Page 7 of Our Daughter's Bones
“Mackenzie?”
“Sorry. I don’t know where it is.” It was in the laundry room.
He groaned. “Dammit. I’m late already.”
“Why? Where do you have to be?” She tried to sound neutral.
“I have a meeting with Ron. He’s in a bad mood. I’ll just go without it then.” He picked up his briefcase and put on his coat.
He cupped her face with his calloused hands. She remembered their first date, when he had touched her like this. He told her she looked like the moon on fire, with her pale skin and flaming red hair.
But Sterling said a lot of things. He was charming, successful, and beautiful. He didn’t let anyone mistreat his wife. He helped with household chores. He liked to go down on her.
Mackenzie was lucky. She had found someonegood. She hadn’t made the same mistake her mother had. Sterling was the perfect husband, the ideal specimen.
He leaned in and planted a quick kiss. It left a bitter taste lingering on her lips.
When Sterling walked out, she turned on the blender. The white noise filled her house. She looked up at the box-beam ceiling. She had come a long way from growing up in a house with a cracked and moldy roof. She looked down at the floor. Her kitchen didn’t have dirty yellow tiles. Mackenzie looked around her home—the vast open floor plan, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the front yard. The lack of privacy didn’t bother her; it was easy to look into her house, but there was nothing to hide. No bloodied wives, no dead bodies.
Every day, she admired her garden: the flourishing shrubs, the immaculately mowed grass and the weeping willow that looked like an umbrella. Today, as she gazed out the window, she wondered how he kissedher.
Her stomach churned. Her face turned the color of the tomato she had just chopped. Her bones ached to smash something. She snatched at the blender jug and it slipped from her grasp, spattering the juice over her glistening white counter.
She didn’t bother cleaning it up. Sterling would do it.
She picked up her iPod and went for a run.
Runners usually took the scenic routes in Lakemore. There were plenty—lonely trails through forests or twisting paths along the lakes—but next to Olympia, Lakemore was an ugly mole that couldn’t be surgically removed.
Mackenzie liked to run through the ugliness of Lakemore. Buildings that had no creativity in their design. Parks that were neglected, with broken and vacant swings. Billboards that paraded tacky and half-hearted advertisements.
Lakemore didn’t thrive; it slithered. It didn’t try; it had accepted. It was a city people ran away from, not toward. With Olympia and Tacoma nearby, the brightest minds headed out of town.
But when a town gives up, a few people rise to build it up again.
Detective Mackenzie Price was one of them.
Her breaths came out in short bursts. Drops of sweat popped all over her skin. She ran harder than she had before. The cool but unusually dry air traveled with her. Her feet bounced off the concrete sidewalk. She felt the material of her track pants stick to her legs.
She ran past a boy putting up a poster on a lamppost. She stopped and turned. Breath wheezed in and out of her.
“Hey, kid!” She frowned. “What are you doing?”
The boy froze. He was not even in his teens yet, and he wore a jacket too big. It swallowed his scrawny frame. “Putting up this ad for football coaching.”
Mackenzie snatched the poster from him. He recoiled. “You know you’re covering this missing girl’s poster, right?”
His lower lip puckered. “But this poster is on every lamppost and wall in the city! It’s been a year. Who even cares anymore?”
Mackenzie raised her eyebrows.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
She handed him the poster and folded her arms. “If I see this covering any of the missing person posters, you’ll be in big trouble, kid.”
The boy’s eyes peeked at her toned and muscular arms. He swallowed hard and nodded before running away.
Mackenzie looked at the missing person poster.
