Her and Michael’s schedules conflicted something fierce thanks to him being on deadline for a massive ad project at work, so he didn’t have much availability until the end of the week. And Jade, Pamela, and Rochelle were all asleep well before Riley got home from work.
She needed to talk things out with someone before she burst. And Pete the ghost definitely didn’t count.
So, left to her own devices, Riley sat in front of her laptop night after night. It took her three nights to finally get up the nerve to search for Francis. Just like with the name Mariah, this one had popped into her head of its own volition. Pete had somehow given her a little piece of the puzzle to put together.
Was Hank’s real name Francis? Had “Hank” and Orin concocted an alias for the boy when he’d joined Orin’s little demented team?
Riley knew from Mindy that Francis/Hank had also been a runaway and knew the boy had been twelve or thirteen when he’d joined Orin. Which, if someone had reported him as missing, would have happened in the early ’80s.
Using the same websites where she’d found Pete, Riley looked up “Francis” and scanned for the years she needed. She got no hits at all on one site, and too many on the other. “Francis Hank” got her two hits. Allison Francis Hank and Francis Hank Carras. Not a Gerber listed anywhere.
Riley swallowed and clicked on the second one, bringing up a page similar to Pete’s. The photo at the top featured an extremely good-looking boy; even at thirteen, Riley could tell he would grow up to be a heartbreaker. He had lightly tanned skin, a beaming smile of straight white teeth, and a head of unkempt dark curls.
Biting her lip, she took a screenshot and texted the picture to Mindy with a question mark, hoping it wouldn’t wake the other woman up.
A text came through almost immediately. Damn, Sherlock Holmes! How’d you find him that fast? His legal first name is FRANCIS? No wonder he went by Hank. He would have thought that was too girly. And explains why my lawyer couldn’t find him.
Guess we can add pathological liar to his CV, Riley wrote back.
His stats were listed as Pete’s had been. Age: 13; weight: 110lbs.; height: 66”; hair color: dark brown; eye color: dark brown; race: white; gender: male.
The details of his disappearance listed the date as “June 7, 1980,” followed by, “It’s believed he ran away from home after a heated argument with his parents. Arguments were not uncommon in the Carras home, but in the past, Francis always returned in a couple of hours. When he was gone overnight, the family knew something was wrong.”
She did a search for Francis Hank Carras next.
A year after the raid on the ranch and Orin’s arrest, Francis got into trouble with the law too. He’d been caught with a thirteen-year-old girl when he was eighteen and wound up charged with “fourth-degree criminal sexual penetration.” Francis was sentenced to eighteen months.
Riley wondered how the timelines of Francis going to jail and Mindy moving to Los Angeles lined up. Maybe the harassment of her largely stopped because he’d been in jail and lost track of her.
From what she could find, Francis wasn’t registered as a sex offender. Though, if he didn’t commit any other crimes, and even if he had been on the list for upwards of twenty years—a punishment on the high end for one of the “less serious” sex crimes—he might no longer need to be registered.
She found a social media page which had been updated as early as last week. He’d dropped the first name and was going by Hank Carras. He was listed as divorced, and though there was no mention of kids, it didn’t necessarily mean he didn’t have any. He was the co-owner of a small, local tech firm she’d actually heard of. Managed to do well for himself despite everything.
There were mostly pictures of himself out with friends—lots of happy, red-faced drunken pictures. Pictures of pretty women with their arms thrown over his shoulders. Clusters of attractive men in bars, all posing with beers in hand. There were also reposts with inspirational quotes and “funny” ones about the horror of Mondays.
He’d gone gray at the temples, like Mindy. And he was devastatingly handsome even at fifty; his boyish good looks hadn’t faded in the slightest. What her mother would call a “silver fox.”
He lived just outside of Santa Fe.
Had he moved off his twisted path? Had his time in jail set him straight, encouraged him to undo the damage Orin caused? She hoped so. She hoped those smiling women were blissfully unaware of his time with Orin. Of what he’d tried to do to Mindy.
Riley searched for Mindy’s social media next. She’d looked for it before but hadn’t found it. No profile photos had given her identity away.
Turned out, she did have a page, but the picture wasn’t of her—it was the logo for her old band, The Crooked Horseshoe. If Riley hadn’t seen the shirt on her, she wouldn’t have known who this page belonged to. Her location was set to Anywhere, USA, and the majority of the page was set to private. Good girl.
Around noon the next day, Michael sent her a text: Please tell me you’re still available for dinner tonight! I miss your face. I’m not sure I remember what it looks like, though. Do you remember me? I’ll be the old guy in the lobby sleeping sitting up.
She replied with, Sorry, who is this?
He sent fourteen crying emojis in response.
See you tonight. I have things to tell you! If you get super busy like this in the future, I request that you quit your job so I don’t have to sit on news like this again.
Done and done.
When she left her apartment later that evening, she was annoyed with the flutter in her stomach. It had only been four days! She remembered another reason why she hated dating: it turned her into a goofy mess.
When she made it to the entrance, she found Michael already there and waiting for her. He paced slowly back and forth in front of a bench flanked by overflowing ashtrays, hands in the pockets of his gray slacks, eyes focused on his shiny black shoes, clearly having driven over directly from work. His dark blue button-down was tucked into his slacks, the cuffs unbuttoned and rolled to his elbows.
Oh lord help me.
“Hey,” she said, startling him.
An uncontrolled smile lit up his face when he saw her. That dimple. “Hey,” he echoed, stepping toward her, arms out. “Hug me, woman! I forget what human interaction is like.”
She wrapped her arms around him, laughing. “Don’t you work in an office full of people?”
“Shh,” he said, squeezing her. “I’m having a moment.”
She laughed again. “Unhand me, you weirdo!”
He did and pecked her quickly on the lips. “I missed you.”
Grinning, she said, “I missed you too. Now hurry up so I can tell you about the things!”
With a fifteen-minute wait for a table, they plopped down in the lobby and maintained their usual level of conversational ease while they were eventually seated, and then ordered and got their drinks. Michael mostly wanted details on what it was like to have a ghost for a roommate.
“So what is this thing you wanted to tell me about?” he asked once the waitress left.
Riley was torn between bouncing up and down in her seat like an excitable kid and being worried he was going to think she was insane for meeting with Mindy.
“Dude, what is going on with your face?”
“Don’t call me dude!”
“Dudette?”
She thunked herself in the forehead with the heel of her palm. He laughed. “I met Mindy Cho for lunch.”
His laughed died abruptly and she lowered her hand. “You … you met her? How?” Eyes wide, he added, “Why are you just now telling me this?”
“It was too much to text!”
“Leave me a voicemail, woman!”
With a snort, she said, “She actually got one of the messages we left.”
“No way.”
The waitress arrived with their food.
As they ate, Riley filled him in on the details, thrilled to have someone to talk
with about it. She’d tell Jade all about it soon enough, but Michael felt connected to this whole thing even more since he’d actually seen what happened to her in the cellar. Pamela was still so traumatized by the experience, Riley hadn’t wanted to upset her further.
“It’s so crazy to think that house is the same one where she was held captive,” he said. “I guess when you hear about these kinds of stories, most people are long dead already, you know?”
She nodded. Now if only she could voice the thought she’d been having since she’d fallen into the Francis Hank Carras wormhole.
“What’s that look for?”
She swallowed a large bite of salad. “What look? You can’t be tuned into my expressions. I forbid it.”
“It’s a vaguely guilty look,” he said, narrowing his eyes. Then he straightened, pointing his spoon at her. “Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of trying to find him now.”
Lips pursed, she tucked into the salad again. “Seriously. It’s not fair you can read my face already.”
“So not the thing to be concerned about right now. He might be a sex offender. He was only caught once.” Michael lowered his voice, leaned forward, and added, “What if he has his own cellar full of kidnapped girls?”
With a sigh, she put down her fork. After a few moments of thought, she said, “Do you think things happen for a reason?” Before he could reply, she said, “If you use one of your corny-ass lines on me, I will fling the rest of my dinner at your head.”
He grunted, lightly knocking his fist against the table. “I had a really good one, too!”
“Don’t you dare.”
Grinning, he said, “Sometimes, yes, I do think things happen for a reason.”
“I think I’m supposed to make sure Pete gets put to rest. And not just because he’s currently haunting my apartment. I … I think I ended up at the ranch for a reason.” When she saw the goofy look on his face, she said, “And, yes, you were a nice bonus.”
“A bonus!” he said in mock-horror. “Second fiddle to a ghost.”
Ignoring him, she said, “Pete put Francis’ name in my head. He wants me to know who he is. And Francis knows about Pete—Mindy said Orin told Francis about him. Maybe I can get Francis to tell me where he’s buried.”
“Why didn’t he tell the police back in the day?”
“No one knew he was there. I mean, Orin and Mindy didn’t even know the guy’s real name. Plus, Orin wanted Francis to take the blame for at least some of the kidnappings. Makes sense that Francis would want to lie low. Didn’t want to go down for something Orin did.”
“Or maybe he’s just as guilty as Orin, and Francis just happened to get away with it,” Michael said.
He had a point. Had Orin just wanted to pin some of this on Francis in hopes of lessening his own sentence somehow? Or had Francis, as Michael suggested, gotten away with it, and Orin tried to rat him out because of some perverted desire for justice?
According to Mindy, Francis had “done something” out in the woods. Riley figured Michael would go into cardiac arrest if she mentioned that part, so she kept it to herself.
“Do you think he could be reformed now?” Michael asked, pulling her from her thoughts.
“No idea,” she said. “It looks like he’s living a fairly normal life now. Has friends, was married at some point, co-owns a successful business. It’s been thirty years; he’s had a long time to think about it. Maybe he’d be relieved to have it off his chest.”
Michael squinted at her again. “Maybe.”
“I can keep it all strictly on the phone. Block my number before I call him or something?”
“Just … be safe,” he said. “You might have more faith in humanity than I do. I assume if the guy was scum as a teenager, he’s going to be scum as an adult.”
“So says the guy who calls himself a reformed idiot.”
“Oh, I’m still an idiot,” he said. “But I’m trying to be better about it.”
Riley shrugged. “Maybe Francis is trying to be better, too.”
After they paid, Michael walked her to her car. They lingered outside it, her back to the driver’s side door. Dinner hadn’t lasted nearly long enough.
Reaching to grab one of her hands, he ran his thumb over the back. “So when do I get to see you again?”
“You’re the one with the fancy-pants job,” she said.
“Not anymore,” he said. “I’m now a vagabond and ready to be at your service whenever you need me.”
She smiled, rolling her eyes. “Sunday? I work all day tomorrow and Saturday.”
“Okay.”
Riley pulled him into a hug.
When they broke the embrace, her hands slid from around his neck, to flat on his chest. He still had both arms around her waist. When she glanced up at him, his focus was on her mouth. His lips parted slightly and his tongue flicked across his bottom lip.
His gaze found hers. “We’re still taking things slow, right?”
Riley nodded.
“Is it still considered moving slow if I kiss you goodbye?”
“Yes.”
One of his hands cupped the back of her neck, and his lips were on hers before she finished the word. Though the kiss felt a bit desperate, it was chaste, and over after only a few seconds. Her eyes stayed closed for several moments after it was over, missing the feel of it already.
When she opened them, he was smiling down at her. “I should probably let you go before I embarrass myself.”
“Before?”
“Ha ha,” he said, backing away and fully breaking the embrace. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”
“Okay.”
He stared at her a moment longer, his smile slipping a little—it reminded her of the look he’d given her in the kitchen at the ranch when she’d told him she was going to bed. “Have a good night, Riley.”
“You too.”
Normally before Riley took a shower, she ended up in some state of being disrobed—if not complete—while she rummaged for a change in clothes and waited for the water to get warm. Now, with a nine-year-old boy able to appear at any moment, she didn’t start to take off a stitch of clothing until she was inside her bathroom with the door shut. Which was ridiculous, she knew, because doors didn’t keep spirits out. The kid hadn’t taken to snooping, but she didn’t want to encourage the possibility. She hadn’t seen him at all in over twenty-four hours, actually.
She’d just whacked her elbow on the sink in her tiny bathroom as she tried to pull off her socks in the small space available, when her cell sitting on her counter beeped. The excited flutter in her stomach quickly turned to one of mild dread when she saw it was an email, not a text. And it was from a Nina Galvan, not Michael Roberts.
Dear Riley,
I hope it’s okay that I got your email from Angela. I thought you might want to hear these. They’re both from our time in the cellar.
Orin answered a couple of your questions. If you have any idea what they might mean, I’d love to hear your theories.
Best,
Nina
She stared at the two attachments to the email. Audio files. Goosebumps broke out across her skin at the mere thought of hearing Orin’s disembodied voice.
Curiosity was definitely going to be her downfall.
She turned off the shower, scurried out of the bathroom in just her bra and jeans, hurried back to the bathroom to pull her shirt back on, and then set up her laptop on her coffee table. Remembering how distorted and gravelly the EVPs sounded when the team shared their most “impressive” ones, Riley went hunting for her headphones. She pictured herself playing the files on a loop for half an hour before she even had a guess as to what they said. On Paranormal Playground, they often added subtitles to EVPs, as they were largely unintelligible.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her laptop, she made sure her headphones were snug, then downloaded the files. Her heart thudded so hard in her chest, her body slightly rocked with the force of it.<
br />
She hit play on the first one. Blowing out a deep breath, she heard, “Why was Pete first?”
Ugh. Did she really sound like that?
A long stretch of silence after the question. Riley’s blood pounded in her ears while she waited.
“Why are you still here?”
“Dark room,” boomed into her ears in a clear, deep voice.
Riley yanked off her headphones. On her feet in an instant, she let out a sound she usually reserved for successfully flicking a bug off her shirt, thereby narrowly escaping death. She shook out her arms, the hair on the back of her neck standing up.
Orin still hung out in the cellar because of a dark room? Like where people developed pictures back in the day?
Riley rubbed her hands up and down her arms as she paced behind the couch, scowling at her computer like she blamed it personally for the creepy shit that just came out of her headphones.
“Now’s the time to help me out,” she said to her empty apartment. “Any clue what the dark room is, kid?”
Something moved in her peripheral vision to her right and she turned toward it. Nothing. A cold draft swept past her suddenly and she shivered. The air grew colder and colder. Her cell phone’s screen lit up, then gave a beep and died, the battery drained. Then her laptop died, the screen going black. Riley rubbed her hands up and down her arms.
“You’re creeping me out, kid,” she whispered, glancing around the room. Pete had never needed this much energy to manifest before. Why did he need so much now?
A faint outline of the little boy shimmered into view on the other side of her coffee table. Riley could see right through him, like he was made of plastic. His brows were pulled together, his expression pained. Fists balled and jaw tight, he appeared to be doing all he could to will himself into existence.
“Pete … ?”
The image flickered, the outline of him twitching. Then he was gone. Cold air sucked away.
A lump welled in her throat. She couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow this little boy was dying all over again. Was it because he was here with her, so far from his body? What would happen if he stayed here too long? Would he just fade away? She didn’t want that for him.
The Forgotten Child Page 20