I lay my phone down on the bed and lean my head back against the headboard. My head is pounding. I’m not sure if it’s from all the junk food or the stress. My therapist told me to take five deep breaths when I start feeling the anxiety rising. Maybe it’ll help my headache too.
I only remember getting to the fourth breath before sunlight is shooting through the crack in the curtains. I grab my phone and see that it’s 9:00am. I slept for almost twelve hours. And when I sit up, my neck and shoulders confirm that I slept in one position for that long too. My headache is gone though so at least there’s that.
I stretch my arms above my head and arch my back, triggering multiple cracks and pops in my neck and spine. Once I get up out of bed, I quickly take a shower, gather my stuff, and check out without really paying attention to what I’m doing. It’s so strange being by myself but I just let autopilot keep driving as I put the address into the GPS.
The next five hours are mind numbingly boring, but it helps me process the shock of it all. With no one to talk to, all I do is scan radio stations until I find one that comes in. I can’t even call Kendra because she’s locked inside her head. And I don’t want to call Viv. It’s now that I realize just how small my circle of friends really is. I hope Squeaker isn’t giving June and Earl too much trouble. I would call them to check in on her, but I know if I do, I’ll regret leaving her behind and become homesick even more.
The highway runs next to the Long Island Sound so I’m able to see water here and there on the drive. It’s so beautiful! I wish I could just stay here. If I had Squeaker with me, it wouldn’t take much to convince me to fall off the face of the earth here. If Viv didn’t know about Mike, or now the trucker, and if she didn’t have a tracker on my phone, I actually could disappear.
How did Viv work her way into owning me?
Maybe she needs to be taken out too.
That internal voice again. What is that?
I turn the music up louder to drown out any other snippets that voice has to say as I pass by the sign that reads “Welcome to Niantic.” It’s a quaint waterside town with cute shops. There’s a couple of mom-and-pop shops, a breakfast place, but not a ton of places to go, or stay at.
Ah crap! Kendra made the reservations, and I don’t know where we’re staying. Double crap!! Kendra has the company card!
I find a parking lot behind a strip of buildings and call Viv.
“Yes, Effi?”
“Hey, okay, I’m in Niantic, although you probably already know that.”
“Effi, get to the point.”
A mom holding hands with her two kids walks in front of my car. The little boy waves at me so I wave back and fake a smile. “I don’t know where Kendra had us staying and I don’t have her company card. Am I supposed to use my card the whole time? I just realized that I used my card at the hotel I just stayed at. What do you want me to do?”
Viv takes in a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll have to get her card before someone steals it from her at the facility. Yes, just use your card. I’ll reimburse you when you get back. You need to keep all of the receipts so that I can have them for my records. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.” I hope I have enough room on my credit card.
“Very well. Is that all?”
I hear Barbie in the background asking Viv a question. “Yeah, that’s it. I think I can go from here. Oh! The one attachment wouldn’t open. The one that gives tips on hunting someone.”
“Oh, right. Well, in a nutshell, just ask around until you find him.”
I smile to myself. “Got it.”
And then I hear a click, and silence. Viv really should learn the art of saying goodbye.
I pull back out onto the road and follow it into the town of East Lyme Niantic. I don’t know where Roxbury is but I’m hungry and need to find a restaurant before I go much further. I was still a mess this morning with suddenly being left on my own, that I didn’t have much of an appetite. Come to think of it, I haven’t had anything! Not even coffee!
Up ahead, I see a little restaurant named Deke’s Bagels. I bet they’d have coffee. And a bagel sounds good too. When I pull into the parking lot, I can see all the lights in the bagel shop are off. My clock reads 2:57pm. Wow, how did it get so late?
The sign on Deke’s reads that they are open from 7am to 1pm. Maybe I’ll hit that up tomorrow. But for now, I need to find another place to eat. I did see a sign for a Dunkin Donuts a way back. Since I don’t see much else for just a grab and go, I backtrack and hit up good ol’ Dunkin. I pull in through the drive-thru and wait for the person in the speaker to ask me for my order.
“Ahem, yes, oh, wait, is this on? Oh my gosh! Hi, welcome to Dunkin Donuts. May I take your order?” The voice squeaks at me through the box. I’m guessing it’s a boy going through the lovely stages of puberty.
“Hi, yes, can I get a large black coffee and a sourdough breakfast sandwich.”
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“Um, yeah… okay, will that be all?”
I can hear someone training this boy in the background. As much as I want to make it easy on him, I do need to get something to keep that isn’t the chips and candy that Kendra packed for snacks. “Can I get two bagels, sliced, with cream cheese on the side? And then I think that’s it.”
“Okay, push that button. And then ask her, oh geez, you have your finger on the microphone button.”
“Oh! Oh my gosh. Is that all, ma’am?”
I can’t help but giggle. “Yes, that’s it.”
“Uh, okay, I’ll have your total at the window.”
I pull around to the window and a boy with curly blonde hair and a zit on the end of his nose pokes his head out. He forgets to tell me the amount, but I hand him my card anyway. “Can I get a receipt, please?”
The boy points his finger at me like he’s trying to remember to do everything in a specific order. “Right!” He rips off the receipt, hands it and my card to me in a crumpled pile and then turns around and bumps into his manager. The window closes behind him, but I can just barely hear his manager telling him it’s okay and to just relax. That’s a good manager.
He opens the window again, hands me a large coffee and a bag of goodies. “Thank you and have a great day!”
“Thank YOU! Good luck!”
He grins and wobbles his head like he’s not sure he’s going to do very well. I honestly think he’ll do fine. He turns away and starts listening to his manager as I pull away to park in a spot nearby. The smell from the breakfast sandwich awakens my salivary glands and my mouth fills with saliva. It smells so good!
Once I park and pull out the sandwich, I so badly want to talk to Kendra. I wonder how she is, where did they put her, is she talking? So many thoughts race through my brain and yet one thought doesn’t race through that should have. I should have asked that kid if he knew a Blake Randolf and if so, where is he?
Mouthful after mouthful of this wonderful eggy bacony sandwich and I finally feel full enough to get my phone out to look at a picture of Blake. Viv was nice enough to send an author picture to my phone this morning. The author picture is one that we take right after the author signs the contract. It’s for our records only and it’s usually only used for times like this when we’re hunting.
Blake looks exactly how Kendra described him. He didn’t even smile in his picture, which is very odd considering he just signed with a traditional publisher. Maybe the thought of having to produce on a schedule got to him already.
Beside the slicked back hair, his grey eyes, thin lips, and straight pointy nose screams of someone who fades into their surroundings. How in the world am I going to find him? I’m good with faces but c’mon. I don’t even know how tall he is, just that he’s thin. Squirrely I believe Kendra said in her notes.
I guess the first place I should start is at his address on file. Even though it says that his house has been foreclosed, maybe he’s still there. He could be squatting. I punch in his last known address into the GPS and hit go. The GPS says I’m only ten minutes away but it’s in the direction I just came from. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to any of the roads as I was coming into Niantic. I just kept going, even though Roxbury Road was a street that I could’ve hit on my way in.
I turn out of Dunkin Donuts to go toward Roxbury Road. It’s really not that far from here. I turn right onto the road and start watching the house numbers. After a couple of minutes, I see the house on my right. The house is hidden behind some trees and other than a big house on the right of it, there aren’t a lot of neighbors around.
I pull into the driveway, and past a car that looks like it might’ve been for sale at one point but is now just rusting in place. The house reminds me of the Brady Bunch house with a giant sloped roof off to one side. The Brady Bunch was a show that my mom had on when I was a kid. It was on Nick at Nite and she thought it was better for me to watch that than some of the cartoons. All I really remember from that show was the phrase, “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.” And “Oh! My nose!”
I giggle at the memories as I pull up next to the house. The lights are off and it definitely looks abandoned. There’s a sign on the front door. I’m sure if I went up there it would read “Foreclosed.” I’m not even sure what constitutes a house getting foreclosed, but I have a feeling that it’s not good.
I turn off my car and look around. It’s pretty quiet and I don’t see anyone. Do I just go up to the door? My door makes a horrible creaking noise when I open it, which I’m sure it’s done before but when I’m in a weird place and I’m trying to be quiet, it sounds like a banshee screaming. I don’t close my door all the way because I don’t want to make any more noise. I don’t know why. It’s not like it’s out of the norm for me to be going up to a house. I just feel out of place and would rather not draw attention to myself.
The yard is overgrown and hasn’t been mowed in a while, but it looks like it could be a nice place if someone took care of it. I guess Blake didn’t pay his friend the rent that was due. Or maybe Blake moved out before the house got foreclosed. There’s really no way to know until I find him.
The front windows are huge, and someone has taped brown paper over them from the inside. I walk the rest of the way to front steps and notice that the wrought iron railing is not only peeling but it’s beginning to rust. I reach up to the door and hesitate. I came this far. I might as well knock on the door. Although the paper on the windows is a good indicator that no one lives here anymore.
My knuckles rap gently against the wooden door, barely making any noise. When no one comes to the door, I knock again, this time louder, and listen for any movement inside. A squirrel runs through the yard behind me, making me jump at the noise. When no one comes to the door, I decide that it wouldn’t hurt to look in the other windows. I walk around to the side of the house, but every window has that brown paper on it making it impossible to look inside. I’m sure that’s to keep people from breaking in and looting but it doesn’t help nosey people like me.
I debate walking around to the back of the house, but my nerves are getting the best of me, and I decide to walk back to the front. My feet crunch on rocks in the yard that used to be up near the house as the base for a garden. If it were my house, or even my friends, I would pick the rocks up and put them back, but it’s not, so I just continue up to the rocky garden near the big window.
The paint on the white windowsill that wraps the giant window crumbles under my fingertips. I try to wipe the paint onto my pants but the sweat on my fingers makes it stick too much and it acts like it’s my new skin. There’s a pokey bush near the steps and it looks like the tape on the inside of the window above the bush didn’t stick very well. I push my way between the bush and the house, feeling the thorns on the bush scrape the back of my calves. As much as I want to yell out, I also want to keep quiet. I can’t exactly sneak up on someone if I’m screaming.
The void in the paper is a little too high up for me to look through. I grab onto the wrought iron handrail that goes alongside the steps and stand on the edge of the steps with my tippy toes. I balance carefully on my toes and lean to my left, straining to see inside. The glare on the window hits right where the void is so I put my left hand on the window and press my face against the glass.
There’s someone standing there looking back at me!