Page 76 of The Catcher
“Tell him to get on the phone.”
“I’m sorry, sir, he isn’t here.”
“Please contact him and ask him to get back to me withTyler Ashford’s number or at least find his grandson and keep him safe.”
He hung up, a sense of unease settling over him. “You think our perp has got Nicholas and plans to go after Tyler next?” Callie asked, her voice laced with concern.
“If McKenzie’s right, Nicholas is the perpetrator, and he has Tyler,” Noah responded, a spike of fear and confusion rushing through him at the implications of their conversation.
Callie turned down Power House Lane.
They couldn’t help but feel a sense of solemnity descend upon them as they approached. With over 1,000 memorials, the cemetery stood as a testament to the lives and legacies of those who had come before. Nestled behind a hotel near High Peaks Municipal Electric, it was hidden away, surrounded by a grove of trees.
“Park over there,” Noah instructed, gesturing towards a spot as he watched the compass and the number of feet decrease on his phone.
They exited the Jeep and began to walk among the gravestones, which seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. “You are searching for a large upright gravestone. Several family members have been buried around it,” Noah read from the app’s blurb about the location. He tapped the photo at the top of the screen to get a better look, studying the surroundings for any familiar landmarks.
“It looks like so many others,” he remarked, furrowing his brow in concentration as he tried to compare the trees in the background and some of the other gravestones. Hereturned to the compass, watching how close they were getting. “Seventeen feet, northeast,” he noted. “Twelve feet, northwest.”
Suddenly, he stopped, a sense of frustration washing over him. “Shit, I must have gone by it.”
“Let me take a look,” Callie offered, her eyes scanning the surroundings as she studied the photo on the screen.
They continued moving until they were only six feet from the target location. “It has to be one of these,” Noah said, feeling a growing sense of urgency.
“Noah, look at the image. See the design on the gravestone; it looks like an open book. Over there is the only one with an open book,” Callie pointed out, her voice calm and decisive.
As they approached the gravestone adorned with fresh flowers and numerous trinkets, Noah’s phone vibrated, indicating that the question button had unlocked. “That’s it,” he confirmed, his eyes scanning the screen as he read the question. “What is their name?”
Without hesitation, Noah crouched down and looked at the name engraved on the gravestone. “Elizabeth Anderson,” he stated confidently, his fingers moving swiftly over the screen.
The completed screen showed a close-up of the gravestone with a blurb below it that read: “She didn’t deserve to die.”
Noah again lifted his eyes to the gravestone and read it:
In Memory of Elizabeth Anderson. 2005 – 2022
In an instant, his mind flashed to one of the geocachesthey’d found at the phone booth and the riddle. He muttered it under his breath so quietly that not even Callie could hear:
“In the year 2024, a mystery unfolds,
Two years prior, a life foretold.
At seventeen, they met their fate,
Now, tell me, friend, what was their birth date?”
It had been 2005. His eyes drifted down to the gravestone.Forever in our hearts. Loving daughter of Anna Anderson and Joshua Anderson.
“She was only seventeen when she died.”
Callie crouched beside him, her brow knitting together thoughtfully. “Huh. I remember her.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, it was before you arrived. Two years ago, a teen from the high school took her own life. Her parents said that she’d been the target of bullying. It couldn’t be proven. Tragic really. Ironically, her father is the current school guidance counselor.” Even as the words left her mouth, Noah’s mind connected the dots: the meeting with Mia and the counselor at the beginning, the photo on his desk, and his conversation with Noah before he left after asking him if he’d been drinking.
“Drinking? God, no. I learned my lesson from my father. You go down that road and... well, let’s say it doesn’t end well,” Noah had interjected.
