I closed my eyes in the hopes that I could unsee the scratch marks and bits of my mother’s broken-off fingernails embedded in the wood.
“Gage, come back to me,” Nash begged.
I clung to him as I fought my way back to the surface and struggled to take in clean air instead of the rancid smell of death.
“Tell me what you did to him.”
“His lawyer got a jury to buy that the guy was mentally ill. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital. He got out a little over a year ago after his doctors deemed him cured. He took his meds and said all the right things. Seven years… he spent seven years in a cell that was five times as big as the box he put her in. Seven years – one year for every day she spent alone in that box, waiting for me to come for her.”
“Don’t do that to yourself,” Nash said as he massaged the back of my neck with his fingers. “There was nothing you could have done.”
I knew he was right, but it didn’t silence my mother’s screams for help.
“After my mom was found, I decided to leave the Navy so I could move back home and take care of my dad. He was struggling a lot. It was during that time that Grace and I decided to have a baby together. On the one hand, we weren’t sure if it was too soon after losing my mother, but on the other, we needed that reaffirmation of life, you know?”
Nash nodded. I’d calmed enough that I was able to pull back so I could look at him as I spoke. I liked that he kept touching me, despite me being more in control of myself.
“Losing Grace so suddenly just turned my whole world upside down, but in a way, it helped my dad push past his grief. Our only focus became Charlie and I think that ended up saving both of us. But when we got word that the guy was getting out last year…”
I shook my head because there were no words to describe how I’d felt in that moment.
“My father said we needed to try and move on with our lives, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I didn’t accept that this guy was allowed to walk the earth, looking for the next person he’d put in that fucking box. So I began tracking him. I told my dad I had to leave town to take care of a mix-up with my benefits, but it was just an excuse to buy me the time I needed. I found the guy in the very house he’d taken my mother to. It was so fucking easy,” Imurmured. “I almost felt cheated. And guess what I found in a box in his basement.”
“No,” Nash breathed.
I nodded. “A sixteen-year-old girl – some runaway he’d picked up hitchhiking.”
“What did you do?” Nash asked.
“I put the guy in the box and took the girl to the nearest ER. I left her there and went back to the house and took the guy to a cabin in the woods that my parents used to rent every summer.”
“Tell me what you did to him,” Nash said. “Everything.”
So I did.
I told him about the bones I broke, the fingers I cut off, the teeth I ripped out with pliers… the list went on and on, and Nash barely reacted. “Eleven days,” I said, once I’d finished the list of brutalities I’d inflicted on my mother’s murderer. “I kept him alive for eleven days, and the only reprieve he got from me was when he was lying in that box. He begged me over and over to let him die. I gave him his wish on the twelfth day by burying that box in the ground in the middle of nowhere. He changed his mind about dying just as soon as he realized I wasn’t going to make it quick for him. I plugged up the hole with a small PVC pipe that I bent at the top so that when it was sticking out of the ground it would allow him to breathe, but it wouldn’t collect any rainwater. A week later I went back and removed the pipe.”
“You had to have been the cops’ first suspect when they realized the guy had gone missing,” Nash said.
“I had an alibi.”
“Your dad?” Nash asked. “I thought he didn’t know?—”
“No,” I interjected. “I fully expected to get caught. As hard as it would have been to lose my daughter, I couldn’t regret it, and I knew if given the chance to do it all over, I would have done the same thing. A day after I buried the fucker, a man showed up at my house and handed me a folder. There were copies of several receipts in it. One from a cheap motel just outside of Portland, several from a liquor store in the area, some from gas stations on the way downthere… they all had my credit card number on them. There was an affidavit from a guy who said he was an escort that I’d hired for the twelve-day bender I’d been on down there. Money matching the amount I’d supposedly paid him had been withdrawn from my checking account from various ATMs in the Portland area. And there was a copy of surveillance footage from several traffic cameras in that area that showed a car that looked like mine, with a driver matching my description, traveling the area around the motel for that entire time period. The car even had license plates identical to mine.”
“What?” Nash said, completely confused. “How is that even possible?”
“No clue. The guy who handed it to me said if it didn’t throw the cops off, to call him and he’d help me and my family disappear. He wouldn’t tell me who he was, just said I’d saved him the trouble of having to kill the fucker himself.”
“What happened?”
“Cops showed up about a week later. I gave them the receipts and the number of the guy I’d supposedly spent the week with. I kept the rest to give to a lawyer if it came to that. It didn’t. Cops cleared me. With the alibi and no body, there wasn’t much they could do, and I doubted they cared enough to make the effort. I called the guy about a month later to find out who he was.”
“Did you find out?”
I nodded. “It was Ronan. He agreed to meet with me. He explained that he’d been tracking the guy after seeing the news about him getting off for my mother’s murder. He recognized me from news reports. Since I beat him to the guy, he let me do what I needed to do and worked to cover my tracks. Then he offered me a job.”
“Does your father know?” Nash asked.
