No, Elijah Schiver had been thoroughly alone.
Until Delores.
She’d come into his life, a whirlwind of emotions, and had stirred up more feelings in his one meeting with her than he had felt in many years.
The days after meeting her, she was the only thing to pass through his mind. He worried for the woman that had cried in his arms and clung to him like he was all she would ever need on this planet. And with her tears and her pain, Elijah had discovered the man that lived inside of him. The one which lay underneath everything else. The real Elijah Schiver. One unburdened and able to thrive.
His parents had been his own form of alcohol. And he’d spent years drinking in their need for him until they were gone. In that way, he was more like his father than he ever realized. The realness of himself buried beneath an unshakable weight.
Elijah started the car and drove, letting his hands automatically do what needed to be done, his feet instinctually pressing peddles with very little coaxing needed from his subconscious.
He was mechanical.
He was a machine.
He was automatic in his conditioning and reasoning.
And as he pulled up down the street from Delores’s house he knew he had done the right thing.
Elijah watched as Michael Stanton left his house. He put his two children into the back of the car and then he drove away. Elijah waited five full and incredibly long minutes before he got out of his pickup, looked both ways, and headed across the street.
He slipped down the side of the house, reaching over and unlatching the small lock at the top of the gate before slipping into the back yard. As far as he could see, no one had seen him, and Elijah quickly made his way to the back door. At the bottom of the entrance was a small cat flap, and Elijah got down on his knees and pushed his hand through the small opening, feeling around on the left side of the wall, for the small pot where the key was left.
Delores was forever misplacing her keys whenever her condition hit. Tired of being called out from work, or coming home to find Delores and the children on the door step, Michael had insisted on her hiding a spare key. Elijah unlocked the backdoor, closed it carefully behind him and walked further into the house.
The smell was the first thing to hit him. Burnt toast and overcooked rice. Two separate meals, both ruined and inedible. Pots were stacked high in the sink, and when Elijah opened the dishwasher, he found it full of more dirty pots. The kitchen bin was full, almost to the point of overflowing, and when Elijah opened the refrigerator door, he found barely any food inside.
The house was in similar disarray, leading Elijah to the conclusion that Michael was not functioning well without his wife. Anyone else would have read it that Michael was falling apart because of his wife’s disappearance, but thanks to Delores, Elijah knew enough about Michael to know that this wasn’t the case. It was staged. At least to a point.
Michael was used to having things done for him. He was used to someone else taking care of the children, and someone else cooking his food. He was used to someone else cleaning his home and ironing his suit. He was struggling under the weight of responsibility, not worry.
Elijah continued on through the house, seeing the beds unmade, the bathroom floor wet, toys strewn around, and clothes piled in corners. It had only been three days and already the house was falling apart. Deep down, Elijah wondered whether Michael was playing on Delores’s OCD about cleanliness and keeping things tidy. Perhaps this staging was not just done to prove his innocence in all of this, but also in spite for his wife and her illness.
In the en-suite bathroom, Elijah noted that there was only one toothbrush, and in Anabel’s bedroom was Delores’s hairbrush. He knew it was hers because it was the one she normally carried in her handbag. He’d seen her use it before she went back home to Michael.
Elijah frowned, wondering where Anabel’s brush could be. Perhaps it had been mislaid in all the confusion, or perhaps Delores had taken it along with her own toothbrush.
Delores had left, and she had packed beforehand. Taking essentials like her toothbrush, and yet, she had possibly taken her daughter’s hairbrush instead of her own? Elijah frowned and sat down on the edge of the bed. Something wasn’t right. Delores was OCD about everything. She only ever used her own things, and she always put them back afterwards. If she’d time to pack her toothbrush, she would have had time to find her own hairbrush, Elijah surmised.
And if she’d time to pack any of these things that meant that her leaving wasn’t such a last-minute rushed ordeal as everyone had assumed. It had been planned and organised. But how had she planned it when she had been with him?
No. This was all wrong. This wasn’t a last-minute thing, and it wasn’t an organised plan either. Something was very wrong.
There was deliberateness.
Intention.
There were lies.
Chapter Nineteen
Elijah
Elijah drove into town.
His thoughts were on Delores’s and her increasingly-odd behaviour in the last couple of weeks. He knew without any doubt in his mind that she’d been taking her medication; he’d watched her on several occasions. As far as he could see, she took two different types of meds, though she’d warned him sometimes there were more for when things got bad.
Her main ones though were Lithium and Risperidone. One tablet was an antipsychotic and the other helped control her depression. One, though he couldn’t be sure which, was left on the tongue to dissolve, and the other was swallowed whole.
