106 Miles to Chicago

(10...)

"Soul Man" on the oldies station. Frank switched it off.

The revolver sat on the passenger seat, four inches of blued steel catching weak December light. He covered it with the newspaper. The headline was about a school board meeting. He hadn't read a word.

Across the street, the house slept. Vinyl siding gone grey. A rebel flag in the front window, sun-faded to pink. Trash bags split open on the lawn, their guts scattered by dogs or wind.

Robert Macey was inside. Sleeping it off, even though parole said no drinking. Frank had found the bottles in the trash three nights running. He'd been through that trash every week since Macey moved from the halfway house, fingers sorting through coffee grounds and cigarette ash and wadded tissues, looking for something he couldn't name.

He never found it.

(9...)

A girl on the sidewalk. Blond pigtails, blue dress, ribbons catching air as she skipped. Singing something he couldn't hear through the glass.

Frank's hands went still on the wheel.

She was maybe six. Maybe seven. The age Jenny would have been if she'd gotten to keep having birthdays.

The girl passed his car without looking. Her shoes were white with pink laces. She turned the corner and was gone.

Frank realized he'd stopped breathing. He made himself start again.

(8...)

The red wagon had been sitting in front of the house. Two wheels on the curb, two wheels in the street. That was the first thing he saw when he woke up on the couch, late afternoon light slanting through the blinds, the television still on.

He'd told the police he only looked away for a minute. He told Carol the same thing.

He'd been asleep for two hours.

The wagon was there. Jenny was not.

(7...)

They pulled her out of the river eleven days later. Carol knew before the divers surfaced. She made a sound Frank had never heard before—not a scream, not a word. Something older than language.

He pushed through the uniforms trying to hold him back. He saw.

She was naked and her eyes were open.

The coroner zipped the bag and Jenny became a shape, and the shape went into a van, and the van drove away. Frank stood on the muddy bank until someone led him to a car. He couldn't remember who. He couldn't remember the drive home.

He remembered the eyes.

(6...)

Carol went into the ground eighteen months later. The doctors called it pancreatic, called it aggressive, called it inoperable.

She fought the morphine at the end. Spitting, clawing at the sheets. Trying to hold on long enough to learn who took her daughter.

Frank held her hand and said nothing.

He could have given her a name to curse. His own. He could have told her he'd been asleep, that Jenny slipped outside while he dreamed of nothing, that the lie he told was the first thing he thought of when he saw the empty wagon.

He let her die without anyone to blame.

(5...)

Robert Macey. Sex offender, prior conviction. He'd grabbed a girl fifty miles from his house—same age as Jenny, same coloring. A neighbor got the plate number. The girl had screamed and kicked until he let go.

Frank wondered if Jenny screamed.

If she did, the couch swallowed it.

(4...)

He spent Carol's life insurance trying to make the connection. Macey lived a hundred miles from where Jenny disappeared. If a man would drive fifty miles to take a child, why not a hundred?

The police shrugged. Not enough evidence. Nothing to connect him. We're sorry for your loss.

They gave Macey twelve years. He served six.

Frank sold the house. Lost the job. Slept in the car more nights than not. Nobody looked twice at a man like that. He became furniture. He became invisible.

He became this: a man in a parked car with a gun under a newspaper, watching a house.

(3...)

The December air hit him when he opened the door. Cold and bright, the kind of morning that felt like it should mean something.

He tucked the revolver into his waistband. The weight of it settled against his spine.

The block was quiet. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice and stopped. A truck passed on the cross-street, engine fading. Then nothing.

Frank crossed the cracked asphalt. His footsteps sounded very loud.

The entrance was on the side, half-hidden by a dying boxwood. As he stepped onto the porch, he noticed the mailbox.

A sticker. A penguin. Cartoon eyes, orange feet.

The kind of thing a child would put there.

Frank stared at it. The hair on his neck lifted. The gun went steady.

(2...)

The gun was in his hand now. He didn't remember drawing it.

Blue dress. Red wagon. Slack hand.

The penguin stared at him with its cartoon eyes. Frank reached out and touched it. The sticker was peeling at one corner, old, sun-bleached.

He cocked the hammer.

(1...)

The door was not locked.

It swung inward on silence. The smell hit him first—stale beer, old smoke, something under it that might have been mold. Darkness after the bright morning. His eyes adjusted slow.

A hallway. Carpet worn to the backing. A bathroom door hanging open on the left. At the end, a room where grey light leaked through crooked blinds.

Frank raised the gun.

He stepped inside. The floor creaked under his weight and he stopped, listening. Nothing. No movement. No sound except his own blood in his ears.

On the wall by the bathroom, a picture in a dime-store frame. Frank turned his head just enough to see it.

A child's drawing. Crayon. A house with a triangle roof. A yellow sun with rays like spokes. Two stick figures holding hands, one big, one small.

Below the picture, written in a child's careful letters: I LOVE YOU GRAMPA.

Frank stood very still.

The gun was shaking. His whole arm was shaking. Blue dress turning the corner. Penguin peeling at the edge.

From the back room, a cough. Wet, rattling. The sound of a man who'd spent forty years with a cigarette in his mouth.

"Who's there?"

Frank's finger was on the trigger. Two pounds of pressure and Robert Macey would stop breathing, and Jenny would still be dead, and Carol would still be dead, and whoever drew that picture would learn what a grandfather's body looked like when—

He thought: I don't know if he did it.

He thought: I'll never know.

The floor creaked again as he took another step forward. Then another. The door to the back room was open. Inside, the shape of a man sitting up in a bare mattress on the floor, blankets twisted around his legs, squinting into the dark hallway at the silhouette standing there with something raised.

"What the—"

Frank said: "We're on a mission from God."

He pulled the trigger.

The gunshot filled the house.

Then silence.

In the hallway, the stick figures kept holding hands in the dark, waiting for someone who would never come home.

The End