Gone for Good (36 page)

I stared at the slab. Frosty walked away, pulling the leash taut, and sniffed at a nearby stone while a chorus of cicadas rose and fell in the trees above, their chittering eventually winding down like a worn-out clock. I often tried to imagine what had happened to Caitlin. Try as I might, a coherent, sensible narrative concerning the events that had taken place just yards from where I stood in the cemetery never formed in my mind. But I did hear the soundtrack in my head. Often.

I lay in my bed at night, the lights from passing cars dancing on the ceiling and walls, and I heard Caitlin's screams, the sound of her voice rising in terror and growing hoarse. Did she cry? Was her face soaked with tears and snot? Did she suffer? How long did she call for me?

I pounded the mattress in frustration, buried my face in the pillows until it felt like my head would explode.

I knew the statistics. After forty-eight hours, the odds
of a child being found alive were next to none. But I managed to ignore the numbers and pretend they didn't apply to me. Not then. Not ever. I still stopped at the front door every night, flipped on the porch light, and made sure the spare key – the one Caitlin occasionally used to let herself in after school – lay under the same flowerpot, right where she could find it.

But it was difficult to argue with a headstone.

Frosty came back and nudged at my calf with his snout. I could tell he was growing impatient and wanted to move on. He didn't like to stand still when there were sticks to fetch and trees to mark. I shooed him away, lost in my own thoughts. I resented Abby for the ease with which she chose to move on, to accept that our lives would go forward without any hope of seeing our daughter again. I'd crusaded on behalf of my daughter's memory, and for what? To find out that life progressed without me as well as Caitlin?

‘Frosty. Come here.'

He wandered back, happy, tail wagging. I crouched in the grass and placed my hands on either side of his head. He opened his eyes wide but didn't resist, perhaps remembering the swat he'd received earlier. I felt his hot, stinking breath in my face, saw the stains on his long teeth. I asked the dog a question I had asked him several times before, ever since that day he came home from the park trailing his leash with Caitlin nowhere in sight.

‘Frosty? What did you see that day? What happened?'

He stared back at me, his panting increasing. He didn't like the way I was holding him, and he squirmed.

‘What did you see?'

He
started to slip away, so I pulled him back. He shook his head as though trying to knock the feeling of my hands off his body. I stood up.

‘Fuck you,' I said. ‘Fuck you for not being able to talk.'

I looked at the headstone once more, letting the image of my daughter's name and possible –
likely
– date of death burn into my brain, before giving the leash another tug.

‘Come on, Frosty,' I said. ‘We've got someplace to go.'

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First published in the United States of America by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, under the title
Never Come Back
2013

First published as
Gone for Good
in Great Britain in Penguin Books, 2014

Copyright © David J. Bell, 2013

Cover design:
www.mavrodesign.com
Cover images © Joanna Jankowska / Arcangel Images; Luna4 /
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All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-1-405-91061-3