“Wow.” I was aghast at my ignorance. “We’d better check into the rating of the nursery at the Sparling County Hospital.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to drive into Atlanta unless we have a really good reason,” Robin said.
We looked at the Lamaze class schedule and picked out a start date that would allow us to complete the course with a comfortable margin of time.
When I told him the library policy allowed me three weeks’ maternity leave, Robin was not happy.
“That’s not long enough,” he said. “I know you like your job, but we don’t have to depend on it for the income. You may not feel like going back that quickly. Of course, that’s up to you.”
I’d thought three weeks was generous. But I understood his subtext: I was old for a first-time mother. “Would you take care of the baby if I did go back to work?” I asked.
Robin looked startled. He ran his fingers through his already wild red hair. “Sure,” he said stoutly.
“Are you as scared as I am?”
He looked rueful. “Maybe more.”
“Let’s not talk about names for a while,” I said. “That’s going to be a delicate process.”
“Oh, God,” he said, closing his eyes in horror.
So Robin and I had a productive, but anxiety-ridden, discussion. I got ready for work, feeling tired and as if I should be going back to bed.
So, I have a lot of excuses … but the fact was, I never tracked down Phillip to find out what he had wanted to talk about. And I didn’t miss Phillip the next afternoon. And I had no idea anything was wrong, until the evening.
Phillip wasn’t in the house when I got home from work at three forty-five. Robin had left a note. Gone to post office back soon. I looked for a note from Phillip, but I couldn’t find one. We had some rules about Phillip keeping us current on his whereabouts, and I wasn’t happy. But when I checked my phone, I was glad to see that he’d texted me. With Josh, it said. He’d sent it at three thirty. Josh Finstermeyer came by almost every day after public school let out, to pick up Phillip. The two ran errands for Josh’s mom, or went to Sonic, and Josh usually picked up his sister Joss after basketball practice or soccer lessons. Joss was a busy girl.
Just the day before, I’d seen Phillip with Josh and Joss and two other teens, all crammed into Josh’s car. They’d been laughing. I’d felt warm and reassured about this glimpse of Phillip’s new life. Phillip was fitting in and making friends.
I glanced at the clock. I figured that by five or five thirty, Josh would drop Phillip off, and we’d have dinner together an hour or so later, which had become the frequent pattern of our evenings …
But that didn’t happen.
* * *
My cell phone rang about five o’clock. I noticed the time, because I’d been trying to imagine what we could have for dinner that night, and so far I hadn’t come up with anything. I was exhausted, after a very mild day at work. Would this be the norm until the baby was born? That would be a real pain.
Supper had to be ready early, because Robin’s writers’ group was meeting tonight at the new Community Center, at seven.
Right after I’d come home I’d gotten a load of clean clothes out of the dryer to fold. Then I’d collapsed on the living room couch to read for a few minutes. When those minutes were up, I tried to summon up some energy. Either this exhaustion was a result of the pregnancy, or an energy-draining vampire was sneaking in at odd moments.
Maybe we could have bacon sandwiches with fruit salad?
When the phone rang, I answered it without much enthusiasm.
“Roe,” said Beth Finstermeyer brightly. “Listen, the kids wouldn’t happen to be at your house, would they?”
“I’m sure they’re not, but just in case they slipped past me, I’ll check Phillip’s room,” I said. A finger of dread tickled my spine.
I knocked, and when I didn’t get an answer I opened Phillip’s door. Either thieves had ransacked his room, or a very localized tornado had swept through.
“No, it’s just like he left it,” I said to Beth. I looked at my phone. “And he hasn’t texted me again, since he told me he was going out with Josh.”
There was a moment’s silence. “I am sure I’m just being a silly mom,” Beth said, “but would you try to call Phillip? I can’t get either Josh or Joss to pick up. There are a million reasons, of course.…”
“Sure,” I said promptly. “A million. Of course I’ll try him, Beth, and I’ll call you after I talk to him.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Oh, and congratulations on getting married. I never said anything, but Robin’s so much fun. I know you two will be really happy together.”
“Thanks, Beth,” I answered. I could tell she was really anxious, and I found it was contagious. “I’ll let you know about the kids the minute I hear.”
I called Phillip the instant after I’d pressed End Call.
My call went directly to voice mail.
“Yo, leave me a message, and I’ll get back with you,” Phillip said in a tough-guy voice.
“Phillip, it’s Roe. Please call me back the second you can. I really need to talk to you.” I heard the front door open and hurried back into the living room. Robin was taking off his coat and hanging it on the old rack just inside the front door. Then he started riffling through a small stack of envelopes, probably from his official Robin Crusoe mailbox. But when he looked up, he dropped the letters and came to me.
“What’s wrong?” Robin had radar for trouble. He put his big hands on my shoulders and looked down at me intently.
“Beth doesn’t know where Josh, Joss, and Phillip are,” I said. “They’re late getting home.”
“Worrisome,” Robin said, instead of trying to soothe me with possible explanations: Phillip’s phone could have gone dead or he could be in one of those areas out in the country that had no bars (why?), or he could be away from his phone (as if! he slept with it), or he could be simply avoiding me. If he was, it was the first time he’d transgressed to such an extent, and I found it unlikely he was doing something so heinous at exactly the same moment his friends were.
I called Beth. “No answer,” I said, in the brightest voice I could manage. “I’ll keep trying.”
Robin had pulled his coat back on. He had mine over his arm. “Let’s go look,” he said.
That was such a perfect thing to do that I felt a flood of reassurance. I’d often doubted my wisdom during my time with Martin; but now I felt a rightness and a surety that we had done the right thing when we got married.
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
We’d driven all around the high school, the baseball practice field, the soccer field, and the basketball gym. We’d even checked the football stadium. Then we’d cruised past the Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, Burger King, and every other fast food place where kids hung out. We’d checked out the Finstermeyers’ house, just in case. We’d gone past the Cinema Super Six. We’d even checked out the nearest mall, ten miles closer to Atlanta, which I avoided like the plague after Thanksgiving Day.
We didn’t see Josh’s car, a black 2010 Camaro, anywhere.
I’d dredged up the names of a few of the kids Phillip had brought home or talked about, and we’d been by their houses; I knew where most of them lived.
And we didn’t find the kids or the car.
On our way home, I called Beth and told her what we’d been doing and that we’d found nothing. Beth was still at home with her thirteen-year-old, Jessamyn, and she had given up any pretense that everything was normal. “I’ve called the police station,” she said, a hitch in her voice. “They haven’t had any accidents reported this afternoon. And I called George, he was already on his way home from the office.”
George Finstermeyer worked for the federal government in downtown Atlanta, and he took an express bus both to and from his job, leaving his car at the bus station most days so Beth wouldn’t have to fetch him. That was the extent of my knowledge
about George.
“Good,” I said. “If he knows of any other place to search, we’ll be glad to go there. I guess now we’ll head back to the house. We’ve looked everywhere we can think of to look.” I hesitated, realizing I was about to cross a line. “Could Jessamyn suggest any places we might check out?” I asked. That was the nicest way I could think of to ask if Jessamyn knew where her brother and sister were, or if they’d told their sister to keep a lid on that knowledge.
“I would put bamboo slivers under her nails if I thought she knew where they were,” Beth said frankly. “She talked to Joss, but only about Joss’s hair appointment. But when I can be calm, I’m going to have a heart-to-heart with her.”
“Of course,” I said, though privately I was wondering where I could find some bamboo slivers. “I’ll talk to you soon. I am so going to ground Phillip for the rest of his life.”
“Me, too, when I see them,” she said, and started crying. We both hung up.
I called the police myself. I explained the situation to the officer who answered the phone. She advised me that teenagers often didn’t let their parents, or their half sister, know what they were doing. I reminded her that three teenagers were missing, not just one, and they were all reliable kids with no history of causing trouble. I may have been a little forceful.
“Your brother’s name is Phil Teagarden, have I got that right?” she said in a long-suffering tone.
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. “His name is Phillip. Phil is our father.”
When Robin and I walked into the house, it was six forty-five and had been dark for a long time. Robin’s meeting was at seven, and I told him he should go. The group wouldn’t meet again for a month because of the holidays, and he was president and founder, so he needed to be there. After some debate, he agreed, but made sure I would call him if I heard anything. Of course, I said yes. He made himself a sandwich and ate it standing, and then he was out the door.
If I’d asked him to stay home, we would officially have had a crisis. I still had some hope that Phillip would walk in the door at any moment, looking abashed and with a simple explanation for his absence. Flat tire in an area with no bars? Something like that.
So I sat on the couch and watched the front door. I wasn’t hungry at all. Robin texted me every twenty minutes to let me know he was thinking about me.
Truthfully, it was almost a relief to have him gone for a while, because I was trying to grasp the whole situation. While I brooded, Moosie came to sit in my lap. Half-Siamese and declawed, Moosie was a relic of my sister-in-law Poppy Queensland, who had died a few weeks earlier. No one had wanted Moosie, even me, if truth be told: but I had not-wanted her the least of anyone. Now I was glad for her presence.
I used the landline to call Aubrey Scott. He answered immediately, his voice tense.
“Aubrey, it’s Roe,” I said.
“Have you seen her?” he asked, his voice desperate.
“I was going to tell you that Phillip is missing, along with Joss and Josh Finstermeyer,” I said. “Are you telling me…”
“Liza is gone,” he said. “Do you think they’re together?”
“But … she’s so much younger than Phillip and Josh and Joss,” I said. “I was hardly aware they knew each other?” I’d only been able to get Phillip to go to church with me twice since he’d shown up on my doorstep.
“She’s been completely nuts about Phillip since she saw him come in the church with you,” Aubrey said, sounding both fond and exasperated. “She’s at that age. It’s like he’s Justin Bieber.” And then his voice broke in a sob.
I had had no idea Liza felt like that. If Phillip had known this, he’d been too self-conscious to bring it up. I didn’t remember his ever having mentioned Liza’s name.
“Aubrey, call the police now. I already have. I know the kids will show up, but it won’t hurt to have as many eyes looking as we can.”
He hung up, unable to speak. I sat with the phone in my hand, thinking so many thoughts, all of them horrible in varying degrees.
The least important was that Emily, Liza’s mother, had never cared for me, and now she would hate my guts.
The most important was that people might say that Phillip, who’d only been here for a short time and was therefore an unknown factor, had abducted Liza. And Josh and Joss, presumably.
I would swear on a stack of Bibles that this was unthinkable. But I didn’t know if everyone would believe me.
Chapter Four
Robin hurried into the house a little after eight, his face asking a question without any words. I shook my head. “The only development is bad,” I said. “Liza Scott is missing, too. And she’s only eleven.”
He was as stunned as I’d been. “That has to be a huge coincidence,” Robin said. “What could they have to do with each other?”
“According to Aubrey, when I took Phillip to church, Liza fell into crush at first sight,” I said. “But I would swear Phillip wasn’t the kind of guy to take advantage of a kid like that. And I know he likes girls his own age.” I simply could not believe that Phillip was such a creep as to make a pass at a child. At the same time, as a mystery reader, I knew that no one else ever felt that way about their loved ones. At least not in books. Surely, in real life, you’d have a clue?
“Aurora. Don’t even think that. Phillip and I are nowhere close to the same age, but from Phillip’s conversation when we’re guy-on-guy, I’m sure he’s completely oriented to females of the appropriate age.”
“You don’t think he was blowing smoke?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not a psychologist, but I’m not dumb.”
I nodded. This was not conclusive, but it was comforting. “I don’t know what else we can do,” I said. “We’ve been everywhere we can imagine. It’s not like we have the old family cabin in the woods, like they always have in books.”
“Where people always suddenly remember, ‘Oh, yes, as a child he used to go there whenever he was upset,’” Robin said. “Nope, in his case I guess we’d have to go to California.”
“And I don’t think he’s gotten to pick where he is,” I said. “He’d never just leave town without telling me. And Joss and Josh would hardly go with him! Much less Liza.”
There was a knock at the door. I sat up so suddenly that Moosie was dumped off my lap. She vanished into our bedroom. Robin launched himself at the front door. “Phillip!” he was saying as he pushed it open.
But it was not Phillip. It was the police.
“Have you found him?” I asked, aware for the first time of how accurate the description “my heart was in my throat” was. “Have you found the car?”
“No.” The woman who entered first said, “Roe, do you remember me? I’m Detective Cathy Trumble. We want to ask you some questions.” I did remember the detective. We’d met before. The uniformed patrolman with her was Levon Suit; I’d gone to high school with Levon. We nodded to each other.
“Sure,” I said. “Anything to help find Phillip.”
“When did you notice he was missing?” Trumble, middle-aged and solid, sat down on the couch opposite my chair. Robin sat on the ottoman, holding my hand.
“I knew he was with Josh and Joss, and I expected him home by five or so. They usually drop him off by then, but I figured, the last day of school before Christmas, maybe they did some extra shopping or celebrating. So I wasn’t really worried until Beth called me.”
“Bethany Finstermeyer.”
“Right.”
“And what have you done since then?”
“We’ve tried to call him many times. We’ve driven around town looking at all the places we imagined he might be.”
“You haven’t called his mother or his father?”
“I was so hoping that he would come home and I wouldn’t have to,” I confessed. “But I’m going to have to do that soon. They’re out in California, you know, and they’ve separated. So calling them with news like this … if there’s any way around it
…”
“Mr. Crusoe, what about you?”
“What about me? What do you mean?”
“You just got home? Your car was warm.”
“Yes, I had to leave Roe for a little while to go to a meeting, and as soon as I could leave it, I came home.” Robin’s tone had chilled considerably.
“Despite the fact that her brother is missing?” Detective Trumble could not raise one eyebrow, but she could hike them both. And she did.
“I told him to go,” I said, not believing the left turn this conversation was taking. “It was his last meeting before a month’s break, he’s the leader, and he needed to be there. Plus, I figured it was better than sitting here worrying.”
“Is this the first time your brother has pulled a stunt like this?” Cathy Trumble looked like a pleasant middle-aged woman, but I abandoned any view of her as pleasant the minute the words left her mouth.
“Pulled a stunt? I don’t think he’s pulling a stunt. I think something has happened to him, and it’s not going to be anything good!”
“But he ran away from his home in California to come stay with you. How do you know he hasn’t run away to somewhere else?”
I took a deep breath, trying to keep levelheaded. “Because he wouldn’t take an eleven-year-old girl, and the Finstermeyer twins, with him!”
“But if they weren’t involved, you might be thinking he’d left for home?”
I struggled with that one. I wanted to categorically deny it, but I would have been less than honest. “I don’t think he’d hitchhike back to California,” I said. “He had a scary thing happen on his trip here, and I think he’d be very leery of repeating that experience. And he’s happy here, already making friends and looking forward to going to public high school next semester. A little concerned about changing classes and teachers, sure. But Phillip is smart, and I don’t think he was anywhere close to scared about it.”
At least Cathy Trumble was listening to me. She nodded, and wrote something on a little tablet, which she’d pulled out of a pocket.
“Can I look in his room?” she asked, out of the blue as far as I was concerned.