Page 31 of Be A Detective, They Said. It’ll Be Fun, They Said

Chapter Eleven

“So that’s a picture of a real alien? Is that where we’re going with this?”

“We don’t know if it’s a real alien, but look at fucking Hank. Either way, Wings took this picture and the whiteboard she attached it to has nothing else but a land survey of the site in Roswell, where alien debris was allegedly found. But if she was into the Roswell shit, why does she have a picture of an alleged alien from the school, and how the fuck was she connecting all this?”

I stared at the picture of the alien, its shiny globe-like eyes and distorted skull blurry, but still very much resembling an alien as we’ve come to know them in media and movies.

Marty raised both her hands. “Okay, let’s take inventory of what we have so far. It might not be much, but we need some clarity. The timeline for Neerie on the day she disappeared is this: She took Tamlin to school. According to the camera footage Tottington watched, she arrived back at home just before eight-thirty in the morning. She never left until it was time for her to pick up Tamlin at school at three in the afternoon. She came back home, sans Tamlin, about six, a little after the time Naida said she dropped her off at her house, left again and never came back home after that.”

Scratching my head, I nodded. “So she must have gone off to meet the FB group in the woods then. A dead end so far. Next, we have her text to Earl about the basement, but we have no idea what she meant or if she even meant to send it to Earl at all. Melba thinks the text was meant for someone else entirely.”

Nina rolled her tongue along the inside of her cheek. “Yep. And BTdubs, Melba was at a pottery class until eleven o’clock with her husband. They went home after the class and went to bed. But she claims Neerie is alive, wherever she is. I guess we have to lean toward that being fucking true, because she did see the text to Earl in said vision. There’s no other way she could have seen it.”

“Though, wait. We still have Neerie’s ex-husband Will to talk to. He did threaten her if she wouldn’t let him see Tamlin,” I added.

Tottington came down the stairs and cleared his throat. “However, Mr. Tempe has been in fairy prison for the last four days, madam, and remains there as we speak. Darnell did some poking about and sent me the information. He can thusly be ruled out.”

“So what else do we have?” I almost shouted, my panic beginning to take hold of my good sense. “Nothing. We have nothing. None of the mothers from the PTA had anything helpful to say, other than Neerie was, well, Neerie. Overbearing, rude and pushy. That doesn’t help us find her!”

I gripped the shoulder of the suit of armor that sat in the corner of the basement, almost digging my fingernails into it.

“Hold the phone! I mean, literally,” Marty squawked, holding up the cellphone. “Look what I found in the search history on Neerie’s phone!”

I closed my eyes and prayed it was something that would help us find her. “What is it?”

Marty licked her lips, her eyes bright with excitement. “Were you guys aware that not one, but three children have gone missing from schools for the gifted in the last four months?”

I froze in place.

“Paranormal kids?” Nina asked.

Marty chewed on the tip of her nail. “Uh-huh.”

Nina frowned, nodding slowly. “Yeah, I remember seeing something about it on the paranormal web. All kids attending paranormal schools, right?”

Sometimes, I wondered if it was such a good idea to keep our children isolated from the outside human world. I understood protecting them until they could protect themselves, especially my Sam. He is, after all, a pale green.

It’s not something we could hide or something humans wouldn’t question, or even something he wouldn’t be tortured endlessly about. We’d purposely put him in this school for that reason—with others like him.

While lots of paranormal parents chose to let their children attend human schools, and I respected that, it was a big burden to keep your true nature hidden. One we ultimately decided was an extra helping on their plates they didn’t need.

It was hard to keep the schools hidden—it took a lot of work on our part to make it happen. If outsiders asked where the children attended school, we simply told them they were home-schooled. To further keep prying eyes at bay, we had all registered as home-schooling parents.

Marty shook her head as she squinted at the phone. “Yep. All paranormal kids, attending schools for the gifted. Tina Madry in California, a werewolf. Chester Godfrey in Virginia, a vampire, and Lori Caulfield in South Carolina, a witch. All around nine or ten, the first one taken four months ago. No suspects, no leads.”

A witch, a vampire and a werewolf… “The locations are so random. So what do they all have in common?” I wondered.

“They’re all paranormal and gifted?” Marty replied. Then she frowned. “But wait! They’re all in the top one percent of children in their schools with way above-average IQs. They’re super-geniuses, according to what this one person said on the California school’s page.”

“So someone’s snatchin’ kids who are smart—to what fucking end?”

Fear trickled down my spine. “My immediate thought is the government. They took children with high IQs, and they’re all a different species…”

Was one of the missing the child who’d called out to me for help? The voice had said help us. I clenched my fingers into fists. “What if…what if one of those children was calling me for help? The voice I heard said help us!” I squeaked, my cheeks flushing hot.

Marty gripped my shoulder. “Okay, let’s slow down, Wanda. First, we need to figure out if this has anything to do with Neerie’s disappearance. It’s a bit of a leap to suggest she was looking into this simply because of her search history. Maybe she was just reading articles on the paranormal web. She could have been looking for a million things that have nothing to do with her. We don’t even know if what happened to you has anything to do with this yet. We don’t know if there’s a connection. There are no children missing at Sammy and Olivia’s school—only one adult.”

“And we don’t know where the fuck you went, or if you went anywhere at all. If you’ll damn well recall, the last time someone fucked with our heads, they made me think I was in some dark hole when I was really in an apartment. So what if that was all some illusion?”

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