Coming soon from Kensington Publishing Corp.
CHAPTER 1
SHE HAD THAT SOUTHWESTERN
charm people adore: a calm disposition, obvious Texas twang in her accent, a generally carefree, relaxed outlook on life, and Christian manner. Since 2002, sixty-eight-year-old Rueon had been married to eighty-three-year-old Gethry Walker, a man who was pretty much set in his ways. Gethry was a gentle spiritâone of those rare men that listened more than he talked, an old-school, churchgoing Texan who wore suspenders, a dress shirt and slacks, subtle, elegant tie, almost every day. When Gethry did have something to say, in fact, he spoke it at the altar behind a lectern during services at the Greater Love Temple Church in Tyler, Texas. Both Gethry and Rueon were, first and foremost, God-fearing people; they believed in Jesus Christ, redemption of the cross, penances paid for wrongs committed, justice, andâbeyond perhaps most anything elseâfacing demons and coming to terms with who you are as a human being under the guidance, influence, and faith of God.
When Saturday, June 19, 2010, came to pass, and Gethry or Rueon had not heard from Gethry's daughter, thirty-eight-year-old Cherry Walker, they felt something was wrong. It was that paternal instinct kicking in.
Where is Cherry?
Still, after thinking about Cherry in a more positive light, they considered that perhaps she had simply decided not to call. Cherry was entitled to her own life. Plus, she could be absentminded like that once in a while. Cherry had suffered from “learning disabilities” all her life and had just gone off to live on her own. She was almost thirty-nine, her birthday four months away. Clinically classified as MR, “mentally retarded,” by her doctors, with all the progress she'd made recently, what was the big deal with a missed call home once in a while?
That Sunday morning (which also happened to be Father's Day), as Gethry and Rueon, Cherry's stepmother, got ready for church, Rueon started to wonder once again why Cherry had not called. She would always call before church to check in or ask what time the van was coming to pick her up. But as the morning wore on, there had still not been any word from Cherry. Almost two full days now and not a peep.
Totally out of character for Cherry.
Rueon fixed her hair and figured the church van, which Cherry's brother drove, had picked her up for services and they'd meet Cherry at Temple Love. She told Gethry not to fret. It would all be okay. They'd go to church and run into Cherry there. No worries. Rueon could kindly scold Cherry and tell her she had forgotten to call not only the day before, but that morning, and she was well aware that calling Rueon and Gethry once a day, if not every other day, was what they expected from her. They could talk about it, remind Cherry she needed to take responsibility, be done with it, and enjoy Sunday service praising Jesus.
Gethry and Rueon looked for Cherry as they walked into Temple Love, but they did not see her. Cherry had her favorite seat down in the front row of pews, her name on it. But when Rueon reached the front of the building by the altar, she looked around and Cherry was nowhere to be found.
Rueon sought out Cherry's brother. “Where's your sister?” He had driven the van.
“I thought she was with y'all,” he said.
“No, we thought she was coming with you.”
Throughout that Sunday service, as anxiety turned more into a genuine concern for Cherry's well-being, Rueon started to call Cherry at her apartment and on Cherry's cell phone.
“We got no response,” Rueon said later.
If there was one thing about Cherry that Rueon and Gethry, and anybody close to Cherry knew, the girl did not go anywhere without two things: her money purse and cell phone. These two items were part of her, attached.
For Rueon and Gethry, it was easy to write off any fears or bad feelings by telling themselves,
Cherry probably just went to church with someone else.
“She sometimes did,” Rueon explained later.
When Rueon and Gethry got home, Rueon called Cherry several more times, but there was no response.
“You know,” she told Gethry, “I'm going to git her.”
It was so unusualâthe not knowing. Cherry had struggled, but worked hard, and she'd managed to overcome many difficulties and disabilities to carve out a life for herself with a small studio apartment across town in Tyler, not far from Rueon and Gethry's home. She'd had help from an aide, who came to see her every day, but Cherry was living on her own, doing things for herself. There was no explanation they could think of that would put Cherry in a position of not calling them for this long a period of time. It just did not make sense.
“Call her again,” Gethry suggested.
There was no answer.
“Let's go eat, and if we don't hear from her by the time we're done, then we can stop by Cherry's apartment and check in on her,” Rueon suggested.
Gethry nodded in agreement.
They ate lunch and still had not heard a word from Cherry. Leaving the restaurant, they stopped back at home to grab the spare key to Cherry's apartment and headed out to West Houston Street in Tyler, the Citadel apartment complex.
Rueon walked in first. She couldn't believe it. The place was in “disarray,” which was entirely unlike Cherry, who was a neat freak and was even fixated on cleaning and cleaning supplies in an obsessive-compulsive manner. She'd never, under her own will, leave her apartment with “everything” all over the place. “Her ironing board was up. . . . Her bed was unmade . . . and things were just kind of scatter-y,” one source later recalled.
“This is not Cherry, ain't it, Gethry?”
“Sure ain't,” he said.
In addition, Cherry would have never walked out of her apartment without taking a bath, changing her clothesâall of which needed to be ironed before she'd wear themâor tidying up. Just wasn't in her DNA. Everything in her apartment had its place, and there was a place for everything. That was how Cherry lived her life.
Structure.
Focus.
Detail.
“This was the first thing I noticed,” Rueon later explained. “And you just kind of get a feeling, you know.”
A sense. That sinking pit in your gut. A parent's intuition that something, as horrible as it felt to admit, was off.
Rueon looked in Cherry's closet. In her kitchen. All over. She searched for Cherry's cell phone or that specific coin purse Cherry always carried with her. Not finding either gave Rueon a bit of comfort, actually, because there was no chance Cherry would ever leave the house without either of them. With both being gone, there was a bit of relief in knowing that she wasn't whisked away in some sort of home invasion or kidnapping.
Still, walking around the apartment, Rueon couldn't shake the feeling:
Something's wrong.
Indeed, comb on the vanity counter, mouthwash there by the faucet, spray bottle of tile cleanser on the floor by the shower, where Cherry always left it, the smiling kitty cats on the ironing board apron underneath a pair of socks waiting to be ironed, two cases of Pure Life and Ozark water on the floor by the waste basket can, a roll of paper towels on the kitchen table, Cherry's favorite posterâfrom the horror film
Shutter
âtaped to her wall, her velvety red chair against the wall, stacks and stacks of DVDs, mainly horror or soft-core porn (
Beyond the Busty Stags
and
Night of Perverted Pleasures
and
Experiment in Torture,
among them) around the television, the TV remote sitting on the bed.
Everything in Cherry's life was there waiting for her, but she was missing.
Rueon didn't see it then, but on a calendar on Cherry's wall, two dates in particular stuck out: June 18, the previous Friday (which had passed), and the following Wednesday, June 23 (which had not come to pass). Somebody had written
Babysit
in pen on both days.
Cherry was babysitting? Who would hire her? Who was she babysitting?
This was odd.
One other possibility existed here, Rueon thought as she walked around the apartment on that Sunday afternoon. One of Cherry's closest friends or even her caseworker, Paula Wheeler, a woman who saw Cherry almost every day, had come by and picked her up to go out to eat or shopping. Rueon had been getting on Cherry lately, in a motherly way, “Girl, you know . . . you're [thirty-eight years old] now, and, you know, you need to grow up.”
They had been trying to show Cherry what Rueon called “hard love,” based partially on the idea that Rueon and Gethry could not be with Cherry foreverâshe'd need to spread her wings and go off on her own. Was this Cherry doing that very thing: going it alone? Had she taken Rueon's advice? You look at Cherry's collection of DVDs and it was clear she was growing up rather quicklyâthat is, if she had led a sheltered life Rueon and Gethry had supposed she had while under their roof back at home.
There was another side of Cherry that Rueon and Gethry worried about, however. Cherry might have been thirty-eight; she might have watched soft porn and gruesome horror films, such as
Saw, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
and her absolute favorite,
Paranormal Activity,
but she also played with children's toys and could not read or write much more than her name and a few numbers and letters. She was very much a child in an adult's body.
Rueon and Gethry decided to go home and wait (and hope) for Cherry to call. It was early afternoon, Sunday, June 20, 2010. Why grow sick with worry now, they decided. After all, wasn't the entire point of Cherry renting her own apartment and moving out of the house was so she could become a responsible, independent woman?