A/N: Ready for some MORE answers?
My heart was beating rapidly. I was finally about to have the answers to my questions. But Seeley took his time. He didn't seem to know where to begin, much like Christine had been when she had told her versions of the events. I watched him take a deep breath before he started.
"I guess it all began when we adopted Jackson. I assume you know about my son, right?"
I nodded.
"Yes, I do. I know about his parents dying in a fire but what I don't know is how he came to live with you."
"It happened in a weird way, actually. After the fire was put out, the bodies of his parents were pulled out of the house. We knew that they also had a baby. We searched through the wreckage for hours but we couldn't find him. Bones was wrapping up the bodies when we heard a cry coming from the backyard. We found him hidden behind a shed. We have no idea how he got out there. He didn't have any burns on him, only a few scratches and dirt.
Bones and I were registered as a foster family so we took him in while the social services looked for living relatives. A couple of weeks later, they still hadn't found any. His parents were from another state. His mother's parents had died before Jackson was born and she had no siblings. As for the father, this remained a mystery. They never found any relatives. In the end, Bones and I filed for adoption. We loved that boy so much! Especially Bones. She got really attached to that boy! It took about a year before he was officially ours."
I smiled.
"It's a very sweet story."
Booth nodded.
"It was at first! Jackson really livened up the house. Christine was a happy child full of joy, but Jackson was something else. He was active, always climbing up things he wasn't supposed to. He was the running-around-the-house-naked type of baby. It drove Bones crazy!"
A warm smile grew on his face as he remembered his past. I wondered where such a perfect story had gone wrong.
"One day, we started receiving letters. The letters were typed and stated that Jackson had been wrongly given away for adoption and that we should bring him back to the social services so he could be reunited with his real parents. The letters didn't seem very legit. They had no signatures and no logos or return addresses to know where they had come from. We received three or four like that within the course of two months before they stopped. A couple of months passed and nothing else happened. Eventually, we forgot about them.
One day, Bones came home saying she thought she was being followed. Bones wasn't the paranoid kind, so I believed her right away. We began to be more aware of our surroundings when we went out, especially when Jackson was with us. We didn't see anything out of the ordinary. One summer, Bones and I took a whole month off to be with our children. We went out to different places. Bones was in her photographing phase and wanted all of our outings to be "documented", as she put it. So, Max became our non-official photographer. That's when we began noticing the same man in some of our pictures.
As the weeks passed, he kept appearing in some of them. He was always in the background. Eventually, he began to come closer. He would be standing in line behind us at the grocery store, at the amusement park, at a restaurant… Wherever we want, there he was."
"Why didn't you report it?"
"We did. Well, Bones did. I knew the police would say there was nothing we could do about it. The man was always polite. He would only smile and say hi, nothing more. Eventually, he stopped following us. We didn't see him for a couple of weeks. Then, one day, we saw him again. This time, he was braver and talked to us. He told us we made a beautiful family and even offered to take a picture of us."
I thought of the only pictures that didn't include the mysterious man in it. I shivered at the thought the man had probably harmed them later on.
"Is that when you asked Max to give you the fake IDs?"
"No. The next time I saw him, I told him to stop following us or I would call the police. He simply laughed and we didn't see him again for a month or two. We thought life would finally be back to normal. Then, he showed up at our door. He told me Jackson was his son and that he wanted him back. I told him to leave. He came back several times, asking to meet Jackson. Every time we refused. One day, he shoved Bones aside and came in. I pushed him back out and locked the door."
He paused for a few seconds.
"I'm sorry this is taking so long."
I told him not to worry about it. He continued.
"One night, our alarm system went off. We heard footsteps in the house. I took out my gun. When I stepped out of my room, I saw him standing in front of Jackson's door. He sprinted past me and ran out of the house. I followed him for a few blocks before I lost sight of him. It was dark; he turned a corner and he was out of sight! That's when I realized I needed to do something to protect my family. I filed a report and told the police about the break-in. They treated this as an abduction attempt. But they never found him.
That's when I decided to get the fake IDs. Bones was getting worried about the children's safety. She wanted to make sure we had a getaway plan in case something happened. We knew he would strike again. He wanted Jackson with a passion. He was convinced that he was his father."
"When did the break-in happen?"
"About five months before we left."
"Did you see him after that?"
Seeley shook his head.
"Not until the night we left."
I gulped. This was it!
"What made you leave that night? Did something happen that caused you leave your house?"
Seeley paused.
"Yes. The man, he… walked in Jackson's daycare that day. He said we had sent him to pick Jackson up and bring him home. The worker called me and asked to confirm that it was okay. I told her that I hadn't sent anyone to pick him up. She stayed on the phone with me until Jones left. He just apologized for the disturbance, said that he probably got the daycare address wrong, and left."
"Did she call the police?"
Seeley shook his head.
The more he spoke, the angrier I got. The case seemed like an open-and-shut case and yet, here we were more than a decade later, with the victim in jail and an abductor on the loose. I wasn't sure why the police hadn't picked up on all of that information. Were the daycare workers even questioned after the couple disappeared? Or had the worker simply not given any thought to the strange man that had walked in the daycare earlier that day?
"I left work early, picked up Jackson at daycare and Christine from school and went home. We didn't leave the house. I locked the door, charged my gun, and waited for Bones to come home. When she came in, I told her what happened. She said we had to leave town for a little while. Everything had been packed for months, just in case. That's when we realized Christine was listening to us. I told her to get her brother and that we were going on a little trip."
I nodded.
"I already spoke to Christine. I know her version of what happened next."
"You spoke to her?" Seeley asked.
"Yes."
"Does she know I'm alive?"
I shook my head.
"No. I haven't told them yet."
"Them?"
"Jackson, Christine, and Parker. They don't know I found you."
He didn't say anything to that. Instead, he continued his tale.
"Then you must know about the days we spent on the road."
I nodded.
"Yes, Christine told me about hiding in the park and living in motel rooms for a while. She wasn't sure what was going on, only that a man seemed to be following you. She was afraid of him because he was always yelling and sounded angry."
"Yeah, well, he was."
"What's the man's name?"
"Thomas Jones."
"Do you know where he is?"
Booth nodded. The soft expression I had seen on his face when he spoke of his children was long gone and had been replaced by anger.
"Yeah. Buried somewhere."
This information surprised me. Deep down, I had thought the pictures had been sent by the mystery man as a way of telling the Booth children he knew they were still alive. However, this theory was no longer valid.
"What happened to him?"
"I killed him."
"How come?"
Booth clenched his fist.
"He killed my wife."
I am so... SO sorry! :-( Please don't be mad!