Buzzkill: The Reckoning

Chapter 3

The air sent a chill down Ruth's spine. Even the bench she sat on felt cold through her jeans. She studied the place around her for the millionth time, it was all she could do. She felt trapped, as if she was locked away, out of reach from everyone.

But the truth was, she was sitting at the same place she had practically everyday for a couple of years now; on a park bench just outside of downtown Malmö. She chose this park not only because only a handful of people a day walked its paths, or that she had a 360 degree view of everything around her, it was because of where this particular park bench faced; the front of the house of David and Alice Rogers. Her childhood home.

This house haunted her thoughts. The only thing that could quiet her mind was to study it. The problem was, the Rogers family must have sold this house and moved into a much larger one years ago. Now, a far younger family played outside under the looming shade trees and beautifully kept garden. Everyday she watched them felt like viewing the life she could have lived. She was sold to keep that house. And in the end, the Rogers' still moved on to something better.

Sitting in this spot, once an occasion saved for particularly slow weeks, now became the only thing Ruth felt she could do. She felt as if she had done everything else to occupy her time without leaving Malmö for longer than a week.

Following the capture of James, Ruth followed the news closely. She saw that James had escaped, but after that, radio silence. She didn't know where he could have gone. Was he dead? Had they killed him? Do they have him in a cell deep underground where they can interrogate him for the rest of his life?

Though her mind feared for the worst, Ruth knew in her heart that she couldn't leave Malmö. This is where she told James she would be, and she would wait until eternity if it meant she could see him again. Ruth knew she didn't have anything else.

It was her fault.

If she never left James, she could have helped him. She could have stopped the police from taking him. She could have negotiated an agreement for his freedom, having them take her instead. She could have told them that he wasn't the man they thought he was. She could have pinned it on herself, anything so that James could walk free. That's all he deserved, peace. After the hell he lived through for the past seventy five years the least he deserves is a life outside of a cell. Couldn't they just give him that much?

The guilt tore her apart inside. She was always cold as if a ghost haunted her footsteps, the warmth taken from her. She felt the cold grip onto her head and swell in her chest, leaving a void that Ruth couldn't seem to fill.

As she sat on the park bench, Ruth listened intently to the sounds around her, hyper vigilant for any signs of danger. Sunglasses covered her eyes, dark enough where no one could guess where she was looking. A book sat on her lap, open to a page she had read a hundred times before, the spine of the novel Sherlock Holmes bent and broken. Every couple of minutes Ruth would flip to the next page, sometimes actually reading the words and sometimes not.

The usual sounds stuck out like in any other day; the gentle purr of a car strolling by, the quiet melodies of the birds chirping far above her in the trees, and the rustle of leaves crunching beneath the wheels of the bikes that would pass by. These sounds became almost as a silence amongst the silence.

A loud churn of a car engine differentiated itself from the silence, a glint of black metal catching Ruth's eye. Glancing over to the vehicle, she studied it as it stopped just a hundred feet from where she sat, parking on the side of the road next to the park.

Ruth knew she could use the park as an advantage against the dark vehicle. Large, sturdy maple trees lined the edges and encased the park with only a short distance in between each of them. Ruth could see the strangers coming out of the vehicle, knowing the exact amount of time it took for someone to walk past one tree to the next, giving her time to get up and walk away, disappearing from their view.