Ryder

by Hope Stone

  “Oh, we sent them home about an hour ago. We’re inside reviewing security footage and once the crowd was gone we didn’t need crowd control.”

  Dammit. I couldn’t find Ryder or Lily or Bailey.

  “Okay, thanks.” I turned to Maria. “It looks like it’s gonna be a long night for me. If you want to drop me off somewhere, I can take an Uber to the hospital.”

  “No way. I’ll take you there now.”

  “Thanks. I really appreciate it. You’re going way far out of your way for someone you just met.” As we were pulling out of the parking lot, I remembered there was a Starbucks down the block. “Can I get you a coffee or something to say thank you?”

  “Honestly, that sounds really good about now.”

  The news was still talking about what had happened, but there was no real information coming out. My plan was to get some coffee, get to the hospital, and see if the girls were there. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted them to be there, or not.

  I was glad the Starbucks was still open. The hours posted said they closed at 11:00 but there were still a ton of people inside. It had been a very traumatic experience for a lot of people and when that happened, people tended to want to come together.

  Maria had a handicapped placard that she said was from a back injury from when she was pregnant with Mario, and so we were able to park right in front. I was really worried about the girls and just wanted to run in, grab a couple of coffees, and get to the hospital. If the Starbucks had been a drive thru, we wouldn’t have even gotten out of the car.

  “Let’s just grab our coffees and get to the hospital. I’m sure your sister is just fine,” Maria said, gently touching my arm.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “What can I get started for you tonight?” The older woman behind the register was probably the owner and was working so that her employees could go home. Given how packed the place was, she would likely be here all night.

  “Just a tall Americano,” I said.

  “Same,” Maria said.

  As I stuck my debit card chip into the machine, I looked around at all the people here. So many people hugging and crying or looking worried on the phone.

  Speaking of which, I pulled my phone out to see if maybe, just maybe, Bailey had written back.

  My heart leapt when I saw that I had a text message. It wasn’t from Bailey, but it was from Ryder.

  Hey. Where are you? I’ve been trying to call!

  I looked at my phone and somehow the ringer had been turned off.

  OMG I’m sorry. My ringer was off. Where are you? Have you heard from the girls? What happened tonight?

  I haven’t heard from the girls, and I’m still not really sure what happened at the event. I’m at the Starbucks where we were supposed to meet up, but they’re not here.

  I’m at a Starbucks too. Which one are you at?

  The one on third street about four blocks from the convention center.

  My head shot up from my phone and looked around. Ryder was here? Maria came over and handed me my coffee. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Wait. The brother of my sister’s friend is here!” I was looking all around.

  “The who of your what?” she asked.

  “My sister went to the concert with a friend. Her brother is here!” Just then, I saw his dark hair over by the restrooms. “Ryder!”

  His head raised at the sound of his name and I had never been happier to see a familiar face in my life.

  “Oh Ryder!” I ran across the crowded room and straight into his arms. Tears I didn’t know I’d been holding back came streaming out and I pressed my face into his chest. “I am so glad you’re here.”

  The smell of his leather jacket was very comforting and I felt safe in his arms. Between the attack in the parking lot and the girls going missing, there was a lot of pent up emotion as I’d been trying to hold it together.

  I heard someone clear their throat and realized that Maria was standing right there.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” I said, wiping my tears away. “Ryder, this is my neighbor Maria. Maria this is…”

  “The brother of the friend of your sister.” She was smiling. “Nice to meet you.”

  “The police told me to check at La Playa Memorial and so we stopped for some coffee on our way,” I said.

  “I’m glad you did. I was supposed to meet the girls here after the concert but they never showed.” He stood to grab his trash and said, “Let’s go to the hospital together.”

  I looked at Maria, who said, “No worries. I’ll go home and keep your parents company.”

  “Maria, you’ve done so much. You should just go home and rest.”

  She smiled and said, “What are new amigas for?” Holding up her coffee, she said, “Besides. I just had coffee. I can go talk their ears off until you get home.”

  We exchanged phone numbers so that I could keep her updated and then we hugged before she left. She leaned in close and whispered, “That is one fine-looking man, and he’s definitely into you.”

  I didn’t know how she could tell from having met him for five minutes, but I wasn’t going to question it. I had other things on my mind...

  Twenty-Nine

  Ryder

  As soon as my phone powered on, my heart sank. No calls or texts from Lily. There were several missed calls from Paige, and that’s why I decided to text her. Little did I know she was standing a few feet away from me.

  I had to admit, it felt pretty amazing to have her run straight into my arms. A guy could definitely get used to that.

  But first we needed to get to the hospital. I honestly didn’t think that Lily or Bailey would be there. There didn’t appear to have been any fatalities or major injuries from tonight’s chaos, according to the news. If one of them had been hurt, the other surely would have contacted us.

  I didn’t have a good feeling about this at all, but didn’t want to freak Paige out, so I didn’t say anything to her about it.

  It took about twenty minutes to get from downtown La Playa to the hospital. This time of night normally doesn’t have any traffic, and I was glad that the hospital parking lot wasn’t too crowded.

  I stole a glance at Paige as we were looking for a parking space. Despite the chaos of the evening, she looked gorgeous. She’d changed since dinner and her hair was up in one of those messy buns that looked sexy and casual. My body started to remember our passionate kiss from earlier, but my mind stayed focused on the task at hand. Find the girls.

  “I hope they’re here, Ryder,” she said as we pulled the car into a space next to the Emergency Room. “I can’t imagine why no one has contacted us.”

  I reached over to squeeze her hand, and said with more confidence than I felt, “Everything is going to be okay.” Maybe if I said it, it would be true.

  The line for the information desk wasn’t long, but the woman behind the computer must have been a hundred years old. We stood there for a good fifteen minutes while she yelled “What?” and “Could you speak up?” to the people in front of us.

  Finally, it was our turn. “Hi. Our sisters were at the convention center tonight and we wondered if they had been brought here.”

  “What?” she said. Her brown eyes were watery and her dark skin was so wrinkled it looked like a fabric bag that had been through the washer too many times.

  “Our sisters. We need to know if they are here.” I enunciated very clearly.

  She looked at Paige. “Is this your sister?”

  “No. We both have sisters and we want to know if they are here,” Paige said. This would be funny if we weren’t so worried.

  “Oh. Okay. What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Mine is Lily Hernandez.”

  The woman started to hunt and peck on the keyboard.

  “And mine is Bailey Anton.”

  Her head shot up. “Which is it?”

  “Both,” we said in unison.

  She gave us a blank look and then said, “Your siste
r has all those names?”

  “No! There are two sisters!” I was looking around for her supervisor. This was ridiculous.

  “Oh. Why didn’t you just say so? What are their names?”

  Paige shot me a look and I took a deep breath. I have never wanted to punch an old woman in my life, but this one was coming close.

  “Lily Hernandez. L-I-L-Y.”

  “What? Can you speak up?”

  It took us almost half an hour to find out that Lily and Bailey were not at the hospital. While part of me was relieved, the bigger part of me was really worried. Where the hell could they be?

  “So, tell me what happened again? From the beginning?” Paige was sitting in the front seat of my car with her knees up, hugging them.

  “We left La Passarelli when you saw us. We were a few blocks from the convention center and they wanted to be let out so that they could see some t-shirts and stuff this guy was selling. We were going to meet up at the Starbucks after the concert.”

  “And you never saw them again after that?”

  “No. After the explosion by the waterfront…”

  “Wait, what?”

  “There was an explosion by the waterfront a few minutes before everything went down inside the convention center.”

  “What kind of explosion?”

  I shook my head and decided not to get into it. “No one knew. But needless to say the security team was on alert. So I went and tried to find the girls in their seats but the band was just coming on stage and it was too crazy to see anything.”

  Paige was frowning and had a confused expression. “Okay. So then what?”

  “Then I went outside to talk to Padre and someone inside the convention center heard three pops that they thought was gunfire, and evidently everyone else did too, because people started running out of every door. I went in to try and find them, but people were getting trampled and by the time I made it to the floor, they were gone.”

  “And then you went to the meet up place and they weren’t there either.”

  “Right.” We just sat there in silence for a bit, each lost in our own thoughts.

  “Should we go to the police?”

  I shook my head. “There’s no point yet. Two sixteen-year-old girls go to a concert and they don’t show up at the appointed meeting place after the concert? It doesn’t exactly sound fishy.”

  “Right, but Bailey would never just not call. It’s completely out of character for her.”

  I wished I could say the same thing about Lily. I knew the next person I needed to talk to, and did not want Paige to be with me for it. “Look. Why don’t I take you home and I’ll talk to some people and see what our next move is?”

  She sighed. “Normally, I’d say that I wanted to keep looking but my parents are at my apartment and I’d better get over there and do some damage control. Poor Maria is alone with them.”

  I started the car and pulled out of the space to head back to North La Playa. While Paige was going to be doing damage control, the rage filling my belly told me that I was about to do some serious damage myself.

  Thirty

  Paige

  I could see the lights still on in Maria’s apartment as Ryder pulled up front. I really didn’t want to go in there, partly because I wanted to stay with Ryder and partly because I didn’t want to deal with my parents.

  What I wanted was to be inside my apartment, eating tacos with Bailey and Lily. Tears sprung to my eyes. What would I do if something happened to her?

  “Don’t think about it, Paige,” Ryder said. He reached out and pulled me over for a hug. “I will find the girls. I promise you that, okay?”

  I looked in his face and saw fierce determination. He would find them.

  He opened his car door and came around to let me out. “Let me walk you to the door.”

  The last thing I needed was to be questioned by my parents, so I said, “Just stay and watch me walk in from here, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I wrapped my arms around him, inside of his leather jacket, for a hug. He felt so good and strong that I never wanted to leave. Reluctantly, I pulled back. “Keep me posted, okay? Call me as soon as you know anything.”

  “I will.”

  I then walked the path up to Maria’s apartment, dreading what waited for me inside.

  “Where have you been?” My mother stood up from the couch as soon as Maria closed the door behind me. “Where’s Bailey? Did she go up to your apartment?”

  “Rosemary, let the girl inside before you start peppering her with questions.” My dad’s face was literally pale with worry.

  “I just want to know, Russell. Where is your sister, Paige?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know. We couldn’t find her.”

  “You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know? First you lie to us about going to the concert with your sister, and then you LOSE HER?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened, honestly.”

  Maria was looking at me empathetically. “I’m sorry, Paige.”

  “Come on Russell. Hand me my purse. We’re going to the police to sort this out.”

  My dad stood up and was looking around for my mother’s Louis Vuitton bag.

  “Mom. The police aren’t going to do anything. She’s sixteen and is late coming home from a concert.”

  “Like hell they won’t,” she said.

  “Look. Why don’t we go upstairs to my apartment and let Maria get some sleep. We’ll wait a little while and if we don’t hear anything by morning, I’ll drive us to the police station.”

  My mother looked at my dad, and he said, “She’s making sense, Rosemary. They won’t do anything until at least the morning.”

  Maria went to the fridge and got the bag of food I’d bought earlier at Southgate. For a moment I remembered the attack, but put it out of my mind as fast as possible. “Thank you so much for everything, Maria.”

  “Of course, amiga. Keep me posted, okay?”

  I hugged her and ushered my parents out her front door. “My place is up here.”

  I opened the door and held it for my parents to go in first. It was strange to go inside and see everything as if I were seeing it for the first time through their eyes. When I’d left the apartment earlier this evening, I was just running out for a few minutes to get some snacks for the girls. Now, it was 2:00 am, I’d been accosted in a parking lot, Bailey had gone missing, and my parents were standing in my living room.

  The apartment was really bare. Just a leather couch I’d gotten from the thrift store, along with a coffee table that I’d found by a dumpster outside of Tiny’s. I was using inverted milk crates as end tables, which I thought was a very clever idea until I saw my mother staring at them.

  “Are these my lamps?” she said.

  “No, those are the ones I got at the Hendersons’ garage sale last year and was storing in our garage.”

  “Ah. I thought they looked familiar.”

  “So, are you going to give us the grand tour?” my dad said, trying to break the tension.

  Grateful for the diversion, I said, “Well, what you see is what you get. This is the living room and that is the kitchen. In there is the bathroom.” I walked about ten steps to my doorway. “And this is my bedroom.”

  Noting the papers and notebook on my bed, my dad said, “Still doing homework?”

  “Actually, it was research.” I paused for a moment trying to decide if I was going to talk to my dad about the business idea now or not. On the one hand, we were all really worried about Bailey. But there was nothing any of us could do now but wait, and maybe it would get our minds off of it. So I grabbed the notebook and papers and went back out to the living room. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “Me? You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Is this my 2017 Caymus Cabernet?” my mother said, holding up a bottle of 2017 Caymus Cabernet I’d snagged from her wine cellar. “That you’re drinking out o
f a...Wonder Woman cup?”

  Damn. I wasn’t exactly expecting company. “Oh, yeah. I’ve been meaning to thank you for that.”

  “Thank me?” She looked confused.

  “Yeah. For the housewarming gift.”

  “I didn’t give you a…”

  “Anyway, come over here and sit down. You can have a glass of the wine if you’d like, Mom.”

  Both of my parents came to sit on the couch. I hadn’t had a chance to prepare what I was going to say to them, but I was pretty excited about the idea I’d come up with.

  “Mom. Dad. I have a business proposition I’d like to run by you.”

  From the looks on their faces I wondered if maybe I should wait. But, I really didn’t want to.

  The idea was still fresh in my mind, and unless I wanted to sit there and be on the receiving end of my mother’s judgment all night long, I should get them thinking of something else. Let her judge the business idea instead of my personal life.

  “Before we get started, can I ask you a question?” my mother asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s that bruise on your neck? It looks like a handprint.”

  My hand instinctively flew up to my neck and I raced to the bathroom. Sure enough, looking back at me through the cloudy mirror was a handprint. From that asshole in the parking lot. I had a mark on my neck from where he had his disgusting hands on me.

  The panic and fear that I’d been holding back came rushing out. That experience had been traumatic enough. What if Bailey and Lily were being held captive and raped right now?

  I started to hyperventilate and cry.

  “Paige? Are you okay?” My dad came into the bathroom. “What’s the matter honey?” I didn’t want to tell them what had happened to me, because it would just add credibility to their feeling that I wasn’t safe living here and couldn’t handle myself.

  On the other hand, I was standing in my bathroom with a big purple handprint on my neck hyperventilating and crying.