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“Jamie,” I said when he pulled back and looked at me, “I don’t understand. How are you here?”
He looked at me, just a hint of confusion passing through his eyes. At first I thought he was going to say something sarcastic, like he walked there, but then he looked me in the eye and his own had cleared. “I miss you, Caden.”
My heart dropped, because how could you miss someone if they were right there? “Jamie? I…I miss…what’s going on? Did we find you? I don’t understand.”
He laid his head down on the pillow beside me and looked at me with that little smile I loved. His eyes were shining and happy like normal. He ran the back of his hand down my face. “You know I love you, right?”
I thought maybe I felt like crying. “Of course. I love you, too.”
He said something else, but he was whispering, and I only caught pieces of what he said. “I’d be here, if I wasn’t….Caden, I want to be right beside you…if I could just…and I’m broken.”
“Jamie, what did you say? I can’t understand everything you’re telling me.”
Before he could reply, my eyes shot open, and I gasped, quickly realizing that I was not in my dorm, and Jamie was nowhere around me. “You ok?” Caitlin’s voice broke through my haze of confusion.
I looked around me, at my friends in the van we’d rented shortly after leaving the library armed with our new information. It was the middle of the week, and none of them had been missing classes like I had been, but they still dropped everything to take me to Crystal Shores. I wasn’t sure what exactly we were planning, but we were going regardless, and the five of us were apparently going to comb the largest forest in the state all by ourselves. I knew it was a fool’s errand, but it was all we had to go on. We’d found Wally’s hometown, so we had to check there. I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t do everything I could. I was already having enough trouble just living without him.
I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah,” I finally answered Caitlin, “I’m ok.” From the seat beside me, Jesse was looking at her in the mirror, and I knew he was silently conveying to her that I had nightmares every time I went to sleep. That I woke up like that every single day.
My friends were all silent and somber, and I found myself longing for a different kind of road trip, the one we’d all been planning for the summer. We were going to rent an RV or something and just travel the country. The people surrounding me in my life, Jamie above all, had become my family, and I loved spending time with them more than anything. I prized my alone time with Jamie more than anything else, of course, but all of my friends were important to me. They were family to me. I would do anything for them.
I wished I would wake up in my bed with Jamie letting himself into my room, that I would discover all of it was just a nightmare. I wished I would wake up to find that I’d never actually lost him. That we were all getting ready to go on a fun road trip instead of on our way to search for what could very well end up being his body. How had I let it happen?
I began scrolling through the pictures on my phone again. Jeff was driving and Caitlin was in the passenger seat with a map pulled up on her phone to make sure we took the quickest routes and avoided traffic. I knew a few minutes probably wouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but I appreciated their efforts. Jesse was looking at his phone again, and Amber was nodding off in the back seat.
I stopped for some reason on a photo of Jamie outside the club. I couldn’t even remember why I’d snapped the picture, but Jamie was making a goofy face at me, despite the circumstances. I remembered the night vividly because it was a night Wally had shown up and gotten angry that he couldn’t buy a lap dance from Jamie. He’d caused a scene as he put up a fight and insisted that his money was the same as everyone else’s. Tristan had sent Jamie to the back and argued with Wally that any dancer had the right to deny a patron if they made the dancer uncomfortable.
It wasn’t the first time Wally had tried to get a lap dance, but Jamie usually just avoided him, or Tristan interfered if he wouldn’t let Jamie avoid him. Wally didn’t usually argue when Tristan got involved, but for some reason, he had that night.
It was never clear to me if perhaps Wally had actually gotten a lap dance the first time he’d visited the club after finding that damn ad that said, “Come in and meet Raven.” He’d come in to meet Raven and hadn’t left until he got what he wanted. Until he’d taken everything from me. But back then, on that first night, none of them would have realized how dangerous he was. So I always wondered if he’d gotten a tease, just a taste, and had been unable to let go after that. I never asked Jamie because Jamie hated talking about him.
Everyone knew what Wally’s car looked like. I knew, Jamie knew, Tristan knew. Everyone who worked at Club Adonis knew. We knew to watch out for it. It was an older black car, one of those land yachts that would go fast once they were moving and weighed almost as much as a train car. I wondered at first if that was how there was no damage to the vehicle, if he could have hit the bike and no one noticed minor damage on such a sturdy car. But there wasn’t a scratch or dent or streak of paint. And if that was the case, then we were way off, and he’d been somewhere close to campus the entire time. I didn’t like that scenario because they’d searched everywhere in the area and had found nothing. And if it was the case, then nothing was most likely what we would continue to find until the case faded into obscurity for everyone but me and the other people who loved Jamie.
Looking at the picture more closely, unsure of why I’d stopped there, I noticed a small, gold car in the background, and there appeared to be someone in the driver’s seat. It could have been anything. It could have been someone leaving or arriving at the club. It could have been an Uber waiting on someone. But there was something ominous about the silhouette to me, even though it wasn’t clear in the photo. Thinking back to that night, I did remember having an odd feeling even though Tristan and Sam, the other main bouncer, had both checked the parking lot and area around the club before Jamie came out the door.
I remembered laughing at the silly face he made for the camera. He played the whole night off like he wasn’t worried, just like he always did. I remembered looking around, though, because of the weird feeling. I hadn’t noticed anyone in any of the cars around us. It hadn’t been that long ago, so my memory didn’t fail me, and I knew I was on high alert at the time. I was paying close attention to my surroundings. I didn’t remember a car leaving the lot or anyone walking into the club while we were outside. I knew there were no cars running as though waiting for a someone, because I would have noticed that, as well. I would have noticed anything that happened that night because I was so hyper aware.
“Uh, guys?” They all looked at me, even Jeff looked up in the rearview mirror. '“Check this out.” I held the phone up, zooming in on the car. I couldn’t get close enough to make out any features without the picture getting blurry. It was night, and my phone had been focused on Jamie, not some random car.
Amber had woken up fully and was leaning over my shoulder. “What am I looking at? she asked, scrunching up her face as she tried to figure out what I wanted everyone to see.
Caitlin, though, my budding investigative journalist, immediately piped up, “There’s someone in that car.”
“Bingo,” I said, pointing to her, “And this was the night Wally was harassing him about a lap dance. It wasn’t that long ago, and I was on high alert. I would have noticed someone getting out of a car or a car leaving. I had a weird feeling, almost like I was being watched, but I looked around and didn’t see anything.” I paused, looking back at the picture. “I didn’t notice anyone following us that night, but we all know there were times he was there when no one knew.” They knew the cops had photos I didn’t want them to have, and though they didn’t know what the photos were of, they had a pretty good idea. “Either way, something about this picture gives me the serious creeps. I thought I was just feeling weirded out by the whole situation. But what if I wasn’t?”
Jesse took my phone, and Amber was now peering at it over his shoulder as they scrutinized the photo. My mind wandered back to that night while they were preoccupied. “I don’t want you to get rid of it,” I’d said, running my hands over the seat of his bike like it was a living creature. I pouted a little bit, but then looked up at him. “I get it, though. You know I want you to be safe more than anything else.”
He'd been contemplating selling his bike even though he didn’t really want to. He loved it and he loved riding it, especially with me on the back of it. But he was also starting to feel like a target on it. He was too vulnerable when he was riding, too out in the open. He could outrun a car under most circumstances, but he also had to drive dangerously to do so. And if the car was waiting for him instead of following him, he was in trouble.
We’d already become fairly certain by then that Wally wasn’t just a mildly obsessed person, an over-zealous, inappropriate fan who just wanted to talk to Jamie and wouldn’t leave him alone. We’d come to the conclusion that he was legitimately dangerous. Possibly violently dangerous. But before Jamie could even put the bike up for sale, our greatest fear had come true. He’d been ambushed on it, forced off the road, and he hadn’t made it home on that bike.
The police had finally decided, just like I’d wondered, that there had been damage to Wally’s car and that it had been so minor on the tank of a vehicle that he’d been able to buff it out himself. That scenario didn’t make sense, though. The car was in the driveway of his apartment at the same time Wally called his mom from that motel. And there was no sign Jamie was ever in the car. There was no way Wally could have gotten rid of all the evidence. I may have underestimated him, but he was also no professional. I highly doubted that after kidnapping Jamie, he would have had the time to not only completely sterilize his car inside and out but also buff scratches out of it. I also doubted he would have had the ability to do so if he wanted to. The idea that he used a different car made more sense.
Wally could have taken Jamie anywhere in another car and no one would have even been looking for it. He could have passed by any number of police without being noticed. That car could also be anywhere, but it would be filled with evidence. Jamie had been bleeding. There was blood on the ground near his bike, the bike that was sitting in the police impound. It was damaged but probably fixable if someone tried, although it was currently being used as evidence in a murder case. I could not believe where we’d ended up.
Caitlin reached for the phone and Jesse handed it to her. She stared at it intently. The angle of the photo wasn’t right to tell much about the car other than that it was gold. It was smaller than Wally’s car, probably a mid-size. I didn’t even get the full windshield in the photo, but I did get the person in the driver’s seat.
Caitlin handed my phone back to me and went back to the map on her phone. I wasn’t sure what she was looking for until she said, “Hey, look at this.” She had the satellite view up, and it took me a minute to realize I was looking at Wally’s mother’s house. We’d looked at it before, trying to figure out if there was anywhere nearby where Wally could have been hiding, but the police had thoroughly searched her property and the surrounding area.
