"Lindy, nothing's happening." He promised her. He tried to assure Melinda that Tess would be fine, and that they would find her. He tiptoed around Ricky, dancing as best he could to avoid saying his name, to avoid mentioning what happened to Melinda's son. Still he might as well have said nothing.

"It started with Ricky, with my boy, but its not done."

"Lindy?"

Eddie tried to make his sister look him in the eye, but her gaze drew to the floor, beyond the floor to some void that he could not see. He shook her and still she could not focus in. Mindy doubted anything he did would stir her, but her sister surprised her. As Mindy hesitated ever so briefly on those stairs, she saw her sister look up into her brother's eyes and finally she recognized him.

"Don't you see it," she whispered. "It's this family. Our parents, our aunts, our uncles, they all disappear. Now it's our children. You can't let it take Jimmy, you can't."

"No, Lindy, I won't" Eddie pressed his sister's head to his shoulder, ever the protector. "It's all going to be alright."

Throughout it all, Don did nothing to soothe his wife. He simply turned his back on the Robachs and retreated into the kitchen once more.

Lousy dick.

Mindy continued up the stairs, considering only briefly her sister's words. Their father had abandoned them in eighty-eight, the most recent example in a long history of family abandonment. Their aunt Emily fled to the Carolinas in the early seventies, and had never even bothered to meet her nieces and nephews. Their uncle Ned had run off with his daughter Emily before Mindy was even old enough to remember him. Then a couple of years later her uncle Bobby had uprooted his family, moved out of Russet Creek, and severed all ties.

Even Mindy's eldest sister, Shelly, had run away a year before their father left. Some in town blamed that on Jimmy Robach, but Mindy had always known her father to be a gentle man. Of course, that hadn't stopped him from leaving. For the first few years, they had received postcards from Shelly, but they had never been able to find her, and besides assurances that they weren't to blame for her leaving, she had offered up little else in her messages.

Mindy remembered, however, that Melinda had never believed that their sister or father had left. Lindy had been two and three respectively when each abandoned the family, and she had no concrete memories of either, but Melinda had always born the greatest wounds from their leaving. She feared abandonment above all else, and could not accept that her father and sister had left her. So she had made up stories about them being taken. This had continued into middle school until after a slumber party at Margaret Fischer's word came back to their mother. Melinda didn't make up stories after that, but now, with the loss of Ricky, she had begun to speak up again; her doubts resurfacing in soft whispers on the wind.

Tess going missing would do her no favors.

Mindy stopped at the top landing, pushing past her sister's regression. She knocked at the first door – Jimmy's door. A poster for an indie metal band spanned the width, displaying a face graced with an infinity symbol between its eyes, its flesh dissipating, torn away by some unseen breeze, revealing beneath it a hollow fractal shell, all against a storm-riddled sky and above a nameless river winding through an equally unknowable landscape. The bold name read SOCIONIC.

Mindy paused momentarily, uncertain when Jimmy had moved from choruses of the itsy-bitsy spider to whatever it was that Socionic sang. Whatever it was, she felt fairly certain it wasn't the itsy-bitsy spider or the ballads of Ray Stevens.

She knocked.

Only silence answered.

"Jimmy, it's Mindy. Can I come in?"

Still no answer.

She knocked again. "Jimmy!"

"What do you want?" Muffled.

Mindy eased the door open, a small sliver of light piercing into the dark room beyond. Jimmy lay on the bed, one earbud in, another dangling to the side, and a pillow raised just slightly above his head. Through the dark Mindy couldn't get a clear view of his face, but she had a strong suspicion that he had been crying.

     Mindy paused at the corner of the bed, intending to take a seat and comfort Jimmy like she had when he was younger. Instead she paced there a moment, then pulled up a chair from a writing desk in the corner.

     "Are you okay?"

     Jimmy crunched up the pillow and glanced out the window. His face turned, he tried to wipe away his tears without his aunt noticing, but he was only ten, no matter how old he thought he was, and had not yet mastered any true subterfuge.

     "Yeah. I'm good."

     "Don't B.S. me. What is it?" She knew she should leave it at that. The boy obviously had his own problems, and she had already wasted enough time here tonight. Yet, she had come here to find out about her daughter; she had to at least try. "Is it something about, Tess? Did you see her?"

     "Tess? No. Are you fuckin' blind?" She should have let the boy have his moment.

     "Don't talk to me like that."

     "Whatever."

     "Jimmy."

     Mindy grabbed his shoulder, lightly, soothingly.

     "I know it's been tough."

     "Tough?" He shrugged her hand away. "Really. That's your sage insight? Mom's a fuck --" Mindy glared, interrupting, and he regrouped. "An f'ing zombie, dad's simmering but pretending everything is fine, and Ricky's gone. Taken by some kiddie pervert. Tough doesn't cut it, aunt Mindy."

     Jimmy hugged his pillow tighter and let the tears come, this time unable to hide them. Mindy grabbed his hand and squeezed it, expecting him to pull away again. This time he didn't. She held tight, feeling the throb of his racing heartbeat through his sweaty palms.

     "You're right. It doesn't. I'm sorry."

     "Mom doesn't mention him, you know? Dad, either. I've tried to ask about him, but they just ignore me or change the subject, like I didn't say anything."

     She started to speak, then stopped. She had almost blurted that his mom was having a tough time. It probably wouldn't be the best choice of words.

"Your mom, she's grieving in her way," she said rethinking her approach, "but I'm here if you have questions."

     "Yeah."

     Jimmy leaned back against the headboard staring up at the stars on his ceiling.

     "She watches me constantly, you know?"

     "Your mom?"

     "Uh-huh."

     This didn't surprise, Mindy. In her sister's shoes she would be doing the same. Only, in some ways she already was in her shoes.

     "I get why," Jimmy continued, taking his aunt's pause as encouragement to speak. "It's just, it's weird, right? Like, I wake up at night and she's there, the door open, just watching me. I don't let her see that I'm awake or nothing, I just lay there waiting for her to leave, and she just keeps on watching. Half the time I fall asleep again before she leaves.

     "Then the other morning I'm getting ready for school and I'm..." Jimmy hesitated looking to his aunt to see if she was still listening. Mindy nodded and he turned away, not able to meet her eyes.

     "Well, I'm taking a shower, and the glass is all fogged and all that, but I swear she was standing there watching. It never ends, you know. She's always there, reminding me that I'm all she has left, that Ricky's gone and well, maybe I'm next."

     "You're not next. No one is. The man who, who took your brother, the police put him away." Jimmy looked dubious. She didn't even believe it herself, not completely. Else why was she so gut-wrenchingly worried about her own daughter?

     "You know, I don't think she likes Tess."

     Mindy startled, clenching Jimmy's hand. Slowly she eased off, collecting her thoughts.

     "Of course she does."

     "She did, but I've seen the way she looks at her since. It's not like when she's watching me. Not lately. It's like when she's angry, like when Ricky and I had trashed dad's study that one time,when he was off in Kansas City, only worse because there's no cause to it – just Tess being Tess."

     Mindy swallowed back a small rise of bile. Of course Melinda blamed Tess. Tess had survived and her son had not. Still that rationalization did little to soften her unease.

     "So Tess has been around? Today?"

     "No. Not today. She hasn't been by since, well since you know when. It's mainly in the schoolyard, when mom's picking me up. Mom waits outside the car, just following me my whole walk up to the car. She doesn't look anywhere else, not unless Tess is there. Then she just sort of, I guess I'd say, burns. Does that make sense? She just burns and stares at her.

     "But worst is when we're in the car. The things she says about her. She wishes it had been Tess, you know. Says Tess is a brat, a bully and that she never liked Ricky, and that it should have come for Tess, not her Ricky. Not me. It should have grabbed Tess and taken her away and left her sweet little boys alone."

     Jimmy wiped at his eyes and waited for Mindy to speak, but she couldn't. She knew that her sister had been in shock since Ricky's disappearance, but hearing that Melinda wanted her daughter dead, that went the proverbial bridge too far.

     "I know it's terrible, Aunt Mindy, but I can't help but get stuck on the not me part. Why does she think something's coming for me?"

     Her heart broke and she pulled Jimmy close. For a few seconds he was the same sweet little boy that used to come over and read books to his baby cousin, her sweet nephew that used to crawl into her bed at night after his nightmares. That had been after her and James had split and she and Tess had moved in with Mindy for a couple months. She held him close, and assured him that no one was coming for him and that he was going to be okay.

     Even as she did, she found her gaze torn to the open doorway where she half-expected to see her sister waiting, waiting and watching. Instead she only saw the empty hallway. Downstairs she could hear the sink running and the clatter of plateware once more. It came up the stairs in yet another gentle echo, only now that echo took on new form, its hollow reverberations accentuating more than the emptiness that had swallowed the Farmhouse whole, but also the darkness that had filled that void, devouring her sister and leaving that husk below.

     That dark emptiness had bored into her as well and into the town itself. It surrounded them all, and somewhere within it her daughter wandered with no one there to comfort her, alone.

When Tess had been born, some force had been watching out for her, something greater than Mindy that had ensured that her daughter had lived. Perhaps it had been watching out for her ever since, but even so, why hadn't she done the same, she thought. Why hadn't she watched out for her own daughter? Why had she let her go off on her own?

She shook as she rocked back and forth cradling Jimmy and wondered where her daughter had gone and if that same something was still protecting her from whatever lurked in that vast and hollow dark.

Thanks, as always, for reading.  If you enjoyed the chapter, please click that star, comment, or share. It is much appreciated.

Now, let's jump right on into some questions. 

What are your thoughts on Melynda?
Donald?

How about Jimmy?

Have you listened to Socionic?  If not, check them out.

And just where exactly is all of this headed?

And where is Tess?

Anything else on your mind?  Let me know.  Next up, the old man makes yet another fateful encounter.  Can he resist the urges rising within him?