Hard to Find: A Tillgiven Romantic Mystery

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  “Any word?”

  “She hasn’t replied to my text, but she did post a completely generic shot of the inside of her train.”

  She passed me her phone.

  “Is it completely generic, though?” I stared at the picture. “It’s not a selfie, you’d agree?”

  “Correct. She’s not in it.”

  “But two other people are.”

  “But wouldn’t you say they are sort of accidentally there?”

  “No. I think she’s still toying with you, so it’s not an accident.” I made the picture bigger. “Stare hard at the girl, and see if you think it could be Marissa.” The corner of the Instagram shot had the shoulder and partial head of a girl, from behind, and a blond man, also sitting, who was about half a head taller than the girl.

  “When I saw the girl with Drew, she had a motorcycle helmet on.”

  “All we can see is her shoulder, but don’t you think that looks like a motorcycle jacket? Does it look like the one the girl on the bike was wearing?”

  “I was so stunned to see those red lips smiling at me that I didn’t notice her clothes. But the shape of the shoulder does look right.”

  “This could be a message about who she is with, wouldn’t you say? Drew, Marissa, and the tall blond fellow?”

  “It could be, but that really doesn’t help us figure out where they are.”

  “Look closer. See how the picture is angled toward the people, and the window. What do you see out the window?” I wasn’t looking at the phone anymore and didn’t know what Dani could make out. I did know the window was there.

  “It’s no use. She’s used a filter on it, and the windows are all blurry.” She looked up at me, her eyes brighter, I hoped because of the food. “But it was a good idea.”

  I ate slowly. It didn’t seem wise to drive around Calais all day using up our gas.

  “I don’t know if you know this…” Dani hesitated. She rubbed her knuckle. “But if we drive after them, as I really, really, really hope we will, we will hit a lot of toll roads, and it gets pretty expensive. Getting to and from Nice was about a hundred and fifty euros.”

  She was right: I needed to remember the toll roads, even if I didn’t want to think about them right now. “Okay. Then when we figure out where they are, we’ll find the not-toll roads.”

  She nodded, her face relaxing. Kid was a bundle of nerves, and she believed I could make stuff better.

  I sat up straighter. “Drew is escalating her behavior by taunting you with her posts and responding to some, but not all, texts. We’ll be able to catch up with her in the next day or two. Until then, we relax a little—take a breather.”

  She paled. Relaxing wasn’t going to be something she could do.

  “If you want, you can go back to the school. I promise I will find your sister.”

  Her color returned. “No. Absolutely not.”

  I fumbled with my water glass, surprised at how glad I was she had said no.

  She toyed with her phone, eyebrows drawn together. “We just need that one clue to get us started.”

  I finished off my lunch while she poked at both the phone and her food. “I wish you would eat that.”

  “I will. I just feel like there is something here that I’m missing. The key piece of info…maybe it’s been here all along.”

  I scratched my head. The key piece of info was that her sister was a selfish brat, but she should have known that without the social media hack.

  “What about Wickham…” Her voice trailed off. It wasn’t a question for me.

  I gulped my water and wondered if we could find a grocery store before we left town. It was turning into a warm day for October, and the coach in me wanted us to have plenty of bottled water.

  “Isaac, my phone is going really slow. But I have an idea, only it might be nothing.”

  I let her work without comment. If she had a new idea, she was miles ahead of me.

  “That’s it! The stupid brat!” Dani bounced in her seat, her face split in an excited grin but her eyes flaming. “She couldn’t be a bigger brat if she tried! Do you remember, I mean, did I tell you that she had gone to Cardiff first and that I was annoyed because all signs pointed her eloping to Gretna, but Cardiff was way out of the way?”

  I nodded. It wasn’t so much a lie as a maneuver to get her to move on with the story. It didn’t really matter if I remembered that or not.

  “She posted pics of a Wickham concert. It was in Cardiff. I just went to Wickham’s website, and they played Gretna after that. When I was there, oh, Isaac, I could just kick myself. When I was in Gretna, I saw a scrap of a Wickham concert poster and didn’t think twice about it. And then Angus who bought me dinner said he was in town to open form some little band. How could I have missed the obvious? It was right there, staring at me, drinking a beer. Drew and Marissa are following the band.”

  “Angus who did what?” More had apparently happened in Scotland than I had let myself imagine.

  “It’s okay. I got away.” She grinned, from ear to ear.

  I remembered a flannel shirt in the passenger seat of the Saab, and wondered if I should ask about it. I did not want to ask. I leaned in. This was a real step forward. “If Marissa and Drew are following a band, we can predict where they are going and get there at the same time, instead of waiting for her to tell us.”

  Dani chewed her lip.

  “Tell me you are on the band’s website, looking at their schedule.”

  She nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Well?”

  Her voice came out a hoarse whisper. “They’re playing in Nice next.”

  My lip curled in disgust. Nice was the last place on earth I wanted to take Dani Honeywell. “If we go there to get your sister, can you manage to not get arrested for assault?”

  Dani Honeywell 11

  To Isaac Daniels I was ignorant and violent. His lip even curled in disgust when he looked at me.

  On the other hand, I had cracked the code. My stupid sister was running around following a band, maybe and maybe not with a new lover, who might be a girl called Marissa or a tall blond boy who sat next to Marissa on the train.

  I had to take the good with the bad. Isaac might disdain me with every fiber of his being, but he wasn’t going to abandon me, and for that, I could have leaned over the table and kissed that smirk right off his face.

  I played Wickham the whole way back to Nice, and by the time we got there, even Isaac liked the album.

  “It took me a while to get into the didgeridoo, but they kinda work it.”

  “Exactly. They don’t overdo it, at all.”

  “It would be easy to overdo a didgeridoo.”

  “You’re telling me.” We were a little slap happy, and neither of us had our sea legs. I don’t know that we had any clue what we were actually talking about.

  As if from memory, Isaac pulled into the chain hotel.

  “We should go to that hostel.” I didn’t want to boss him, but neither of us had the dough for two separate rooms at a place like this.

  “Wickham is definitely playing in Nice tonight?”

  I looked at the clock on the dash. It was one thirty in the morning. “Yes, but only technically.” I yawned. Nerves had kept me awake the whole drive. The “back way” to Nice reminded me of my dad’s shortcut from Bend to Portland.

  “Wickham has grown on me, I admit it. But they’re an indie band from, did you say the Netherlands? And they play a didgeridoo? I doubt we will have a hard time spotting Drew in the crowd.”

  I wanted to be a little insulted, but he was right. Drew and I had even chatted with the band members after the show we went to in September.

  “I say we check into the hostel, then, and lie low until the concert. Can you handle that?”

  I yawned deeply. “Yes, Professor.”

  It was weirdly easy to check into the hostel in the middle of the night, and I appreciated the narrow bed with the thin mattress in the small all-girls room more than I
could say.

  I met Isaac at the cereal bar in the cafeteria at seven the next morning. I know I looked like death after a particularly hard workout, but he looked great. He was rested and his hair was clean and his teeth made that “bling” noise in my mind when he smiled.

  I grunted a greeting at him, and he didn’t seem put off.

  I filled a bowl with muesli and drizzled some buttermilk-like substance on top of it. I covered that with syrup. European breakfast was not my favorite.

  I filled the biggest coffee mug I could find and dragged myself behind Isaac as he found us a table.

  “We’ve got a long day ahead of us.” He laid a flier in front of me. “But I’ve got the time and address for the concert, so today we have our showdown.”

  I grunted my agreement and then crunched some cereal.

  “In the meantime, what should we do? The beach? Town? More of those crazy peppery crepes?”

  I closed my eyes. I wished he would stop being so awake.

  “Or, maybe you want to have your breakfast and go back to bed for a while. That works for me. I might take a walk out behind the hostel. There’s a trail into the hills.”

  Still. Talking.

  He slurped his coffee. “Okay, then. That’s what I’m going to do. You eat up, go to bed. I’ll come back and look for you at ten. Does that work?”

  Why did it take him so many words to go away? I grunted again.

  He laughed.

  Ugh.

  I abandoned my slop and my coffee and went back to my room. It would be a different world after a few more hours of sleep.

  When I woke up, morning had broken and gotten repaired. The sun was full on, and I could think straight again.

  I found Isaac reading a travel pamphlet in the hostel lounge.

  “How was your hike?”

  “Healthy.” He seemed to have lost some of the energy I had found. It was a good thing. I could keep up again.

  “I want to get out of here.”

  “Good.” He got up without hesitating and led me out one of the back doors. We walked in silence along a palm-tree-lined road. Cars were parked on one side, and the other was a rock wall. It felt foreign and French and exciting. My heart sped up.

  Did I owe Drew a thank-you for my adventure? I thought back to Angus and the awkward…goodbye…in Scotland. No, I didn’t owe her a thank-you. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy the bright side.

  The landscaping was dry, and the air felt dusty. The breeze held a hint of salt from the ocean far below, and the spice of pine from the hills beyond us. We rounded a corner and were confronted with a sweeping view of Old Town and the beach beyond. My breath stopped. I reached for Isaac’s hand and squeezed it. “Can you believe we’re here?”

  He sort of half squeezed my hand and half stroked it, and then dropped it again. “I don’t think I will ever believe this last week was real.” He seemed unmoved by the view and kept walking. Something was eating at him.

  We were getting closer to town, where the police on their funny roller skates and Segways were around every corner. I had a lightweight gray-and-black scarf wrapped loosely around my neck. I took it off and shook it loose. It was a wide but not quite square piece of fabric. I tossed it lightly over my head, and then around my shoulder. Mostly I wanted to not look like the girl who got herself arrested for assault (twice), but something about the soft, silky fabric made me feel like an old movie star. An old movie star in skinny jeans and ballet flats. But I could do better than that for the concert.

  We meandered through the back roads until we were in the heart of Old Town again, with its narrow streets of octagon pavers and stepped hills. He stopped at a little socca shop.

  He ordered two. “I don’t think I’ve been taking very good care of you.” His face was under a cloud. “We might not connect with your sister tonight.”

  I bit the hot, savory socca dripping in butter, and tried to ignore his fatalism.

  “And if we don’t, I want you to go back home. I’ll take you.”

  I wanted to stamp my foot and say “No!” but I kept it together. “Let’s not expect the worst.”

  “No matter how it goes tonight, I need to bring you back to school. This is our last try to catch your sister.”

  “It’s kind of also our first try.”

  “Dani…”

  “Last time we were here, we were looking for Si…” I spoke slowly, wanting to come across as mature and reasonable. I sat up and adjusted my scarf in an attempt to keep my profile as hidden as possible.

  “I can’t make you come back with me, but I feel really convicted that I am supposed to deliver you safely back to Tillgiven, leaving tomorrow.” He cleared his throat. “You know I have no reason to hurry back, so it doesn’t make me any happier than it makes you.”

  He was in a mood. The best I could do right now was play along. “Okay. After tonight, we go back to school. After all, as you said, it won’t be hard to find her at a Wickham concert.”

  Isaac Daniels 12

  She wasn’t convinced, but I couldn’t help that. I had had very few moments in my life of absolute assuredness, for lack of a better term, that God was giving me directions. And tomorrow morning, I had to take Dani back to school. I wished I had just gone back to bed instead of going off to be alone with God. Walking and praying and listening was not the kind of thing to do if you wanted to have your own way in life.

  God did not tell me if we would also have Drew. He didn’t even tell me if we’d see Drew or not. But I had to get Dani back to school.

  I tried to ignore the implication that I had to walk her into the school, because I wanted to have her drop me off in Vetlanda at this apartment of Stina’s and let her drive herself the four miles or so back to Tillgiven. If El Jefe saw me on campus, it wouldn’t be good.

  The conviction that I would get her back to the school, no matter how impossible the task looked to me, was so strong that I let her go off and rest and hang out in her dorm without hesitation. Something else my soccer hero, Kaká, said replayed in my mind: “I will win some matches and I will lose matches, but I know that in all of this, God has a plan.” I had stopped believing that my losses were part of God’s plan—they were my fault, all of them, and therefore out of his control. But if Kaká—the smoothest futboler to hit the pitch in my lifetime—believed that his losses could be a part of God’s plan, then…I don’t know. Maybe mine could be too. And then, maybe not. But the idea that the plan was bigger than me and my mistakes was winning my internal argument, and so when Dani went back to her room after our trip to old town, I wasn’t filled with terror that she would slip through my fingers, or get arrested again.

  We only met back up in time to go to the concert.

  It was evening and the sky was a dusky purple, with the last glimpse of the orange sunset slipping away slowly at the edges of the world.

  Dani nearly stopped my heart when she walked across the hostel garden. She wore a long black skirt, fitted high at her tiny waist, and a black top with thin straps. There wasn’t much to it, and her skin glowed against the inky fabric, begging me to touch and see if she was as soft as she looked. She had simple sandals, and her hair, that hair. Her hair haunted me, and there it was, glossy, flowing, moving. Alive. It was almost a relief when she threw the scarf over her head again. I knew she was trying to keep a low profile, but the scarf did not make her disappear in the crowd.

  I offered her my arm. When she took it, laying her thin, tan hand gently on my coat sleeve, a bolt of electricity lit a fire in me. If only the school had fully fired me so I could run away with Dani and never come back.

  But then, maybe God knew that was what I’d be thinking, and that was why he had extracted the promise to bring her back to school tomorrow.

  Wickham was playing in a little pub off the Promenade des Anglais. We paid our cover and took seats in the back. The room was dark, the only light from small candles on the table, and the lights on the stage. The heady scent of roaste
d meat spilled into the room from the kitchen, to balance out the cigarette smoke lingering in the doorway. The room was only half-full, and the band was warming up, laughing and strumming their instruments while checking their set up.

  “So that’s the infamous Wickham.”

  “Yup. I feel awful that I can’t remember the drummer’s name. The guy in the pink shirt is Berger, and the girl is his twin, Antje. He sings lead.”

  I nodded. We had had this conversation three times on the drive down here. But both of us were looking around for Drew and not giving our full attention to what we were saying.

  She fussed with her scarf a little bit.

  I don’t know what came over me, but I reached around and pulled it off her head.

  Her eyes flew open, the size of dinner plates. “Isaac…” She whispered my name. She grabbed up the scarf and threw it back on, nodding toward the door. A Rollerblade cop was silhouetted in the doorway. I couldn’t tell if he had seen us.

  I felt rotten. I had been spurred by the desire to get her attention, to see her glossy hair again. I knew she was scared, even if it was silly to be scared. I stood up and began to adjust her scarf for her. “Like this.” I wanted to make her laugh, so I tried my best to do a Middle Eastern accent. “You must cover yourself, woman.” I pulled the scarf across her face and tucked it in so only her eyes showed. I let the ends drape to cover her bare shoulders, and as I looked at her, I understood. If you hide the women away, you won’t be constantly forced to practice self-control. I grinned, but she shivered.

  My attempt at humor seemed to have failed.

  “You dare show your face?” My accent was terrible, but I thought that might make it funnier. According to the evil eye she was giving me, it didn’t. “My first wife wouldn’t go around like that.” My voice was low, but a woman at the table next to us turned and gave me her best evil eye too. “Joking, sorry.” I gave her an apologetic grin.