Sleep was hard to find.
Between withdrawals, having everyone here, and my heart breaking for Mrs. Statham and her niece, my mind never did fully shut off.
I tried my best to at least try to rest.
I slept in Dallas's old bed and gave Kelsea mine while Aries slept on the couch.
It's mid afternoon before Kelsea and I find our way back downstairs.
"Hey." I say weakly to Dallas where he sits just inside the back door, his head leaned back and eyes closed. "Did you get any sleep?"
"Some." He yawns and looks at me. "You?"
"A little." I half shrug a shoulder.
I'd come down a few hours ago to check on him, he'd been sitting on the back steps, leaning against the railing, his head turned while he looked into the darkness of the back yard.
I know he didn't sleep. He's not the type. I know full well he stayed up all night watching and waiting and listening.
"I'll set my tent and stuff up tonight." He says absently around another yawn.
I don't like him sleeping outside, but I know arguing is useless. I'm just happy to see him back inside after all he'd said last night. It feels good to have him here, even if a small part of the back of my mind wonders just how long he will make it before he takes off again.
"Officer Gillians called." Aries says, walking into the kitchen and stretching his arms over his head. "I've got to go in."
"Why?" I demand but he just shrugs.
"He wouldn't disclose that information over the phone with me." He tells us, mimicking Gillians's no nonsense tone. "He just said he needed me to get down there right away."
"You think it has to do with Amie?" Kelsea asks. Hearing that new name still twists a little blade into my chest.
Amie Farmer.
The latest missing girl of Faulkner Montana.
Jasmine is now old news.
She's only seventeen. She had a whole life ahead of her and now Amie is likely just like the rest of them. A story that will live on to scare people at campfires and sleepovers in the future.
Aries lingers in the doorway, looking at me like he wants to come to me, wants to hug me or something more than a wave, but in the end that's what he does.
He gives a half smile and a wave half heartedly in my direction. "I'll call when I'm leaving. Let you know what he says."
"Ok." I nod, this weird urge to go and hug him bothering me now too.
He grabs his coat off of the counter and his boots from the door and turns and leaves.
It's so quiet in the house we can hear his car crank and the tires as they make their way up the driveway and towards the main road.
I don't like the idea of him going there alone, but I also know that I can't go with him. Not with all the new speculations between the two of us.
"I should go too." Kelsea says, squeezing my arm. "I need to go by the house and get changed."
Kelsea, on the other hand, I can't let go.
"Can I come too?" I ask, praying she doesn't say no. I'm too afraid to let two people I love walk out of my sight today.
"Yeah," she nods enthusiastically, like she was hoping the same thing. "Do you..." she glances at Dallas. "Do you wanna ride with us?" She asks him. "You could grab a nap in the truck."
He seems to ponder it for a second and I see the answer playing in his features but I speak before he has the chance to turn her down.
"Yeah, Dal." I hold a hand out to him. "Come with us. You don't want to be here alone anyway."
He stares at my hand, still wanting to say no, but then he looks into the pleading look in my eyes and relents.
"Yeah, ok." He lets me pull him up from the floor and I'm still taken aback at how much of a man he is now. So tall and broad and strong. I start to pull him forward, to follow us out but he tugs it back. "I'll meet you out front."
That fear in his eyes is back and I nod slowly. "Ok."
He turns and goes out of the back door and I lock it behind him before I walk with Kelsea back out the front.
I half expect him to run, but when we get outside he's slowly making his way around the side of the house and over to Kelsea's truck.
We squeeze in and the heat feels good blowing on my freezing body.
"You need to borrow some clothes anyway." Kelsea says to me as we turn out into the main road. "You can't keep wearing sweats and pullovers in this weather."
"I don't know what you have that'll fit, but I'll try." I do my best to smile at her even as every bump in the road makes my body hurt and my stomach roll a little.
The drive out to her neighborhood is a quiet one, but I welcome it. I don't know how much more of the constant chatter of the news I can take today. I'd already heard so much while Kelsea watched it on her phone this morning when she thought I was still asleep.
They still have no clue where Amie could be. She worked her shift at the diner and had texted her mother that she was on her way home, but no one had heard from her since. She never came home. Her car is still missing. The surveillance camera outside of the diner shows her leaving, talking in the phone, and then getting into her car and driving away in the direction of her home.
The friend she'd been speaking to said they were discussing their plans to go out together in Whitefish that night. She said the call was completely normal.
They'd interviewed the girl as she cried, not wanting to accept what the whole town is thinking.
Amie Farmer, is dead.
It's not until we pull into Kelsea's driveway that I remember.
Mrs. Statham lives across the street.
Kelsea gets out and Dallas remains in the truck, his eyes closed as he leans against the window, but I stall behind Kelsea at the porch.
"I'm gonna walk over and check on her." I say and Kelsea nods.
"Ok." She says. "I'll be upstairs."
I walk across the street, maneuvering around the multiple cars parked in Mrs. Statham's driveway and I knock on the front door.
A man I don't recognize answers, his thick grey eyebrows pulling together as he looks me over. "Can I help you?" He asks and I can hear the murmur of voices coming from inside.
"I wanted to see Mrs. Statham." I tell him, shuffling my feet in the thin layer of snow that's blown up onto the porch.
"Hey, Nance," the man calls over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on me. "Someone is here to see you."
A moment later she comes around the door, looking around the man to see who it is.
"Oh, Missy." She sighs. She's dressed in pajamas and her makeup is all gone, just big bags under her red rimmed eyes. "I'm so sorry I didn't call you, I just-."
"No." I shake my head quickly and reach out to touch her arm. "Don't even worry about that, I just wanted to see if you're..." I was going to say if she was alright, but of course she isn't. "I'm so sorry to hear about Amie."
Fresh tears bloom to her eyes and her lip quivers. "T-thank you for stopping by." Her voice shakes. "I really appreciate that. We are all just trying to deal with everything, you know? It just doesn't make sense. Amie is such a sweet sweet girl, she'd never do anyone wrong, it just doesn't make sense." Her shoulders begin to shake and the man beside her pulls her over into a half hug.
"Have you heard anything at all?" I ask carefully, not wanting to push.
"Only what the police have released." She sniffles. "Her parents are just beside themselves. My sister won't leave Amie's room. She just keeps saying she knows she's gone but I'm holding onto my faith that they will find her."
"Me too." I say, even though the lie sours on my tongue. "I'm so sorry you're going through this." I add to make the lie feel less heavy. At least the second half is true.
"Thank you for coming by." The man says, pulling her back away from the door with him.
"Of course." I say, knowing I'm being dismissed. I turn to go but she calls me back.
"Wait just a second." She holds a tissue up to her eyes and blots under them. "Jeff, go on in, I'll be right behind you." She steps out onto the porch and let's the door close behind her. "I need to ask you something." She tells me seriously. "I was gonna bring it up at dinner, but...you know."
"Yeah, anything." I nod, the way she looks so broken and feeble makes me feel such a thick wave of sympathy it makes me sway on my feet.
"First, I want to say I'm not mad about it, ok? I'm not upset or trying to accuse you."
Oh no.
My stomach sinks impossibly lower. She is finally going to confront me about stealing her pills.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Statham." I say weakly, looking at the ground because I cannot face my guilt.
"Honey," she sighs. "It's ok, I'm not upset." She says again. "I just wish you would have told me you didn't feel comfortable with someone else having keys. I would have understood that, dear, with everything you've been through."
I blink back up at her, my forehead wrinkling. "I'm sorry," I place a hand to my temple and rub. "I'm not sure what you mean."
Now she returns my look of confusion.
"My spare set of keys to your place?" She says, lifting a brow. "I went to go through the file on your place and I noticed the keys were missing." She explains. "I thought maybe you had...well...on the day you came over for lunch?"
She thinks I stole keys to my own house from her? Honestly, the idea that she even had a spare set didn't even register to me before now. Of course it makes sense that she would, but I wouldn't have a reason to take them.
"I didn't..." I pause. "I didn't take any keys." I tell her.
She purses her lips and frowns. "Ok." She says after a moment. "I'll look again. Maybe I misplaced them or they fell into the bottom of the drawer. I just assumed..."
She just assumed I'd stolen them because I'd stolen from her already.
"I'm sorry." I shake my head in shame. "I didn't take those." I can't say I didn't take anything because we both know that would be a lie.
She purses her lips again and tries to smile. "I should get back inside."
"Right." I nod. "I really do hope you find Amie."
"We will, dear." She smiles softly as she turns. "We have to keep the faith."
I stand on her porch and watch her close the door behind her.
I used to admire people who had faith in something. People that could believe beyond all odds that everything has reason and that if they have enough faith they can ensure good will come.
But watching Mrs. Statham walk away with tears in her eyes, it just makes me sad. Sad to know she's putting faith in something that will never happen. Her faith is just keeping her blinded for longer before the new blade of the awful truth cuts her down again.
I cross the street again, glancing at the truck to see Dallas still asleep against the passenger side and walk into Kelsea's house.
It's just as weird as before. Being in a house that is now hers but that once belonged to people I knew.
I follow the sounds of rustling through things up the stairs and into a spare bedroom where Kelsea is rummaging through a closet.
"I found a few things that might fit." She says, pulling another sweater out to toss into the pile she's started on the floor. "What's wrong with you face?" She asks when she really looks at me.
"Mrs. Statham's spare set of keys to my house is missing." I say, finally letting that part of the information settle. "She thought I'd taken them but it wasn't me, so that means..."
I shrug a helpless shoulder and then cross to pull one of the heavy black coats of off the ground to wrap around my body.
"So you might not have been going crazy thinking someone had been inside." She says lightly, like we aren't discussing the very real possibility that someone out there has the keys to my house. Has been inside. Has been messing with me.
Just thinking it is one thing, but to really understand that my delusions may not have been delusions at all? That shit is scary.
"Someone has been there while I'm there." I say, a chill running up my back. "Someone has been watching me." My skin crawls. Someone who is twisted up enough to be killing girls, and doing it just like my father, has been close to me. In my home while I slept. "Dallas said this is personal, but I don't think even he realized just how personal this is."
"Should we even go back there?" Kelsea asks. "We could stay here."
"What if that's what they want?" I muse, turning it over in my mind. "The messages to leave, trying to scare me? What if they needed me to not be in the house?"
Kelsea's eyebrows lift. "It would be pretty hard to start dropping bodies off when you're home." She says. "But then...Ok, I don't mean this to sound morbid or whatever but if this person has been getting that close to you, why aren't they killing you?"
The thought has already crossed my mind.
"I really don't know." I shake, rubbing my aching temples. "It's hard to try to find any reason in this whole thing?"
"So we are going back?" She asks, a small shiver in her tone even as she stands tall and confident.
"I feel like if they want me to go, then that's the last thing I should do." I say after a moment. If me being here somehow throws a wrench into this psycho's plans, then I'm all for it. If I can be a disruption to whatever this sick scheme is, I might just be able to slow them down.
That, or they'll just kill me too.