EDDIE Chapter 3 | 4:05 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
EDDIE STEVENS SQUEEZED THE STEERING wheel until his knuckles hurt. He released his grip and sank back against the chair. The drive had been harder than he thought. Now here he was: the last place his daughter, Hazel Rae Stevens, was ever seen alive. She walked into these woods, on this trail. He watched her do it, just like the tall blonde did now, and she never came back out.
The thought of it lit the backs of his eyes. Waiting an hour in the van had seemed like a waste of time then. He’d lucked into a string of extra work, and he was determined to save up enough money to be able to send Hazel to college without her having to take out student loans. He’d told her he had to get some work done in town and would meet her back right here.
Right here, Hazel Rae. Five PM, and not a second late, you hear? You like runnin’ by yourself better anyhow.
The memory brought the burn in his eyes from back to front. They smoldered, still dry, tear ducts squeezing the way a throat does after a hot day without water. He pressed his fingers against them, trying to dull the pain and the sound of her voice in his head. She’d asked him to wait for an hour.
If only I’d waited.
He’d logged over 1,200 hours in these woods since then. He’d memorized every inch of the five-square-mile search zone. He knew where the trails were most likely to wash out during a hard rain, where the river bottom dropped after a tight bend, which rocks shifted with a person’s weight. But he didn’t know where Hazel was.
“Come with me,” she’d pled that day. “We can just walk. It’ll do you some good.”
“My knee is acting up again, Hazy. I don’t want to slow you down.”
“You can set the pace,” she’d offered.
“Not today. I got a wiring job in town. Should be quick. You and I will finish up about the same time.”
“Meant to be, then,” she’d said, and retracted her petite frame from the open passenger door.
“Hey, Hazel,” Eddie had called through her open window.
She’d popped her head and shoulders through the opening, resting her elbows on the frame. “Yeah, Daddy?”
“I know you’re eighteen and grown and all, but just be careful. Don’t talk to anybody you don’t know.”
Hazel’s expression had softened into something playful. “Daddy, I barely talk to people I do know.” Then she’d walked away, her purple-streaked, frizzy hair flashing through the early scattering of trees before the woods swallowed her up.
Most people had read Hazel wrong her whole life, even more so once she hit fourteen and traded every shade of color in her closet for black. One night, he found her in the bathroom they shared, hair bleach burning her scalp. He’d steered her under the showerhead and held her there while he rinsed it clean. The bleach had been on long enough to turn her soft brown curls brittle and orange. Eddie had damn near cried.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she’d said real soft, jade eyes downcast. “I just wanted to look like Mom.”
“Me, too, Hazy. I’m sorry, too.” He pressed the side of his face against her dripping head. “I’m no good at this stuff.”
“You’re not bad at it, either.”
Eddie had told her he was going to get dinner and came back with a new box of hair dye, which the store clerk had recommended for Hazel’s hair type. Hazel broke down in tears, shaking and snotty. So Eddie read the directions, pulled on the thin, clear gloves, and dyed her hair himself.
Eddie slammed his open hand on the dashboard. He shifted his gaze to the nine-millimeter sitting on his passenger seat. There were two rounds in the clip. One to fire into the air to draw the attention of anyone nearby, the second to lodge into his brain by way of his mouth. That angle of trajectory left zero chance of survival and, if he leaned toward his window, wouldn’t spatter a mess on the last chance Hazel had to be found.
When she never came out of the woods that day, Eddie had gone in. He’d called her name. Waited. Listened. Only crows answered. A storm had snuck in over the ridgeline. Within minutes, the sky had opened up, and the rain came down nearly too hard to see through. Eddie had struggled up hill after hill, cursing his weight and work boots and trick knee, especially when all three hit head-on and took him to his hands in a torrent of water streaming down the narrow path.
By the time the first officers arrived, Hazel had been gone an hour and forty-seven minutes too long. The night sky was black as ink, and the lights from the patrol cars bounced off the shining walls of rain-soaked evergreens.
Runaway.
He’d heard it that first night and most days after that, usually in conjunction with the words “loner kid,” “dead mother,” and “goth.” In the jury of public opinion, the case was closed in the first forty-eight hours. The official search ended two months later, and the disappearance of Hazel Rae Stevens moved into the cold case files by the end of winter.
Now, one year after she vanished, Eddie was determined to force his daughter’s name and face back into the spotlight. There was one last way he could make them pay attention. One way he’d make them remember Hazel.
Under his nine-millimeter sat Hazel’s journal and a stack of evidence Eddie had tried to give to the station months ago, with little response. Three other people had disappeared in these parts in the past ten years. There were no similarities between them, and none of them had ever been found. No bodies. No farewell notes. No scrap remnant. Just gone.
The detective assigned to take his questions and keep him updated had accepted the information like a teenage girl receiving a tacky sweater from a distant relative, complete with a pat on his shoulder, and handed it right back to him.
“She’s not in those woods,” the detective had said.
But she was. Eddie knew it. He also knew he wasn’t a smart man. Not the kind of smart it would take to make investigators listen. And he was a transplant here, moved from Texas after his wife passed. Last year, a handful of people had baked casseroles and hung flyers and searched the forest on foot and horseback, but their commitment to Hazel evaporated in a slow, invisible way. They hadn’t known her as a baby, sweet and shy. Or as an eight-year-old who could play three instruments. They knew her only as a sullen-seeming teenage girl with too much eyeliner and not enough interest in high school football or the boys who played on the team. They’d failed her. He’d failed her. There was only one way he would gain enough attention to bring her home. All he had to do was pull the trigger.
He touched the barrel of his gun with his index finger. Regret whispered through him. After two weeks with no sign of Hazel, detectives had started preparing him to find a body, coaching him on what a relief it would be to lay her to rest, to know where she was. He wanted to agree with them. He did agree. Ending his life was his last effort to find Hazel in two ways: to reignite interest in her case, and, if there was another side, some kind of place people go when they die, to maybe find her there. Everyone else was sure she was dead. He knew he’d been a fool to think anything different. So why didn’t he feel it? Shouldn’t a parent feel it when their child is gone, some kind of instinctive recognition? He wasn’t sure either way. Aside from not knowing where she was, that unknown bothered him the most.