The recommended healthy sleep schedule for an adult is seven hours. It’s recommended by doctors and other medical professionals all over the world that sleep is something the human body needs. And not unlike other medical advice, like drinking pots and pots of coffee a day isn’t good for you, Caroline assumed the stats didn’t include women with their own death hanging over their head like some type of dark and f***ed up mistletoe. “A kiss of death”, it wasn’t funny but it forced a laugh out of the sleep deprived woman as she found herself in Abel’s office in the middle of the night, staring at stacks of files and evidence gathered by her husband and the countless security members on their payroll.
There was something about the whole case that Caroline couldn’t stop thinking about. It wasn’t just a case, she was even an investigator, this was her life. So, the question that plagued her, it was heavy and felt like a noose around her neck. She felt like she was on her tippy toes on a chair and she had to figure out a way down before the chair slipped, and she found herself hanging from the ceiling, dying while trying to remind her husband how much she loved him. The question? Why?
Caroline had tried to rewire the way she thought about the whole thing, she tried to look at it from a different perspective, and instead of trying to just simply figure out how to catch the man, she had to figure out why. She stared at all the incidents, Abel had organized everything that had happened to her at the hands of the man, and all the details. It wasn’t until she started digging through everything at once that she figured there must be a pattern.
She rushed from her husband's office to her own, grabbing supplies that she’d need and stopping by the kitchen for a nice large cup of espresso. She needed it to keep her sharp. Just because she couldn’t fall asleep didn’t mean the exhaustion didn’t hit, so she’d need extra caffeine if she was going to single handedly solve a case and save her own life, it was big shoes to fill and Caroline was up for the challenge. It was like if she was working on it, she could escape the guilt and fear she felt, she could feel useful instead of a burden. She felt like everyone around her was in danger, and she simply couldn’t let that happen.
She was back in Abel’s office, it was strange being in there without him, but he had all the evidence and she knew better than to take the files and risk ruining all the small bits of information that he’d worked so hard to find. She brought back various colors of gel pens, thread, a corkboard that she used for vision boards when she’s creating a new collection and tons of thumb tacks. She pulled her hair up and off her neck, securing it with a pink and purple gel pen on top of her head. She had her glasses perched on her nose, and she was ready.
She started by creating a timeline, she used the photos and sticky notes to mark the date and what happened all the way up until the last incident which was the gift of cemetery plots in her and his name. She took a step back and stared at the whole thing as a whole, a cup of coffee pressed to her lips as she tried to find some tiny detail to connect the events. Maybe, if she could connect the events back to him, she could find enough evidence to put him behind bars.
She’d been there for hours, it felt like, staring at the board, and realizing just how many times that man had come so close to killing her, but didn’t. What was the end goal? That was something that she needed to figure out. She started looking at it differently, instead of looking at the actual incidents, she started looking at the dates and time. She started dissecting every little piece of information, and it started to form a pattern. She only received gifts on 15th of any month, they always showed up on the fifteenth. Now, it wasn’t that she always opened them on that day, but the postmark or the day the box was recorded to have shown up either at home or at her office, it was always the 15th. And the only time he pulled large stunts in which he was in close proximity to Caroline was always at least 30 days from the last gift, which was just double 15. What was the significance of the number 15?
It didn’t stop there, and of course, neither did Caroline. She noticed that the first gift she ever received was in 2015, it was when she was 19 years old and she had just assumed it was the beginning of fan mail, she didn’t think it had anything malicious attached to it, but she was incredibly wrong. She started highlighting every 15 she could find, from the number of words in a letter, to the number of mannequins that were destroyed in her office, and the amount of leaked photos from their wedding. It was all fifteen. Her eyes wide and stressed, she stared down the board as she tried to figure out where it started. She googled the event that she’d met him at, or the one she’d assumed that she’d remembered when she was drugged, it also occurred on the 15th.
She started looking at herself, she started wondering where the pattern connected her life to his. She wondered where it started so that she could perhaps find an ending that didn’t leave her dead and her husband to plan a funeral for the love of his life. She felt like ever since he laid his hands on her months ago that she’d been gasping for air ever since, she felt like she was holding her breath and he liked it. She felt disgusted and watched, she felt like a woman on display and weaker than ever with the fact he held the key to the door, and she wanted out.
She was mad, she figured the stress and the weight of the situation had caused her to not be able to get pregnant, and the emotional damage that he’d caused for both her and her husband was probably never to be healed. “Where was I at 15?” she said, flipping through stacks of paper, and realizing that it probably wouldn’t be there since there was little information about herself out there before she was adopted by her dad. She’d just opened Abel’s macbook to google when the door opened and a very sleepy and concerned husband walked through, “Hi babe.” she said casually, as she googled Caroline Tipton Louisanna 2011, and that’s when she found it.
“Babe, look.” she said, her eyes wild with lack of sleep, anxiety and some type of weird joy that she perhaps might have solved a tiny piece of the puzzle. With a large gulp of coffee before she started speaking, “Look, it’s the last pageant I ever did with my birth father, Miss Teen Lousianna, and look, it was on the 15th, and I was 15, it was even held on 15th street.” she said, spinning around in the chair and feeling much like the godfather in Abel’s office, and not standing but pulling the pen out of her hair and letting it fall to use it as a makeshift pointer. “The number is in every single time he’s done anything, look, babe, look.” she said pointing at each and every one, a little proud of herself and a lot exhausted.
Caroline didn’t know what any of this meant, but what she did know was that she was closer than ever and she would continue fighting rather with her hands or mind until one of them died, and she was determined it wouldn’t be her. Caroline was a fighter, she’d been fighting her whole life to stay afloat, and now that she was happy, loved, and cared for? She wasn’t giving it up, like the song in their wedding, she wanted to grow old with Abel, she just had to find the last piece of the puzzle.
