Of Guilt and Innocence Read Online Free Page B

they realized their only child was missing. This was a fear of not knowing what to do, or what they should do. It bordered on guilt, not knowing what the “protocol” was in this situation to try to get their child back. Who would they ask? Who should they compare themselves to? They certainly knew of no one who had been in this position. Were they to become the people they had seen on news programs throughout the years? The people who made impassioned pleas on Good Morning America ? Was that how these things were supposed to go?
    â€œWe need to look for her ourselves,” Lisa said staring straight ahead, finally breaking the silence. “She’s our baby, we need to be out there looking, not leaving it to the police.”
    â€œWe need to call our families . . . they should hear it from us first.”
    â€œI don’t care how they hear it, if I’m not out there looking, if I don’t get out there to look today, I don’t think I’ll ever live with myself. I don’t know how we sat here for so long without going out there and looking. What is wrong with us?” Her voice cracked again as her guilt again began to show.  
    â€œAll right, let’s go.”

 
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    CHAPTER 2
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    Earlier that morning, a little farther south, in the town of Davie, the inhabitant of a small, muddled studio apartment struggled to rise from his pullout couch bed. A portly man, Louis Bradford stood only five feet six inches tall, but weighed two hundred and thirty pounds. He lived alone in that studio apartment, which was located above his mother’s garage, while she solely occupied the property’s main house: a modest, two-story home.  
    Louis staggered through the tiny apartment as he tried to shake off his slumber and prepare for the day ahead.  He had lived in the apartment or the main house nearly all of his thirty seven years. The only exception came in his early twenties, when he spent two years away from his sanctuary in a Florida state prison in the town of Raiford.  
    In the main house his mother had been up for hours and was laboring to tidy up. At the age of sixty-seven Anne Bradford was worn down by life, both mentally and physically. She had very few personal indulgences or pleasures anymore. In fact, what made her most happy was still being able to take care of her only child. She had never resented Louis’s refusal to work after his arrest, or that he had never shown an interest in moving out or starting his own family. She always turned a blind eye to his quirks, even as disturbing as they seemed. He stopped letting her come into his apartment years ago, saying he would clean it himself, though she knew he never did and at times the odors that would emanate from it were unbearable. She picked up on other things through the years she thought were odd but quickly suppressed those thoughts and move on. She never wanted to push him away.
    His arrest and subsequent incarceration took a significant toll on her and continued still to have a profound impact on her life. People treated her differently because of it. Some blamed her openly for his behavior, while others who had been friends before his arrest avoided her all together after it.      
    Feeling winded already, Anne broke off the morning cleaning early and plopped herself down in a kitchen chair to rest. She suffered from a variety of medical conditions, but what had been bothering her most recently was her right hip. She had a replacement put in over ten years ago, but it was apparently beginning to falter and the pain was becoming unbearable. She had taken a leave of absence from her job as an in-home nurse for a hospice care company and had been seeing her physician regularly, discussing the prospects of yet another hip replacement surgery. Despite the gradually intensifying pain, she still took the bus wherever she wanted to go most of the time, which required a three block walk