She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,187

the hall was a little larger than the first but just as empty. A couple scraps of discarded paper were on the floor. I knelt down and studied the carpet, looking for the telltale indents of a former bed, maybe a dresser, but found nothing. If someone had slept here, they did so without a bed.

Stella was back in the hallway, her eyes fixed on the closed door at the end.

It had to be a bathroom.

My mind brought back the image of Cammie Brotherton’s lifeless body.

So many things could go wrong in a bathroom.

16

Former detective Terrance Stack, just Terry now, kept his old service pistol under the center cushion of the green velour couch in his living room, the one he bought back in 1973. The couch was so uncomfortable, he didn’t have to worry about anyone sitting on the ratty mess and discovering the gun. Children weren’t a worry, either. The last child who set foot in his house was now married with three kids of his own. He had no reason to store the gun out of reach and always felt there were many reasons to store the weapon within reach. At eighty-two years old, within reach became a theme in Stack’s life. He reached under the cushion and plucked out the gun.

The magnum in hand, he went back to the window.

The white van hadn’t moved.

“What the hell are you up to,” he muttered aloud.

Stack slid the gun into the front of his pants under his belt—he didn’t give a damn who saw it—and went out his front door and down the steps. He was halfway to the van when it started up and rolled down the street just fast enough to remain out of reach.

17

Stella remained still as I stepped past her, my grip tightening on the shotgun as I reached for the bathroom doorknob. I counted down from three, mouthing the words for my benefit as much as Stella’s, before twisting the handle and slamming the door open into the room.

The walls of the small bathroom were pink tile. The toilet, sink, and bathtub were pink, too. Probably original to the house back in the sixties. Like the kitchen, the drawers and two doors of the vanity were open and empty. One drawer held several elastic hair ties and a half-empty tube of toothpaste. The shower curtain slid to the side, the room empty.

I lowered the shotgun, pointing the barrel at the floor. “I can’t tell if someone left here in a hurry or never really moved in. I’ve squatted in abandoned houses before. They looked just like this. But this place feels like someone just left, like we just missed them.”

When Stella didn’t answer me, I turned.

She was no longer there.

“Stella?”

I went back down the hallway and found her in the kitchen again, peering into the refrigerator. “We have a package of hot dogs, half a bottle of Patron tequila, about a third of a loaf of bread, white, and three cans of Diet Coke. There is no mold on the bread. It looks fresh, and the hot dogs expire next week. Considering the power is on, I would have to assume they left quickly, and they left recently. In fact, I am absolutely certain they left yesterday.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

She closed the refrigerator and pointed to the calendar attached to the door with four Pizza Hut magnets. “Because all the days leading up to today are crossed out. I’m also fairly certain they like pizza—nobody has four magnets for the same store unless they are feeding some type of compulsion on a regular basis.”

“Dunk said she moved around a lot. We must have just missed her.”

Stella leaned back against the counter. “It was kind of her to leave us food. I’m famished.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“She left for a reason. What if they’re coming?”

“What if they’ve already been and gone? What if she’s coming back? I’ve been running for over four years, and I too have stayed in houses just like this. Everything I need can be found in my duffle. If I stayed in this house for a week, and I ran out for some reason, even just for an hour, that duffle would go with me. I’d leave this house as bare as it is right now. She might be coming back, and if we leave, we miss her entirely. For the first year after I left that house, I lived in constant fear. My life was ruled by ‘what