4

Breaking the news to Ed's side of the family was not easy. Renée completely broke down; Charlie was badly shaken too. Who wouldn't be - Edward's their only son. But being the ex-sheriff, Charlie handled it better. So he was there for Renée. Alice was at first too shocked to show any reaction. But then she broke down too. She cried quietly, unlike her mother, with her arms around her husband Jasper, the war-hardened ex-Marine. He'd been to Iraq twice. The scars from then are still clearly visible. They make him look frightening. But this blond man is one of the most compassionate and gentle people I've ever known. The fact that he was no stranger to loss showed in the way he held Alice and comforted her.

No one said anything about my dry eyes. They knew I loved Edward dearly; but they also understood that I had a different way of mourning. Yeah, I had cried when Mum died, but this is so much different from that. I need to feel something to cry, and when mum died I felt grief; so I cried. But now, I feel nothing; just… numb.

Both Alice and Renée volunteered to stay with me. But I managed to fend off Renée's proposal. While Renée was a great person, she'd just lost her son. She needed taking care of and I'm not sure I was the right person to do that. Evidently Charlie thought so too because he fought against his wife's suggestion with as much force as I did. But I couldn't sway Alice. She said she would and did stay with me. Jasper didn't mind, instead he encouraged Alice. She stayed with me for 17 days after which I literally pushed her out the door. She still spends most of her time at our house, but at least now she's living in her own home again.

It's been 3 weeks since that horrible night. Throughout this time I'd spoken to Jacob at least a hundred times, each day. I was on the phone with him practically every minute that they searched the wooded parts of the ditch. So far, they had found nothing, not even a scrap of cloth. I'd watched enough CSI to understand how things were being done. 10 days after the accident, I was asked to go down to the station and identify the things from the car as Edward's. I refused to leave the house and nothing anyone said changed my mind. Finally Officer Uley brought photographs of all the things for me to see and I identified it all to be my husband's. That was on the 14th day.

Yesterday, Jacob came over and told me that DNA tests had confirmed the blood on the driver's seat to be Edward's.

"So now we know that he was, at least, terribly injured when the seat-belt snapped and he broke through the windshield", Jacob said. He'd come back today to have another one of our, as we called it, "talks".

I'd made him swear to discuss every detail of the case with me dispassionately, as if this was just another case which was not even slightly related to us. Oddly enough, this angle was working remarkably well for both of us. Jasper called it our coping mechanism, Renée thought it was madness, Charlie agreed with Jasper and told her to leave us be, and Alice always made herself scares whenever Jacob and I sat down to talk. When I told her, Rose just thought for a while and said, "Whatever floats your boat, honey."

"But where did he fall?" I asked.

"That, right there, is the million dollar question!" was Jacob's declaration.

"People just don't get into accidents and disappear, Jacob."

"I know", he huffed out a breath; "it just doesn't make sense."

"None of it does. From the beginning to now, none of it does." I said, burying my head in my hands.

For the last hour, we'd been going over every detail that had been discovered in the last 14 days.

"So," I said for the umpteenth time, "according to you, judging by the damage done to each car, both cars would've had to have been going at a speed of well over 100 miles per hour to have collided…"

"Head on."

"…head on, to do that kind of damage to each other." I said.

"Which couldn't have been because according to the impound technician, the VW van had an engine so old and not-taken-care-of that it could hardly have reached a top speed of 60 miles per hour", Jacob said, lying straight on the living room sofa and covering his eyes with his right arm.

"Right. Meaning the Volvo had to have been going at around 200 miles per hour, which is impossible because that 2008 Volvo C30 T5 has a top speed of 134 miles per hour" I said. I'd learned that from Edward shortly after he had bought the car.

"Either or, it's impossible because from Seattle to where we found the cars, within that distance, at least one highway patrol car would have called in an incident of speeding and the last such recorded incident on that day was a black Audi A8 at about 11:30 AM." Jacob was now sitting up straight, again.

"Yes. Plus the only way for the cars to have fallen into the ditch was if they had tried to swerve away from each other to avoid collision. But the smashed up fronts of both cars clearly show that that's not the case. And you say there are no trees within 15 feet of where you found the cars."

"That's right. So the cars must've had a full frontal collision. Then, how'd they fall into the ditch?" Jacob said looking just as baffled as he had a week ago when we first started "talking".

"More importantly how did both cars end up on the same side of the road? Cars in such situations swerve away from each other, not towards definite doom, especially in the same direction. There should have been one car on each side of the road, facing opposite directions, not one car on top of the other like a pile-up!" I exclaimed with vehemence.

"I know. God, ugh…" was all Jacob could manage for a while.

And then…

"And where the hell is Edward?" we roared simultaneously.

Author's Note: I am soooooooooooooo SORRY for the delay. it's been a CRAZY couple of days. But things are quite sorted out now. I'll try to upload the next chapter soon. LOVE you all for reading my stuff. Please read and review. And again SO SORRY!