Three Days Missing

by Kimberly Belle

  “My son disappeared on your watch.”

  “I counted the kids, Kat. Twice! I counted them and there were eighteen, but it was so dark and Avery couldn’t put out the fire. They were frantic, and so was I. We all were.”

  “You looked me in the eye and told me you’d watch out for him. You promised.”

  “I know. Oh my God, of course I know.” The last word dissolves into a wail, and her face collapses. “And I did. He was there when we ran outside, I’m almost positive of it. You have to believe me, Kat. This isn’t my fault.”

  Her defensive attitude only infuriates me more, as does Bill’s not-so-subtle calm-down look.

  “When the kids make fun of him at school, when they call him names or shove him on the playground, you pretend not to notice. My son comes home at least once a week in tears because his bullies are torturing him, and they get away with it because you do nothing. You say nothing. So of course I blame you. What happened here is all your fault.”

  Her mouth drops open, and whatever she was about to say is sucked into the clamor of a helicopter circling overhead. Her face crumples, and she cries into her hands.

  I grip my hands into fists, grit my teeth against Emma’s tears and Bill’s stare and my fury that rushes like ice through my veins. “Maybe you are telling the truth. Maybe you were right there, guarding those kids the whole time. Maybe whoever took Ethan would have taken him regardless. But every night for the rest of your life, I hope you think of my son, shivering and alone in somebody else’s sleeping bag. I hope you see his tearstained face and remember that that’s on you. You let that happen.”

  I don’t wait around for her apology, partly because we both know I don’t forgive her.

  But also, so she won’t get the satisfaction of seeing me cry.

  STEF

  7 hours, 32 minutes missing

  “Stefanie Huntington! What a lovely surprise.”

  Alexis Fischer greets everyone by their first and last names, and with a sugarcoated enthusiasm that matches the head-to-toe Lilly Pulitzer dress I know she’s wearing. Not that I can see her tropical-print outfit through the phone, but I’ve never seen her in anything else—not even in the dead of winter.

  Alexis and I are not what I’d call friends, though she’s never been unpleasant or unkind. She’s never said a bad word about me, not to my face or behind my back. She saves me a seat at school concerts and lets me cut in front of her in the car pool line, and she never complains when I neglect to return the favor. She tries so hard to be likable, yet no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to make myself like her.

  But Alexis has a son in Sammy’s class, and she’s married to Avery, who somehow snagged the hot-ticket role as field trip chaperone. Despite whatever opinions I might have of her, I will suck it up now and play nice.

  I slip out the back door and onto the patio, the pad of paper I’ve been scribbling notes on all morning tucked under an arm. “Hi, Alexis. So sorry to disturb, but—”

  “Oh, you’re not disturbing anything. I’m just enjoying these last few hours of peace and quiet before the kids get back. I don’t know about you, but I’d vote for another day or two of this. I haven’t missed Timmy for a second.” She laughs and lowers her voice. “Don’t tell anybody I said that.”

  I force myself to slow down long enough to be friendly. “Your secret’s safe with me, I promise. But the reason I’m calling is to ask for the number of Avery’s cell. It wasn’t listed in the school directory.”

  Her friendly tone dips a full octave. “I suppose you haven’t heard.”

  My mind whips through the possibilities. Ethan was found. He’s in the hospital. The morgue.

  I sink onto the couch, dizzy with dread. “Heard what?”

  “That for the past two and a half years, Avery has been getting hot and heavy with his secretary. Now, I know what you’re thinking—his secretary. I mean, how cliché can you get, right? But don’t you worry. I’ve got Gina Winters on the case. She’s going to take him to the cleaners.”

  My heart settles in my chest—for Ethan, not for Avery. Gina Winters is a name both revered and feared in moneyed Atlanta. A powerhouse divorce attorney who takes all her clients’ cheating husbands to the cleaners. I hope for Avery’s sake he’s not too attached to his homes and bank accounts, because Gina Winters never loses.

  I toss the notebook onto the coffee table and curl my feet up onto the cushions, settling in. Any conversation that includes the words husband and cleaners is not going to be a short one. “I’m so very sorry to hear that. Divorce is never fun, no matter which side you land on.”

  She makes a throaty sound. “Yeah, well, save your sympathy for Avery. He’s the one who’s going to be sorry. Anyway, I’d love to give you his number, but I’ve removed every trace of him from my life, and that includes his number from my phone.”

  I roll my eyes. Alexis has been married to Avery for how long now? Surely she remembers his number. “Alexis, I really—”

  “I learned that from your mother, you know. Dr. Mel says the only way to truly let go of the past is to do just that—let go of it. And to do that I had to completely expunge him from my being. She said to think of it like a reset. A control-alt-delete of my heart and soul, and boy, was she right. I feel so much better now that I’ve gotten all that negative energy out of my life.”

  There are so many things I could say here. That I’ll never understand why my mother’s fans act like cult members. That even with a full-time nanny to run interference, it’s pretty much impossible to expunge anyone from anything when you share ten-plus years and two children. That if Alexis expects me to believe she doesn’t remember Avery’s number, she’s as ridiculous as her wardrobe.

  “I appreciate what you’re going through, Alexis, but this is an emergency. I really need to talk to someone up at the camp, and Emma isn’t answering her cell. I don’t know who else to call.”

  “Did you call the school?”

  “Of course I called the school. I left messages on at least a dozen people’s voice mails. So far, nobody’s called me back, and no matter how many times I hit Redial, I can’t get a human on the line. It’s like nobody’s there.”

  “Why?”

  I frown. “Why is nobody at the school?”

  “No. Why do you need to talk to Avery?”

  I fall silent, thinking. On the one hand, I don’t want to incite panic among the parents, which telling Alexis will for sure do. She’s never been the close-lipped type, and she has an obvious penchant for gossip over facts, which in this case are far too sparse to be the least bit sensational. If she doesn’t know about Ethan—and it seems clear that she doesn’t—no way am I going to be the one to tell her.

  On the other, Brittany showed up at our front door hours ago with the news, and there’s still no word from the school. No sorrowful statements, no updates, nothing. The longer this radio silence stretches, the twitchier I become. Call it mother’s intuition, call it a premonition, but my body won’t relax. Not until I know for certain that Sammy is okay.

  I decide on a careful version of the truth. “It’s not Avery I need to talk to, but Sammy.”

  “Well, why didn’t you just say so? My boys both have cell phones—one of the few perks of being a child of divorce. Give Timmy a call. Wait, don’t call him. He responds better to WhatsApp or FaceTime. Actually, do you have Snapchat?”

  I reach for the pad and a pen. Thank God for parents like Alexis, who think the school’s no-cell-phone policy doesn’t apply to them or their children. “What’s Timmy’s number?”

  She rattles off a string of digits, then launches into her ideas for the fall fund-raiser she’s in charge of planning. A long, drawn-out account that I know from experience will end in an ask: for my money, my time, my assistance. I’m waiting for a pause in her monologue when my cell phone beeps with an incoming call.
r />   “Sorry, Alexis, but I really need to take this. Thanks again!” She’s still talking when I hang up.

  The call pops up on my screen, but not with a number. With a single, solitary word. Unknown. A call that on any other day, any other situation, I would decline.

  I press the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  KAT

  8 hours, 34 minutes missing

  Back in the tiny cabin on the other side of the clearing, I plug my phone into the socket by the sink and flip the switch on the kettle. I’m not so much thirsty as I am freezing, my bones and teeth rattling from both my still-damp clothes and the terror gripping my insides. I rummage through the cabinet for a tea bag and drop it into a mug marked with stains I’m too exhausted to think about.

  “Clean yourself up.” That’s what the sheriff said when I walked back into the dining hall, his gaze raking over my stringy hair, my muddy skin, my jeans dark with dirt and dew. “Press conference is in an hour. Be ready in a half. You’re gonna need some practice rounds.”

  While the water rouses itself into a boil, I lean into a rusty mirror above the couch and wince. Wild hair, skin splotchy and sallow, pale everywhere but the two half-moons of purple and green that sit under my eyes like bruised fruit. My nose, normally small and straight, is puffy from five hours straight of crying, the skin around it mottled and peeling. I dig a tube of hand cream from my bag and rub some into my face and hands, then instantly regret it. The smell, citrus and jasmine, churns my empty stomach.

  The kettle flips off with a sharp click, at the same time my phone springs to life with a series of incoming messages. I drop the tube in my bag and rush across the floor to my phone. Work has already begun, and most of the emails and text messages are from the office. As the newest personal claims agent in the department, I’m the lowest on the employee totem pole. My inbox collects the claims no one else wants. Lost dentures. iPhones dropped in toilets. Cockroaches floating in soup. My workdays are spent wading through everyone else’s shitty leftovers, but not today. Today I can’t contemplate any of it.

  I pull up my boss’s contact card and fire off a quick email—Won’t be in today. Family emergency.—but the message won’t send. The emails must have come through in a rare burst of reception, and now I’m back to no bars.

  I flip over to a handful of voice mails, and my heart stutters and misfires. There are five, and they’re all from Andrew.

  With shaking hands, I tap the screen to listen to the first one, checking the time on the clock. He left it only twenty minutes ago, about the time I was hyperventilating with the sheriff in the dining hall.

  “Kat, it’s me. What is going on? My phone has been blowing up with messages from the police about Ethan. Have they found him yet? Call me back as soon as you hear this. I’ve got my ringer on and I’m not putting my phone down until I hear back.”

  Hearing his voice again ungrounds me. Six months limited to no contact means my body’s reaction now is knee-jerk. My muscles go tight and tense, bracing for impact even though he’s I-don’t-know-how-many miles away. The distance doesn’t stop his words from stirring up first hysteria, then confusion. He sounds worried. Normal. Human. If Andrew is behind Ethan’s disappearance, then his performance on this voice mail deserves an Oscar.

  I click to the next one and press the phone to my ear.

  “Me again. I heard your voice mail and now I’m pissed. I can’t believe you think I have something to do with this. In fact, why don’t we talk about your culpability instead? You’re the one who let an eight-year-old go on a camping trip without one of us there as chaperone, not me. You do realize how irresponsible and careless that is, right? How utterly stupid. I sincerely hope the reason you haven’t called me back is that you’re out there in the woods searching for my son, because I will tell you this—I am going to spend the rest of my life and every last goddamn penny of my money fighting you for custody. I’m not fucking around, Kat. Call me back.”

  The recording ends, and I look behind me. Actually twist my body around to check for Andrew in the empty air at my back. Even though I know he’s not there. Even though I feel ridiculous. But everything about my body’s reaction—pounding heart, clenched muscles, limbs braced for fight or flight—tells me he’s standing right behind me.

  Pull it together, Kat. Ethan’s disappearance is not my fault, and the abrupt swing from concerned to hostile is quintessential Andrew, as is his tone: loud, arrogant and demanding. I tell myself this is the Andrew I’ve come to know, the one that comes in guns swinging. Andrew was always the vinegar, I was the honey. He agitates, I smooth over. He’s the master at manipulating a situation to suit his version of reality, and as awful as his words are to hear, at least now we’re back in familiar territory.

  I listen to the rest of the messages, which only go downhill from there. Obscenity laden and filled with threats and hateful names. By the last one, I’m shaking with both fright and fury, the weight of his words crushing my chest. Once this nightmare is over, once the police find Ethan and hand him back to me, I’ll be swept into the next nightmare—a custody battle I can’t afford, with a man who has already proven that he doesn’t play fair.

  But the more pressing point is, Andrew has surfaced. Dawn and the sheriff will want to know.

  I’m turning for the door when Lucas’s voice booms from somewhere outside the cabin, disturbing the silence that is everywhere except in my head. “Kat, you in here?”

  I drop the phone on the counter with a clatter and rush to the door, flinging it open. “Did you find him?”

  He clomps up the steps, panting like he ran all the way here. “No, but I found everything he put there. Ethan left a trail from the back door of the cabin all the way to the road.”

  “Are you sure it was his?”

  Lucas gives me a don’t-be-stupid look. Sometime since the last time I saw him, he’s draped his body in head-to-toe camouflage, from the canvas hat pulled low on his forehead down to the pants that tuck into his muddy brown hiking boots. The fabric is darker than it should be in wet patches on his chest, under his arms, on elbows and knees caked in mud and dirt and sweat. It drips in dirty lines down his face and neck, disappearing into the pink skin around his collar.

  He steps inside, and I shut the door behind him. “Snapped twigs. A dropped pencil or candy wrapper. A stone pressed into the bark. He left us something every twenty feet.”

  “What good is a trail when Ethan is long gone? He’s in a car, Lucas. A car.”

  “Because studying the trail will tell us things the dogs can’t. He left all sorts of litter behind, and his pace was shorter than it should have been for a kid his size. That means he was deliberately walking slow, trying to delay his escape. He wasn’t running, that’s for sure. The second trail belonged to someone more than twice his size. An adult.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Height and weight could be either, and so could the size of the boots. Unfortunately, the rain made it difficult to get a good print, but they’re still trying.”

  “So basically, you learned nothing.” I return to my bag, burying a fresh bout of tears and rummaging around for my brush. “Ethan’s maybe with Andrew, maybe with someone else, a man or a woman, but by the time you were following his tracks through the woods, he was long gone.”

  “I know it seems like nothing,” Lucas says, stepping closer, “but—”

  I turn around, pointing at Lucas with my brush. “But what? The dogs took forever to catch the scent because they were using a sleeping bag that didn’t belong to Ethan. His teacher confirmed it. There were too many scents in it for them to be sure, so the sheriff is calling the dogs back in to start over from scratch. They’re using Sweetie Honey this time so there’s no contamination.”

  I don’t have to explain Sweetie Honey, Ethan’s stuffed rabbit, to Lucas. He’s the one who gave it to Ethan one year for Easter, the same S
weetie Honey that’s now squished into a giant ziplock in the dining hall, infusing the air inside the bag with Ethan’s one-of-a-kind scent.

  I step to the sink, run my brush under the tap and start dragging it through my hair. I have less than a half hour until the sheriff plunks me in front of a room filled with television cameras, where I am supposed to beg some nameless, faceless person, who may or may not be Andrew, to give me back my son.

  Lucas leans a hip against the counter and watches me. “I’m telling you, another run of the dogs is only going to slow us down again. That was definitely Ethan’s trail I was on. No question because those wrappers I just told you about? They were from those disgusting dollar store treats you try to pass off as candy. Look.”

  He pulls a clear plastic bag from his jacket pocket, and my stomach twists. If I was holding out any hope the dogs chased the wrong human scent to the road, it just died with the muddy strips of orange and yellow paper in Lucas’s hand. The kind of snacks I buy in bulk because they’re cheap and peanut-free. The kind I toss in Ethan’s backpack every morning.

  “I also found this.”

  Lucas hands me a brown leather bag, and I don’t have to turn it over to know the leather’s cracked on the bottom, or that there’s a long, ragged scratch that runs diagonally across the back. It’s my great-grandfather’s old pouch, the one he used to hang from his belt while surveying the wilderness of southern Kentucky. I fling open the flap and it’s empty.

  “I double-and triple-checked a hundred-mile radius around that thing,” Lucas says, his voice low and steady, “but I didn’t find the compass. Ethan must still have it on him.”

  A huge silent sob racks my body, and I turn back to the mirror, my image going blurry with tears.

  Lucas steps up behind me, draping both hands on my shoulders. “Kat, I know it’s hard, but this is good news.”