Little Girl Lost: A Riveting Kidnapping Mystery- Book 1

by Alexandria Clarke

  I scuffed my sneakers against the floor. “I missed you too, Emmett.”

  “If it’s possible, I’d like to see you more,” he went on softly. “Maybe outside of a bar, since we tend to get in trouble if there’s alcohol involved.”

  “If I recall, you were the one who got into a fistfight at The Pit a few nights ago,” I reminded him. “Not me.”

  “And you were the one who got carted off to the hospital last night,” he countered, playfully bumping his hip against mine. “Are we keeping score?”

  I nudged him away, careful to avoid the piece of machinery he held. “I’m too competitive to keep score.”

  “I know,” he agreed. “So what do you say? You and me, minus the booze.”

  “Look, Emmett,” I said. “I would really like to, but I’m not here to catch up with old friends. I’m here to find Holly.”

  “I’m sure Holly would want you to let loose a little,” he told me. “She was always worrying about you.”

  “And now it’s my turn to worry about her.” Over Emmett’s shoulder, Bill had vanished amongst the other customers. “I’m sorry, Emmett. Maybe after I get my sister back, we can talk about it.”

  He cleared his throat and straightened up. “Totally. Holly’s my priority too. I just figured I’d try to take care of you while she’s gone, but I probably should’ve known that you don’t need anyone to take care of you. It’s one of the things I like about you so much.”

  I stood on my toes, balanced myself on Emmett’s forearm, and kissed his cheek. “Thanks. I’ll see you around, okay?”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  As I stepped around him to chase after Bill again, I tried not to make too much of his melancholy expression. Emmett had resting puppy face, and turning him down was like taking a delicious steak bone away from a well-behaved dog. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hang out with him. Emmett was one of the few people who had the ability to distract me from the problems that followed me around. His methods of doing so were uncouth, but we always had fun. Unfortunately, I couldn’t run from my issues anymore. I had to chase after them instead.

  For a moment, I thought I’d lost Bill in the maze of the supply store, but after another lap around the hardware section, I found him helping an older gentleman pick out a trailer hitch for his truck. I waited until they were finished. When Bill turned around to continue his shopping and found me in his way, his thick beard turned swiftly downward.

  “I thought I told you to stay away from me while you were in town.” He attempted to push his utility cart past me, but the castor wheels were fickle.

  I propped my foot against the cart, preventing him from going any farther. “I need to talk to you.”

  “If this is about Holly’s damn case file, I already told you that I won’t let the cops give you permission to look at it,” Bill growled. “Relentless, aren’t you?”

  “This isn’t about Holly’s case,” I said. “It’s about the barn.”

  His bushy white eyebrows lifted, wrinkling the lines on his sunburned forehead. “You mean the one you burned down?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  Bill leaned down on the cart handle. “Oh, this oughta be good.”

  I gulped and stepped free of the cart’s immediate path, lest Bill attempt to run me over with it once I fulfilled the postcard’s instructions. “Bill, before I tell you this, you should know that I was young and angry then. Everything felt like the end of the world to me. I did a lot of things that I’m not proud of. I know you and I have never had the best relationship, but when I think about what I put you and Emily through, I feel awful.”

  Bill, leery of my repentant tone, narrowed his eyes. “Do I smell the apocalypse brewing? Because this sure as hell sounds like an apology to me, and I never thought I’d hear one come out of your mouth.”

  “It’s kind of an apology,” I admitted. “But it’s more of a confession.”

  Bill straightened up, looming over me. “What did you do?”

  “You already know what I did,” I told him. “You don’t know why. The truth is that I set fire to the barn because I thought you were in it.”

  It took a moment for the statement to settle into reality. I watched as Bill’s jaw went slack and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes bunched up.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted out. “Like I said, I was sixteen and stupid. It didn’t seem fair to me that you were alive when my parents were dead, especially after what you did to Emily—”

  “You hated me that much?”

  “I—” The tremble in his quiet tone completely threw me. He had never sounded so vulnerable before. “I hated everyone. You just happened to be the closest target.”

  “You do realize that you just admitted to attempted murder,” he said.

  I swallowed hard. “Yes, I do.”

  Bill didn’t rush me with the cart or explode with anger like I expected him to. Instead, he hung his head, stroking his beard in quiet thought.

  “You know, Bridget,” he said so softly that I had to lean in to catch the words. “I always tried to do right by people. Emily and I don’t foster kids for the extra cash or tax breaks. We started doing it because Emily always wanted children and we couldn’t have any of our own.”

  “Oh.”

  “She likes them,” Bill continued. “Hell, I like them too when they’re not bouncing off the walls or flushing toys down the toilet. The point is, when we took you and Holly in, we knew it would be hard, but we thought it was for the best. You and Holly wouldn’t get bounced from house to house like most of the other kids in the system. You could stay in Belle Dame, where the rest of your friends and family were. We saw two heartbroken girls in need of a home, and we were in a position to provide that.”

  “Bill, I—”

  “I’m not finished,” he said, holding up a meaty finger to stop me. “I did my damnedest to be patient with you because I couldn’t begin to understand what you were going through. And then the sneaking out started, and the petty theft, and the vandalism. You were a damn tornado, Bridget. You ripped apart everything in your path without thinking of the consequences.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry.”

  “And now—” Bill raised his voice to overpower my apology. “You come into town to blame me and my wife for Holly’s disappearance and to inform me, in public, that you wanted to kill me when you were a teenager? What I can’t understand is why you’ve decided to torture me like this. All I’ve ever done was try to protect you from yourself.”

  I covered my mouth, holding back a sob. Impatient tears spilled over my eyelashes, and several passing customers shot suspicious looks at me and Bill.

  Bill sighed and tightened his grip on the utility cart. He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Look, I believe that you’re here for Holly. I believe that you love her and that you would do anything for her. Here’s the thing though. I’m responsible for Holly until her eighteenth birthday. After that, she can do whatever she wants, but until then, I don’t want you anywhere near my family. Don’t come to my house. Don’t talk to my kids. Don’t come near my wife. When Holly gets home, I’ll give the two of you an hour to catch up, and then I expect you to go right back to Turkey or Greece or wherever you were before Holly disappeared. Actually, I don’t care where you go as long as it’s far away from Belle Dame. If you don’t respect my decision, I won’t hesitate to take out a restraining order against you. Understood?”

  My chin quivered as I fought against the flood of emotions threatening to burst out and leak onto the floor of the warehouse. If I opened my mouth, I would lose it, so I nodded once and kept my eyes on Bill’s boots.

  “Good.” Bill pushed the utility cart down the aisle. “God help you, Bridget. You sure as hell need someone to.”

  As his girth faded into the crowd, a short, desperate cry escaped from my lips. I clamped my mouth shut and made a run for the door, bumping customers out of the way. The sun hit me like a smack in the face. Tears str
eamed down my cheeks as I vaulted over the landscape border to the side of the massive warehouse, away from the front door and the dusty parking lot. I sagged against a bale of hay and lost it, crying into the itchy yellow grass.

  The phone vibrated in my pocket, buzzing against my thigh. I took it out, wiped my eyes to see straight, and checked the messages.

  Well done. One step closer to saving your little sister.

  When I’d gathered myself into one piece again—or as close to one piece as I could get—I walked back into town. My chest felt hollow, as though someone had reached in and ripped my heart out of place. Bill’s reaction confused me. All this time, I’d painted him as a villain. I should’ve known there was more to the story behind the Millers’ love of fostering. This was why I’d left Belle Dame in the first place, because it was impossible for me to measure up to the expectations of those around me.

  An engine hummed as a squad car pulled up to the sidewalk next to me. Mac rolled down the window and leaned across the seat, frowning when she saw my pink, tearstained face. “Everything okay?”

  “No.”

  Mac drifted along as I continued trudging down the street. “Been looking for you. We got a call at the station about a half an hour ago. It was Bill Miller. He said the two of you had a run-in at the supply store, mentioned that you might be a danger to yourself and to others. I convinced Scott to let me track you down. Anything you want to tell me?”

  I counted the neat cracks in the concrete beneath my sneakers.

  “Bridget.”

  “I can’t talk here,” I muttered.

  Mac cupped her hand to her ear. “What’d you say?”

  I stepped over the grass to the curb, looked around to make sure that no one was within earshot, and bowed into the window of Mac’s cruiser. “I can’t talk here. Someone might be listening. We need to meet. Tonight, in the home team dugout at the old high school’s softball field. Two o’clock. Can you do that?”

  Mac tapped the temple of her aviators, sliding the glasses down the bridge of her nose to scrutinize me over the frames. “You gonna fill me in on what’s happening with you then?”

  “As much as I can.”

  The sunglasses went back up. “All right then. Two o’clock. What should I tell Officer Scott when I get back to the station?”

  I retreated from the window of the squad car. “Tell him it’s the same old shit.”

  At half past one, when the only people left awake in Belle Dame were the regular ghosts of the local bars, I dressed in dark jeans and a black jacket, yanking the hood over my head and cinching it tightly around my face. My reflection in the motel room window looked ready to rob a convenience store, but those days were long behind me. I took the Polaroid photo and the postcard from the motel safe and stole into the night. I left my phone in the room, just in case Holly’s captors had somehow managed to turn it into a tracking device.

  I jogged through the back side of town, jumping fences and startling cattle in order to avoid the main roads. Every so often, I looked around to make sure that no one was following me. In the open fields of Belle Dame’s rural landscape, there weren’t many places for a stalker to hide, another advantage of taking the long way.

  The old high school was practically falling over. Cinderblocks crumbled at the corners, red and black paint—Belle Dame official colors—peeled off the building, and someone had toppled the statue of the school mascot in the quad. I snuck beneath the dilapidated overhangs and past the portables to the rear side of the school, where the chain-link backstop of the old ballfield cast a cage of shadows across the infield in the moonlight. The home team dugout faced the opposite direction. I clambered over the fence, crept across home base, and sidled into the little alcove.

  Mac stood at the very back, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, eyes open and alert. I jumped at her statuesque posture. She was as still and quiet as the rest of the night, like a wolf waiting out its prey.

  “Shit, you scared me,” I said, taking a breath to steady my racing pulse.

  “Sorry.” She moved into the moonbeams and sat down on the rickety wooden bench that stretched from one end of the dugout to the other. “What’s going on?”

  I sat next to her, drew the Polaroid out of my pocket, and set it in her lap. She picked it up, eyed me carefully, and examined the photo.

  “What is this?” She pointed to the center of the picture. “Is that you?”

  “Flip it over.”

  She did so, squinting at the smudged writing. “‘Want me back alive? Play along.’ Bridget, what the hell?”

  “That’s Holly’s handwriting,” I told her. “I’d recognize it anywhere. She’s still alive, Mac.”

  Even for a cop, Mac possessed an unusually keen sense of perception. “And you know this because of the photo or because of something else?”

  “I saw her. Last night, when I passed out at the bar. It wasn’t because I was drunk. I had this weird out-of-body experience. I saw Holly. I talked to her. They’re keeping her tied up in some basement—”

  “All right, slow down.” She held the photo at eye level, comparing the two versions of me side by side. “You told me before you were having auditory hallucinations. Did this vision feel the same way as those did?”

  “They weren’t hallucinations,” I insisted. “It’s real. Holly and I have some sort of weird connection. She said so herself.”

  “Bridget, come on.”

  “I shit you not.”

  Mac slumped against the dugout wall, humming with exhaustion. “All right, say it’s real. What’s stopping you from just asking Holly where she is? Or who took her?”

  “I tried that,” I said. “She doesn’t know. Part of me wants to tear apart every house in Belle Dame until I find her, but I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  My gaze flickered to the picture in her hands.

  “This is blackmail, isn’t it?” she asked, lifting the Polaroid again.

  “About as black as it gets,” I replied. “You can’t tell anyone at the station about this. Whoever took Holly is keeping tabs on me. That’s why I had to sneak out here in the middle of the night. If they find out I met up with you—”

  Mac heaved a gusty sigh. “I get it. Tell me about this picture. Not everything,” she added at the look on my face. “Just enough for me to know what’s going on.”

  I swallowed, trying to alleviate the pressure that felt like a hand around my throat. “You already know some of it. That picture was taken roughly three years ago at an abandoned hotel outside of Paris. I met that man—” I pointed to Fox’s exquisite face “—on a tour of the catacombs under the city. He was charming, charismatic, and gorgeous, everything you’d want out of a hot foreign fling.”

  “Fox. I remember. What happened?”

  “He had a different idea of how our relationship should go,” I said, biting down on the bitter taste on my tongue. “I worked for him.”

  Mac closed her eyes in comprehension. “You worked for him.”

  “A lot of girls did.”

  “Ugh.”

  “His network was huge,” I explained. “He had people all over the biggest cities in France. I heard he ran operations in other countries too. The people in that photo were just involved with the Paris sector.”

  Mac studied the picture with a disgusted sneer. “How long were you there with him?”

  “From the time I was nineteen to the time I was twenty-two,” I told her. “I was his favorite, so he kept me close. I went along with it. It came with certain perks, like regular meal times and staying alive.”

  Mac covered her mouth as if subduing a gag. “Oh, God. Bridget, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s over now.”

  “It still matters. How did you get out?”

  I ducked my head, drawing patterns in the dirt of the old bench. “That’s the thing. I did a lot of illegal shit in order to survive at the hotel, and then I did a lot of illegal shit to make it out of Fran
ce alive. It didn’t end well for Fox’s business.”

  “You told me Fox was dead.”

  “Collateral damage,” I said with a shrug. “Fox may be gone, but his business partners aren’t. I betrayed every one of the people in that photograph. They lost everything because of me.”

  Mac fluttered the Polaroid. “You think one of them took Holly.”

  “No one else would have a copy of that picture.” I showed her the catacombs postcard. “They sent me this too.”

  She read the message on the back. “I guess this explains the incident with Bill earlier.”

  “I have to play the game,” I told her. “Holly said so, but no one ever said I had to play it by their rules. Can you check these for fingerprints?”

  Mac tucked both into the inside pocket of her jacket. “I can, but it’s unlikely I’ll find anything. This photo’s not in great shape, and you’ve been touching this postcard all day by the looks of it.”

  “Just try.”

  “I will. Is that all?”

  “For now.”

  We stood and left the dugout, in step with each other as we crossed the neglected ballfield. Mac kicked her shoe against the ground, showering home base with red dirt.

  “I’ve never seen infield clay this color before,” she remarked. “It’s weird. Rusty. Like—”

  “Like blood.”

  4

  Do Not Pass Go

  The remaining dark hours of the morning passed in a combination of insomnia and nightmares. Whether I was awake or asleep, dingy basements and abandoned hotel rooms and stacked skulls haunted the black screen of my eyelids like a broken rendition of a horror movie marathon. For a while, I tried to contact Holly again. Apparently, there were no rules to whatever connection linked her mind to mine. No matter how much I attempted to recreate the strange buzzing feeling that filled my head each time Holly contacted me through brainwaves or whatever shoddy science that linked us, the experience fell flat. There was nothing to find out there in the ether. It was as if Holly was the one who needed to initiate the psychic phone call. Either that, or we both had to be reaching out at the same time. It occurred to me that Holly may not be strong enough to get ahold of me. After all, she was tied up in a basement. Who knew how long it had been since she last ate or drank. The mere thought made me shake with anger.