31. 31 – Zella
M y hand keeps running over the soft material covering my legs as I sit in the back of the thing they call a car.
There’s a rumbling beneath me, and my body vibrates as Maverick does something and the car comes to life beneath me.
Ryder’s hand covers mine and I glance down briefly, distracted by the warmth.
I’m so cold.
But my eyes are huge, glued to the glass window as Maverick drives us out of the garage. I can’t see much, and Ryder leans across me, pressing something that makes the glass slide down.
“Thank you.” With the glass down, I still can’t see much. It’s pitch-black outside, the only light coming from the lights of the car. As I crane my head, I catch glimpses of the trees I ran through on my first night.
“Whoa there, princess.” Ryder tugs me back as I stick my whole head out of the window in my enthusiasm to see. “You won’t see much if you fall out.”
As the car picks up speed and I try to get used to the sensation of moving so quickly, nausea flips in my stomach and I pull my head back, leaning it against the back of my seat and closing my eyes.
“You okay?” Ryder asks softly. His fingers trace shapes on the back of my hand. “It’s been a strange day.”
My nod feels absent, and I keep my eyes closed as I try to process how I’m feeling. I’m not entirely sure that the churning in my stomach is just from the car.
“Where are we going again?” I ask, my eyelids cracking open in time to catch Maverick’s eye in the little front mirror.
“You’ll see.”
Hmmm.
“Is this where you kill me and bury me so nobody will find out your secrets?” I ask absently.
Ryder and I tip to the side as the car jerks, but Maverick pulls it back. “Shit!”
Ryder steadies me. “You okay, princess? Jesus, Maverick.”
“Sorry,” Maverick says shortly. He waits until I look up and meet his eyes to respond. “Zella, we are not going to hurt you. Not now, not ever. We’re just… showing you something.”
I swallow back the small ball of relief. Not that I seriously thought they would hurt me… but then, I didn’t actually think Enzo was a serial killer who carves up evil men in a dungeon underneath their house.
I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t trust my own instincts at this point.
They seem to be broken.
“What are you showing me?” I ask, leaning forward. Maverick snaps his eyes up.
“Sit back,” he says firmly. “We’re showing you the other part of our work, Zella. What happens at the end.”
At the end?
I turn the words over in my head, sitting quietly with my own thoughts as we drive into the night. I press my face against the window as I see a sea of lights in the distance, rising high into the sky. “What’s that?”
“New York,” Ryder says softly. His hand plays with the edge of my braid, pulling it between his fingers. “That’s where your apartment is.”
Was.
“Right,” I whisper. New York looks gigantic to me. I can’t believe I’ve spent so much of my life there, and yet it feels so unfamiliar.
The lights disappear as Maverick continues to drive. Ryder settles in next to me, and my head leans against his arm. When the car finally stops, I blink, half asleep as I lift my head up. “Are we here?”
“We are,” Maverick confirms. When I look out of the window, there’s a row of houses opposite us. Lights are on in a few, and my eyes are drawn to a little flickering light in a dark window. A single candle, the little flame bright.
Maverick turns around in his seat. His light eyes look dark, purple shadows underneath.
“Where are we?” I ask softly, my eyes still on the little orange light.
Maverick draws in a breath. “This is where Sherileen Jacobs lived.”
It takes me a second.
“Sherileen Jacobs. Fourteen years old. She was looking for her dog when he called her over. Told her he’d help her look, and then he buried her, prey. He buried her so deep, her family never had a chance at finding her.”
My mouth dries, and I look between them. “I don’t… I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Sherileen’s parents are Roger and Sandra Jacobs,” Ryder says from next to me. His eyes are on the candle too. “They lost their daughter ten years ago, when she went missing on a dog walk and never came home. Every night, Roger and Sandra light a candle in their window.”
“We’ve been watching them, Zella,” Maverick murmurs. His face looks sorrowful when I turn to him, my heart starting to twist inside my chest. “They know that their little girl isn’t coming home, but their pain is eating them alive. They have no idea what happened to her, and it torments them.”
I turn back to the light, to that little beacon. “You’re going to tell them,” I breathe, looking back to them. Something cracks inside my chest when Maverick nods.
“They deserve to have closure, sweetheart.” He reaches out, catching something on my cheek. When I touch my fingers to the same place, my cheeks are wet. “They deserve to know why their daughter never came home, and we can give them that.”
It hurts. Inside my chest, something twists and breaks, as I imagine Sherileen’s parents waiting for an answer that never came.
I swallow heavily, sniffing. “Can I come?”
Maverick blinks as if surprised. Ryder stiffens next to me when he nods. “Mav.”
“Let her see, Ryder,” Maverick says softly. He doesn’t move his eyes from mine. “This will not be easy, Zella. Brace yourself.”
The air feels cold, biting on my face. I shiver inside the sweatshirt Ryder pushed over my head before we left, grateful for the warmth as I silently follow Maverick up the tidy wooden steps.
The house is dark, but Maverick knocks anyway.
I hold my breath, but a bright light flickers on within seconds, and the sounds of feet pounding echoes through the door a second before the door is thrown open.
An older man, gray-haired and tired looking, clutches the edges of the door as he peers out. I see the second the light fades in his eyes, the way the little piece of hope is snuffed out, and it breaks my heart.
A woman comes up behind him, patting her hair with shaking hands. “Roger?”
“Can I help you?” he asks. His eyes flit between the three of us, and he takes a step back.
Maverick steps forward, holding out his hand. “Mr. Jacobs. My name is Maverick Brooks, and I’m a private investigator.”
I fight to keep my composure as Roger Jacobs shakes his head. “If you’re selling, we already tried that route. They didn’t find anything.”
His wife places a hand on his arm. “Don’t you think we’ve tried everything?” she asks, her voice shaking. “We can’t afford any more. We’ve tried . I’m sorry, but you’ve wasted your time.”
“We’re not selling,” Maverick says quietly, and they both silence. “I know what happened to Sherileen, Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs.”
Mr. Jacobs drops like a stone to his knees, his wife grabbing his shoulders as he curls himself inward. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
He looks up at us with wet eyes. “We know she is. We just want to know where she is, Mr. Brooks.”
His wife is crying, and I watch with a closed throat as Maverick kneels in front of Sherileen’s father. His words are firm, enough that they focus on him as he speaks.
He tells them that their daughter is dead. Their grief is a tangible, dark thing, hovering in the air around us. But there’s relief, too. Relief that the ax hanging over their head has finally dropped.
“Every day,” Mrs. Jacobs whispers shakily. “Every day I’d wake up, and it would take me a second to remember.”
She looks at me desperately, and I swallow. “I’m so sorry.”
She nods vacantly. “But we know now. I didn’t think we’d ever know.”
“She’s coming home?” her father says, and the tears on his face shine in the little light from the porch.
“Yes,” Maverick tells them. “Your daughter is coming home.”
I manage to hold on to my tears until we’re back in the car. And then Ryder lifts me, pulling me across the seat and drawing me into his chest as I choke on my tears and sob into his chest. Maverick makes a call from the front, talking into the earpiece about search areas.
“It’s so unfair,” I gasp. “They waited all that time.”
“The world isn’t fair,” Ryder says softly. “But they know now, Zella. They know what happened to their little girl. They’ll be able to bury her, visit her. It’s better than the agony of not knowing.”
I don’t think I could have understood that without seeing their reaction. The pain, the agony, but the relief too. Relief that so many questions left unanswered are now solved.
“Closure is the only thing we can give them,” Ryder whispers.
Closure.
“Not the only thing,” I whisper, and he makes a noise of acknowledgement.
It burns in my chest, the injustice that Sherileen will come home to her family in a box because of the actions of one man.
But there’s a dark satisfaction curling in my stomach, too, satisfaction that the man responsible is suffering for his evil. A poetic justice that he will die in agony, that he will writhe and scream for mercy that doesn’t come, just like they did.
I don’t know what happens after we die. But I hope that whatever the afterlife looks like, John Millers spends it in as much pain as he is experiencing right now, for eternity.
My heartbeat thuds loudly in my chest.
“Take me home, please,” I say into Ryder’s chest. “I’m ready to go home now.”
Maverick finishes up his call, and we pull away from the Jacobs’s home.
And behind us in the window, the little light is blown out.