by Gregg Olsen
“Got it,” he said. “The guy is an ass. If he treats his wife like he treats his dealership secretary, I’d have left him, too. Pregnant or not.”
Emily started for the door. “We’re in sync. I’ll run up to Spokane and see if anyone saw her yesterday.”
The saleswoman behind the counter at Chelsea’s Natural Baby probably hadn’t eaten a full meal in five years. Her gaunt visage was a sharp contrast to the lovely photographs of pink-cheeked babies and their madonna-esque mothers in designer clothes that ran along the back wall of the boutique. She had black hair that she wore swept back, held in place with an impossibly large tortoiseshell clip. Her skin was pale, almost the color of chalk. Her nails, blood red.
Emily approached her and she snapped her cell phone shut.
“I’m Caprice. Are you shopping for a grandbaby?”
Emily shook her head and wondered how bad she looked. Not that bad.
“I’m Emily Kenyon, Cherrystone Sheriff. I’m not a grandmother, thank you. I’m here on business.”
Caprice had small birdlike eyes that she tried to make look larger by applying bold strokes of black eyeliner. She glanced at Emily and then away across the store at a teenage girl who entered from the main mall entrance.
She gathered her lips in a puckered frown. “Sorry. How can I help you, Sheriff Kenyon?”
Emily held out a photograph from the county’s security badging office. In it, Mandy’s hair was a little longer, and her face a little thinner than when she’d last been seen. She set it on the counter and waited.
Caprice looked down at the image. Recognition came quickly. “She’s bigger now. Yes, she’s a customer. A good one with negligible taste, but charge cards with plenty of room. Amanda Crawford is her name.”
Caprice had insulted Mandy, but at least she had a good memory.
“Thank you. When did you see her last?”
“It’s been awhile. Not for a couple of weeks. I can check our records, if you want to wait a moment. I’m the manager here.”
Chimes sounded that indicated another shopper had entered and Caprice looked a little distracted as she kept her eyes on the teenager who started hovering by a hanging garden of baby dresses.
“Dior,” she said, whispering. “I have to watch that girl. You wouldn’t believe the number of shoplifters we get in here. Having a baby apparently means being a thief for some of these younger ones.”
Emily nodded, not because she believed for one minute what Caprice was saying, but because Caprice was the type of woman who needed to deride every person that came into her shop.
“Maybe you can arrest her if she steals something,” Caprice went on. “You know the type. Pregnant and stupid. Or stupid and pregnant.” When the shop manager took a breath, Emily steered the conversation back to Mandy.
“About Mrs. Crawford. Are you sure it has been a couple of weeks? You didn’t see her here yesterday?”
She let out a sigh. “I’m sure. Yesterday was slow. I could have used a new mom with a decent credit limit. I had a shipment of pink blankets from Paris that she would have liked—or that I could have sold her, anyway.” She laughed, like she was trying to be facetious. Emily knew better.
“She was going to have a girl?” Emily asked.
“Pink and lavender, that’s all she wanted to see.”
Emily thanked her and went down the mall to the Baby Gap.
No one had seen Mandy there, either. It was likely Mitch Crawford’s wife had disappeared before she ever made it to Spokane.
As Emily departed the mall, she wondered why a dour hard-liner like Caprice felt a need to run a place in which she loathed her clientele. What happened to the women who worked in such shops and radiated the joy of motherhood? Mandy wasn’t a missing woman to Caprice, but a missing customer.
Emily scoured the parking lot for her car. As she walked across the lot, she couldn’t help but think of her time in places like Chelsea’s when she was a young mother looking for the perfect little dress for the daughter who ultimately would always be the center of her life. She favored mint and lavender for her daughter, no pinks whatsoever. She wanted her to be the pretty little girl, Daddy’s Girl, as she’d been, but strong, too. She carried a bittersweet image of those early years with David and Jenna. He’d been the young, handsome intern and their baby had been a delightful surprise. In the beginning, as she worked her schedule as a Seattle Police detective around a new baby and a husband who was always at the hospital, she’d held out hope that easier times would come. All young couples struggle in the beginning.
Emily sat in her car, taking in the flood of memories. She watched a woman and her three children climb into the gleaming silver of their brand-new SUV. The car was expensive. More than fifty thousand dollars, she thought. She wondered if the husband part of that family’s equation was more welcoming of the children than David had been of Jenna.
David Kenyon could not take the spontaneity, the uncertainty that comes with a free-willed child. At the hospital, he was God; in control of the very lives of his patients. At home, he was a husband and a father. He couldn’t make the tiny pieces of a real, dynamic life fit in his ordered, unyielding world of medical emergencies. He couldn’t understand why Emily had wanted to catch the killer, put the baby rapist in prison, and stop the murder plot of an old man’s greedy family.
But most of all, he could never understand why Jenna had to come first.
She’d loved David so much back then. Deeply so. She’d seen his need to keep things ordered and under control as central to who he was as a doctor. But she had needs, too. Her life was about being a mother, a wife, a cop. She saw no shame in those ambitions, in that order.
She turned the key in the car and pulled into light traffic.
Chapter Four
“Sheriff Kenyon,” she said, holding the phone to her ear. Outside her office door, she could hear Gloria chatting with Jason about something—judging by their laughter, it had nothing to do with the case at hand. There was nothing to laugh about there. Just the uneasy feeling that Mandy Crawford’s vanishing act might not have been her own doing.
The person on the other line gasped. A crackle. Then, silence.
“Are you there?” Emily asked.
Another crackle.
“Hello?”
“Sheriff Kenyon? This is Hillary Layton. Mandy’s mother.” There was anguish in every syllable.
Emily had been expecting the call. She both dreaded and longed for such calls. They were always enveloped in worry, regret, and heartache, but they were necessary to move any investigation forward. She’d left messages at Luke and Hillary Layton’s Spokane home. The answering machine indicated that they’d be “in and out” but would be checking messages. Mitch Crawford had told Emily that Mandy’s parents were vacationing in Mexico and he had no way of knowing how to reach them.
“Mrs. Layton,” Emily said, “I’m so sorry.”
It wasn’t much, but it was heartfelt, and really, all she could say. Right then, they had not a scintilla of evidence pointing to Mandy’s whereabouts. The rest of the conversation would be driven by the mother of a missing young woman.
“Any sign of my daughter?”
Emily could tell that the woman, so far from the snowy Northwest, was about to shatter into a million pieces. “Nothing. But we’re working every lead we can. Where are you?”
“Puerto Vallarta. Mandy and Mitch sent us down here for a week—they have points in a timeshare. I didn’t want to go, because she’s so close to her due date. But she wanted us to go. She was so insistent. I can’t believe that she’s left him. She never told me anything.” Mrs. Layton took a deep breath. “Just a minute.”
Emily heard Mandy’s mother put her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone and say something to someone standing nearby. The break in the conversation gave Emily a split second to collect her thoughts. She wondered why Hillary Layton would leave her daughter with her first grandchild due any day. It seemed peculiar.
A man’s voice could be heard in the background. It was the heavy growl of a big man. An angry man.
“The guy’s a self-centered sack of crap!”
“Shhh! Luke. That’s not helping!”
Emily tried to defuse the anger, with a calming tone. “Mrs. Layton—”
“Hillary, please.”
“Hillary, then, where do you think Mandy might have gone? Are you close?”
“I don’t know where she is. And yes, we are extremely close. I saw her once a week and we talked on the phone almost every day. We’re as close as a mother and daughter can be, yet still have our own lives. After I got your message, I called her girlfriends, Sammy, Dee, Caroline, and Sierra. No one knows anything.”
One name caught Emily’s attention. “Who’s Sammy?”
“Samantha Phillips, her best friend. She lives on West Highland Drive. Married to a dentist.”
Emily knew who Dr. Dan Phillips was. He’d taken over Dr. Cassidy’s dental practice—the one that had seen half of Cherrystone through their first cavities in grade school to the trauma of impacted wisdom teeth in college. Cherrystone was more than a six-degrees-of-separation type of town, she thought. More like three degrees. Emily seized on Samantha’s name because she never heard it mentioned before. When Mitch gave Deputy Howard a list of those with the tightest bonds to his missing wife, Sammy’s name hadn’t been among them.
Emily’s eyes landed on the photo of Mandy that the women from the county clerk’s office had brought in for a missing persons poster they’d made. She wondered when the photo had been taken.
“When are you coming back?” she asked.
“Tonight. We’re leaving PV tonight. First flight we could get seats on. Alaska Airlines through LAX.”
“All right. We’re doing everything we can to find her. I want you and Mr. Layton to come to my office when you get back home.”
Hillary Layton finally lost her fractured composure and started to cry. “Sheriff, do you think she sent us away because she wanted to leave Mitch? Or maybe…you know, something really bad happened to her.”
Emily had worked missing persons cases in Seattle. She knew that the first hours were crucial, and in the absence of any reason for Amanda to flee, chances were that she was either abducted or injured somewhere. Or dead. Few people went missing longer than a day without one of those reasons accounting for their disappearance.
Yet to the mother on the phone, hope was essential just then.
“Hillary, please, don’t think the worst. Right now, we have to turn every stone. We need to focus our energies on finding your daughter. That’s what we’re doing. We’re rolling on this at one hundred miles an hour.”
Hillary stopped crying. “Thank you, Sheriff. My husband and I will see you tomorrow.”
Emily hung up and picked up the photo. She felt a small surge of hope. If Mitch Crawford was, in fact, involved with Mandy’s disappearance, then he’d made his first mistake. He’d lied when he said he didn’t know exactly where to reach his in-laws. Even if there was some reason that he didn’t know which timeshare unit they’d been sent to, he surely could have tracked them with a call to the resort company’s customer service center. After all, Mr. and Mrs. Layton were using his resort points for their stay.
It was a stupid lapse, all right, but it made Emily smile.
There was also the matter of Sammy Phillips, Mandy’s closest friend, another oversight on Mitch’s part. He’d never mentioned her.
The Phillips residence was everything Mitch Crawford’s house could never be. It wasn’t in a gated community, with the pretentious accoutrements of a wannabe estate. It was grand and authentic, a vintage home decked out in holiday finery that was subtle and respectful for the season. The two-story white colonial had an oversize gilded eucalyptus wreath on each of the double doors. Tiny faux candlelights were set in each of the fourteen windows on the street side of the house.
It was dusk when Emily arrived. She parked on the street, slick with melted snow. She’d never been inside the house; however, she knew its history. No matter how long the Phillipses would live there, Cherrystone old-timers would always call it the Justin House. It was named for Herbert Justin, a banker who’d had it built and lived there with his wife, Matilda, until he died at eighty-one and she was shuttled off to a rest home in Portland to be near her kids.
It was sold three weeks after the old lady was sent packing “for her own good.”
Samantha Phillips was a stunning blonde with green eyes. She stood in the doorway as Emily made her way up the steps, wrapping her arms around her black-cashmere-clad torso and shuddered at the cool air.
“Come inside, it’s getting a little more than brisk out here again,” Samantha said, looking out across the sky, which was dark with the threat of rain or snow.
Emily followed her into the two-story entryway, across blue Persian rugs with a pile so deep that it nearly sucked the heels off her shoes. Samantha had a teapot on a tray with some of the delicate rolled cookies that Emily knew were krumkake, the same that her mother had made for the holidays. The room was dominated by a ten-foot-tall tree that, by fragrance alone, indicated that it was a real Balsam fir.
“I see you’re Norwegian,” she said, looking at the cookies.
A warm smile came over Samantha’s face. “The krumkake. Have one, please. My great-grandmother’s family was from Oslo, and these cookies are about the only Norwegian tradition that I have.” Samantha motioned for Emily to sit. They faced each other in matching mohair love seats, obviously real and perfectly at home in the grand old house, stuffed with tasteful antiques and paintings.
“Your home is lovely,” Emily said, taking it all in.
“Thank you, but I take no credit for it. My husband had the guts to buy it when we really didn’t have the money. We do now, of course,” she said, catching herself in a flutter of weakness that she didn’t like to share with strangers. “The practice is thriving, I mean.”
There was a kind of awkwardness in the air. Emily knew that Samantha was chattering on to fill up as much time as possible, so as not to have to talk about what was really on her mind.
“I voted for you,” Samantha said, as odd a non sequitur as Emily had ever heard.
Emily smiled graciously. “Thank you. I appreciate your vote. We need to talk about Mandy, Samantha. This is very important. Her mother tells me that you’re her best friend. Is that right?”
Samantha poured tea, a cup for each of them. She motioned to the sugar. Emily declined.
“We knew each other in college,” Samantha said, swirling sugar into the steaming amber liquid. “We were freshman roommates. We were that strange pairing of girls that actually clicked. Most of the girls who were paired off with high school friends ended up hating each other by Christmas. Not us.”
“You’re not from here, are you?” Emily asked, already knowing the answer. She knew everyone with deep roots in Cherrystone, because she had them herself.
She shook her head, and Emily noticed for the first time that the diamonds on Samantha Phillips’s earlobes had to be at least two carats each.
“No, but I’m here because of Mandy. I was out here visiting her and Mitch, and I met Dan at a party.”
“Did you know Mitch well?”
“Well enough to hate him, if that’s what you want to know.”
Emily set down her cup. “How come?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I hated him because Mandy could have done so much better. She always dated decent guys in school. Mitch was such a jerk. He never let her do anything that went against whatever he thought best. It was like the second she married him, I had to make appointments to see her.”
“So he’s controlling,” Emily said. “But what else? Was he abusive?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “I mean,
he didn’t hit her. I know she’d never put up with that and I know she would have told me.”
Emily searched Samantha’s worried eyes. “You’re holding back on something.”
“I know you’re here for some big revelation, something that will give you a clue about what happened to her, where she might be. I just can’t help you.”
“Was she happy?”
“She hadn’t been for a long time, but when she became pregnant, Mandy changed. She seemed to be her old self again. There was some joy in her voice. She’d wanted to have a baby for so long, but Mitch kept telling her the time wasn’t right.”
“So last year, the time was right?”
“I think so. I really don’t know. One time when we were having coffee at her house—which, by the way, she hated the place—she told me that if she didn’t start a family with Mitch she’d leave him. She said, ‘I don’t care about the things he cares about. I want to be a mom. I will be a mom.’”
“So, she must have convinced him it was time?”
“Or tricked him,” Samantha said, looking like she’d spoken ill of the dead.
“Tricked him?” Emily prodded.
“I’m overstating, I think. You know what I mean, she just wanted a baby so much. She’d skip her pills and make things happen. She wouldn’t have been the first woman to do that.”
Emily could no longer resist the cookie. The buttery crunch reminded her instantly of her own childhood, of holidays with her family, and later with Jenna and David. There was a bittersweetness to the memory.
“Mitch was looking forward to the baby, too?”
“I think so. I think it took awhile. Dan and I went out to dinner with them in late October and they both seemed excited that they’d be parents by Christmas. Mitch was bragging about how he’d have a son to follow in his footsteps at the dealership.”
“But it wasn’t a son.”
Samantha looked across the room then back at Emily. “I know. I almost dropped my fork. I nudged Dan to keep his mouth shut. I knew it was a girl, but it was clear that Mandy hadn’t told Mitch. You could have knocked me over with a puff of air.”
