Chapter 4
ELLA
Caleb barely has the apartment door open before my loud words push against him violently. “Why does my sister go to that crap-hole gas station!”
It takes Caleb a few seconds to recover. Dressed in gym shorts and a T-shirt with a beer bottle in hand, he glances self-consciously over his shoulder to the group of friends scattered around his living room, playing video games. The muscle in his jaw twitches. “Ella, I already told you. I don’t know.”
His eyes shift back and forth as he stares at the concrete threshold, and then he takes a long swig of his beer, avoiding eye contact at all costs.
My head cocks to the side, deep in concentration. “But you have an idea?” That comment sparks some interest.
Eventually, he sighs, shifting his body to the side so I can enter his second-story apartment. He nods to the back balcony door, indicating the need for some privacy. I recognize several of the guys in his living room, not only from the times that I hung out here with Carrie, but from the searches that we did for her right after she went missing. As I approach, a handful of them catcall to me, inviting me to join the play on the newest and latest video game.
“Not now.” Caleb’s firm tone leaves nothing for debate, and they quickly turn their attention away from us.
I take a seat in one of the chairs on the back balcony.
“Just a second. I’ll be right back.” Caleb returns a few moments later and passes a bottle of water and a blanket to me before taking the seat next to mine. He’s holding a long-sleeve shirt in his hand and quickly pulls it over his head, adding an extra layer to fight against the cooler temperature of the night.
Settling into the chair, he twists the lid off his fresh beer bottle and tosses the cap into a small trash can stashed in the corner. Neither of us speak; we just stare in silence, looking out through the black metal slats of his balcony railing.
“So, you have an idea of why she goes to that gas station? Why she drives thirty minutes when there are fifteen gas stations less than five minutes from our house?”
Caleb’s solemn face is sobering. He’s always been so jovial and happy. I just knew that one day he would be my brother-in-law. I knew it the minute I saw him and Carrie together. They met the week she started college, in her American History class. He was basically a member of my and Carrie’s little nuclear family. Until he and Carrie stopped dating.
Completely cold turkey.
They stopped calling one another, stopped seeing one another, stopped... everything. Carrie refused to talk about it. Even to me. I thought she just needed time, so I didn’t pressure her.
Why rush? We had all the time in the world.
Until we didn’t.
He nods and takes a long, deep drink from his bottle. I mindlessly run my fingertips around the back of my neck and finger the raised edges of my scar, patiently waiting.
“Carrie’s a drug addict, Ella.”
My heart stops. My breathing stops.
Drug activity became my educated hypothesis upon observing the gas station cashier and patrons all afternoon, but I refused to believe that Carrie was directly involved in that. The whole ride back into town, I marinated on a myriad of possibilities, no matter how far-fetched.
Maybe Carrie somehow got roped into being an informant for the police and she goes to the gas station to keep tabs on the comings and goings of criminals. Maybe she got recruited by an overzealous reporter to act as some undercover spy to detail what happens in the drug underworld. Hannah is a journalism major, I think, so it’s completely plausible.
But all of my fantasies dissolve into a bitter pile of acid with Caleb’s one simple statement.
“Wh—what?” My voice is raspy and dry.
He shakes his head and quickly downs the rest of his beer, anger and frustration consuming his every feature. He raises his arm over his head and throws the beer bottle from the second-story balcony like he’s pitching in the last inning of the World Series. A small scream rushes my lips as I rise forward in my seat, just in time to see the brown bottle crash into the open mouth of a large dumpster below. The explosive shatter echoes through the night, and I sigh, just glad Caleb didn’t hit some straggling pedestrian or animal.
“A drug addict. She’s addicted to drugs. Prescription drugs. Well, not legal prescriptions,” he clarifies.
“I don’t understand. Carrie doesn’t do drugs.”
Caleb glances over and looks at me with complete and utter sympathy. He stares at me like I’m nothing more than a na?ve adolescent with ‘sunshine and rainbows’ syndrome.
He should know better. Carrie should have taught him better.
I stopped believing in sunshine and rainbows a long time ago.
“She does. You name it, she does it. Oxy, Vicodin, Percocet. Hell, even fucking Ritalin.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “It can’t be. I would know. I would see the signs. We’re together all the time.” It hurts to even talk. It feels like I just drank hot tar. “How? When?”
“After her surgery.”
My mind churns. About a year and a half before she vanished, Carrie had a terrible fall from her bicycle and completely shredded her knee. She broke her patella and tore her ACL and had to have surgery with extensive physical therapy afterward. The surgery that Phillip did. Carrie, Phillip, and Dad had been out riding together with their normal cycling club when it happened.
“She got addicted to the pain medication and she can’t stop.” He tosses his hands in the air, not sure what tense to use. “Couldn’t stop.” He sighs deeply. “She wouldn’t stop.”
I find myself rubbing my scar again, lost in thought. I quickly pull my hands into my lap. Carrie’s always trying to break me of that bad habit. I’m surprised I even realized I was doing it.
“You have to be mistaken, Caleb. She had pain killers after surgery, sure, but she stopped taking them all within a month after surgery.”
“You’re wrong. That’s when the doctor stopped prescribing them. That’s not when she stopped taking them.”
I simmer on his words, letting them seep into my subconscious. Is that right? Is my sister a druggie? “Carrie doesn’t act like a drug addict. She doesn’t look all strung out and dirty and nasty. She takes care of me.”
Caleb stares at nothing in particular. “Of course, she doesn’t look like an addict.” He closes his eyes and sighs softly. “She’s fucking gorgeous.” His voice cracks with emotion, and I find myself involuntarily consoling him.
I give his forearm a gentle squeeze, giving him just a moment before I pepper him with questions. “I don’t understand. How’d she get them? She’d never ask Dad, and no one else at the practice would risk their medical license for that kind of stuff. There’s like...a thousand forms to sign where you promise not to go against doctor’s orders on your meds.”
“At first, I wasn’t sure where she got them. Or if she got them at all. I’d see her taking one, and she’d just say, ‘Oh, I had a few left in the bottle.’ That went on for months. I think her addiction started slow. Like only getting high once or twice a week. But, that one bottle was like a clown pulling scarves out of his sleeve. It just kept going and going. One night, I found a stash of pills in her purse. She had them in that tin mint container.” He points to me. “What’s the one you hate?”
“Altoids.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, I confronted her about them. She told me that she was still having pain so she got some pills from a friend. She promised she wouldn’t do it again. A few months later, I walked in on her buying pills from one of my fraternity brothers. I beat the shit out of him and told Carrie that she had to stop or I would go to your parents. Everything was good after that, or so I thought. I thought I had her back. But I was wrong. She just got better at hiding it.”
He stops and doesn’t say anything, but I can tell there’s more to the story, so I don’t interrupt. Eventually, he starts again. “There’s more, Ella.” He shakes his head. “She’s not just a user, she’s a dealer too.”
“What!”
“That’s why I broke up with her. I found out she was selling.”
“Selling? Selling to who?”
“Just some people at school,” he says with a shrug. “I’m not sure who all it was, but I do know at least to Catie, Hannah, and Dakota.”
“What! Are you serious?”
“Yep. That’s how I found out. Catie apparently couldn’t pay one day so she made a pass at me. Said she’d sleep with me in exchange for me stealing some Oxy and Ritalin from Carrie.”
“Are you kidding?”
He drags his hand over his face. “I wish I was.”
My body feels like it’s on fire. A burning, scorching mess of confusion, anger, and denial. I put the cool water bottle against my sizzling forehead and rub it around. “And the gas station is where she can get drugs?”
“I’m not for sure, but I think it is. She never let me ride out there with her, but I saw receipts in her vehicle from gas and stuff. Whenever I asked her about it, she always made up a different excuse of why she went out there.”
I close my eyes and lean my head back against the wooden slats of the chair. “I don’t see how I could’ve missed all this.” It’s Caleb’s turn to comfort me now. He reaches over and gives my knee a reassuring squeeze.
“I know you hate it when I talk about you being young, but it’s the truth, Ella. You were what, one month away from turning sixteen when she had her surgery? You were a kid. You’re not supposed to watch over your older sister. That’s what parents are for. It’s just shitty luck that you have a mom who’s more interested in the next piece of jewelry she can buy, and a dad who’s more interested in the next piece of cunt he can screw.” Caleb doesn’t hide the utter disgust in his voice. He’s always been protective of Carrie and me, and I’ve always loved him for that.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about this, Caleb? Why not tell me or Detective Marcum, at least. He needs to bring Catie, Hannah, and Dakota in. He needs to question them.”
Caleb chuckles cynically. “He’ll never get anything from them. They’ll deny everything. They don’t wanna be known as the crack whores they really are.”
“But still, why not tell Marcum about Carrie’s addiction?”
“You know what happens when people find out that the missing person they’re looking for is a drug addict. They stop looking. It’s automatically assumed that they went away on some bender. That they just walked away from life because they wanted to. You think Carrie’s face would’ve been plastered across every news outlet in America if they knew she popped pills like they came out of a PEZ dispenser? Hell no! My girl would’ve been tossed to the back page of the newspaper. Keeping this secret is the only way I can make sure that every single person in the lower forty-eight knows what Caroline Hill looks like.”
I chew my bottom lip. He’s got a point. Not that I agree with it, but it’s probably true.
He lowers his head between his hands. “We were kids too. Me and Carrie. I thought I could do it alone. I thought I could save her just by loving her. She’s the love of my life. Still is. But there’s no way I can compete with addiction.”