Or what if she was just hurt? Bleeding or injured?
He moved through the kitchen, past the table where he had spied her dad planting that creepy kiss on Tabitha’s lips. He shivered at the memory, which had been enhanced and made even worse by the information he’d learned online. Again, he reminded himself not to dwell. There’d be time later to deal with those things. Hopefully there would be, he thought. Hopefully there would be.
He reached a hallway that ran to the front of the house. The smell seemed to be coming from somewhere in that direction. He hadn’t adjusted to it, not at all. He took off his sweatshirt again, feeling the cold chill of the house against his bare arms, and pressed it against his nose, hoping to block out the odor.
There were doors on either side of the hallway. One of them was open, and Jared peered inside. A bathroom. The sink was streaked with rust stains, the shower curtain torn and hanging loose. A pang of regret stabbed his heart, an aching sorrow he felt to his core. He hated to think Tabitha lived in these conditions in a dirty run-down house. She showered there in the crude little room. Went to the bathroom and combed her hair.
Then he saw the door on the left, one that must have led to a bedroom. It hung open, but there was a hasp attached to the wood on the outside. No padlock was in sight, but it meant that someone had been kept locked inside there. The hasp was new, the metal clean and shiny in the dingy gloom.
Tabitha.
Had she been a prisoner in her own house? Held by her father?
Jared rushed into the room. He saw a mattress on the floor and some cardboard boxes against the wall. The closet hung open but was empty.
Jared saw scattered papers and a textbook he recognized from school. He also saw a notebook, one with scribbles on the front. He recognized Tabitha’s handwriting and bent down to pick it up. It was full of drawings. Flowers and horses and a unicorn. The kind of things lots of kids, especially girls, drew. Page after page of them.
He flipped back and looked at the inside front cover. Someone had signed their name there in a large flowing script.
Natalie Lynn Rose.
And under the name, a photograph. Taped to the notebook. A beautiful woman who looked a lot like the girl he knew as Tabitha. But older, probably in her thirties.
Her mother. Had to be.
Jared gently peeled the photo off the notebook and slid it into his back pocket.
He tucked the notebook under his arm and left the bedroom.
He brought the sweatshirt back up to his face. As he moved down the hallway toward the front of the house, the smell grew stronger. Even through the thick material of the sweatshirt, the odor reached him. His eyes watered from the stinging stench.
Faint light leaked into the front room through a small opening in the blinds. Jared saw two overstuffed and dirty chairs, a small out-of-date TV with an antenna sitting on a plastic milk crate. An inert lump, fat and bloated, lay sprawled on the floor.
It was a man. Jared could see that. But not Tabitha’s dad. This man wore a business suit, the tie knotted against the thick folds of skin at his neck. A giant pool of blood spread around his head like a halo. The blood was thick and black, and Jared could tell no one could survive losing that much from his body. A few feet away from the body sat a small ceramic statue of Santa Claus, the weapon that was probably used to smack the fat man over the head.
Jared stared a moment longer, making sure, really sure, the man was dead and beyond help. He clearly was. His mouth hung open, the jaw slack. His eyes behind half-closed lids were sunken. At the moment of his death, the man’s bowels had emptied, the main source of the nasty odor in the house.
Jared backed away. He went down the hallway and through the kitchen. He saw the back door, the one he’d tried earlier. He turned the lock and pulled it open, stepping out onto the small back porch and letting the cool air wash over his face. He took the sweatshirt away, gulping in the mercifully clean and cold air of the late-winter night.
He huffed in the air for a few moments. Then he called the police.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The first two police officers to arrive on the scene asked Jared a lot of questions. He couldn’t answer many of them. He told them who had lived in the house as of a few days ago, and he related the story online identifying Tabitha’s dad as a fugitive and a murderer. The officers—one of them young and stocky, the other middle-aged and wiry—made him go over that a few times before it was all clear, and once it was, they decided to go into the house.