And there was her address.
He’d been mentoring her, educationally, for years. And more recently, since her trouble with Sammie in the spring, he’d thought they’d become more than just teacher and student. Closer to friends…with the professional distance mandated by their positions, of course.
She was a woman carrying a huge load, alone. She worked hard. Did all she could. She never asked for favors or special consideration. She never made excuses.
He tried to focus on the rest of his day. On lunch, and the afternoon and evening ahead. Papers he could grade. Calls he should make.
There was a mother whose child was missing.
Something Cal knew far too much about. He could still remember the sense of panic. The horror and disbelief. The pain that never healed…
No.
This was Morgan Lowen. Not Rose Sanderson. This was Tyler, Tennessee. Not Comfort Cove, Massachusetts. This was 2012. Not the 1980s.
He decided he was going to do a quick drive-by to make certain that she was okay. Then he’d head straight home. Due to his slow start that morning, he hadn’t left lunch prepared in the refrigerator for his father and chances were that the older man wouldn’t bother to fix something for himself.
Frank was a good cook. Better than good. If his father cared enough to get up and get out to the kitchen, they’d be eating much better meals than the ones Cal provided for them.
If Frank cared what he ate, or if he ate…
A child was missing. Frank would care about that… .
All thoughts of his father fled when Cal turned the corner of Apple Road and saw the cars parked outside the small duplex in the center of the block. Could be a woman having a Friday luncheon. Or a kids’ play group. Could be, but his gut told him it wasn’t.
People were walking the neighborhood. Calling out. Some had fliers already. He pulled up slowly, stopping his blue Ford Flex right behind a Cadillac Escalade—the vehicle he would have bought if he’d had the money.
A woman who looked to be about forty stood just off the sidewalk a couple of units down from the front door bearing the number he’d pulled from his computer. She had her arm around a young girl, holding her close, as she surveyed the street.
Moms would all be holding their kids close in that neighborhood tonight. There’d be no more summer nights playing tag on the streets. No more summer days playing tag, either. The fliers would be hung, and when they faded, they’d be rehung. People would watch carefully as they came and went. New locks would adorn doors that would remain tightly shut to the summer breeze.
Fear would become a family member.
No, this was Tennessee, not Comfort Cove, Massachusetts.
Flashes of knowing accompanied Cal as he approached the screen door of Morgan Lowen’s small home and knocked.
A woman appeared almost immediately. She was about his age, early thirties, with long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her face was pinched, her green eyes void of any makeup at all. She opened the door with an expectant look.
“Is Morgan here?” he asked.
“She’s in the living room.” The woman kept herself placed between him and the inside of the home.
“I’m Caleb Whittier, her English professor. She was in my class this morning when she got the call about her son.”
“Dr. Whittier?” She said the name like she knew it. Like it would be followed by “The Dr. Whittier?” He couldn’t tell if recognition was a good thing or not, but he nodded.
“I’m Julie Warren,” the woman said. “I’m the secretary at Sammie’s school. And Morgan’s friend. I’m the one who called her out of class.”
“Have they found him?”
After seeing the cars on the street, the shake of her head was no surprise. He shoved his hands into his pockets.
Julie Warren stood back. “Come on in.”
“No. I don’t want to bother her. I just…”
Just what? He could have called to find out if she was all right. If Sammie was. Or waited until class on Monday.
He could have watched the news tonight and known, if nothing was there, that the boy had probably been found.
“Morgan’s told me about you. About your talks,” Julie said, still holding the door open. “That’s unusual for her, the way she talks to you. Morgan doesn’t open up to people much.” The woman was talking fast, as though running away from something, or trying not to think about someone who couldn’t be found. “You may not realize it, but your support has helped her a lot,” Julie said now. “I really think she’d like to see you.” The woman’s brow was creased with worry.
She held the door open farther and Caleb moved forward.
* * *
SHE’D HEARD THE KNOCK on the door a few minutes ago. Could see the people traversing the street through her living room window. She knew her mother was sitting next to her on the sand-colored faux-leather couch she’d picked up at a moving sale several years before. Her father was just around the corner in the kitchen, talking on the phone. His tone brooked no argument or refusal.
His first time in her home and he’d already taken command of the place.
Sammie was still gone. Todd had been questioned and released.
Detective Martin was around someplace. Outside, maybe, directing the canvas of the neighborhood. They’d tapped her cell phone. And her father’s. Morgan didn’t have a home line. But they wanted her there, anyway. In case Sammie came home. Or someone brought him home. Or tried to contact her there.
Morgan listened to the flapping sound of Julie’s flip-flops out in the foyer where she’d gone to answer the door. Her friend had been sitting on Morgan’s other side on the couch for most of the afternoon. She was wearing the sleeveless, long, tie-dyed cotton dress that she’d bought the year before at a clearance sale. Her husband hated the dress. Morgan loved it.
The couch was nice. Soft. And clean. Morgan had gone over it twice with leather cleanser and antibacterial cleanser, too, when she’d purchased it. She wanted to make certain that it was safe for Sammie. Should she tell Detective Martin she’d done that? It proved how much she loved her son, didn’t it? Proved that she was a good mother.
Jumping up, Morgan stood at the window. Staring out. No matter how tightly she wrapped her arms around herself, she couldn’t seem to get warm.
Julie flapped in, flip-flop, flip-flop.
“Morgan?”
She heard her friend. She just didn’t turn around. Watching the flurry of activity on the street was as close as she could get to doing something. The inactivity was driving her crazy.
For a second she imagined herself and Sammie on the beach. In Florida. They couldn’t afford the Hilton Head vacations she’d taken as a child with her parents. Florida’s beaches were more fun. Less stuffy. She and Sammie were holding hands, screaming as they took a big wave together… .
Outside, a man she didn’t recognize moved into her line of vision.
She should be doing. It was her job to see to her son’s needs. To look after him. She was always the one who was doing for Sammie. The only one…
“Morgan, Dr. Whittier’s here.”
She turned. Still outside looking for her son. Still on that beach in Florida.
The man standing in her living room was as unreal as the rest of her current world. Dr. Whittier? In her home?
“Hi, Morgan,” he said. “I looked up your address. I hope you don’t mind my stopping by, but after the way you left
class, I just wanted to make certain you were okay.”
She shook her head. “My son’s missing.”
“I know.”
Of course he did. The whole class knew. Maybe the whole town did. She hoped to God the whole town knew.
“Dr. Whittier? Are you Sammie’s doctor?” Morgan heard her mother’s voice as if from a distance greater than the couch across the room.
Morgan looked back outside.
Surely someone would have seen a ten-year-old boy wearing cutoff shorts, a Phoenix Suns T-shirt and black sneakers with a hole in the toe. Sammie was small, like her, but he wasn’t invisible. That blond hair, and those big brown eyes of his…
“…her English professor…” Cal Whittier’s voice infiltrated briefly.
Sammie had wanted her to practice catch with him the night before. She’d been too busy cutting decorations for Saturday’s picnic. She’d started at the day care when she’d been pregnant with Sammie. The job had offered free child care, which saved her enough money that she’d been able to get them the duplex in the nicer neighborhood rather than settling for an apartment in a less safe part of town.
She’d worried, at first, that she wouldn’t qualify for the job, but Tennessee law allowed you to teach in a day care with only a high school diploma. She’d started out as an assistant teacher and then was offered the job of executive assistant to the director. She liked teaching, though, and she substituted for the full-time teachers whenever she could. She’d lucked out. She got to spend the first five years of Sammie’s life with him and earn money, too. And once Sammie had started school, Morgan’s boss had allowed Sammie to come to the day care after class to play and help with the little kids until Morgan was off work.
As a bonus, she’d loved working with the preschoolers—she’d been a natural—and had found a career.
“Morgan was in my class when she got the call about her son… .” She assumed Dr. Whittier was still addressing her mother and she turned back around.
The three of them—Morgan, Whittier and Julie—were standing in the middle of her tiny living room, while her mother perched on the edge of the couch, her thumbs rubbing back and forth across opposite palms.
“I’d just seen Sammie half an hour before he went missing,” Julie was telling Whittier. “I’d gone into his classroom to take a message to his teacher and he’d called out to me, flashing that big grin of his.”
He’d just run away. Sammie was doing this to prove he could. To prove that he was old enough to be on his own. To prove…
“They’re going over her computer now…” Julie continued, filling in the newcomer, just as they’d all done every time someone new arrived on the scene.
Morgan had caught Sammie on the internet again the night before.
She’d yelled at him. He knew that he wasn’t allowed to be on the internet without her. It wasn’t safe for kids.
“I have parental controls in place but he knows how to hack through them.” Her voice sounded far away—a disconnect from the cottony haze of unreality that had her in its grip.
“You think he might have met someone there?” Whittier’s piercing gaze confirmed that she was in the conversation.
Morgan held on to that look. To him. And touched ground for a second. “No.” She shook her head again. “I caught him before he could clear history and cache. He was looking at basketball shoes.” She repeated what she’d told Detective Martin an hour before. And her mother and father when they’d arrived at the police station.
“Does he clear history and cache regularly?”
“He used to, before I caught on to the fact that he was sneaking on to the computer behind my back. Then he figured out that if I saw everything cleared, I’d know he’d been on.”
“Do you have any idea what he was looking at?” His tone held the same deep concern he’d expressed the previous spring when she’d first told him about the son she was raising alone and struggling to let go of enough to give him some independence, but hold on to enough to keep him safe.
“Basketball,” Morgan said, breathing normally for a moment. “Stats, schedules, shoes, basketball video games, autographed balls…”
Whittier frowned. “If that’s all he was into, why delete the history?”
“So I wouldn’t know he’d been on the computer without supervision.”
“Because he thinks you baby him too much.”
She’d appreciated Whittier’s conversation regarding her son these past months. Appreciated his male perspective.
“I know you agreed with him when it came to showering. I have to trust him to get himself clean enough and to give him his space to grow into a young man. But there are just too many dangers on the internet. I still won’t let him go on unless I’m sitting there with him.”
“And he probably sees that as more proof that you don’t trust him.”
“Right. I can’t budge on this one. But I make sure that I put aside time to let him surf to his heart’s content. I want him to learn the internet, to know how to get around and to be privy to the wealth of good information out there. Seems like we’ve been to every basketball site ever uploaded. We look at all the baseball sites, too, but basketball is his first love. Did you know that in the history of the NBA only eight players were born on May 3? And that the most recent was in 1977? That was Tyronn Lue. He was drafted by the Denver Nuggets and played for ten years. Sammie’s birthday is May 3… .”
“Morgan, Detective Martin needs to speak with you.” The booming—and openly reproving—voice rent through her like a shard of lightning. She should have been more focused on the moment, should have known the second the detective had reentered her residence, seeking her attention.
She’d been rambling. Her father thought she talked too much. That she took a hundred words to say what could be said with ten.
The detective was waiting for her in the foyer. “No one in the neighborhood has seen your son since the two of you left this morning.” Elaine Martin’s tone was all business now. “But we found one eyewitness, a seventy-year-old woman who says she saw Sammie on the corner of Bohemian and First.”
Heart pumping, Morgan took a step back until she was almost leaning against the man who’d sired her. Bohemian was four blocks from school.
“He was speaking with a man.”
“What man?” She couldn’t stop the shaking that had control of her body.
“We don’t know. We’re hoping you can help us.” Detective Martin pulled an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch copy of a hand sketch from the portfolio under her arm. “Do you recognize this man?”
Morgan stared at the chiseled features. The longish hair. And the tattoo on the muscled shoulder. Some kind of spiked something.
“I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“Look closely, Morgan. Take your time,” Elaine Martin said. “Our witness says the man was in his mid-thirties and was well over six feet tall.”
She wanted to know the man, wanted to find her son, and choked back tears as she shook her head.
“Look again, Morgan.” Her father’s voice jarred her further. “You must have seen him someplace.”
She stared at the photo, studying the tight cheeks, the shoulders. The tattoo. Eyes that were…human. Trying to place them all. Running the image through her mental memory bank. A coach? A relative at the day care? Someone at the grocery store? The mall? Or the pizza place?
“I don’t know him… .” Her voice was onl
y a thread—a thin thread—a testimony to the fragile hold she had on her composure. And as she turned and looked directly at her father, tears filled her eyes.
“I swear, Daddy, I don’t know him. I wish to God I did.”
Morgan glanced back at the freehand drawing. If that man…that fiend…had her son…
If he touched him…
Sammie could already have been—
No, he’d run away. He was fine. Just hiding from her. And they’d find him. Sammie wasn’t as grown up as he thought.
“What about an Amber Alert? Can you issue one of those now?” Did they have reasonable belief that Sammie had been abducted? If they issued an Amber Alert anyone who saw him would know that he was missing.
“We issued it half an hour ago.”
Which meant they no longer thought Sammie had just run away.
The words struck a new chord of fear that Morgan couldn’t ignore.
CHAPTER FIVE
CALEB KNEW LONG nights. He’d lived with them for most of his life. Which stood him in good stead over the next several hours as he stayed with the Lowens and Julie Warren and waited for news of Sammie’s whereabouts.
He’d offered to stay. Morgan had accepted his offer immediately, with none of her usual assurances that she would be fine. He made coffee and small conversation when fatigue and panic threatened to get the best of the women. He sat quietly, a steady breath in the storm when detectives reported in or the phone rang.
And he studied Mr. Lowen with the outside eye of a scholar. Or so he told himself.
“I didn’t realize George Lowen was your father,” he said softly, sometime after ten that evening as Morgan accepted his invitation to step outside for some fresh air.
He’d thought the man heartless when, two years before, Lowen had bought up a block of real estate that included the city’s oldest library and the complex that held the young artists’ league studios and small gallery and tore it all down to replace it with a gated community of luxury condominiums. His perusal of George Lowen over the past few hours hadn’t softened his opinion of the business mogul much.
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