Seed (22 page)

“Jack.”

“…Jack, can I level with you?”

Jack nodded again, and Marvin glanced over his shoulder before proceeding.

“When we showed up, it appeared that from what your wife told us, she was convinced that Charlotte was the one who had abducted Abigail. Do you…” He shook his head, trying to make sense of it. “…do you have any idea why she would have come to that conclusion?”

Jack leaned back in his chair and sucked a breath in through his nose. For a flash of a second he considered tearing the seam on his dark secret, considered telling Marvin and his band of merry men that Charlie wasn’t Charlie anymore, just like he hadn’t been Jack on that fateful summer night in the nowhere town of Rosewood. He pictured Marvin’s face while calling out its names: Devil, Satan, Lucifer, demon. He imagined the officer’s expression twisting in silent disgust before his cheeks turned red like a drunk’s. That’s when Marvin would throw his head back and exhale a boom of laughter, dismissing the entire thing as a hoax.

“Officer Marvin,” Jack said, “Charlotte is six years old.”

Marvin nodded, and Jack sat there for a moment, staring at the cop across from him.

“She’s six years old,” he repeated himself. “She can’t even tie her own shoes.”

“I understand,” Marvin assured him. “But you also understand that, as it was said, it’s my job to question all possibilities.” When Jack didn’t respond, Marvin rose from his seat and tucked the tiny photo of the girls into his front shirt pocket. “Obviously, we’ll keep in touch. Would you like an officer to stay at the house with you while the situation pans out?”

“We’ll be fine,” Jack told him.

Marvin scissored a business card between his fingers, holding it out to Jack. “If you think of anything or if you find a larger photo… please call me.”

Jack took the card and offered the policeman a tight-lipped smile.

After the troopers had filtered out of the house, he was left listening to Aimee’s whimpering. It took all his strength to stay in the kitchen instead of storming into the living room, ending her then and there.

There was no sound save for the furious padding of his feet and his breath, which came in waves. Jack fled that trailer in the dead of night, and while he couldn’t remember how he had got out without being chased by his father, he knew he had to run as fast as he could. His lungs burned as he sprinted down route 17. Eventually he stopped, his hands pressed to his trembling knees, his head hanging limp between his shoulders. It was then, gasping for air, that he realized he wasn’t wearing any shoes.

His feet were bleeding. From what he could see in the pale Georgia moonlight, he’d somehow managed to get some of that blood on his hands. But that didn’t matter. After catching his breath, Jack took on a brisk pace toward Rosewood, where he’d jog out to the highway and hitch a ride out of Dodge. Stephen and Gilda would never see him again.

He bypassed Rosewood as much as he could, not wanting anyone to spot ‘the Winter boy’ stomping his way out of town. When he hit the highway he thrust his skinny arm out into the road and jutted his thumb into the sky. Childhood optimism assured him that someone would stop. Someone had to. Only a heartless bastard would pass up a scrawny barefooted kid. Violent psychopaths didn’t even enter Jack’s mind. In his head, he knew some nice couple would pull over, toss him in the back seat, and get him a fancy dinner at the Huddle House or Waffle King. They’d tuck him into a hotel bed and kiss him on the forehead and swear they’d protect him forever. Jack was running away, but it wasn’t because he didn’t want parents. He just didn’t want
his
parents. Anyone who yanked him off the highway would be better than Stephen and Gilda. He was never going back to that run-down trailer on the outskirts of town.

“They’ll miss me,” he muttered as he marched ahead. His arm was growing tired but he kept it stuck out to the side even when there weren’t any cars coming, sure that as soon as he let it fall some phantom sedan would scream out of an invisible vortex and pass him by.

“They’ll be sorry when they find out,” he said. “They’ll see that I’m gone and they’ll be so sorry they won’t even know what to think. They’ll cry until they’re dead.”

A pair of headlights appeared in the distance. It was an old pickup, its rusted red hood rattling on the latch that held it down, threatening to release its grip and toss that metal sheet into the windshield like a drunk girl flashing her tits at Mardi Gras. Those headlights were cockeyed. The left one pointed too far to the left like it was searching for roadkill, while the right pointed down a bit too sharply. When the truck’s cross-eyed headlights caught Jack’s silhouette, it came to a stop dead center in the road.

Jack stood on the shoulder while the truck rumbled like a tyrannosaur. He kept his arm out and his thumb pointed up even after locking eyes with the giant inside the cab. The guy’s teeth gleamed in the darkness. He leaned across the bench seat and pushed the passenger side door open. The door hinges creaked.

“Hey there, chief, need a lift?”

Jack climbed into the truck without a word. The driver fell silent as well. Jack didn’t care where he ended up: he just wanted that big driver to drive. And the jolly green giant wearing the John Deere cap didn’t ask where the kid wanted to go, he just eyed the fourteen-year-old boy sitting next to him and grinned.

He grinned because Jack Winter had been in the exact spot he was meant to be in that night. He grinned because, judging by the dazed expression on the kid’s face, Jack Winter didn’t realize he was covered from head to toe in blood.

It seemed like the sun would never set. The hours ticked by with the slowness of a hundred years. Jack and Aimee kept to their separate rooms—her in the living room, Jack in the kitchen—making time inch by that much more slowly. There was a sickening tinge of finality to their division, as though they’d reached the end of something.

Jack had already pushed through four cups of coffee when he decided to try for a peace offering. Part of him wanted nothing to do with her, but the other half—the half that had loved her for so long—pushed for reconciliation. He fished a mug from the cupboard and poured Aimee a cup of coffee.

When he stepped into the living room, Aimee was in the same spot he’d left her hours before: her feet were pulled up onto the cushions of the couch, her shoulders wrapped in a faux cashmere blanket Patricia had given her as a last minute birthday present—the kind of gift you pick up on your way to a party: an afterthought. Aimee’s eyes were still swollen. Her skin was sallow. She was coming down with a bad case of heartbreak. Jack stepped across the room and offered her the mug. She didn’t take it, and he placed it on the coffee table before silently taking a seat next to her.

It was hard to know what to say. They couldn’t talk about normal things because nothing was normal anymore, and they certainly couldn’t talk about the girls because the girls were gone. Jack pressed his lips together in a tight line and finally found a suitable inquiry.

“Did you call your mother?”

Aimee rolled her eyes and chose not to answer. Apparently it was a question that didn’t deserve a reply.

Jack stared at his hands for a long time, trying to decipher the puzzle that had suddenly been set out before them. Despite the gut-wrenching anxiety of having both their children missing, he couldn’t seem to fit one of the pieces in its rightful slot. It seemed that they should have been closer than ever while dealing with something so incomprehensible. When they had met, banding together had been one of their talents. They were on the same side of every argument, shared the same opinion on nearly every subject. But now, just when they needed each other most, Aimee wasn’t there at all. She was vacant. Missing, just like Abby and Charlotte. And Jack was half-gone, his soul being eaten away by the darkness of his past.

“Did I do something?” Jack asked. “Is there a reason that you’re shutting me out?”

Aimee kept her silence, deeming that question just as undeserving as the last. Jack looked back to his hands. He tried to sit there, to give her time, but after a handful of seconds that familiar irritation started to itch beneath his skin. He got up.

“Whatever,” he said under his breath and pointed himself down the hallway. Aimee spoke up just as he rounded the corner.

“You’re a liar,” she said flatly. “You brought something into this house. I found the photos.”

He knew she had. He’d seen them torn on the comforter. The sight of them had nearly set him off, nearly sent him into the kitchen for Aimee’s butcher block.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s that shadow that shows up in all of them? Do I deserve to know yet? Or will I only deserve it when the police call and ask us to meet them at the morgue?”

Jack retraced his steps into the living room. The man that loved her wanted to tell her. Telling her would lift the weight of his terrible secret; it would free him from the burden of looking over his shoulder every day, half-expecting to see a razor-toothed monster standing behind him with a snarling grin. But the look on her face stopped him. Her expression was bitter, twisted in muted betrayal. He could see the simmer of loathing behind her eyes. Those big doe eyes that used to smile at him were now filled with nothing short of confined disdain. He had expected a lot—losing Charlie, facing his darkest fears… but seeing Aimee fall out of love with him right before his eyes was something he hadn’t counted on.

“So you aren’t going to tell me?” she asked.

Jack shook his head.

“No,” he said, then turned down the hall.

Aimee followed him into the bedroom, caught him pulling on his jacket. She blocked the door by pressing her hip against the jamb.

“You’re leaving?” she asked, her tone growing more defiant. Jack didn’t look at her. He slid his arms through his sleeves and shoved a few supplies into his backpack—a flashlight, some extra batteries, a bottle of water he’d grabbed out of the fridge.

“I’m going to look for the girls.”

Aimee didn’t move when he approached her. She continued to block his way, and he had to physically move her aside to get into the hall. Aimee watched him stalk down the hallway; and suddenly panic set in. It was her turn to get that sense of finality, to realize that this moment would forever change her life.

“Jack.” His name warbled in her throat. When he turned, she hesitated. “Maybe you should just stay here,” she said.

“You know I can’t,” he told her.

Aimee looked down at her feet. The familiar burn of saline flared in her sinus cavity. When she looked up again she was crying, looking so much like she had when they’d first fallen in love that it made Jack weak in the knees.

“But I don’t want to be alone,” she confessed.

Jack shifted his backpack from his shoulder to the floor and met Aimee at the threshold of their bedroom. His hands drifted to her shoulders as a sob rumbled deep in her throat.

“You won’t be alone for long,” he assured her with a whisper. She eventually nodded, roughly wiping the tears from her face. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, then leaned in and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

She tried to whisper “
I love you
,” but it caught in her throat. The screen door slammed behind him, and she slid down the wall to the floor, sobbing like a girl who’d just lost everything.

Chapter Fifteen

J
ack stared ahead into the trees. His first instinct was to get in the car, but just before he reached the driver’s side door he paused, those keys hanging from his fingers, swaying like a noose. Something pulled at him, like a magnet tugging a metal screw across a table. It was coming from across the road.

Standing next to Arnold’s car, he could almost see Charlie and Abigail running into the trees, hand in hand like two best friends. That slow pull assured him that he was right about the two dashing across the street, but it wasn’t to go on a lighthearted expedition. Aimee was right: Charlie did take Abigail. But she hadn’t taken Abby because she wanted her: she had taken Abby because she wanted Jack to follow them.

The keys slipped from his fingers. It was oddly poetic: instead of taking his father-in-law’s showboat into the abyss, he’d simply step into the darkness and let it engulf him the way it had always wanted. Like stepping into the gaping mouth of a whale, he’d either be swallowed whole or he’d find a wooden boat.

But Jack was a pessimist. There wouldn’t be a boat. There wouldn’t be an ‘other side’. No light at the end of the tunnel. Not the welcoming faces of his mom and dad, smiling, reaching for him, inviting him up to a bright white Heaven.

Jack stood on the front lawn of their small Southern home for a few moments longer, remembering the day he and Aimee first spotted this place while taking a late afternoon drive. He remembered how hard it had been to get the king-sized mattress through the front door, and how even more impossible it was to maneuver it through that narrow hallway. He saw Aimee painting the walls of what would become Abigail’s nursery a pastel yellow that felt like sunshine. He remembered how Aimee had yelled for him to come as fast as he could when Abby trod down the hall in a half-walk half-stumble that made up her first steps.

Then there was Charlie—beautiful, amazing Charlie, who had mesmerized Jack so fully he had been afraid he’d love her too much. There was her bubbly laughter as a toddler, her dress-up sessions as she got older; the Spongebob theme song that, for a whole year, she’d sing at the top of her lungs at random intervals, making Jack laugh every time she did it.

There was Aimee’s garden in the backyard, where she planted sunflowers that came back every year, and the way she’d stand in the full-length mirror on early summer mornings and look herself over like a surgeon, picking herself apart while Jack wondered how a woman could be so beautiful. It seemed as though his entire life had happened in this run-down house. It began here, and it would end here. Thirteen short years of bliss. It hadn’t seemed like bad luck until just then.

Jack sucked in a steadying breath and stepped forward, his back to his home and wife and all the memories that made him who he was. That magnetic tug pulled him forward like a string tied around his heart. He had no idea where he was going, no idea whether he’d find Abby or Charlie or anyone out in those trees. All he knew was that he was done running. It was time to face the shadow with the jagged teeth and hungry smile; time to look himself in the eyes and face the demon he was and the killer he’d always be.