I will tell you,” I said. I said this because I had always told Brianna everything. I also knew that she was trying to smooth things over between us, but one day she would want to know. One day I might need to tell her.

“Claire, I don’t need…”

“It’s okay,” I said. “One day I will tell you. But not today.”

“Okay.” She hugged me hard, and I inhaled her scent. She released me and said, “Hey, wanna make brownies and watch The Cutting Edge?”

I laughed. It had been our ritual before I was taken. Whenever one of us had needed cheering up, we would make brownies and eat all of them while we watched The Cutting Edge. It was a silly romantic comedy, but it always made us feel better. I hadn’t thought about it in almost a decade.