“I’m sorry, honey.” She opened the screen, and he came up the steps.
He shook hands with Clint, who clapped him on the shoulder, squeezing it.
They went into the kitchen.
“We were just having coffee,” his mom said. “I can pour you a cup. It’s still fresh.”
He shook his head.
His mother and Clint sat down, but Jake remained standing. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, thumbing it on. Panic kept trying to stand up in his belly. He kept shoving it down. “Maybe the sergeant—Sergeant Kersey in Houston—has heard something.”
“I talked to him a few minutes ago,” Clint said. “He’s been by Steph’s house. There’s no sign of her. House is dark, he said. No sign of anyone.”
“God! Where is she? Where has she taken Zoe?” Wheeling, Jake slammed his hands down on the countertop, shutting his eyes against the bite of tears.
“Oh, honey—” His mom came to him. He felt her hand, rubbing circles on his back.
“She’ll turn up—” Clint began.
“You should see how she’s living.” Jake got a glass from the cabinet, filled it with water, and drank it down, collecting himself, settling his breath. “Everything she told us about her cute little garden apartment in the Ward, how the neighborhood has turned around—her place is a dump. Kersey might as well have called it a crack house.”
Neither Clint nor his mom spoke. What could they say?
He blinked at the ceiling. “Now she’s got my kid. She’s got Zoe and taken her God knows where.”
“But I’m like Clint, Jake. I can’t see her doing this.” His mom sounded genuinely perplexed. “The whole point of leaving here, leaving you—she didn’t want to be a mother. Clint? Isn’t that what she told you and Cricket, too?”
“Yeah.” He moved his coffee mug between his hands, studying them.
“So what are you thinking?” Jake asked him.
He glanced up. “I don’t know. Call it cop brain, but I can’t see Stephanie having it together enough to plan something like this. Skulking around in a hoodie, taking Zoe on the sly.”
“But if it was random, the sickos who take kids—they don’t operate this way, do they? Picking out a kid, posing as a parent. A stranger—it’s more like a grab and go, isn’t it? Or they try to lure the kid with candy or something. Zoe knows all about that. She would have yelled her head off if a stranger had offered her candy to get in the car.” Jake looked from Clint to his mom.
She said, “Maybe Steph has changed her mind about being a mother.”
“Or maybe the boyfriend changed it.” Jake stopped, sickened at the idea of some other guy trying to be Zoe’s dad.
“She’s got a boyfriend?” his mom asked.
“According to her neighbor, she does.”
“Houston PD is trying to find out who he is and where he is,” Clint said.
“What if he’s with Steph?” Jake said. “He’s probably like her, some doper, and they have my kid.”
“If there’s a boyfriend involved, if he’s participating, there’s no telling—” His mother paused.
“Mom? What?”
“What if they try to take Zoe out of the country? We’ve all heard the stories about other parents who’ve done it. Given what she’s already done, how far she’s already gone . . .”
Jake turned to Clint, blood like ice in his veins. “Are you guys checking the airports?”
“Yes, and the bus stations south from here to Houston and north to Dallas, and so far there’s no trace of them. They’d need passports for international travel,” Clint said. “It takes time to get one.”
“She might have planned ahead,” Jake said, “she and her dickhead boyfriend—sorry, Mom.” He paced a line in front of the kitchen sink.
“If only she’d call.” His mom sounded hoarse.
From worry, Jake thought. And exhaustion. She liked to say she went to bed and rose with the chickens. “You should go home, Ma. Get some sleep.”
“No, I couldn’t,” she told him firmly.
Couldn’t leave him to handle the situation alone, she meant. Not when he was in such dire straits. No matter what, she was always there for him. He had almost choked on his shame, confessing to her and his dad that Stephanie was pregnant. It wasn’t his first experience, getting a woman in trouble that way. His folks could have rightfully asked him how he could let it happen again, and the second time he was no kid. But they hadn’t even brought up the first time. Other than to say that a baby on the way wasn’t a good reason to plan a wedding, his mom had never told him or Steph what to do.
But the day came, and at the last minute Stephanie couldn’t terminate the pregnancy despite how little she wanted it, and Jake had felt honor bound to stand by her, to marry her and make it right. Women didn’t get pregnant alone. He’d been eighteen when his mom pointed that out the first time, barely out of high school.
Clint stood up now. “Y’all should both try and get some rest. I hear anything from Houston, or anywhere, you’ll be the first to know.”
“What do you know about Gilly, the waitress at the café?” Jake asked him.
“Gilly O’Connell? Not a lot. Why?”
There was a leap of something more than curiosity in Clint’s eyes. He seemed intent now. Jake felt his mother’s questioning glance, too, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about it—the business with his wallet. It was too crazy, the way his brain kept trying to make the leap from Gilly knowing where he could find that to her knowing where he could find his daughter. Zoe wasn’t some object he’d mislaid. She was his flesh and blood, his kid.
“Jake?” his mother prompted.
“No, it’s . . . This is going to sound nuts, but when I couldn’t find my wallet yesterday”—was he really going to get into this?—“she told me where I’d left it in the garage, on Great-Granddad’s tool chest.” Jake looked at Clint. “You ever heard of anything like it? I mean has she made other predictions that you know of?”
Clint’s glance did an odd shift.
Jake’s mom said, “Are you saying Gilly’s clairvoyant?”
“It’s nuts,” Jake said, although he had asked Gilly the same thing, and she’d denied it.
“Maybe not,” Clint said.
Both Jake and his mother looked at him.
“I don’t know much about psychics, but talking to her today, I got the impression Gilly O’Connell knows something more than she’s telling.”
Jake’s heart began to pound. Now he understood Clint’s look a moment ago. “What, man? Does she know where Zoe is?”
“No.” Clint said it emphatically. He locked Jake’s gaze and held it, making sure Jake got the message.
“What then?” Jake asked.
“She claims to know Stephanie isn’t the woman who picked Zoe up at school. But she also said she doesn’t know Stephanie, which could be a lie—” Clint broke off again, frowning.
“You’re thinking there’s a connection?” Jake was guessing.
“Gilly’s from Houston,” Clint said.
“The two might have met,” Jake’s mother said.
“It’s a pretty big city,” Jake said. “Gilly wouldn’t have to run in the same circles. She doesn’t strike me as the doper type.”
“I dunno,” Clint said. “We’re looking into her background.”
“You’re kidding.” Jake was incredulous.
“She’s relatively new in town.” Clint’s gesture was vague, and his eyes kept shifting in a way that bothered Jake. “If nothing else, we need to rule out the possibility she’s involved.”
“I can’t see it,” Jake said. “She’s great with Zoe.” He was thinking of the silly pancakes Gilly made for Zoe, and the way Gilly would just pick up telling Zoe a story. The way she’d admire Zoe’s nail polish, and Jake’s, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man to go around with painted nails. Yesterday when he’d gone on about his idea for building houses out of concrete, the light in her eye
s, her interest, had been genuine and real. Like her interest in Zoe. Was it too much? The other times they’d had coffee together, had she been working him to get to Zoe?
“You never know about people,” Jake’s mother said.
“You can get fooled for sure,” Clint said. He pushed his chair under the table. “Thanks for the coffee, Justine.”
Jake went with him to the front door. “About Gilly O’Connell. What if she does know where Zoe is? What if she saw who took her and where they are in her mind the way she saw my wallet?” Jake thought Clint would laugh or dismiss the idea, but he didn’t.
“Her husband was murdered in Houston a few years back in a convenience-store robbery down there.”
“Are you serious?” Jake was stunned. “She told me yesterday that he’d died suddenly, but I had no idea—”
“Yeah,” Clint said. “It was a wrong place, wrong time kind of deal, a total fluke.”
“How did you find out?”
“Background check. Cricket does one on all her employees prior to hiring. The case is still unsolved.”
Jake didn’t know what to say.
“One other thing Cricket found out in the news reports about Gilly’s husband—there was some reference to her being—what’s that word Justine used?”
“Clairvoyant?” Jake said. “I asked her if she was when she ‘found’ my wallet. She was pretty adamant that wasn’t the case.”
“Huh. Well, supposedly, according to what the media reported, Gilly knew her husband was going to be shot beforehand. It’s probably a lot of hype.”
“Yeah, probably,” Jake said. But he was thinking, What if it isn’t? It was a fact that she’d located his wallet. Maybe she had also predicted her husband would be killed, as horrible as it would have been for her. And if she could do those things, wasn’t there a chance she could know Zoe’s whereabouts?
Clint said, “What bothers me is that Gilly can’t, or won’t, say how she’s so sure it’s not Zoe’s mom who took her.”
“Maybe it’s just a gut thing,” Jake said.
“Yeah, maybe.” The police captain pondered it a moment, then clicked his tongue. “I never know what to think when I hear stuff like this, do you?”
“No,” Jake answered. “I don’t either.”
After Clint left, Jake argued his mom into lying down on his bed. He bedded down on the sofa, but sleep was impossible, and after a while he left the house. He drove his truck out of his neighborhood, Mustang Hill, over to Lacey Oaks, the subdivision on the other side of Wyatt where Gilly was living. He knew the location because the house she was leasing belonged to Ruth Rendell, a local realtor he worked with sometimes. He’d run into her at the grocery store a while back, and she’d told him. Jake turned down Little Sandy Lane, where the house was, and hoped Gilly wasn’t a night owl. The street was deserted, awash in the murky glow of the streetlight. Overhead, a misshapen moon wobbled in a high corner of a midnight sky. He went slowly, feeling like an intruder, possibly a stalker, hunting the house that he knew was yellow clapboard. When he spotted it, he pulled to the curb. The porch light was the only light that was on, and a flight of moths shadowed it, dipping, fluttering. Doomed, he thought.
Now that he was here, he didn’t know why he’d come. It was well after midnight. Gilly was probably asleep. It would only scare the shit out of her if he were to bang on her door. He wiped his hands down his face. Maybe it was crazy, the whole idea that she could be in there dreaming, having some vision that would lead him to Zoe. But maybe it was for real. Maybe Gilly’s mind was some kind of conduit tuned into a cosmic channel only she had access to.
The big screen of the universe.
What a joke.
Or not. He didn’t know. That was the hell of it.
Not knowing where Zoe was right now—that was a worse hell. His brain wanted to explore possibilities, feed him scenarios, all of them terrifying. He shut his eyes, clenching the steering wheel as if squeezing it might choke them out. It didn’t. It was hard now getting his breath. His heart pounded. He felt its hammer blows against his ribs. A sound broke from his chest. He bit down on it, bent his head to his knuckled fists, and told himself to get a grip.
After several minutes, he wiped his eyes, shifted into drive, and pulled away from the curb. He was going to find her, if it was the last thing he did, if it killed him. Like Nemo’s dad, Marlin. He remembered telling Zoe one of the gazillion times they’d watched it that if they ever got lost from each other, the way Marlin and Nemo had, he would be just like Marlin. He would never give up searching for her. But he couldn’t think about it—timid Marlin who when it came to his missing son had the heart of a shark. This was no movie, and he and Zoe weren’t clownfish.
“Daddy’s coming, ZooRoo.” He said it aloud. He needed to hear himself say it. “Don’t be scared, okay? Just hold on. I’m coming.”
He left Lacey Oaks and drove to the Little Acorn Academy. He couldn’t have said why, except it was the last place Zoe had been seen before she was taken by a woman driving a sedan, exact make and model unknown. Not any woman. Stephanie. His mind clung to the hope despite the growing evidence that it might not have been her. He didn’t know where he’d be if he opened that particular door. As long as he believed Zoe was with Steph, he could believe she was safe. But even in this, he was snowing himself, and he knew it. He pulled up to the school entrance and cut the truck engine.
The front of the small, one-story building was illuminated, bathed in a pool of greenish light—security light. There wasn’t a security camera. Kenna had said her budget didn’t allow for outside cameras, and while it did allow for lights, they were only across the building’s front. The sides and back were dark except for an eerie glow through a window that he decided must be coming from a computer or some other electronic equipment. Or even the aquarium. Maybe that light was left on all night.
The school sat in a three-quarter-acre clearing eight miles west of Wyatt on a meandering county road named Shady Oaks Lane. The rural setting suggested a wholesome and safe atmosphere. But what Jake saw now was the school’s vulnerability, its isolation from town or any populated area. He doubted that the Madrone County sheriff or the Wyatt police patrolled out here on a regular basis outside school hours. The nearest subdivision was a good five miles away, and houses there were on acreage. Ranch land, and land that belonged to a state park—Monarch Lake State Park—surrounded the school on three sides. A high game fence separated the properties, but it wasn’t well maintained, and even in daylight, sections of it were obscured by a heavy growth of underbrush and woods.
The same woods Zoe and the other children were warned to stay out of unless they were accompanied by an adult. The very woods where—according to waitress and so-called clairvoyant Gilly O’Connell—the fairies had charmed the monsters out of eating eyeballs.
If you could believe her fairy tale.
Jake wasn’t sure what to think about her. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that she might be involved in Zoe’s disappearance, and yet he couldn’t entirely dismiss Clint’s suspicion of Gilly either. She’d been through some shit for sure. Lost her husband to violence. Knowing that did explain some things. Like why she’d left Houston, even why she wasn’t an architect anymore. But why had she chosen Wyatt to run to, if running away was what she was doing? He might think of the town and its location as some of the most beautiful country on earth, but most big city hotshots would call it the ass end of nowhere.
Feeling the need to move, to get away from his thoughts, Jake got out of the truck and instantly felt a jolt of foreboding. He looked alongside the building toward the back, where the playground was located, the last place Zoe had been seen for sure. Beyond the fenced boundary the woods loomed. The moon had sunk behind the thick wall of trees, and the shadows that layered the ground shifted with a restless wind. The air seemed alive, bursting with the sound of children laughing, but reason said it was his imagination. He remembered a nature walk he’d taken in
these woods earlier in the spring. The school regularly sponsored the walks for children and their parents. The kids gathered bits of moss and twigs, whatever caught their fancy, and made collages out of the stuff. Zoe had made a heart and printed on it in alternating shades of red and green crayon: FOR DADY. Jake could see it in his mind’s eye, the crooked red and green letters, her misspelling: Dady. His throat closed.
She would be so afraid if she were in those woods now when it was so dark. God—
Clamping his teeth, he got a flashlight out of his glove box, and switching it on, he followed the beam, playing it over the area, illuminating in flashes a colorful collection of molded plastic playground equipment, the seat of a swing, the glint of a metal chain. He passed the white four-foot picket fence that surrounded the vegetable garden Zoe was so crazy about. The tomato plants, already towering out of their cages, were covered in blooms. They’d be choking on the harvest by summer’s end.
He was some twenty feet past the garden when he found the fence line. Raising the flashlight, sweeping a path to his right, he spotted the gate almost immediately, and his heart dropped. It was open.
Wasn’t it? Hadn’t the assistant said she’d closed it?
He paused, focusing his gaze in an attempt to discern exactly what he was looking at. Panic wrecked his mind. Fatigue sanded his eyes. He couldn’t trust either. Pulse hammering in his ears, he walked closer to the gap that the gate was designed to fill, keeping the beam from his flashlight trained on the location, trying to make the gate be there, closed and locked the way the assistant had claimed she’d left it.
But it was ajar.
It was no lie, no trick played on him by senses overloaded with fear or a body dragged down by exhaustion. He paced short lines, walked a few tight circles, toeing the ground with his boot, using his flashlight to search the greening grass, the coarse tangle of shrubbery. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but the notion that this was the last place Zoe was seen pounded in his brain. Looking up, he panned his light over the area beyond the juniper-choked fence line until the bright beam found the narrow trail. Jake knew it led to a small pond about a half a mile away. He’d been there with Zoe and her classmates a handful of times.
What Lies Below: A Novel Page 8