by Dana Becker
MISSING PERSON
“So you met her here?” another of the officers asked.
“No,” April said, with a big sigh. “I didn’t meet her here. But she said she was coming here. That was the last thing she told me.”
“So you don’t know if she actually came here that day?”
“No,” April replied, grimly.
A heavy wave of hopelessness suddenly overwhelmed her. Her patience with the cops’ questions was beginning to wear thin, revealing the truer emotion underneath it. It was the feeling she had been trying, for weeks now, to avoid: raw despair. That was the exact moment she heard a voice from inside the small crowd of onlookers.
“I saw her,” the voice said.
It was a man’s voice. April and the police officers, and a few stragglers standing around in front of Metropolitan Bakery, suddenly turned around to see who’d spoken. Before April spotted the man, she saw the faces of the people who had seen him: the looks were of startled surprise, curiosity, even amusement. And then she saw what they saw. A young Amish man, with wide shoulders and long limbs, stepped confidently forward.
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DANA BECKER
ZEBRA BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
MISSING PERSON
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Teaser chapter
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2020 by Avi Steinberg
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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Chapter One
April wasn’t the type to call the cops. She took care of her own business, didn’t need to rely on anyone. That, at least, was the story she liked to tell about herself. But here she was, standing at the bustling center of Reading Terminal Market in downtown Philadelphia, talking openly with two uniformed officers as a small crowd of curious onlookers gathered around.
She was trying to explain, for the hundredth time, what had happened: her sister, Rose, was gone.
“What do you mean ‘gone’?” one of the cops asked.
“Gone,” April replied, already regretting this conversation. “As in disappeared.”
Nobody had heard from Rose in about two weeks. She hadn’t shown up to her job at Walgreens. She had, by all appearances, vanished into thin air. Wasn’t it difficult enough for April to deal with this emotionally? Why did she have to explain it, too?
And there were things April wasn’t saying. Things she’d barely admit to herself, much less tell the police. But here’s what she did reveal: her sister’s last words to her, before she disappeared. I’m going to Reading. I’m going to that bakery. Well, April was now at Reading Terminal Market, at that bakery, doing her part. She was talking to the cops, trying to make them understand.
“So you met her here?” another of the officers asked.
“No,” April said, with a big sigh. “I didn’t meet her here. But she said she was coming here. That was the last thing she told me.”
“So you don’t know if she actually came here that day?”
“No,” April replied, grimly.
A heavy wave of hopelessness suddenly overwhelmed her. Her patience with the cops’ questions was beginning to wear thin, revealing the truer emotion underneath it. It was the feeling she had been trying, for weeks now, to avoid: raw despair. That was the exact moment she heard a voice from inside the small crowd of onlookers.
“I saw her,” the voice said.
It was a man’s voice. April and the police officers, and a few stragglers standing around in front of Metropolitan Bakery, suddenly turned around to see who’d spoken. Before April spotted the man, she saw the faces of the people who had seen him: the looks were of startled surprise, curiosity, even amusement. And then she saw what they saw. A young Amish man, with wide shoulders and long limbs, stepped confidently forward. April had seen him before, around the market, but never up close.
“Yes,” he said, pointing to the photo that one of the officers was holding in his hand. “Her,” he continued. “I remember seeing her. I saw her last week.”
For a moment, nobody, not even the police, said a word, as though waiting to hear what else the man might have to say. But, for the moment, he said nothing more.
The cops eyed him warily, skeptically.
“You sure?” one of the officers said.
“Yes,” the Amish man replied. “I am certain.”
And he really did seem certain. As he answered the officers’ questions, April watched him closely. When they asked his name, he turned to April, as though addressing her, looked deeply at her, and said, “Joseph. Joseph Young.” He pronounced his own name as though he were delivering a piece of dramatic news. To April, that’s exactly how it felt.
His demeanor was unlike anything she’d ever seen in a man. Especially in one her own age. He seemed entirely in control, but without the need to assert his control over the situation. He held
immense power in his large body but didn’t bother wielding it, didn’t seem to feel the need to show off. He seemed even more powerful for his restraint, more charismatic for his ability to master his charisma. To the police, he delivered strong, clear answers that were direct and sincere. He answered with a crisp “yes,” never “yeah” or “yup.” He wasn’t trying to conceal something or compensate for anything. He was, in short, perfectly comfortable in his skin.
And what a skin it was. This man was head-turningly handsome. His serious face allowed for a quick smile, and April noticed he had dimples.
April was noticing, too, that she wasn’t the only one seeing this. The eyes of the cops, and everyone who lingered in front of the bakery, were glued to this strange, beautiful man. Nobody wanted to interrupt him or let him go. Unless it was her imagination, it seemed that the cops were now only asking him questions as an excuse to keep him in front of their eyes.
And then there was his gaze. At various moments, he looked directly at April with intense green eyes—but why was he so interested in her? Maybe it was because she was the sister of the missing girl. Or was it because April herself was staring at him? Could it be because he was as taken with her as she was with him? Whatever the reason, the effect of that gaze on April was immediate, and it registered bodily. It felt as if she was standing in the hot beam of a theater spotlight. It was the same sensation she’d felt when she used to act in school plays. And, just as his eyes warmed her skin like hot stage lights, she felt the need to perform, to make a speech, to undertake some grand gesture—and increasingly the gesture she wanted to make was a dramatic exit. The heat was too much. She needed to do something, anything, not to seem like a deer caught in the headlights.
But the more April watched him, and the more she detected how intensely controlled he was, the more she also sensed that he was, just maybe, a bit too controlled. He would be hard to reach. A fortress. An impressive fortress, no doubt. But a fortress.
So mesmerized was April by this man that she hardly noticed that the police had stopped talking to him and had turned back to her, with some additional questions. She tried her best to focus on what she was being asked. But, in doing so, she lost track of the beautiful man. And before she knew it, when she looked around, he was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
That was the first time April paid close attention to the mysterious Joseph Young. But it wasn’t the first time he’d studied her. In fact, he’d had his eye on her from the moment she’d made a dramatic entrance at the bakery in Reading Terminal Market almost a week earlier.
Joseph had witnessed the whole scene that day. From his own corner of Reading Terminal Market, at the Amish-run diner next to the bakery, he’d watched it unfold. That day, a Friday, he could tell that something was very wrong even before he knew what it was. He sensed trouble. And he wasn’t the only one. The bakery’s owner, Carmen, also sensed it.
Standing at her shop counter, carefully arranging the day’s assorted delicacies—brioches and tartes Tatin, fresh out of the oven—Carmen sensed a commotion outside the bakery, somewhere out in the sprawling mass of Reading Terminal Market, which was packed with crowds shopping for a summer weekend. Carmen and Joseph, both, detected it as a minor disturbance of air, like the early breezes of an impending storm.
Just as Carmen rose to her tiptoes to peer over the crowd and investigate the situation, April lunged out of the mass of people, elbowing her way forward—seeming, as Carmen would later remember it, as though she weren’t walking but somehow spinning, like a drunk ballerina pirouetting wildly. April sped headlong through the doorway of Carmen’s bakery, tripped over one of the café chairs, and braced her body against the counter. Joseph, who happened to be standing nearby, saw this and followed her into the shop, where he witnessed the whole exchange.
“I need your phone,” April had said, staring directly at Carmen. “I gotta make a call.”
April was not blinking.
Carmen drew a long, loud breath through her nose.
“Sorry, hon,” she said, straightening her back. “Can’t do that.”
Carmen wasn’t from Philadelphia. But she’d lived there long enough, almost twenty years now, that she’d seen all of the mischief and misery the city had to offer. Half of the city, it seemed, needed her phone, or something of hers, at some point. Did a day go by when someone on the street didn’t try to hustle her out of something?
Carmen quickly sized up the young woman standing in front of her. To survive in the city, a pretty girl like this would have to project an aura of danger. High and tight ponytail, hoop earrings, fire engine red lipstick to contrast with straight black hair and green eyes, high-waisted slightly baggy jeans, ripped at the knees and dotted with flecks of paint, red Air Jordans on her feet, a short, purple-black faux leather jacket, and a grimy fraying gray T-shirt. Philly was full of young women like her, Carmen thought. They’re tough, sure, but mostly they want you to think they’re tough. In other words: they’re hiding something. Carmen tried to remain unmoved.
What gave her pause was the look on the young woman’s face, the same look that had brought Joseph into the shop behind her: it was a look of genuine distress.
A memory flashed in Carmen’s mind. Childhood. The farm. That girl.
Carmen came from country folk, who only went to hospitals if they needed surgery. Otherwise they used their own home remedies. Once, when she was really young, maybe eight or nine, she’d seen the most awful thing. Without any warning or previous sign of illness, a teenaged neighbor girl dropped dead one day while doing her chores in the dairy. Within days, the family buried the poor girl in the family plot. There was only one problem: she wasn’t dead.
She’d fallen prey to a rare form of catatonia, which closely mimicked signs of death. When they’d checked for a heartbeat, they didn’t hear it because the beats were so faint and so infrequent that her heart truly might not have been beating during the moments when they listened. She was, to all appearances, dead. And so they buried her.
The girl’s younger brother, however, was so distraught at her loss that he’d spent all of his free time at her graveside, refusing to believe that she was gone. Incredibly, he heard clawing sounds from her tomb, and set out desperately to dig her out. In the end, they rescued her. But she was never the same.
Carmen had seen the girl after she’d been unburied. She remembered seeing her walk around town, at the market, so skinny, and with this doomed look on her face. Could the girl speak? She must have spoken. But Carmen never once heard her say even a single word. A ghost of a ghost.
She rarely thought about the unburied girl from her childhood. But that girl, her face, came to Carmen suddenly when she saw this stranger—the look in her eyes—as she leaned against the bakery counter. The memory came with a startlingly vivid flash.
“Phone,” April was saying, almost panting. “Please.”
Carmen felt her defenses weakening.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?”
“My sister, she’s . . .” said the girl, in an odd, absent sort of way, “gone.”
Carmen retreated into the back to find her phone. As she rummaged through her purse, she saw April standing at the bakery counter, eating the bread samples, ravenously, until the plate was empty.
Why me? Carmen thought, then felt a bit guilty.
When Carmen returned to the counter, April was in tears. She was holding a photo of her missing sister, printed on a piece of office paper.
“This is the most recent one I got,” she said. “Have you seen her? Her name is Rose. She comes around here a lot.”
“Here?”
“Here,” April said, “to this bakery.”
“Oh,” said Carmen, feeling a sudden knot in her throat. “I see.”
She examined the photo. The missing girl had boy-short, bright red hair and big, mischievous eyes. She appeared to be a bit younger and a bit more punk than April. In the picture she was shown in a booth at a Chili’s, i
ntentionally leaning in front of another girl, impishly blocking her out of the photo. Her mouth was slightly open.
“What was she saying?” Carmen suddenly asked.
“Saying?” said April.
“Yeah,” Carmen replied, handing the photo back to April. “In the picture. It looks like she’s saying something.”
April looked at the photo and smiled a tiny bit. “Probably something dumb.”
“Well, she does look familiar, I think. That red hair,” Carmen said. “But I can’t remember when I might have seen her last. Not this week, I don’t think.”
Carmen handed her phone to April. She wiped her hands on her jeans, pulled out a piece of paper with a number on it, and began furiously dialing.
“I’m calling her friend,” she said to Carmen. And then, a moment later: “Ugh.” There was no answer. She left a breathless message.
Uh, hey, it’s me . . . I’m calling from someone’s phone because mine got cut off. Look, Rose’s gone. I don’t know where she is. I haven’t heard from her for more than three days. You know she’s not like that. I’m really scared. I don’t need to tell you what I’m afraid of. I know you know. I’m at Reading now. Please call me back at this number or come here as soon as you can. I’m at . . .
She turned to Carmen.
“Metropolitan Bakery,” Carmen said.
The Metropolitan Bakery, April said into the phone. Reading Terminal Market.
April put the phone back on the counter and looked helplessly at Carmen.
“I think you should call the police, hon,” Carmen said.
“No,” April replied with a vehemence that startled Carmen.
“I just think . . .”
“I’m not calling the police.”