Waiting for him?
He hated to call the police and have it be a false alarm. But he also didn’t want to end up with a bullet in his chest because he walked in on a burglary in progress.
Unlike private investigators on TV, Zachary didn’t carry a gun. He didn’t even own one. With his history of depression and self-harm, it had always been too big a risk.
Zachary eased his phone out of his pocket, moving very slowly, trying to be completely silent. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got it out. If he called emergency, he would have to talk to them to let them know what was going on. They wouldn’t be able to triangulate his signal to a single apartment.
Just as he looked down at the screen and moved his thumb over the unlock button, it gave a loud squeal and an alert popped up on the screen. Zachary jumped so badly that it flew out of his hand, and he scrambled to catch it before it hit the floor. He wasn’t well-coordinated, and he just ended up hitting it in the air and shooting it farther away from him, to smack into the wall and then land on the floor.
3
He froze. His brain seized up.
He didn’t know whether to turn around and run out the door or stay where he was and hope that the burglar hadn’t heard him. He could dart across the room and pick up the phone. If he didn’t, he had no way to communicate with the outside world and with the police in particular.
He could hear footsteps crossing the bedroom, turning into the hallway and coming toward him.
He swore under his breath, still not sure of the best course of action, then finally staggered across the room like a drunken penguin and snatched up the phone.
The alert was still showing on his screen—a message from Rhys Salter. With the screen lock engaged, it wouldn’t show what the actual message was. He had been in too many situations where a suspect seeing his incoming messages could have been disastrous.
He wondered fleetingly what Rhys had said, and if it would be the last communication that ever passed between them. He spun around, trying to press his thumb over the unlock button.
How long would it be before the cops could get there?
Assuming he could even manage to call them.
The burglar strode out of the hallway.
4
Zachary nearly collapsed with relief.
The loose-limbed black teen looked at him and raised his eyebrows questioningly. He spread his hands out in a ‘what’s up?’ gesture.
Zachary fell back onto the couch, putting his hand over his pounding heart.
“You scared the heck out of me, Rhys! How did you get here?”
Rhys seemed unperturbed. He pointed at the broken doorframe. Then he indicated a student bus pass that hung around his neck.
“You could have told me you were coming over here. I thought you were some serial killer.”
Rhys raised his own phone and turned his phone screen toward Zachary.
Zachary couldn’t see what was on Rhys’s screen from that distance, but he looked down at his own phone. Rhys had messaged him. He finally managed to unlock it and tapped on the notification to bring up the message that Rhys had sent to him.
An animated gif of Charlie Brown knocking on the roof of Snoopy’s dog house. Rhys’s way of letting Zachary know that he was there at his apartment.
Zachary shook his head. “Sheesh. You gave me a turn. Come sit down.”
Rhys complied, sitting in the easy chair. He pointed again to the broken door and lifted his eyebrows.
“I had… well, it’s a long story. The police broke in.”
Rhys gave a short laugh.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Zachary told him. “I mean, they weren’t breaking in because of something I did. There was a guy here… a murderer, and he was… well…” Zachary shrugged helplessly. “He was going to kill me.”
Rhys settled back in the chair, folding his arms and giving a little lift of his chin. Oh, is that all.
Zachary chuckled. “I was glad the police came. I didn’t even care that they broke the door. Except that I couldn’t stay here last night.”
Rhys made a kissing noise. Zachary’s face got hot. He tried to appear casual. “Yes, I stayed with Kenzie.”
Rhys nodded, his eyes dancing. Clearly worth it to have his door broken down if it meant Zachary got to spend the night at Kenzie’s. Zachary suspected Rhys had a crush on Kenzie. He never failed to ask about her.
Rhys leaned forward again. The amusement left his eyes. He tapped his phone screen, looking for something. Rhys had come to the apartment for a reason. He clearly hadn’t told Vera, his grandmother, that he was going to see Zachary, or she would have driven him rather than his taking the bus. If she approved of his going to Zachary’s, which she probably didn’t. She preferred for the two of them to meet at her house rather than anywhere they might be seen together. People might misunderstand their relationship.
Zachary moved down the couch, closer to Rhys, and leaned in. Rhys tapped a picture and turned the phone around for Zachary to see.
She was a pretty girl. A teen around Rhys’s age, cute, dark-haired, smiling at something off-screen. She didn’t look like she had been aware that her picture was being taken. There was no attempt to ham for the camera. Most of the phone pictures of teenagers Zachary saw posted on social media had them posing, making faces, or had some popular filter or photobooth alteration.
Zachary nodded. “Is this your girlfriend?” he asked, and then made the kissing sound that Rhys used to designate Kenzie.
Rhys shook his head, serious. His mouth turned down naturally. He always looked sad, and Zachary knew that, like he did, Rhys struggled with depression and his traumatic past. There had been too much violence in the Salter family, and it had left its mark on Rhys. He rarely spoke more than a word or two and, even when communicating using his phone, usually avoided even written language, falling back on memes and gifs that the recipient had to interpret.
“What is it?” Zachary asked.
Rhys looked at his phone again. He tapped and swiped to find another picture, then turned it to Zachary again.
This time, the girl was smiling at the camera, her lips bright red. She hung on the arm of a tall, blond boy. He was a little older than she was. Maybe still a teenager, maybe twenty. He wasn’t looking at her or the camera, but off to the side, eyebrows down like he was worried or suspicious about something.
“Is this her boyfriend?” Zachary asked, though he already knew the answer.
Rhys nodded. He turned the phone back around to look at the picture himself and, for a while, just sat there, quiet and unmoving, contemplating the picture.
“Did something happen to her?”
Rhys nodded. His dark eyes were full of sorrow. Zachary reached out and touched Rhys’s shoulder.
“What is it? What happened?”
Rhys made a ‘blowing up’ movement with his fingers, flicking them all outward. At the same time, he puffed up his cheeks and blew the air out in a ‘poof.’
Zachary searched Rhys’s face, wishing he could read the interpretation there. The gesture had not been violent, so he didn’t think it was an explosion. More like a puff of smoke. A magician. Now you see it, now you don’t.
Zachary considered, biting his lip. “She disappeared?” he asked finally.
Rhys pointed at Zachary, nodding.
“And the boy?”
Rhys continued to nod.
“You think he had something to do with her disappearance?”
Rhys’s eyes closed and he nodded again. Zachary could feel Rhys’s pain and anxiety over her disappearance like it was centered in his own chest.
“How long has she been missing?”
Rhys held up four fingers, then five, then made a wobbling motion with his hand. Four or five days, more or less. Long past the ‘I was just at a friend’s house’ period.
“Have you asked what happened to her? Do you know?”
Rhys’s lips pressed together into a thin line and h
e gave a slight head shake, brows drawn down. Zachary had broken a cardinal rule of their communication system. Never ask more than one question at a time.
“Sorry. Do you know what happened to her?”
Rhys shook his head slowly. The slowness of it and the tension in his expression told Zachary that he didn’t know for sure, but he had his ideas.
“Did you talk to her family?” He had to bite his tongue to keep from asking more follow-up questions. There was an urgency to their conversation. He wanted to move it along faster. But communications with Rhys could not be rushed.
Rhys shook his head.
“Have the police been called? Is she a missing person?”
Rhys gave a wide shrug.
Zachary was impatient, but he waited, analyzing their conversation and thinking about the pictures and about Rhys being there, waiting for him.
“You want me to look into it?”
Rhys smiled, nodding emphatically.
Zachary nodded and sat back, thinking about it. There was certainly no problem with his making some initial inquiries. Maybe her parents could tell him what had happened to her. Hopefully, there was an easy explanation for her disappearance. Maybe she had gone to visit a sick relative or her parents had put her into a better school. There were lots of reasons a teenager might be at school one day, and then not show up again.
“Okay, yeah. Can you give me her name and anything you have about her? Contact details?”
Rhys tapped away at his phone and, in a moment, Zachary had her name, phone number, and a couple of social network names in his messaging app.
Madison Miller.
“Got it. And can you send me those pictures?”
Rhys nodded and sent them over as well.
“Do you have others?”
Rhys was still. He considered the question. Zachary furrowed his brows.
“If you want me to find out about her, then I need whatever you’ve got.”
Rhys shook his head. He pushed his phone into his jeans pocket.
Zachary looked at him. “What’s going on here, Rhys? What aren’t you telling me?”
Rhys motioned to Zachary’s phone. He had the information he needed. But Zachary knew, going into it, that he didn’t have everything. Rhys was keeping something from him.
“Are you worried it would get her into trouble? With her parents or the police?”
Rhys shook his head. But his expression was still veiled. Zachary didn’t know if he were telling the truth. There was definitely something that he wasn’t prepared to reveal.
“Rhys… I understand that you’re trying to protect her. But you know… sometimes not knowing what I’m walking into can be hazardous. I don’t want to get hurt, and I don’t want anyone else to get hurt because of what I don’t know. You know that… I’ve had some dangerous cases lately.”
Rhys shook his head and drew a straight horizontal line with his hand.
“Nothing unsafe?” Zachary asked, to be sure of Rhys’s meaning. “I don’t need to worry about what I might be getting into here?”
Rhys gave a single nod and pointed at Zachary. His sign for ‘you got it.’
Zachary looked back down at Madison’s information and sighed. “I’ll do what I can,” he promised. “Now… we’d better get you home. Your grandma doesn’t know you’re here, does she?”
Rhys’s hand made a wobbly side-to-side shake. Well…
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. Ask me to come to your place next time. She doesn’t want you coming over here. If you call me, I’ll come.”
Rhys shrugged. Zachary was left wondering how much else he was trying to get away with behind Vera’s back. It wasn’t likely the first time that Rhys had hopped onto a bus and gone somewhere other than home or school.
5
Zachary believed that Rhys didn’t think he was getting Zachary involved in anything dangerous to himself or to Madison. Still, he had enough experience as a private investigator to know that Rhys could very well be wrong. He hadn’t given Rhys any particular timeline for the investigation. After he had dropped Rhys back at home, he went to a coffee shop and opened his computer to see what background he could find on Madison Miller.
Was she really missing? If she were, did anyone have any idea where she was? Was she just staying with friends somewhere, or had something happened to her? Vermont was not known as a high-crime area, but that didn’t mean they had escaped the seamy underworld. There was still plenty of violent crime, drug trafficking, and street life. Even postcard-perfect Vermont couldn’t escape that, as Zachary had personally experienced.
Madison Miller’s social networks seemed pretty clean. Only the occasional posting, mostly selfies or memes shared with friends.
At least, her social accounts that Rhys had known about.
Facial recognition searches led Zachary to several other user accounts that Rhys had not known about, and which were not quite so squeaky-clean. Zachary scrolled through several racier pictures of Madison and her boyfriend. Nothing X-rated. No nudes. But maybe not pictures she had wanted her parents or casual friends to see.
There was ample evidence Madison was drinking. Zachary wasn’t as sure about smoking or drug use. There were hints of it in Madison’s posts, but sometimes kids bragged about things like that when they never would have even considered using.
Going back through her history, it looked like Madison and the boyfriend had started showing up together about two months previously. While there was nothing overtly wrong in the new accounts, something about them rang alarm bells for Zachary. He couldn’t put his finger on anything specific. But something wasn’t right.
Maybe it was because Rhys seemed so young. He didn’t seem like the kind of kid who would be interested in the drug culture and had always denied any interest in having a girlfriend. Zachary didn’t want to believe that he or any of the kids his age were old enough to get themselves into that kind of trouble. Rhys was clearly not telling his grandmother about his concerns or about going to visit Zachary to ask him to investigate Madison’s disappearance.
How much else was going on that Vera wasn’t aware of? She hadn’t handled her daughters’ rebellion or mental illness well. She had denied everything for as long as she could.
Zachary made notes about Madison’s activities and user names as neatly as he could so he’d be able to read them when he went back over them later.
Zachary’s door was not fixed that night, so he spent another night with Kenzie—which really didn’t hurt his feelings at all. Not totally exhausted when he got there like he had been the previous night, he took a few minutes while Kenzie was making dinner to explore the house.
In addition to the master bedroom with the ensuite where Zachary had spent the night before, there was one room that appeared to be a cross between storage and a home office, and there was a third bedroom, neat as a pin, set up as a guest bedroom. Zachary glanced over it and shut the door quietly, grinning to himself. When he had called to ask Kenzie whether he could stay with her while his door was being fixed, she had denied having a guest room, using it as an excuse to invite him into her own bed. He was delighted to learn that it had been a lie. She could have put him up in the guest room as a friend, but had chosen not to. He didn’t need to feel like he was imposing himself on her. He was right where she wanted him to be.
Zachary returned to the living room and sat down on the couch with his computer, glancing into the kitchen to make sure that his absence hadn’t been noticed. Kenzie gave no sign that she realized he’d been anywhere but the bathroom.
“Do you need help with anything?” Zachary offered.
“Do you actually know how to cook?”
“Well… no. But I’m pretty good at putting plates on the table.”
Kenzie laughed. “Okay. Set the table.”
He got up and looked through the cupboards, working around her, to find the plates, glasses, and cutlery, which he laid out neatly on the table. He even grabbed a jug of juic
e from the fridge and put it on the table. Kenzie looked up from the bubbling pot of sauce on the stove.
“You actually know which side the fork goes on,” she observed in a surprised tone.
Zachary tried to restrain a smile. “I did remember some of the lessons my foster moms tried to drill into me.”
“Didn’t any of your foster families try to teach you to cook?”
Zachary shrugged. “That required a bit more sustained focus than setting the table. It never went very well.”
Kenzie nodded. “Well, it’s never too late to learn.”
Zachary looked down at the pots on the stove. “Pasta?” he guessed.
“Yes. And this is something that is certainly within your capabilities. It doesn’t take much to boil pasta and warm up some bottled sauce, if you don’t want to learn to make your own sauce.”
“On a good day,” Zachary said. “But you have to remember to take the pasta off before the pot boils dry.”
Kenzie raised her brows, chuckling. “Well, yes, that’s true.”
“It makes a terrible stink when it starts to burn.”
“Really. So you have tried.”
“Once or twice. I’m better at the frozen stuff you can just stick in the microwave.”
“As long as you remember to take it out,” Kenzie teased.
Zachary nodded. He had warmed up meals and then forgotten them in the microwave more times than he would like to admit. His meds tended to suppress his appetite, if not make him nauseated, so eating meals was more of a chore for him than a pleasure. Something that was easier to forget or not get around to.
A timer buzzed, and Kenzie took the lid off of the pot of pasta and tested it. “What do you think? Look good?”
Zachary nodded. “Looks fine to me.”
She shook her head. “I have a feeling you’d eat it whether it was over- or undercooked. What are you thinking about?”
Zachary realized he’d been staring off into middle distance, reviewing the information he had on Madison Miller. “Oh… just a new case. Maybe.”
She Told a Lie Page 2
