“I didn’t go with him. We ran into him in the city…”
“But you took him to those places. Looking for Brianna.”
“I went with him,” Erin corrected. She was in the right on this one. She had tried to talk Joshua out of it, and when she hadn’t been able to dissuade him, she had gone along to help keep him safe and out of trouble.
“You have shown a shocking lack of awareness of what is appropriate behavior and what could have serious consequences. You should never have let Joshua search for Campbell.”
Erin’s temper rose at the unfairness of Mary Lou’s comment. “I’m not his mother. I couldn’t stop him from doing anything. I went along to try to keep him safe and that’s the best I could do. What would he have done if I told him he couldn’t go look for her? He would have laughed in my face.”
“Then you call me. You let me know what’s going on. You don’t just let him rush headlong into something dangerous.”
“Okay, fine. I didn’t do that. I guess I should have. But that doesn’t have anything to do with him being missing. That was months ago.”
“I told you I didn’t want you to have anything more to do with him.”
Erin rubbed her face tiredly. “I know. And I didn’t.”
“You didn’t talk to him in Whitewater?”
“Well… yes, I did. He came to my hotel. I didn’t seek him out. And when I asked if you knew where he was, he said you did.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with Joshua. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. I don’t know why he’s disappeared. But if it had anything to do with you…”
“It’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t have anything to do with him disappearing. The last time I saw him was when he was working on the article for the paper. I never saw him or talked to him again after that.”
There was silence for a few moments. “Very well,” Mary Lou said finally. “If you hear anything… I expect you to tell me. Not Officer Piper; me. His mother. And if you do anything to interfere, anything that puts him in further danger…”
“I wouldn’t do anything. I won’t. And I hope… I hope he turns up again soon, and that everything is okay.”
“So do I.”
Mary Lou hung up. Erin put her phone down, put her arm over her eyes, and tried to resist the urge to burst into tears.
Chapter 13
Erin was getting ready for bed when she heard Terry answer the door. She hovered near the bathroom doorway, listening to identify the visitor. It didn’t take her long to figure out that it was Stayner, the newest member of the Bald Eagle Falls police department. He had been contracted when Terry was unable to work, and they had managed to make room in the budget for him to stay on for an extended period. He was young and didn’t have a lot of experience. Erin hoped that he was a quick learner. She found him abrasive and too quick to jump to judgment. He was opinionated and, she thought, sexist, though he had never come right out and told her that her place was in the kitchen. Or the bakery. It was just a feeling she got from him.
But Terry and the sheriff said that he did good work. Yes, he was rough around the edges, but that would improve with experience and a good teacher.
“Ten to one, he’s on a binge,” Stayner told Terry in the living room. “It’s a waste of our time and resources. He’ll show up again when he sobers up. Mom is overreacting.”
Terry’s response was softer, and Erin hoped it was something along the lines of ‘Mary Lou is not overreacting. She waited a full day before reporting him missing, and he’s now been gone for two days. No one knows where he went.’
“His friends know where he is,” Stayner said. “Mark my words. Probably his brother too. He acted all shocked and concerned, but I know the way these kids act. He knows exactly where Joshua Cox is.”
Erin moved out into the bathroom, closer to the living room. She didn’t want them to see her, didn’t want to have to deal with Stayner’s ‘I know better’ bluster, but she wanted to learn what she could.
“What did Cam have to say?” Terry asked.
Erin heard the squeak of springs as Stayner sat down to continue the conversation. “He said he hasn’t talked to Josh for a few days. And when they did talk, Joshua didn’t give any hint that he was planning to go anywhere. Everything was normal, according to big brother. But I highly doubt Joshua left without telling Cam where he was going.”
“No sign of him in Cam’s apartment? No hint that someone else has been staying there?”
“He doesn’t have an apartment of his own. From what I can tell, he couch surfs between a few different friends. So, yes, there are plenty of signs that someone else has been around, because it’s not Cam’s own place. And there are others who live or crash there, too. It would be impossible to sort out whether Joshua was ever there.”
“So he couldn’t ask Josh to come live with him. Or even just sleep over.”
“I don’t think the fact that it wasn’t his apartment would stop him. They all seem pretty casual about it. I probably could have stayed there, as long as I promised to look the other way on any drug charges.”
“What kind of a mood was he in the last time that Cam talked to him?”
“Fine, according to Cam. Good spirits. Happy with his bonus English assignment. Ready to kick back and relax for a while.”
“Uh-huh.” In her mind’s eye, Erin saw Terry rubbing his chin as he often did when pondering. “And nothing from his school friends?”
Erin had thought that Terry would have been the one to interview Joshua’s school friends, but she supposed that since he’d been up most of the night and then would have had a ton of reports to fill out, he probably hadn’t been able to get over to the school between the time that school started and he finally clocked out.
“I talked to his loser friends,” Stayner agreed.
Erin clenched her teeth at his characterization. Joshua and his friends were not losers. Joshua had been through a lot, that was all.
“Loser friends?” Terry repeated. “Is that what went into your report?”
“No, of course not. But they are. His friends are the lowest class at the school. Nowhere kids. They don’t belong to any of the teams or clubs, get rock bottom marks, have no motivation to do anything but go home and game or surf porn on their computers.”
“Josh used to be on the sports teams. He got out of them because of the difficult time that he’s been having. You have to remember what happened with his dad, and then with Campbell. The kid is lost.”
Stayner snorted. “Yeah,” he agreed. “They’re all lost boys. They’re going nowhere and will amount to nothing. Look for them soon begging on a street corner near you.”
“And none of them had any idea where Josh might have gone?”
“No idea. I don’t know if any of them even noticed that he was missing. It was like, ‘Oh, Josh? Yeah, where is he, man?’” Stayner used his best stoner voice. It would have been funny if Erin wasn’t so angry at him for his insensitivity.
But he didn’t know she was there listening. He thought he was just talking to a fellow cop, and Erin knew that they frequently dealt with the stress of the job with gallows humor and sarcastic or inappropriate comments. He would probably have guarded his tongue if he had known that Erin was there listening. Which was why she hadn’t made herself known. She wanted to hear everything he had to say.
“Today was a waste of time,” Stayner’s tone was annoyed. “The whole day was a write-off. We didn’t get any farther ahead on anything.” There was a pause in which neither of them spoke. “No one had any motive to kidnap the kid, Piper. He’ll show up again when he feels like it.”
“You think that he wrote the note,” Terry said.
“Him or one of his equally illiterate buddies, yeah.”
Erin just about shouted at him despite not wanting them to know she was eavesdropping on the conversation.
Joshua was not illiterate! He had just finished having an article published by the p
aper. Not the school paper, the Bald Eagle Falls weekly. It might have been small, but it was a real paper and he’d managed to get his article published by them. His marks had fallen not because he wasn’t smart enough, but because he’d been through a series of horrible family tragedies and couldn’t deal with schoolwork on top of it.
“Well, only time and further investigation will tell. We have to put in the footwork, even if you don’t think there was any foul play. We need to do all of the right things, just in case. Don’t allow investigative bias to creep in. What would you do if there were signs of violence? A ransom note? What if it was a ten-year-old girl instead of a teenage boy?”
Stayner was silent.
“We’ll have a team meeting tomorrow,” Terry told him. “We’ll go over everything that we’ve found so far, and we’ll talk about what to do next. But think about it. Come up with some ideas and suggestions to bring to the meeting. Show that you can think critically and conduct a thorough investigation.”
“Yeah, okay,” Stayner agreed, his voice quiet for once instead of blustering. He’d just gotten some good advice from his senior officer, and if he wanted to be respected within the police department, he would follow up on it.
Chapter 14
Erin took the first tray of flat cookie disks out of the oven and put them on a cooling tray.
“So the cookies need to be folded while they’re still warm. Once they cool, they get crispy, and then it is too late to fix any mistakes. This is how you do it.”
Her assistant bakers watched closely. Erin hoped that the cookies held together like they were supposed to. She had tested the recipe out already and practiced folding the fortune cookies, but that didn’t mean that a batch couldn’t go wrong. Too much moisture or not enough, left in the oven a minute or two too long, or something else that she couldn’t foresee or control. There were no guarantees.
“The fortune goes inside,” Erin placed one of the slips of paper on the flat disk. “Then, you fold the cookie into a half-circle.” Erin demonstrated. “And then bring the ends together into the classic fortune-cookie shape. You can rest it on the rim of a glass to cool, or just place it carefully on the cooling rack.”
“That’s so cool,” Bella said. “But I’m a little sad to know the secret of how the fortune gets inside the cookie.”
Everybody nodded and laughed, agreeing.
“One of life’s mysteries solved,” Erin said. “You’ll have to move on to how they get the caramel into a Caramilk bar.”
She stepped back from the counter. “I’d like to make sure everyone makes two or three, so you get a feel for it.” She moved to the next oven and pulled out another tray as the timer chimed. She put it down on another counter across the kitchen from the first. The group split into two. The kitchen was crowded with so many people there. Still, it had seemed like the best idea to show everyone how to make the fortune cookies at the same time, instead of having to demonstrate several times or have everyone showing everyone else, possibly losing something in translation.
She watched as each of the employees tried several fortune cookies. There were some misfolds and some breakage. That was all to be expected. They would just eat the mistakes instead of sending them on to the Chinese restaurant.
After everyone had a go at it, Erin dismissed them. “Great, thanks for coming by for this. I’ve had Matt print a bunch of fortunes for us, we’ll get the rest of the cookies done over the next week, as per the schedule.”
Erin had been thinking all day about Terry’s advice to Stayner. Imagine that they had proof that Josh had not disappeared voluntarily, and work from there. She put the possibility that Joshua had left of his own accord out of her head and focused on what they knew.
He had come back from Whitewater and written his article. He hadn’t been back to Whitewater since then, as far as anyone knew. He had talked to his mother, his friends, and his brother in the days before his disappearance. He hadn’t said anything about plans to go away, being stressed out, or anything else that would explain his disappearance.
Had he received any threats? Anything to indicate that he might be in danger? If he had mentioned any threats to his family or friends, she assumed they would have reported it to the police after his disappearance. So he must not have.
How could he disappear in the middle of the night? He’d been there when Mary Lou had gone to bed but wasn’t there when she got up. Had he gone somewhere voluntarily, to a party or to see Campbell or a girl, and then something had happened to prevent him from getting home again? Had someone come into his bedroom and taken him away? If so, why wasn’t there any sign of a struggle? He could have been drugged or knocked out. He could have been taken at gunpoint or under some other threat. He was a slim teenager, stronger than a ten-year-old girl, but still not man-grown, and not someone who did bodybuilding or martial arts. He had dropped out of all of his sports teams. If someone had threatened him with a weapon or threatened to do something to Mary Lou, he wouldn’t have had any choice but to go with them.
If someone had come for him, was it someone he knew? A stranger? Would he have let a stranger into the house?
Was it someone that Joshua connected with Erin and that was why he had written the note?
But if he had been taken from his room under threat, when would he have had the time to leave a note? What kidnapper would have let him do that?
Or had the kidnapper forced him to write that note to throw suspicion onto Erin? As Mary Lou had said, she assumed that Erin’s past actions had something to do with Joshua’s disappearance. She didn’t think that Erin had taken Josh, but she believed it was, in some way, Erin’s fault.
“Who would take Joshua?”
Vic looked over at Erin, chewing a bite of sandwich. “What?”
Erin hadn’t meant to speak the question aloud. But now that she had, she might as well see what Vic thought.
“Who would take Joshua? If he was taken from his room—or somewhere else in town—who would do that? And why? Mary Lou thinks it was because of me.”
“No, she’s just worried.”
“She said so. She thinks it’s because of something that I did.”
“Well…” Vic chewed slowly. “I don’t know what Joshua would have to do with anything from your past. That doesn’t make much sense.”
Erin nodded. “Right? I mean, I know Josh, but not well. We’ve talked a few times. But we haven’t really had anything to do with each other. So why…?”
Vic wiped a bit of mayonnaise from her lip. “You and Josh. The only time you ever really did anything together was when we were all in the city. Is that what you’re talking about?”
Erin thought about it. “You think it’s someone who saw us together when we were looking for Brianna? I still don’t…” She trailed off, shaking her head. What was the connection? Why would someone kidnap Josh because he and Erin had been in the city together?
“It’s not a very long list,” Vic said. She licked her finger off and held it up in a ‘number one’ sign. “There was the girl at the first apartment we went to. The girl with the black eye. The second one, there wasn’t anyone there, right? Someone still might have seen us there. Then…” She cleared her throat. “The mob guy. Mickey. But he’s in prison, so it wasn’t him.”
“But there was a girl there, too.”
“What reason would any of them have to take Josh?” Vic shook her head. “Nothing I can think of. I mean, he’s a white boy living at home; maybe they figured they could get some kind of ransom for him…” “But there hasn’t been a ransom demand.”
They both thought about that. Someone could have taken him intending to ask for a ransom. But Erin didn’t like where that led. That would mean that something had happened to Josh to prevent them from making the demand. She didn’t even want to entertain that possibility.
“Maybe one of them liked him,” Vic suggested. “They started to see each other quietly, and she eventually talked him into running away with her?
”
“Okay, maybe,” Erin agreed. She searched in her purse for a piece of paper to write it down. One of the girls they had seen that day. And the note was just to throw Mary Lou off of their trail. So that she thought it was something to do with Erin instead of Joshua running off with a girl. That could be true of any of the girls in town, too. They didn’t need to know that Erin and Josh had been in the city together, just that Josh knew her and that Mary Lou had not been happy with Erin.
Mary Lou hadn’t exactly kept it a secret.
Chapter 15
When he woke up again, the room was a little lighter. Josh tried to crane his neck around to look all the way around it and, while he couldn’t make out what most of the dark shapes around him were, he saw a high window above him with some light leaking in around the edges. Not enough to make the room bright. Just enough to lift a few of the shadows.
He remembered the whispered voice. Someone had been in the room with him the last time he had awoken. That person had blindfolded and gagged him and knocked him out with some drug. The blindfold and gag had been removed again, but his hands and feet were apparently still bound. Josh lay still, trying to learn as much as he could about his environment without moving. It was a large room. He couldn’t see all the way around it. It was filled with a lot of shadowy objects, but they didn’t seem to be arranged in any particular order, like shelves or furniture. More like a storage room where everything had just been shoved in together.
His mouth was so dry he couldn’t work up the spit to irrigate it. His tongue felt like it belonged to someone else, clumsy and swollen. There were cracks in the corners of his mouth. His nose also felt dried up, more cracks running from the outside corners of his nostrils down toward his mouth.
There was a noise.
Joshua strained toward it, trying to see if it were a rat or a person or some other random noise from the building itself shifting. He couldn’t see well in the dark, but the furtive sound continued and, in a few minutes, he could see the shape moving toward him. Human-sized, not a rat. He didn’t dare hope it was someone there to save him. He was grateful for the removal of the gag and didn’t want to earn it back by addressing his captor or making any attempt to attract attention.
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