The cardboard boxes softened and sagged in the rain, but Teddy Garner didn’t care.
He didn’t care for much, these days. Expected, though, wasn’t it? June had been missing for seven months. The police called their search off, and told him the chances of his daughter turning up alive were “slim to none”. How could a man care for anything after that?
Teddy sniffed the trickle of mucous — which dribbled down his philtrum — back into his nose. He opened the door with one hand and held the box of paltry belongings in the other. Any second now, it would give way and spill its soiled guts across the front steps of the house. Fall apart like everything else in his life had.
But it didn’t.
The door creaked open and he stumbled into the dusty — but dry — interior of the house. He supposed he better get used to the rain. The real estate agent had called the downpour “perennial”. A house-viewing request in Litwich surprised her into a momentary lapse of dishonesty.
He didn’t want much out of this. Only the truth. Only a response to the single question that flickered in his mind, like a red neon sign. It buzzed and glared for the past six months and three weeks. It never went out, not even when he lay down in his lonely bed and tried to get some sleep. If anything, the darkness intensified the juxtaposition.
WHAT HAPPENED?
All the other rubbish — the reasons he imagined others came here for — Teddy had cast aside. Redemption, forgiveness, connection, peace. He didn’t expect any of that. Sure, if in reach, he’d take those things. But only after he got an answer. His driving force.
Who knew? Could be he’d get a chance to enact vengeance. If someone ended up linked to her disappearance, of course. Something in Teddy’s gut told him a stranger — some silhouetted monster — had whisked her away. He had fantasies. Morbid, gore-slaked fantasies about taking revenge, about inflicting pain.
But what if nobody bore the blame for her death? What if — God forbid — she died because of an accident? At least with murder, Teddy could unleash his rage on this cruel world. With an accident — a car crash, a fall, anything — only one guilty party remained.
God.
Not that Teddy hoped June’s final moments were fearful — he hoped for anything but that. Please, God, he prayed as he dropped the box to the floor with a wet squidge. He rotated a full 360 and took in the dark mahogany of the house. Rather beautiful, in a gloomy gothic sort of way.
Let her have died quickly and cleanly.
© Joshua Insole 2021-05-25