Three Days Missing

by Kimberly Belle

  Those closest to us are often the most dangerous...

  It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: the call that comes in the middle of the night. When Kat Jenkins awakens to the police on her doorstep, her greatest fear is realized. Her eight-year-old son, Ethan, is missing—vanished from the cabin where he’d been on an overnight class trip. Shocked and distraught, Kat rushes to the campground, but she’s too late; the authorities have returned from their search empty-handed after losing Ethan’s trail in the mountain forest.

  Another mother from the school, Stef Huntington, seems like she has it all: money, prominence in the community, a popular son and a loving husband. She hardly knows Kat, except for the vicious gossip that swirls around Kat’s traumatic past. But as the police investigation unfolds, Ethan’s disappearance has earth-shattering consequences for Stef, as her path crosses with Kat. As the two mothers race against the clock, their desperate search for answers reveals how the greatest dangers lie behind the everyday smiles of those they trust the most.

  Praise for the novels of Kimberly Belle

  “You need to check out The Marriage Lie. This domestic thriller will keep you reading into the wee hours of the night to find out how it all ends.”

  —Redbook

  “This delicious, serpentine thriller starts from a simple premise: what if your husband was not who you thought he was.... A good, old-fashioned page-turner, with a poisonous sting in the tail.”

  —Daily Mail

  “Fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train will eat up Belle’s latest novel. The pace is relentless, and the plot never runs in a straight line.... This one is a true brain twister!”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “With plot twists around every corner, Belle isn’t afraid to keep her readers guessing until the very last page of this heart-pounding story of one woman’s desperate search for answers.”

  —Booklist

  “[A] compelling domestic thriller.”

  —BuzzFeed

  “The suspense builds rapidly.... A compelling adventure.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Belle’s Three Days Missing is her best book yet. And that’s saying a lot. This one is vividly written, emotional, and engaging, with real, three-dimensional characters who will always keep you guessing.... This one’s a winner!”

  —David Bell, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter and Bring Her Home

  “A missing child, a desperate mother, and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing—Three Days Missing has all the right stuff for an engaging, suspenseful read.”

  —Wendy Walker, author of Emma in the Night and All Is Not Forgotten

  “The Marriage Lie is the definition of a page-turner.... We don’t know who to trust, who to root for, who is dangerous, and the effect is dizzying. A pulse-pounding good book.”

  —Kate Moretti, New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Year

  “[A] suspenseful, layered and emotionally gripping novel. Belle steers a twisting course that will have readers breathlessly turning the pages.”

  —Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One

  “A surprising and fast-paced read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Three Days Missing is a taut, intelligent, heart-pounding thriller.... Belle weaves a spellbinding tale of suspense and family drama that twists and turns until the final pages.”

  —Karen Katchur, author of The Secrets of Lake Road and The Sisters of Blue Mountain

  “Kimberly Belle’s Three Days Missing is exactly what you want in a thriller—riveting, edge-of-your-seat storytelling.... Absolutely unputdownable.”

  —Mindy Mejia, author of Everything You Want Me to Be

  “The Last Breath will leave you breathless. This edgy and emotional thriller will keep you guessing until the very end.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence

  “Perfectly paced, highly suspenseful, and heart-rending, The Marriage Lie kept me enthralled right up to the shocking final twist.”

  —A.J. Banner, bestselling author of The Good Neighbor

  “The Marriage Lie explores what makes people ‘tick,’ squints at the blurring of lines between good and bad, crime and human nature.... A beautifully written, perfectly populated, edge-of-your-seat story.”

  —Susan Crawford, author of The Pocket Wife

  THREE DAYS MISSING

  Kimberly Belle

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  For my parents, who always believed.

  Contents

  Kat

  Kat

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Stef

  Kat

  Ethan

  Acknowledgments

  Questions For Discussion

  A Conversation With Kimberly Belle

  KAT

  My phone is already buzzing with work email as I rush Ethan through his morning routine. Get up. Get dressed. For the love of God, brush your teeth and hair. In none of his eight short years has my son ever been a morning person, and I’ve never been the most patient of mothers, not even when I didn’t have a boss clocking the second I step off the elevator.

  Not that stay-at-home moms don’t have plenty of stress, but at least then Ethan and I were united in it, members of the same team tiptoeing around the eggshells Andrew left lying all over the house. But this is the habit we’ve fallen into these past six months, ever since the separation. Ethan dallies and I nag.

  “Come on, baby, we gotta go.”

  His hair is still sticking up where it was pressed against his pillow. His T-shirt is stained and wrinkled, which means he probably plucked it from the dirty pile on the floor. My son is an unapologetic slob. He’s uncoordinated and more than a little awkward looking. His ears are too big and his curls are too fickle and his glasses, constantly clouded with fingerprints, never seem to sit straight on his nose.

  But I love him with everything inside of me—not despite all his quirks but because of them. If there’s one thing Andrew taught me, it’s that you can’t love only pieces of a person. You have to love all of them, even the ugly parts.

  I hustle Ethan down the stairs, down the cramped hallway and out the back door. Our tiny ranch is not much, but divorce is expensive, and every time my attorney thinks we’re getting close, Andrew comes back with another ridiculous ultimatum. The antique side table we bought on our honeymoon. A pair of crystal candlesticks he broke ages ago. The negatives for Ethan’s baby pictures. As long as it’s not Ethan he wants, I give in to his every demand.

  Ethan stops in front of the car, still half-asleep. “What are you waiting for? Get in.”

  He doesn’t move. I check the tim
e on my cell—six-twenty-seven.

  “Ethan.” When there’s no response, I give his shoulder a little jiggle. “Come on, sweetie. Get in the car. Otherwise you’ll miss the bus.”

  Which leaves in exactly thirty-three minutes, from a parking lot across town. Today’s destination: Dahlonega, an early gold rush town an hour north of Atlanta. Ethan’s class will be traipsing through mines two hundred feet under the ground, panning for gold and semiprecious stones, sleeping in a cabin under the stars. When he brought the permission form home from school last month, I thought it was an April Fools’ joke. What kind of teacher takes a busload of second graders on an overnight trip on purpose?

  “But we do it every year,” Miss Emma assured me when I questioned her. “We stay at a YMCA summer camp facility so it’s perfectly safe. One teacher or chaperone for every five students. The kids look forward to it all semester.”

  It was the speech I heard her give every second grade helicopter mom, but in doing so with me, she missed the point. It wasn’t Ethan’s physical safety I was worried about, but his emotional. Ethan has an IQ of 158, a level of giftedness that comes with a particular set of challenges. This is a kid who’s brilliant but socially awkward. An analytical thinker who needs constant stimulation. An insatiable learner with a never-ending stream of questions. His speech, his interests, the way he thinks—his world is so different from his peers that there’s practically no point of contact. He’s been at Cambridge for two years now and hasn’t brought home a single friend. No playdates, no sleepovers. Nothing.

  But his class has been learning about the mines all spring, and Miss Emma has filled his bottomless brain with tales of hydraulic sluices and a network of underground tunnels. Lode mining, my son informed me, and up until this morning, he was desperate to see it for himself—despite having never slept in a bed that wasn’t under the same roof as me or Andrew. He begged long enough that I caved. I swallowed down my worries and signed the damn form.

  He climbs onto the backseat, and I toss him a peanut-free breakfast bar, which he ignores.

  “What’s wrong, baby? Are you sick?”

  “No.” He looks at the wrapper and makes a face. “Just not hungry.”

  “Well, eat it anyway. You’ll need the fuel to climb all those steps to get in and out of the mines.” The last bit is a deliberate reminder, meant to drum up some of his previous excitement.

  But my son is onto me, and the look he gives me is textbook Ethan. Dipped chin. Arched brow. Eyes on the verge of rolling. He heaves a sigh so forceful that it lifts his little body from the seat.

  “You’re always starving in the morning. Why not today?”

  “I don’t know.” His glasses slip down his face, and he wriggles his nose to push them back up. They’re too loose, the fake tortoiseshell too heavy for his head. Ethan is eight, but he’s small enough to be six, yet another disadvantage he faces. “I’m just not.”

  You need to stop coddling him. I hear Andrew’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting here, in the passenger’s seat beside me. Otherwise that kid will never toughen up.

  You need to. He’ll never. This is one of Andrew’s more impressive accomplishments: he’s an expert at assigning blame. He’s only been practicing it for years.

  But Andrew’s not here, and I need to get to work. I can barely afford my half of Cambridge Classical Academy’s tuition, not with the clock still ticking on this divorce and the stack of bills by the toaster, as terrifying to me as Ethan’s fear of the monsters that live under his bed. My boss doesn’t have kids. She doesn’t understand that Ethan’s little Einstein brain needs longer than others to weigh the pros and cons. I need this job, which means I need to get him on that bus. I start the car and back out of the driveway.

  All the way to school, I watch Ethan’s expression in the rearview mirror. Not for the first time, I wish the uncoupling between his father and I wasn’t so explosive. That our conversations didn’t have to happen in writing and from a minimum physical distance of two hundred feet. The restraining order sure makes coparenting hard, especially when your Dahlonega-bound son sits staring out the window like he’s on the way to a root canal.

  I hit the button for the radio, silencing the morning-show prattle. “Sweetie, please tell me. What is it? What’s wrong?”

  His gaze flicks to mine, sticks for a second, then slides away. He bounces his shoulders, even though he knows the answer. Ethan always knows the answer.

  “Are you worried about the other kids?”

  He frowns, and I know I’ve hit a nerve.

  “Is someone bothering you again?”

  I purposefully don’t say bully, the B-word that his teacher has been avoiding, along with the name of the little shit—though both of us knew who she was talking about. Miss Emma tried to blow off whatever happened as a silly squabble, one she promised she had under control. But that’s part of the problem. She dismisses all the bullying as petty, silly squabbles, even when things turn bloody.

  “If you tell me what happened, I can help you fix it. I’ll talk to Miss Emma and make sure she’s aware of the problem. Miss Emma and I are on your team here, you know. We want to help.”

  “It’s nothing, okay? Nobody’s bothering me.”

  “Are you worried about being away from home?”

  Ethan frowns into the rearview mirror.

  “Because you shouldn’t, you know. Miss Emma will take good care of you.”

  No answer. He slumps in his seat, his palms cupping his elbows, his fingertips tapping out a nervous rhythm on his skin—a tic he’s picked up when he doesn’t want to talk about something.

  We drive the rest of the way in silence.

  By the time I race up the tree-lined drive that leads to Cambridge Classical Academy’s parking lot, I don’t have to check the dashboard clock to know it’s well past seven. The yoga-toned mothers milling about on the lawn, the squealing kids swirling in circles around their legs, a pacing Miss Emma with her phone pressed to her ear. Their pinched faces say it all.

  Late.

  I pull into the first spot I see, hit the brakes with a screech and clamber out.

  “Sorry,” I call out over the roof of my car. “We’re here, we’re here. Sorry.”

  Ethan steps from the backseat, pausing to watch the kids race around the lawn. His face betrays his thoughts, his longing so obvious it’s almost written in the air. It hits me right in the stomach where his body used to, back when I was nine months pregnant and he kicked so hard his tiny foot would almost punch through my skin. My beautiful, brilliant son wants nothing more than to belong, and I don’t know how to help him.

  With a sigh, he reaches inside the car, hoists his backpack onto a shoulder.

  I poke him on the other. “Hey, I got you a surprise.”

  The look he gives me is dubious. Ethan knows money is tight, and surprises are reserved for special occasions. “What kind of surprise?”

  I pop the trunk. He tips his head around the side, taking a peek, and when he returns his gaze to mine, his eyes have blown wide. “You got me the mummy bag?”

  I grin. “I got you the mummy bag.” The sleeping bag that had made him desperate with want when he’d spotted it at Walmart. Not because it comes with a flip-over hoodie and a built-in pillow, but because of the hidden pocket for the raggedy strip of baby blanket he doesn’t want any of his classmates to know he can’t sleep without. “Your you-know-what is already in there, zippered into the inside pocket.”

  The smile that creeps up his face is worth every hard-earned penny.

  “Do you like it?”

  He reaches in, clutches the roll with both arms to his chest. It dwarfs his tiny body, looking like it might topple him over. “It’s totally awesome.”

  “Excellent. Then maybe you won’t even need the other thing I brought you.”

  His eyes narrow into slits. “W
hat other thing?”

  I reach in the car, into my bag on the middle console, and pull out a worn, brown leather pouch.

  Ethan recognizes it, and his face alights with excitement. “Your great-grandpa’s compass?”

  Or more accurately, his surveyor’s compass. This one is from the mid-1800s, with a pair of brass flip-up sights on opposite ends, which my great-grandfather used to measure the wooded land along the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. It’s probably not worth much, thanks to the web of scratches and the star-crack in the northeast corner, but since it’s the last thing my mother gave me before she died, to me it means the world.

  He grabs it from me now and presses it with both hands to the mummy bag. “I’ll take real good care of it, Mom. I promise.”

  “For the record, I am not giving it to you—not yet. But you can borrow it for a couple of days if you think it might make being away from home a little easier.” I bend down, looking him in the eye. “And to be honest, it makes me feel better knowing you have it. If you get lost, you can use that thing to find your way back home.”

  He gives me a happy grin. “I’m not gonna get lost.”

  “I know. But take it anyway.”

  Behind us, the bus starts up with a loud rumble, a sleek black machine more suited for a rock star and his entourage than a couple dozen screaming eight-year-olds. Most of them are already inside, bleating their excitement from behind the tinted windows, telling us it’s beyond time to go. Miss Emma turns, looks our way. Her gaze catches Ethan’s, and she smiles and raises both hands in question. Are you coming or not?

  We gather his stuff and hustle across the lawn.

  At the edge of the lot, I squat, putting me face-to-face with Ethan. This farewell will be quick. Clean and clinical, as much for him as for me. “Be good. Listen to Miss Emma and the chaperones.” I straighten his glasses, fix his rumpled collar. “And have the very best time.”

  He gives me a close-lipped smile. “I’m pretty sure I can do that.”

  I think back to the first time I held him, in the hospital delivery room. He was so tiny, so pink and sticky and fragile. I remember how he looked up at me, his tiny mouth opening and closing against my arm like a fish, how that first swell of motherly love took my breath away. The hopes and intentions and fears—they’re nothing compared to what I feel now.