Jaxon With an X Read online

  With his other hand, the deputy gripped the rope threaded through the boy’s belt loops and waited for the fight to melt out of him. His stringy back muscles relaxed. The boy’s trembling body surrendered, and he collapsed into the snow. Unable to escape, the boy turned his head to look back at the deputy with wide eyes. He whimpered, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Patterson recoiled at the words. His bulletproof vest offered no protection from the pain in those terrified eyes. He loved police work but hated domestic-violence calls because of the kids cowering in the corner of a house, desperately wanting things to be better but not wanting to tell on Mom or Dad. Even in only the light from his car, he could see the kid was in worse shape than anyone he had seen before.

  Leaving his hand resting on the boy’s back in case he tried to flee again, the deputy leaned back on his haunches and stared into his face. “Son, I’m not going to hurt you. I want to help.”

  The boy’s blue lips moved rhythmically as he recited a mantra over and over as if he was praying. Patterson struggled to understand, but the voice was too soft, and the wind was blowing too hard. He leaned over to hear the words.

  “Never let them see you. Never let them see you. Never let them see you.”

  “Never let who see you? Who are you afraid of?”

  The boy didn’t answer but continued his recitation. His eyes darted about, searching for an escape. Patterson slipped his arms under the boy’s body, balanced in a crouch, and stood, easily lifting the kid into the air. He was paper-light, with bone-thin arms and legs and protruding ribs. The boy didn’t resist, but nor did he help or wrap his arms around the deputy’s neck. His body slackened in total surrender. He shivered uncontrollably as he repeatedly muttered, “Never let them see you. Never let them see you. Never let them see you.”

  Patterson carried the light load cradled in his arms to the rear of his cruiser and balanced him while opening the back door. As easily as he would a bag of groceries, he laid him across the plastic backseat then closed the door. He extracted a bright-yellow emergency blanket from the trunk of his car and reopened the back door. The dome light went on, and the boy scrambled across the seat to the other side of the car, curled into a tight ball, and quaked in fear. Careful not to move too quickly, the deputy unfolded the blanket, leaned into the car, and stretched it across his shivering body.

  With his charge safely stowed in the backseat, Patterson returned to the driver’s seat and cranked the heat. Through the rearview mirror, he watched the boy clutch the blanket across his body. Their eyes met, and the boy began franticly clacking the door handles. “They only open from the outside, son.”

  The boy slumped and returned the deputy’s stare with wide, fearful eyes hidden under frozen locks of shaggy brown hair. “Oh.”

  Patterson didn’t have kids and wasn’t even married, but he had a nephew he adored. The boy was eleven. Healthy. Athletic. They spent hours in the river together, trout fishing, telling jokes, and laughing with each other. The kid in the backseat didn’t look anything like that—he was more like an injured animal, cornered and scared. “You thirsty?”

  The boy shrugged.

  Patterson removed a water bottle from the small cooler on the floorboard of the passenger side of the cruiser. He cracked open the lid and held the bottle through the cage.

  The boy eyed it and licked his lips.

  “Go ahead, son. You can have it.”

  A bloodied hand shot forward, grabbed the bottle, and pulled it back into the shadows. He tilted it upwards and guzzled the liquid, water sloshing across his chin and dribbling on his shirt.

  “You’re okay, son. Just relax.”

  The boy’s hand wiped the dripping water from his chin. His eyes flicked across the steel cage separating the backseat from the front before looking outside into the storm.

  “Son, I’m not gonna hurt you. Whatever is wrong, I can help.”

  The boy curled back into a tight ball against the far door and wrapped the blanket firmly around himself. To Patterson, he appeared to be attempting to vanish into the corner. The melting snow and ice clung to his stringy hair, partially hiding his gaunt face. His fear-filled eyes were cold, gray, and lifeless. A strong stench of body odor emanated from him and filled the car. His teeth were crooked and dirty. Worse, Patterson noted, several teeth were missing. A jagged scar stretched from his right ear to his mouth. His lips were cracked and bleeding. Blood dripped from his chin and stained his left hand.

  “Were you in an accident?”

  A shake of the head.

  “Are your parents okay?”

  A pause followed by a small shrug.

  Patterson opened the paper sack sitting on the passenger seat and extracted half a sandwich. He unwrapped the plastic and slipped the food through a slot in the mesh. “You hungry?”

  The boy eyed the sandwich warily. With the same sudden swiftness used to retrieve the water, his hand shot forward, grabbed the bread, and yanked it back. He stuffed it inside his mouth and devoured the food as if he didn’t remember his last meal or know when the next was coming.

  “Slow down. There’s plenty more food where that came from.”

  The boy gagged and coughed but swallowed as quickly as he could. He didn’t appear to believe in endless food supplies.

  “Where are your parents? How do I get in touch with them?”

  The boy shrugged again and licked the crumbs from his fingers. Patterson grabbed another bottle of water from the seat beside him and offered it through the cage. Again, the boy eyed him closely before snatching the bottle and retreating into his corner. His frozen fingers fumbled with the cap before spinning it off. He drank deeply, but more slowly and controlled than before.

  “Did you run away? Don’t you think they’re worried about you?”

  The boy glanced up into the rearview mirror and locked eyes with the deputy before shaking his head.

  “Look, kid, if you’re running from something, I can help. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  The boy shrugged his scrawny shoulders.

  Patterson sucked on his lower lip. “Okay, let’s back up and start with an easy question. My name’s Jon. What should I call you? Can you give me a name?”

  7

  A name? Sorry, Deputy, but that’s not an easy question.

  He called me Teddy. If he was in a good mood, it might be T-Dog. If he was being sarcastic, I got called Terrible Ted. If he was pissed off about something, which was often, he had more colorful labels for me—Dipshit, Asshole, Dufus, Dumbass, or other derogatory monikers. Lots of times, he didn’t bother with a name at all and just called me “boy” or even “Hey, you.”

  It wasn’t just me. He did things like that to everyone.

  I replied no matter what he called me because not answering resulted in beatings. The name didn’t matter when his fists flew.

  But now, I’m away from him. My name matters. It matters a lot. I don’t want to be Teddy anymore, the name he gave me, because it’s not really my name.

  Every kid got a new name on their first day.

  Sometimes, when that door to the cellar opened and we cowered, praying, not me. Please don’t pick me, he wasn’t there to call one of us upstairs. Instead, he would shove some new kid down that flight of steps, watch him tumble head over heels, and then shout, “This is Joey. Welcome him to our family.” Or Chad or Mike or Steve or Dave or whatever.

  Joey would be bruised, beaten, bleeding, and worse. And he would be crying for Mommy and Daddy, telling us over and over his name wasn’t Joey.

  We comforted him and told him it would be okay. It wouldn’t, but it would have done no good to tell him that.

  And we would tell him to get used to being called Joey. Get used to it real quick. We didn’t want the man to overhear the new kid’s protest, rip that door open, and storm down the steps to teach the kid a lesson about living in his brand-new home. Not that we cared much about the new kid, but those things tended to get out of hand. We didn’
t want to be collateral damage.

  Besides, beatings would happen soon enough, so there was no need for Joey to rush things.

  He gave us new names because, he said, old names reminded us of old things. Our pasts. Our friends. Our families. Things that were gone and never coming back. The past didn’t belong to us anymore, so no good could come from remembering it. We each got a new name suitable for our new home with a new family and new friends.

  The sooner Joey figured that out and accepted his fate, the easier things would be, for him and for the rest of us. So we called him Joey. Loudly. We wanted him to know we understood the rule and embraced the names he had given us.

  Some kids accepted it quickly. Some were slower. I don’t know how long it took me. I can’t remember my first day. I’ve been Teddy forever.

  Sometimes, when we thought he couldn’t hear, we rebelled in our own little way. The upstairs door closed, the lock snapped shut, darkness descended on us, and we couldn’t hear him stomping around upstairs. Then—and only then—some of us, the braver ones, rolled out past names and told stories about past lives. A little bit of resistance, even though it was done quietly and hidden from him, freed our imprisoned souls.

  Kevin did that. He was my best friend, the boy closest to my age, and we both had been there for a long time. The new kids, the Joeys, came and went, but Kevin and I remained. We huddled together for warmth and whispered tales of our previous lives. He told me about his old friends and the games they used to play. He spun tales about his family and told funny stories about his brother and the stupid things they used to do. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, swapping fables about past lives, kept us sane.

  As much as we hated the suffering a new person faced, we also rejoiced that a newbie livened things up because their stories were new. We would coax them into whispering all about their previous life—family, friends, siblings. The new stories enlivened our little world for a while, but once we tired of them, we resorted to retelling ours again and again.

  For those who never returned from a final trip upstairs, we honored their memory by sharing their stories and weaving them into our own. Sometimes, we told it as their story, and sometimes, we told it as our own. We didn’t mean to lie, but our histories became so intertwined that it became difficult to remember whose past was whose. Our personal histories grew foggy with the mingling of fact and fiction.

  We made up nicknames for each other too. We called one kid Digger because he was convinced he could tunnel out of the cellar, though he never made it past the stone walls. Another went by Mad Dog because he yelled at one kid for trying to eat more than his fair share of our meager rations. We had a Twinkletoes because, weak from hunger, he fainted and busted his lip on the stone floor. Bucky earned his nickname after the man upstairs said he was bucking his rules, though he didn’t learn of the new name until he regained consciousness. Someone was Spidermonkey because he had long arms and legs on a skinny body. I remember a kid called Biscuit, though I can’t remember why.

  So, Deputy, what’s my name is a tough question. In the telling and retelling of our stories, in the myth-making and bullshitting, in all of the years of living in that hellhole, I’ve heard many names.

  I wade through them one by one and discard them. I reach back through my memories to an ancient time, a time I can remember only through a haze. The day before the day I arrived. Back in history when life was lived outside, happy and away from the awful place. Back to when the warm sun shined on my face and I had a family who loved me and cared for me and wanted the best for me.

  I reach back through my memories for that warm embrace, for a real name, not a made-up one. Not one given to forget, but one given to remember. I open my mouth, my voice cracks, and I say words I haven’t uttered in a very long time.

  “Jaxon. With an X.”

  8

  Coincidence, thought Sheriff David Newman. Many people were called Jack or some variation like Jackson. Many parents wanted unusual names for their kids, so spelling it “Jaxon” wasn’t that strange. If he’d called the principal down at the high school, she probably would have told him of others.

  Just because the name was spelled the same didn’t mean it was his Jaxon. Besides, his Jaxon would be sixteen years old, not twelve.

  “Stop seeing ghosts,” he muttered to himself as he parked his unmarked black SUV in a reserved-for-law-enforcement space beside an ambulance at the emergency-room entrance. He waved to the maintenance workers salting the sidewalks and nodded a good morning to a paramedic pushing an empty stretcher out of the building.

  Voters loved a sheriff who was another down-to-earth, working-class guy, same as them, not too full of himself to say hello. He made a point to smile and shake hands wherever he went. It had to be done. The key to being reelected time after time was being both likable and tough.

  All it took, though, was some particularly heinous unsolved crime, a deputy captured on a cell phone being overzealous during an arrest, or some other ridiculous scandal to push open the door for some ambitious person to emerge and challenge him for the office.

  The former sheriff had certainly understood that, if too late to save his job. The disappearance of Jaxon Lathan a decade earlier had brought hordes of national media to their small town. Unaccustomed to the limelight, he’d tried to explain how thoroughly they were checking every lead—knocking on doors of all known sex offenders, interviewing every neighbor, questioning teachers. The reporters who’d wanted a simple story and a bad guy to pursue portrayed him as indecisive and weak. His statement that they had no suspects and no leads was played over and over, even becoming the headline of the local weekly paper.

  Wanting to take the heat off himself, the sheriff had invited his lead investigator to handle the press. David knew what the sheriff told the reporters was truthful and accurate. They were following every possible angle, even if none of them looked particularly promising. But having learned from his boss’s mistakes, David had stood shoulder to shoulder with the FBI agents in front of a swarm of cameras, confidently describing their desire to locate the ex-husband as a person of interest. Not a suspect, oh no, but he had disappeared at the same time as the missing child. They just wanted to talk to him, to find out what he knew. And that gave the media horde and the public someone else to focus on.

  By the time Harold Lathan was found days later, drunk and high in a motel room with a hooker, the public was convinced he was guilty. The citizens of Miller County clamored for his head on a stake. Without any other viable suspects, David dragged him into an interrogation room and leaned on him hard, but Harold refused to confess. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain where he had been or what he had been doing during the days following the boy’s disappearance. He couldn’t even remember if he had shown up to watch his sons that day like he was supposed to. Still, he steadfastly denied abducting or harming Jaxon. He would never have hurt him, he protested.

  Armed with search warrants, they combed Harold’s few possessions for clues. Jaxon’s prized baseball cap was tucked under the front seat of his car. The boy was rarely seen without it, and his older brother, Connor, was sure—pretty sure—well, maybe—that Jaxon had worn it that fateful morning. When pressed, though, Connor really couldn’t remember whether he had been wearing the hat or not. Maybe it had been the day before or the day before that.

  A pair of Jaxon’s underwear was found in Harold’s mobile home along with other clothes. Some of Connor’s clothes were in the trailer too. Harold admitted the boys often visited, despite the custody agreement forbidding either of them from being at his place or in his car. Connor backed him up, saying the boys often snuck over there during the day.

  They needed a body. Without forensic evidence from a corpse, they didn’t have a case. Despite days of searching with dogs, they never found it.

  Frustrated by the lack of evidence and needing to respond to the citizens’ cry for justice, David and the district attorney did the only thing they could do—they charged Ha
rold with unrelated but provable crimes. Enough drugs to charge him with intent to distribute had been found in his car and home. Given his previous convictions and the suspicions of worse crimes, he went to prison.

  The community became convinced that justice had been served. The district attorney became a law-and-order congressman. David ousted the former sheriff at the next election. No one other than Harold questioned the outcome.

  Ten years later, a boy with the same first name with the same unusual spelling was found wandering in a snowstorm along the interstate. What if it’s his Jaxon? Where had he been? Who took him? Did Harold Lathan have nothing to do with his son’s disappearance? Were the man’s professions of innocence real? And, if so, had the real kidnapper slipped away undetected?

  Stop it. This kid isn’t the same Jaxon, so think of the upside. Finding a lost kid could be a boon in an election year.

  A heroic sheriff’s department rescue of a little boy during a snowstorm—a story like that could go a long way in solidifying political support. Even the television station down in Asheville would love an image of the thankful waif sitting in his hospital bed, smiling his gratitude while the sheriff modestly stated in a photogenic aw-shucks way, “Just doing our jobs.” The citizens of Miller County deserved to see an ever-vigilant, professional, and highly reelectable sheriff on their TV screens, describing the successful search and rescue.

  He marched through a pair of sliding glass doors, paused to say hello to a maintenance worker mopping the hall—barely spoke English so probably wasn’t even a voter, but one never could be sure—and entered the large rectangular room housing the hospital’s emergency department. At that early-morning hour, most of the patient cubicles ringing the outer wall were empty, their privacy curtains pulled open to expose vacant beds and clean sheets waiting for the inevitable patients a snowy day would bring. Cars would collide on slippery roads, feet would slip on icy sidewalks, kids would crash sleds into trees, and people would have heart attacks shoveling snow, but the carnage wouldn’t begin until after breakfast.