I tipped the drink down, and instantly regretted it.
Rather than the usual burn from the alcohol as it slid down my throat, the whiskey lit my taste buds up and set a fire to my tongue. As it rolled through my mouth, the initial kick lessened. The taste was sweet, far sweeter than I was used to. After I’d swallowed the liquid amber, a pleasant aftertaste lingered in my throat.
It wasn’t what I was used to, but overall it wasn’t bad. It would have been better if I’d been prepared for it.
I pushed Beau’s glass toward him. “That’s got some kick.”
“Heh, yeah. It ain’t called Fireball for nothin’.” Even as he said the words, he pressed Play on the projector and the screen flashed to life.
Before I could tell him to stop, to wait a moment so I could collect my thoughts before I had to see it, he slid the remote over to me and stared at the screen like a starved man might look at a sirloin steak.
I wasn’t sure I could do it—sit in the room where I’d have to watch him watch her. The words, “Get the fuck out,” were ready on my tongue, when a man’s voice asked Phoebe if she was ready to go.
“Whenever you are.” My knees buckled as I saw my baby on the screen. Her voice was full of life, full of the joy that I was used to—the lilt that had been torn away before the last call she’d made to me. Instead of telling Beau to leave—I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to voice the words without my throat constricting—I moved to the light switch in the room and flicked them off, plunging the room into darkness.
When I took a seat at the table again, I poured myself another generous glass of the whiskey. I’d have to be careful how much I had, but I couldn’t continue without something more. The interviewer confirmed with her the clause I knew well. The one that had given me access to the recording. When Phoebe responded, she looked so serene. So goddamn happy. The opposite of the way she’d sounded when she called me. I forced down a mouthful of whiskey to drown the sobs that threatened to escape me.
As the interview progressed, they went through some of the standard “extras” fans wanted to know about. Things like music tastes and playlists. When she mentioned two country songs as her top favourites before going on to explain that she was willing to try to be a country fan for someone special, my gaze sought out Beau despite the darkness.
He was captivated by the screen, and I could’ve sworn a tear rolled down one cheek.
Her words. His reaction. It all pointed to one fact.
Beau hadn’t been lying when he said she’d gone to him. That she had decided to be with him after all.
Her next statement, “He’s actually the reason I’m here in the States at all,” proved it beyond all doubt.
Where did it go wrong, Pheebs?
Across the table from me, Beau shoved out of his chair and stalked away. I tried to ignore him and watch the interview. Tried to focus on any little clue about Phoebe’s behaviour, or anything she said that might indicate why she’d left if things had been going okay between the two of them.
When the conversation turned to how excited she was to be in the car, I reached for the remote. All it was doing was solidify the nagging worry inside me; the certainty that it wasn’t just her running away from her responsibilities. Something was wrong.
And perhaps Beau was the perfect ally to find out what.
I stopped the recording and climbed from my chair. I covered half the distance to where Beau stood facing the back of the room. The hand at his side shook, the other scrubbed at his face—as if clearing away tears.
“She really loves you.” I hated to admit it, but it was undeniable in light of the footage I’d witnessed. When Phoebe was talking about Beau, she looked so much like Alyssa did when reciting her vows on our wedding day. As though a light had been switched on within. “She lights up just like her mother whenever she talks about you.”
Why did that light go dim after this interview?
“How d’ya know it’s me she’s talkin’ about?” Both of his hands rubbed at his face and his voice was thick, choked by tears, as he asked the question.
It was the easiest question in the world to answer, and yet the weight of implications around it made my tongue heavy. “There’s only one reason she came to the States. One person she came for. And it wasn’t Xavier. Whatever might’ve happened between then and now, that much is true.” I moved closer to him and rested one hand on his shoulder. “We need to find her. For both our sakes.”
When he asked whether the footage might help convince the police that she didn’t willingly run off, I said a silent prayer that it would. If it was the evidence they needed to open a case, I would let them have it. As I tried to puzzle around what could have happened between then and the phone call, I asked a question the police had asked me—one I couldn’t give an answer to because it seemed unfathomable to me. Other than the typical high school bullies, she’d never had enemies. “Do you know if there’s anyone who would want to hurt her?”
“There is someone.”
My gaze shot to Beau as he said the words. Someone would want to hurt Phoebe? The yes had rolled off his tongue so readily it was clear he’d thought about it. “Who?”
He told me about some arsehole named Jase and how he’d attacked Phoebe before being kicked off the team.
Another lie. Another secret. I was starting to wonder whether I even knew my daughter at all anymore. There had been a time when there was nothing hidden, and now I didn’t know anything she’d faced. Alone. In another country.
While I was trying to recover from learning we’d sent her into a workplace where she’d been attacked, Beau offered another blow. The car she’d been promised still had a driver attached when she’d joined the team. Her contract had been the death knoll on his. It wasn’t what Alyssa and I had been told. We’d been informed that he was moving on to another team.
Although Beau swore he didn’t think it could be possible the deposed driver, Cash, was responsible for Phoebe’s disappearance, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was now back in the car. In her car. An opportunity he could have easily made for himself by . . .
I had to cut the thought off so I didn’t lose my tenuous grip on reality. Things had gone from perfect to fucked up and confusing in record fucking time.
After checking whether there was anyone else Beau thought might have reason to hurt Phoebe, I gave him my business card and took his in return. I wasn’t exactly happy to be working with him—I still didn’t know whether or not to trust his seemingly earnest personality—but if it helped me find out what happened to Phoebe and where she was now, I wasn’t going to burn any bridges.
As soon as I pocketed his business card, he looked like he was going to say something more, but stopped himself. Then his gaze found the floor. “Are ya gonna release any information about her goin’ missin’?”
It was a question that had persisted in my mind for the better part of the afternoon, and having seen the footage of her so happy—footage taken less than a day before she disappeared—it was the only thing that made sense as a next step. That and going back to the police and demanding action.
At Beau’s request, I agreed to delay the press release until he was back with the team and could tell them firsthand that as far as I was concerned, Phoebe was officially missing.
As the words echoed in my head, they formed a knife that plunged deep into my heart.
My baby girl is missing.
AFTER OUR AGREEMENT, Beau moved to disconnect the hard drive from the projector.
“Leave it,” I croaked. “I want to watch the rest.”
“Yes, sir. Would ya like me to leave the bottle too?”
I had no idea how he could know how desperately I needed to keep drinking. All I wanted was for him to leave the bottle. If I did that though, how soon would I be drowning at the bottom of it? How long would it be before I’d be making stupid decisions again? I couldn’t go back to that. I knew my limit these days, and it was easy to recall promises I’d
made to Alyssa over a decade ago to not use alcohol as a salve. No matter how fucking badly I needed it.
“Best not tempt fate,” I said, pushing the bottle back toward him.
Ignoring the bottle, he grabbed the tumblers. “I’ll get these cleaned up, and then head off.”
Leaving him to do his self-appointed chores, I grabbed the remote to continue the interview that had been paused. When Phoebe’s voice filled the room again, she was talking about her motorbike.
Her lip stuck out in a pout I was so familiar with as she added, “Not that I can ride it at the moment. I’ve been banned until the ice clears from the roads. It’s here actually. Do you want to see it?”
When the journalist agreed, Phoebe leapt off her chair and led the camera over to where her bike was in storage. While still filming, they did some still photos of her on the bike.
Behind me, I heard a choking sound. Taking care not to move too fast or draw attention to myself, I shifted my head to the side and glanced back to Beau with my peripheral vision. One hand covered his eyes and he was taking slow breaths through his nose. The footage had upset him, that much was clear. But was it concern or guilt that caused his angst? I had no way of knowing, and couldn’t trust anything he said if I asked him outright.
“She’s a natural on her bike,” he said after a moment, no doubt aware I’d spotted his return.
“There isn’t much with a motor she isn’t a natural on.” It was impossible to keep the pride out of my voice. Ever since she’d voiced her concerns that maybe she was only on the track because of who I was, I’d tried to take a more critical view of her driving, but it was impossible to see anything other than what was in front of me. She had a way of squeezing a few extra fractions of a second, a few extra kilometres per hour, out of every machine she touched.
The thing was, I was good at driving. In my day, I’d won multiple championships and even with the great big speed bump in my career—or possibly because of it—I had gone down in history.
Even I wasn’t too proud to admit that she was better than me.
Better than almost any driver I’d ever seen. And I didn’t just think that because she was my daughter. Not all of our family were as in tune with cars and motors as she was. In fact, she had more talent for driving in one little finger than Brock had in his whole body. He was built all wrong for getting behind the wheel professionally, taking after Alyssa’s brother, Josh, far more than he did me. He could get around a kart track respectively well enough, but would never make it as a racer—not that he cared. He’d never had the same affinity for engines or passion for racing as Phoebe or me. His passion was basketball and a career as a professional in a suit, and he was perfectly suited to that desire.
Thoughts of all my kids, their individual talents and dreams, crashed over me. God, I missed them. I missed Beth’s sweetness as she made sure everyone was taken care of at breakfast; Parker’s sense of humour and the way he idolised both Phoebe and Brock; and Nikki’s little arms wrapped around my neck as I carried her out of her crib. I even missed Brock’s newly found attitude—becoming fourteen had apparently been some turning point on his path through puberty.
“You woulda been so proud of her in the stock car.” Beau’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. “She struggled at first, mostly ’cause she was havin’ a difficult time adjustin’ to bein’ here, but then—” A wistful sigh left him. “—she found her rhythm. It was a thing o’ beauty.”
I couldn’t respond because my emotions had stolen my voice. I would’ve been proud of her even if everything had fallen to pieces for her. She’d been trying something new and different. She’d followed her heart, and hadn’t given up on her dreams to do it. But I’d never got a chance to see her race. I focused on the screen in front of me.
When I didn’t respond, Beau grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the table. “I . . . uh, I should probably head on out. Are ya all right with this equipment?”
“Yeah, I’m sure I can figure it out. It’s not much different from our set-up at home.”
With the bottle still in his hands, he stopped by the table. “If there’s anythin’ else ya need—”
“Yeah, I’ve got your number.”
He hung his head and dropped the hand holding the bottle of whiskey to his side. “Yeah. Ya do.”
After he’d left, I turned up the sound and sat watching the interview to the end. Phoebe didn’t reveal anything more, and all it did was add more barbs to the wires around my heart.
Once I’d watched the whole thing twice, I packed up the hard drive and made my way back through the offices. I hoped the time I’d spent had been enough to let the alcohol I’d had burn through my system. As I turned off the lights, defeat rolled through me, weighing down my shoulders and leaving me exhausted.
When I reached the hotel, I was ready for sleep—especially considering the early morning I was supposed to have in order to meet the superintendent for Phoebe’s building so he could let me into her apartment. I couldn’t go to bed though; there was still too much I needed to do before I could rest.
I booted up my laptop and hooked into the hotel’s Wi-Fi to upload the interview footage to Emmanuel Racing’s server so that Alyssa could watch it too. It wasn’t fair that I’d been able to see those snippets of our daughter’s life over here and Alyssa had been left to deal with the family, the business, and everything else back home without anything to comfort her.
While I watched the upload tick over slowly, my eyes dragged closed. I rested my head on the table to rest for just a moment.
I woke to my Skype chiming with a call from home. The grey of dawn was creeping in through the open curtains.
Fuck.
I straightened, and an ache in my back and neck were my reward for the night spent asleep at the table. Goddamn it!
Even as I shifted from side to side to stretch out my back, I pushed to answer the call.
“Have you slept at all?” were the first words from her mouth.
“A bit.” The words weren’t specifically a lie.
“How are you going? You didn’t let me know how you went on with the police? What did they say? Have you heard anything more? What’s happening there?”
Despite the situation, I had to chuckle. “How about one question at a time?”
“Sorry, I’m just going crazy over here. There’s so much going on, and I feel so helpless.” The expression she wore, the dark circles under her eyes, and the fact that her hair was drawn up into a simple ponytail were all testament to her words.
I launched into the story of my afternoon with the police, told her about the interview and that I’d uploaded it onto the servers, and explained my plan of attack for what I’d do next—including making a shortlist of everyone who might have had reason to hurt her.
Alyssa paled as I spoke. “You . . . you really think she’s been . . . taken?”
“I don’t know what to think. All I know is when she recorded that interview, she was her normal self and practically declared her love for this Beau character, and it was less than a day later she made that call home. Something spooked her, or someone was with her. Something happened.”
“The police didn’t find anything at any of the hospitals?”
“If they did, they didn’t call me. I’m going to see them again later today though, take them that footage and prove that she didn’t just take a vacation.”
“What do you need me to do?”
I told her about Max and asked her to talk to him. “Then talk to Mum, find out if there is anything she can remember that seemed odd.”
“She’s already told us about her trip.”
“Yeah, but that was before. You need to talk to her again. Make her remember anything she can.”
“I’ll call her when we’re finished.”
“Angel too.”
Alyssa nodded.
“And I need you to draft up a press release about Phoebe’s disappearance.”
Her lip quivered, as if
hearing those words drove home the reality that Phoebe really might be in trouble. “Okay,” she whispered.
“Just . . . don’t release it yet. I promised Beau I’d give him a chance to tell the team in person when he returns to Florida on Wednesday.”
“You’re not coming home anytime soon, are you?” Tears flooded her eyes as she asked the clearly rhetorical question.
“I’m sorry.”
“Just find her. That’s all that matters, Dec. Find her and bring her home safe.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I know.” She met and held my gaze as wordless concern passed between us.
“Do you think it’s worth offering a reward?” I asked.
She stared at her hands for a moment. “It can be a double-edged sword. I think maybe we keep it up our sleeves for the moment.”
I nodded as I tried to find focus again.
“There’s something else I needed to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“Veronica called for you again.”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. The woman was relentless. She had been ever since she’d approached me at Dad’s funeral, but I wasn’t willing or able to listen to her story. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “I hope you told her that I don’t have time for her shit.”
Alyssa’s brow dipped, and I knew the words that would come next. The same ones she’d said every time Veronica was mentioned. “I think you at least need to hear her out.”
“When Phoebe’s not missing and I don’t have all this other shit going on, then maybe I will. Right now, I couldn’t care less about her claims.”
“I get it. I do.” Alyssa drew her ponytail over her shoulder and played with the ends. “But I don’t think she’s going anywhere until you do.”
“Can you please just buy me some time with her? A few weeks. Then . . . I’ll see.”
Decay (Phoebe Reede: The Untold #3.2 Declan Reede: The Untold Story #6) Page 6
