A Day In The Life - {Watty Awards 2015}

Chapter 9: No Reply (Melinda)

It was about 4:30 when Jezebel called last. I looked at the clock: 7:00 PM. It wasn't unlike her to take a while at the junkyard, but two and a half hours? She certainly didn't take that long to go to the junkyard, buy a starter, and install it. She said an hour, tops. 

* * *

It's 7:30, and Jezebel still hasn't called. It's been three hours. I'm starting to get concerned. If I thought she wouldn't take two and a half hours, I know that she definitely wouldn't take three. 

* * *

It's 8:30 now, and I know she would have called me when she was done. It could not have taken her four hours to finish with a starter. I decided to go over to her house and see what was up. Maybe her family had told her she couldn't work on the car any more tonight. If she got back around dinner time, this was a huge possibility. I grabbed my keys and just as I was heading out the door, I backed up, deciding to tell my mom where I was going in case I was there a while. 

"Mom?" I shouted, hoping she'd hear me.

"Yes, honey?" She said, turning to the front door from the kitchen.

"I'm going to Jezebel's, I might be awhile." I said, trying to suppress the sound of worry in my voice.

"I thought so. You and Jez have a good time!"

"We will," I said, hoping I hadn't just lied to my mother. 

I hopped into my Impala, turning the key in the ignition. Blue Oyster Cult's (Don't Fear) the Reaper was turned up full volume, and I snapped it down. I sat there a minute, knowing for sure that I had neither been listening to that song nor had the volume up so high, but trying to convince myself that I had, because that might calm my nerves for my best friend enough to trust myself behind the wheel. 

When I had calmed down a bit, I put the car in reverse. I slowly backed out of my driveway and headed for Jezebel's house. It took about twenty minutes to get there, both longer than usual and the most terrifying twenty minutes of my life. I parked in her driveway where Andrew's car had been and went up to the door. I knocked and her mom answered, looking like she'd just gotten up from the dinner table, and surprised that I was there. 

"Hi, Mrs. Williams," I said, trying to hide the hope and fear in my face and voice, "is Jezebel here?"

"No, actually I thought she was with you. You haven't seen her?" She looked a little concerned that I hadn't seen her.

"She said she was going to buy a starter at the chop shop. She didn't tell you that?" The feeling of worry crept past my defenses and crawled up in my throat, threatening to choke me as I thought of the possibility that I'd never see her again. 

This upset her mom visibly, and she went back into the house to the dinner table, supposedly to tell everyone to look for Jezebel. Andrew and Michael came out to the front and I knew that this encounter would be less awkward than the others. 

"Do you know where she is?" Andrew looked at me, worry filling his eyes and voice at he thought of his little sister being gone.

I felt bad answering him. "No, I don't. She said she was going to the chop shop to pick up a starter for her Impala. It's the last part she needed. She said she'd call me when she was done installing it. She said she'd be an hour at most. You know as well as I do that she wouldn't leave her baby here, almost finished. She's been working on that car for a year, building it up from basically scrap metal. She put all of her spare time into that thing." 

He said what I'd been thinking. "Let's go check the scrapyard. Maybe she's still there."

I went back out to my car as the two grabbed their shoes. I started the car, remembering the last time I'd got in, trying to think back to before turning my car off, still trying to think of how the song could've been on so loud. The guys got in the backseat, shattering my thoughts. 

"So," Michael said about halfway through the ride, making me think that if Jezebel were here, we'd be laughing and saying "Buttons." But she wasn't here. And we weren't laughing. "When we get to the scrapyard, do you want to split up and cover more ground?"

"No, have you never seen a horror movie? Splitting up is bad news. We stick together, okay?" I asked, sure that they'd be fine with that, on account of the fact that I was in distress. I pulled up in the parking lot. Sure enough, Andrew's car was there from when Jezebel jacked it. We all piled out of the car and walked towards the gate to the Pick 'n' Pull Jezebel always goes to. I opened it and went in, starting on the path to the '67 Nova that Jezebel used when she could get the parts to match her Impala. I looked around in the car, seeing that the starter had been pulled out recently. 

"She made it to the car," I said, "So unless she's wandering back to your car now, we should find a starter lying on the ground somewhere." I said, having barely collected my thoughts enough to think about something like that. I could only imagine what we might find on that starter, if we found it at all. As I was walking, I saw the distinct prints of Jezebel's shoes, which looked like she was running, meaning we were getting close to where we should find the starter. I stopped dead in my tracks, unable to move. 

Michael caught up to me, and when he saw it, he stopped in his tracks, too. "Oh, god." he said. "We can't let Andrew see this." 

Just then, Andrew caught up to us. "What's everybody staring at?" His question died off at the end, as he saw what we were looking at. In the ground, there were signs of a struggle, then an imprint of her back, with too many rocks missing to only cause slight concern, because that meant that those rocks had left with her body. She had rocks embedded in her skin and bones. Where her head should have been, there lay a large pool of blood that had just finished drying up. In the blood, the kidnapper had written, "She didn't even scream. Don't Fear the Reaper." The last four words shot ice through every vein in my body. He had been in my car. He knew who I was. He had kidnapped my best friend. I was going to kill that self-righteous son of a bitch if it was the last thing I did. 

I borrowed Andrew's cell phone to call Cindy and let her know what we'd found. I told her we'd come back to the house. I looked over at Andrew to hand him back his phone only to see that he was holding back tears. I knew that he agreed that this monster had to die. 

When we got back to the car, I asked Michael to drive, because he was the least emotionally disturbed of all of us by this situation. He was more shocked than angry, I assumed this was because he didn't know her very well. While he was driving us back to the house, I caught sight of his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were the size of saucers. My eyes moved from his eyes to his knuckles. They were white on the steering wheel. He was much more upset about the disappearance of Jezebel than he wanted to let on. It struck me as polite, how he held his own scaredness in so that it wouldn't upset us, the people who knew her better than he did. 

When we turned onto the street Jezebel lived on, I heard sirens. Then it hit me again: she really was gone. I saw the cops and felt like I was going to throw up. If Jezebel were seeing this, she'd probably crack some terrible pun like, "It's getting fuzzy." I needed to stop obsessing over her lack of presence and start focusing on how I was going to get her back, but first, I'd have to figure out what I was going to say to the cops.

When we pulled up to the house and Michael stopped the car, I looked over at Andrew. He was still crying. We were certainly an interesting car full of people. Our driver can't move, the other man is crying, and if anyone touches me, I'll vomit. This will go over well, I thought to myself, as I made myself open the door and walk toward the swarm of cops by the front door.