After She Fled: A Troubled Spirits Novel by J.R. Erickson

Author:J.R. Erickson [Erickson, J.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

26

My mother’s house, as usual, stood quiet when I walked in.

I microwaved a frozen dinner and sat at the table, opening a web browser on my phone. I typed ‘Freddy’s House—Draven, Michigan’ into the search. The results that populated were not helpful. They mostly involved men named Freddy or Frederick, who lived in Draven. There was nothing at all about the abandoned house just down the road.

I changed the search and typed ‘Addison Green, Draven, Michigan.’

News articles came back, including the clippings I’d found in the envelopes in both Tony and Varena’s rooms. I read every article, but the details were obscure. The Draven police refused to comment in each one and after the one-year anniversary no more articles had been printed.

I erased the search terms and typed in ‘Mia Berry and Tony Swift, Draven, Michigan.’

I clicked the first article.

Head-On Collision Claims One Draven High Student, Leaves Other in Critical Condition.

I stared at the black-and-white photo of the crash. Mia’s car was a mangled sculpture of death—it no longer resembled a car at all. The semi they’d hit, its front end bashed in, sat on the side of the road. Police surrounded the scene and tarps covered portions of the car.

My stomach twisted at the image. I had never seen it—never once looked it up or driven by the junkyard in town where people said Mia’s car had been towed that day.

I could not imagine how Tony had survived. How any living person could have been extracted from the wreckage.

I closed the browser and stood, appetite gone, and walked my dinner to the trash. As I dumped it in, I noticed several of Tony’s pill bottles. I reached in and picked one up. It was empty. The label on the outside classified the medication as an opioid. I wondered if my mother had finally started to sift through Tony’s stuff. I hoped so.

I dropped the bottle back in the garbage and went to bed.

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