Confessions of a Murder Suspect

CONFESSION

I clicked off the TV just in time. Those four words were enough. Too much.

The girl was found.

Had I been lost?

Malcolm and Maud would have told the police that I was lost, I’m sure. But something told me I wasn’t. My mind was starting to feel like it was emerging from a fog, allowing me to trust something beyond the facts stored in my conscious mind. It was starting to allow me to trust my gut.

And this is the truth my gut told me.

I’d been found, but I hadn’t been lost, and I hadn’t been alone.

I closed my eyes and lay down on the couch. I saw the ghostly face in my mind again, and this time I wasn’t scared of it. This time I didn’t pass out. I concentrated on it.

His face wasn’t clear enough yet, and I couldn’t tell how old he was. But I could remember now how desperately I had wanted to be with him. Passionately, you might even say. I think I would have done anything for him to help me get out of the prison. The prison that was my life.

We were escaping.

He had promised me freedom. And I’d tasted it—I could almost taste it now. I had flashes of his fingers interlacing with mine. Leaving under cover of dark. Looking at the stars together. Spooning together in the backseat of his car. Laughing as he tried to educate me about all the pop music on his iPod, and then enjoying long, peaceful stretches of classical music when I switched over to satellite radio. We even started compiling a sound track for our getaway.

It seemed so easy. So perfect.

We were headed for Canada, and we got as far as a McDonald’s in northern New York State, where we stopped for breakfast at dawn, snuggling into the same side of a booth. I’d never been to a McDonald’s in my life. I remember being happy at the thought of how enraged Malcolm would be to see me there, and thinking I had the whole world—the real world—ahead of me.

Until the place was stormed by a bunch of thugs.

I had made two mistakes: not being a hundred percent aware of my surroundings at all times, like I usually was, and seating myself on the outside edge of the booth. So that when they came for me, I was easily yanked out.

In my mind’s eye, I can’t see his face as I was being torn away from him forever. But I can feel his arm around my waist and his hand clutching at my sweater to hold me to him. I can hear his voice shouting: Tandy, they can’t do this. They can’t keep you away from me. They can’t keep you in a cage. Don’t let them.

And his last words: I’ll come back for you.

But he never did.

My last sight of him was a view of his hunched-over back as he was shoved into an Escalade. And as I screamed his name and tried to fight off my captors, I saw who was supervising the whole operation from just a few paces away: Uncle Peter.

That’s when I realized Malcolm and Maud had been tracking me.

Like a dog with a chip, penned in by an electric fence.