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  I hope she knew.

  I hope they both did.

  Her grades were regularly posted for the financier to see, and she was doing rather well in all of her classes. I wouldn’t likely be as willing to fund all of it myself if she was doing poorly.

  Vivian and I were under a strict unspoken agreement that I would pay for Katherine’s college. Vivian was obviously not paying because they hardly talked and she moved across the country to California selling high-end real estate.

  I was left footing the college tuition because I was the reason she left.

  There was a knock at my door and Abraham’s deep voice boomed from the other side. “Trotter, get out here. We’re going out, Trotter. Open up.”

  I unlocked my door and stood in the doorway. He looked past me to the coffee table. He knew where to look to find how far my inhibitions fell.

  “Hey, I’m not judging,” he said. I didn’t speak a word. “I’m already four deep. We’re going out tonight.”

  The spot we typically go to after a rough day was too packed, even for a Tuesday. So we drove, instead, to Lucky Charley’s on Fifth and Grand.

  Lucky Charley’s was a classier joint than what we were used to. The lights were dimmer, and the music was softer. It wasn’t as loud, but it was pretty packed. We wanted more people so it was easier to get lost in the crowd. It’s not a good sign when two detectives working active cases are out drinking late on work nights.

  I sat at the bar and had two more down before Abraham asked, “Why do you think she did it?”

  I shook my head. “Not tonight, man. I’m not about to do this tonight.” I nodded to the bartender after nursing my sixth beer of the night for far too long.

  “C’mon Trot,” he said. He knew it drove me crazy when he called me ‘Trot,’ but I wasn’t in the mood to combat him tonight. “I’m going to be thinking about it all night. I know we’re seeing the mom tomorrow, but you know how I like my theories.”

  “Figure it out yourself tonight in your dreams,” I responded. “Let me know what you come up with so I don’t have to come in to work tomorrow.”

  “My guess is that she found out her boyfriend dumped her, and couldn’t take it anymore,” Abraham said. He used to be quite a bit more solemn after witnessing what we saw today, but he coped by exploring elaborate theories with me, and who-knows-what else in his head.

  “That’s as good a guess as any,” I half-heartedly responded. “Any chance you’ll drink the rest of that rum and coke and shut up about the kid?”

  “Not likely,” he said with a smile and a gulp. The girl on the other side of the bar was eyeing him. She wasn’t making it subtle either. The entire time he talked to me, he had his eyes fixed on her. “Nothing like skipping our usual spot just for me to hit the jackpot tonight.”

  I shook my head. “Have fun, my friend. Remember, we have to be at the house on Lewis Avenue at one o’clock. That’s when the mom said she’ll be ready.”

  He waved me off, clearly focused on his attempted tryst.

  I was clearly inebriated by the time I stood up, but I tried not to show it. Abraham had driven us here, and I would likely have to find a new way home anyway, so I dialed an Uber.

  ***

  I rode in silence in the backseat. The driver had choices on the app that ranged from a conversation to complete silence.

  I chose the ladder. Peering out the window, I could see happy couples sitting on benches and laughing. Even in the bitter cold, they looked ecstatic to be in each other’s presence. Their faces lit up with joy as they flirted with one another, play fighting and throwing bits of frozen snow from the ground.

  It wasn’t the flirting I missed; it was the joy. The fall was fast and hard, and the hole seemed too deep for anyone to climb out of.

  Especially someone whose antagonist is the very motivation he desired. It wasn’t even the love that I strove for anymore, but the acceptance that I wouldn’t change. If Viv and Katherine accepted that, then the pressure would be off.

  Then again big changes were made. I had dealt with everything I saw in the past with throwing myself into every case. Finding the ins and outs of everything I needed to and more.

  Viv hated me for it. Katherine despised me for it.

  Now, I go through the motions when working. I knew it, and so did everyone else. The catch I made just before becoming a detective nearly ten years earlier is what I still held onto, but it still wasn’t enough.

  I would give it all up again if my family came back together.

  The elevator was shaky on the way back up and the balcony’s air felt more brisk than ever. The air farther out looked more inviting, as the city’s lights appeared as dimmed fireflies searching for their way.

  The wind blew slightly, and I began to wonder if the wind would also jostle me in the air like it did poor Madison. Would I land where I intended?

  The pavement below felt hard under my feet walking up to the building and didn’t feel so inviting.

  In fact, it felt painful. It felt hard and unforgiving.

  For this, I was glad.

  I didn’t want to jump tonight like I did most nights, though I wasn’t sure exactly where the optimism came from. I dug deep inside, but couldn’t find anything keeping me from purposefully falling off the ledge.

  I wanted to step back down onto the safety of the balcony floor beneath me. I wanted my bed, and I wanted something comfortable under my head.

  I wanted to find what motivated Madison to complete what I couldn’t bring myself to do.

  Chapter Three

  Brooks Ingram looked through his windshield at Covey Bridge. The freezing rain had stopped for the time being, but he knew it could start up again at any moment.

  The bridge held an important place in his heart; one that he wouldn’t soon forget.

  The girl, the fall. It was all too familiar.

  Brooks gritted his teeth through his cleanly shaven beard. His glasses slid down to the end of his nose where he liked them. That way he had to angle his head up in order to look down on people.

  He enjoyed being able to converse with people he knew more than, and he made it a point to make it a point. Brooks had been in the crowd the morning before, surrounded by people wanting to get a glimpse of what happened to the poor young girl.

  That’s all the morning paper had confirmed. She was female and very young, though there were no indications of what exactly happened. There were rumblings in the crowd that the girl had accidentally fallen to her death; other’s said she jumped. Either way, it affected Brooks more than anyone else in that crowd.

  That included the child’s mother.

  He watched as she cried uncontrollably with detectives nearby to console her, unsuccessfully. She was making a mockery of the situation. She could display her sadness, of course, but Brooks thought it was disrespectful to the child who lay at the bottom of the creek.

  Mother was taking the entire spotlight from her poor daughter as the restless crowd grew more curious and anxious. That wasn’t what good mothers did.

  Brooks had watched from down the block with binoculars as the medical examiner team fished her body out of the creek and used a pulley system to bring her to the top. Luckily, she was covered by the time she was in view of his seclusion, or his mind may have gone a different route.

  The mother weeps and wailed at the astonishment of the crowd. Brooks noticed one of the detectives handing her something that made her wail even more.

  It was quite a movie-esque performance. The woman’s name was Kay Maise, and Brooks had seen her and Madison at a gas station nearby nearly one month ago. Even before that, he saw her husband’s picture in the newspaper, fighting for the shortest possible sentence on criminal sexual assault.

  Brooks didn’t know the entire story; the paper did its best to keep the dirty details under wraps, but Brooks was also no dummy.

  The reason Brooks came back to the bridge was unknown to him. He felt a certain catharsis standing in the c
rowd for that hour. Nothing he did could bring him down.

  He didn’t know why the emotion ran roughshod through his body, making his legs twitch and sending chills down his spine. It was such an awful moment, but he immediately found peace.

  But, he knew why today.

  Today was different. The peace that came over him was not only present, but intensified.

  Brooks harnessed it. He let it overtake him.

  Brooks felt both love and hatred, feeding into his innermost being simultaneously as one. It festered there throughout one sleepless night as he tossed and turned and fought it. He knew it wasn’t something he could beat given all he’s been through, and it eventually became something he didn’t want to beat.

  “Your memories don’t have to stay so clear, my boy,” his father had told him, with one hand on his shoulder. He didn’t understand at the time, but he saw everything now. The misdeeds of his father and Uncle Samuel rushed back into his amygdala and he gripped the steering wheel much harder.

  It was fear.

  Fear kept him from remembering all of these years. Brooks didn’t learn to hate his father and uncle, but was definitely confused. It might appear to be a waste of emotional resources given that their deeds were done. Their punishments were handed out.

  Why was the satisfaction not passed down a generation?

  Brooks adjusted his rearview mirror and saw a police car directly behind him. He sighed and rolled down his window for the approaching officer.

  “Good morning, officer,” he smiled.

  “Morning,” the officer said. She was taller than average, and her olive skin contrasted with the surrounding whiteout.

  “I was just about to leave.”

  “Did you know the girl?” the officer said. Her nametag read: Hammel.

  “Not exactly,” Brooks said. He certainly didn’t know her, but he felt her. How to describe that, he didn’t know.

  “Yeah.” Hammel looked down the road towards the bridge. “The station is taking it pretty hard right now. Especially those that were at the scene.”

  “I’d imagine,” Brooks said, trying to sound sympathetic. The last thing he wanted was to take a second of the attention away from the girl. He wanted to somehow honor her death, though he didn’t know how…or why.

  “Well, we got a call that someone was down here stopped for the past few hours, so I’m here just checking out no one else is thinking about doing the same thing.”

  Brooks looked up, shaken out of his train of thought. “No…God no. Certainly not.” Brooks couldn’t dishonor Madison’s death that way. He felt like he could call her by her first name now. He’s grown to know her much better now than when he first parked his car six hours earlier. “If it’s bothering the neighborhood, I can leave.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Hammel said. “I’m not about to tell someone they can’t mourn because it makes others uncomfortable. Go right ahead, sir.” She gave the door a few taps and walked back to her car.

  But, Brooks wasn’t mourning. At least, he wasn’t mourning anymore.

  It started out as curiosity, sitting out here in the freezing rain with the car turned off. He barely noticed how visible his breath was.

  The mourning came yesterday. Today was an unfounded optimism. Optimism he could grasp with his bare hands and let take him through whichever path it dare take.

  Now with more questions than answers, Brooks started up his car and pulled away - in the opposite direction of the bridge.

  Chapter Four

  I pulled up to the Maise residence four minutes before Abraham. The clock on the dash said 1:33 p.m. There were teddy bears and hand-written cards near the front of the driveway leading up to the Astro Van. Stuck into the ground was a tiny cross with: “RIP Madison Maise” with angel wings on both ends. Kay was sitting inside the enclosed porch of the doublewide smoking a cigarette. Her dress looked unwashed and worn for several days in a row, though it wasn’t what she was wearing at the bridge the day before.

  Kay's outstretched hand met us as we approached the steps. She offered a cigarette from a pack of menthols. I gestured ‘no,’ and poked at the door.

  “My we come in?”

  She nodded. Her sunken eyes haven’t seen sleep since yesterday morning, and the days and nights had been rough to her even before that. Her license said she just turned thirty last week, but her face looked much older and wiser.

  Life was not kind to Kay Maise.

  “It’s cold out here, ma’am. Do you mind if we step inside?” Abraham asked. Her nonchalant demeanor and total disregard for the freezing temperatures only intensified the awkward silence.

  She took another puff of the cigarette and flicked it into a metal Folgers coffee can at her side. “Follow me.”

  The entrance into the living room was modest at best. The furniture was well worn, and the carpet was thin and ready to be replaced. The cheap cabinets and countertops were likely originally made for the trailer in the 1980s. She had straightened up before we arrived, but didn’t put forth much effort on cleaning grout or windowsills.

  She walked with a slight limp across the living room into the kitchen. She opened a cabinet directly above the stove. “Can I get you two a coffee or something?”

  “I’ll take a little; black,” Abraham answered from the doorway. I gave him a disapproving scowl from the couch.

  Kay returned with a cup and handed it to Abraham with an attempted smile. She was reluctant to make any eye contact. “Please, join your partner and have a seat.”

  Abraham sat down next to me and Kay sat in the peach-colored velvet rocking chair facing the small flat screen TV across the room.

  “Mrs. Maise,” I started. “First of all, I just wanted to say that you have our condolences regarding your daughter. The circumstances here have shaken this city and if there’s anything you need, you can reach out to us.”

  It wasn’t often that a suicide in Lincolnshire was put on full display in a public area. The news spread quickly with the few people crowded around the bridge. The media hadn’t even gotten ahold of the news yet.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her attempts at smiling were noteworthy. Talking to us was probably the last thing she wanted to do.

  “We’d like to talk a little bit about Madison,” I continued. “We want to get to know her a little bit. We’d love to understand more about what was going on so we can try to help other kids in her situation.”

  Kay let out a sigh and took a sip of her coffee. “Madison was…a carefree child. She was so artistic and had the ability to create everything out of nothing.”

  I gave her an encouraging smile and raised my brows. “So, she probably has some of that scattered about.”

  “She does,” Kay continued. “Her ability to create a world full of characters was unmatched. There was always a problem, though.”

  “Oh?” I leaned forward.

  “Yeah, her stories always started out bright and colorful, but her characters always ended up dying and her worlds fell apart. She always let me read them. They all had such hope until something terrible happened.”

  “Was there any way in particular they died?” Abraham asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Kay said, looking down at her coffee. “I asked her once…what it all meant. She told me their deaths were - inevitable. Something they couldn’t avoid. We talked a little bit about what it meant, but she never got that deep into it. I always thought it was a phase. I guess I should’ve fought harder for the truth.”

  “This whole thing doesn’t look to me like something you could’ve foreseen,” I said. “She was obviously struggling with something, but in the twelve years I’ve been doing this, it’s never anything that’s on the surface. Kids struggle with stuff that we never see all the time.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “But, Madison was different. She was turning thirteen next week, but she acted like she was mature enough to be in college. She always wanted to make huge life decisions. Any time I told her
to just ‘be a kid’ for once, she would lash out and scream. She wanted to just grow up and experience the world.”

  A mouse noticeably scurried across the floor from behind Kay. I did my best not to look.

  “I guess this was the most adult decision of all,” Kay said, breaking the short silence. Her tone was somber, and demeanor solemn. She had no fluctuations in her voice, which was a far cry from what we experienced at the bridge.

  I looked towards the hallway. “Do you mind if we take a look around?”

  “By all means,” she said.

  The hall was against the outside wall, with doors to the left. We passed a bathroom and a room used for storage. Madison’s room was obvious, as it had many brightly colored paintings on the wall, along with many darker ones.

  “She’s taking this about as bad as she can,” Abraham said in a hushed tone.

  “She’s not doing well at all,” I replied. “We need to get psych on the phone to see if they need to do an evaluation. I don’t feel comfortable with her here alone.”

  Madison’s bed was unmade, with the black comforter pushed back and almost on the floor. The wood paneling walls offered no resistance to sound from the other rooms. The structure was even more weakened by all the nails driven into it, possibly adding to the idea that Kay should’ve heard Madison waking up and getting around so early in the morning.

  The paintings themselves were hung anywhere and everywhere. No rhyme or reason, and not always placed straight. Almost like they were meant to be crooked.

  Her room was spotless compared to the rest of the house. Her closet door was closed and clothes were color coordinated. Her dresser was wiped down and didn’t even have a flake of dust or dirt.

  A tiny booklet was open with yesterday’s date on it. It read:

  I am leaving and I’m not coming back. I feel the pain that you have caused, but don’t worry…I won’t call you out by name; your secrets are safe with me. You are like a terrible Phoenix, destroying everything in your path. You are caged, but you will soon be free to do as you wish.