by David Bell
But how could he?
If even the smallest chance existed that Felicity was his child, he couldn’t.
The photo Erica showed him came back, the little blond girl in front of the barn. She looked so much like Robyn, it stabbed his heart, taking him back to the days before her death, before that black cloud settled in above his parents. And then to think of the outrage of someone harming that child, taking her from a park, snatching her away from her mother and everything she ever knew, holding her God knew where.
Something hot twisted in Michael’s gut, a searing and frustrated rage against the perpetrator. The feeling consumed him, swelled up inside his stomach like a balloon. He pounded the flat of his hand against the steering wheel, making Tolliver jump.
“What?” Erica asked.
His hand stung. “Nothing. Nothing. Just . . . frustrated. Pissed.”
“I know,” Erica said. “I get angry sometimes because that keeps me from crying.”
As the light changed, Michael’s phone rang. He saw Angela’s name on the car’s display. He needed to talk to her. He knew she’d called multiple times.
“You can take it, Michael,” Erica said. “Just tell her she’s on speaker.”
Michael thought for a moment, then guided the car to the side of the road, stopping in front of a church.
“What?” Tolliver asked.
“I’m going to take this,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Erica said to Tolliver, “He’s afraid to talk to his wife where I can hear. He wants to pretend I don’t exist. I’m pretty sure his wife also wishes I didn’t exist.”
“I thought we were in a hurry,” Tolliver said. “Have you reconsidered taking me along?”
“No,” Michael said. “But I need to take this. I left home in a rush, and I don’t want anyone worrying about me.”
“I’ll say it again. His wife. That’s who he means.”
Michael ignored her and stepped outside, into the night’s heat. When he closed the door, he placed the phone to his ear and answered.
“Michael?”
He heard the relief in Angela’s voice, and that brought a new wave of guilt. He’d left her behind, run off like a thief in the night.
“It’s me, yes,” he said. He stepped up onto the curb. Through the car’s windows, he saw Tolliver and Erica illuminated in the glow from the dashboard display. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer sooner, but we were in the middle of some stuff.”
“I’m not even going to ask you what you’ve been doing,” she said, her voice still buoyant. “I don’t need to know. I just want to know that you’re okay. I just wanted to hear from you.”
The sound of her voice soothed Michael. He remembered when they first started dating, and he’d call Angela on the phone. She sounded so happy to hear from him, and that enthusiasm for the sound of his voice—and the lift it always brought to him—never diminished. Her voice sounded like home. That night and all nights.
“I’m okay. Really. We went and talked to the guy Erica wanted to talk to. And now we’re going to the police.”
“The police?” she asked. “Michael . . . What happened to a quick trip there and a quick trip back?”
Michael offered no answer. He didn’t have a good one.
“The police just left here,” she said, lowering her voice as she grew more guarded. “They’re looking for Erica. Hell, now they’re looking for you.”
A light breeze kicked up, causing the leaves above his head to make a soft soughing. He checked the car. He still saw Erica and Tolliver in their places, but Erica cut her eyes in his direction. He saw the plea there. Hurry up.
“I’ll tell her to call them,” Michael said. “Why are they looking for her? Is there news? Did the police find Felicity?”
“Nothing like that, but she should be at home. And, Michael, we have things to talk about. You and I. They got onto your computer. I looked at your computer. At least the parts of it we could see.”
“You just let strangers get on there?”
“They’re cops, Michael. They’re looking for a missing child. And Erica is telling them you’re the father. They kind of need to know about you, don’t they?”
“So you saw . . . I mean, what did you look at?”
“I saw the wedding picture.”
Michael didn’t know what else to say. He made a sound deep in his throat, something that sounded like “Ugh.”
“Is that why you changed your e-mail and Facebook passwords?” Angela asked. “Because you were checking out Erica?”
“I wasn’t checking her out. That sounds . . . bad. I was curious. About her life. And, yes, I changed the passwords so you wouldn’t just get on there and see without context that I’d been doing that.”
“Without context? That sounds like you’re talking about something on the news. And do I need context to know why you have a picture of you and your ex on your wedding day on your computer now? If you wanted to look at a wedding picture, you could have walked to the foyer and looked at ours.”
“Angela, you can understand being curious about an ex.”
“Curious, yes. You seem obsessed.”
“Don’t say that. . . .”
“Do you know they’ve investigated Erica? For endangering her child, the one who is now missing? Just a month ago.”
“There’s an explanation for that.”
“Michael, listen to yourself. Are you just going to believe whatever she tells you? That the kid is yours? That she didn’t hurt the girl or put her in danger?”
“I’m going to go, okay? I don’t want to argue about this now. I just need to take care of this. We’ve wasted enough time, and we need to go.”
“She’s using you, Michael. The cops think that too. They think you might be in danger with her. Are you, Michael? Are you safe?”
He saw Tolliver in his own living room, and Erica reaching out with the stun gun, sending the man to the floor in pain. A child left alone while her mother spent time with a man in a store parking lot.
And he saw the face again, the one that looked so much like Robyn.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I still plan on coming home tonight. Soon.”
“Michael . . .”
Michael kicked at a pebble on the ground. “Look, I . . . We’re still going to go away together. Next week.”
“Are we?” she asked.
“Yes. We are.”
“Well, I hope so.”
“We will. Look. . . .” He wanted to say more. He tried to think of something he could say that would make everything feel better and normal again, to remind them both of what they shared.
But before he could say anything else, Angela said good-bye, so Michael returned to the car.
chapter
twenty-five
Michael climbed back into the car, which was still running. The cool of the air-conditioning felt good against his face. Until he returned to the climate-controlled car, he hadn’t realized how hot it was and how much he’d sweated just standing outside talking on the phone.
Michael said nothing to the two of them but paused for a moment, staring at the glowing dashboard display. Erica had the back window down, the tip of a cigarette glowing in the darkness. The baseball game had ended, and the announcer ran through a list of scores and highlights from games around the country. As a kid, Michael had loved listening to the game reports from far away. He liked to imagine the other lives progressing in other places, and he felt linked in some way to what was happening in another city.
Just like he still felt linked to home, even as he continued to drive away from there.
“Look,” Tolliver said next to him, “just let me go. You don’t need me. I didn’t take Felicity. I swear.”
“Shut up,” Michael said, the words coming out more harshly than he intended.
The schoolteacher grew silent for a moment, his head moving back as though he’d been slapped. Then he said, “You know I’m not the one causing all the problems here. Erica has been—”
“Are you trying to say the mother of a missing child is causing problems for everybody else?” Michael asked.
Tolliver could tell Michael didn’t expect an answer, because, for a change, he remained silent.
“Thank you, Michael,” Erica said, her voice close to his ear, even though she sat in the backseat.
“You need to check in with the police too,” he said, his voice still sharp. “Do you know the cops were just at my house, hassling Angela? They’re looking for you, so it’s a good thing we’re heading there. How do you know they don’t have some important piece of news to share with you?”
“Did they say they did?” she asked.
“No. I guess not. Still . . .”
“I’ve been checking my phone. And while you were out there talking to your wife, I texted the lead detective on the case, Detective Phillips, and told him I was fine.”
“Yeah,” Tolliver said, “shouldn’t you be home, waiting for Felicity to come back. I mean, what if she did and you weren’t there?”
Erica grew silent and thoughtful for a moment. The soft whoosh of the air-conditioning filled the car’s cabin, and the baseball announcer’s voice gave way to someone selling mattresses at an amazingly low price. His voice was shrill, earsplittingly so.
“The police are doing their job” she said, her voice low. “And I’ve been at the house or the police station all day. Don’t you think I’ve thought of all of this? They’re at the house, the cops. They’re watching everything, even my e-mail.” Her words came out short and sharp, like little jabs at Tolliver and anyone else who might question her. “I made a decision late this afternoon. I wasn’t just going to sit by if I could possibly go out and help my daughter. I wasn’t going to sit on my hands.”
In the faint light, Michael met Erica’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They locked, and Erica seemed to be addressing her next words directly to him as she tossed her cigarette out the window.
“I’ve sat by before and let things happen that I didn’t want to happen,” she said. “I’ve let things go before without fighting as much as I could. I’m not going to do that when it comes to my daughter.”
Michael put the car into drive and prepared to pull into traffic. But before he did, the run of inane commercials slipped into a newsbreak, the announcer’s voice deep and serious.
“Officials in Davenport County have suspended the search for nine-year-old Felicity Frazier, missing since this morning from the Tom Haynes Municipal Park. Searchers were forced to stop looking for the missing girl due to darkness, but officials expect to resume at first light tomorrow. In national news . . .”
Erica took a long, shuddering breath in the backseat. “She hates the dark,” Erica said. “She’s so afraid of the dark. She still sleeps with the light on. She’d hate it if I told anyone that, but she does.”
“Let’s go talk to the police,” Michael said. “Maybe they can bring some sanity to everything.”
He accelerated, and they resumed their journey.
chapter
twenty-six
11:25 P.M.
Griffin stood outside the car on the sidewalk in front of Helen Winningham’s house. Twitchell was inside the vehicle, talking to headquarters. They’d already done a quick Google search, using their phones, and without much trouble located the most basic information about the missing child Helen referred to. Griffin held her phone in her hand, the information still on the screen, and she stared at it, flipping through, hoping to learn something else.
The late-night revelers continued to pass her by. Even on a weeknight, the neighborhood swelled with young people intent on drinking and partying. She looked up from the screen, watching them pass and listening to their chatty voices. Their carefree smiles and easygoing strides tugged at something in her chest. Every once in a while, when she felt angry or confused or lonely, she wished she could be leading that life as well. To live in an uncomplicated bubble of friends and good times, to work normal hours and not suffer the emotional hangover of bringing the awful things she saw on the job home with her.
She knew it was a fantasy. She knew she would never trade her life and career for one lived by the people passing on the street. And she knew that every person walking by, even the ones smiling the broadest and partying the hardest, carried something with them. A sick parent, a broken relationship. An existential fear about their own future. But on a night like the one she was experiencing outside Helen Winningham’s apartment building, the temptation to be someone else grew so strong, she could taste it.
Two guys passed, young and bearded. They wore skinny jeans and checked shirts, the sleeves perfectly rolled to the elbows. Both sets of eyes trailed to her, gave her a careful up and down as they walked past. One of them smiled, showing a row of gleaming white teeth, and said, “Hello” in the friendliest voice possible.
Griffin nodded, feeling the little thrill she always felt when a man paid her that kind of attention. She couldn’t help the response. Could anybody? Wasn’t it innate to feel a pleasant surge when someone flirted?
Not yet, she told herself. She wasn’t ready for all of that yet.
But soon. At the very least, she thought, she could stand some physical proximity to a man. And not just sitting next to her middle-aged, sweaty partner in a government-issued sedan.
She lowered her eyes as the men walked off and examined her phone.
The facts about the missing infant were sparse. A three-month-old child, Stacey Ann Flowers, disappeared from her mother’s apartment one evening two months after Erica and Michael Frazier split up and about four months after Erica suffered her miscarriage. Stacey’s mother left the child in her crib, sleeping, while she took the opportunity to shower. When she came out, the baby was gone. Apparently, the mother, Tiffany Flowers, had forgotten to lock the apartment door. A search followed, but there were no good leads, no witnesses to the crime. Tiffany Flowers told police she couldn’t imagine who had taken the child, but she did recall seeing a woman following them a few times as she pushed the baby in a stroller through the neighborhood. Tiffany also admitted that the woman could have just been someone going about her business, not intending any harm. There was no way to know. She provided a description of the woman, but it sounded pretty generic.
In the ten years since Stacey disappeared, there had been no leads. No hint of her.
Griffin lowered the phone. The sidewalk was clear, the street quieter. She felt the same nagging, twisting sickness as when she contemplated Felicity Frazier’s being gone, but somehow it might even be worse.
An infant.
Either someone murdered the child shortly after taking her. Or the child grew up never really knowing who she was, never knowing her mother or the life she was supposed to live.
The passenger-side window rolled down behind her. She opened the door and slipped inside. “What’s the story?”
Twitchell sighed. “Still a tragedy. Not close to ‘All’s well that ends well.’”
“No news at home? Any sign of Erica’s boyfriend?”
“Jake Little,” Twitchell said. “He called in to work, told them about Felicity disappearing, said he was distraught, and no one has been able to find him. They’re still looking.”
“So he’s a person of interest. He has to be.”
“Sure. Anyone connected in any way.”
“And is there anything else?” she asked.
“No real leads. Lots of silly tips, as you might expect. Still, no one has come forward who saw Felicity in the park with her mom. They do expect to have more volunteers tomorrow when they start up again.”
“And it won’t be long before they tail off, before everyone loses intere
st and goes back to their regular lives.”
“People know what we know,” he said. “After a certain amount of time . . .”
He left the thought unfinished. It didn’t need to be said. They both knew what he meant.
“What did Reddick say about this Stacey Flowers thing?” Griffin asked.
“She listened and asked a few questions. I planted the seed.”
“Yeah, but think about what we’ve got. A mom who isn’t keeping in good touch with us, who has decided to run off with her ex-husband instead of sticking close to home while her daughter is missing.”
“Erica Frazier did text Phillips,” Twitchell said. “A short message just to say she was all right. But she didn’t say where she was.”
“Great. She miscarried right before this missing child was supposed to have been born, and has already had child protective services on her butt. And, lo and behold, a baby disappeared right near where she lived at the time of the miscarriage. A baby who would be the same age and gender as the child she claims is missing.”
“A child no one saw at the spot she allegedly disappeared from,” Twitchell said.
“Yup.”
“And who hasn’t been at her summer music lessons for the last few days before she disappeared.”
“Yeah.” The weight of the facts pressed down on Griffin. If she’d been standing up or trying to carry them, her body would have sagged. “What do you want to do?”
Twitchell scratched his head. “There’s no law that says Erica Frazier has to sit at home and wait for us. She checked in so we can find her if something breaks.”
“But her kid is missing,” Griffin said. “And she’s out. What if Felicity came home and her mom isn’t there?”
“She’s looking. Maybe.” Twitchell shrugged. “I don’t know what I’d do if my kid were missing. I wouldn’t want to sit at home and wait like a chump. Wouldn’t you go out?”
“We’re cops. It’s different.”
“Maybe. I can understand her restlessness, her desire to act instead of just waiting for someone else to solve the problem.” He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “When you have a kid, shit, you’d do anything.”