During the course of the morning, Sam left Emily two messages on her cell phone and sent four texts and hadn’t heard back.
That was strange, but he was feeling strange, so it didn’t register that anything was really wrong with her.
Everything that was wrong was with him.
But when he got out of his morning class and she didn’t answer her phone and still hadn’t returned his text messages, a new feeling took hold.
Panic.
Sam phoned the Orange Tree and got a recorded greeting.
So he got into his car and headed straight over to the shop.
Robb Ellis was standing on the sidewalk in front of Ferdinand’s. He looked lost.
Sam pulled into a parking space and could see right away that the Orange Tree was closed. His gaze shifted to Robb, who didn’t look happy. He made his way over to Sam’s car. He leaned down and spoke through the open window.
“What’s up?”
Sam was wondering the same thing. “I’m looking for Emily.”
Robb nodded. “I’m looking for my car.”
“Where’s Destiny?”
“I’m not sure. She’s not at work. I know that much.”
They both were silent for what seemed like too long. Robb found himself thinking that if they were girls, a lot more information would have been exchanged.
Finally Sam asked, “Destiny doesn’t answer her cell phone?”
Robb just shrugged. “She doesn’t have one.”
Sam nodded as if that were normal.
For seventeen years of his life, that was the case, but now that he’d been mainstreamed, rehabilitated, and brought into another world, the idea of not having a phone that you carried at all times seemed strange.
Sam finally offered up: “Emily isn’t answering her phone. I haven’t heard from her all morning, actually.”
Now Robb nodded like that was normal, when he felt certain that it wasn’t. He and Emily weren’t even very friendly anymore, and she returned his calls right away. That’s the kind of person she was.
Robb leaned back on his heels and decided to just come out with it. “We both had the day off from the restaurant. I slept in late, and when I woke up, Destiny and my car were gone.”
Sam let this sink in.
He knew that Destiny was living in the motel. He’d dropped her there the night before.
A horrible feeling now gnawed hard in his gut.
He hadn’t thought about Robb Ellis staying at the motel with Destiny, not that it mattered and not that it surprised him.
Did Robb know anything about what happened yesterday?
He didn’t seem to. His sense of defeat looked completely unrelated to Sam, who finally said:
“Did she leave a note or anything?”
Robb sighed. “No. But all her clothes and her personal crap are in the motel. I sat around waiting for her for an hour. And then I walked over here, because I thought maybe she’d gone to the restaurant or something. But they haven’t seen her.”
Sam felt his heart race. He had to ask. “Do you think they’re together?”
Robb gave it some thought. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
Sam’s mind went over the facts.
Two girls were missing.
Two girls who knew each other but didn’t have much of a connection.
Unless you counted him as the connection.
And that was a sickening thought.
Destiny was messed up. Was it possible she’d done something to Emily? Would she try to hurt her?
Sam motioned to the passenger door. “Get in.”
Clarence Border’s name was in the news in Northern California, and his photo and a description were circulated to all agencies of law enforcement.
But Dennis Hauck, who was in charge of the First Alert program, fell down a flight of stairs on the afternoon that Clarence went missing from the Merced Medical Center bathroom.
Dennis was the California liaison to the other Pacific Northwest states. It was his job to make sure that interested parties were notified immediately when something like this happened.
Dennis fractured his ankle and spent two days away from his desk. Tammy Tolin was placed in charge while Dennis was out, and she flagged Clarence Border on her computer.
But when Dennis returned, his desktop files didn’t sync properly with what Tammy had used. Dennis had received an alert to upgrade his browser, but he had failed to do so.
And all of that meant he didn’t see Tammy’s notice. She assumed that he’d sent out electronic alerts to the Bell family in Oregon and that he’d also spoken to their local police department.
But that wasn’t the case.
Dennis Hauck dropped the ball on four cases when his ankle failed him.
Only one of them mattered.
34
Destiny kept her distance, following the silver car but doing her best to be inconspicuous.
Her small fist slammed down into the surprisingly firm passenger seat of Robb Ellis’s SUV.
If only I had a cell phone, I could call for help.
Or if she had better vision, she could get the license-plate number of the silver car and then pull over and tell someone what she’d seen.
But without a license plate, what would she say? And who would believe her?
To get that information, she had to be close. Really close. Because her eyesight was bad. Destiny had known she needed glasses since the blackboards at school started to go fuzzy. And that was back when she went to school, which was a long time ago.
Three blocks from Agate Street, the silver car turned onto Franklin, which had more traffic.
Two cars got ahead of her, but several miles down, she still had the silver car in view and watched as it made its way to the interstate on-ramp.
Sitting back on the crunched Kleenex box, Destiny didn’t flinch.
She continued right on the freeway entrance and headed due north.
Outside the house Clarence had pushed the gun into the small of Emily’s back as he said:
“You’re the reason my boys turned against me.”
She thought she would scream.
But she didn’t. Fear was in charge. Terror took control.
And it was then that she began her out-of-body experience.
Because she was there but not there.
Her heart was beating and she was breathing, but it was impossible that this was happening to her.
She had never met this man. But she knew who he was.
She had first seen him in a picture that Robb Ellis had taken on his cell phone so many months ago when he’d followed Sam and Riddle out to the house on River Road.
And then she had seen a police photo when this monster was arrested.
She wasn’t supposed to see that. But she had opened a file that her parents had printed out. It was paperwork for adopting Riddle. And it had been there.
This man was in prison.
He was never getting out.
But he was right here.
A second shadow-self repeated in an inner chant, Make it stop.…
But the monster, in an icy calm voice, had said to her:
“You and I are going on a drive. If you yell, or if you scream, I will shoot you. Right here, in your fancy brick driveway, and I will shoot anyone who comes out of your house when they hear the shot fired. I will aim for their heads and I will take them all down with you. So now you have a choice. Now you can be an executioner.”
And then he started to walk, the gun pushing against her side, and she moved with him.
Her legs felt funny, like they weren’t there, and inside her head it was humming. Her ears rang.
Loud.
The humming was a buzz, like something electrical had snapped in her brain.
She didn’t see anything. Not the dog barking in the front window. Not the kid riding by on his bicycle.
Not Robb Ellis’s car parked on the street.
The only thing sh
e could see now was walking next to her.
The monster.
And what sickened her was how she could make out Sam in the features of his face.
Inside the silver car, the buzzing got louder.
The monster drove down the street, not fast and not slow.
Just the speed limit. Cars whizzed past, and no one knew. None of them could see that something was deeply wrong inside the silver car.
He talked. It was to her, but it could have been to himself.
“When I come to a stop, you might think you can open the door and jump out. But if you open the door, I’ll put my foot all the way down on the gas, and I’ll drive straight into whatever is in front of me. It could be people in a crosswalk. It could be the gas tank of the car in front of me. Whatever it is, I’ll do that. And I’ll take it all down with us. How does that sound?”
She could hear him. She could understand him.
But it didn’t make any sense.
He was locked up forever.
How did he end up at her back door?
She shut her eyes, and the buzzing in her head changed frequency. And then she opened her eyes, because she felt something inside her purse, which was still over her right shoulder and out of the monster’s view.
It was vibrating.
Her cell phone. Someone was calling her.
Sam. She knew it was him.
But the phone did not ring, and then she remembered that the battery was low. She hadn’t charged her phone at night. She hadn’t followed any of her regular routine.
Emily closed her eyes again and willed Sam to somehow know that she needed help.
The vibrating stopped, and she watched, staring straight ahead out the windshield as he turned onto the on-ramp and merged into the northbound traffic.
And that was when he said, in a voice that was just an airless whisper, “Your parents stole my kids. Now I got you, babe.”
35
Detective Sanderson drove an unmarked car, but like most unmarked police vehicles, it didn’t take much attention to detail to notice that it wasn’t ordinary.
The side-view and rearview mirrors were twice the regular size. The license plates didn’t follow the regular state letter-number sequence. And the sheer nondescript nature of the boxy blue sedan in excellent condition seemed to shout that something was up.
Beto saw the car coming down the block and turned to Riddle. “The boss is here.”
Two patrol cars were already parked at the curb, and neighbors from across the street were on the sidewalk talking to Tim Bell.
Three of the four officers were inside the Binghams’ house. The remaining officer was outside with Debbie Bell.
The three kids had been instructed to stay inside the house, but they were on the Bells’ porch. Riddle, sketch pad in his lap, was still drawing. They were part of this and they were not going to miss out on anything now.
As the unmarked car parked at a distance and Detective Sanderson got out, Riddle said: “I know him. He helped find me and Sam.”
Beto was impressed. The idea that Riddle knew a detective was cool. The whole day was shaping up to be way more exciting than Beto would have ever imagined. He wondered if they would be in the news. He could see that happening.
Jared fidgeted, shifting his weight from side to side as he bit down on the inside of his cheek.
Beto’s excitement couldn’t be contained. “What if the bad guy is still in the neighborhood? What if he’s watching us from someplace hidden? What if they find him now and there’s a shoot-out? How cool would it be to see a real shoot-out!”
The expression on Jared’s face said not cool at all.
Riddle’s face was impossible to decipher.
All three boys held their breath as Detective Sanderson went into the house. He shot a look at the boys on the porch.
Riddle kept his eyes locked on the detective as he said, “He’s in charge of secrets.”
It wasn’t a typical case of breaking and entering, because the person had spent time in the residence.
The intruder or intruders had left a dirty kitchen, an unmade bed, wet towels (folded), and open drawers and cabinets.
The officers had no way of knowing that Clarence had packed the bulk of the casual wardrobe that Roland Bingham hadn’t taken on his trip.
It was now in two duffel bags in the backseat of his car, along with their better pieces of silver, jewelry passed down from two generations of the family, the whiskey and scotch from the pantry, and most of their prescription medications.
The officers approached the crime in a procedural manner, even if it was unusual to have a criminal return to the freezer the unused portion of a bag of onion rings that he’d opened and broiled on a cookie sheet.
The lead officer, Jay Dooley, hadn’t yet filed a report, so he was surprised to find Sanderson standing in the entry.
But the detective volunteered the explanation right away. “I know the people who called this in. The Bells.”
Officer Dooley proceeded to go over the facts, which included that the residents were away on vacation and their home was being looked after by the neighbors. Specifically, three young boys.
The person who’d been inside had used the key.
Had someone been spying on the boys who were feeding the fish? Or had the boys told someone about the placement of the key?
It could have been the work of a transient, or teenagers, but it somehow didn’t look that way.
Dooley lowered his voice when he made his final comment. “One of the kids isn’t from the neighborhood. He goes to school with them but lives on the other side of the Ferry Street Bridge. His name’s Roberto Moreno. They call him Beto. You might want to run a background check on his parents when you’re in the station.”
Sanderson looked at Officer Dooley’s thick neck and made a note to run a background check instead on Dooley. He wondered if the guy had any prior incidents of racial discrimination.
Detective Darius Sanderson walked back to his car with a sour stomach. And it wasn’t just because he was going to forgo lunch and work through the afternoon.
Moments later, Officer Dooley went to his car and filed his first report about the break-in.
While he waited for more information on fingerprints and other on-site DNA analysis (there had been samples taken from the bathroom and the bedroom where the intruder had slept), he concentrated on a ten-year-old named Roberto Moreno.
The kid knew something.
Dooley felt sure of it.
36
Destiny looked down at the gas gauge.
The needle showed that the tank was almost full. That was one thing about Robb Ellis: he may have had a patch of furlike hair at the base of his spine, but he also had a working credit card and he knew how to use it.
If she could ever get her life together enough to have her own car, she just knew she’d always be running on empty.
Up ahead the blue sky was turning milky white.
Destiny crinkled up her nose. Summer storms appeared from the mountains, and now it looked like she was driving into one.
No, she was following someone who was driving into one.
Now that she’d been on the road for nearly an hour, her concentration was flagging.
What if she’d gotten the whole thing wrong? What if the guy in the silver car up ahead going just three miles over the speed limit was Emily’s uncle?
But why would an uncle put a gun in her back?
Maybe it wasn’t a gun.
It certainly appeared to be a gun. And she’d seen weapons.
And why else would Emily’s face have looked like a hunk of ice when she got in the car?
Destiny reassured herself that she was doing the right thing and kept her foot in the orange slipper pressed down on the gas pedal.
Emily dropped her right shoulder, forcing it to relax as she slowly worked to edge her purse off her body.
It took total concentration, but she was eventually able
to get the soft leather strap to release, moving the bag down her arm against the door.
From there, she maneuvered her elbow to slip her right hand inside.
Her fingers angled through the leather opening and moved silently over the objects.
A hairbrush.
Lip gloss.
A key chain with a house key and a car key.
A ballpoint pen.
A mint candy wrapped in cellophane.
A hair scrunchie.
Her wallet.
A dime. A penny. A nickel. A dime.
A business card. She could feel the raised letters. It was from the optometrist. From when she and Sam took Riddle to get his new glasses.
Riddle. He had lived with this man for a decade. And so had Sam.
How had they survived?
Her fingers now ached as she thought of the two brothers.
And then, finally, her hand touched her cell phone.
Emily stared straight out the window as she pressed on the center dimple.
From there, she slid her index finger across the bottom. She had no way of knowing if it was on or what mode the phone would be in.
Or if the battery was so gone that nothing was now happening.
But she ran her fingertips over the bottom third of the glass screen, hoping that she was communicating something, anything, to the outside world.
Emily’s best friend, Nora, officially hooked up with Rory the summer before junior year. Once Nora had a boyfriend, the two girls were no longer joined at the hip.
But they still spoke often, even in the summer. Emily was now with Sam. They both had jobs. They got used to not knowing exactly what the other person was doing.
That was a good thing. Really. Even if it made them both sad to think that some of the closeness between them was now lost.
Nora was a lifeguard over the summer. Every ninety minutes she had a ten-minute break, when she and her lifeguard partner, Asher Luzatto, blew their whistles and cleared the pool.
Everyone was hauled out. The pool’s sanitary levels were checked, and the lifeguards got a much-needed break. It was hard work doing nothing but sitting in a chair looking down into the bright light at splashing bodies.