When You Disappeared by John Marrs

Author:John Marrs [Marrs, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781611097511
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2017-07-12T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SIMON

Colorado, USA, twenty-three years earlier

2 May

The faces of the others I’d killed hadn’t haunted me like Paula’s.

Again and again, I recalled the warmth of her soft cheeks and her hair as it brushed against the back of my fingers. I remembered thinking how surprisingly light she felt when I threw her body into the road.

I could still hear the bursting of her skin and bones as the van crushed her. I still felt the adrenaline soaring through my blood as I ran back to my hotel to grab my backpack and then vanished into the night.

But when my foot pressed hard on Betty’s accelerator and Key West faded behind me, all I saw was my imaginary passenger Paula’s face in the rear-view mirror.

Over the next three months, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado all flashed past like a wheel of photos in a red plastic View-Master. The majority of my time was spent on the road manipulating fellow runaways into helping fill my hours – new groups of friends for the days and women for the nights. And when female volunteers were sparse, I’d seek out those who required payment by the hour.

Bony or Rubenesque, dark-chocolate complexions or as pale as death – appearances never mattered when I knelt behind them as they balanced on their hands and knees. And if they could provide the chemical stimulants I’d grown to enjoy since my first time with the two girls in Miami, then even better.

I offered transportation to anyone who needed to be somewhere else, even to a state hundreds of miles from the route I’d intended. I did anything to avoid being ensnared by myself, because that’s when I dissected my actions.

I didn’t doubt for a moment that killing Paula had been the right thing to do. In fact, I was still galled by her for backing me into a corner. Paula had had a choice; I hadn’t. By following me, she’d made the wrong one. I had made the correct one.

I’d gone to great pains to keep my past and present separate. And when she’d demanded reasons, I could predict the chain of events that would’ve followed my allowing her to walk away. She’d have hurried back to the hotel to inform Roger his departed friend was actually thriving under the Floridian sun. Then, on their return to England, he’d have felt duty-bound to tell Catherine that she’d been abandoned, not widowed. While I was missing, there was doubt and an assumption of death. With confirmation came certainty and I did not want to be thought of in either a negative or positive light.

Paula had paid the price of interfering with what was meant to be. And I was not responsible for that.

Utah, USA

20 July

I removed my belongings from my backpack and spread them out in a semicircle across the saline terrain. I built two heaps – the ‘keep’ pile and the ‘toss’ pile. The first contained essentials such as clothing, maps, Darren’s passport, and money.

The second

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