Loves Me Not

THIRTEEN

AFTER
DETECTIVE BRETT PORTER

By Saturday morning, Catalaina's face is plastered on every television station. Every radio channel is talking about it. Every person in Bridgeport is dying to know where the beautiful and alluring Catalaina Kittridge has disappeared to.

It's a mystery that people want to solve. They want to help bring her home, do everything in their power to help, whether it be putting up missing persons posters, assisting the search team scour the town, or holding vigils. People want to take credit. They want to feel responsible. Feel like a hero.

I look up from my cup of coffee and stare at the face that looks down at me from the television screen. It's the same photo that Ben gave me, the one of her in the plaid shirt, bright green eyes staring at the camera lens. I think back to my conversation with Mrs. Kittridge, the story she told me of Catalaina coming to her with a selection of photos. I wonder if Catalaina would be satisfied with the photo they're currently airing on television right now. Would she have chosen the same photo? Did she choose this photo?

Today I need to track her movements. I need to find out every single thing Catalaina did in the preceding days and weeks before her disappearance. Wherever she is, she brought her phone and purse with her. Not her car though. Whatever happened in the early hours of Thursday morning, she left her car at home. Did she leave the house willingly? Was she planning to meet somebody? Was she taken from her home?

We've got a trace on her phone, which is long dead by now. It last bounced from a cell tower six miles from her house. Police are trying to track it down now. However, I highly doubt they'll find the phone with her at this point.

I managed to get a warrant for her phone records early this morning. Don't know how long those will take to come in, but once I get them, I can find out exactly who she was in contact with.

As for the hidden money stashed away in her bookshelf... I'll need to setup a meeting with the manager at Catalaina's bank as soon as possible to delve into her finances and get a better idea of her and Ben's financial situation. However, it's now the weekend and the manager won't be back until Monday, so I'll make an appointment for then.

My next step is social media. In this day in age, social media is ubiquitous. Everyone uses it, everyone's always on it, twenty-four-seven. People post about everything in their lives. There's no such thing as "over-sharing." I don't really use it myself, never found it enjoyable to say the least. But I go on Facebook every now and then to check in with my sister and people that I used to call friends. I scroll down the timeline and read paragraphs of people bitching about their lives. Their neighbor calls the city on them for parking on the street overnight and it's a fucking crisis that warrants a Facebook rant.

Nonetheless, social media is a beneficial element in solving crimes, especially in a missing person's case. I need to look into Catalaina's life and try to examine everything I can through her online presence. However, there's one problem: Catalaina feels the same way that I do about social media. She doesn't have anything except for Facebook, and even that she uses sparsely.

I scroll to the bottom, see that she first created her account in 2008, just when Facebook was becoming a trend. Throughout the years her posts are pretty mundane. They were more frequent in her younger years, and eventually die down as she gets older. In the past year, the only thing she's posted about is her engagement, some photos with family, and a few articles she has shared. Other than that, there is literally nothing useful on here that can help me delve into her life and figure out what kind of person she is. For someone who supposedly writes everything down, she sure doesn't share a lot with the people of the internet.

The one solid thing I do have at this very moment, is her laptop. With the help from Catalaina herself, I have the passwords to everything. First thing's first: digging through her life, one word at a time.

I open the laptop and type in the password. The screen opens willingly. Her desktop is minimal and clean. She has everything organized into folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders. I imagine this is how she manages her actual life as well.

I click through everything, opening folders, reading through files and Word documents. She is extremely meticulous and organized. She has a calendar on here as well with every single appointment, event, or coffee date. She has multiple to-do lists per week. She has Word documents of random mundane thoughts that occur to her throughout the day. For example:

"We long for the day to be over, wish for the week to be over, then complain that life passes us by far too fast."

"We're always drawn back to the same flame that burnt us."

"The biggest irony in life is that we don't say the things we want to say simply because we don't think it's what the other person wants to hear."

I keep clicking, scrolling, reading. Eventually, I find a journal. It's over 300,000 words. Jesus Christ. She must have been writing in this thing for years. If I wanted to read the entire thing, it would take a few years in itself. I don't have that kind of time. And I'm assuming neither does she, if we're going to find her alive. So instead, I skim.

Thursday October 1, 2018

The start of a new month brings many things. Hope, aspirations, goals to accomplish. New feelings of solstice and change. And not only is it the start of a new month, but it is also the start of a new season. Fall has officially arrived, and with it has come crisp air and changing leaves. I love the fall. Always have. It makes me feel nostalgic of the past. I remember being a kid, sitting by the front window of my childhood home, watching the leaves fall from the trees. It was magical to me, how the leaves that once possessed a hue of bright, vibrant greens were miraculously turning to shades of red, yellow, and orange.

Ben and I are planning to go apple picking this weekend. It was his idea, not mine, but I loved it just as much. I want to pick enough apples to bake a few apple pies.

I love watching the students change as the seasons change. They are all so young and have such potential ahead of them. I talk about this with them in class sometimes. I have them write out goals for themselves at the start of every month. Why wait for the New Year to change? Why not start now? Why not start again every month?

I stop reading and reach for my coffee cup. I glance at the clock. It's quarter after eleven in the morning. I've only managed to get through 200 words. This is going to be a long day.

I decide to skip ahead to the end, to the very last entry in here. That will be the most important entry, I presume. It will be the last thing that she wrote, the last thing that was on her mind before she disappeared. I scroll down, all the way to the bottom.

It's dated from the Saturday evening right before she vanished. It's a paragraph detailing the paralysis she feels in life. How she's petrified of living a mundane existence and not making enough of a difference in the world. She says that she feels as though there's no one out there who truly understands her. The real her.

The paragraph ends with a very cryptic tone and I'm not sure how to decipher it. The very last thing that Catalaina wrote before she disappeared was this:

If it is I who needs to be solved, then it is he who holds the key.