by Lyla Payne
“There has to be a way to prove Ellen left it there after she left Daria’s. She had to have gone to Autumn. Where else would she go?”
“That kid…” Lindsay trails off, looking sick to her stomach.
“He’s Trent’s,” I finish for her. Lindsay nods, biting her lower lip. “What we need to prove is that he’s also Ellen’s. If we can do that, then we can get Autumn to tell us what happened to her. She must know.”
“I think she does. The thing is, I also think she loves that baby, Graciela. And that means we don’t have a lot of time.”
Chapter Eighteen
I drop Lindsay off at home because she really does have plans with Marcella, then text both Amelia and Beau to let them know I won’t be home before heading straight to the police station. Will is there, along with Ted Ryan, who looks incomplete without his brother at his side. Not that it stops him from yanking my ponytail when I try to skirt his desk.
“Stop it, you oaf.”
“No. You never come in here to see me, only Will.” He pouts. “I deserve attention, too. I can solve things.”
“You’re right, Ted. And I need all the help I can get on this one, so come on.”
He launches himself out of his chair and follows me to Will’s desk. The uniform on my first love still throws me off, though he looks as if he was born to wear it, and my appearance seems to confuse him.
“Am I late for dinner?” he asks, looking down at his watch, then outside, where it’s only twilight.
I’ve totally forgotten we were supposed to have dinner at this point and shake my head. “No.”
“Wait, you two are having dinner?” Ted raises an eyebrow. “Does Smellanie know?”
I roll my eyes and ignore him, despite a knee-jerk reaction to stomp on his toes for using the hated nickname for my old friend. “I need your help with this Ellen Hargrove thing.”
“Ellen Hargrove?” Ted asks. “That girl who went missing…what was it, over a year ago now?”
“Yes, that one.” I start pacing, but then set Ellen’s backpack in the chair next to Will’s desk. “I think this girl named Autumn Wasserman might have killed her and stolen her baby.”
Will’s eyes go wide. “She was pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“Autumn Wasserman? I knew her. She was…” Ted trails off, his cheeks getting redder and redder as I watch him try to finish.
“What?” I press, about to die from impatience, if that’s a thing.
“Friendly,” he finishes lamely.
“That’s guy talk for easy,” Will informs me.
I make a face at him. “I’m aware. Anyway, she has a baby that looks exactly like Ellen’s ex-boyfriend, and I found this in her closet. It’s Ellen’s, but there’s no way that I can tell to pin down when she left it there.”
Will has perked up, all of his focus on me as the wheels start to turn in his brain. “I can put in a request to have it analyzed, but that’s going to take a couple of days.”
“We don’t have that long.” The pit of dread in my stomach that started with Lindsay’s warning in the car continues to grow. “She loves that kid. If she even thinks we’re on to her, that we might be able to take him away, she might run. Isn’t there some way we could, I don’t know, bring her in for questioning? You can hold her awhile for that, right?”
“Without evidence?” Will rubs his face. “We can, sure. As a person of interest.”
“Do it.”
He nods and picks up the phone, then sends Ted off somewhere to round up his brother for backup. Once he’s done working out the legalities, he stands up, and faces me. Gratitude swamps me—for his trust, for his willingness to go out on a limb. “We’ll leave now.”
“I’m coming with you.”
I can tell he wants to argue but thinks better of it, either because he’s picked up on my urgency or because he knows there’s no point, it’s impossible to say.
It’s ten minutes before Ted gets back, then he and Tom pile into one cruiser while Will and I take the other. He says we’re not allowed to turn on the lights and sirens because she’s not a suspect, and the twenty-minute drive seems to take forever. It’s been almost two hours now since Lindsay and I left Autumn’s house, and every time another minute spools off the clock, my stomach clenches harder.
Her street is as quiet as it was earlier. All of the windows in her blue ranch-style are dark. My fingers curl into fists, my nails pinching into the skin of my palms as I wait for the door to swing open for Will and Ted as they wait on the porch.
Nothing.
Will glances back at me and shakes his head. I roll down the window. “Go in!”
“I can’t break in, Gracie.”
I sigh and get out of the car, bringing my purse and my handy lock-picking kit with me.
Will starts to protest when I pull it out, but Ted puts a hand in front of his chest. “Just let it happen, man.”
If my insides weren’t tied up in knots, the exchange would make me smile. At least someone in this town has learned to stand aside instead of wasting time trying to get in my way. The lock pops open after a brief struggle, a cheap number that wouldn’t have held up under a solid kick.
“There. Now it’s unlocked. No breaking necessary.”
Will doesn’t reply. He and Ted draw their Tasers from their hips—no guns, that’s Will’s rule—and step into the foyer. Tom stays outside with me, his cell phone clutched in his palm while I pace and fidget for the thirty seconds it takes them to sweep the small house and return to me, shadowy in the deepening night.
I know what they’re going to be before the words come out of his mouth, but Will says them anyway.
“They’re gone.”
At the police station, I give Will a detailed account of everything I’ve found out. The forensic people the Heron Creek Police Department contracts out to will be here in an hour to take Ellen’s backpack and scour it for clues, right after they finish going through Autumn’s house in Driftwood. The police force there is as small as the one in Heron Creek and has agreed to cooperate fully.
Will’s on the phone with them now, giving one-word answers with a grim expression on his face that makes me want to shake answers out of him.
He hangs up and looks me in the eye. “They found more of Ellen’s things. Her wallet and an application to the state Medicaid office requesting pregnancy and birth coverage.”
I blow out a breath. “That means she was there after she disappeared. Right?”
“It seems to point to that, yes. Why else would her wallet be there?”
“What can we do?”
Will sits for a few seconds, deep in thought, his fingers steepled under his chin. He sits up straight a moment later, snapping. “I’ve got it. We need help looking for her, and if we could get the father to press kidnapping charges, we could have her face on every news channel in the Southeast.”
“It’s Trent Boone,” I tell him, realizing he hasn’t had time yet to read my statement.
His jaw falls open, but like everything I’ve ever said to Will, it doesn’t take him long to shake his head and get on with what needs to be done. “You have his number?”
I nod, pulling my phone out of my pocket and scrolling through until I get to his name. It rings only once before he picks up.
“Hello? Graciela?”
“Yeah. Listen, Trent…could you come down to the Heron Creek Police Department?”
The pause on the other end of the line seems to go on forever. “Is it about Ellen?”
The defeat in his voice tightens my throat. “Yes.”
I can’t tell him everything on the phone. He needs to be here. But it sucks, letting him think the worst, because I know he’s imagining that we’ve found Ellen’s body.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“He’s on his way,” I tell Will as I hang up, my voice strangled as it squeezes past the lump in my throat. “He lives in Seabrook, though.”
Sitting st
ill gets old after a couple of minutes. My flitting gaze lands on the backpack, waiting for the team to get here to pick it up. “Do you have any gloves?”
“Sure.” He hands over a pair of latex gloves from a box in a desk drawer. “What for?”
“I’m going to go through her backpack again, more carefully.”
I hadn’t had time to see much in the closet and only had Lindsay’s confirmation that nothing of use was inside it. She’d been distracted, at best, after getting a look at what has to be a nephew she never knew existed. From a brother who wants nothing to do with her and vice versa.
The gloves feel loose and powdery on my hands as I unzip the backpack. I pull out the contents and lay them out on Travis’s empty desk, then study them one at a time.
The books. Two bags of Cheetos and one of Cool Ranch Doritos. A chocolate bar. The clothes at the bottom are T-shirts and underwear, and at least one of the former is so huge it must have belonged to a man. Maybe Trent. Maybe her father. Impossible to know.
In the trash, I find a ticket stub from a movie almost three months after she disappeared, for the theater in Driftwood. My mouth goes dry, even though it isn’t proof of anything except that she was still alive at the time. My ghosts can do pretty crazy things, but if they wanted to go to the movies, I imagine they would simply walk straight in and grab an empty seat.
A folded scrap of paper grabs my attention. Inside the creases, I find a list of names. At first, they’re boys and girls, but toward the end, only boy names. As though Ellen had known the baby growing in her belly would be a son. Perhaps she’d gone to a doctor anonymously, or maybe she’d only guessed right.
Either way, my heart stops beating when I see the only name with a circle around it. Noah.
Who could have possibly known that, other than the person Ellen had been with in the days before she gave birth and somehow lost her life?
“We probably have at least two hours to kill before Trent Boone can get here,” Will says, eyeing me. I can only imagine what my face looks like, but the inside of my head is a horror show of emotion. “How about I go ahead and write up the kidnapping charges so we can get them filed as soon as he agrees and you go pick us up some dinner from Pete’s?”
“Dinner?” I repeat like a parrot. “You’re hungry?”
I haven’t eaten since my early lunch, but hungry is the last thing I am.
“Sure. It’s past dinnertime. And we were supposed to have dinner.”
Will should have clocked out twenty minutes ago, to be exact. The look on his face says he’s not going anywhere, and I love him for it. The least I can do is grab us some sandwiches and fries, and besides, I had promised Mel I would talk to him about her new career choice. With hours to kill, I’ll go crazy sitting and twiddling my thumbs.
“Okay. You want a bacon cheeseburger?”
“Yes, with the curly fries.”
“Obviously.” I find a smile and offer it to him. “Anyone who chooses another kind of fry when curly is available is certifiable. And that’s coming from me.” I grab my purse. “I’ll be back soon.”
Pete’s is crowded, which isn’t a surprise for a Saturday night. I make distracted small talk with a couple of people at the bar while I sip a bourbon and Coke and wait for the double order of bacon cheeseburgers and fries. If Will asks who I talked to when I get back to the station or what we discussed, I won’t have a clue.
My fingers curl around the paper takeout bag on the short walk down the block, nearly dropping it when Henry pops up to walk the last hundred yards at my side.
“Henry, I’m sure you don’t know about bacon cheeseburgers, and I’m not familiar enough with the delicacies of your day to make a proper comparison, but if you had made me drop these, I swear, it would have delayed your article by six months.” I glare at him but can’t keep it up after seeing the excitement on his face. A sigh burbles past my lips. “My friend is sending me more information about Elizabeth. She’s the reason you want to be remembered, right? Even after all this time it will feel good for people to know you proved you were good enough for her, after all?”
His solemn nod, followed by the glittering of tears in his eyes, are like a knife straight through my heart. I pause outside the doors to the police station and give him a reassuring smile. “I’m on it, Henry, okay? There’s just a line at the moment, but you’ve been patient enough.”
His gaze flicks toward the door a half second before he disappears, and Tom Ryan pushes open the door. He glances down at the bag in my hand and makes a face. “Nothing in that bag for me, I suppose.”
“I’m not the Wizard of Oz, Ryan. If you want a brain, you’ll have to find your own flying house.”
“Ha-ha. I was thinking more along the lines of Mary Poppins. You do have a fair amount of tricks up your sleeve.”
“Is that so?” I ask, neatly sidestepping his attempt to trip me from behind.
“You’re getting back into the groove. I like it. Makes you more fun.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “When was I not fun?”
“When you first got back. Also when you spent a couple of weeks all moony-eyed over the mayor.”
My jaw falls open. “I was not all moony-eyed.”
“Oh yes you were,” Will confirms, reaching out to take the sack of food from me. He reaches into it and extracts the two Styrofoam containers, setting them on his desk. He picks up a sheaf of papers on the edge and holds them out to Tom. “Look these over for me, will you?”
Tom nods, looking unhappy at being dismissed. The Ryan twins do love their gossip.
I sit and pop open my container, the scent of grease, bacon, and cheese making my stomach decide that perhaps I am hungry, despite all of the craziness. Flavors explode in my mouth, and I have to bite back a moan. “I should eat crap more often.”
Will wipes grease off his lips, one eyebrow raised at me. “Gracie, all you eat is crap.”
“Fair point,” I agree.
We eat in companionable silence for the five minutes it takes me to polish off the rest of my cheeseburger. I pick up ketchup and squirt one packet onto the crinkled paper in my container, summoning not only the nerve but the brain power to have this conversation the way Mel deserves.
“I wanted to have dinner with you so we could talk about something,” I start, feeling like a tool.
“About Mel’s new career plans?” he guesses. I’m not sure whether it’s me or her that he can read so well. Probably both of us.
“Yeah.” I pause, trying and failing to gauge his expression. “What’s your main objection? The danger?”
He sighs and sits back, pushing his half-full container of curly fries away. “I don’t know, Gracie. Honestly. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself.”
“I don’t think it will be that dangerous. The cases Daria works are…dead people. All Mel’s going to do is the background on the houses and properties. Fairly low-key.”
“You mean the way seeing ghosts has been low-key and safe for you?”
“Again, fair point.” I squirt a third ketchup packet, gathering my thoughts. “But Mel won’t be doing what I do. Daria cleanses houses, moves ghosts along. She doesn’t need to solve their mysteries like I do.”
“Then what’s the purpose of my wife doing research for her?”
“Honestly? I think this is an experiment for Daria, too, and so far Mel’s spent more time tidying their office space than researching cases.” I chew a fry, then another, while Will waits for the rest of my thoughts. “The background could give Daria ideas on the best ways to cleanse a property or to make sure that she gets all of the spirits hanging around and doesn’t leave any behind.”
“Do you really believe in all that stuff?” There’s no judgment in his voice, only curiosity.
I shrug. “There’s not much I don’t believe in these days.”
Will seems to consider that, leaning forward to grab some of his fries after all. “I know I should let her do what makes her happy. I guess af
ter everything we’ve been through lately, I’m just worried.”
“That’s what you do, Will.” A soft smile finds my lips. “It’s what you’ve always done: watched out for us. Mel’s your wife. You have a son together, and a daughter on the way. It’s natural to want to protect that, but I promise that you’ll all be a lot happier if Mel is happy.”
His face twists in disgust. “I hate that stupid saying, ‘Happy wife, happy life.’ It’s so insulting.”
“So do I. Like it’s all about just placating your spouse to make your road less bumpy.” I smile bigger. “If you wanted a smooth road, you wouldn’t have married a woman like Mel to begin with.”
“Or fallen for a woman like you,” he adds quietly, his bright blue eyes warm on my face.
It’s odd, sometimes, to acknowledge our past. It would be stranger to ignore it or pretend it never happened, though. Like all first loves, ours changed us both for the better. I wouldn’t trade it, and looking into Will’s eyes, I know that he wouldn’t, either.
“You love difficult women. It’s your curse.”
“And my blessing,” he says with a smile. “I believe you’ve informed me on many occasions that my life would be boring without you.”
“That’s true,” I tell him with a serious expression. “Without us, you’d be the one the Ryan brothers accuse of being not fun.”
“They still say that.”
“Well, they probably have a little bit too much fun, considering they’re impersonating cops now.”
“You know I can hear you,” Ted complains from where he’s plopped at the desk across from his brother.
Will and I laugh, both eating fries now and feeling better. I don’t know whether he’s okay with Mel and her new line of work or he’s going to go along with it for her sake, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll be in a happier place either way.
“I heard you and Beau had a pretty awful double date the other night,” Will comments.
I toss a fry at him. It hits him in the nose. “I don’t want to talk about Leo and his new girlfriend.”
