First Girl Gone: An absolutely addictive crime thriller with a twist (Detective Charlotte Winters Book 1)

by L. T. Vargus

  Now Charlie’s eyes latched onto a picture of Amber and another girl smiling at the old Poseidon’s Kingdom amusement park. They were seated high up in the Ferris wheel. She’d heard about people climbing it to sit in the very topmost cars, but Charlie had never had the guts to do it.

  At last she took a step back to get a look at the rest of the room. There was certainly more of a traditional girly feel here than she’d found in Kara Dawkins’ room. Pinks and purples dominated the area around the bed. That region almost seemed trapped in little-princess mode to a creepy degree.

  The rest of the room spoke more to the twenty-year-old that Amber truly was.

  Posters of various pop and rock stars coated most of the walls, spanning multiple genres and eras. Adele. Beyoncé. Kurt Cobain. Jim Morrison.

  She picked up a music box from the high closet shelf, turning it over and over in her hands. She wound it up, opened the lid, and it tinkled out its melody—the theme from Swan Lake.

  When the box stopped turning in her hands, she saw it—the seams slicing a rectangular slit into the wood on one side.

  She dug a fingernail into the gap and slid the drawer open. Inside she found a single cigarette, the tangy tobacco smell rising up to meet her nostrils. Beside the white tube sat a black matchbook.

  She picked up the matchbook, thinking it might contain the detective novel cliché of a phone number written inside, but plain white cardboard stared back at her when she flipped it open. Then she turned it over and read the business logo printed on the other side.

  She gasped so hard she almost choked.

  White text and red graphics gleamed against the glossy black. Stark and bright. A cartoon of a dancing girl twirled about the curved lettering of the logo:

  The Red Velvet Lounge.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It took Charlie a second to get her breath back. She stared down at the logo quivering along with the matchbook in her hand.

  The Red Velvet Lounge—the filthy strip club that reeked of fryer grease—could now potentially be tied to both girls. This was huge.

  Part of Charlie wanted to rush straight to the club now. Kick down the door. Tear the place apart searching for anything. But she knew that wouldn’t do. The bouncers knew to look for her.

  She needed to be strategic. Patient. Needed a plan.

  In the meantime, there was still work to be done here at the Ritter house. Frank’s gut said the family knew something, and Charlie planned to find that out here and now.

  She tucked the matchbook into her jacket pocket and stood on tippy toes to slide the music box back on its shelf in the closet. For now, she’d keep this little tidbit from the family. Just in case.

  She thought back to her visit with Uncle Frank, his words echoing in her head: If her family carries on like that in public, then what goes on behind closed doors? The secrets. The secrets often lead you where you need to go.

  Charlie snaked a hand into her bag, pulled out a small, white cube. A nanny cam. She’d hide it here in Amber’s room, see if maybe someone came in after she left.

  She tucked the camera in a scarf on the dresser, propped it up behind the jewelry box. Then she moved to the hall.

  Peeking out of Amber’s doorway, she held her breath and listened. Faintly she heard what sounded like a fork tinkling against a plate. They were still eating. Good.

  Working quickly, she checked the other rooms in the hall, identified two bedrooms. She entered the master bedroom first, scanned it in the half-light streaming in from the hall. Her heartbeat thrummed in her ears, the notion that she might get caught sending a thrill through her.

  She nestled the second camera among the Spanish moss in the pot of a fake ficus in the corner. She didn’t love the angle—about half the room would likely be cut off—but as hiding spots went, faux plants were among the best. They didn’t have to be watered.

  “You’re really doing this, huh?” Allie said.

  “What?”

  “Spying on these people.”

  “I’d be willing to do a whole lot more than this to find those girls.” A memory of the day the police came to tell her parents what they’d found on the beach flashed in Charlie’s mind. She could still hear the low moan of anguish her mother made when the deputy told her they were reclassifying Allie’s case as a homicide. “All that matters is finding the truth.”

  Next she went across the hall to the other bedroom, presumably that of Amber’s brother—the dirty clothes on the floor and multiple bottles of Axe body spray on the nightstand seemed to verify that.

  Allie read off the varieties of Axe, amused.

  “Ice Chill, Apollo, Anarchy for Him. Oh my God. Smell the Anarchy one. Please.”

  “No time,” Charlie said.

  Charlie chose a bookcase to house the camera. The lens would peek out from one side of a Bluetooth speaker, nicely concealed from most angles. It was perfect.

  With the camera in place, she hurried back into the hall, slowly shutting the door behind her. Again, she listened. This time no fork sounds tipped anything off. She wanted to place one more camera, but it would be a risk.

  “Where’s that last camera going?” Allie said.

  “Basement.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just a gut feeling. There’s probably a rec room or something down there. Maybe a home theater. We’ve got the bedrooms covered. That’d be another place someone might expect privacy.”

  She dug another camera from her bag and placed it in her jacket pocket. Better to have it close.

  She took a deep breath and started her descent. If the family were still eating, her path should be clear—that window of opportunity had to be waning by now, though.

  At the bottom of the staircase, she went left, working her way around the dining room to the kitchen, figuring that to be the most likely place for a basement entrance.

  She passed through a living room with a blocky-looking wood coffee table and tufted leather furniture in the exact shade of a Tim Hortons coffee with two creams. The floors were some kind of polished stone, and Charlie had to be extra careful because her feet made a tap-dancing sound with every step if she moved too fast.

  The Christmas tree stood in here, festooned with silver and red. She’d never seen such an anally decorated tree outside of a magazine. The trees they’d had growing up had always been a mishmash of ornaments, many of them made by her and Allie in school: a googly-eyed felt Santa, a pine-cone reindeer with lopsided antlers, a snowman made from pompoms and pipe cleaners.

  At last she stepped into the kitchen. Stainless-steel appliances. White shaker cabinets. Marble-look countertops. Mason jars wrapped in burlap and baker’s twine. A suburban cliché.

  There were two doors on the back wall of the kitchen. One of them had to be for the basement stairwell.

  “It’s definitely the left one,” Allie said.

  Charlie chose the door on the right, twisting the handle and pulling the door free without a sound. The distinct smell of rotting produce wafted in her face, a wedge of light from the kitchen pendants illuminating a broom closet with a stainless-steel garbage can inside.

  “Ha! Told you,” Allie said, her voice annoyingly smug.

  Just as Charlie eased the closet door shut, she heard a chair scrape over the dining room floor. She had to hustle.

  The next door revealed what she’d been looking for: carpeted stairs leading down. She could only see the first four steps before darkness blotted out everything beyond, but she could hear the telltale sound of a handful of silverware clattering on top of a plate. Whoever was clearing the table would probably enter the kitchen any second now.

  Charlie stepped into the dim stairwell and shut the door behind her, sealing herself into the pitch-black space. She felt around on the wall for a light switch. There was a long beat after flicking it before the fluorescent lights below shivered to life.

  Her shoes whispered over the carpeted stairs as she descended. She had been right about the base
ment rec room idea. A huge flat-screen was mounted in one corner with every video game console imaginable sitting in the entertainment center underneath. At least ten controllers cluttered the coffee table in front of yet another tufted leather sofa, this one the color of a Spanish peanut.

  But the real centerpiece of the room was a huge train set. It dominated the basement, covering more than half of the floor space. It was set up in a large rectangular loop with a hinged section at one end that could be lifted out of the way like a drawbridge. A miniature village huddled at one end, with tiny buildings and roads. At the other end, there was a mountain with a tunnel and rolling hills flocked with some kind of green fiber to mimic grass.

  Charlie bent closer, admiring the level of detail on the train depot, right down to the arrival and departure times posted behind the ticket window. She imagined how much fun she and Allie would have had with a giant playroom like this.

  “Playroom? Are you kidding?” Allie said. “This is all Tahhhhd’s. Guarantee it. Look how fussy it is. How clean. Everything in its place. They probably don’t even let the kids down here at all.”

  Charlie nestled the final camera behind a bundle of wires to one side, angled to stare out at the rest of the room.

  At the top of the stairway, she turned off the lights and listened, holding her breath in the dark. When she was as confident as she could be that no one was outside the door, she went for it. Slipping out of the basement, she glanced around, finding the kitchen empty.

  The door closed with a soft click, and just as Charlie’s fingers released the handle, she heard a noise behind her. The soft scuff of feet over tile. She turned and found Sharon Ritter staring at her from the kitchen doorway. Eyebrows scrunched. Lips pressed into a thin line.

  “Sorry, I was looking for a bathroom?”

  The woman’s face softened.

  “I always say this house has too many doors,” she said and gestured over Charlie’s shoulder. “Go all the way through the dining room and there’s a powder room off the entryway.”

  Charlie thanked her and ducked through the doorway she’d indicated. Entering the small bathroom off the foyer, Charlie was practically punched in the face by the overwhelming odor of pine. As she closed herself in, she spotted the can of Glade in a wicker basket on the back of the toilet.

  “Sparkling Spruce,” Allie said, reading the label. “This family is obsessed with artificial smells.”

  Charlie made a show of flushing the toilet and washing her hands.

  “It’s almost as if they’re hiding something, you know?” Allie arched an eyebrow. “Air fresheners. Body spray. It’s like underneath the picture-perfect family, they know there’s something stanky they have to cover up.”

  Charlie was eager to see what the cameras would show her. She hoped Frank was right, and that the secrets she found here would be the key to finding the girls.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Charlie lounged in her car across the street from the Ritter house, computer sitting open on her lap. Now, thanks to the nanny cams, she could get a deeper look inside the Ritter household—as close as someone could get to peeling off the roof and seeing the family secrets laid bare.

  Her gut told her that something she found tonight would lead her to the girls, one way or another. Amber had gone missing first. Someone in the family had to know something. Had to.

  Four miniature screens filled her monitor. Most were inactive at the moment, and the basement screen was pitch-black with the lights off. So far the only notable action had been a black-and-white cat sauntering through the master bedroom.

  A light snow began to fall, peppering the windshield with random flakes. Charlie popped open a bag of Doritos and a Fresca and waited to watch the family in their natural habitat. They’d creep into their private areas sooner or later. In any case, it was better to have a snack with this kind of thing, she thought, or else the restlessness could wear your nerves down quickly. Even in a best-case scenario, a surveillance session like this was a tedious task. Lots of downtime. Lots of staring into a blank screen or watching nothing through binoculars. Food made it borderline tolerable.

  Charlie nibbled on another chip, this one inexplicably lacking nacho cheese dust. So far something like every other one had been like that. Had she gotten a bad bag?

  It was inane details like this that often came to the forefront of her thoughts only in the midst of this part of the job. Bored and listless, suddenly every nacho cheese detail tapered into a sharp focus.

  After they’d been sitting in silence for some time, Allie spoke up.

  “You know what your problem is?”

  “This should be good,” Charlie said.

  “You’re aloof.”

  “Aloof?” Charlie snickered. “I guess somebody’s been leafing through a thesaurus.”

  “You make no effort with people. No attempt to be part of the group.”

  Charlie let her head fall back against the seat and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Sorry I was never Miss Popular like you.”

  “I’m just saying. If you don’t learn to open yourself up to people, you’ll end up a bitter old hag who collects creepy dolls because she has no friends or family.”

  Charlie snorted. “That’s oddly specific.”

  “Life is so beautiful, Charlie. We are surrounded by mysteries, miracles, wonders, and love. A universe populated with details that are striking, strange, vexing, haunting, moving. It’s everywhere. All around us. You just have to reach out. Connect with something outside yourself. Try.”

  Allie sighed. Then she went on.

  “You stopped believing in it, I think. Life, I mean. You could be out living it instead of what you’re doing, which mostly involves eating in your car alone, from what I can tell. Not all of us get to do that, you know? Live our lives. We don’t get to love or share our passions or fight for what we believe in. It got taken from us. Anyway, it’s not for me to tell you what to do, I guess. It’s your life.”

  She was quiet for a moment, and Charlie thought that was the end of it.

  “Just remember, I’m not always going to be here. What will you do then?”

  The smirk on Charlie’s face vanished.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Allie shrugged.

  “Just saying. I could disappear at any second.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. Poof. Gone.”

  “Shut up,” Charlie said.

  What was Allie’s obsession with this lately? First she’d gone on and on about Frank, and now this.

  Charlie tried to focus on other things, but her mind kept wandering back to the idea of Allie being gone. She couldn’t imagine what her life would be like without her sister constantly in her head.

  Over an hour passed before anything on the screens moved. The basement lights clicked on, the one dark screen going to a blinding bright white. As the camera adjusted, the picture seemed to fade into view, and then a figure appeared, moving down the stairs.

  “Activity in the basement,” Allie said, as though reporting it over a police radio. “Looks like the patriarch of the house, one Todd Ritter, is heading down to his man-baby room. Over.”

  “Man-baby room?”

  “Yup. He’s going down to his basement to play with his trains. Like a freakin’ baby.”

  Sure enough, Todd Ritter moved to the train set. He leaned down and flipped a hidden switch under the table. Tiny lights flicked on in the model buildings, and the little steam engine raced around the track, taking a winding path over a bridge and through the mountain tunnel. The chugging of the train sounded tinny over the laptop speakers. When the steam engine’s whistle blew, it was quite shrill.

  “See? Man-baby.”

  Charlie crunched another chip before she answered. She tried to chew as obnoxiously as possible, knowing that Allie had always hated that when they were kids.

  “I guess.”

  Todd fiddled with train bits and changed some of the cars for the
next few minutes. Watching this was somehow duller than watching blank screens, Charlie thought, and she tore into the Doritos pretty good.

  Another forty minutes went by before one of the upstairs cams came to life. Charlie’s eyes snapped to it as Allie narrated once again.

  “Activity in the master bedroom,” Allie said. “Looks like Sharon Ritter… and… an unidentified male subject?”

  Charlie squinted at the screen. Most of the man’s body was cut off the left edge of the picture, but he was too tall to be the brother, Jason. Before she could think much about it, the guy ripped his T-shirt off.

  “Holy shirtless!” Allie said. “We’ve got man meat.”

  The pants came off next, one leg and then the other. He hopped off-screen. Then Sharon passed through the frame, stripped down to her underwear. She, too, exited stage right, the last visible bit of her body language seeming to suggest she was climbing onto the bed.

  Now even Allie was speechless.

  “Hurry,” Sharon said, her voice hushed. Within seconds, soft moans came through the laptop speakers over the train whistles in the other room. Even with the action happening off-screen, the sound made it too intimate, so Charlie turned it down to a level that was just barely audible.

  She struggled to process what she was witnessing. Sharon Ritter was having an affair? With Todd in the house? She slid her eyes back to the basement camera feed. Todd was still playing with his trains. Oblivious.

  “Yikes,” Allie said. “You wanted to know what the Ritters might be hiding? Well, there’s a family secret for you.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie agreed.

  They fell quiet. Charlie couldn’t pry her eyes away from the feed showing the blank slab of wall and a window in the master bedroom. After a second she noticed that shadows flitted against the wall, presumably from the doings on the bed.

  “Just reading the shadows here, but if I’m not mistaken, is that reverse cowgirl I’m seeing?” Allie said, laughing to herself. “Go Sharon. For an older gal, I’m sort of impressed.”

  Charlie closed her eyes, thankful to see the screen disappear for a second.