The Things We Couldn't Forget

Chapter 14.

We make the drive into town in uncomfortable silence. My mind is racing and I know as much as she doesn't want to believe me, Kelsea's eyes tell it all.

She'd tried to explain it away, to make sense of this senseless act. She wants to believe things aren't as bad as they seem and part of me is jealous of that.

I'm jealous that she has such a hard time wrapping her head around such malice because it means she has never had to live through it before.

Sure, crime in New York is awful. There are countless stacks of unsolved homicides and muggings and all sorts of other depravity, but something about serial offenders just hits different.

It stirs a fear in us and a desire to give reason to the things that cannot often be explained.

The whole world is obsessed with them. Movie after movie, podcasts, Netflix series, books. They all try to explore the mind of these people who must be so different so other. Like they're alien to us.

Because to so many, that's true.

It's something to study and gossip about. It's something that draws the attention of even the most careless minds.

It is an entirely different experience for those of us who live so closely to these unexplainable, inexcusable people.

For us, the why is such a different kind of cross to carry.

Growing up I'd heard all about Bundy, Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, The Golden State Killer. They were the monsters we would tell stories about at sleepovers, trying to scare each other. I'd gone to movies and sat in theaters on the edge of my seat watching movies of fictionalized versions of these kinds of people.

You never think that it can happen to you. Not to your friends. Not in your town.

Until you live through it, the spectacle is just that. Living nightmares that took place in distant places, long ago.

They don't happen here and now and to you.

"We're here." Kelsea breaks the silence and my train of torturous thought.

She pulls her truck off onto the side of the road outside of a large gated lot. We get out and I follow her into the small dimly lit office building where a short bald man smokes a cigarette behind the counter, a thin plexiglass separating his office from the tiny lobby with three folding chairs and a small tv in the corner set to the news.

I do my best not to look at it, though the man's eyes seem transfixed on whatever they're covering right now.

"Hey," I say, getting his attention and he moves his eyes to me, annoyed. He puts out his cigarettes in the overflowing ashtray to his right and raises his brows at me expectantly. "I'm here to pick up my car?" I don't know why it comes out as a question. "The police had it towed here."

"Name?" He's still disinterested.

"Missouri Jacobs." I say lowly, something I've been in a habit of doing for a long time now, desperate not to draw attention.

"Alright." He huffs, patting his large belly. "I'll ring em and let them know you're here to pick up." He says, reaching for the phone beside him. "They'll pull it around to the gate. But so you know, backseat upholstery and the lining of the trunk was removed, I don't got no liability on that. It's the way it came."

Fuck.

I shutter to think how much this rental is going to cost me now that it's not only wrecked but ruined.

An even worse thought than the money I'll now owe, is what he said. The police removed the backseat and the lining of the trunk? The only reason they'd do that is if they really thought they were going to find something.