by Joanna Bell
"Yeah," I answered quietly. "I do. I just – I don't know what it is. It's like there's some random thing we're missing, some piece of information or some perspective we haven't taken yet. Maybe it really was aliens?"
The FBI agent laughed. "Maybe it was. At this point, the alien explanation is starting to look better by the day."
I opened my mouth to mention that I'd just been in the River Falls Library, and then hesitated. Did I want to tell Marla about that? She was with the FBI, after all. What if she just took my information – and I say my information because I admit, I was already feeling territorial about it – and left me out of any subsequent discoveries she might make with it? What if she didn't give me credit? She didn't seem the type, but..."
"What were you doing at the library today?" She asked, when I didn't speak. "And yesterday? I saw your car parked outside."
I couldn't help but laugh. Marla was good. And then I told her – in purposefully vague terms – what I'd been doing. "I was reading up on old news stories, covering the time period when the River Falls PD's records were destroyed."
"Ah," Marla commented. "You're being cagey. Good for you, Foster. You don't mind if I call you Foster, do you? Anyway, I'm retiring next year so I want you to know that I'm available if you need anyone to bounce theories off of – and I promise not to steal any of your leads."
I trusted Marla Leigh. But even as I trusted her part of me wondered if that was exactly what she was hoping for. And I think she sensed it. So I didn't mention Heather Renner, not right away. I did comment that I hadn't been able to find any other cases of kidnapping where the victim had returned, without any coherent story of what had happened, and then gone missing again. "And now we have two," I continued. "Best friends, both going missing within months of each other, the exact same pattern."
"Yes," Marla agreed. "Two. When previously, there were none. What are the odds?"
"What are the odds?" I wondered, looking out at the parking lot, where a small group of teenage boys were laughing and talking together. "It's strange that the Wallis family have gone so quiet, isn't it? They didn't just go back to the UK, Jerry said it's actually difficult to get a hold of them these days. It's almost like..." I trailed off, not willing to verbalize my suspicion.
"It's almost like what?" Marla asked.
I was already on leave, what harm could speculating with an FBI agent – one I was pretty sure was my friend – do? "It's almost like they know she's fine," I said quietly. "Emma, I mean. The way they were before she came back, and the way they are now, after she's gone again – it's like night and day. Her parents were breathing down our necks every day – and they had their lawyers doing the same. And now? Nothing."
"It's the same on this end," Marla confirmed. "They were all over us. Now we have to call them ten times if we want to ask them something."
"Someone should probably talk to them again, don't you think?" I wondered aloud. The Wallises – unlike the Renners – were still around, after all. "I mean, they haven't disappeared yet, have they? Someone should question them again. Someone should question the sister – did the FBI talk to her before she left? Jerry did, but she was pretty tight-lipped, and there was nothing we could do about it."
We spoke for another half an hour or so. It was good – emotionally good but also practically good, and useful – to talk to someone who wasn't Dan or Jerry at the River Falls PD. Not that they were bad guys, but let's just say neither of them were particularly interested in examining things or beliefs that didn't fit neatly into one of the pre-made boxes they had in their heads. Both of them, almost all evidence to the contrary, assumed that some terrible fate had befallen both Paige Renner – and her family – and Emma Wallis. When I tried to question either one on why, specifically, they thought that, they just brushed me off. But I knew why. It was because they were both young, and female. Of course something terrible had happened to them. That's what happened to young women, wasn't it? On TV and in movies and books and even in real life? Terrible things.
I wasn't convinced. And even as I wasn't convinced that not being convinced was the correct belief, I couldn't shake it. The day after the conversation with Marla Leigh, I did something I probably shouldn't have done. I called Katie Wallis, Emma's sister, on her personal cell phone. Not her parents, and not their lawyers. Marla Leigh had agreed with me that Emma was the one to talk to. She'd been with her sister in that hotel room, she'd probably been the one to drive her wherever it was she went that night. But she'd refused to give us any information before flying back to England.
She knew I was a police officer right away. Maybe it was my American accent? Whatever it was, Katie Wallis clearly didn't want to talk to me.
"Don't hang up!" I pleaded, when she curtly informed me she had nothing to say to me. "Please, Katie. I – I've actually been placed on leave, so I'm not calling you in an official capacity, if that helps."
There was silence on the other end – she was considering speaking to me. Which, yes, was a strange way to behave around one of the people who was desperately trying to locate her supposedly missing sister.
"What do you want?" She asked a short while later, and I could tell from her tone of voice I was going to have to be persuasive.
"What I want is to find your sister," I replied. "And Paige Renner, and her son and father. I'm not calling to interrogate you or anything like that, I was just wondering if I could talk to you about a few things."
But Katie Wallis was too suspicious. For a moment or two it felt like she might be about to lower her defenses slightly, but just when I thought she was going to give me the go-ahead she abruptly told me she didn't have anything to say, apologized, and hung up.
The dryer buzzed before I could lose myself in thought and I went to fold the laundry and put it away. The washer and dryer had been a gift to myself upon getting the job at the River Falls PD, and I was still inordinately proud of them, all shiny and matching and – the important part – not constantly breaking down. The laundry was warm, too, which on a cold winter's day always makes folding it something of a pleasure, if household chores can be said to be such a thing.
So I stood in my tiny little laundry room folding clothes and towels and bed-sheets and thinking about Katie Wallis and her distinct lack of interest in talking to a cop – even an off-duty cop. And for maybe the first time the idea that she knew where her sister Emma was presented itself to me as an obvious truth. I'd been dancing around it in my mind, because it didn't seem to make any sense – but I had to stop doing that. I had to stop clinging to narratives that didn't fit the facts. Katie Wallis didn't want to talk to me – or any police. Neither did her parents. Before Emma's second disappearance, the Wallis family had been as active and overbearing in the investigation as any family would be. After Emma's second disappearance, their whole attitude had changed completely.
What other explanation was there? Katie Wallis knew where her sister was. And I was pretty sure she knew she wasn't dead. Nothing about her tone of voice, or her disinterest in revenge, spoke to someone grieving their only sibling.
I shook the wrinkles out of Ashley's 'River Falls Kids RECYCLE!' t-shirt and folded it carefully before placing it on the pile, chuckling to myself at what a little police officer my daughter had become over the matter. I could barely sneak a can into the trash those days without my little eco-warrior 'mom!'-ing me sternly and watching me, eagle-eyed, as I sheepishly took the can out of the trash and put it in the recycling bin.
I've trained myself not to picture horrible things happening to my child. It's not that I don't know it's a possibility, of course, and it's not that I don't worry about it constantly. But I can't allow myself to cross the line into actually picturing it. When she was a baby, and then a chubby, inquisitive toddler, I could spend hours torturing myself with what-ifs, with the mental images conjured up by my new parent brain. My child horrifically burned. My child's fat little leg snapped if I took my eyes off her and she fell down the stairs. My chi
ld murdered. It was as if I could hear the screams, see the fear in her eyes, feel her fear. I had to stop, because it got so bad at one point it started to interfere with our real lives. I started to catch my heart pounding and my palms sweating in the grocery store when a strange man approached us with his shopping cart, only to offer a friendly nod as he passed by. I didn't want to be one of those parents who kept their children too close and allowed their own paranoia to spill over into real-life restrictions. So I just stopped picturing those horrible things happening to Ashley.
But that day in the laundry room, the thoughts crept back. I'd recognized that parental panic in Emma Wallis's mother and father's eyes. As annoying as they'd been, as pushy and confrontational and demanding, I'd never blamed them for it. Their daughter was missing. And I was literally unable to imagine a worse fate.
But everything had changed. They flew back to England very soon after Emma went missing the second time. And the last time I'd seen them before they left, their eyes looked different. That haunted look – the one I didn't have to think about to know what it meant – was gone.
They know where she is. They know where Emma is.
Six
Sophie
My leave stretched deep into the spring. It should have been over by March, maybe even late February – but I did something stupid. I went to the woods – again. Emma Wallis – and her parents – continued to stonewall me. And as hard as I looked, and as many people as I spoke to, no one seemed to have any more information on Heather Renner, either. All I'd been able to confirm is that she'd never popped up on the radar again. Not under her own name, anyway.
But I was operating under a new circumstance then – the one where the Wallis family knew Emma was alive – and probably where she was – and were for some unknown reason unwilling to tell anyone. The fact that Emma was alive meant Paige Renner was probably alive, too. Jerry Sawchuk should never have put me on leave. All it did was give me more time free of paperwork and dealing with other cases to concentrate on the one case – the missing girls.
That's how I ended up back on the Renner property on one of those February days that fools you into thinking spring has arrived early with its teasing, mercurial warmth.
There were no fur-clad men in the woods that day. There didn't seem to be anything except the sound of melting, and the babbling of the suddenly-full brook that snaked through the trees. I wandered randomly off the path, knowing on the one hand that every inch of ground had been gone over multiple times, and hoping, on the other, that by some miracle everyone had missed the big clue I was about to find – the one that would solve everything in an instant.
I jumped across the little stream, grabbing onto a nearby bush to steady myself when my foot slipped in the muddy earth near the bank. I thought I was close to where I'd seen the man who was strangely unafraid of having a gun pulled on him. I clambered up the bank a little higher, and once again nearly lost my footing.
And then I fainted. I think I fainted. People sometimes describe the experience of fainting as 'everything going black' – and that is what happened. One minute I was in the sunny woods, the next I was disoriented, unable to see anything around me but darkness, my stomach dropping the way it does in an elevator.
It didn't seem to last long. But when my eyes adjusted to my surroundings again, the sun had somehow disappeared behind a thick layer of gray cloud, on a day I could have sworn was blue-skied only seconds before. Also, I seemed to be in a different spot. I wasn't on a slope, and I could no longer hear the stream. I pushed myself up on my arms – because I seemed to have fallen over – and looked around. What the hell was going on? A tiny wisp of panic unfurled in my heart as it dawned on me suddenly, improbably, that I didn't know where I was.
I was in the woods, wasn't I? I was still in the woods. But the weather was different, and so was the ground itself.
"What the –?" I muttered, bewildered.
And then, just as I was about to stand up, my hand felt something in the dirt. Something small and hard. A rock? I picked it up and examined it. Not a rock. A piece of – what? Jewelry? A brooch of some kind? Whatever it was, it appeared to be broken, and tarnished. Still, it was something, and even in my absolute confusion I found my police instincts kicking in. How had it been missed? Someone had probably dropped it – one of the reporters or trespassers or random weirdoes following the same instinct I myself had followed – the one that said the Renner property was the key to the whole crazy situation.
I shoved the trinket into my pocket and grabbed onto a tree root to pull myself up. And then I fainted again. And that time, after the wooziness and the awful feeling of not being able to breathe properly passed, I was back beside the stream on the Renner property, with slushy snow and mud soaking into my jeans.
"Damnit!" I yelled, leaping to my feet – too late to prevent a good soaking – and then doubling over as a sudden wave of nausea lurched through me. I bent over, hands on my knees, and retched hard. I hadn't eaten that day, so nothing came up.
As soon as my head felt straight enough, I turned and headed back the way I'd come, to my car. I was baffled by the fainting, but more importantly hopeful about the little metal object I'd found – even as I knew it would in all likelihood turn out to be nothing.
Still, it wasn't nothing. I could feel it there in my pocket, against my thigh as I drove. I looked at the time. Just past noon. I had a good 3 hours before I had to pick Ashley up from school. I had to get groceries, too. And drop by my mom's house. But I had some time. I could stop in at the jewelry store at the strip mall to show them what I'd found. One of Maria's brother's girlfriends worked there, I'd met her a few times. Maybe she could at least tell me what it was?
"Where did you get this?"
The owner of the jewelry store was the only employee present, but he had agreed to take a look at my find.
"Um," I replied, conscious of the fact that any reply with the word 'Renner' in it would trigger a curiosity response I probably didn't want to deal with. "Some woods. Some woods here, in River Falls."
The stoutly-built jeweler lifted up his glasses and brought the piece closer to his eyes, peering intently. "What was that?" He asked, only half paying attention to what I was saying, so focused was his concentration on the item in his hands. "Here in River Falls? Did someone in your family leave it to you?"
I smiled. "No. I found it. In the woods."
"The woods? You found it in the woods here in River Falls?"
I nodded and he moved his glasses back down his nose.
"Do you mind if I take this into the back? I have a jeweler's microscope back there and a brighter light. Feel free to join me if you want."
I followed the store owner into a small back room, pleased that whatever it was I'd found, it seemed to be worth taking a second look at. I stood aside as he flicked a switch on a device that looked like one of the microscopes we used to use in high school science class and a bright, focused light came on.
"This looks like silver," he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me, as he held the piece under the light and peered at it through the microscope. "But I can't find any silver hallmarks. And it – it looks etched, but it doesn't look like any etching I've ever seen before. I don't know what kind of tool could have made marks this organic looking. You found it in the woods, you said?"
I nodded again.
"Hm. OK. Would you mind if I took a few photos? I have a professor friend who might know more about it. I'm not saying get your hopes up or anything, it's obviously a broken portion of a larger piece – and even if it is silver, it's not large or heavy enough to be worth much."
"Go ahead," I responded. "Take as many photos as you want."
Half an hour later, after the jeweler had taken photos, written down my phone number on a sticky note, and speculated that the little broken piece might be part of a necklace or a brooch or maybe even a belt-buckle, I left with it in my pocket. It was kind of him to take such an interest, and to take phot
os to send to his friend in academia, but I don't think I expected much beyond an identification of the material used, and possibly some idea of what store it had come from or who the manufacturer was.
When a few weeks passed and I heard nothing, it almost slipped my mind entirely. But one day in late March, after Jerry Sawchuk had been told by some meddling reporter that I'd been spotted in the woods again, on the day I found the jewelry, and seen fit to extend my leave, my phone rang after I'd put Ashley to bed. I didn't recognize the name on the screen – Dr. William Foxwell – but I took the call anyway.
"Hello?"
"Is this Sophie Foster?"
"Yes," I replied.
"My name is William Foxwell, I'm a professor of archeology at Grand Northeastern. Barry O'Dell is a friend of mine."
I had no idea who Barry O'Dell was, so I waited for William Foxwell to explain further.
"Barry O'Dell," he repeated, a moment later. "From O'Dell's Jewelers in River Falls?"
"Oh!" I exclaimed, as I put the name to a face. "Of course, yes. Yes, I am Sophie Foster. Is this about the piece of silver jewelry – or whatever it was?"
Dr. Foxwell was calling me at home, after 9 p.m. – it didn't seem likely he would be calling a stranger at that time of night with no news.
"Yes," he confirmed. "Yes, it's about the piece you found. I'm sure you're a busy woman, so I can have someone come to pick it up if you like, but I was hoping you wouldn't mind if I took a closer look at it in person, here in my office? I have the tools I need to do a thorough examination here in the lab."
I reached for the remote and muted the TV. "Really?" I asked. "You want to see it in person? Do you – do you think it's something special?"
"Well now," Dr. Foxwell replied, "that I really can't say. But it does have some very unusual markings – markings that are either very well replicated or that shouldn't be on anything found in the woods in River Falls, New York. If you're nervous about letting it out of your hands, you can send it registered mail to my official office here at the college. I –"
