Chapter Seven Kaitlyn
Chapter Seven
Kaitlyn
Hi, this is Kaitlyn’s Reade, Amanda’s sister. I haven’t been able to reach her and I’m worried. Hoping you might know where she is?
After three days with no response, she tried again.
Hi. Checking in again. Please contact me when you get this.
Again, nothing. She called; it went straight to voicemail.
That uneasy feeling she’d experienced sitting in Amanda’s empty apartment came creeping back.
Something wasn’t right. Even if this Townsend guy had broken up with Amanda—which, given her sister’s track record, was not unlikely—wouldn’t a decent person at least respond to Kaitlyn saying he had no information?
His silence felt significant. Kaitlyn’s gut told her this man held answers to explain her sister’s disappearance.
And if he wasn’t going to respond to her messages, she was just going to have to take a different tack.
On LinkedIn, Kaitlyn searched for St. Augustine alumni from Townsend’s year still living in Austin, and after poring over dozens of profiles, she finally found William Dupont, a Southwestern University grad who worked as an associate at Rutland & Wiles, a rival firm to the one she worked for.
Someone she could conceivably reach out to for networking purposes.
It was too perfect. After confirming that William’s connections on LinkedIn included Townsend Fuller, Kaitlyn sent him a message:
Hi William! I’m a paralegal at Stevenson Ellis who’s considering making the move to Rutland. I would love to hear from a fellow SU grad about the office culture there. Would you be open to meeting for coffee?
He’d responded within a few hours. Please, call me Will, he wrote. I’d be happy to grab coffee and chat. Go Pirates!
Kaitlyn wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of rendezvousing with a stranger, but she felt calmer once they arranged to meet at Galaxy Cafe in Clarksville. It was a safe, neutral location. What was this guy going to do—murder her in broad daylight?
After the obligatory small talk about their respective firms, Kaitlyn brought the conversation around to Townsend as casually as she could.
“By the way, I think we know someone in common. Townsend Fuller?”
Will’s eyebrows raised at the mention of his old classmate. “Oh, sure. How do you know him?”
“My sister is dating him, I think,” she said carefully. “Or, at least, was dating him. I’m protective. I want to know if he’s a good guy.”
“A good guy?” Will laughed like he’s just remembered an inside joke. “I don’t know about a good guy, but he’s definitely a legend.”
Leaning back in the booth, Will proceeded to share stories about his old St. Augustine classmate, told with a blend of amusement and awe.
He recounted the time Townsend won class treasurer and then didn’t show up for a single officer meeting, and the time he threw balloons filled with piss at the beekeeping club, and the time he hooked up with three different girls during the two-day retreat before junior year.
After twenty minutes of this, Kaitlyn resigned herself to the fact that the only intel on Townsend she was going to get from this guy was a greatest hits of dickish antics.
But then, as she debated how best to extricate herself from the conversation, Will unexpectedly shared a story that caught her interest.
“I remember there was this big house party in Barton Creek where he and all his friends lived. Some neighbor approached the house and threatened to call the cops, so Townsend shot at him with a paintball gun from an upstairs window until the guy finally left. Apparently, the guy suffered a corneal abrasion or something from one of the paintballs and showed up on the evening news, wearing an eye patch, complaining about the out-of-control parties in the neighborhood. Townsend wore a Pirates of the Caribbean T-shirt under his uniform the next day.”
Will laughed, but the story didn’t sit right with Kaitlyn. “He blinded a guy?”
“He, like, scratched his cornea. I’m sure the guy was fine.” Will shrugged. “But I wasn’t actually there. I just heard about it later. Everyone did.”
“And everyone thought it was funny that he shot a guy?”
“It was a paintball gun. It wasn’t a big deal.” Will smiled in a way that said Can’t you take a joke?
The image stayed with Kaitlyn for the rest of the day.
She pictured the nosy neighbor writhing in pain, hand clutched to his face.
A raw, bloody eye socket. Townsend standing in the window, finger still on the trigger, a look of cold amusement on his face.
Nothing Will had said about Townsend was outright incriminating in regard to his relationship with Amanda, but there was just something about his description of the guy that made Kaitlyn’s skin crawl.
I’ll give it one more week, she told herself on the drive home.
Seven days came and went with no word from Amanda and no word from Townsend Fuller. Kaitlyn was forced to admit she was in over her head. She looked up the number for the Austin Police Department, hands shaking as she dialed.
“Hello? My name is Kaitlyn Reade. I need to report a missing person.”
Riding the elevator up to the Stevenson Ellis office on Monday morning, Kaitlyn thinks about how infuriating it is, the fact that the world does not stop moving just because your own life has come to a standstill.
Two women to her right chatter about the latest episode of some HBO true crime series.
Fuck your TV drama, she wants to tell them.
My sister is missing—like, real-life missing—and no one even gives a shit.
When she called to report Amanda missing, the officers had assured Kaitlyn they’d investigate, including looking into her sister’s last known boyfriend, Townsend Fuller.
But when she called back a few days later, they claimed he’d already been cleared.
“We spoke to him, ma’am,” a woman who introduced herself as Detective Harris said.
“He’s not a suspect at this time.” She thought she was putting Kaitlyn at ease by saying this, but she thought wrong.
“How can that be?” Kaitlyn argued. “I saw his car outside of Amanda’s apartment.”
From the information database she paid for, Kaitlyn knew that Townsend Fuller was the registered owner of a silver BMW Z4 Roadster.
When she googled the make and model, an image of a sporty coupe convertible popped on her screen and sparked a memory.
The night of her disaster date with the data science professor at Latchkey, when she passed by Amanda’s apartment building without stopping in, she spotted a car that looked just like it.
She remembered it barreling through a stop sign right as she stepped into the crosswalk, nearly hitting her in the process.
It had to be the same one, right? It had to mean something.
Kaitlyn had spent more time than she cared to admit hovering in the vicinity of Townsend’s condo building, waiting to catch a glimpse of the roadster to confirm her theory.
One Saturday in mid-June, she’d seen it pull into the circular drive.
For a moment, she thought about getting out and confronting him right then and there, but she could see there was a woman in the passenger seat with him, and Kaitlyn hadn’t liked the idea of having an audience.
“We asked him about that night,” Harris had told Kaitlyn. “You thought you saw his car outside of Amanda’s place around eleven p.m. on May eighteenth? It turns out he was just getting takeout from a nearby restaurant.”
How convenient for him, Kaitlyn had wanted to say.
But she simply said thank you and asked them to please keep her informed.
It wouldn’t do her any good to make enemies of the detectives working on the case.
Not when she could tell they already thought she was just being hysterical.
Already, they’d confirmed that Amanda wasn’t abroad (they’d checked flight records) and wasn’t traveling by car (her white Honda Accord was sitting in her building’s parking lot).
She could be traveling with friends or hitchhiking, they said.
She could be totally fine. After all, wasn’t this behavior pretty on-brand for her?
Wasn’t that why Kaitlyn waited three months to report her own sister missing?
They won’t come out and say it, but she knows what the police believe, because it was what she herself once believed: that the only danger Amanda is in is the danger she poses to herself.
Over the years, Amanda has let Kaitlyn down in a hundred different ways.
There was that time she skipped Kaitlyn’s college graduation (without apology) to attend the Hangout Music Festival in Alabama instead.
And there was that time she missed their family Christmas (without explanation) only to later post pictures from a nightclub in Miami.
But flakiness can’t explain the aroma of bleach permeating Amanda’s empty apartment or her Instagram grid, not updated since March.
It can’t explain why she didn’t show up to their father’s grave for his birthday, like she’d promised she would.
The last brunch they shared in February ended with regretful words and hurt feelings, but still, the sisters had made a vow: They would visit Dad’s gravesite on his sixtieth birthday in June, and together, they would celebrate the milestone he’d never reach.
That day was a week ago, and though Kaitlyn showed up at the cemetery—wishing, hoping, praying that her sister would prove her wrong—Amanda did not.
But when she shared this story with the police (which felt, in her mind, like irrefutable evidence of something gone very wrong), they weren’t as convinced.
“You’re worried because she didn’t attend your dad’s birthday?” they asked. “But he’s deceased?”