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 flinched at the monster’s demon eyes, the flesh hanging from cheekbones, the skull hollowed out. He blinked and the image transformed to his everyday face, corn-flower-blue eyes, and smooth tanned skin. Jackson splashed that face with cold water, then got the hell out of there, back to his seat.
His head pounded. Even now, so many years later, he was still trying to uncover a shroud of mystery. Which of those two faces was he?
He’d claimed a window seat, which he was grateful for, but there was nothing to see outside except a suffocating blackness, and his reflection in the pane.
His boots felt heavy, wet from sucking mud each step he’d taken across the parking lot from his car to the terminal. But it was the albatross of fear and guilt corkscrewed around his neck, that was getting heavier, choking him as each minute ticked by.
He closed his eyes picturing Carla’s face on the night her world had 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 gave 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 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 had predicted, Carla died of an overdose without knowing what happened to her daughter.
The flight was a red eye, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Instead, he pulled up the news headlines on his iPad, searching for more information on cold cases. That same familiar photo he’d seen a week ago, stared 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 was long gone, but for the sake of Nyhan’s own reputation and career.
Jack sighed. The plane was 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 was at, had nowhere to hide, not from his conscience, not from his aching heart. It sat on his chest like a slab of concrete. There were no distractions, except for the bourbon burning his throat on the way down to the quarry of stones lodged in his stomach.
He closed his bloodshot eyes again, and this time, his mind, tender and sticky with memories, spun 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 continued to stir the hairs on the back of Jack’s neck as a different memory slithered in, swimming like an eel behind his eyelids. He was back there again, on that rare stormy Vancouver night, all five senses heightened.
He remembered shuddering 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, moments ago, felt half-frostbitten in the blizzard outside. Then the door across the hall swung open, the emerging couple’s laughter echoing like sonar under water, 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, “come on Donny, Mel’s gonna be pissed, she’s only one floor down.”
As they dissolved into the stairwell, and despite the scorching panic engulfing him, he moved fast, past the point of no return, when he picked the lock of apartment 2801.
Back in the present, enroute to Brisbane where his sister now lived, Jackson had to decide if he should tell Mandy the news he’d recently learned. Whether turning into outlaws would be their best option. If he told her, her sheer hysteria would seal their fate as fugitives, fleeing from country to country, always looking over their shoulders, always moving, with no chance to breathe. The dilemma made 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 was 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, was powerless to reject the precious gift, as immobilized as a skier trapped beneath an avalanche.
Sure enough, Isabella, Alyssa’s new legal name, blossomed.
But now super-sleuth Nyhan was in charge, and Jack was 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 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 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, 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. Dude, that’s how you end up in the friend zone.”
Well, if Jack was going to be 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 was as sweet as the minute he was born.
Besides, changing a diaper couldn’t be that bad, could it? Until he 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 was trapped on a plane flying to Brisbane with a choice to make.
The steward approached with another drink. It loosened the verdict right out of him.
After all, Nyhan wasn’t the best gumshoe around; he neither moved stealthily nor did he wear rubber-soled sneakers. Nyhan was entitled, loud, boisterous, and not very well-liked or trusted.
Plus, during this trip, Jack had an interview with the Queensland Police Service in Brisbane. If the job was to his liking, Australia might just become his new home.
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