Thousands (Dollar 4)

I kept reading.

The case for Tasmin Blythe’s whereabouts is still on-going. Due to her own impatience in this matter, Sonya Blythe admitted in her confession that she felt let down by the police and took justice into her own hands.

Oh, my God.

My hands shook as I read faster.

After two months of research, which she willingly handed over to authorities, Sonya Blythe uncovered the man responsible for her daughter’s kidnapping was a Mr. Keith Kewet. A man who had a reputation for under-aged girls and a flashy lifestyle that couldn’t be maintained by his regular city planning job. Instead of alerting the task force in charge of her daughter’s disappearance, Sonya Blythe took it upon herself to subdue and imprison Keith Kewet in order to extract answers.

I slapped a hand over my mouth.

Sonya Blythe kept Keith Kewet alive for four days using her own techniques to extract the truth. She used a lie detector test from her contacts at work and enlisted other unsatisfactory methods disclosed during her confession. During this time, she managed to gather the truth that he was the culprit for her daughter’s disappearance, where he had taken her, and recorded all interactions as evidence.

As part of the video log Sonya Blythe recorded, she said she would turn him over to authorities in the morning, and hopefully, the London police could find her daughter and bring her home.

How had she done this?

Why had she done this?

I didn’t think she cared about me…yet, she’d hunted down my killer. She’d found him. She’d done something the police hadn’t been able to do.

Unfortunately, later that evening, Keith Kewet managed to escape the apartment in which he was being imprisoned, and Sonya Blythe chased after him.

She struck him with a well-aimed bookend to the back of his head, and he fell down the apartment steps. Neighbours heard the commotion and man’s screams and left their homes to investigate. There are multiple reports that Sonya Blythe then bludgeoned Keith Kewet to death, all while cursing him for taking her daughter. Despite his breaking a leg when he fell down the stairs and being unable to run, she didn’t stop hitting him until he was dead.

My eyes glassed with tears.

She’d killed…for me.

Instead of turning herself in to authorities, Sonja Blythe grabbed her passport, gave the video-tape of his confession to a neighbour, and jumped on a plane to Germany where a sex trafficking ring called the QMB, Quarterly Market of Beauties, was supposedly where her daughter was sent to be sold.

A few hours after her crime was reported, Sonya Blythe’s passport was frozen, and German authorities tracked her down upon her arrival into Munich. She was expatriated to England and found guilty by her own admission and sentenced to seventeen years with no parole for the manslaughter of Keith Kewet.

Authorities, both English and German, did their best to track down the QMB but to no avail. Both the trafficking ring and Tasmin Blythe are still yet to be found.

Tears plopped onto the file, turning the paper translucent and the ink glowing with every hardship my mother endured.

How could I think so terribly of her?

How could I ever believe she didn’t love me?

She’d committed murder for me.

She threw away her life, her career, her future all because she couldn’t let me go.

My heart, that’d somehow retained some of its childish whimsy—even buried beneath the hate I’d had for her and the survival I’d armoured myself with—howled in despair.

Carlyn reached over and patted my fingers still tracing my mother’s photo. “It’s okay. At least we know where she is and that she’s alive.”

A tangled laugh fell from my lips. “Like mother, like daughter. She’s in prison, and I’m about to be.” I looked up. “Could we at least share a cell? Could I be sent to England to serve my sentence?”

She smiled in pity. “Your mother is in a maximum security for murderers. Your petty theft isn’t enough to make you join her.”

How strange that I was both relieved and disappointed.

Sniffing back my jumbled emotions, I said, “Thank you for finding her for me.” Looking once more at my mother’s mug-shot, I slid the file back to Carlyn even though I wanted nothing more than to keep it and break her out of jail. “What will happen next? Am I officially under arrest? Seeing as I have no home or mother to go back to, I suppose I’d better start planning my future.”

Carlyn gave me a crooked smile as she slipped the paperwork neatly into a folder beside her.

And just like that, my mother was gone again.

The moment I was free and back in England, I would visit her. I would hold her hands and kiss her cheeks and thank her on my knees for doing her best to find me. I would beg her forgiveness for the awful, awful things I’d thought about her. And I would wait until she’d served her time and then find us somewhere to live, just us…together and far away from the life that had been so cruel in splitting our family apart.