He just did an excellent job of hiding just how badly he was struggling.
“When did she disappear?”
“You don’t know all the facts?” he jeered.
I sat perfectly still, showing him I was here to listen. He was pissed at my family, pissed at the world, and right now, I was the last person he wanted to trust.
Shaking his head, he finally calmed down. “It’s been five years.”
“Were you fighting?”
His eyes narrowed again. “I didn’t fucking kill her.”
“Wyatt, if this is gonna work, you’re gonna have to stop thinking that I’m working against you. I’m asking because I want to know if she ran away because she was unhappy.”
The man was strung tighter than a bow, hardly able to get through a sentence without his anger coming out in full swing. Not that I could blame him. Five years without answers was a long fucking time.
“I’m not sure anyone could fight with Jess. She had an attitude a mile long, but it wasn’t her temper that got to me.” He paused, shifting in his chair. “Jess had issues, but not many knew about them.”
“What kind of issues?”
His lips tightened in a thin line. “Mood swings. One day, she’d be happy and free as a bird. Then she was screaming at me, threatening to kill me if I came any closer to her. It took a long time to figure out there were other issues going on. I didn’t want to see it.”
“Bipolar?”
He nodded. “I tried to get her help. Her parents did, too. She even voluntarily checked herself into a hospital once.”
“What happened?”
“The doctor had concerns. He wanted me to convince her to stay longer. He said she had suicidal thoughts.”
“Could he have made her stay? Committed her?”
Wyatt ground his teeth, his eyes focused on his desk instead of looking at me. “I thought she would hate me, and I was trying to avoid—” He shook his head in defeat. “I worried she would never trust me again.”
“What happened after she came home?”
“Things seemed better for a while. And then the paranoia kicked in. She started seeing signs on the television.”
“What kind of signs?”
“She thought the newscasters were telling her something based on the color ties they were wearing. I found this whole journal after she disappeared. Not much of it made sense, but I realized she was making her life decisions based on these delusions. Of course, it was too late to do anything by then. She was gone, and it was my fault.”
I stayed silent, taking it all in as he collected himself. The man had guilt oozing out of his pores. Maybe he could have helped her. Maybe nothing would have helped. Hindsight was always twenty-twenty.
“Do you know of any friends she might have gone to?”
“Yeah. I checked in with them a lot over the years. None of them had seen her, or so they said. I even drove out to Texas once. One of her friends moved there. I watched the house for days, but there was no sign of her.”
A mentally unstable woman out there for five years. What were the chances she was still alive? Wouldn’t she have come home eventually? The outcome didn’t look very bright, but I wouldn’t say a word about that until I was sure. Wyatt was still holding out hope. He needed answers if he was ever going to move on.
“I’ll start digging into this right away,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Don’t you need a picture? Her social? Anything like that?”
Shaking my head, I started for the door. “Trust me, these guys will have that before you can find everything. I’ll be in touch.”
“Michael,” he called out, stopping me before I could leave.
