Run Away (6 page)

“The way he looks at you . . . it’s gross. I mean, I don’t blame him, but . . .”

Kayla smiled despite the queasiness building in her belly. Was Sam jealous?

They kept walking in silence. After a ­couple of minutes, she looked back over her shoulder to see if they were being followed. But Oliver was gone. There were only shadows in his place.

Chapter 9

July 5, England

A
N UNBLINKING RED
light. More uncomfortable silence. A ticking wall clock. The bitter smell of Dr. Myers’s coffee.

It was their second meeting, a week after the first, which already felt like a lifetime ago. Kayla clenched her fists, watching her knuckles turn white. Her fingernails, which hadn’t been cut for weeks, dug into the palm of her hand. She found the painful sensation strangely relieving. She decided not to think any further into that.

“Take all the time you need,” Dr. Myers said.

More silence. Tick, tick, tick. The sound of the persistent clock was like a cheese grater on Kayla’s nerve endings.

The only option, she thought, was to talk over it. “Gabe was gay.”

Dr. Myers looked up. “I see. And how—­”

“We all fully supported him,” Kayla interrupted. She’d started now, and to stem the flow of her monologue would be counterproductive. “He came out last year, and it just kind of . . . fit. My mum cried, at first, then gave him a hug. My dad slapped him on the back and told him he was bloody brave for telling them. My nan was a little off about it, but she’s old-­fashioned like that. She soon got used to it.”

“How did
you
feel about it?”

“Honestly? It never really bothered me. I was proud of him for coming out, obviously, but I just never understood what the big deal was. And like I said, it just kind of fit. It wasn’t unexpected.”

“I see.”

Kayla stared into her hands, examining the crescent-­shaped indents her nails had left behind. They still stung a little. “We were all so supportive. We loved him to bits. He brought a boy around, once, before they went on a date. My dad gave the guy a stern talking to, like he would if I was seeing someone, and said stuff like, ‘You take care of my son, now,’ just like it was normal. Which it was. My mum quizzed him all about it when he got home. She put the kettle on, and despite his bashful grin, she insisted he told her everything over a cuppa. What Zack’s parents did, did Zack offer to pay for the meal, did he smell nice. It didn’t work out with Zack—­he didn’t smell that nice at all—­but we just knew everything would be fine.

“Everyone loved him. He did well in his exams, and he helped his friends study by sharing his notes. He played rugby for the town, and he went to parties and gigs too. He loved music. Not as a performer, though—­everyone in our family is rhythmically challenged. And he’d recently told my parents he wanted to go traveling after school, and he was so excited for that. He was just a normal seventeen-­year-­old. Liking the same sex was nothing but . . . a side note.

“But then he started getting these messages. On Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. At first, they were nasty, but not threatening. ‘You make me sick, you fucking faggot.’ ” Dr. Myers flinched at the profanity, though she tried her best to disguise it. Kayla swallowed the bile rising in her throat and continued. “ ‘You disgust me. You’re sick.’ That kind of thing. Disgusting, disgusting abuse. Then . . . then they got worse. Much worse. They said they were going to . . . They threatened to anally rape him, because ‘that’s the way you like it,’ and then they said . . .” Kayla cleared her throat. “Then they said they were going to rape me in front of him, to show him how it should be done.”

A pause. Dr. Myers was initially lost for words, but she recovered quickly. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Kayla. Really, I am.” She blew out through her lips, causing them to vibrate. “Was there a police investigation? They can be difficult to deal with when you’re grieving.”

Kayla shook her head. “No. Not an extensive one anyway. Once they’d ruled it as suicide, what was the point? Online bullying is, sadly, very common. That’s what they told my bereaved parents, anyway. As if Gabe was just another statistic.”

“I understand that must have been difficult, Kay—­”

“You don’t, though. Nobody does, and nobody ever will. I desperately need somebody to blame, somebody other than myself, but there’s
no one
. The social media accounts were anonymous, all under different names. Whoever it was—­if it was only one person—­used different e-­mail addresses to set up each one. And we never found the messages on Gabe’s laptop until after . . . you know. So it’s not like we can just ask him who had it in for him.”

Dr. Myers considered this for a moment. She mused, “Maybe that’s for the best, as unlikely as it may seem. You’ll never get closure if you’re constantly seeking answers that don’t exist. And having someone to blame, to channel all your anger toward, can hinder the healing process. Some ­people find themselves constantly dreaming about exacting revenge, and if you have a face to attach to that, it can quickly become an obsession. An obsession that ultimately will destroy you, without ever soothing your heartache.”

G
A
B
E
H
A
D
A
birthmark on his forearm. It was shaped like nothing, really, not a perfect heart or five-­point star like in songs or poems. Just a splodge of pigment that she had tried to lick off when she was tiny, thinking it was melted chocolate. She’d always had a rampant sweet tooth.

For some reason, she couldn’t get that birthmark out of her head. Would it still exist? Would it still be a quirk of nature, a sign of life, imperfectly printed on his skin? Or was the death long enough ago now that it had started to melt away into the earth?

Kayla had once voiced a similar thought to Sam. He’d found it strange, even morbid, that she was so concerned with the physical details, not the emotional implications. She didn’t know why, really. Thinking about it from an scientific perspective seemed to hurt less than the alternative. She could deal with the fact that Gabe’s body would eventually become a part of the earth—­a simple shift in energy that’d ultimately claim us all. But what she couldn’t grasp was the fact that he’d never pop his head around her door again to ask if she’d like a cup of tea (strong, with milk and two sugars, just how she liked it) or flop down onto her bed, sinking into the memory-­foam mattress and insisting that she
had
to listen to this new band he’d discovered on YouTube.

More than just simple grief, the unbearable boredom of being pent up in her parents’ enormous house all day was suffocating Kayla. Nobody told you how dull it was to be in mourning. Did it make her a monster to admit that?

It had been nearly four weeks with no clues, no new developments. No reason for hope. The police hadn’t contacted her with any further questions since her meeting with Shepherd. Even though she hadn’t been a suspect for a while, she’d still expected them to be in touch again. She shook off the uneasy feeling that had settled on her shoulders. Shepherd’s strangely disengaged demeanor had left her cold.

With nothing else to do, she’d read every magazine imaginable, devoured every book on her parents’ bookshelf, given the cleaner a hand with the housework, and even honed her baking skills to perfection with a rather impressive Victoria sponge cake, which her nan had crowned the finest in all of England.

She hadn’t been out running yet. She used to love it, pounding the English countryside with her beat-­up, muddy trainers. She was never very fast, or particularly graceful, but there was something therapeutic about the rhythm of her thudding feet and deep breathing. Her mum had bought her pair after pair of shiny new Nikes, in vivid shades of neon pink and girly turquoise, but she still loved her old school PE trainers, molded to her feet with hundreds and hundreds of miles built into their worn-­down soles and fraying toes.

Running gave her time to think, to plug in her headphones and put one foot in front of the other until she’d left every bad grade, traumatic breakup, and argument with her drunken mother behind her on the grassy fields, muddy trails, and potholed roads. But she had a feeling that now, her issues were too great to be cured by the simplest of remedies, and that terrified her. She was too scared to confirm her fears—­to be stranded in a field, miles from home, with only her own thoughts for company.

No, she didn’t feel ready to run yet. Instead she did something she hadn’t done in a long time: opened the shiny laptop her parents had bought her for passing her A levels. It was wafer thin and ultra-­professional, and all Kayla had ever done on it was read pop culture blogs. Until now.

Forget what Dr. Myers had said. She needed someone to blame, and she was going to find them.

Aran Peters. The sum total of Kayla’s communication with the wiry-­haired, pointy-­faced Aran had been his attempts to fondle her blossoming bosom at their end-­of-­school dance, age thirteen and a quarter. Kayla had told her friends she batted him away in disgust. She’d actually granted him an overdress graze and a slobbery kiss, resulting in the tangling together of their clunky braces. But she was far too concerned with her reputation to admit that.

After that incident, she and Aran went their separate ways, to different schools in different counties. Now it was time for a reconciliation.

Aran Peters was an IT whiz, and not just in the quite-­good-­at-­making-­spreadsheets way that most school-­taught kids were. He was ruthless when it came to learning everything he could possibly know about computers. He’d mastered the basics by the end of primary school, and had a solid grasp of the most sophisticated systems in the country by the time most teenagers were discovering Bacardi. Once, he’d hacked into the school’s server and awarded everyone in their year a 100 percent grade in all of their mid-­semester exams. He was twelve then. Afterward he had bigger fish to fry. He compromised a national exam board and swapped what were meant to be AS level essay questions with replacements that a particularly slow Labradoodle would find easy.

Kayla had no idea where Aran was now. He could be at university, possibly studying for his Ph.D. already, or he could be working in a top secret government facility specializing in homeland security, or something equally heroic. Either that or he’d gone down the route of digital mafia boss and currently had control over ninety-­nine percent of Western civilization. Knowing Aran, both were equally plausible scenarios.

Eventually she found his school’s alumni website, where she came across an article on his resounding success at one of the best universities in the country. He’d completed a four-­year curriculum in eighteen months, achieving the highest marks ever recorded by an undergraduate Information Technology student. He’d be attending the same university again in September, to complete his Ph.D. at the ripe old age of twenty. Perfect.

She clicked on the university’s website and browsed the list of staff, identifying the way in which their e-­mail addresses were composed: [email protected]. Assuming the students would have similar accounts, she started typing a message to the address [email protected].

It was worth a try. Especially considering what was at stake.

Chapter 10

July 6, England

K
AYLA CHECKED HER
e-­mails as soon as she woke up, one eye peeled opened as she stared at the glaring screen of her laptop. Nothing.

She dropped her head back onto her pillow, allowing the laptop to slide into bed next to her. She’d been hoping for a faint glimmer of hope before midday—­she wasn’t exactly looking forward to meeting Kathy Kingfisher, Sam’s mother, for the first time. These things were awkward enough when the love interest was still alive.

Realizing it was already ten-­thirty, Kayla rolled reluctantly out of bed, wrapping a fluffy white dressing gown around her and slipping her unsightly feet into a pair of matching slippers. Both garments had been stolen from a hotel in Dubai by her outraged mother, who was convinced the maid was stealing from the minibar and leaving them to foot the bill. To exact revenge, she’d pilfered not only the complimentary miniature cosmetics—­standard behavior in hotels—­but also the dressing gowns, slippers, and bath towels. The hotel had charged her through the teeth, and the excess baggage charges at the airport amounted to more than the original cost of the flights, but her mother had insisted that was beside the point.

Kayla glanced into the mirror. Weren’t the bereaved meant to gaze upon their own reflections and declare that they no longer recognized themselves? Everything still looked to her as it always had. Her deep tan was fading, her waist-­length dark hair was as unruly as ever, and her generous breasts and rounded hips hadn’t shrunk in the slightest.

Her interest in her appearance had almost completely evaporated. Still, she wanted to make a good impression with Kathy, and so forced herself to brush her hair, apply some dried-­up mascara she’d found at the back of a bedroom drawer, and pick out the nicest day dress she owned: a floaty, buttercup-­yellow affair with a delicate daisy print. Why was she so worried what Sam’s mum would think of her? She spritzed some floral, overly sugary perfume onto her neck—­in case Kathy hugged her—­and borrowed a dainty black leather watch from her mother’s impeccably organized jewelry box. Her heart twitched as her fingertips grazed the woven bracelet that sat next to it on her wrist. She pressed her eyes firmly together until the moment of intense grief had subsided.

It wasn’t even eleven yet.

Time to check my e-­mails once more
.

Still nothing.

K
A
T
H
Y
K
I
N
G
F
I
S
H
E
R
W
A
S
quite obviously grieving. Kayla tried not to feel embarrassed that the middle-­aged woman sitting opposite her in a busy coffee shop was sobbing loudly into a sodden handkerchief, drowning out the clattering noise of the cappuccino maker grinding coffee beans and ferociously frothing milk. She tentatively handed Kathy the paper napkin that had been placed underneath her lemon and poppy seed muffin.

Am I grieving wrong? It hasn’t even been a month yet
.
Why am I not this publicly distraught? Shouldn’t I be weeping into whatever nearby material I can find, crying Sam’s name repeatedly through a dry and sticky mouth? Or dabbing at my haggard face to try and soak up some of my never-­ending tears?

Dr. Myers insisted everyone dealt with loss differently, and Kayla understood that. But she couldn’t help but feel guilty that she wasn’t as overtly upset as she should be. It wasn’t that she didn’t love or miss the ­people she’d lost. It was more that she couldn’t connect with the deaths, couldn’t make enough sense of them to even begin to feel that kind of sadness.

She found herself looking at her mum’s watch. Eight minutes. Kathy Kingfisher hadn’t spoken a word since saying, “Hello hi Kayla nice to meet you I’m Kathy would you like a coffee or maybe some cake,” all in one sentence, as if trying to get the words out before she had a breakdown. Which she did, three-­point-­five seconds later. Kayla had bought the coffee and the cake, and sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair in equally uncomfortable silence ever since. For eight minutes.

Kayla looked around and saw a queue, as there always was at a busy chain like this, waiting to order, a generic soundtrack of inoffensive, devoid-­of-­personality music playing in the background. The controlled temperature was on the cooler end of the thermostat—­lower temperatures made you feel hungrier and more likely to overindulge in cake, her coffee shop expert of a father had taught her. The air smelled of espresso and the warm rain clinging to customers as they traipsed in from outside.

They were in Newcastle city center, as Kathy had driven up from Yorkshire that morning to chat with Kayla about what Sam had been like in his final days and weeks. She’d initiated contact with Kayla by asking Escaping Grey for her number, and considering the circumstances, they’d waived their confidentiality rules. Kayla was glad they had. She felt less alone, knowing she wasn’t the only one suffering in the aftermath.

Through a line of mothers with prams and a group of teenagers with vibrant hair colors, Kayla caught the tattooed male barista staring at her. She looked away quickly, guiltily, before remembering she actually wasn’t in a relationship and flirtatious eye contact was by no means off-­limits. She also realized the poor guy was probably just concerned for her companion’s mental well-­being. She shot him an apologetic glance, but he’d turned his back to her.

Kayla cleared her throat. No reaction. “Kathy? Would you like me to get you anything? Some water or some fresh tissues?”

Kathy looked up, as if noticing her for the first time, and sniffed deeply. “Oh Kayla, I’m so sorry,” she said, her words lulling with a gentle Yorkshire accent. Just like Sam’s. “This is so pathetic of me. I’ve never been such an emotional person but . . . losing your son . . . it just—­it ruins you.” Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy, with grape-­sized dark bags underneath that betrayed her lack of sleep over the past ten days.

“We don’t know that you’ve lost him for sure,” Kayla argued, albeit gently.

“Oh, I know, love, but you know what they say about Thailand. Once you’ve disappeared there, you’re never coming back. Especially when there was so much blood, just from one boy . . .”

“But I still think—­”

“Come on, Kayla. There’s no use clutching at straws. You can’t lose that much blood and survive. Sam’s dad . . . I’ve never seen him like this before. He’s usually so hard. Steely faced. But not now. I’m the strong one of the pair of us these days.” A feeble laugh. “Sam took after me, you know. Always had his feelings on show.” Kayla winced at the past tense. It sounded like a fresh wave of tears had erupted behind Kathy’s eyes, but her face was dry. She had cried for so long that her body had abandoned all hope of trying to keep up.

“That’s weird,” Kayla said. “In the past month, he never really . . .” She didn’t know how to approach the subject. She had no idea how much Kathy knew about her and Sam’s relationship. “I mean, he didn’t really talk about what was going on in his head. Kept his distance. Did he . . . did he talk to you about anything strange?”

Kathy shook her head slowly, and not very convincingly. “Not really. He did seem a bit distant in the last six weeks, which wasn’t like him. The phone calls got a bit more abrupt, whereas usually he’d tell me every little detail. He spoke a lot about you, especially for the first month or so,” Kathy forced a smile. “But that’s why I didn’t think anything was wrong, Kayla, because I thought that if there was, he’d surely tell me.”

Kayla nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I keep feeling angry at myself for not trying harder to make sure he was okay. But then I think that if anything were really wrong, like . . . like what the police are saying, he would have told me. We were pretty close.” As she talked, she was systematically destroying a discarded sugar wrapper in her fingertips. “I should have . . . I
would
have known.”

“So you’d think. But one thing was a bit weird.” Kathy was staring out of the window, not focusing on anything in particular. “Sam was always good with money—­always. As a little kid, he would meticulously save every single copper he could in his piggy bank, until you physically couldn’t squeeze another penny in. He cried when I smashed it, so I bought him another, much bigger one. He just put all of the money from the first into that and kept saving. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” She sighed, taking a sip of what must have now been a rather tepid latte. “I guess it just took me by surprise when he phoned me a few weeks ago and said he needed to borrow some cash.”

“He did?” This was news to Kayla. Sam hadn’t seemed particularly tight for money. Though he was rarely extravagant in his purchases, he would never turn down a meal out or a day trip for frugality’s sake.

“Yes. He said he’d run out of funds quicker than he’d thought, and needed more if he was to follow the four of you to Cambodia after Phuket. I thought it was odd too, you know? He’d budgeted the trip so carefully. But I knew it must have been genuine for him to ask me. He knows I’m not exactly Richard Branson. I live in my overdraft most of the time. And considering how much he was asking for . . .”

“How much?”

Kathy pursed her lips and cradled her coffee cup between her hands. “Three thousand.”

There it was again. That sudden sinking feeling in Kayla’s stomach that felt like she’d reached for a top step that wasn’t there.
Drug money
.
It has to be
.
But three grand?

Kathy was oblivious to Kayla’s shock. “I couldn’t give it to him, though. I did want my boy to have an amazing trip, see the world like I never did. But I just couldn’t afford it, so I told him he would have to come home. I had no idea he might have needed it for something else.”

“You couldn’t have known, Kathy.”

More tears. “I should have tried harder to get the money together, then none of this would have . . .”

A knot was starting to form in Kayla’s stomach. If she’d pushed Sam for an explanation, she might have been able to help. It was common knowledge that her family wasn’t exactly strapped for cash. Three thousand pounds would have been pocket change for her dad, who’d spend a similar amount on a suit without a second thought. To think Sam might have lost his life over something as vulgar as money was unthinkable. No wonder Kathy was so distraught. She would forever carry around the knowledge that if she’d had some savings behind her, she might still have a son.

Kayla asked the question she’d been dying to know the answer to. “Do you really think, though, that Sam would have got himself into so much trouble over
drugs
? I mean, he was so careful and thoughtful. He’s the kind of guy who would never cheat on a test. If he found a wallet on the street, he’d take it to the police station, or if he saw somebody fall over, he’d rush over to help them up while the rest of us laughed uncontrollably. He was—­or still is—­a good person. You must know that more than anyone. I mean . . .
cocaine
? Debt? Drug deals gone wrong?” The room seemed to have suddenly quieted a few decibels, and Kayla lowered her voice in case anyone was listening. “I just can’t see it. I really can’t. Those theories do not fit that boy.”

“That was my initial reaction, too,” Kathy said, nodding. “I thought they had the wrong person. Then when they told me it was definitely my Sam who was missing, something inside me still wouldn’t believe it. I thought the DNA tests would show it was somebody else’s blood, or he’d pop up somewhere in a ­couple of hours having cut his foot on a rock, or something equally clumsy and Samlike.” Kayla couldn’t help but smile. Sam’s ungraceful mannerisms were like a shared secret between the two grieving women. “But the hours turned into days, and the days into weeks. Still no Sam. I don’t know what else to think, Kayla. There’s no other explanation. I keep trying to think about what would drive him to that.”

The knot in Kayla’s stomach tightened.