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I’d been sure that if Josh’s mother heard about what he’d been doing to his girlfriend, she would do something about it. Talk to her son. Or, at the very least, tell the police force to drag him in anytime he got physical with her.
The thing was, I’d contacted her.
And after that was when the abuse not only got worse, but the police stopped coming to domestic disturbance calls at their address.
Josh’s mom, Angela, was the one person I’d ever heard Wren speak ill of, though. In general, my sister always tried to see the best in people, to focus on the good.
But with Angela, well, it seemed all she had to say was bad.
Angela had been a young, pretty girlfriend to a rich husband in her late teens and early twenties. A man who traded her in for a younger model when her pre-frontal cortex threatened to finish developing.
Apparently, that same man “mysteriously” fell to his death from a drop off into the water behind his home a few months later.
It would have just been a tragic accident, something no one ever thought of again, until Angela, after her fourth marriage and subsequent ugly divorce, had enough money to get herself a nice summer home.
And which property did she pick?
Oh, the one overlooking the water.
Where the ex who had dumped her had died many years before.
“I just think that’s a little bit suspicious, you know?” Wren had said, poking around at her plate, but not actually eating anything. “I mean, maybe I would have believed she just really liked living there once when she was young and it reminded her of good days. But when she told me about it, there had been, I don’t know, a dark kind of glee in her eyes.”
At the time, I found the story a little crazy, a bit over-the-top. And, quite frankly, I’d been too focused on my sister to really give it much thought at all except to think that it would make sense if the mother was a monster too. Josh was fruit of a poisoned tree.
It had to be the summer house, right?
If he was looking for a place to take my sister where no one would hear, no one would see, and no one would even know what was happening, then the summer house was the place to be.
I didn’t know the address, but it wouldn’t exactly be hard to find. A rich man falling to his death would have made the news.
Turning, I ran back out of the apartment building as I grabbed my phone, doing a quick search, and coming back with some town in New Jersey.
I didn’t think twice.
I hopped in a cab and gave them the address. If he had any reservations about the drive, they disappeared when I produced a wad of cash and passed it to him.
“Alright then,” he said, nodding, and focusing on the road.
The drive felt like it took forever, but was only about forty minutes, all in all.
Forty minutes was a long time for Wren to be trapped with that psychopath, though.
Even if she’d spent the biggest chunk of that time in the car. Likely the trunk.
If Josh had been away from his apartment and life for days, spending time at the summer house, what did that mean, though? Had he been there… preparing it? To hold her hostage there?
That would be, in a way, a good thing, right?
If his plan wasn’t necessarily to hurt and kill her right away.
If he had cracked in the head and wanted to, like, keep her trapped like a little doll to play with, that was sick, but it also meant that Wren would be alive when I got to her.
It was a disgusting thing to hope for, but I found myself praying for that harder than I’d ever prayed for anything in my life.
So hard, in fact, that when my phone started to ring in my hand, I shrieked and dropped it, making me scramble to try to find it on the floorboard of the car.
“Wren?” I asked, having slid to answer it without even looking to see what the ID said.
