Gone Missing: A gripping crime thriller that will have you hooked

by T. J. Brearton

  They were babbling about the first-fallen leaves. Ramona only had a few words in her repertoire that Cross knew of, but “leaf” hadn’t been one of them.

  “Leaf!” she was shouting. “Leaf-eaf!”

  He found them taking their shoes off in the entryway.

  “Daddy!” Petrie ran to him and threw her arms around his legs. Ramona dropped the red leaf she was holding and charged for her father, too.

  He hugged them both back and said, “I’m going to go get dressed, okay? I’ll be right back.”

  He glanced at Marty, a bit self-consciously since he was mainly naked, but she just smiled and corralled the girls. “Let daddy finish up.”

  So bizarre that his wife was a guest in his home, a place that they had bought together. A house in which they’d shared a bed.

  Cross grabbed some deodorant from the dresser and swiped it over his armpits. He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He ran fingers through his hair, stared at his reflection again. Was his own wife making him a bit nervous? Damn right she was.

  It was getting dark out and he flipped on some lights as he returned to the girls. They’d come into the living room and Petrie had already taken to the corner where Cross had set up her “workshop” – she could spend an hour sitting and stringing together beads for necklaces and bracelets. Ramona had a coloring book on the floor and was busy slashing the face of Curious George with a red crayon.

  Marty was organizing something in the girls’ bags and Cross invited her to sit. She took the armchair next to Petrie’s workshop and Cross sat down on the couch, Ramona near his feet.

  The air felt charged, like he and Marty had things to talk about. But both of them knew it was impossible to really converse when the girls were around. So they settled into small talk, steered clear of Cross’s case, and focused on the girls.

  Ramona, dissatisfied with her rendering of Curious George as a psychopath, tore up her work and crumpled it into a ball. She found this amusing and decided to tear the next page in the coloring book, too, and Cross intervened.

  They spent the next half hour trying on different jewelry from Petrie, dealing with Ramona’s whims – first she wanted to tear the coloring book, then she wanted a horsey-ride on daddy’s back, then she wanted to play with the Bitty Baby and feed it and put it to bed, and then she wanted a snack.

  He and Marty fell into a natural rhythm in the kitchen, getting the girls their before-bed snacks (carrots and pretzels for Petrie, applesauce and pretzels for Ramona) then brushed their teeth. They did paper-rock-scissors to determine who would change Ramona’s diaper (Cross lost) and then Marty lay down with both girls and read them a story.

  Cross slipped out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen. He debated whether or not he should have a drink in front of Marty, decided the answer was to fix one for her, too.

  She didn’t like beer, but she’d have a whiskey and coke, he thought. Marty had never been a tomboy, per se, but she was never one to shrink from a real drink.

  He brought both glasses back into the living room. Marty was still in with the girls so he decided to check his email on his phone.

  No updates from the searchers. Montgomery’s body was undergoing a full autopsy. External would be completed later that night, internal sometime the following day, or maybe the next.

  The Tremblays were back home – they’d told troopers that they were sick of the press hounding them day and night and so had taken off for a couple days, shut off their phones. Cross could understand.

  Jeff Gebhart had dramatically improved and was going home in the next day or so. DA Cobleskill was toying with charges such as conspiracy to commit kidnapping, but there were still too many holes to make it stick, and the prosecution was on hold.

  Marty walked into the living room, stirring him out of his thoughts. He put his phone aside, several emails left unopened.

  “I thought you’d have the news on,” she said, taking the chair by Petrie’s workshop again.

  “I was just checking my messages.”

  “I’ve had it on all week,” she said. “Never watched so much TV in my life.”

  “Yeah.” Cross eyed the remote control sitting on the table beside the couch. It could wait a few minutes. “How’s work?”

  She pushed her shoes off and sat cross-legged in the chair. Cross thought she seemed very comfortable. She was wearing yoga pants, a hooded sweatshirt. She looked good, especially for a thirty-something mother of two who was working her ass off as a hospital administrator. “Work is okay,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh nothing, nothing. You know, it’s just politics. I’m getting used to it.”

  “Politics… You just mean…”

  “I mean politics. You know? There are people making decisions for medical reasons; there are people making decisions for political reasons. Takes a lot of money to run a hospital.” She acted like she wanted to say more but looked at the blank TV screen.

  “Yeah, I can imagine,” Cross said, really having no idea. He grabbed one of the drinks from the end table and walked it over to Marty. “Here.”

  She gave it a look, hesitated, then took the glass. “Thanks.”

  He sat back down with his own. For a second or two it felt like the wrong thing to do, like he’d made a mistake offering her a drink, then he took a sip. The carbonation soothed his throat and the whiskey warmed his stomach.

  “Where’s Dana?” Marty asked. “Still out there?”

  “No, she never was. Been working other aspects of the case. But she’s home now, taking some time with her family.”

  “That’s good.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it again, took another sip of the oaky drink.

  He wondered if all cops were doomed to troubled marriages. How did a person strike a balance between family and a job like this? Dana Gates seemed to be finding one. What was the key? Effective compartmentalization, a proper wall between work and home life?

  But when a cop did that, when anyone did that – did the work suffer? Did the home life?

  He thought of Gloria Calumet. She’d left the search and returned to Brooklyn to check in with her restaurant and store, her employees. Some would call that responsible – with 1,000 people searching for Katie, her presence wasn’t going to make or break the search, and she had businesses to run, possibly an FBI investigation to deal with.

  Others would find it reprehensible. They’d say she was callous, abandoning her family in their time of greatest need. Forget the business, screw the government.

  He watched Marty. She kept staring at the dark TV, then she raised the glass to her lips. When she drank, he felt relieved. Maybe he was overthinking it, but somehow the act removed a barrier between them.

  “You want me to turn it on?” He was already reaching for the remote.

  “No, not unless you want to. Do you want to?”

  He dropped the remote on the couch. He’d been in the woods for a long time. Despite showering, he could still smell the campfire smoke on his skin. She picked up on his thoughts, as Marty was prone to do. “What did you eat out there?” she asked.

  “Ah, food kept coming out. We had a couple supply drops, and then there was sort of a bucket brigade. Hot dogs. Beans. Fruit. Lots of granola bars. I mean a lot of granola bars. I’ll be pent up for days.”

  Marty screwed up her face. “What do you think she’s eating?”

  “We found some minimal groceries at the first cabin. Not much at the second. Honestly, I don’t know.”

  “The second – that was the mountain man’s cabin. Some pot-growing hermit or something?”

  “Yeah. He hasn’t been officially identified yet, but… yeah.”

  She scowled and shook her head, then took a longer pull from her whiskey and coke. “The whole thing is awful,” she said quietly.

  They let it settle. Cross switched topics. “How are the girls doing, how’s your mother handling it?”

  “Good. They’re all good. The d
ay care is excellent, my mom is filling in the gaps. It’s working out.”

  He felt a familiar mix – glad his girls were in a stable situation, glad for Marty, too, but simultaneously disappointed it all seemed to be okay.

  “Listen. Thanks for bringing the girls here tonight. It’s really, ah… I know it’s out of your way. I just… Seeing them here is…” He struggled to find the words.

  “No, it worked out. I’ve got tomorrow off, school is still two weeks away for Patricia. They needed to see you.”

  The idea that Marty thought his daughters needed to see him filled Cross with emotion. He leaned forward, holding his drink, biting back the sudden, unexpected tears. “You know, I never thought I’d be a part of something like this.”

  When he looked up, Marty was gazing back, her own eyes brimming.

  “I mean, this isn’t the first abduction case I’ve had, but nothing like this.”

  She blinked at him, and her emotion dried up. She sat back and then turned her face away.

  You idiot, he realized. She thought you were talking about you and her. The separation.

  “I know,” Marty said flatly, “I understand. This is a big one.” She took a drink then added, “But it’s not unusual for you to get swept away by your work.”

  She changed her position, planting her feet down, no longer in the comfy repose. “And that’s why we’ve, you know… that’s why we have this arrangement. It’s best.”

  “It’s best for whom?”

  She just gave him a look then stood. “Justin, I’m not going to do this.” She walked out of the room, put her glass in the sink; he heard her run the tap.

  “Do what? Talk? We said we’d talk, too. You’d bring the girls for the night and we’d talk.”

  Stop it. What the fuck are you doing? Why are you arguing with her?

  She returned to the chair and sat down. She had picked up her shoes along the way and started putting them on. “I’m coming back in the morning, right? You’ve got to go to the city, you said? To see about the sister or something?”

  Things were falling apart. This wasn’t how he wanted tonight to go.

  “Marty, wait a second.”

  She stood in her shoes and stared at him. He knew that look – she’d wrapped herself in a kind of emotional insulation now.

  He’d blown it.

  He set aside his drink and looked down at his hands. They shook a little and he wrung them together, then found her gaze again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I understand you have to go down to—”

  “I’m sorry I cut you out of my life.”

  She blinked. “It’s your work, you’re a professional and need to use discretion, just like I do.”

  He took a cautious step toward her. In the corner of his eye he could see their reflection in the blank flat-screen TV. She on one edge, him along the other.

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, I cut you out of this part of me that… I don’t know what to call it. I just thought I had to be a man. Whatever that means. Do what I needed to do.”

  She was quiet. Her lower lip started to shiver. “You left me. Maybe not physically, but in every other way.”

  “I know. I know I did.”

  A silence developed. He found it hard to meet her eyes. When he did, he saw her looking levelly at him. She straightened her shoulders. “Justin, a couple only really has a couple different arguments, and they have them over and over again.”

  He got stuck on the idea that she’d just called them a “couple.” Did she still think of them as together?

  “Okay,” he said. “What is this argument about?”

  “For us it’s always been about the work. We both have careers. This is about you wanting to have your career, and wanting me to stay home and raise the girls.”

  He opened his mouth to defend, but nothing came out. She had boiled it down. For some reason, though, he tried a pathetic, “That’s not true.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “I want you to work. But—”

  “But part-time, okay. Well, what about you? Why couldn’t you cut back on your hours with the state police?”

  “Because it doesn’t work like that.”

  She was nodding. “Exactly. See? The same argument. And it doesn’t work like that for me, either. You don’t work part-time as a hospital administrator.”

  “Well, you didn’t have to take the job.” His voice rose an octave; he couldn’t help it.

  She clapped her hands together, once, and smirked. “There you have it.”

  “Well? Two people both working full-time, with two kids?”

  She widened her eyes at him. “Are you kidding? People are doing it all over the country. Most people can’t survive without two incomes.”

  “We could have.”

  “Maybe. Barely. With nothing left to put away, nothing for the girls – what if we wanted to put Petrie in piano classes, or one of them needs a tutor? Hand-to-mouth is not ideal.” She shook her head and flapped a hand in the air as if finances weren’t the point. “Justin, I know you’re not one of these guys who thinks the woman’s place is in the home. I married you. So, what is it?”

  He began to respond but caught himself again. He didn’t want to say what it was. He realized he didn’t even know.

  Maybe he was just an asshole and needed to change.

  He wished he knew how.

  Marty stared at him, and he felt like she was reading his mind.

  “Look what happened to Dana,” Marty said. “Dana Gates worked her ass off – multiple homicides at the college, and she worked day and night. People were gossiping – you told me yourself – how she barely spent enough time with her own girls. What a bad mother she was. If that had been you on that case – you think people would’ve talked about you behind your back about how you were neglecting your family? No. They would’ve commended you for your dedication.”

  She averted her eyes and moved toward the door. “I get an opportunity for a job, something I’ve been working toward for years, and it’s this huge inconvenience. You don’t want to move, you don’t want to take fewer hours—”

  “I told you it doesn’t work like that, I can’t just—”

  “So, this is where we’re at. Two separate households, two separate lives—”

  “Double the expenses,” he shot back. “It doesn’t make any economic sense. We’re back to each barely scraping by.”

  “Well?” Her hand was on the doorknob. “What do we do then, Justin? You tell me. Aside from me quitting the job I worked so hard to get, what do we do?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that, either.

  Her eyes were welling again; she was close to letting her guard down and crying, and he knew she didn’t want him to see it. She hastily mumbled something about being back by nine the next morning, opened the door, and left.

  He didn’t stop her.

  He watched as she backed out of the driveway and drove off into the night, then went and fixed himself another drink.

  The TV was waiting. He settled back on the couch and turned it on, trying to steer his mind away from his personal life and back to the case. It was impossible. That wall he’d tried to build between work and family life was crumbling.

  The eleven o’clock news came on, and the top story was Katie Calumet. It was enough to pull him out of the doldrums and focus.

  There she was in the picture he’d chosen from her house with David.

  “Katie Calumet remains missing tonight as searchers prepare for their fifth day in the West Canada Wilderness, an area in the southwest Adirondacks.”

  The image switched to a helicopter shot over the wilderness. “But as the investigation continues, complications arise. Law enforcement and searchers have been scouring what’s known as a ‘primitive area,’ and the rugged terrain takes a toll. Several injuries and at least one case of dehydration have been reported.”

 
The news anchor appeared, talking into the camera. “We turn now to Dr. Peter Harmon, a wilderness survival expert. Harmon says that every day a hiker is in the woods, chances are slimmer that—”

  Cross sat up and clicked off the TV. He walked into the kitchen, feeling the effects of the drink. After several sober days, he was buzzed off just two weak whiskey and cokes. And he didn’t want to hear an expert predict Katie Calumet’s low chances of making it out alive. He ran the tap and rinsed the glass, then gulped some water.

  He snapped off the lights and went to the bedroom, climbing into bed.

  He couldn’t sleep.

  Taking his blanket with him, Cross crept into the girls’ room. Another thing he’d gotten used to was sleeping on the hard ground.

  He covered up with the blanket and listened to the sounds of his daughters’ breathing.

  Chapter Fifty

  Katie heard the helicopter and shrieked. She waved her arms; she fanned her dwindling fire, watching the smoke roll up through the evergreen boughs, dissipating ineffectually in the pinkish dawn light. She held up the compass, flicked its face toward the sky, but the sun wasn’t even above the horizon yet.

  Then she grabbed the pot, threw the remaining water on the flames. The fire hissed, bellows of steam rising into the trees. The sound of the helicopter sank away, and with the fire gone, the cold rushed in.

  “Goddammit.” She slumped to her knees and dropped her chin to her chest. “God… dammit.”

  It had been four days since leaving Hoot’s cabin. She was tired; she was unbelievably hungry. She’d never known this kind of doubt and isolation. The hunger made it hard to think. Her last meal – a frog she’d chased around the edge of a small pond for an hour before catching it and cooking it whole – was long gone.

  The ground was wet. The night had gotten cool, and morning dew glistened on the leaves. She no longer thought she was between Spruce Mountain and the trail Hoot had told her she would find. Way too much time had passed. Even at her slow pace, she had to come to grips with the fact she was off course, and had been for a while.

  The helicopters had awoken her – the first one, 6 a.m., coming from the south, then this one from the west a half hour later – and knowing they were out there helped keep the fear at bay. But if they hadn’t seen her by now, or her campfire smoke, would they ever? She didn’t know whether helicopters meant searchers on the ground, too. For all she knew, Leno had made it out of the woods and was still negotiating with the police, acting like Katie remained hostage.