You'll Just Know

Chapter 28

            It all happened so much more quickly that I had even imagined.

            Mr. Cameron had smuggled us quickly to the barbershop next-door where he made a few whispered, urgent calls. Within twenty minutes, a green Ford Taurus appeared on the curb and the entire Cameron family was herded quickly inside.

            A man in a denim jacket and a tie pulled me aside and asked me a few hurried questions about the whole thing, including a detailed description of the two men. He got my name, address, and phone number, and promised to get in touch with me again soon for more information. When I looked again, the car that had picked up the Cameron’s was gone. The man offered me a ride home, but I just shook my head numbly. A few moments later, he was in his car parked across the street and he was gone. I was left standing alone on the sidewalk in a desperate, confused daze.

            Three days later, I was still trying to piece together those last moments. It was all a blur. More than anything else, though, I felt horribly and painfully cheated. There had been no goodbye, no last embrace… just that rushed blur. It was bitterly unfair. They hadn’t even given me a chance…

            I stayed in my room. I sat mostly in the window seat and tried to remember our first kiss there. I tried to remember opening the dusty cigar box there. All of these images were vivid in my mind, and taunted me with their clarity.

            My parents doted incessantly on me. When they fist heard what had happened, my mom had to sit down for an hour and a half before she could stand again. Even Sandra had been uncharacteristically silent about the whole thing. Everyone just watched me carefully, checking in on me every ten minutes and constantly asking “Are you okay?”

            I would just nod, but of course I wasn’t okay. Not at all. The dreams and flash-images were still too real. I kept remembering in particular those seconds when I had been dangling from the roof of the Cameron house. Wendy had been there, suddenly. “I’m not going to leave you…” she’d said.

            So I floated in my haze of grief and shock until that third day when there came a light knock on my bedroom door. It cut through a daydream I was having about the first time Wendy and I had gone fishing by the Witchahee. I knew that it was one of my family coming in to check up on me again. “Yes, I’m okay.” I answered automatically, trying not to lose the threads of the vivid daydream.

            The door creaked open, and I turned. “I said I was…”

            But Sandra had stuck her head in carefully and the funny expression she wore made me stop.

“Um… Casey?”

The threads of my daydream slipped away regretfully. “What is it?”

Sandra looked unsure. “The FBI is here to see you.”

            I sat up. “What?”

            Sandra nodded hesitantly. “Yeah, they’re downstairs.”

            I got up quickly and walked across the hardwood floor, following Sandra down the hallway towards the stairs. I had known they would return to ask me some more questions. I wondered if they were here to tell me that they had caught the two men involved. Nick and his buddy.

            In the living room, a man and a woman stood dressed in remarkably similar formal black suits. The man, at least seven feet tall, stepped forward and extended his had when he saw me. “Casey McKenna?”

            I nodded carefully. “Yeah?”

            As I shook his hand, he produced his ID neatly with his other hand. The woman with him produced hers as well, mimicking him in comic unison. “Officers DeVane and Mann, FBI.” he said.