Page 10 of My Heart to Find

Cody, my new roommate, is sitting at the kitchen table. He looks up and gives me a grunt by way of a greeting. First thing he told me on the phone when I inquired about the spare room he was letting out was that he wasn’t much of a talker. I’d laughed goodhumoredly until his second sentence had been, “So I’m going to text for the rest of this conversation.” Sure enough, he’d hung up straight away, and moments later had sent a follow-up text.

In person, he’s no more talkative. Barely got two words out of him last night—and those were in response to me saying I was going out to get takeaway and asking if he wanted any. I’d meant it as a roommate-bonding thing, but he’d taken his dinner into his room and shut the door the moment I’d returned with the hot food.

“I’m only back for an hour or so,” I say, because Lord help me—I have to talk to someone. I’m just one of those people.

Cody nods. He’s got a short hairstyle that emphasizes how bony his skull is at the back, and I can’t help but think longer hair would look better on him. The newspaper’s spread out in front of him, and I lean over as a headline catches my attention:Local Dog-Walker Still Missing.

“Whoa, is that round here?” I ask.

Cody doesn’t answer, but I’m already reading.

Nineteen-year-old student Marnie Wathem is still missing since 10 P.M on September 12th, when she failed to return home. In the two weeks since, there have been no new developments, and Detective Matthews has announced that Wathem’s disappearance is not suspicious. “Marnie is known as a bit of a terror,” he told us. “She wanted to run away, and we have no reason to think another person is involved.”

Wathem’s brother, Trevor Wathem, 31, said his sister had been out walking a group of dogs—part of her new business efforts to save up for the university course she wanted to do, after she’d left her job as a waitress three months ago—but had not returned. He says his sister “would never abandon the dogs like that,” and says he believes the police are wrong in their assumption that the young woman is simply a runaway. The four dogs Wathem was walking were all found in the early hours of the next morning, barking and causing riot amid a field of sheep over on Westford Common. The farmer, Mr. John—

Cody turns the page.

“Hey,” I say. “Can I just read that?”

Cody’s dark, soulful eyes turn to me. He shakes his head. “My paper. Get your own.”

If I wasn’t so interested in the report, I’d be marveling at his use of actual words.

“Come on, man,” I say. “There was only one paragraph left.”

Cody gets up, folds the newspaper, and places it against his heart before leaving the kitchen.

I shake my head as I watch him go, then pull out my phone. “Marnie Wathem,” I mutter as I type her name into Google. There are a lot of articles about her disappearance, but none of them give any more actual info about why she disappeared. Just interviews with the farmer whose sheep were hurt by the dogs, mostly. There aren’t even any photos of the missing woman.

*

“ALWAYS WAS TROUBLE, that girl,” Mrs. East says as I collect Rufus, her golden retriever. “She never was reliable.”

“But she’s gonemissing,” I say. You can’t say these sorts of things about a missing woman. Who knows what’s happened to her?

“She hated doing this job anyway, was only in it for the money,” Mrs. East continues as if she didn’t hear me. Maybe she didn’t. Her hearing aid is making a lot of squeaking noises.

There’s not really much I can say to that, and something tells me that this lady is not one to be argued with. So, I say goodbye, trying not to roll my eyes as she tells her dog that she’ll have his roast chicken dinner waiting for him when we get back. I’m not entirely sure whether she expects me to take Rufus on a walk longer than the forty-five minute one she’s booked me for, especially if she’s cooking from scratch.

“Come on, boy,” I say. Rufus walks in a way that my mum would call ‘pudgily.’ He’s definitely had one too many roast dinners with all the trimmings before, in my opinion.

We head out into the woodland to the north of Brackerwood. Mrs. East was very particular about the places where her precious boy is walked, and told me that there are eight different routes Rufus likes, and he gets moody if you try and take him anywhere else. She’d told me to take him on tis walk specifically.

“It’s one of his favorites,” she had said to me with a beam.

It’s also the last walk that Marnie Wathem took the dogs on. The walk where she disappeared.

“Do you know what happened?” I ask Rufus, stopping at one point to stroke his head. “Did you see?”

I have a dark imagination. It’s all the true crime documentaries and podcasts I surround myself with. I’m just fascinated by them, the murderers. It sounds bad to say, but they’re one of the most interesting types of people. Not interesting in an entertaining way, interesting in a morbidly fascinating way. I’d wanted to study criminal psychology at uni at one point—back at the time when I thought I’d definitely be going to university, before my parents had declared bankruptcy and we’d had to move, uprooting me in the middle of my A-levels. My new school hadn’t offered a psychology course and so I’d taken hard sciences instead—and failed.

But I’m still fascinated by criminals, especially serial killers. I want to know how their minds work. I want to explore their thought processes and what makes them think their actions are justified. Are serial killers really all psychopaths? Do they feel no remorse at all as they murder their victims?

And is a crime case like that what Marnie’s been caught up in? Or is it an abduction case?

As I walk Rufus, I entertain the idea that maybe I’ll be the one to find Marnie. Maybe shehasbeen abducted and this route I’m taking will unlock the mystery of what happened to her. If I was the one to rescue her from some monster, then I’d be branded a hero. And if I was a hero, I’d get attention, for sure. Maybe Cara would be interested in me because of said heroism.

I groan. “Man, why am I like this?” I bend down to ruffle the fur on Rufus’s head. There’s a tennis ball in my pocket, and it digs into me as I bend down. I’d planned on throwing it for him, but when I got it out upon leaving Mrs. East’s house, Rufus looked at it disdainfully. “I need to just forget about Cara, don’t I, boy?”

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