#a guy a bit older than me disappeared in my neighborhood 45 days ago and they have found nothing | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jackfollmanwriter-blog · 6 years ago

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Dead Children’s Society

Everyone knew everyone else’s story, yet we still kept meeting each and every Wednesday night at 7:45 in the multi-purpose room in the River Road United Methodist church so each one of us could re-live the tragic horror which had touched our lives.

For instance, I knew Natalie Basket was just about to go into the wrinkle of her son Jackson’s murder where she blamed herself for allowing him to stay at his grandma’s house even though she knew the grandma lived in a neighborhood with a number of child molesters. No matter how many times I heard Natalie explain her regret, shoulder her blame and sob her eyes out about that detail, I still never silently retracted my blame.

Some of us deserved to be in the Justice For The Murdered Children of Southern Missouri group, and some of us didn’t. I was one of those who didn’t.

Josh left me on a blazing hot day in the summer of 1994, two days before his ninth birthday and 342 days after my twenty-sixth birthday. Little Josh disappeared from our little town of Forsyth on his way home from karate class. The local paper said the town would never be the same.

I felt I held up my end of that bargain, but have to say the town let me down. The place is still the same little, sleepy, half horse of a town it was when my neighbor Louise Fox thought she was supposed to pick up Josh from karate class at 6:30 instead of 5:30 and Josh grew impatient and decided to walk home down the highway.

The only thing they ever found of Josh was that little orange belt from his karate uniform he wore so proudly. They never found his body. They never found a single blonde hair from his soft little head. Worse yet, they never found a single legitimate suspect other than eventually me after they had hollowly questioned every single man over the age of 25 in the town who owned a van.

I still think about Sheriff Andersen sitting in my kitchen, drinking my coffee and asking me veiled questions about what may have happened to Josh. Thankfully the guy who went hunting with my dad every year was so meek, he never flat out asked me if I had anything to do with Josh’s disappearance, because if he did, I may have actually murdered the whole town.

Instead of harming anyone in Forsyth, I just kept doing a piss poor job of driving the school bus Monday thru Friday. I think they just kept letting me drive the thing for fear of causing me to actually snap if they fired me and out of guilt for never finding who took Josh.

Other than driving that bus and coming home, coping with countless hours of television and Orange Crush mixed with vodka, the only thing I ever did, was hit the road for an hour each way to make it to Branson to attend my weekly Justice For The Murdered Children of Southern Missouri meeting. Sometimes I wondered if it was the only thing that kept me alive.

I had started to grow worried about the group in recent years though. It had been 22 years and the group which once peaked at 19 ladies in 1999, had dwindled to just seven women sitting in that multi-purpose room and it had been a couple years since anyone new had joined.

So, I felt a tingle of excitement and drank the Orange Crush and vodka I snuck in each week in a Burger King cup with a little more fervor when I saw a young woman (couldn’t have been much older than 25) with a stack of golden hair sit down in one of our plastic chairs. That tingle turned into a slow burn when I watched her dunk one of those little airplane bottles of Jack Daniels into her traveler mug when everyone but me and her got up to attack the tray of knock off brand cookies someone brought for the intermission.

I hadn’t even gotten the new woman’s name yet. Our group conducted our usual clockwise rotation of talking about what we wanted to talk about this week and our new friend was sitting at about 10 p.m. Because of that, it would be awhile before we heard from her, especially since Tanya Chare told the lengthy story about the time she talked to Nancy Grace, but got edited out of the show because she used the “C” word a couple of times.

I wasted no time, the rest of the ladies in the group would gulp down their watered-down Maxwell’s House and Western Family cookies in less than 10 minutes and they would have to jump right back into the monotony of their weekly sorrow right away. I walked across the room and stuck a hand out to the woman who was sucking back on her traveller mug.

“Hi, I’m Holly Barrow. Are you new to the group?” Thought I’d introduce myself.”

I was nervous. I prayed the new woman wouldn’t sense the vodka sweat on my palms.

“Oh hi, I’m Krista Hansen, and yes, this is my first time to the group. I just moved from Kansas and saw the group listed in the paper up in Springfield, so I thought it would come down. I’m glad I did. Everyone seems so nice.”

I almost laughed out loud at Krista’s innocence of thinking everyone in the group was really nice. Just give it a few weeks. Regardless, I really liked her vibe. She seemed like the kind of person who could serve as a sounding board for my frustrations with the group and the stupid shit people post on Facebook. I needed that.

“You got a flight tonight?” I said coyly and shot a look at the purse where I saw Krista tuck her little bottle of Jack Daniels just a minute ago.

“What?” Krista answered back with a big, oblivious smile.

“You drink,” I said and flashed a wide smile.

“Ohhhhhhhhh,” Krista responded with a blush and a giggle. “I had no idea what you mean by what you said about a flight.”

“Oh,” I spoke softly. “Those little bottles of booze are called airplane bottles or shots because I think you usually buy them at an airport, or they are what you can actually take on an airplane.”

Krista blushed some more.

“I’ve never been on an airplane,” Krista answered bashfully.

My eyes lit up.

“Neither have I,” I blurted out.

“Did we just become best friends,” Krista blurted back.

I jokingly just laughed and nodded on the outside, but on the inside, all I could think was, yes, yes we did.

We eventually got to Krista’s story after we heard a few ladies (myself included) retell the fucked-up tales of woe we justifiably let dominate our lives.

That familiar drunken sweat returned to my palms when Krista stood up to dive into her story.

“Hi, my name is Krista Hansen, I’m from Springfield, Missouri, but I only just moved there a few weeks ago from Wichita, Kansas. It has been really, really good for me to hear all of your stories about going through the same thing I went through six years ago. There are not groups like this anywhere in Kansas as far as I know, so I’m so glad I found y’all here. I don’t know if you saw it in the news. It was a bit of a story over in Kansas City, but don’t how far it made it, but my son, Christian Hansen was murdered six years ago and they never found the killer. Never really found a suspect, other than me, I guess. At least that’s all they could come up with, but I was cleared, and it all went away.”

I felt my heart swoon for this woman. She was so much like me.

“Christian was on his paper route early in the morning when he disappeared and was never found again. They never found his body, just the outfit he was wearing and some DNA on a knife they found by a river.”

Krista started to break down. I could see her jaw wobble from across the circle.

“I’ve spent the last six years basically sitting in my house, crying every night about Christian. Just thinking about what happened to him, recreating it in my head, over and over again, until I almost want to kill myself.”

Krista broke down for a few seconds, sobbed into her drink which only I knew was spiked.

“And I just wanted to share my story and meet some other women, and men, potentially, like me,” Krista barely got her last statement out before sobbing some more and taking a big swig of her drink.

The group responded a flurry of sobs from around the whole circle, myself included.

I anticipated the group engulfing Krista as soon as the meeting was over, so I picked off the last of the cheap cookies and waited out in front of the church with the plan to smoke cigarettes until Krista came out. I was fully aware that my strategy was like that of some kind of 50s greaser punk looking to get sweet with a young coed, but I didn’t care. I wanted to talk to Krista one-on-one and didn’t want to risk her slipping away.

I couldn’t have killed my smoke faster when I saw Krista walk out of the front doors of the church. There could have been a baby at my feet and I still would have let that burning ash fall right down on its bonnet.

“Krista,” I blurted out her name before we even came face-to-face.

Krista jumped back in fright as soon as she heard my voice. I grabbed my heart and apologized. I put an arm around her and walked with her towards the parking lot.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted to touch base with you before we both went home. I just think we have so much in common.”

“It’s okay and I couldn’t agree more,” Krista responded and stopped at the driver’s side door of a filthy Ford Focus.

I watched Krista unlock her car and take her cell phone out of her clutch.

“Let’s exchange numbers,” Krista suggested and my heart fluttered.

The exchanging of numbers went smoothly and within less than a minute, I was standing in the parking lot watching the taillights of Krista’s Ford pull out onto the road.

After catching my breath, I turned around to hustle back to my car parked on the other side of the church, but didn’t make it far.

I tumbled down to the hard asphalt, having tripped on something that had been resting just behind my feet. It was Krista’s black clutch.

“Hi Krista, it’s Holly. Already, I know...but, I found your clutch in the parking lot outside your car. You must have dropped it when we traded numbers. Anyway. I will wait here for about twenty minutes, but then I gotta hit the road back down to Forsyth. Maybe we can meet up for coffee or a drink or something tomorrow if we can’t connect tonight. Alright. Bye.”

I was shocked I didn’t hear from Krista during my entire drive home. It was all I could think about as I wound the near hour on the highway and fought back the urge to snag her wallet out of her clutch and do some investigating.

I battled that urge until I got home, but once I was placed back into the half-buzzed monotony of my little house on the edge of town, I couldn’t fight it anymore. I dove into Krista’s clutch, splayed out her wallet and started to dissect its contents. I’m not proud, but at least I’m honest.

The first thing which jumped out at me was the name and picture on Krista’s Oklahoma state driver’s license. Her first name was exact, but her last name was listed as Gunderson and her picture looked much different than what she looked like in the flesh back at the church. In her driver’s license photo, she had one of those god awful haircuts where everything is long except one buzzed side and her hair was a deep red, almost maroon.

This was all excusable. It was very possibly Krista had been married and divorced a time or two and every lady is entitled to a new look. I added the Oklahoma license into that category as well. Krista had only talked about being from Kansas and recently moving to Missouri, but maybe there was something in her past she didn’t want to talk about. The amount of times I thought about completely changing my life and taking my cousin Desi’s offers to join her as a truck stop stripper down in Arkansas haunted me in my sleep. Who was I to judge?

I am no angel. The suspicions sparked by the inconsistencies in on Krista’s license were enough to send me to my laptop to do a little Googling about her, and her story of her murdered son, Christian.

My temperature and heart rate started to rise when “Christian Hansen murder,” “Christian Hansen Kansas murder,” “Christian Gunderson murder,” “Christian Gunderson Kansas murder,” and pretty much every other combination of search I tried came up with nothing. Anything in general for Krista Hansen and Krista Gunderson and a murder and a child murder in Kansas City produced absolutely nothing.

My initial thought was Krista was a fraud. Someone who for some reasons decides pretending to have a child who was murdered was a good thing for them to do. She wouldn’t be the first. Our group had already been infiltrated by a couple of them. It was so common we actually came up with the name “widiots” for them. We didn’t like them, but they were pretty much harmless and went always away as soon as we called them out on it.

I dove further into my research of Krista. I found a Facebook profile for a Krista Gunderson in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but it was private and her only visible picture was of a cat. Fuck, I hated those ultra-private on Facebook people. Just don’t have a profile at all if you don’t want anyone to stalk you online. I tried everything I could to see if I could find a picture, or more info on that Krista Gunderson profile - stalking everyone with the last name Gunderson on her friend’s list. Stalking the seven people who liked her profile picture, but it was all for not.I was out of options.

Then my phone rang and jarred me back into the non-digital world and sent me at least an inch off of my computer chair seat.

I checked my phone. It was Krista calling.

“Hello.”

“Hi, is this Holly?”

“Yes, Krista?”

“Sorry, I just got your message. I can’t believe I dropped my clutch. Thank you so much for finding it. I guess I got lucky. But anyway, do you think I could come by and pick it up tonight?

I stumbled on my own tongue. Krista wouldn’t make it down to my place from Springfield until at least 2 a.m.

“I uh, yeah,” I agreed without thinking about it any more.

I regretted giving Krista my address while I sat there and sipped on my fifth Orange Crush and vodka of the long night.

It was nearing 2:30 a.m. and Krista had yet to arrive. I texted and called her in the last hour and had yet to receive an answer back. She was driving though, I guess.

Making matters worse, a heavy rain had begun to fall in the last hour and the hard pitter patter of the precipitation on my thin roof dulled every sound around me. Krista could have slipped in the house through the back door which would no longer lock, scoop up her clutch and leave again without me even noticing.

I sat in my little living room, staring out the window at my gravel driveway waiting for that red Ford Focus to pull up. All I could think about was seeing headlights soon. I was buzzed, tired with a brain fried from thinking about trauma for hours. I should have been more scared, but I think my mind was so worn down and exhausted, it was pushing the fear back and pulling up my desire for sleep. I plunked a Five Hour Energy shot into my drink and chugged it down.

I quickly felt that sick, syrupy kick of an energy shot kick in, but it started to fade almost as soon as it came. My eyelids went back to being heavy and started to slowly open and close while I stared out at my wet yard, bathed in the pale light of my flood lighting.

One more futile flutter of the eyelids and it was all over. My eyes remained shut and my body went limp in my rolling computer chair in the living room with my body facing my front yard. Between the long day of travel, the half a handle of vodka I downed, and the stress in my head, my body finally tapped out and I fell helplessly into sleep.

The entire world was dark when I woke. I shook my head, rubbed my eyes and scanned my surroundings, tried to absorb as much of what I saw, as soon as I possibly could.

No clock in sight and no cell phone in reach, I had no idea what time it was. All I knew was at some point in my sleep cycle, the floor light in the front yard had shut off and whatever lights I had in the house had as well.

Had the power went out?

I reached over and tried the lamp next to my chair. It flicked on and bathed the room in soft light. The power wasn’t out, but I definitely had lights on when I fell asleep. How did they all turn off then?

I made my way to my feet and stumbled around, trying to find my bearings and figure out what happened. I found my first clue when I retrieved my cell phone.

There were three texts from Krista waiting for me on my phone.

Be there in five minutes.

I’m here. Sorry it’s late.

Hey, didn’t want to wake you, but found my clutch and wallet and went home. Thanks. See you next week. Krista.

So Krista had came in through my unlocked front door, retrieved her stuff without waking me up and left again in the middle of the night? Seemed impossible, but there was no other explanation which could have made sense.

None of that felt good, but I guessed if there was anything sinister about Krista, she could have executed it while I was passed out, so I also thought I didn’t have too much to worry about. I could retreat back to my bedroom in peace, join my cat Ranger in my bed and sleep away the night in hopes that I wouldn’t have a raging hangover the next time I woke up.

That hangover I feared more even more than a crazed woman who may have been pretending to have a murdered child came on hard as soon as I woke up just before lunch time and launched back into my research of Krista.

Facebook had proved fruitless, but Google would not let me down. Well, to rephrase that, Myspace shockingly did not let me down. After a Google search of “Krista Gunderson,” I was able to find a Myspace.com link a few pages into the search results which pulled up the ancient bones of a bedazzled Myspace profile for Krista which clearly hadn’t been updated since 2008 and listed her location as in Oklahoma.

Most of the 200 or so pictures attached to her profile were useless. Just low-quality snapshots of her at bars with friends. I almost gave up scanning through all of them, but was glad I didn’t, because the very last picture in the gallery took my breath away.

Captioned with the phrase “I love my baby,” the photo was of a slightly-younger Krista sitting on a dock on a lake with her arms around a teenage boy with sandy blonde hair and a smile I couldn’t mistake. It had to be a coincidence, but the boy looked exactly how I imagined Josh would look had he not been taken from me.

Just looking at the picture of someone who looked so much like him, brought tears to my eyes and I had to pause my investigation.

My suspicions about Krista helped me work through the pain. I hadn’t been able to find a single thing about a dead son in Krista’s online footprint (and nothing about what she put out there made her seem like some kind of broken woman with a chunk missing from her heart). To put it crudely, she looked just like any kind of piece of shit woman you might find hanging out in the bar in Missouri, Oklahoma or Kansas these days.

I wasn’t going to waste any more time on Krista. In less than 24 hours, she had went from my celebrity crush/obsession to deepest, darkest fear and now back to an afterthought. So what if she was faking a murdered son? It didn’t really affect me and I’m sure she would get sick of it or get outed by someone else in the group sooner rather than later. It wasn’t my job to go after her.

I gnashed my teeth for the 12 minutes I had before the group meeting started, waiting to see Krista walk through that door. But she never came.The meeting started, we all told our stories, nibbled on our cheap cookies and sipped on our watery coffee then headed back on our separate ways.

My cell phone burned a hole in my pocket all the way back to Forsyth. Why had Krista no-showed? Should I call her? Text her? Did she somehow find out that I was cyber stalking her? Had I “Liked” something of her’s on Facebook? My mind was a troubled ocean of doubt and fear.

I had finally settled on leaving the Krista situation alone unless it forced itself on me when I pulled into my driveway and finished chewing on the last of the fingernails I had left. The rest of my night was going to consist of checking the thick stack of mail I pulled out of my mailbox for the first time in two weeks, cueing up Netflix and hoping I could find a decent show to binge on until I fell asleep with Ranger by my side.

The stack of mail was mostly just junk and past due bills. I chucked all of it into the trash can except for a blank manilla envelope about the size of a sheet of paper. I pulled the thing open and came face to face with a handwritten note scrawled in black ink.

It’s time again…

Well that was comforting. Even in my moment of deepest terror, I couldn’t help but be cynical with myself. Getting the horrible morbid people who used to torment me for fun after Josh disappeared to get active again was just what I didn’t need in my life. I thought about the loaded pistol in the nightstand for the briefest of moments. No, this was just another horribly mean prank and that’s what these awful people wanted. For me to get so depressed from their torture that I decided to join Josh.

I wouldn’t give in. I tore it up and threw it away. Fuck those assholes.

The days went. The weeks went on. The meetings each Wednesday night went on with my stiff Orange Crush and vodkas, but Krista never showed up again or texted or called me.

The temptation to call or text Krista boiled for the first few weeks, but it slowly began to fade and my day-to-day life started to go back to about as normal as it could be.

Then I started to get the messages.

They were voicemails left on my phone in the middle of the night, when my phone is always turned off. I periodically would make up to new messages on my phone. At first, they started as just muffled voices I couldn’t understand or windy sounds, but they eventually started to turn into clear messages I could make out, and could no longer ignore.

The first one I could properly hear was a conversation between myself and what sounded like a counselor or social worker I never remembered happening. A vague conversation with the tone from the counselor seeming to suggest I did something wrong, but wouldn’t admit to it, listening to the little snapshot of the back-and-forth raised the goosebumps on my arms.

I figured it must have been some counseling I had to do after Josh disappeared and I had forgotten about it or blocked it out of my mind. Either way though, it still didn’t explain why it was being left as a voicemail on my phone in the middle of the night.

It also didn’t explain why the voicemails started coming in every night.

At first they were just continuations of that vague conversation with the counselor and I thought it must have been the counselor doing it, or someone who found her tapes. Those thoughts would not last. After a few days, the voicemails turned much darker, much more-detailed and much more personal the first night. I finally gave in and decided I would leave my phone on when I went to sleep.

It took me a few moments for the ringing next to my head to rustle me from my slumber then reached over and snatched up my phone on about the third ring.

“Hello?” I couldn’t have sounded any groggier.

No voice picked up on the other end of the line. All I heard was the click sound a tape deck makes before it starts to play and then a voice that took my breath away. It was Josh. Talking to me through the shitty speakers of flip phone.

“I don’t know,” were the first words I heard Josh speak.

The voice was clearly Josh. The exact voice I remembered from around when he disappeared. Not the giggly toddler voice he had before he turned five and headed to Kindergarten or some kind of maturation I imagined would have happened had he lived to 16, but that exact, childish voice he had around eight and nine years-old.

“I don’t remember,” Josh’s sweet voice went on in the recording. “I try not to remember. I just remember the red bottle and then I remember it would happen. That’s it.”

My still-waking and still-buzzed brain tried to filter the words that were coming out of little Josh’s mouth, but still couldn’t make sense of them.

“I tried it once. She mixes it with the orange fizzy pop I like, but it tasted bad, so I didn’t again.”

Josh was talking about my drinking. The red bottle referring to my usual fifth of Smirnoff,the orange fizzy pop, the Orange Crush soda I had relied on as a mixer for damn near 30 years.

“That’s when it would happen,” Josh’s voice starting to quiver with sobs which drew my attention away from my pondering.

“What happened?” An unknown female voice popped up onto the tape and asked Josh a question.

There was a long pause from Josh.

“She would hurt me,” Josh’s squeaky, little voice barely got the words out.

The tape cut out. The call dropped.

I didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. Or the next night. I went on a 48-hour drinking and smoking bender in the comfortable confines of my living room. Ignored the calls from work when they came in and picked up the calls which came from the unknown number with recordings of Josh talking with a counselor.

“So she hit you?” Every word hurt when it came out of that smug counselor’s mouth.

I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the shit out of that little mousy fucking counselor. The last three messages had been her talking Josh into the idea that I abused him. Something that I swear never happened. I was pretty deep into the bottle back then, but that’s just because I was still numbing myself from Josh’s dad leaving me and my parents dying in their 50s.

There was a long silence on the line.

“You’re shaking your head yes, Josh,” that asshole counselor’s voice kicked up again.

I tossed the phone across the room.

It wasn’t true. I knew it wasn’t true. It didn’t matter what those tapes said. It wasn’t true. You have to believe me. I know it in my own heart.

That was the last of the phone calls. I patiently waited by my phone with the cracked screen waiting for more calls. I checked every five seconds for a new voicemail whenever I left my phone or fell asleep for a few moments. I didn’t leave the house for a week. Started to just eat pancakes without butter and without syrup for every meal because it was the only food I had left.

After about a week of doing that, I realized I should have been checking the mail more often. I only remembered because my mail man knocked on my door one afternoon to tell me he couldn’t fit anything else in the box because it was already stuffed full and handed me another unmarked manila envelope.

“Couldn’t fit this in. You should check you mail ma’am.”

I started opening the envelope before the mail man could even scurry away from the frightening sight I’m sure I was.

A pile of photos fell at my feet once I ripped open the envelope.

I bent down and picked up the first photo I could get my hands on and saw Josh staring back at me, shirtless, in a poorly-lit room with his torso covered in purple and puke yellow bruises. I wanted to puke, but flipped through the rest of the pictures. They were all the same - Josh - just in his underwear displaying signs of abuse. I actually put the photos down on my kitchen counter and walked away before I got through all of them.

A retreat to my bedroom and a shutting off of the lights and official shutting out of the real world was my last move. I pulled my ratty comforter over my head and let the booze still rushing through my blood drift me off to sleep in the middle of a sunny day.

I’m not sure how long I was out, but it was pitch black all around when I finally woke. The clock in the corner of the room told me 3 a.m. and the icy chill which filled every empty space of my bedroom told me I never turned the heat on. I looked over to my nightstand and saw a little frost on the glass of ice water which had been sitting there for weeks collecting dust.

The room spun for a moment before I collected my head and turned my senses on full blast for the first time in a long time. I must have actually slept off a little bit of the booze and the world was suddenly a cold, harsh and painful place which made my head feel like it was stuck in a vice.

I allowed a few seconds to pass to try and take everything in and about three seconds into my “warming up phase,” I heard footsteps from just outside of my bedroom door.

I flashed my eyes over to the door, open just a little crack and saw a shadow cut through the little sliver of light the crack let in. My arm ripped over to that nightstand where I knew my gun rested and knocked that neglected glass cup of water onto the hardwood floor where it shattered.

A good, hard blink reset my senses and allowed the world to re-focus in front of me. I started at that little crack again and saw nothing. Stayed silent with my hand resting next to the gun inside the painted wood of my nightstand and heard nothing. All was silent. There was nothing in the house as far as my human body could tell. I was just going crazy and I was just incredibly hung over. That was my biggest concern at the moment.

My human body did what it could to help with the situation by pulling my hand away from the nightstand and to my mouth where it tried to stop a heaping load of liquid barf from erupting from my lips. I felt the vomit stream out from my hands and all over my torso before the power of the hangover took me over again, I laid back onto my bed and fell asleep.

The world was just coming to life the next time I woke. I could feel a hint of warmth trickle through the little open slats in the blinds of my bedroom which faced the backyard. A few more hours sober, I felt a little more control over my body, but could still feel the powerful stranglehold of an aching headache and bubbling stomach torturing my body. It was going to be very hard to get out of bed.

That little bit of light from the rising sun helped me roll over in bed, in the direction which led to the bathroom. I was pretty sure I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in almost 24 hours and it felt like the entire lower half of my torso was going to explode.

I went to throw that lower torso half over the edge of the bed, but stopped myself. I remembered I broke the glass of the cup on the floor right next to my bed in the night and the shattered glass was still spread across the hardwood floor.

Stopped on the edge of the bed, I peered down at the glass and gulped down a hearty chunk of vomit because of what I immediately noticed. Trickling away from the thick pile of shredded glass was a trail of blood which pitter pattered on the floor until it disappeared out the doorway which led into the hall.

I wasn’t a forensic expert, but based on the wetness of the blood spatter, the blood appeared to be rather fresh. Couldn’t have been more than an hour or so old. Had I stumbled up out of bed in the night and stepped on the glass? I reached down and grabbed the bottom of my feet. Not a scratch. No.

My still-fogged brain began to panic. Someone was in the house this time. Someone was probably in the house in the night when I convinced myself they weren’t last time.

I scrambled for my phone which rested on the pillow next to my head with just two percent battery power. Shit. I hadn’t charged the thing in days, but I would probably still have enough juice to call the cops.

But there was a voicemail waiting on the home screen of my phone. I looked at the little message indicator for a few seconds and watched my phone’s power slip down to just one percent. I had to listen to it. I could flick out of it and then call 911 if it was worthless.

I put the phone to my ear and let the voicemail play.

I could tell the voice in the message belonged to Krista before she even spoke. Picked up her essence in the frantic inhale which opened up the message.

“Holly. You need to know this is not what I meant to happen. I had no idea. I had no idea what he wanted to do. I figured he wanted to find you just to know what you were doing. I never thought…”

Krista’s frantic voice paused.

“But when he found out what you were doing. Seeking sympathy for what you did, he couldn’t take it. He had to go to you. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t. Maybe because I don’t really feel sorry for you. You are probably going to get what you deserve.”

Krista’s voice started to calm and speak more slowly and more clearly.

“You’re probably wondering what this all is and I’m sure it is a shock, but something is really wrong with Holly. You can’t remember what happened day-to-day because you pickled your piece of shit brain starting back 25 years ago, but you are not a good person. Josh wasn’t murdered. He ran away. He snuck off in the middle of the day and rode his bike until he ended up Oklahoma, far away from you, and became a foster child. A foster child I eventually took in and made my son. Josh ran away because you abused him. You can keep trying to deny it, but those tapes you heard, those photos he sent, they tell the real story. Why do you think the cops only questioned you? They figured you murdered Josh, but they could just never find proof. Why do you think no one in that town can look you in the eye.”

Krista began to break up again on the phone, her mouth full of spit. I imagined tears running down her cheeks.

“I don’t know what he is going to do to you, but I can’t say you don’t deserve and I don’t think anyone is going to judge either of us when they find out what you did to him and why you made him run away.”

The voicemail ended or the phone ran out of battery, I wasn’t really sure. Either way I put the phone down and noticed something step into my field of vision out of the corner of my eye.

I turned my head to the door to my room and started to cry. Standing right there in the doorway was the adult version of my Josh. Clad in dirty jeans, a faded-blue sweatshirt and a sloppy blonde beard with a head of long shaggy hair, he looked at me across the room with dark eyes.

“I’m sorry Josh,” the words barely dribbled out of my quivering lips. “Please, please, understand that I have been sick. Been sick for a really long time.”

“I know,” Josh said so softly I could barely hear.

Josh’s voice was so much deeper, scratchier, but I could still remember it. I could still picture that innocent little nine-year-old with the slight hint of a lisp.

“Please, please, don’t hurt me,” I started to please. “I’m already hurt too much. You got me back for whatever they convinced you I did to you. Please.”

Josh shook his head.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

My thanks started to dissolve when I saw Josh take a zip tie out of jean pocket.

“No, no,” I started to plead again as Josh walked towards me.

I vomited before Josh got to me, the puke muffling the word “no,” which was the only thing I could repeat.

I was helpless, Josh had that zip tie on my wrists as I kicked around the bed.

“I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t worry,” Josh whispered into my ear before he lifted me up off the bed. “I’m just going to do to you what you forced me to do because I couldn’t take it anymore.”

I screamed as Josh lifted my hangover-ravaged body up off of the bed.

Crammed in the trunk of Josh’s truck for what seemed like hours. I feared I was running out of oxygen, but honestly I felt that could have just been more of the withdrawal. Either way, my entire body was a mess as I laid in the dark with my eyes closed, trying not to throw up for the third time in the day.

I started to breath normally for the first time in a long time when I felt the car come to a stop. I let out a full on gasp when the lid of the trunk opened up and stung me with the light of the frozen day. I took in a few cold heaves of air before my eyes fully adjusted to take in Josh towering over me in the sharp sunlight.

“Please just let me go,” I screamed up at Josh.

Josh ignored my demand. He grabbed me around the waist and drug me out of the trunk.

I fell hard on the ground and looked up at the blue sky which was garnished with the dead tips of a forest of tall trees which were fighting off the frost of the winter with the help of a low, beaming sun. I took in the winter beauty for a minute to try and collect myself until Josh stepped into my field of vision and towered over me.

“This road is where I ended up in the middle of the night when I finally worked up the courage to run away.”

I looked around me on the ground level where I laid. It appeared to be a desolate back road in the country which went from nowhere and led to nowhere.

“It’s also where I eventually found a way to my real home,” Josh went on as he cut off my zip ties.

“Please,” I called out as Josh walked away and back to the car.

Josh stopped just inside the driver’s side door of his beat-up Civic.

“I hope you can do the same.”

Josh just tipped the cap of his stained-black baseball cap and ducked back into his car. The tires of his Civic spit gravel in my face when he roared away into the setting sun.

I eventually made my way to my feet and started to stagger in the direction Josh’s car drove off in hopes of eventually finding someone who could help me. Still dressed in just the nightgown Josh grabbed me in with the darkness bringing on the full brunt of a Missouri, or maybe Oklahoma winter? I didn’t know how long I could make it.

Turns out the answer to that question was all night. I walked on that little gravel road until the sun started to come back up and my eyes set upon a bleak, little town with a gas station and a mini-mart across the street, neither of which were open yet.

It took another good chunk of time before a couple of trucks rolled by and their Oklahoma license plates finally signified to me at least what state I was in. I tried to wave one down for help, but my arm was too tired to even lift up off of my shivering hip.

Right when I was on the verge of death, someone finally stopped in a decrepit little hatch back and picked me up. They took me to the emergency room where I have been recovering for the past day. I guess I beat Josh’s challenge, but I don’t know if that really even matters and I don’t know if I can even go back to our little town and face my life now that Josh’s confrontation and my moments of sobriety have forced me to finally face the truth.

Maybe I will keep following in little Josh’s footsteps, stay here in Oklahoma and make a life for myself. It seemed to work out just fine for him, I guess.

Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com.

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