If She Saw

“Sounds like a plan. You have fun tonight. Is little Michelle sleeping through the night yet?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Ouch,” Allen said, and ended the call.

Kate pocketed her phone, juggling her bags of purchases as she did. She smiled in spite of herself. She was standing in the sunshine in her favorite part of town, having just gone shopping for a two-month-old granddaughter, whom she was babysitting tonight. Given the way her day was going, did she really want the bureau to call at all?

She was walking back to her home—a three-block walk from where she had taken Allen’s call—when she saw a little girl with a My Little Pony T-shirt. She was walking with her mother hand in hand, just a few feet ahead of her, traveling in their direction. She was five or six years old, her blonde hair up in a ponytail only a mother’s care could create. She had blue eyes and a sharp end to her nose that looked rather pixie-like. And it was that feature that sent a spike of despair through Kate’s heart.

An image flashed through her mind, a little girl who looked almost identical to this one. But in this image, the little girl had dirt and grime on her face, and she was crying. The lights of police cars flashed behind her.

The image was so strong that it caused Kate to stop walking for a moment. She tore her eyes away from the girl, not wanting to appear creepy or strange. She clung to that image in her head and did her best to find the memory associated with it. It came to her gradually and when it did, it unrolled itself slowly, as if she were reading the case report.

Five-year-old girl, found three days after reported missing. Stored in a fishing cabin in Arkansas with the dead bodies of her parents. The parents were the fifth and sixth victims of a serial killer that had terrorized Arkansas for the better part of four months…a killer Kate had eventually taken down, but only after he had claimed a total of nine people.

Kate was aware that she was suddenly standing as still as a statue on the street but couldn’t seem to move. That case had haunted her for a while. So many dead ends, so many false leads. She had been running around in circles, unable to find the killer while he continued to add to his body count. God only knew what he had planned for that little girl.

But you saved her, she told herself. In the end, you saved her.

Kate slowly started to walk again. It was not the first time a random image from her past work had slammed itself across her mind and caused her to zone out. Sometimes they came casually, albeit out of nowhere. But there were other times when they came on strong and fast, like a post-traumatic stress flashback.

The image of the girl from Arkansas was somewhere in between. And Kate was thankful for that. That particular case had nearly caused her to step down as an agent back in 2009. It had been soul-shattering, enough for Kate to request two weeks off from work. And all of a sudden, for just a split second while walking back home with gifts for her granddaughter in her hand, Kate felt like she had been pushed back in time.

Nearly ten years had passed since she had rescued that girl. Kate wondered where she was—wondered if she had outlived the trauma.

“Ma’am?”

Kate blinked, jumping a bit at the sound of an unfamiliar voice in front of her. There was a teenage boy standing in front her. He looked concerned, as if he wasn’t sure if he should be standing there or running away.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “You look…I don’t know. Sick. Like you’re about to pass out or something.”

“No,” Kate said, shaking her head. “I’m good. Thanks.”

The kid nodded and carried on his way. Kate started walking forward again, ripped out of some hole in the past that she assumed had not yet quite closed up. And as she drew closer and closer to home, she started to wonder just how many of those holes from her past had been left uncovered.

And if the ghosts of her past would continue to haunt her until she, too, became a ghost.

CHAPTER TWO

Kate spent the next hour or so tidying up the house, even though she had already done so before leaving to go shopping. It made her feel off to be so anxious to have Michelle coming to her house. Melissa had lived in this house during her high school years so when she came to visit (which wasn’t often enough in Kate’s opinion), Kate didn’t feel the need for the place to be spotless. So why was she so concerned about how it looked for a two-month-old?

Maybe it’s some odd kind of grandmother nesting, she thought while she scrubbed the sink in the powder room…a room she was well aware that her granddaughter would not even see, much less actually use.

As she rinsed the sink out, her doorbell rang. She was flooded with an excitement that she had not quite been ready for. She was smiling from ear to ear when she answered the door. Melissa stood on the other side, carrying Michelle in her car seat. The baby was fast asleep, a thick blanket tucked around her legs.

“Hey, Mom,” Melissa said as she stepped into the house. She took a quick look around and rolled her eyes. “How much did you clean today?”

“I plead the fifth,” Kate said as she gave her daughter a hug.

Melissa set the car seat down carefully on the floor and slowly unbuckled Michelle. She picked her up and handed her softly to Kate. It had been almost a full week since Kate had visited Melissa and Terry, but when she took Michelle into her arms, it felt like much longer.

“What do you and Terry have planned for tonight?” Kate asked.

“Not much, really,” Melissa said. “And that’s the beauty of it. We’re going to go out for dinner and drinks. Maybe some dancing. Also, we changed our minds about asking you to watch her overnight because we realized we’re not quite ready for that. The unbroken sleep is much needed, but I just can’t be away from her for that long.”

“Oh, I think I can understand that,” Kate said. “You guys go out and enjoy yourselves.”

Melissa shrugged the diaper bag from her shoulder and set it by the car seat. “Everything you need is in here. She’s going to want to eat again in about an hour and she’d going to fight sleep. Terry thinks it’s cute but I think it’s of the devil. If she gets gassy, there are gas drops in the back pocket and—”

“Lissa…we’ll be fine. I have raised a child, you know. She turned out pretty good, too.”

Melissa smiled and surprised Kate by giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll pick her up around eleven or so. Is that too late?”

“Nope, that’s perfect.”

Melissa gave one final look to her baby, a look that made Kate’s heart swell. She could remember being a mother and having that internal feeling of love fill her—a love than translated to the sheer will of doing anything and everything to ensure this human you’d created would be safe.

“If you need anything, call me,” Melissa said, though she was still looking at Michelle and not Kate.

“I will. Now go. Have fun.”

Melissa finally turned away and headed out the door. As she closed it, little Michelle stirred awake in Kate’s arms. She gave her grandmother a sleepy little smile and let out a tiny yawn.

“So what do we do now?” Kate asked.

The question was playfully directed at Michelle but she felt a weight behind it that made her wonder if she was simply voicing a rhetorical question to herself. Her daughter was grown up now, with a daughter of her own. Now here she was, nearing fifty-six and with her first grandchild in her arms. So…what do we do now?

She thought about that pull to return to work in any capacity and, for perhaps the first time, it felt small.

Smaller even than the little girl she now held in her arms.

***

By eight o’clock that night, Kate was wondering if Melissa and Terry had simply managed to create the most well-behaved baby in recorded history. Not once did Michelle cry or even get fussy. She was simply content to be held. After two hours in Kate’s arms, Michelle nodded off to sleep. Kate carefully placed Michelle on the center of her queen-sized bed and then stood at the doorway for a moment to watch her granddaughter sleep.

She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there when her phone buzzed from the kitchen table behind her. She had to tear her eyes away from Michelle but managed to get to the phone within a few seconds. The single buzz meant that it was a text rather than a call and she was not at all surprised to see that it was Melissa.

How’s she doing? Melissa asked.

Unable to resist, Kate smiled and responded: I limited her to just three beers. She went out with some guy on a motorcycle about an hour ago. I told her to be back by 11.

The response came quickly: Oh, you’re not funny at all.

The back-and-forth banter made her nearly as happy as the sleeping baby in her bedroom. After her father died, Melissa had become withdrawn—especially toward Kate. She’d blamed Kate’s work for her father’s death and even though she had come to understand that was not the case later on in life, there were times when Kate felt that Melissa still resented the time she had spent in the bureau after his death. Oddly enough, though, Melissa had shown some interest in pursuing a career in the FBI herself…despite a less-than-positive attitude about the events of the last year concerning her mother’s interrupted retirement.

Still smiling, Kate took her phone into the bedroom and snapped a quick picture of Michelle. She sent it to Melissa and then, after some thought, she also sent it to Allen, only his had the message: Partied out!

She found herself wishing he was there with her. She found herself feeling this quite often as of late. She was not naïve enough to think she loved him, but she could see herself falling in love with him if things kept going the way they were. She missed him when he wasn’t around and whenever he kissed her, it made her feel about twenty years younger.