by Willow Rose
“Oh, you were a great help,” detective Fisher says with a smile. “A great help.”
Chapter Seventy-Three
April 2016
I park the car in front of Joey’s townhouse and walk up to the entrance. The light is on inside and I hear voices. I take a few deep breaths to calm myself down a little.
I have spent the entire day with Chloe and Danny, trying to figure out who this Boxer is. Well, it was mostly Chloe who did the work from what she could get out of Tara’s iPad. But so far, we still have no idea who this guy is. Only that he has chatted with both girls in chatrooms of several games and social media sites. Chloe went into the police file and found all the info they had extracted so far from Paige’s computer and now we hope that she can use that to track this guy down.
Meanwhile, I have no idea how she does any of it, so I have been drinking coffee and talking to Danny and Chloe’s mother, Carolyn, who I always try to chat with whenever she’s awake and I am visiting their house. I think it helped Danny too to take his thoughts away a little. Carolyn was in a wonderful mood for once and told us amazing stories from her youth.
When we were about to leave, she said something I still can’t get out of my mind. She is an old, very sick woman, but there was something about the way she said it. Like it was urgent.
“He misses them,” she said. “That’s why he keeps looking for them. Over and over again.”
What on earth could she be talking about?
I shake my head, then raise my hand and knock on the door. I have Snowflake with me, since he misses Bonnie and Clyde so much, well mostly Bonnie, I think. He can smell the pig on the other side of the door and goes crazy. I can barely hold him.
The door opens and Salter looks at me. “Mom? What are you doing here?”
When Snowflake sees Bonnie, he pulls so hard on the leash I let it go and he storms inside. “What happened to, ‘Hi, Mom, so good to see you, Mom; I missed you, Mom?’ I’m here to pick you up,” I say. “Remember?”
He looks like he doesn’t understand. I continue:
“It’s Tuesday. You’re supposed to be with me from Wednesday till Sunday evening this week.”
“I…I…we didn’t think that was until tomorrow?” Salter says.
“Who is it?” Joey appears in the doorway. “Mary? What are you doing here?”
I hear loud voices coming from the living room and look in to see a couple of familiar faces. Joey’s parents’ faces to be exact. Both of them engaged in what looks like delightful chat with Jackie.
“You’re introducing her to your parents now? That’s nice,” I say.
“Mary…”
“No. No. It’s okay. It’s your life. Even though things are moving a little too fast for me, it doesn’t have to affect you in any way. I’ll keep my mouth shut now. Are you ready to go, sweetie?”
“But, Mo-om, Grandpa and Granny are here.”
“Come on. It’s my turn to have you now. I’ve missed you so much and I’m not leaving here without you.”
“Go get your stuff, buddy,” Joey says, placing a weighty hand on his shoulder.
Salter leaves, shoulders slumped.
“I’m sorry about that,” Joey says. “I didn’t keep an eye on what day it was. And I’m sorry about…that,” he nods in the direction of his parents. “I just figured, since she has moved in, they might as well meet.”
“Right.” I feel very uncomfortable and hope Salter is hurrying up. I don’t want to say anything I’ll later regret.
Salter finally comes out wearing his new clothes that Jackie bought for him. He looks ridiculous. Who buys a leather jacket for a ten-year-old? A ten-year-old in Florida? And those shoes? What the heck are those? They blink every time he walks, constantly changing colors.
His teacher called me earlier to tell me he can’t wear those to school anymore, since they disturb the other students. At first, I thought she was overreacting a little, but now I understand. What’s worse is, I am going to have to be the one to tell him and be the bad guy…again.
Chapter Seventy-Four
April 2016
“Mommy?”
Paige Stover tries to open her eyes, but her eyelids feel so heavy. She blinks several times before she succeeds in waking up and looking around. Her mommy is not there. She is not in the dog crate anymore in that awful man’s house. But where is she now?
“Mommy?” she repeats and sits up. She is on a bed in a small room with nothing but the bed and a dresser. There is a window, but the curtains are pulled.
Paige gets up and walks towards the window, feeling slightly dizzy. She pulls the curtains and looks out. Water as far as the eye can see. And she is up high. Not in a condominium, but like the third floor of what looks like a house. A big house. A mansion. Below her, she can see a tennis court, a basketball court, and a lap-pool. It’s all surrounded by lots and lots of palm trees. The water is not the ocean, she knows that much. She can see land on the other side and a bridge far away. It must be the Intracoastal waters, or the river, as most people call it. It all looks very familiar to her.
Paige grabs the sliding door and tries to open it, but she can’t. It’s locked. She looks for a way to open it, but can’t find it.
“You’ll need a key,” a voice says behind her.
She gasps and turns. The face looking back at her smiles. “Hello, Paige.”
“Who are you?”
“Well, who am I? I’m your new best friend; that’s who I am.”
“I’m not allowed to talk to strangers,” she says. “I want my mommy. Where is she?”
The man sits on the bed. He sighs. “I’ll tell you something. I wanted your mom to be here too. But they tell me she couldn’t make it. Not this time. Something happened to her.”
Paige starts to shake. She fights her tears. “What do you mean something happened to her?”
“Well, last thing I heard was that she was run over by a car.”
Paige stares at the man. She had thought it was all a lie. While lying in the crate, she had been certain that Boxer had only told her it to make her go with him. She didn’t think it was the truth.
“I want to go to the hospital and see her,” she says.
The man shakes his head. “Now, I can’t let you do that,” he says. “But we can do something else.”
“What?”
“How about we play a game?”
“I don’t want to play a game. I want to see my mommy!” she yells.
The man gets up from the bed, walks to her, then slaps her across the face. It burns like crazy on her cheek. But it makes her stop crying. She stares at him, baffled, her cheek red and burning.
“There’ll be no crying, do you hear me? No crying, no screaming, no trying to run away. You can’t get out of here. All the doors are locked and I am the only one who can open them, so you might as well not try. I’ll spare you the trouble right away. So you can’t run, all right? But you can do something else. Something a lot more FUN.”
“W-w-what’s that?” she asks, still startled by the slap. She is terrified the man might hurt her again and her voice is shaking.
He leans over and whispers in her face, spitting slightly as he speaks. “You can HIDE!”
Chapter Seventy-Five
April 2016
Salter is hardly speaking to me. The next morning, I send him off to school by bus. His dad lets him bike to school, but I feel more safe with him going by bus. I don’t feel like he is safe on that bike, and especially these days with the disappearance of Paige Stover, I am not comfortable with him biking to school.
I explain it to him, but he just gets mad at me. Again, I am the bad guy and he is angry at me all morning.
I feel awful as I take care of my dad. He tries to cheer me up by moving his toes that he is now capable of moving back and forth. It does cheer me up a little, and I can’t help smiling when Jack, his physical therapist, arrives.
“He’s doing so well,” Jack says. “The video you ma
de in the middle of the night helped him believe that he can actually move his feet, that he can regain mobility in his feet and legs again. You have no idea how much hope means for a patient like your father.”
“Thank you,” I say, feeling slightly overwhelmed with emotion.
He smiles. “Just thought you should know.”
I leave my dad in Jack’s hands and grab my bike to go to Chloe’s house. She’s in the kitchen as I knock and walk in.
“Coffee?” she asks.
I nod and she pours me a cup. I sip it and look at her. She looks awful. Her hair is a mess, her clothes the same as yesterday. “You been up all night?”
“Yup.”
“Anything new?”
She nods. I feel relieved.
“I have a lot for you to look at, come.”
I follow her to the back of the house where all her computers are lined up. It’s dark and cold in there. I pull out a chair and sit next to her, my cup between my hands.
“Look at this,” she says and hands me a stack of papers she has printed.
I flip through them. First is a case file for the missing persons report for Paige Stover. There are interviews with all the people who have daily contact with her, like her teacher at school, her basketball coach, her swim teacher, and her math tutor. “What am I looking for?”
“Look at the last page. A statement they took yesterday,” she says, turning her chair to face me.
I find the last statement and look through it. “What the heck?” I exclaim, after reading a few lines of this guy’s testimony. “He says he saw Danny talking to Paige at the rally? That he grabbed her arm and they left together? That’s ridiculous. Danny wasn’t even at the rally!”
Chloe nods. “Exactly, but the police are all over this. Your friend Fisher is determined Danny is the guy they’re looking for.”
“He is not my friend,” I complain. “I just tried to help him with the case. I thought he took me seriously, but he’s just interested in busting Danny.”
“And now they have the eye-witness to back up their theory,” she says.
“Who is this guy anyway?” I ask and look at the head of the file to see his name. “Joseph Barrow?”
“According to this, he’s Paige’s basketball coach, Coach Joe,” Chloe says. “But check this out. It gets a lot better.”
Chloe puts a stack of papers in front of me. “These are all the case files from the missing mothers and their daughters. I have pulled all of the missing persons reports. I went through all of them and this is what I found.” Chloe leans over and points at the first report, Kim and Casey Taylor’s file. She rests her finger on a name in the heading. “Look who showed up as an eyewitness? Stating he saw them at the mall right before they disappeared?”
Chapter Seventy-Six
April 1975
“I’m scared, Danh.”
Long looks at him with her big moist eyes. Bao is sleeping, his breath uneven and weak.
“Me too,” Danh says.
“You think he’ll die?”
“Stop saying that. Stop! Now, go to sleep!”
Danh looks around while his sister does as she is told. Three men are watching them, big grins on their faces, machine guns over their shoulders. Danh hasn’t slept in two days; he has been watching over his brother and sister night and day, especially keeping an eye on the men on the ship who look at his sister in a way that terrifies him.
He has been begging them for medicine and food for days, but all they’ve given them is water and very little of it. It’s not enough, and Danh is on the verge of breaking down. He is so hungry he can’t even feel it anymore and so thirsty he hallucinates, seeing his dear mother coming towards him. She looks angry. Is she angry with him?
I am sorry. I failed you, Mother. I miss you so much. I don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t save him. I can’t save Bao.
“I can help you,” a voice says.
Danh opens his eyes. The sun is burning his face. The silhouette of the man standing in front of him is moving closer.
“What?”
“I have medicine,” he says and kneels in front of him. Danh can now see his face properly. It’s the guy wearing the captain’s necklace around his neck. Danh gasps.
“I have medicine for your brother,” the man says.
Danh sits up straight. Is this true? “You have medicine?”
The man nods. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something in his closed fist. He shows it to Danh. A small bottle with the word penicillin on it, curled up in the palm of his hand. Danh looks at it with a small whimper. He knows what this is. He remembers having seen it once before, when one of his brothers was very sick. The doctor came to their house carrying a bottle just like this.
So many sleepless nights, he has been hoping and praying for medicine for Bao. But they told him there was no more onboard the ship. Long got it all, they said.
Danh reaches out to grab the bottle, but the man closes his fist and pulls it back. He is grinning from ear to ear.
“No.”
“No?”
“We make a deal.”
“What do you want? I’ll give you anything, but I don’t have much. I don’t have anything of value.”
The man nods. “Yes, you do.” As he speaks, his eyes fall on the sleeping Long next to Danh.
Terrified, Danh shakes his head. “No. No. NO.”
The man rises to his feet. The medicine disappears into his pocket again. “As you wish.”
He turns and walks away. Danh grabs Long and pulls her closer. He holds her in his arms till she wakes up.
“I heard what the man said,” she says, when she opens her eyes.
“What do you mean? Don’t talk nonsense,” Danh says.
“I want to do it,” she says.
“NO! Never!”
“Bao saved my life when we were on that other boat. He refused to let them throw me overboard. Both you and he chose to get into that small boat for me. I owe him, Danh. I can do this.”
Chapter Seventy-Seven
April 2016
I stare at the name on the file. “Joseph Barrow, Joseph Barrow…who are you?”
Chloe is on the computer when Danny knocks on the door and pokes his head in.
“Hello? Anyone home?”
“In the back!” Chloe yells.
“What’s up?” I ask as he comes inside. He has already helped himself to a coffee in the kitchen. He looks so tired and I am guessing he hasn’t slept all night.
“The police called. They want me down for more questioning.”
Chloe turns her chair to look at him. “I might have an idea why,” she says, and shows him the file. “This guy walked in yesterday and told them he saw you with Paige Stover on the day she disappeared. He says you and she left the rally together.”
Danny almost drops his cup out of his hand. “What? But I wasn’t even there. I told them I wasn’t.”
“I’m guessing they aren’t going to believe you after this,” I say.
“Who is he?”
“His name is Joseph Barrow,” I say.
“Joe?” Danny asks.
“You know him?”
“Well, of course I do. He’s one of the coaches at the rec center. I’ve known him for years. I helped him get the job; I recommended him because he didn’t have anything else when he was fired from Disney two years ago. I’ve known him since we were in the army together. We were deployed together in Afghanistan in ‘04. His brother was with us too. Terrible thing. A kid with explosives blew him up. Joe had her, could have shot her, but he hesitated and the kid exploded herself and took Joe’s brother. Joe was never himself again after that.”
“His brother? But it states here that he was at the rally with his brother. That’s what he told them,” I say.
“Yeah, he would say that. Joe went kind of cuckoo after what happened. Kept talking about his brother like he was still alive. Kept claiming he was with him everywhere. It was awful. He
refused to realize his brother was gone. Hard to understand why he was so attached to him, though. The brother was a heavy drinker and gambler who cheated Joe out of a lot of money, always had him pay off his debts. As far as I know, all Joe has left is his mother who is dying from cancer.”
Danny hesitates. He looks like he just remembered something. “Wait a minute.”
“What?” I ask.
He looks at me. “Boxer? That’s the name of the guy who we believe chatted with both Paige Stover and Tara, right?”
“Right,” Chloe says.
“Oh, my God. It’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of it sooner?”
“What?” I ask.
“Joseph Barrow is his name.”
He looks at us like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. I have no idea where he is going. I look at Chloe, who doesn’t seem to have a clue either.
“Joseph Barrow,” he repeats. “As in Joseph Louis Barrow, as in Joe Louis.” He looks at us again. “Ah, come on, get there faster!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about?” I say.
“The boxer. The famous boxer, Joe Louis. He shares his name with him. I should have seen this from the start when Chloe told us about The Boxer.”
Chloe looks at me, then at Danny. Danny looks like he isn’t really sure he understands this properly yet, like he is still piecing things together in his mind.
“Oh, my God, Joe has taken Paige? And Tara?” he says. “But…he was just there the other day…helping us…you remember him,” he says, addressed to me, “you held his hand when we searched for her at the school.”
My heart stops. Literally. The very thought makes me sick to my stomach. “That was him?”
“Yes. I can’t believe it. He was right there all the time. We’ve got to tell someone. We’ve got to tell the police.”
“Who is going to believe us?” I ask.
Danny sinks into a chair. “You’re right. Fisher knows all of us. Even if you do it, he’ll think you’re just protecting me.”
