AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But it wasn’t one of the pigs.
He squinted at the form of a woman covered in blood and wearing pajamas emerging from the door. And then there was another behind her. The last sprinted out before collapsing on the yellow grass.
“Dad!” Hannah yelled, her eyes on the scene too.
“Get inside now,” he said. “Call 911.”
Then he raced across the street.
His green baseball mitt landed on the lawn.
He wouldn’t be able to pick it up again without thinking of this day. Those women. Those broken girls.
Three
Maddox was tired.
He also had a thumping in his skull thanks to the Jameson he drank the night before. He wasn’t proud of the amount of liquor and beer bottles in his recycling bin every week, but he didn’t really care much about what people thought of him either. He never drank on duty, and he never made a mistake on the job. So, what of it if he caught a little buzz after a hard day’s work? He had earned it.
He often told himself things like that throughout the years. That his drinking was simply a way to blow off steam. That it was the only thing that could help him sleep. But he knew deep down he drank because of her. Because she had left him with a feeling unlike any he’d ever had before in his sixteen years of life, and then, without warning, she was gone. Vanished into thin air.
The Clark County Sheriff’s Department never really did open an investigation on Orion’s disappearance. As the largest county in the state of Missouri and situated smack dab in the middle of meth country, Clark County didn’t have time to waste on teenage runaways. They looked at her home life, at the previous runaway attempts, at the mental institution stay when Orion was twelve, and they determined she most likely ran away again. The police never looked for her, her parents never looked for her, and her memory was left to wither away to nothing.
Detective Maddox Novak, one of only two detectives working out of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, couldn’t accept that. He never believed she would up and leave, not without saying something, at least. She would’ve contacted him. Even before their kiss, even before he confessed his feelings, he had grown up with her. He wanted to believe she cared for him like he did her. Maybe that’s why he ended up joining the department.
When the call came in from the sheriff on his weekend off, he was thankful, if he was being honest with himself. He grew to despise days off. Much like the alcohol, work became a way for him to forget, to busy himself numb. His sister had taken the early shift on the Saturday that would flip his whole world upside down, so he was left alone and miserable, with too much alcohol in the fridge and a service revolver that beckoned him, as it often did when the depression was particularly bad.
The call from the sheriff was unusual. Three women found in a suburban neighborhood, covered in blood, confused and with signs of abuse. He’d been at the scene, and it was clear that these women were abused. The fucking prison in the basement told him that. The filthy mattress and the chains, the albums upon albums upon albums of child pornography told him that. He wasn’t comfortable with the thoughts of Orion that hit him when he searched the premises.
Once forensics arrived, and the coroner soon after for the dead meth head in the basement, Maddox was sent to the Cook County Regional Hospital with his partner, Detective Eric Baptiste, to interview the girls who had escaped. He hadn’t checked the case file yet, hadn’t seen her name among the women. Had he seen it, he wouldn’t have made his way so leisurely to the hospital.
He stopped in the doorway of their room, staring at the three women wearing hospital gowns only briefly before his jaw dropped. His heart beat so hard, it felt like it might burst from his chest.
Orion Elizabeth Darby.
He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. He just stared as Eric continued jabbering on beside him about the Cardinals and who they needed to trade for.
There were four beds in the room. Three beds had been slept in, the sheets messy, but all three of the women were crowded together on the fourth bed. Not touching, but close. That told him things. That there was a bond between them. From captivity. Abuse. Murder. He felt comfortable, if only slightly, in knowing she at least had them in that wretched place.
The TV perched on an extendable arm in the corner showed Maury Povich, and the three women were captivated by it.
“Hey, you hearing me?” Eric asked, but his partner continued into the room, toward the women, ignoring him. Eric scoffed and then followed him in.
