Hard to Find: A Tillgiven Romantic Mystery

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  “Get in.” I pulled the door open for Dani. Food had fortified me and brought me back to some kind of sense of control. “We can’t just ditch Si. He’s seventeen, and that’s the only reason they let me run after you two.”

  “Yeah. It’s good luck I ran into you. Now we can bring Si with us and he won’t get the wrong idea.”

  “Good.” I was more than pleased to hear her reasonable answer. “So text him and tell him to get out here. We’ll drive you two back to the school and then let the police find Drew.”

  Dani popped her door open. “Nope.”

  I gripped the steering wheel. “Let’s take it one step at a time. Just text Si and get him out here.”

  She shut the door again.

  I stared out the window while she messaged Si. I had a feeling she didn’t realize my job was on the line, and that I didn’t have anywhere to go should this fall through.

  “Shoot.” She bit her lip.

  “More details, please.”

  “He says the train is leaving in five minutes.”

  “Please say that’s a figure of speech.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not.”

  “Where does he think he’s going?”

  “South?”

  I gritted my teeth hard. I had prayed about this situation less than an hour ago, and if possible, it had only gotten worse. “Can you text him and ask him where he is going?”

  “Yeah, sure.” She typed on her phone, and I stared at the train station trying to remember the exact series of choices that had landed me here. Obviously, they had not been the right choices.

  “He said he’s headed somewhere ‘nice.’” She frowned. “I hate bad puns. That’s not even how you pronounce it. Why would he go to Nice?”

  I pulled the keys from the ignition. “I don’t care, let’s just grab him before he does.”

  It took more than five minutes to get to the train leaving for Nice, and Si had been correct in his first text. We saw the tail end of the train as we ran toward the terminal, breathless.

  I gripped my side, annoyed that I would be out of breath even though I’d been training hard with the soccer team. Coaching and playing just weren’t the same, I guessed. My phone rang, which annoyed me even more. “Yes?”

  “Where are you?” Stina’s cold, Swedish voice annoyed me.

  “In Calais, waving goodbye to the train.”

  “Oh, that is not good.”

  “Of course it’s not.”

  “You know the new director of the International Evangelical Bible School Association? El Jefe? He’s Si’s uncle, and he is making his first visit to our school in three days. He’s bringing his mother—Si’s grandma—with him. You have to get him back here.”

  I stared down the now-empty train track and tried to pretend she hadn’t said “three days.”

  “Isaac? Did you hear me? I’m covering for you with the Hoffens, and you don’t even want to know what I told them. But you have got to get that kid back home immediately.”

  “I think he went to Nice.”

  “Well, go there and get him. How hard can it be?” She sighed with impatience.

  “Of course. It’s perfectly simple. I’ll just beat his train there and pick him up at the station and turn around and come home. The whole thing won’t take more than thirty-six hours of straight driving with no sleep. Perfectly simple.” I didn’t try to hide my sarcasm and contempt. “Remind me again why I don’t turn around and come back right now?”

  “Because Si ran away while you were in charge, he is underage, and he left his insulin here.”

  “What?”

  She sighed again. I could understand perfectly why the most beautiful woman I had ever seen was still single at her age.

  “I spoke with Garret. He said Si took his blood test kit with him, but we have all his insulin here in the office. It’s just easier, in case he passes out or something. Megan Hoffen is a nurse in her real life.”

  “Of course. Of course. Because Si can’t just be the bratty nephew of the new director of the whole school system. He also has to be at high risk of dying and needed back in an almost impossible time frame.”

  “You can do it, Isaac. JoHanna from the kitchen is teaching for you. Don’t stress out, just hurry.”

  I hung up, because what else could I do? Then, Dani in tow, I found a train schedule and found the next train to Malmo, Sweden. “You’re going home.” I dragged her to the terminal. We had a bit of a wait for the train to show up.

  “I understand.” She looked at her feet and with a soft, apologetic voice said, “I see why I need to go back. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  I hadn’t explained the call because Stina could be heard loud and clear.

  “Good.” I couldn’t look at Dani right now. Not that I would run off to find her sister if I looked at her, but I had a feeling that she would win me over to something I would regret, if she was given half a chance to.

  “I’ll catch this train. But you should leave now if you want a head start. According to my phone, Nice is eleven hours from here on the A26.”

  I opened my EuroRail app and checked the trip from Calais to Nice.

  I looked from the empty train track to Dani.

  I swallowed.

  “The train only takes eight hours. How am I going to find him if he has a three-hour head start?”

  “You could take the train too…”

  “And leave the car here for who knows how long?” I could cut his head start down by more than an hour if I took the train, but the school car…while this was the best-paying Bible teaching job I had come across, it did not pay well enough to replace a car that I had technically stolen.

  Dani rubbed the toe of one shoe with the other. It was cute. “You know, Si has been sort of keeping in touch with me, texting and stuff. Maybe I should come with you after all.”

  If I walked now, I would still be three hours behind Si. If I waited here to bodily put Dani on this train, I’d be even farther behind.

  Dani looked up at me from underneath impossibly black eyelashes. Those big green eyes. She was still doing the cute thing with her feet. And she was planning on getting rid of me so she could go to Scotland and find her sister. So either I left now and was still too late to get Si, and Dani turned around and took a different train, or I put her on this train only for her to get off again and find a different train that went where she wanted to go, and I was even farther behind Si. Great options.

  “Yes. Right.” I turned and walked back to my car. She’d come with me because that was what she had been after all along. And I guessed we’d better hope her sister had gone to Nice. But even if she hadn’t, who cared? I treated her to silence, since the things I was thinking weren’t the kind of things I should say out loud.

  She didn’t seem to notice or care. “Ooh! New message from ‘Marissa’ to my sister. ‘Got your message. Will wear a carnation. See you at the anvil.’”

  “The anvil?”

  “Yay! I was right. They are absolutely going to Gretna.”

  I had managed to get her back to the Saab, where she was now seat buckled and locked in. I started the car. If the car was moving, she couldn’t get out. I could have her back at the school by dawn. If I didn’t have to go get Si, that was. One out of three didn’t seem too shabby.

  “We need to get tickets for the ferry. If she’s taking the Chunnel, and the train and stuff, we can beat her.”

  I gave her idea more of my silence.

  “Okay, I Google mapped it. We can get there in eight hours, if everything goes our way. The weather is perfect; I’ll buy the ferry passage. What’s eight hours in the whole scheme of things?”

  That would give me two out of three missing kids, and while I liked the idea, it was not the two students the school cared about. “But what about Si?”

  “What about him?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Stina is covering for me at the school so that I can nab Sioeli, the sickly underage runaway MK.”<
br />
  Dani chuckled. “He’s also El Jefe’s nephew, as he likes to remind the rest of us plebes.”

  “Exactly. And El Jefe and Si’s grandmother are coming to see him in two days. They expect him to be there.” All I knew for sure about this El Jefe character was that his name was Dr. Grey, he used to be the director of, and still lived at the Costa del Sol Bible school campus in Spain, and Dr. Hoffen shivered when anyone mentioned Dr. Grey’s name. If I lost El Jefe’s underage nephew while I was in charge of the school, I could just buy my ticket home now.

  “We can’t go to Gretna, sorry.”

  “You’re not going to let my sister throw her whole life away just because some brat ran away from school?”

  “Your sister is some brat who ran away from school.” I turned the car toward the A26. The only way to win a game was to play hard. No distractions. Laser focus. It would be difficult, with Dani sitting next to me, smelling like peaches, as I drove across France, but I could do it.

  Dani Honeywell 4

  I was more than relieved to have found Isaac at the train station. I hadn’t thought he had it in him, to be honest, but finding he would follow his runaway students all the way to France said all kinds of good things about him.

  But now that I had him, I wasn’t sure I wanted him.

  He was going to be difficult, that much was sure.

  I could see his reasoning for going after Si. And I could see my reasoning for going after Drew. But the two of them had gone in opposite directions, so I was beginning to think the professor and I needed to go in opposite directions.

  Except for my driving need to not travel all over Europe alone—which was how Drew ended up at school with me in the first place.

  Nonetheless, if she had eloped…

  I glanced at the clock. She had to be at least in England by now.

  I trained my eyes to the road ahead while the professor snored in the passenger seat. He needed the sleep. I was tempted to take off in the wrong direction and live with the consequences, but he looked so peaceful and innocent while he slept, I just couldn’t bring myself to it.

  The professor slept the whole way to Nice, including my two bathroom stops, my fill up, and the time I pulled over to close my eyes for ten minutes that turned into an hour.

  The eleven-hour drive Google had predicted had turned into fourteen hours. My stops hadn’t caused nearly the delay the tolls had. I was out one hundred euros by the time the professor woke up, and hoped very much that we could twist Si’s arm enough to make him buy us dinner.

  The sun was low in the sky and spilling a rosey warmth across the pewter clouds as I pulled into Nice proper, unsure of where to stow the Saab or how to find the cleanest youth hostel. The sunset was opposite the glorious coast, whose blue water shimmered in the lowering light. I wanted to pull over, climb over the guardrail, and walk straight across the pebbly beach into the cold water and absorb the glory of the day’s end at one of the most beautiful places on God’s planet.

  I also wanted to find Si before the clouds that had followed us from the north burst into the rainstorm they were promising. The sky was menacing—pregnant with a storm we would regret fast if we didn’t have shelter in time.

  The professor roused himself, possibly because eleven hours of sleep is enough for anyone, possibly because I had slowed down as I stared at the ocean. Cars zipped around me, so I picked up the pace and told myself I could contemplate the palm trees and whether or not they were a good idea, later.

  “What now?” Isaac rubbed his eyes and stared out the window. “I had no idea it was so beautiful.” He yawned.

  I was coming up to an American-style chain hotel, which, if nothing else, offered us a place to park while we texted Si and searched for the simple things like hostels and dinner.

  The rain started falling as soon as the car stopped—great fat drops that would soak us to within an inch of our lives. I shivered. The day—and the mission—was suddenly that much darker. “So I’ve texted Si and haven’t heard back yet. From a few things he said on the train, I’m going to guess he’s here for the surfing. What do you think?”

  The professor stared out the window. “Do you think he would leave school to go surfing? I wouldn’t have thought that of him.”

  “He’s an opportunist, I think. I needed a chaperone, so he took the chance to skip. I don’t know that he would have done it for no reason.”

  “But you think he would want to surf enough to skip the country?”

  “He’s a kid, on his own for the first time.” I tried googling surf shops in Nice on my phone, thinking one of the first places Si would have wanted to go was a place to rent equipment.

  “You’re a kid, on your own for the first time, and you didn’t run away from school.”

  I stared at him. Was he in the same car with me? Did all men sort of only see what they wanted in the world, or just this one? “I’m not ‘a kid on my own for the first time,’ and I did run away from school.”

  The professor grimaced. “We’ll let the kid thing slide for now. And you are right. You did run away, so there you go.”

  “And you ran away, too.” I grinned. The sooner the professor realized he wasn’t so different from me and Si and Drew, the better.

  “Point taken.”

  I relaxed. He wasn’t all bad, the professor.

  “So, you’re not on your own for the first time? World traveler before you’re twenty?”

  “I’m just starting the world traveling thing now. But I’ve seen a lot of the United States, and most of it just with my sister.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “She’s a black belt.” I smiled. Little Drew could take down so many big bad guys, so easily.

  Professor Daniels groaned. “Then why did you run after her?” He gripped the handle of the door and stared out the window.

  “Well…” I tapped my phone as I tried to figure out the best way to describe my sister. “She’s physically tough; I mean, she’s got a lot of wins under her black belt. But…”

  “She’s not got a lot going on upstairs.” His words were said kindly, despite the snotty turn of phrase, so I let it pass. Especially since he was essentially correct. Sort of.

  “It’s not that she’s dumb.”

  “Oh no?”

  “She’s a lot smarter than me. But when you get…that smart…you know what I mean, right? She’s not got a lick of common sense. She’d run away with a stranger for candy, if the stranger was interesting and the candy was imported.”

  “Ah.”

  He didn’t sound like he believed me about her being a genius, but she was, and it didn’t matter what he thought about it. Or, it kind of mattered because he had to get with the game about her being in danger despite her black belt. She was in just as much trouble as Si was.

  “Well, anyway. We’ve traveled a lot, both with our parents and alone, and we know how to get around. But that doesn’t mean she’s making smart decisions or isn’t in danger. And even though Si’s been all over the world more than once, I guess he technically could be in danger too. So we should find the cleanest hostel in Nice and see if he’s there. He’s a bit fussy.”

  “Fine.”

  I couldn’t tell if the professor was angry with me, just really rummy from sleeping in the car, or what, but his mind was elsewhere, and I had to reel him in. “And we need to eat.”

  “Exactly.” He popped open his door. “The rain is letting up, probably. Let’s leave the car here for now and see what we can find.”

  By my calculating, the rain was not letting up soon and we were at least half a mile from the action. So…yeah. I got out of the car. But if he continued to make stupid decisions, I was going to have to intervene.

  The hotel was right off the Promenade des Anglais, and to my chagrin, the rain did start to let up almost as soon as we were out of the parking lot. And it was Nice, France. And the air was slightly salty, and slightly fishy, and ever so slightly fumes-from-the-highway, and the
sun was almost completely gone from the sky, and I was walking along the Med with Isaac Daniels.

  Searching for Si was not the worst thing in the world.

  Isaac seemed a little vacant still, but it had to be because he had slept through lunch. I was tempted to reach for his hand and lace my fingers through it, because that was the way a girl wanted to stroll along the most famous sea walk in the world. But I didn’t. If I had nothing else in the world, I had a tiny bit of self-control.

  I did, however, grab him by the elbow gently and steer him toward Place Massena, where the rest of the people brave enough to walk in the rain were headed. Like the crowd, I was following the smell of French food, being eaten outside on little tables under umbrellas.

  I dragged us to the first line I saw and ordered the thing everyone was eating. The café was tiny and the line was long, but the thing they baked over the fire came out crispy, hot, and tasting of olive oil and pepper.

  “That wasn’t a crepe.” I had finished it too fast, and got in line for another, but the lady by the fire was shuttering her shop already. “What was this?” I asked Isaac. I crumpled up the parchment paper they had served it to me on and tossed it in a bin.

  The professor had brightened up considerably. “The sign says socca. Whatever it’s called, it was bon.”

  “Miam-miam.” I smacked my lips.

  The socca shop must have been a popular one, because even though the kitchen was closed—apparently the socca was sold out—the crowd around the black bamboo café tables was big. “But it was just a snack, as far as I’m concerned. So if you see something else to eat, let me know.” I spotted a big glass chicken rotisserie thing, about the size of a fridge, across the street. The aroma of the chicken was incredible; that’s saying something, since I had been a vegetarian for the last thirteen years. But I had no sweet clue how to eat a roasted chicken while walking the streets of Nice. Hunger bit at my still mostly empty stomach. “Let’s head to the nearest hostel and start asking around.” I wove my way through the crowd, hoping to find something to eat conveniently on our path.