Coming Back
Authors: Emma South
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary, #Military, #New Adult & College, #Romantic Suspense, #Sports, #Mystery & Suspense, #Suspense
Coming Back: A New Adult Romantic Suspense
Emma South
Published by Emma South
Copyright 2015 Emma South
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Disclaimer
All characters and events are entirely fictional and any resemblances to persons living or dead and circumstances are purely coincidental.
pter 1
January 2012 (Before)
Christie
The walls of my room, once so homely and comforting, were going to crush me. I was sure of it. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I could
feel
the pressure as the pastel colors slowly moved closer.
It should have been a safe place to fall. Where else are you supposed to go when the love of your life was killed, if not back home to your parents? In reality, the safest place I ever knew, in Nick’s arms, was gone forever and running back to this room only reminded me that the future was gone and the past was all I had.
I knew that under the pastels were layers of different colors and designs. My dad had a do-it-yourself attitude while lacking the complete know-how to
properly
do it himself, so parts of my history had been painted over while I grew up in this room.
That was how it was supposed to be. You started off with the princess and fairy decals, the pinks, through the tomboy-neutrals, the poster and picture craze phase, and finally you ended up with the pastels.
It was bittersweet when Nick and I moved in together. I remembered taking one last look at my room and taking a deep breath. I closed the door, lovingly, on the past and held Nick’s hand as we walked into our future to paint our own rooms.
Except now, I was back. After Nick’s parents passed away it was my place, my duty, to be the one that always had to worry about receiving that knock on the door to tell me that Something Bad had happened while he was on active duty overseas. Maybe even The Worst Thing.
I sat bolt upright on my bed and swung my feet to the floor as I remembered opening the front door and seeing the man in uniform with a well-practiced look of sympathy on his face. Just thinking about it brought the tears back and cramped my stomach. I couldn’t even touch my eyes, they were so raw from all the rubbing.
Just like that, with a form letter read aloud by somebody I didn’t know, he was gone. Poof. Smoke. The person who I had known since we were five, my first enemy after he put glue in my hair and I kicked him in the nuts, the one who had begged for a date until I relented and showed me a warmth I’d never felt before.
The muscles of my jaw were sore. I’d been clenching my mouth shut for days, because if I didn’t do that, if I didn’t concentrate, I would scream. Scream and scream, and I might not stop.
Gone. He’d changed himself to be with me. I couldn’t live with a drug-addict boyfriend who got into fights and committed petty crimes. I needed the man he showed me in private. He did it, and I was
so
proud of him. I thought,
I knew
, that under that big, rough and tough exterior that he was a gentle giant who would do great things.
Up until that knock on the door, my heart still fluttered every time I saw him, heard him,
thought
about him. Gone. Now my heart felt like it wasn’t beating, it just cramped along with the rest of my muscles.
The air in my room was too hot, too stuffy. The clock said it was only eight o’clock. I had to get out.
As soon as I opened my door, I heard a chair in the kitchen scrape back as somebody stood up. By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, my mom was right there. My dad and sister were side by side at the edge of the living room.
“I’m…” my voice cracked and broke. I cleared my throat. “I’m going for a walk.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Amber.
“No!”
The word came out so much harsher than I intended, and my sister was startled. Amber, always the class clown in school, had a mouth that sometimes opened and let loose the most unexpected and tactless things in the name of attempted comedy.
She’d been mercifully quiet since I’d come running home with my news, but even the effort of explaining what I was doing was taking precious emotional resources away from stopping myself from falling to pieces. I could already feel my breaths hitching again, my knees threatening to buckle under me to send me crashing to the floor.
“I just n-need to walk by m-myself for a bit. Please.” It was impossible to keep the edge of desperation out of my voice.
“OK, honey, OK. Just don’t be too long. Understand?” My mom put one calming hand on my shoulder and I nodded.
“You have your phone?” my dad asked.
I nodded again and patted my pocket. “See you soon.”
Before I’d even finished putting my shoes on, I had one hand clamped over my mouth to stop the sobs from escaping, from sparking any more protests or advice from my family. I couldn’t handle it.
I closed the front door behind me as carefully as I could in my rush, and it still slammed shut. My first steps were shuffles, but I was running by the time I was out the gate, running blind as if there was somewhere to escape to.
Warfields was a small town, so such an escape wasn’t possible. Whenever my vision cleared enough for me to look around, I saw somewhere else that Nick and I had been. Our elementary school, the restaurant he’d taken me to during our first date, the hall where the school held our prom, they all flashed by in a blur.
The next time I looked up, I saw I was at the edge of the park. I didn’t know how long I’d been running for, but it was here that I finally slowed to a walk.
The path meandered through the trees and open grassy spaces, with a lake in the middle of it all where ducks played up for anybody who would throw them bread. In the daytime, it was a busy family area. At night, it was usually more or less deserted.
Our kids would have played here.
The thought came unbidden and made me groan with the weight of everything that I had lost. I folded my arms over my stomach and staggered forward, hunched over as if against a cold much more severe than the mild chill that was actually in the air.
There it was, another place where we’d made a memory. The bench by the lake where we’d sat and eaten ice cream as the sun set.
I remembered the heat on my face, the warmth of his love radiating from my side as I laid my head on his shoulder, and that cool chocolate ice cream stopping me from overheating into a nuclear meltdown of happiness. I could almost see us there, but that happiness was too far away for me to touch.
A whizzing sound was my only warning before a pain worse than the most severe of wasp stings hit me right on the butt cheek. I screamed and jumped, swatting at the seat of my jeans in a panic, and I felt something stuck there that only hurt more when I touched it.
I craned my neck around and saw the orange fluff on the tail of a little dart sticking out of me. I pulled it out and held it up, staring at it in confusion in the moonlight.
Coming at me across the grass was a man in a hoodie tucking something, a gun maybe, into his front pocket. It was too dark to see his face. I couldn’t recognize any features, but something about the way he was walking immediately drove out any thoughts that this might be some local kid with a crap sense of humor. This might be life or death.
I screamed and started to run, but a numbness was already spreading from my right ass cheek down my leg, making me hobble. I made my way along the path, screaming, looking for somebody to help, but there was nobody except me and the man behind me, getting closer every time I looked over my shoulder.
My mouth seemed to dry up all of a sudden and my lips went tingly. My screams for help became slurred and the world started spinning. I staggered and fell.
BONK!
The sound of my skull hitting the path boomed inside my own head, and I felt a warm wash of fluid immediately start flowing down the side of my face. My limbs were so heavy, I could barely move them. The only muscle that was working properly was my heart, which pounded in panicked terror as I managed to roll over and see the man standing over me, watching impassively as I bled and struggled.
“You better not die. Nobody’s gonna want to fuck you if you’re dead.” His voice sounded like it came from a long way away.
Everything went black and the warmth of the blood flowing from the wound in my head seemed to wash over my whole body. I didn’t know if I was ever going to wake up again. The last thing I saw was an image of Nick in my mind, reaching down to me.
I’ll see you soon, babe.
pter 2
September 2013 (After)
Dean
The drunks of Warfields were a considerate bunch. We only had the one holding cell to detain them, and they never seemed to disturb the peace on the same day.
I slid the cover on the viewing slot to the left and peeked inside to see Johnny Stamford there. They also almost seemed to work on some kind of roster system. If Johnny was sleeping it off, then it was probably Wednesday.
I closed the cover and headed for the lunch room, passing Dan Abrahams on the way. Officer Abrahams had a salt ‘n’ pepper moustache that was about as thick and rigid as a wire brush. Talk around town was that it could stop bullets and would be the last recognizable thing in his coffin after he finally retired on the day he died.
“It’s Wednesday, right?” I asked.
“Yup.”
A man of few words in a town that required few police officers. It was a quiet existence, but a lot better than the alternative. When this kind of job got exciting, I knew only too well how the best and brightest died along with the worst.
The lunchroom itself was only slightly less Spartan than the holding cell, with the table in the middle and the ancient television on a bracket on the wall, playing on low volume non-stop since sometime during the industrial revolution. I threw my brown paper bag on the table and it slid across, skidding to a halt in front of the chair at the far end.
“You should work in a bar or something, your talents are wasted here,” said Rusty, a guy a couple years older than me that I’d vaguely known in school but only really spent any time with since coming back to Warfields and working with him.
“Don’t tempt me. You bring in Johnny last night?”
“Yeah, he awake yet?” he asked.
“You mean has he stuffed toilet paper into the sink and flooded the cell yet?”
“Pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Pretty much, but no.”
“Great. A few more minutes and he’ll be your problem.”
I sat down and unfolded the top of my paper bag, hoping to reach inside and pull out something good, but knowing it was just the PB and J I’d put in there that morning. And an apple, don’t forget the apple.
Rusty and I exchanged small talk for a while until I asked him what he was doing that weekend and didn’t get an answer. I looked up from my sandwich and saw him staring up at the TV, his brow furrowed in concentration.
Before I could even look, I heard two words from the otherwise unintelligible background noise that the TV offered. A name I’d recognize as well as my own when whispered in a crowded room.
Christabelle Jayne
.
I twisted my head around so fast I almost gave myself an injury and saw the big headline under the news presenter that said ‘Breaking News!’ along with scrolling text that said ‘Christabelle Jayne Found.’ I turned back to the table to scramble for the remote, but it wasn’t there.
“Where’s the remote? Where is it?” I said, shooting to my feet and sending the lightweight chair flying backwards.
Rusty shook his head and I took the few steps to the screen, seeing the remote stuck to the side with a couple strips of Velcro. Ignoring it, I twisted the volume knob on the TV itself, bringing the sound up to a level that made the speaker distort for a moment before turning it down a bit.
They found her. My heart had jumped into my throat and refused to be swallowed back down as I tried to follow what was being said by the presenter. Dead or alive? That was the question.
“Please, please, please,” I whispered.
“
… this incredible footage from the first people on the scene when Christabelle Jayne was found today.
”
The screen switched to a low resolution and shaky video, clearly taken on somebody’s cell phone, from inside somebody’s parked car, as the person being filmed in the driver’s seat talked about some crazy thing a friend of his had done while drunk or high or something.
“
What are we seeing here, Ethan?
”
“
These are Stirling and Jaqueline Rome, in their car outside the Black Hills Gas ‘n’ Snack moments before…”
said the reporter over the sound of near-hysterical laughter.
“
Whoa, whoa, whoa…
” said Jacqueline from off screen as the image went more wobbly than before.
“
Then that dumb mother…
”
“
WHOA! What’s goin’ on over there? What’s that?
”
“
What?
”
The screen zoomed in on something that was right at the edge of the almost entirely empty car park, which had a tiny grass verge that quickly disappeared into dense forest. It was impossible to see what they were focusing on.
“
This is when they first realize they’re seeing a person…
” said the reporter, Ethan.
“
It’s some girl,
” said Stirling.
As if that was the magic word, the image stabilized and cleared up for a second and showed Christie on her hands and knees, staring across the carpark towards the Romes with semi-clean tear tracks running down her face through the grime and dirt. They froze the video on that frame, with Christie’s haunted and desperate gaze front and center.
Dried blood was caked on one side of her face, and numerous scratches of varying age were evident on her arms. Everything she was wearing was filthy and torn, and the look on her face made it clear that she’d been through hell, but she was alive.
Christie Jayne, the most beautiful girl to ever set foot inside Warfields, let alone be born and raised here. When she went missing, the town lost the best thing about it.
In a town that revered high school football as much as this one did, I’d coasted through my senior year like a local hero. After one particular incident before an important game, Christie, one of the cheerleaders, had stepped up to that pedestal too.
She was the heart of a little town like this, and when she was ripped out of it, it had been agonizing. I could see that in everybody’s eyes when I moved back, but nobody spoke about it. It was too painful. It was personal.
They took our Christie.
I remembered her so well from high school, and she
never
had a look like that on her face back then. She never looked anywhere
close
to being beaten. Not Christie. She had this
fire
in her eyes, in her spirit. I always thought of her as the one who got away.
Now, somehow, by some superhuman effort that only a girl like Christie could have managed, it looked like she’d gotten away again. Something was building up inside of me, something I hadn’t really felt in a while.
A spark of hope was floating dangerously close to some dry kindling. If Christie was alive, then there was something truly good in the world again.
The view changed back to a split screen of the news presenter and the reporter standing next to the man from the video and a woman, presumably Jacqueline.
“
That was the scene earlier today, and authorities have confirmed that this is indeed Christabelle Jayne, who went missing from Warfields, Missouri, nineteen months ago, though no statements have yet been made about where she’s been
.”
“
HOLY SHIIIIIT!
” I yelled, bringing my hands up to my hair and grabbing twin fistfuls above my ears. I couldn’t help it.
Less than ten seconds after my outburst, Captain Lewin burst into the lunchroom and puffed up with all the authority of his position. “Who the hell wants to explain why somebody just cussed loud enough to be heard at the front desk?”
Behind me I could sense Rusty pointing at the TV, and I saw Captain Lewin look from him to me and then to the screen. I felt the cool air on my cheeks and realized I’d shed a couple of tears. From shock or joy, I didn’t know, but there they were.
Ethan turned to Jaqueline. “
What went through your mind when you saw Christabelle come out of the forest?
”
“
I was like, damn, this girl in trouble, man. Stirl and I, we went over there and she kinda cringed like she thought we was gonna hit her or somethin’, she held out her hands to the sides and all she was sayin’ was I’m Christie, I’m Christie, help me. Just over and over again, man, y’know?
”