This story is by Julie Squires and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
In the washroom mirror of the Boeing 787, he recoils at the sight of the monster’s demon eyes, with flesh hanging from cheekbones and a hollowed-out skull. He blinks, and the image morphs into his everyday face, corn-flower-blue eyes, and smooth, tanned skin. Jackson splashes cold water on that face, then swiftly exits, returning to his seat.
His head pounds. Even now, so many years later, he’s still trying to uncover a shroud of mystery. Which of those two faces is he?
During check-in, he had claimed a window seat, which he is now grateful for, but there is nothing to see outside except a suffocating blackness and his reflection in the pane.
His boots feel heavy, wet from sucking mud with each step he’d taken across the parking lot from his car to the terminal. But it’s the albatross of fear and guilt corkscrewed around his neck that is getting heavier, choking him as each minute ticks by.
He closes his eyes, picturing Carla’s face on the night her world shattered in a way that had nothing to do with her heroin overdose and everything to do with regaining consciousness in a hospital room surrounded by cops. Himself and three policewomen had given Carla the chilling news: Carla’s babysitter reported she’d left Carla’s baby alone to go buy alcohol, and when she returned, the lock had been tampered with, and the baby was gone. Someone had carried five-month-old Alyssa out into the night. Jackson would never forget the quivering raw sores on Carla’s cracked lips, just before her screams began.
Immediately, he’d plunged deep into the icy waters of the investigation. But despite the meticulous work of the Vancouver Police Department with determined Detective Constable Jackson Delaney at the helm, the case of baby Alyssa Dunn’s kidnapping had gone cold. The child had simply vanished into thin air, words that nauseated Jack every time he heard them. Soon after that, and as Jack predicted, Carla died of an overdose without knowing what had happened to her daughter.
The flight is a red-eye, but he knows he won’t sleep. Instead, he pulls up the news headlines on his iPad, searching for more information on cold cases. That same familiar photo he’d seen a week ago stares back at him: Detective Patrick Nyhan. The new hotshot eager to crack the cold case of Alyssa’s kidnapping. Not for Carla, of course, who is long gone, but for the sake of Nyhan’s own reputation and career.
Jack sighs. The plane is hours away from landing, the influx of time stretching ahead, nerve-wracking.
Here, forty thousand feet in the air, the torture of his dilemma, the crossroads he is at, has nowhere to hide, not from his conscience, not from his aching heart. It sits on his chest like a slab of concrete. There are no distractions, except for the bourbon burning his throat on the way down to the quarry of stones lodged in his stomach.
Jackson closes his bloodshot eyes again, and this time, his mind, tender and sticky with memories, spins like cotton candy on a paper straw, back to his childhood. As a big brother to his sister, eleven years younger than him, his life with Mandy and his parents, in that whitewashed house near the Vancouver seaside, could be described as… blissful. Summers spent barefoot on the sand, laughing as high-spirited Mandy chased the frothy waves crashing onto the beach. And then holding her on his lap, snuggled in a blanket, tiny moccasins on her feet, captivated by the darkness descending after sunset, the mystifying light of the moon shining in the indigo sky.
But when Mandy was twenty-four, her and her husband’s car skidded on a highway reflecting the pouring rain’s oily incandescence. Mandy lost her world that night. Not only her husband and part of her leg but something else just as precious.
A jolt of turbulence, and the past’s ghostly fingers continue to stir the hairs on the back of Jack’s neck as a different memory slithers in, swimming like an eel behind his eyelids. He is back there again, on that rare stormy Vancouver night, all five senses heightened…
He’d shuddered at the smell of stale cigarettes, grease, and the horror scampering down his spine. Within the warmth of the apartment, an itchiness thawed his toes that had, moments ago, felt half-frostbitten in the blizzard outside. Then the door across the hall had swung open, the emerging couple’s laughter echoing like sonar underwater before spotting him.
“Crap, must be cold out, or are you a creep trying to rob someone, eh?”
The man was sallow, and so skinny he could pass for emaciated.
“Don’s right, you look sketchy,” his girlfriend squeaked, her pupils dilated.
Sweat forming on his skin, Jack didn’t dare think about removing one article of the clothing mummifying him, the winter parka with its hood over his face, the snowpants, the black boots.
“Sorry, didn’t realize how I look, bus didn’t come, stupid transit, I’m still frozen from that walk,” Jackson said.
“Sucks,” Don replied, his girlfriend simultaneously muttering, “let’s go Donny, Mel’s gonna be pissed if we’re late.”
As they dissolved into the stairwell, and despite the scorching panic engulfing him, he had moved fast, past the point of no return, when he picked the lock of apartment 2801.
Back in the present, en route to Brisbane where his sister now lives, Jackson must decide if he should tell Mandy the news he’s recently learned. Whether turning into outlaws would be their best option. If he tells her, her sheer hysteria will seal their fate as fugitives, fleeing from country to country, always looking over their shoulders, always moving, with little chance to breathe. The dilemma makes his bones feel like deadweights, both splits in this crossing as treacherous as quicksand.
Mandy had begun to live again after Jack’s painstaking mission had been accomplished, her sapphire eyes sparkling in the southern-coastal sunshine as she held the baby. They both knew his story about finding Alyssa abandoned beside a dumpster on Vancouver’s east side, without anyone around, was a lie. But the second part was the truth. He had secured a new name for her, a passport, ID, birth certificate, everything he needed to bring her across the pond. After all, he was a cop; he knew people. The shady but skillful ones.
And Mandy, in love at first cuddle, had been powerless to reject the precious gift, immobilized like a skier trapped beneath an avalanche.
But now super-sleuth Nyhan is in charge, and Jack is afraid. Advances in forensics could change the entire scope of the investigation.
Back then, surveilling Carla for weeks, Jack knew that circumventing any hidden or outdoor cameras was as important as timing. His unidentifiable car sat parked for days where not one camera existed. Until the night Carla had left to pursue the euphoria her veins screamed for.
Inside the apartment, Alyssa had begun stirring on the dirty mattress, salty streaks glittering like diamonds on her face. He’d wasted no time securing her into the goose-down baby carrier, zipping the parka back up over her. An opening for air, a bouncing stride to soothe, a freak snowstorm to muffle cries, it was as good a recipe as any to carry her the four blocks. Warmth in the car, and relief the bottle of formula had stayed tepid in the insulated bag, had followed.
For most of his adult life, Jackson had been called the eternal bachelor, never in a relationship for longer than six months. His last girlfriend ran off with some bad-boy-gangster who would inevitably leave a buildup of scar tissue on her heart.
“You’re too nice, Jack,” his friends told him, “Girls these days don’t want an overprotective brother. That’s how you always end up in the friend zone.”
Well, if Jack was guilty of being a nice guy, at least he’d put it to use. And, despite his muscular frame and skull and crossbones tattoos, symbolizing death apparently, Jackson could never change; he’d always be as sweet as the minute he was born.
Besides, he’d thought to himself back then, changing a diaper couldn’t be that bad, could it? Until he’d discovered Alyssa could be so… squirmy.
In the end, all that mattered was getting Alyssa, renamed Isabella, and no longer neglected or abused, across the Pacific to Australia. Into the arms of Mandy who, after the accident, could never have children of her own.
That was nine years ago.
And now he’s trapped on a plane flying to Brisbane with a choice to make.
The steward approaches with another drink. It loosens the verdict right out of him.
After all, Nyhan isn’t the best gumshoe around; he neither moves stealthily nor does he wear rubber-soled sneakers. Nyhan is entitled, loud, boisterous, and not very well-liked or trusted.
Plus, during this trip, Jack has an interview with the Queensland Police Service. If he’s offered the job, Australia might just become his new home.
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