Traces of the Girl Read online

  I never knew whether the war had activated my mental disorder, and I used to wonder, “If I hadn’t gone to war, would I not be ill?” And I never knew if the mental disorder had caused me to drink, or if it was the war, or maybe both. I did know that if I drank a little before losing my job, I drank a lot more after. Because I didn’t have much to do anymore except tend to my house and property.

  The war gave me nightmares, I knew that, and for a full year after my discharge, I never went a single night without having one. I developed an eating disorder after they threw me out of my job, so that I could have some control over something when the rest of my life was completely out of control. But Dr. Tompkins helped me stop that.

  So when these people came to my door, I was messed up and troubled, and had a long history of being messed up and troubled. I wasn’t somebody the police would have trusted. Most of the time I spent too much time in my house alone. I didn’t care if others viewed me as a freak, a weirdo, all that mattered was that I was happy in my own little bubble.

  I wasn’t just fired for my one screw up, a big screw up at that, but still just one. The main reason I was fired – I didn’t just suspect this, I could feel deep down in my core, in my gut, just how real it was – was because I’d threatened to go to my boss’s superiors at the flight school about his sexually harassing me. He’d just used the other thing as an excuse because it had happened around the same time. And that’s why he’d ‘retired’ me instead of firing me. It had turned out he had a history of it, and that’s why so few women stayed at the job. It was almost as if he thought that just because he was a handsome, powerful man that gave his bad behavior a pass.

  It went like this: if I’d stay quiet, I’d get to keep my pension. So, because without any other source of income besides my small Air Force retirement benefits I needed the money, I stayed quiet. Without it, I’d lose my home and property and be homeless.

  I’d dealt with some harassment before in the Air Force but nothing as bad as what I’d dealt with at the flight school. And I didn’t comprehend how wrong that situation was until I said it aloud to the only person I told what had happened there, my ex-fiancé and former co-worker, Peter. But even he didn’t know the full extent of the situation.

  At first the guy had singled me out to lavish praise on me and I was flattered because he was my boss and was an experienced pilot. He used to give me compliments like, “There’s something about your presence that commands respect”, and he used to say he could see me being a great leader someday and that he would promote me soon. I liked that he said those things. I hadn’t felt respected since leaving the military and he’d made me feel respected again. For a while. Until he started expecting things from me, as though he wanted to trade his praise and promises for favors.

  I never even told my therapist how bad it got because, even with my therapist, I was afraid that, with my military background, I’d look weak for not punching the guy out for what he did to me. But I feared retaliation from him and felt he could ruin my life if he wanted to.

  Chapter Two

  “How do you know my name?” I asked the woman, one of the two strangers who’d invaded my house.

  “From the newspaper, Emily,” she said. “No one can help you now. You’re all alone out here. We’re in control now.”

  The woman was right. I was very much alone out there. And I knew I wasn’t in control of what happened next, that once they’d entered my house they controlled what happened and they controlled me. And as someone who liked being in control of my life at all times, my biggest fear had come true.

  The man shut the front door, and I couldn’t stop him.

  The few acquaintances I had, including Dr. Tompkins, who knew I lived all the way out there, didn’t live anywhere around there themselves. My parents had died in a road rage attack when I was very young – they were shot to death – and I had no siblings. I’d been estranged from the rest of my family since my parents’ deaths. These family members were too busy with their own lives and the families they’d created, to have bothered to have helped raise me.

  The military had been my ticket out of a life of foster homes. The same military had given me an identity and a sense of purpose, and when that had ended, I didn’t know what to do. So I took the flight school job, but lost that too. The fighter jet with wings in the background that I had tattooed on my forearm when still a rookie pilot served as a daily reminder of who I wasn’t anymore, but I’d never remove it. And I continued to look at it each day.

  At one point I had been engaged to Peter then I broke it off by telling him I couldn’t spend the rest of my life with him because I didn’t love him. Afterward he moved hundreds of miles away to escape ever seeing me again. Peter and I had had a dog, a yellow Labrador Retriever named Sally. Peter had got her trained and certified as a therapy dog for me. He let her stay with me when he left, and I’d buried Sally recently on my property after she died from cancer. Needless to say, it wasn’t a good time for me, with that and my thinking I remembered stabbing someone, and then those two weirdos showing up.

  As strange as they were, they were the only company I’d had in a long time. My nearest neighbor, a creepy guy named Smith Reed who made advances toward me almost every time I saw him, which I tried to avoid doing, lived over a mile away.

  The woman and the man trod softly as they looked around my house together. They seemed to feel right at home, and they seemed too sophisticated to be common criminals.

  “Nice little place you have here,” the man said.

  “Very tidy,” the woman remarked.

  Despite all the chaos in my life at the time, my orderliness was still very much military about me. Except for my bedroom upstairs.

  “Do you have a gun?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied. I had a gun in a lockbox out in my garage. Right then I wished I kept it nearby, but Dr. Tompkins had suggested I keep it out there while I was recovering from a period of having suicidal thoughts after I lost Sally, and I hadn’t remembered to bring it back inside after that stopped.

  I wasn’t interested in in-patient treatment, and I’d tried group therapy once but found it wasn’t for me and never went back.

  I could have kicked myself for not keeping up my workout routine after leaving the military. Maybe then I would have had more strength to defend myself if I needed to.

  “A gun isn’t by your side, despite your having been in the military?” She seemed surprised. “I thought you types always have a gun near you.”

  “I don’t have use for one out here.”

  “You’re all by yourself out here and you don’t have a gun in case you need protection? Seems unlikely.”

  I couldn’t tell if she didn’t believe me or if she just got a kick out of teasing me.

  “I haven’t had a need for one since the military,” I said.

  Another lie. I used to go to the shooting range every couple of weeks to practice out of habit before I became afraid of my gun after having those suicidal thoughts and locking it away in my garage.

  I couldn’t tell whether the woman had a gun. At first I suspected the man was in charge because he had a gun, and had brought the woman along so I’d feel less intimidated. Then she made it clear she ran the show.

  “We’re gonna be your house guests,” she stated.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Too bad because we’re going to be here even if you don’t want us to.”

  “For how long?” My voice started to break a little as I became fearful. My military training had prepared me for a lot of bad things but this wasn’t one of them. You never knew how you would react to something until you were put in the situation.

  “For how long will you be here?” I said again.

  “For however long we feel like or as long as it takes for you to crack and give us what we want,” she snapped back. “Whichever comes first.”

  I glanced at the landline phone on the coffee table by the couch where I th
ought I’d been reading last night. My history book was next to the phone.

  Phone. I needed to get to a phone fast, any phone, and I forgot about the one in my pocket, the one they thought I’d turned off.

  Instinctively, without thinking, I ran for the phone, but the man grabbed it before I could reach it and ripped the cord out of the wall.

  “Why are you doing this?” I shouted. I could not let them see me cry. I couldn’t, no matter what they did to me. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

  At least I didn’t think I had.

  The man looked straight at me. “We’ve already said why, we’ve been watching you.”

  I wanted to whimper but had too much pride.

  Watching me? Watching me from where? From the window? My eyes drifted to my large, curtainless windows. It hadn’t occurred to me before but suddenly I found it odd that despite my paranoia I had never hung up curtains.

  I didn’t see a car anywhere outside. Had they walked to my house? They couldn’t have come from very far away.

  The woman looked sinewy, and the man seemed robust, like the kind of man who worked with his big hands outdoors doing something in construction. Had they really climbed the large, very tall tree outside my door and spied on me through the windows and heard me talking in the doorway? They could have heard everything the man I had stabbed said to me from there.

  The woman hurried over to look out the window while the man kept an eye on me. When she returned to stay with me he went to peek outside, with caution, as if he thought someone could be following them.

  What if they were undercover detectives, spying on me? Or was somebody after them? Were they bad guys and the police were after them?

  “I bet you wish I had a TV,” I said calmly. “So then you could see yourselves in the news.”

  She ignored me. The sun, a fading orange light, set behind the snow-capped green mountains in the distance.

  “It’s pretty here,” the man said.

  “Are you two on the run?” I asked both of them.

  She smiled, and her teeth had a sheen. “The police aren’t going to show up to save you, if that’s what you’re thinking. No knows we’re here. No one even knows you’re here.”

  But someone did know: Dr. Tompkins. And I had missed my appointment. I silently debated if Dr. Tompkins would be the type of therapist to call the police if I hadn’t showed up for an appointment or whether he might come to my house himself. I wasn’t sure I even wanted the police to show up at my house since I might have killed someone. Then I felt like I needed to warn Dr. Tompkins not to come to my home alone because he could be putting himself in danger. But I couldn’t use my cell phone without them noticing.

  She and the man were silent for a few minutes and I became quiet too.

  “I’m going to have to nail some cloths to the frames to cover these windows,” he abruptly said. “I’m going to need big cloths or towels to hang up.”

  “I can get you some, but I have to go upstairs to get them,” I said. “They’re in the closet upstairs.”

  “Okay.” He looked at the woman and nodded.

  She trailed me when I went to get the towels from the linen closet on the second floor.

  I tried to figure out the dynamic between the two of them. Were they a couple? Friends? Siblings? They didn’t look alike. And there didn’t seem to be much affection between them, at least not in front of me, and they were too close in age to be mother and son. Accomplices? Yes. I didn’t have a television or even a radio, and I didn’t get the internet out there, even the cell phone reception barely worked, so it wasn’t like I would have heard of them or what they might have done or were planning to do. I suspected that was just the way they liked it.

  From how they talked, I figured they were from around there. I wondered if they were career criminals or whether they had regular jobs. The woman sort of seemed like she could have been a career criminal. But the man had to have worked in manual labor from his build. Or just gone to the gym a lot. Then again, maybe they were run-of-the-mill psychos who’d just snapped. I smiled inside at the joke that as a crazy person myself I felt entitled to make.

  The woman watched me take the towels out of the closet. I didn’t see a gun on her but I might have been wrong. She didn’t speak to me and followed me downstairs in silence when I’d finished getting the towels. I found it strange because only a moment or two ago she seemed like the kind of person who couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

  I decided to talk to him even though she seemed like the one in charge, because he seemed more approachable and he did have that gun.

  “What do you both want from me?” I asked as I handed him the towels. I didn’t want to let go of their softness, the one single comfort I’d had since before everything began to spiral out of control starting last night.

  “We’ll stay here for a while and then you can help us,” she answered for him.

  In charge, like I’d thought. That didn’t mean I was going to let her, or them for that matter, treat me like crap.

  “Help you? Help you with what?” I said. “You never said anything about that. I thought you just wanted to hide out here for a while.”

  She raised an eyebrow and seemed entertained by my assertion, as if the idea of me believing I could be in control of the situation amused her. “You thought?”

  “Yeah. Then I thought you might take my car and go.”

  “We’re not going anywhere without you. You’re going to fly us.”

  “Fly you? I don’t have a plane. I haven’t flown in forever. Are you nuts like me? You must be if you think I’m going to do that for you.”

  “Oh, you will fly us. You will fly, fly up in the air.”

  “You want me to fly you somewhere? Like I just said, I haven’t flown in years. I don’t fly.” I laughed mirthlessly. “I’m crazy, haven’t you heard? I almost killed someone. Two people, actually. Tourists. I don’t work at the flight school these days.”

  “Almost killed? You did kill someone.” She frowned.

  “No, I almost killed someone before that, in the air during a lesson. I won’t fly you. I’m not flying ever again. You can take my car and get the hell out of here.”

  “No. You will fly us.”

  “I won’t. Even if I would, and I won’t, I don’t have an airplane here, and the nearest hangar is miles—”

  “Shut up!” The man waved the gun. “We’re the ones with the weapon, aren’t we? You shut the fuck up.”

  He and I glared at each other in silence. He won the staring contest, something I considered myself a champion of, as I was the first to look away.

  “I’m going to need a hammer and some nails,” he said like we hadn’t wanted to punch each other a moment ago. I’d been wrong about him being more approachable.

  “They’re in the garage,” I said. “In the toolbox on the top shelf. You’ll find them easily.”

  The antique wooden toolbox Peter had left behind, and I couldn’t bring myself to discard it, although I barely used it.

  The man left the gun with the woman when he stepped outside.

  “I’m Joyce, by the way.” The woman stuck out the hand that wasn’t pointing the gun at me. She could have been an outlaw cowboy in another life.

  I stared at her hand but didn’t shake it. The man returned through the front door.

  I looked at him. “That was quick. Like I said, easy. Right?”

  He stared me down but didn’t talk.

  “And this is Albert.” The woman, Joyce, nodded at him.

  For all I knew, their real names might not even have been Joyce and Albert. They could have been giving me false names so I’d be less able to identify them when they left or if I escaped. Except I couldn’t escape, not after what I’d done.

  I didn’t shake Joyce’s hand, and she pulled hers back and laughed. “Cold bitch.”

  Watching us, Albert chuckled.

  I risked sarcasm. “Not quite cold, just don’t want to shake hands wit
h the devil.” I smiled a little.

  Joyce stared at me with expressionless eyes. “You will bend to our will, Miss Murderess.”

  I couldn’t help be cynical again. “Don’t count on it.” They think they can break me easily? Screw that!

  Albert raised his hand without the hammer in it, like he might slap me across my face, and although I considered ducking out of his reach, I straightened my shoulders and prepared to strike him back. I wasn’t one to back down from a fight, not even with a man – especially with a man.

  Joyce forced his arm down and he complied with her force. I checked over her face but didn’t see any marks or bruises. If he did hurt her it wasn’t visible.

  “You do not hit a woman. There’s a special place in hell for men who hit women,” Joyce said calmly. “Don’t be one of them.”

  Albert seemed to recoil in shame.

  She’d surprised me by taking my side over his. It could be seen as a tear in their relationship or partnership or whatever the heck they had, and could erode their plans. How could they succeed together if they bickered among themselves and one took my side? I knew from my military background that for a team to prosper, they had to have the same vision and stick to the mission.

  Albert took a few nails out of his shirt pocket and then huffed his way over to the bare windows, and using one hand to hold up the towels one at a time, and the other hand to grasp the hammer, he pounded the nails into the wooden frames through the towels. My body shook with each clang.

  Albert hit the frames more softly with the hammer as if he’d reminded himself of the reason they’d come to my house and didn’t want someone to hear him outside. Not that anyone would have heard anything out there in the middle of nowhere, in a place that was from the outside very beautiful, but lonely, layer after layer of cold, thick forest tangled with frozen streams; alone, except for maybe the howling coyotes who roamed that time of the night at the edge of dusk and total blackness.

  The pounding stopped. Albert had finished. I reasoned they’d want dinner next. They would be disappointed since I hadn’t gone shopping in weeks and had just canned items in the cupboards and what was left of a pack of cheap beer in the fridge. I wasn’t supposed to be drinking with my meds but that didn’t stop me from doing it from time to time. More so now that I no longer had a job. It was a way for me to pass the time. Up until Joyce and Albert’s arrival. I smiled a little to myself at the irony of them showing up at my door because they gave me something to do, a way to pass the time.