She Once Vanished, page 14
“I don’t know. Just let me take care of Kenzie first. You already know what happened. Signed statements can wait a day or two.”
“Your video extends out to the curb, doesn’t it?” one of the security company guards asked. “In case someone messes with your vehicles?”
“Yes.”
“So you have video of what happened.”
“Uh… yeah, I guess we do. Can you run a copy for the police?”
“I sure can. If I have your verbal password?”
Zachary gave it to him, and the guard nodded. “I’ll do that now.”
28
The various cops and guards filed out of the house. Zachary escorted the cops and security guys out. He returned to Kenzie, who was still crying, though she had lowered her hands from her face.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m never this emotional. I just… nothing happened. There’s nothing to cry about. But I can’t stop myself. I just feel like…” She broke off, shaking her head, and sobbed.
Zachary could identify with her better than she probably realized. How many times had he lost control in the throes of a panic attack, of a compulsion he couldn’t resist, or some other reaction that was beyond his control?
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “Just give yourself some time. Trying to control it… will just make things worse.”
“What could be worse than this?” Kenzie demanded, again giving way to loud sobs.
“Do you want to lie down? We can cuddle. I can get you a cold drink. It really helps.”
“I don’t want anything, just to feel better. How can I not be safe in my own home? How can they just walk up to me, my house, my car, and take over? Isn’t there any way to protect ourselves? We’ve got the security system, but that doesn’t stop anyone from just walking up to me anywhere and…”
Zachary swallowed. He, too, had been snatched, although he had been drugged and didn’t remember the details clearly. Maybe that had been a blessing, so that his brain didn’t know what to be afraid of, wasn’t triggered by similar circumstances. He already had enough other triggers.
“It’s going to take some time,” Zachary tried to assure her.
“They can just walk up to my house and take me!” Kenzie shouted at the top of her lungs. The cops outside the house heard her through the closed windows and heads turned toward them. Zachary ignored them.
“I’m going to call Dr. B,” he told her.
It wasn’t a question. Zachary wasn’t asking Kenzie for permission or for her opinion. Kenzie needed someone to get her through this, and Zachary wasn’t a therapist. He was more damaged than she was, and the last thing she needed was for him to have a meltdown or to scream back in her face. It was all he could do to hold himself together when faced with screamed, unreasonable demands and accusations. His body wanted to react. Fight or flight. He couldn’t stand there and take it without reacting.
Kenzie didn’t stalk out of the room and slam the bedroom door. She just cried, as heartbreakingly as if he had screamed at her. Zachary removed himself from the room. As much as he wanted to hold her and soothe the sobs away, he couldn’t help her now.
Dr. Boyle answered after several rings. “Zachary. How can I help you?”
“There’s been… you know when Kenzie was kidnapped? How she told us it had happened? It’s happened again, they pulled up in a white van. Guys in balaclavas got out to grab her—”
“Zachary! She was kidnapped again?”
“No. They didn’t get her. I went out there. The security alarm. The police. They took off again. She’s safe, but…”
“Oh, dear. Where are you? The hospital?”
“No, at home. Do you think… I didn’t know whether to take her to the hospital. I don’t know if she would go. She wanted me to go for X-rays, but I think she would object if I said that she needed to be admitted. And I don’t know if she does. She’s just… upset. And it’s perfectly normal to be upset after something like that, right?”
“Of course. Give me your address so I don’t have to dig it out of the files. I’ll come right over.”
Zachary told Detective Cameron to let the doctor through when she arrived. Then he sat with Kenzie on the couch, rubbed her back, and tried to keep her calm until Dr. Boyle could get there. How many times had she comforted him during a panic attack or flashback? She always provided a comforting hand, a soothing voice, and the anchoring that he needed to get back on a stable footing. Now, it was his turn to try to give Kenzie some of that back.
Roxboro was a small town, so it did not take Dr. B long to get there. Cameron escorted her to the door so she didn’t have to fight her way through the cops. Zachary was waiting in the doorway and let her in before re-arming the security alarm. She watched him, and then, when he had checked the alarm a couple of times to make sure it was properly armed, he motioned for her to go ahead of him to the living room.
The therapist looked around the room. She had never been to the house before. She sat down on the couch, not touching Kenzie.
“Kenzie? It’s Dr. Boyle. How are you doing?”
Predictably, Kenzie was too upset to answer her, but continued to sob. She did raise her head long enough to reach out and touch Dr. B’s leg to acknowledge she was there, but nothing escaped her mouth except sobs.
Zachary hovered in the doorway to the living room, unsure where he should be.
“We’re probably going to be a while,” Dr. B told him. “I can come find you if I need you. Is there something you could do to occupy yourself?”
Zachary nodded. He stepped closer to grab his laptop. “I’ll be in the bedroom. No, the office. Better if I work at the desk. And then, if she wants to lie down, I’m out of the way.”
Dr. Boyle nodded. “That sounds good. I imagine she’ll be very tired and she might want to.”
With how tired Zachary was feeling, he agreed. He wouldn’t mind lying down himself, even though he rarely napped during the day. There was a spare bedroom; if Kenzie wanted her space, Zachary might just stretch out in there in the next hour or two. He had taken painkillers for his ribs, but every breath he took caused a deep, burning pain.
“Are you okay?” Dr. Boyle asked. “I can understand why Kenzie wanted you to go to the hospital. You look like you took quite a beating.”
“I’m okay. It’s Kenzie I’m worried about. She’s the one who needs support.”
“We all need support, and you’ve gone through an ordeal too. You and I will talk later.”
Zachary nodded. He retreated to the home office at the end of the hall and set up there.
He didn’t try to listen in on Kenzie and the therapist. He wanted to know that she was okay and that Dr. B could help her calm down and move forward from the attempted kidnapping, but he knew that Kenzie needed space. Away from him.
If he were in the room, he would feel compelled to answer Dr. B’s questions in Kenzie’s place, explain all of what had happened, and put his own spin on what Kenzie was feeling instead of just waiting for her to speak up for herself. But stepping in to explain things for her would not be helpful. And if she wanted to vent about Zachary, about what he had or hadn’t done during the attack or afterward, he should be out of the way so that she could talk openly and not worry that he would overhear and get upset about her feelings.
He needed something to occupy his time. Dr. B had said it might take a while, and he didn’t know whether that time would be measured in minutes or in hours. Or whether they would need to go to the hospital eventually. As hard as it was for Zachary to know when he needed to admit himself to the hospital, it was even more challenging to know what someone else’s emotional needs were. Kenzie had never been hospitalized for mental health issues. He had always been the one who had needed the extra support.
If Kenzie were admitted to the hospital, Zachary would have to call Lisa to explain what had happened, and that was going to be a difficult conversation.
29
Zachary opened his computer. He didn’t go to his email inbox or social networks. If he started on one of those apps, he would just scroll mindlessly, thinking about the attack and Kenzie and feeding his own anxiety.
He needed a project that he could really dig into and lose himself in, something that would require all his concentration.
He pulled up the map that he’d been working on for Elysse. What he needed to focus on was each location she had definitely been seen at. He would define that as five sightings in a small town or isolated setting or ten sightings in a big city, no matter where they were, whether they were on the route he expected Elysse to take or not. The police had been blinded by their investigative bias, focusing solely on sightings that were on the route from Vermont to New York. They had been taken entirely off guard when Elysse had shown up in the Grand Canyon, caught flat-footed looking for her on the other side of the country.
If he could find definitive proof that she had been in a place, it didn’t matter whether it matched his expectations or not. Currently, no one knew where she had been. They assumed she had taken a direct route from Vermont to the Grand Canyon, but that wasn’t what the preliminary clusters seemed to indicate. Elysse had the money to go wherever she wanted to, by whatever means she wanted to. She could have flown to Paris before returning to the Grand Canyon. Zachary didn’t know whether she’d been driving her own car when she was discovered. Even if she had, someone else could have driven it there. Elysse and her car might have taken completely different routes to get there. He couldn’t make any assumptions. He was looking for proof of where she had been.
He started working through the locations witnesses said they had seen her at. He would rate police tips as the most likely genuine sightings, and then search for social media posts that confirmed she had been in a particular location. With everyone carrying a camera in their pocket, there was a good chance that wherever she had been, someone had taken a picture of her.
In smaller towns, he searched for hotels and noted them down with their phone numbers. He would call to find out whether Elysse had been checked in there. See whether they had any video surveillance footage that he could review. He wouldn’t say he was looking for Elysse, of course. He would come up with a good cover story. But what he would be looking for was video confirming that Elysse had been there.
Where had she been? Had she been by herself or with someone? If she was traveling alone, had she been stalked? At some point, had it changed from a voluntary disappearance to an abduction? She might have flounced off after the argument with Dain, still planning to be at her next shoot, but then something had happened to prevent her.
She might even have gone missing on purpose, wanting to draw attention to herself and to get her fans worked up. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. As long as her fans didn’t figure out that it had been on purpose, they would welcome her back with open arms and be even more enthusiastic followers in the future.
If Elysse had been abducted or coerced in some way, why had she not reported that to her fans? Why hadn’t she said anything about it when she was interviewed on TV? To the police? To Dain or Mike? Instead, she had just withdrawn, not even posting anything online after that. Unless she had created new social accounts under different names and email addresses, Elysse had not posted a single thing since her disappearance. Not an “I’m back” post, “Sorry I was out of touch,” or even a post saying that she would not be participating in social media anymore and was taking her life in another direction.
He started to group the pictures he found online according to location. Some of them were extremely grainy, low-light, or taken from the wrong angle so that her face could not be seen. But a few were clear and appeared to show somewhere she had been. Sometimes, she was wearing the same clothing in pictures taken by different fans, which increased the likelihood that it was her. He had a fairly good facial recognition app that he used to search internet pictures and profiles, but the fan photos were rarely good enough quality to use the app on. It returned percentages like “10% match,” indicating that the results were not reliable.
He worked away at it, going down the list of locations in order of the number of police tips. He switched pin colors on his virtual map, starting to drop blue pins where he had pictures or video that he considered good enough to prove Elysse had been at the location.
30
“Zachary?”
Zachary pulled himself away from the project and looked around. He had been so completely immersed in the job that he had forgotten where he was. In the office. Waiting for Dr. B to let him know how Kenzie was doing and what their next step was. And now she was in the doorway, waiting for him to orient himself and switch his focus to the here and now.
“Sorry, Dr. B. I lost track of time… how is Kenzie?”
She glanced around the office, but there wasn’t a good place for her to sit down to chat. “Do you want to meet in the living room or kitchen?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” He stood up quickly, and the resulting knife of pain from his ribs and sternum had him gasping for breath and holding on to the desk to keep from keeling over. He’d forgotten his injuries while sitting nearly motionless in the chair, hyperfocused on his project.
“Are you all right?” The doctor was at his side, touching his arm, ready to provide support or to help him sit back down again.
Zachary took a slow, shallow breath, waiting for the pain to subside enough for him to move again. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Fine?” she repeated with clear disapproval.
One of the rules he and Kenzie had agreed to follow, both in therapy and in their personal communications, was never to say that they were fine or any other polite social reply to brush off the question. His answer needed to be thoughtful and honest. If he didn’t want to be honest about his feelings, then an “I don’t want to talk about it” was acceptable. But not saying he was good when he was not.
“I’m… pretty sore,” he revised. “Physically. I forgot for a minute and moved too fast. If I take it easy, I will be—if I take it easy, it won’t hurt so much. I want to sit down and talk about how Kenzie is doing.”
Dr. Boyle kept her hand on his arm, escorting him toward the door and then letting go when they arrived at the hallway. She let him walk ahead of her, watching carefully. He could choose the couch, which would be more comfortable but more difficult to get back up from. Or he could choose a kitchen chair, which would be supportive and easier to get up from when they were done.
The kitchen was a good choice. Zachary got them each a glass of water before beginning and started brewing a new pot of coffee. He looked sideways at the clock, totally disoriented about the time of day, and saw that it was late in the evening. Maybe too late to offer guests coffee.
“Thank you.” Dr. B took a sip of the water. “Talking, especially when there is lots of emotion involved, is thirsty work.”
“Kenzie is lying down?” Zachary asked. It was a simple conclusion based on the fact that she wasn’t in the living room or kitchen. And he hadn’t heard her leave the house. Granted, he had been deep into his research project but thought he would have heard the door open. It would have been concerning enough for his unconscious brain to send a warning to his consciousness that someone was coming or going.
“Yes. Hopefully, a few hours of sleep will help Kenzie to recover more quickly.”
“Is she okay? You don’t think she needs to go to the hospital?”
“I think she will fare better here, where everything is familiar, and she doesn’t have people hovering over her. She needs some time to process what happened.” Dr. Boyle tapped the side of her glass lightly as she thought. “The negative of staying here is, of course, that this is where both the abduction and today’s attempted abduction occurred. Will she have negative associations with it? Will being here make her more anxious rather than less? It may be a while before we have the answers to those questions.”
“It’s Kenzie’s house… I hope she doesn’t… I wouldn’t want her to have to move somewhere else because of what happened here. Because she doesn’t feel safe.”
“How about you? Do you feel safe here?”
It was a good question, because Zachary had been attacked there more than once. Not just outside on the street, but inside the house. A break-in where he was assaulted. A letter bomb. And those were not the only incidents. But he still felt like it was home. He didn’t like to think of moving.
He had moved so many times as a child that he tended to get overly attached to places. Kenzie would have to initiate a move because he didn’t want to even consider it.
“I feel safe here,” he told Dr. B. “Mostly. We’ve got a security alarm.”
“That didn’t help you today. That doesn’t help when something happens outside the house.”
Was she trying to make him more anxious?
“It did help today. I hit the panic button and the security company arrived in minutes. They have a very fast response time.”
“But you were the one who had to intervene physically. What would have happened if they’d been a little longer?”
“I don’t know.” Zachary shook his head slowly, thinking back on it again. “I don’t know if… I don’t know how committed they were to snatching her… Maybe it was just intended to scare her.”
“Really.” Dr. Boyle studied him, small frown lines appearing between her brows. “Is that what you really think, or is it something you made up to make yourself feel better?”
Zachary sipped his water and thought about it. Was he just trying to make himself feel better about it? Telling himself that they weren’t really in danger and the Russians didn’t really want to snatch Kenzie, but had just been sending a warning to her father? Seeing how Walter would respond?
