Page 60 of The Sister's Curse
Flight Risk
To my frustration, no one was found at the park.
To add to it, I called EPA. After some time with considerably soothing hold music, I finally reached a pleasant-sounding person, who took my report but wouldn’t take my sample. She said EPA had to take their own readings, and she’d forward my request to an agent, but she warned me that they were facing a backlog of requests. Even though this request was from law enforcement, there would be a wait.
It didn’t sound hopeful, at all. If I were honest with myself, the evidence I’d shared with her wasn’t great…just some dead animals. That was pretty thin, and my dreams and hunches just weren’t something I could put in a report.
I ground my teeth and called Nick to see if I could drop the sample off at the hospital lab instead. He agreed, and I dropped it off.Fingers crossed.If they found nothing, maybe I could convince myself that my memories meant nothing and that everything was fine.
I was on the way back to the house when an APB came out over the radio:
BEEP.“…missing juvenile. White female, age sixteen, five feet six inches tall, one hundred and thirty pounds. Blue eyes and brown hair. Leah Susanna Sims was last seen on County Road 13, hitchhiking…”
Shit. That was Pastor Sims’s daughter. Her last known location was on the other side of the county, and I was sure it would be crawling with cops.
I parked, and fished Leah’s phone out of my purse. I hadn’t gotten anything back about her messages yet, but I could see if she had wiped her location history.
She had location services turned off.Damn.
I went to her pictures. Maybe there would be something here that I hadn’t noticed before. I scrolled through the photos that Leah had taken of herself and her friends. They seemed like pretty ordinary photos: the girls at a playground, swinging on swings. The girls working on homework. Pictures of an herb garden, with the plants neatly labeled.
I looked at the backgrounds. Many were the living rooms of houses, judging by carpeting and couches. I recognized the park as a community park downtown, beside the courthouse. Many pictures had a stage behind the girls, where they were working on some kind of art project with costumes. The church, I supposed. Maybe getting ready for a Christmas pageant.
There were a few photos, though, that gave me pause. They were selfies of Leah, outdoors, in low light. She was gazing at the camera with a sense of knowing, with a come-hither look. The top buttons on her dress were open, and her right hand was in her hair. Her hair was undone, wild around her shoulders. I detected makeup: eyeliner, lipstick, mascara.
These pictures were meant to depict her as sexy. For herself…or for someone else?
I found a few more like them, her playing with her hair. Some were at the golden hour, looking across a barren parking lot.
I stared at the background: an overgrown field, a gravel lot with weeds growing through it. An abandoned place. One of the pictures showed her laughing, and behind her was a corner of a building with chipped paint. And there was a picture of her looking at a road, with the shadow of a gas pump outlined in a sunset before her.
“Gotcha,” I whispered.
—
I zipped down backcountry roads. Gibby sat beside me, in the passenger seat, panting. He knew we were chasing something, and his tail thumped his excitement.
“We’re going to find her,” I told Gibby. But I wasn’t sure what else I was going to find. I just knew I had to get to Leah first. Kids didn’t run away out of fits of pique. Most of the time, they ran away from something serious…like what I’d seen happen at Rebecca’s botched exorcism.
I drove to the outskirts of the county seat, to a closed-down gas station. As a cop, I knew where all the twenty-four-hour gas stations were in the county, and remembered when they closed down. The lights were out at this one, but I pulled into the cracked concrete parking lot. The station had been vandalized with graffiti, and trash was strewn around. Windows had been boarded up, and the place looked deserted. It had been at least two years since Monica and I had gotten our caffeine fix in the middle of the night here.
I shut off the engine and went to the door. It was locked. I regarded the graffiti on the door with narrowed eyes. The ouroboroswas drawn in black paint. It was reasonably fresh, too, painted over anarchy symbols and a colorful portrait of an animated dragon. There was no number here, so I didn’t get the impression that the symbology was here as a threat, necessarily. Maybe some personal sigil?
I went around to the back. Gibby followed me, tail wagging. Everything was locked up there, too, but I noticed cigarette butts beside the back door. They, too, looked reasonably fresh, the filters still intact and not disintegrated by rain or the sun.
I inspected the back door. It was locked, but the plywood covering the bottom panel was loose. I plucked at a corner of the plywood, and pulled away easily. I shone my flashlight into the station. My light picked out old metal shelves and paper on the floor.
On my hands and knees, I crawled inside and stood up. Gibby wiggled in beside me.
“Hello?” I called into the dark. “Leah?”
I smelled cigarette smoke. I followed the smell past the restrooms, to the main sales floor. It was completely trashed, with rodents scuttling in the periphery of my vision. Gibby peeled away to chase one.
I exhaled. “Leah.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the old counter, behind the empty lottery machine and cigarette displays. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, her hair long and loose over her shoulders, and she hugged a duffel bag to her chest. Winged eyeliner adorned her eyes, and lipstick glossed her lips. She seemed much older now, almost an adult.
She froze when she saw me, ash dripping from her cigarette. “Did my dad send you?”
