AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As Detective Kittleson announced the warrant’s scope: the keys to the Kia and the Kia itself, I shifted my gaze to the two little girls. Unlike April, they were totally oblivious to the magnitude of what was happening on their front porch. The taller of the two, whose blond bangs stuck up at an angle that made me think she’d just gotten out of bed, hopped from one foot to the other while she tapped on her mom’s leg, pointing at the police car in the driveway. The younger girl looked between her mother and older sister, patiently waiting for someone to tell her what was going on.
I was so busy looking at the three of them, that I didn’t even notice the fourth person standing a few feet behind them in the hallway until she stepped forward.
She had straight brown hair and wide hazel eyes with the thickest set of eyelashes I’d ever seen. She was wearing a comfy-looking burgundy velvet tracksuit. She appeared to be about the same age as April. Was this a sister? A nanny? From the expression on her face, my first thought was that she looked like she’d seen a ghost too.
And she had.
Because she looked right at me and whispered, “Are you dead?”
28. MEGHAN
Salt Lake Valley, Utah
Now
Domanska listened to her hunches.
Which was good. Because that’s all I could contribute—aside from making her Weimaraner Joey uneasy when I got too close.
So when the nervous waitress from Gracie’s couldn’t conclusively identify James Carson in the photo lineup of dark-haired, handsome men in their late twenties, Domanska didn’t give up.
She watched patiently while the skinny, blue-eyed woman scanned each photo, then nodded her head vigorously. “That one could be him. I think that one, maybe? I remember he was cute. He also had brown hair. So that guy fits the bill.” Then she moved on to the next photo, frowned, and said the same thing.
I yelled at her. I sat on top of the desk with the photos and got right up in her eardrum when she scanned the actual photo of James—which had been plucked from his LinkedIn profile. “That’s him. You talked to him! Look at it harder. That’s the one. Remember.”
All it seemed to do was increase her anxiety. By the time she left the police station, she was visibly shaking. There was no way that a judge was going to grant Domanska a warrant based on that ID.
Domanska, however, was unfazed. She thanked the waitress for her time, placed the photos back into a folder, and asked her assistant to find out whether the traffic cameras in Salt Lake and Cedar Fort still had backup footage stored in the system.
When James Carson had moved to Idaho, he’d gotten himself a bus-bench lawyer who ripped Domanska a new one and made a blistering call to her supervisor about harassing his client. She had patiently made a note on his file—but kept it open on her desk.
She wasn’t going to let this go.
Which encouraged me to hold on a little longer, too.
When I wasn’t peering over Domanska’s shoulder at the computer or riding along on calls, I drifted. I spent more and more time with my memories as the days turned into weeks and Domanska worked on other cases. Twenty-six years holds a lot of memories. So there were still plenty of static worlds to explore that allowed me to come back to the land of the living. I savored each one like a rerun of a beloved TV show. But binge-watching memories or TV by yourself gets lonely. I thought about Grandma Rosie—and the others who had passed on—almost constantly.
At first, I stayed at the police station when Domanska went home at night. It never really closed down. There was always something happening. Always somebody waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It was interesting for a while. I saw a lot of things up close that I’d never seen—or wanted to see. A lot of screaming. A lot of crying. A little blood. A lot of phone calls. And a lot of questions with unsettling answers.
I went home with Domanska for the first time the night they got a call from West Valley about an endangered child—and arrested her parents. I didn’t want to be in the same building as the quiet, bespeckled man with salt-and-pepper hair who had raped his ten-year-old daughter. Or the mother who knew about it. So when Domanska left for the night in her unmarked cruiser, I got into the passenger seat with her.
I wasn’t comfortable staying at her house when she wasn’t there. In large part because Joey, the Weimaraner, peed on the carpet then barked until I went outside the one time I tried.
The comfort of going home—to any home—at the end of the day was just enough to keep me going. At the end of every day, we microwaved one of those frozen meal subscription dinners. Then we took Joey for a walk (he tolerated me if Domanska was nearby), came back home, and watched an episode of Parks and Recreation. Sometimes Domanska’s daughter dropped by with dinner, and we all went for a walk and ate dinner together.
I thought about my parents a lot. About whether I should have spent my last days haunting them, instead of Domanska and the Salt Lake City police department. I missed my mom and dad, but knowing that I’d see them again—that they would find me in their memories someday—kept me where I was. Grandma Rosie had made it clear that once I made the decision to cross over into that universe of untapped memories, I couldn’t come back.
My unfinished business was here. And after months of being alone with my own bones in the mountain, Domanska’s place felt like a home of sorts.
* * *
After a few months had passed, I finally won Joey over. When I sat down next to Domanska to watch Parks and Rec, he sometimes sat on my side of the couch, snuggling against the pillow and wedging me into the crack between the cushions. I loved it. It was the only thing that still made me feel like I still existed on this side.
The traffic cams had proven useless. And the woman who had called in the tip about James Carson the previous year didn’t have anything more than a hunch to offer, either. She knew James’s wife from church. She got a bad feeling about him and thought he looked like the photo that had run in the stories about my murder. But that was all. April Carson—James’s wife—wasn’t talking either. When Domanska called, she said she’d been advised not to answer any questions by her husband’s lawyer. So that was the end of that.
All we had left were hunches. But hunches could only take us so far. Domanska kept my file on her desk. She followed every single new tip that trickled in periodically. She didn’t know what I knew, though. And I couldn’t tell her.
* * *
