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They're Gone
Author: EA Barres

 

PART ONE


A NEW DAY

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

1


Winter 2019

DEB LINH THOMAS didn’t understand how she’d slept through the night. Something should have woken her.

The sounds of gunfire, no matter how distant.

Her husband’s soul ripped away.

The abrupt, violent, permanent change to everything she knew.

But Deb had slept peacefully and only woke when she drowsily heard the sirens outside her home.

Instinctively, her first thought had been about her daughter, Kim, at Washington College.

In a panic, she turned toward Grant’s side of the bed.

And that’s when she realized he was gone.

Minutes later Deb stood barefoot in her kitchen, wearing a robe hastily thrown over the thin T-shirt and shorts she’d worn to bed, numbly listening to two cops tell her that her husband had been killed in a robbery.

This wasn’t something she could have imagined—or accept. Now in her early forties, Deb was of an age when tragedy was striking her friends: rapidly moving cancer, the slow death of parents. But not violence. It felt like the worst kind of horror, one that Deb thought she’d been spared.

And not Grant. He wasn’t a small man, or a passive one. He’d boxed in and after college, and although he didn’t have a temper, people knew better than to test him. For the most part, despite a rueful middle-aged softening, he stayed in shape. He was popular, respected by colleagues and neighbors, always in control—physically, emotionally, professionally. When change happened, it was because of a decision Grant made.

But now that notion seemed hopelessly ignorant.

And terrifying.

Grant had been murdered, and he’d been powerless to stop it.

Men who kill, Deb realized, make their own rules of law, even nature.

And now the laws of her reality were unwritten.

Friends and family soon filled her suburban Northern Virginia home, but Deb was very much alone. She had to be reminded to eat; her eyes were raw from constant crying; her ribs ached from ragged breaths. Her voice, hoarse and grief-stricken, sounded distant to her ears, as if coming from somewhere buried underground.

Her nineteen-year-old daughter, Kim, returned from college to stay with her. Deb knew she needed to be there for Kim but, for those first few days, the most they could do was cry in the same room and hold each other, as if desperately trying to stop themselves from dissolving.

Deb had known Grant was going to die someday, the same way she understood she would also die, but it was impossible to accept.

There, but for the grace of God, went others.

Not him.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

2


TWO YOUNG COPS pushed through the doors of Baltimore’s Fells Gate Tavern, eyed by everyone in the dark, dingy bar, then ignored. Most uniformed cops took control of a room when they entered it. But the moment these two walked in, the room had them.

They stayed in the doorway. One cleared his throat and asked, “Is Cessy Castillo here?”

No one in the sparsely crowded bar replied. The bar wasn’t large—nothing more than a handful of tables, and only about half were occupied. It was too dark to see everyone clearly.

The cops approached the bartender, a short twenty-something woman wearing a tank top, with tattoos running down her right arm.

“Do you know where we can find Cessy Castillo?”

The bartender drank from a shot she’d poured herself. The glass knocked loudly on the wood when she set it down.

Her voice was guarded when she spoke.

“You know what she looks like?”

The other cop shook his head. “Her neighbor just told us she’d be here.”

“Why’d you go to her apartment?”

“It’s about her husband. Hector Ramirez.”

The first cop glared at the second. “But we really can’t discuss that with anyone but her.”

The bartender’s eyes widened. “Hector? Hell, I’m Cessy. What did he do?”

“You’re Cessy Castillo?”

The bruises Hector had left on Cessy’s back and stomach earlier that evening ached. She wondered if a neighbor had heard Hector, called the police.

“What did he do?” she asked again.

“He died, ma’am,” the second cop blurted out.

The first cop—slightly older than his partner, but only in his serious face, the premature stress lines around his hooded eyes—nudged the second. “I’m sorry. My partner’s new.”

“Hector’s dead?”

For a moment, the pain from her bruises was forgotten. Everything was forgotten. Cessy felt the room darken, her mouth dry. First grief, then relief. The two emotions wrestled inside her like darting flames, each trying to devour the other.

“I’m sorry,” someone said. One of the cops.

Cessy was gripping the edge of the bar. She relaxed her hands, shakily poured herself another shot. Drank it.

“If you can,” the older cop asked, “we’d like you to come with us. We have some questions about your husband.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Her mind raced to figure out what had happened. Natural causes wouldn’t have brought the cops. An accident would have to be suspicious.

A killing.

“We’d prefer not to discuss the incident here,” the older cop told her.

Cessy had suspected there was something shady in Hector’s life—the way he took phone calls in another room; the late nights when she woke to discover he’d returned to the apartment and was in the shower—but she’d suspected he was having an affair.

Had some enraged husband murdered him?

Or had it been something else?

“Okay,” Cessy said. She slammed the shot glass down on the bar, called to the back office, “Will! I’m out. Hector’s dead. See you tomorrow!”

The younger cop said nervously, “Um, you probably don’t want to broadcast …”

Relief was winning out, the first giddy realization of freedom. “Let’s go, amigos,” she said. “What are we doing? You need me to identify the body? In the morgue?”

“We don’t do that. Just show you a photograph.”

“Well, damn.” Cessy grabbed her purse, the quick move igniting the pain in her back. The pain that would never be there again. “How am I supposed to dance on a photograph?”

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

3


DEB KEPT SEEING flashes of men.

She first noticed them one morning when she decided to finally clean the house. People had come and gone over the last week, and the house was in disarray. Glasses randomly left on tables and countertops, throw pillows tossed on the floor, clothes tangled under furniture. Like a family had fled their home in the middle of the night.

Deb straightened out the living room until she reached the mantle over the fireplace. She paused at a picture of her with Kim and Grant. It was from their trip two years ago to Hawaii. Kim stood between them, the same uncertain smile Grant had. She’d been given her father’s height and, at sixteen, had already surpassed Deb’s sixty-two inches.

Grant stood on the other side of Kim, wearing a polo and shorts and sandals, squinting at the camera through the sun. His arms hung uncertainly at his sides, like a novice actor waiting to be told what to do with his hands, and the polo strained to hold his chest. Back then he’d always been clean-shaven. It wasn’t until the past few months that he’d let his beard grow. Deb could still feel it tickling her face when they kissed, under her fingertips when she touched his cheek. The beard was bristly when it first emerged, then turned flower-petal soft.

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