Page 80 of Last Seen
Touching, isn’t it? She cares so much about the person she should despise the most. She has no idea the impact that little investigation will have.
What people don’t like to think about is what happens when someone goes missing and no one takes it seriously. Perhaps the person was lost to their family already. Perhaps they never had anyone to start with. Perhaps they were poisoned inside and people were happy to have them gone.
People disappear every day. Hundreds of them every year. And you don’t hear about 99 percent of them. Only when it’s an adorable young child or a plucky college student are you made aware. And if they are not from a suburban, white world? Good luck ever learning about it. Unless you seek it out, of course. There’s usually a family in tears, or a boyfriend praying no one runs luminol over his back seat.
Catriona Handon was able to disappear off the face of the earth from a swank spot in the middle of nowhere. And what, two people give a shit? Three? Of the how many people she came across in her life? How come no one came here looking before now? It’s been fifteen years—fifteen years, one month, and eighteen days, to be exact. Why does it take a feisty little sister who—let’s not delude ourselves for a moment here—is out for revenge upon the person she now believes ruined her life to start asking all the right questions?
Granted, Cat was a very bad girl, and naughty girls don’t engender loyalty. Girls who kill their mommies aren’t lauded by society. Did you know that when Harvard found out about her past, they rescinded their invitation to join the class of 1996? She flew up to Boston and insisted on making her case in person,making them look her in the eyes and deny her the privilege they’d extended when they didn’t know of the mistakes she’d made, refuting the claims that they weren’t aware of the rehabilitation she’d gone through. Turns out they were just covering their asses. She had disclosed her circumstances in her essay, and they’d been happy to invite her to matriculate because recidivism is so much lower among the educated and they thought it was fiction and other nonsense they spewed to justify letting her in. Turns out, the parents of someone else in the entering class did some background checking on their sweet daughter’s suitemate-to-be and forced the school to back out of their offer. When faced with a discrimination lawsuit by a legal eagle tied to the juvenile psychiatric facility in Nashville, though, the school happily backed away. The problem student’s parents sent her to Yale instead, and Catriona Handon got her second chance at the ivy-and-brick paragon of elite intellectualism, where she excelled.
There’s an article about it. You should read it. Quite the little social experiment.
Cat was a smart girl. Always had been. Sometimes too smart for her own good, and certainly leaps and bounds above her parents and her teachers. She was gifted, gifted with intelligence, yes, but also with a preternatural self-awareness that every little thing she did caused trouble somewhere along the line. Maybe it was the voices; maybe it wasn’t organic at all, and simply her personality. She was mercurial. Unpredictable.
How could a man not fall in love with that kind of chaos?
But for a woman like that to go missing, for fifteen years, and no one came looking? No one came to Brockville until now? Until sweet, delectable little sister, whom I just want to touch, to skim my hands along her strong shoulders, to count those freckles I bet she hates? Smell her breath and the nape of her neck, discover that silent place every woman has and is different on them all. Little sister is young enough to be impetuous and think she’s impervious to harm, but old enough to understand the ways of the world. My heart cannot take much more.
She is perfection.
She must not go.
She must stay.
Saturday
Chapter Thirty-Two
Halley
Halley checks the Jeep as if she’s about to pilot a Cessna, paranoid but knowing she can’t chance it. She walks around the entirety of the car, examining the bumpers and the wheel wells, looking in the back for anything amiss—anyone lurking—then gets in and reloads the pistol. Noah might not like guns, but he was savvy enough about them to have unloaded it before handing her the bag. She checks her purse for the letter from her sister, which is nestled in its spot, and plugs her phone into the car charger. It beeps with a new voicemail.
She can leave now. Go ... elsewhere and try to figure all of this out. She needs to puzzle out the letter. She should have done that first. Though it seems straightforward, she’s convinced whatever message lies inside might hold all the answers.
She puts the Jeep into gear and gives Noah a little wave. He watches her pull out of the parking space, shrugs and shakes his head as if acknowledging that he tried, then returns to the restaurant.
She hits the speaker on her phone to play the message.
“Halley, it’s Baird. We got a line on the woman from the feedstore video. She’s FBI. Or was, she resigned two years ago. Name is Kade. Donnata Kade. Has a former address near where you are. What the hellshe was doing in Marchburg messing with your Jeep is beyond me. Get in touch when you can. I let the sheriff down there know about your visit, and I’ll also let him know about Kade.”
So a retired FBI agent is poking around all this, now, too? One that lives here in Brockville? Boy, would Halley like to talk to her. She has to admit she is lost. Her sister’s disappearance seems more menacing by the hour, and now she doesn’t know what to do.
Should she go home to Marchburg? Death and destruction await her there, but she has Early, and Meredith for backup. DC? Patch things up with Theo, or end them for good? Stay here? Brockville in the daylight isn’t nearly as forbidding as nighttime. And Noah really did seem like he wanted to help. A second set of eyes on all this wouldn’t be a bad thing. Nashville? See if being in the setting would help her remember exactly what happened that fateful day?
Damn it. Nothing feels right, so she turns to the infallible. Her brain says there are answers here. But her gut says to leave Brockville.
So that is what she’ll do. She’ll figure out whether to turn east or west once she gets to the highway. She can always come back. Maybe she’ll have more answers next time. Maybe whoever is playing games with her will be gone.
The sun peeks over her shoulder as she wends her way out of town, shining on her dash, showing all the dust and grime that’s built up since she last detailed her car. The trees are vibrant under the morning dew, and this time, as she gets to the big sign on the edge of town, there is no police car waiting for her. By now, there’s no way Cameron doesn’t know she’s pulling a runner. They really are letting her go.
With a huge sigh of relief, she follows the well-maintained road out of the valley, up, up, up the mountain, and five minutes later clears the last switchback. Her ears pop. The sky is close. From this vantage point, she can see the misty blue ridges that make up the titular range spreading into the distance and looks down the valley at the town of Brockville below. It seems so quaint. So unthreatening. She is tempted to stop and admire the scenery, but her desire to leave prevents her.
She has escaped, and she isn’t going to stop now.
She keeps the Jeep rolling, is five hundred feet down the back side of the crest of the hill when something catches her eye. It’s there, then gone, and she slams on the brakes when her brain processes what it was.
A boy. A young boy, maybe five, six years old. Wrapped in a blanket. On the side of the road.
She skids to a stop, looking over her shoulder, in the rearview. Nothing there.
