Chapter Text
Grace had left when his dad arrived.
Or rather – Grace has left when his dad arrived for the first time.
She'd been there most of the day – his dad had been gone since before breakfast, and now it was dark, and she had other things to do.
He'd said he would be right in – they were going to go to a drive in this weekend, and he said he would be right in.
Dad looked so happy.
But Grace was gone now. And his dad had driven off again without saying anything more.
It's already night – a thin moon hanging in the sky – and Tim drags a chair closer to the big window overlooking the road outside their house.
He's not supposed to drag the chair (it'll leave scratches on the floor, and it'll damage the chair – he hears his dad say inside his mind). But he's also not supposed to be left home alone with no warning, so it balances out.
And this way he can see his dad's car as soon as it turns the road.
This way he'll see when his dad comes back.
He's been waiting forever, and the car hasn't come back.
But there's a rather more pressing issue right now.
Food. The issue is food.
Grace hadn't made him dinner – that's his dad's job. His dad likes making dinner.
But his dad never came inside the house, and dinner never got made, and now he's so hungry he feels like he could faint.
(He's fine. He ate a large lunch and multiple snacks since then. But he's ten and ten year olds like to be dramatic where their stomachs are concerned)
Deciding he can leave the window long enough to make himself some food – he drags the chair all the way back into the kitchen. Remembering only when he gets there, that there are actually multiple chairs already in the kitchen, and he probably could have left this one by the window.
Oh well – all done now.
Dinner that evening consists of peanut butter, jelly and pickle sandwiches (two of them); a handful of the chocolates in the upper cupboard his dad thinks he doesn't know about; and cookie dough ice cream.
After a moment, he adds an apple to his plate as well. It's important to eat healthily.
Somehow he also managed to dirty four knives, two forks and three plates in the process – but hey. Ten year old.
Pulling the whole lot back to the window, he only drops the peanut butter onto the rug once, and he's able to lick most of the mess up – so that doesn't even count.
So he waits.
He waits while he finishes his food sitting by the window.
He waits.
He waits while he watches one movie from start to finish.
He waits while he watches a second movie too.
He waits until his bedtime is long behind him, and he waits til his eyes are dropping closed on the sofa, and he waits until it's closer to midnight than he's ever stayed up (excluding New Years Eve, because that doesn't count).
He waits until the night is pitch black and the shadows are long and the monsters are coming out to play.
He waits until he's scared to sleep in a house all alone, all by himself.
He waits until he can't.
The phone rings.
Once, twice, three times.
She considers letting it go to voicemail – she was practically asleep already, and so not in the mood to talk to him right now.
But maybe he needs something, and it's great being able to hold things over peoples head in the future.
She's not going to be happy about it though.
“What do you want Tom?” her voice is perhaps a bit more brusque than strictly necessary, but that's part of the fun for her. “It's almost midnight.”
There's silence for a second, and Emma almost thinks he phoned her accidentally when -
“Aunt Emma?” He sounds small and scared and younger than his ten years.
“Tim? Is something wrong?” She sitting up, getting out of bed before he says anything because Tim doesn't phone her at midnight if everything is dandy.
“Maybe? I don't know.” His voice sounds distant, as if he's not sure what's going but doesn't want to get anyone in trouble “Dad, um, Dad went out earlier and he hasn't come back and I'm scared to go to sleep on my own.”
Emma's face pinches – and Tom better have a damn good reason for this – but she tries not to let it show in her voice.
“I'm coming over right now. We'll be there as soon as we can.” She reaches over to shake Paul awake, currently lost in dreamworld on his side of the bed. “Just, uh, watch a movie until we get there.”
“If you want to,” he says – but there's a note of desperation in his voice that says he's very glad his Aunt is coming. “I'll see you soon.”
“I can stay on the line with you if you - ” the phone goes dead.
Turning on the main light, Paul is drawn back into involuntary consciousness and deals with it by trying to swat some imaginary creature from the air just in front of his face.
“Em? It's the middle of the night – turn the light off.” He rolls over, trying to fall asleep again.
“Tim phoned – Tom's disappeared, and he's alone. We're going. Now.”
There's no arguing with that (his brain tries but doesn't come up with anything better than but I was sleeping - and that's not a great argument).
He slips on a shirt and shoes, grabbing his phone and nothing else.
Emma drives. (It is Emma's car, to be fair)
This was a good idea because he's already half-drifted off again in the twenty minutes it takes them to get to the Houston household.
Ringing the doorbell – Emma half expects Tom to greet them at the door, that this was all some elaborate prank (but that's not really Tim's style. She knows that)
A light turns on in the hallway, a key half turns in the lock before whoever is on the other side comes to a sudden realisation.
“Aunt Emma?” the voice calls from behind the door. “Is that you?”
“Yeah Tim, it's me. And Uncle Paul.”
The door finishes unlocking, and Tim's arms are around her waist before the door is even fully opened.
He looks okay. His eyes are exhausted, and he's got peanut butter in the corner of his mouth, and ice cream on the tip of his nose – but he looks okay.
It takes less than ten minutes for him to fall asleep.
Emma didn't realise kids went to bed that easy – she literally just led him to his room, and he would have climbed into bed, jeans and t-shirt and all had she not pulled a pair of pyjamas out of a drawer and half-tossed them at him (they had ducks on them. They were very adorable).
He smiled sheepishly, changed quickly, and was asleep before she'd finished pulling the covers up to his shoulder.
Downstairs, Paul is picking up the remains of Tim's self-made dinner, and examining what is very clearly a peanut butter smudge in the centre of the rug. It's wet for some reason, and Paul hopes that reason is because Tim had tried to clean it away.
As she descends the stairs, Emma's anger grows.
How could Tom just do that?
Disappear without saying anything to Tim?
Disappear and not come back?
But even anger can only keep you awake for so long – once she stopped Paul from trying to clean Tom's entire home, he'd fallen asleep in minutes – legs dangling off the edge of the couch.
She joins him just after two am, angled towards the door where she'll be able to catch him when he gets home.
If he gets home.
Tom's not back by the time she wakes up in the morning, the early sun cutting through the window and waking her much earlier than she would have liked on a Sunday.
Paul's not there either – but he's much easier to find, cooking pancakes in the kitchen.
Tim still sleeps in his bedroom, and she creeps away from there – letting him sleep as long as he needs.
The anger has mostly faded by this point, replaced by a worry that doesn't want to let go.
At this point, the best case scenario is he got so drunk he slept in his car somewhere. But that's not like Tom. Sure he'd go out drinking every so often – but not spur of the moment, and definitely not leaving Tim home alone.
He'd call Grace, or Emma herself – and there'd be a plan.
Emma may not … always like Tom as a person – but he loves his son, he adores his son above everything else left in the world. That much is very clear.
And for him to just disappear like this, disappear on Tim, is not exactly in his character.
She phones the Birdhouse. There's only one person working there this early in the morning, so it takes a few minutes to get through.
All she wants to know is what time Tom left the night before.
All she's told is that Tom was never there.
And Tom is a pretty regular visitor – they would definitely have seen him if he had been there.
There's only two hospitals in Hatchetfield, and that's her next phone call.
The first won't confirm or deny whether Tom was there or whether he had ever been there and yeah – she gets it – patient privacy. But that's going a bit far right? Not to tell if he had ever been there.
The second also won't tell her whether Tom was a patient. That's just annoying now.
Her fourth phone call of the morning is to the police. This counts as a missing persons, right?
Except not really.
Because she gets as far as saying she wants to report her brother-in-law missing. Tom Houston. When there's a noise on the other end of the line – an “oh” or a “uh”, and Emma finds herself being transferred to another officer.
Well there's good news and bad news.
The good news is that Tom isn't missing. She now knows exactly where that is.
The bad news is that “exactly where he is” is … a holding cell.
Somehow the idiot had managed to get himself arrested the night before, and either hadn't used his one phone, or used it for something other than making sure his ten year old son was okay.
The … medium news? They won't tell her why he was arrested.
So maybe he was trespassing somewhere he wasn't supposed to.
And maybe he's an axe murderer now.
Could go either way.
Tim wakes up just in time for breakfast – having been woken up by his stomach, and led down the stairs by his nose.
There's a split second turning into the kitchen that he looks so excited – but the excitement splits into apathy when he realises the two people cooking him breakfast are not the two (or the one in particular) that he wanted to see.
Breakfast is awkward.
That's the polite way to put it.
Tim is trying to shrink back into himself – head snapping to look at the door with every little noise.
Paul is doing an admirable job of trying to keep a conversation going over pancakes.
And Emma is still figuring out how to explain to the kid that his dad isn't going to walk through the door because he … kinda got himself arrested?
In the end, she sticks with her favourite method.
Not telling him at all.
Her and Paul might be stuck in the clothes they had thrown on at midnight, but Emma runs a comb stolen from the bathroom (probably Becky's, or at least, used by Becky, judging by the red strands of hair through the prongs)
Emma picks out Tim's clothes, specifically picking out ones that make him look “adorable”.
Because who knows – maybe that'll help at the station if he looks like a little angel?
They didn't tell Tim they were going to his dad.
They didn't tell him anything.
They just turned up at the police station and he figured it out for himself.
At least they tell them what happened – now that they turned up at the station and are quite clearly refusing to leave until someone tells them something.
The something is not good.
Tom had nearly run over a girl at the beach yesterday – which is bad enough, but it gets worse.
He'd run over Becky.
And not by accident.
No – he had very clearly targetted her, followed her, and hit her with his car as fast as he could considering she had run among the trees.
“Miss Barnes is going to be okay,” the officer reassures them – “she's still in the hospital, but her condition is not considered life-threatening.”
Paul is staring in disbelief. Emma has turned white. And Tim is trembling and looks a smidge to close to throwing up for Emma's comfort.
“Did Mr Houston know Miss Barnes before this incident?” he asks, and it's a reasonable question that Emma tries to put words to when Tim beat her to it.
“They were intimate together.” He offers. This he knows at least.
The officer … doesn't quite know what to say to that.
“They'd been dating for a few months,” Emma offers up, a moment too late, now her mouth was working again.
“Are you sure it was Tom?” She asks in the next second. “That he was definitely driving?”
There's no way Tom was capable of something like this.
“Dad wouldn't hurt Miss Becky. He really likes her.” Tim tries to add. “He hasn't been this happy since Mom died.” His voice trails off to the end of the sentence. The reminder that his mom is never coming back is never great.
“Your mother was,” he looks down at the paper. “Jane, correct? Did she pass in a car accident?”
“I fail to see how that's relevant.” Paul steps in, before Emma or Tim get a chance to.
The officer sighs. “You better come with me.”
And then he's leading the way.
There's a couple of people in the cells – drunks mostly, people who went too far the night before.
They hear Tom before they see him.
He's ranting – he's raving – the words almost overlapping each other with the speed at which he's speaking.
Jane's in the car. He says. Jane is the car. She's inside the car. She made me do it. Jane made me do it. Jane is the car. Jane made me do it.
And Tim takes a step closer to him, a step closer to his dad, but it's a step too far because in a second Tom has his hands wrapped tight around Tim's shoulders.
Stay away from the car. It's not safe. You need to stay away. You need to stay away. It's not safe. She's not safe. She wanted to kill Becky to get her body. Stay away. Stay away.
And Emma believes now, believes that Tom could actually do something like that.
Something happened last night – before he hit Becky or after – but something happened and it looks like his brain has fractured.
Tim is nearly in tears – both from the state of his father, and the tightness at which his shoulders are being gripped. Paul almost has to pry his fingers backwards, Emma tugging Tim backwards – out of reach of the … thing … that used to be his father.
If the drive to the station was quiet, the drive home was worse.
At least before there was hope it was a misunderstanding, at least maybe there was something to be done.
But it's worse than Emma or Paul could have pictured, and Tim feels nothing.
They get to the house.
Emma wants to be useful. She needs to be useful. She doesn't know how to be useful right now.
So Paul and Tim watch a movie – some disney film or something, with bright colours and happy-go-lucky characters and Paul doesn't even mention the singing.
Emma takes the chance to drive back to her and Paul's place to grab some things. They're probably going to be staying a while, and a change of clothes and essentials are going to be, well … essential.
The rest of the day passes in a haze of TV (the quality of which steadily declines) and take out (twice in one day) and no one talking about Tom.
It's about four pm that Tim asks if they can phone the hospital to see if Miss Becky is okay – the closest he's come to mentioning the mornings event. But they wouldn't even tell them if Tom was in the hospital, and Emma is technically related to him – they're not going to tell them anything about Becky.
He sinks back into the couch
It's about seven pm that Tim remembers he has homework. Homework due the next morning.
Which yeah – not great, and maybe a bit stressful, and also possibly something he could have remembered perhaps more than an hour before he was supposed to be going to bed.
But it's the straw that breaks the camels back – and he's crying for the first time since this all began.
And it's not just crying – Emma can cope with tears – it's tears and screaming and hyperventilating, and he's insisting that he's just upset about the homework but he doesn't know what he's doing.
Emma tries to help, sitting at the kitchen table with him while they try to work through his math homework – but he still has tears in eyes which doesn't help with the reading, and Emma hasn't really done math since school – which was way too many years ago. And numbers are different now? She tries to show him how she remembers doing these sums at school but apparently that's wrong and they do it this way now, Aunt Emma.
And it's only getting him more stressed, and she's getting stressed over it too (and it's 4th grade mathematics. No one should be getting this stressed over 4th grade mathematics).
But Paul puts his hand on her shoulder and they swap places, and he actually knows what he's doing (which – yeah, right. His whole job is numbers. That makes sense).
Emma takes over the job of making the hot chocolate (the nice kind with milk and whipped cream and marshmallow, none of that pretend cocoa made with water).
But the homework gets done (more thanks to Paul than Emma), and the chocolate gets drunk, and it's not even that late past his bedtime that the exhausted boy finally goes to sleep.
“Fucking hell,” Emma mutters, only half under her breath, as she collapses onto the couch.
“Fucking hell,” Paul agrees, handing her a glass of something slightly stronger than the hot chocolate.