Twilight: But it's a Thriller and I Never Read Twilight

Chapter 50: There is No Happy Ending

On the day Bella Swan was supposed to turn nineteen, Charlie got a call from one of the folks that worked out at the clinic in Forks. They said Carlisle Cullen hadn't come to work in a few days and they were worried about him. Charlie didn't bring anyone out with him to the Cullen house, although he imagined he should have. The last time he'd been out there, nearly a year ago, hadn't gone well, and he hated to knock on their door. At the very least, he thought he would just go over and find Carlisle's wife at the door to tell him Carlisle had a bad flu and needed to stay home for a few days. That was how most of these check in calls went.

When he pulled up the long driveway to the house, however, he found all the cars littered with fall leaves, like they hadn't been driven in days and at the top of the steps, the door was slightly ajar. Charlie hesitated in his police cruiser for a moment. He was supposed to call in for back up if anything seemed out of place, but he held onto his radio, unsure if this could be counted. In any sense, he didn't want to call for back up, not out here, not with this family. If anything came of this, he didn't want Bella to be caught in the middle of it.

She hadn't talked to him since the wedding, and he had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach that grew with every day he didn't hear from her. He'd wished she would have waited to get married, but there had been no argument to be made, not after she ran off with him.

Charlie had tried everything he could think of to get her back. He tried to talk to Carlisle, get him to invite him over, just so he could talk this out with Bella, but Carlisle refused. He hired a lawyer to try and invoke his right as a guardian, but Bella was eighteen and out of the blue, the lawyer dropped the case and left town. He couldn't get a word about the Cullens from anyone else in town. The only thing people would say was that they were an odd, but nice family. Jacob was the worst of them.

Charlie knew he'd gone to the Cullen house after Bella had run away from home. He knew that Jacob tried to confront her and bring her home, but when he ended up in the hospital with bones broken in ways Charlie didn't think possible, he wouldn't say anything about it. It would have been so easy if Jacob just incriminated Edward or one of the other Cullens. He would have had something then, but instead, he just got more cryptic shit.

Charlie had grown so frustrated with all of it that when Bella had come back to him and asked him to be in her wedding, he'd forgotten all his points about marrying young and college and futures. He'd just wanted to see her again.

And then she was gone, like she'd never been in his life in the first place. All he had to prove that she'd been part of his life was old pictures, and her torn up bedspread, and lost sleep. So as Charlie held his radio and watched the Cullen house door swing a little on its hinges to the wind, he wanted to see it for himself before anyone else got to the scene.

Getting out of his car, he checked his taser and his gun before he climbed up the front steps and pushed the door inward. The first thing that greeted him was the smell. The entry way smelled like hot rotting garbage and Charlie pulled up his shirt to cover his nose as he stepped into the room.

The white expanse of the living room was still and empty as Charlie looked around, but as he crossed beside the couch, he nearly fell back at the sight of what was laid there. A corpse, rotting and oozing thick black juices onto the couch and floor laid stretched out. The head was missing and all that was left was a black stain on the couch where it should have been. Bits and pieces hung out over the furniture, rotten mush. The dried blood was not brown, but black and Charlie gagged at the site of it.

"What the sweet fuck is this?" he demanded as he looked over the body. If it belonged to one of the Cullens, he didn't know which one. It wasn't rotting like a normal corpse would have. The skin was pale white, like paper and thick black veins covered the skin, poking through. Charlie would have guessed that some kind of poison had killed him if it wasn't for the missing head.