Chapter 2

 

Where Is Beth

I decided to record it, just for fun, but have also included the text below here in case it is not audible.

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Jessie Norris is at home. He is wondering where Beth is. This is not like her. He tries to phone her. Nothing. Not even a recorded greeting. It’s like her phone has ceased to exist. He has never heard this silence on the other side before. 

He wishes now that he had gone to the strip mall with her. It had crossed his mind, but he had let the thought go. Beth was not the kind of girl who needed help with everything, he had told himself complacently.

Jessie is just short of six feet tall. He weighs 175 pounds and looks leggy. He is dark, with nearly black eyes and short curly black hair. He is a couple years younger than his wife. He works in a shop building handmade furniture. He is good with his hands. He is also known to be quick witted.

Beth took the Honda of course. So, he is stuck out here without wheels.

For whatever reason, he is not ready to call the police yet. He feels a little sense of not now.

She should have been home two hours ago. They should have eaten dinner by now and be cleaning up the kitchen together.

He is all questions and conjectures.

He walks the room. His eyes fall on things, but his mind is elsewhere. His handmade furniture, the pictures. None of it makes any impression on him.

He hopes she is just somewhere deep in a serious conversation. But, just sitting and waiting and wondering are not his style. So, he puts on his heavy woolen jacket, stuffs his phone and wallet in his jeans pockets, and makes sure everything that should be turned off is turned off. He thinks it might be good to bring a flashlight, so the last thing he does is get it out of the junk drawer in the kitchen.  It's one of those little super bright ones.

He steps out into the dark on the little wooden porch, sighs, locks up the house and sets out walking toward the little mall where she shops in a Trader Joe’s. He has a ten-mile march in front of him.

Man, it’s dark out here, he thinks. But then his eyes adjust, and he can see the driveway and the surface of the road dimly as he begins his walk.

Jessie is not a fearful man, but this one is hard. He thinks it’s these little phones. They got us all used to being in contact at any time, made us intolerant on not knowing. Now, if the phone doesn’t work, we feel something is very wrong.

Jessie is a pretty good runner, so he pounds out a couple of miles running easily through the soft night. He is looking for anything out of the ordinary on the road. He slows to a long walking gait. Incredibly he is a little sleepy. It’s all dreamlike. The night is silent. Where is Beth?

About four miles out he sees that there is something up ahead in the road, or off to the side actually. It looks depressingly like his own car. Well, it is his car, an old navy-blue Accord. This one is a 2009 model. They really do never die.

Fearing the worst Jessie sprints up to his car and finds the driver’s side door open, the key in the ignition and his wife missing. The two bags of groceries are still sitting on the back seat. No one has stolen the car or even taken the groceries.

Jessie steps back from his car. He looks at the verge and the pavement, with the aid of the small bright flashlight. There are a lot of scuff marks in the soil. He sees a woman’s shoe prints and then they disappear. There are two other sets of prints. There is some blood when he gets down close to the pavement and really looks hard, shining the beam of light sideways along the asphalt surface.

Jessie Norris, alone on a dark highway, has a big problem now and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He gets into the driver’s seat and sits there thinking.

He takes out his own phone at last and calls 911. He gets the police dispatcher and explains the situation. Then he waits for them to come and look at what he has discovered.

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