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It had crossed mine.
First love is a powerful thing.
III
After dinner, with Marc settled in front of the TV and a Netflix documentary about Jeffrey Dahmer (we were both addicted to true crime stories), I began my Google search. I was settled on the bed, legs stretched out before me, laptop in place. I typed inboy abducted and found years later. There was a hope, flickering like a flame in the back of my mind, that the name Jebediah Kleber would surface among the hits. I first went through several pages of the more than thirteen million results, hoping against hope he’d appear. Perhaps I had simply missed the story of how he’d found his way back. It was certainly possible.
But no such name surfaced.
Others did. There was eleven-year-old Shawn Hornbeck, who’d been abducted while riding his bike in a small town outside St. Louis by Michael Devlin. A psychic had proclaimed the boy was dead on national TV, yet he was very much alive. Devlin held him captive for more than four years, when the boy apparently grew too old for Devlin’s taste and he abducted another boy—thirteen-year-old Ben Ownby—at a bus stop. Both abductions took place in broad daylight, but the second time, Devlin wasn’t as fortunate. Witnesses saw him take Ownby and heard his cries. Their reports led to both boys being found, and the case was dubbed the “Missouri Miracle.”
There were other cases of long-term abductions and miraculous returns—Paislee Shultis, Jayme Closs, the very famous case of Elizabeth Smart, Kamiyah Mobley (who was taken as an infant, only to resurface when she was eighteen years old). Jaycee Dugard had been taken at age eleven and kept for eighteen years. There was the case of three young women abducted in Cleveland, Ohio. Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus were kept prisoner in their captor, Ariel Castro’s, home for a decade before being rescued.
The case that resonated most with me, though, was that of Steven Stayner, who’d been taken at age seven in Merced, California and kept for seven years by his abductor, Kenneth Parnell. Despite molestation, Parnell tried to make the boy his son. Stayner attended school and lived openly with Parnell just thirty-eight miles away from his hometown. Who knew how long he would have been kept, had not Parnell abducted five-year-old Timothy White. The presence of the little boy and knowing what he would face, spurred Stayner to rescue him. In a dramatic escape, Stayner (known as Dennis Gregory Parnell) was able to save the five-year-old, becoming a national hero when he returned to his hometown and family. Tragically, Stayner was killed in a motorcycle accident a few years later at age twenty-four.
The Stayner family wasn’t done with tragedy, though. Perhaps marked by the trauma of his brother’s abduction, Cary Stayner later became a convicted serial killer.
Reading about all these cases validated my concern that not all kids who were taken didn’t show up later dead. These cases were the tip of the iceberg.
It was quite possible that Jeb had been taken that night in 1986 and kept by some sicko who wanted a son and/or a sexual slave. I shuddered at the prospect.
The realization also produced another flood of questions.
If Jeb had been abducted on that Fourth of July, how had his abductor known he’d be at our riverside and hilltop lookout? Who’d informed him? Had he been lying in wait in the woods just a few feet away from us? I imagined a dark stranger danger figure lurking in the woods, watching us as we ate our picnic andooh-edandah-edover the fireworks display, waiting, waiting, for his moment to pounce on his prey. The image in my head made me tremble.
And if Jeb, like Shawn Hornbeck and Steven Stayner, had been kept for years on end, why hadn’t his return garnered more publicity? I remembered, years ago, watching a dramatization of the Stayner case on television. It was calledI Know My First Name is Steven. Both Stayner and Hornbeck had made national headlines and were the subject of podcasts, books, and cinematic dramatizations. It was simply incredible, in the truest sense of the world, that Jeb had returned some fifteen years ago—as he’d mentioned—and there was not even a ripple in the media about it. Yes, St. Clair was a tiny town in the poor foothills of the Appalachians, but this would be a big human-interest story, regardless. There’d be some trace of it online, right?
Where was the reporting about Jeb’s return? Where washistrue-crime book? Where washisminiseries?
I shut the laptop and closed my eyes. There were simply too many red flags. How could I believe this guy who’d shown up out of the mysterious, proverbial blue? And, no matter if his story was true or not, what did he want with me now, after all these years? Was it because we’d once been in puppy love? This would be the strangest meet-cute in the history of romance.
It was all too confounding.
I lay down, curling up into a fetal position, and hoped this person, whoever he was, would never darken my doorstep again.
IV
We are there, on the pebbled banks of the Ohio River. Jeb faces me, knee deep in the mud brown water. He’s wearing nothing but the amethyst pendant, and he’s fully erect. Yet, seeing what I’d never seen in real life awakened no lust, as it should have. No, there’s a sense of terror, of dread.
I move to him in the water.
He takes me in his arms and pulls me close. The muscles in his chest are hard against my own. His penis feels like a snake against my damp denim cutoffs.
He squeezes tighter, tighter.
I lose my breath. Yet, he doesn’t stop.
I push against him, trying to scream, but there’s no air.
The sky darkens. Thunder rumbles, followed not by flashes of lightning, but bursts of illumination in red, green, and blue—fireworks in the threatening sky.
He pushes me down, down, until all I can see is mucky, silty water.
I gasp and struggle. Bubbles rise to the surface. I continue to hear the boom of distant pyrotechnics, but Jeb doesn’t loosen his grip, his fingers now entwined in my hair.
The world dims and then darkens.
V
