Lies Left Unsaid

Detective Martìnez

Locating Caitlyn's diary should have been easy, but we blew it, at least at first. Luckily for Caitlyn's sake, I wasn't the type to give up easily. I could hear the ghost of my father whispering, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again" which is exactly what I did.

Detective Brandon was nearly positive that Avery had the diary. If she had snooped through the trashcan to find her sister's pregnancy test, then it was hard to believe that she wasn't the keeper of Caitlyn's journal. The only problem was that Brandon and I messed up the timing of our interviews and it appeared that Dr. Patrick had contacted Vivian, prior to my arrival, and informed her that we were privy to their affair. This meant that I was greeted by an infuriated Vivian Coates, who was less than thrilled to see me, and already seemed to be two sheets to the wind. Through slurred words, she told me that I would no longer have any contact with her daughter and promptly shut the door in my face.

I was about to leave her home defeated, when a thought crossed my mind, a thought that Vivian wouldn't be so happy to hear aloud. I went back to the front stoop and knocked again. This time when Vivian threw open the door, she had a martini in her hand. No doubt, my arrival and the realization that her sham of a marriage was about to combust, had been the catalyst for her midday drinking binge, which she no longer felt the need to conceal.

She began to tell me off while vodka sloshed from the sides of her frosted cocktail glass. I watched as a blue cheese filled olive met its demise as it fell from the glass and was smashed under Vivian's Jimmy Choo heels. It seemed like a waste of the best part of her drink, and what I considered the only real reason to drink a martini, but if you're going to die by shoe, I suppose Jimmy Choo isn't a bad way to go.

I could tell she was about to slam the door in my face for the second time that day so I wedged my foot in the entrance to prevent her from shutting me out before I could get my two-sense in. "Is Mr. Coates home?" I asked, and that's all it took. She knew that if I couldn't get to Avery through her, then I would contact her husband, and that was the last thing she wanted right now. I told her that Caitlyn's diary had the potential to help us figure out what had happened to Caitlyn and the sooner we could figure out what had happened to her, the sooner the attention would be off of her affair with Dr. Patrick. I may have even implied that we wouldn't leak information about the affair or tell her husband, if she gave me the diary, a fact I had no doubt she would forget by the next day. That seemed to ease her vodka-riddled mind a bit, at least for the moment.

Avery did in fact have the diary, which I discovered after a bit of hypothetical arm- twisting. She was reluctant to give it up since, according to her, it was the last of Caitlyn that she had left. She told me that she didn't have her sister, but she had her thoughts, which allowed her to keep her alive in some respect. I felt bad for the kid. She knew if she gave the journal to me then she'd probably never get it back since it would, most likely, become evidence in the case. However, Avery did mention that we were unlikely to get any good leads from the diary, another part of her reasoning for not giving it to us sooner. This could have been a tactic to get me to let her keep it, but I was taking it with me regardless of its usefulness or not. I knew Brandon would have my head if I returned to the station empty handed. When I inquired as to why the diary would be useless, Avery said that Caitlyn was well aware of her snooping, so she learned early on to hide what she was doing and who she was doing it with, by coming up with code names for people and places. I couldn't blame Caitlyn there. I could see why she wanted to keep her life secret from her parents, particularly her mother. She wasn't exactly June Cleaver.

After I left with the journal, I couldn't help but look back up at Avery as she stood peering out at me from behind the lace curtains in her bedroom. I felt a tremendous sense of guilt that I couldn't bring Caitlyn back. It was clear that Avery's home life was barely tolerable with Caitlyn in it, but now that her only ally was gone, it was down right unbearable. Even though Caitlyn and Avery had fought and despised one another at times, there was one area in which they had mutual ground, where all siblings have mutual ground: their contempt for their parents and their understanding of their insane behavior. You can talk to friends about your parents, but no one really understands your family, like your family. Avery was now alone in dealing with her crazy mother, and no one, but Caitlyn, truly understood her pain.

Avery's stare held my gaze. Her eyes seemed to say, "take me with you." Leaving her in that house with her mother, as she headed towards a self-destructive drunken stupor, seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. I wanted to rescue Avery from her shitty home life and her shitty ass mother, but there wasn't time for that right now. I needed to rescue Caitlyn first. One crazy messed up Coates woman at a time was all I could handle. So I continued down the tulip-lined brick path to my squad car with a renewed determination to solve the case.

Once I was sitting in the car, out front of the Coates' home, I took a few minutes to flip through the pages of Caitlyn's journal. It was going to take a while for me to read through it all. I had no desire to hear the whiney ramblings of a lovelorn teen girl, which Brandon was most likely going to subject me to, seeing that I appeared to be more of his minion than his equal. So I ran my fingers through the pages, until I found the most recent entries. I figured I might as well get a jump-start. The pages were warped either from overuse or from tears. Most likely a bit of both. Caitlyn's handwriting was bubbly and legible. There were the occasional "i's" dotted with hearts and "y's" that looped back around on themselves. She had clearly devoted a great deal of time to writing her thoughts down on paper, which I could only hope would prove useful in the investigation.

Unfortunately, Avery was correct about Caitlyn's entries. At least it appeared that way, because the names in Caitlyn's journal didn't match any of those that we had interrogated thus far. There was one name in particular though that stuck out, not because I recognized it, but because of its repeated use on page after page. Caitlyn had written a great deal about a boy, but it wasn't anyone we knew. We had been chasing one lead after the next and hitting one dead end after another. But it looked like that was because we were barking up the wrong tree. All this time we were trying to find Caitlyn, when what we really needed to do, was locate the boy mentioned so frequently in her journal: a boy named Curtis.