Before She Was Found. Heather Gudenkauf

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       Thomas Petit

      Monday, April 16, 2018

      Thomas pulls Jordyn’s damp jacket from the washing machine. The blood appears to be completely washed away. He lifts it just inches from his face to get a better look. He’s tempted to douse it with bleach but quickly dismisses the idea. It was just a spot of blood. Kids bleed all the time. Hell, as youngsters his boys were plastered in Band-Aids on any given day from all the scrapes and scratches they collected.

      But niggling doubts keep crowding his head. As much as he loves his granddaughter, she has always had a bit of a devilish streak. A quick tongue and an even quicker temper. There was the time when Jordyn was about six and the school called saying that Jordyn pinched a girl in her class so hard it left a bruise. “Why?” Tess had asked, wanting to understand.

      Jordyn scowled and said, “She took my spot on the carpet. I told her to move but she wouldn’t.”

      There was the time when Jordyn was benched in soccer for purposely trying to trip her opponents. Jordyn promised she didn’t do it on purpose and Thomas wanted to believe her but there was also the incident last year when Jordyn slammed a locker door on a classmate’s hand, breaking two of her fingers. Again, Jordyn insisted it was an accident but the injured party disagreed and so did her mother. Jordyn was suspended for a day.

      But these examples are eons away from stabbing someone and Thomas pushes the doubts away. He tosses Jordyn’s damp jacket in the dryer, sets the dial to permanent press and then goes out to finally get that cup of coffee. His head pounds from lack of caffeine and the sharp ammonia fumes.

      He checks his watch. They need to be at the police station in fifteen minutes and he can still hear Jordyn banging around up in her bedroom. Thomas grabs a broom leaning against a corner and lifts it, soundly tapping it against the ceiling, and Jordyn stomps her foot two times in response. Normally, Tess would scold them both for this noisy mode of communication but over the years it has become a game between them. Today he finds no humor in it.

      Thomas pours a cup of coffee into a mug that Jordyn made for him when she was in second grade and takes a tentative sip. His stomach bubbles with nerves. When the boys were young, a visit from a police officer or a sheriff’s deputy wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.

      It shouldn’t have been a surprise given Donny’s and Randy’s lack of supervision. It was a catch-22, Thomas thought. If he and Tess kept the boys at the bar where they could keep an eye on them, the questionable clientele and their bad habits were sure to rub off on them. And if they let them run wild they were bound to go searching for trouble with no chance of Thomas or Tess being there to yank them out of harm’s way. It was no wonder that Donny and Randy found themselves in a number of scrapes with the law.

      There was many a night when Randy and Donny were deposited on their front step by Sheriff Tate after being caught drinking, carousing and trespassing on some poor farmer’s land while trying to tip a cow or two. It’s all harmless mischief, Thomas used to tell Tess after the boys, pale and hungover, were out of earshot.

      Yes, until someone gets hurt, Tess would shoot back until it became kind of a joke between them. They laughed halfheartedly at the time but it was with great relief when Randy finally graduated high school and went off to a nearby community college. Donny went his own direction and left Iowa for college in Oregon. Out of sight, out of mind, Thomas thought. And it worked, at least for a few years. Until Randy showed up on their doorstep with a round-faced spitfire of a four-year-old in tow and they found themselves worrying all over again. This time about Jordyn.

      Again Thomas pummels the ceiling with the broom handle. He’s discovered over the years that with girls, with Jordyn, anyway, it was different but much more complicated. The boys only had two moods: silly and sleepy. Jordyn, on the other hand, had too many moods to count. But how Thomas loved that girl.

      Thomas was sure that Tess felt the same way, though they never really talked about it. Maybe it was because they’d never had enough time with Betsy. Jordyn had the same round cheeks, the same widow’s peak, the same belly laugh as their daughter.

      Thomas knows that Jordyn is just on the edge of growing up. That there’s going to be a lot more sass than sweet in the years to come and it scares him to death that Tess might not be around to guide her, and him, through it. Jordyn needs her. He needs her. He tries not to think about life without Tess. It was just a fall, a bad fall, but Tess is tough. Hell, she put up with him all these years. She’ll be able to get through a pesky setback like a broken hip.

      With a sigh, Thomas gives up banging on the ceiling and makes the long trek up the stairs. He pushes open her bedroom door only to find it empty but in typical disarray. Jordyn must be in the bathroom.

      The book bag that Jordyn took with her to Cora Landry’s house for the overnight sits in the middle of the floor. Thomas bends over and pulls out the pair of sweatpants and a University of Grayling T-shirt that Jordyn wears as pajamas and adds them to the ever-growing pile of laundry to wash. His hand grazes something soft and Thomas finds Ella, the gray-and-pink stuffed elephant that Jordyn insists she has outgrown but that always seems to find its way into bed with her. He presses Ella to his nose and inhales Jordyn’s familiar scent. A combination of her shampoo and the Juicy Fruit gum that Jordyn chews incessantly.

      He digs more deeply into the book bag and pulls out a pair of socks and underwear, a hairbrush, a toothbrush sealed inside a plastic baggie. His hand lands on a social studies textbook. It’s heavier than he expects and it tumbles from his fingers and hits the ground hard, thrusting a folded sheet of paper from its pages. Thomas reaches for the paper. It is difficult to pick up but after several tries he is able to snag it with his thick, arthritic fingers. The paper is onion-skin thin and the color of weak tea.

      Thomas pushes aside a stack of books sitting on the foot of Jordyn’s bed and sits down to get a better look. Carefully he unfolds the paper and immediately recognizes Jordyn’s narrow feathery print. Pitch is written neatly across the top and below it is a remarkably detailed map of what looks like the train yard.

      Below a diamond-shaped compass in the upper right-hand corner is the boarded-up depot, the crisscross hatch marks of the railroad tracks and a half-dozen rectangular-shaped boxcars.

      Thomas wants to believe that the map is a geography assignment for Jordyn’s social studies class but the fact that his granddaughter and two friends snuck into the train yard the night before leads him to believe it’s no simple school assignment. Two girls, one with braids, the other with her hair in a high ponytail, are hiding behind one of the boxcars, mischievous grins slashed across their round faces. Jordyn and Violet. A third girl, smaller than the other two, is standing all alone in the middle of the tracks, her mouth opened in a round, black scream.

      He examines the drawing more closely and among the wispy pencil strokes meant to represent the winter wheat next to the train yard is a shadowy spot, more of a smudge, really. Thomas takes the paper to the window and holds it up СКАЧАТЬ