And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(6)

Packard knew his cousin didn’t like being touched so he didn’t try to hug her or shake her hand. She didn’t like small talk either. “Let’s go back to my office,” he said.

Packard waved a security badge in front of a card reader and led Susan through the door and down a hallway past a large open room with desks arranged in rows, past a conference room and a break room, finally coming to the sheriff’s office in the back. The framed photos and articles on the walls were about Stan Shaw. Packard wanted everyone to know he considered his use of the sheriff’s office to be temporary. He hadn’t even wanted to clear Stan’s papers off his desk. Kelly had done it for him.

Packard sat and flipped his yellow pad to a clean piece of paper. “You said Jenny’s missing. Tell me the details.”

“I got up at six thirty this morning to go for a bike ride. At six forty-five I knocked on Jenny’s bedroom door to get her up for school. When I opened the door, she wasn’t there.”

“What time did you last see her?”

“It was around eleven thirty last night, just before I went to bed. She was still doing homework.”

Packard wrote the time on his notepad. “Did you hear or see her get up in the night at all?”

“No.”

“Has she done this before?”

Susan blinked and nodded slowly. “I’ve caught her sneaking out at night, yes. She ignores her curfew whenever she feels like it. Since Tom died.”

Susan and her husband, Tom, had moved to Sandy Lake more than a decade ago. Susan was familiar with the area from summers at the family cabin, same as Packard. His mom and her dad were sister and brother. Their father—Packard and Susan’s grandfather—had built a house on Lake Redwing back when you didn’t have to be a millionaire to do so.

Susan and Tom owned a restaurant, the Sweet Pea, that served elevated comfort food. A bit fancy for Sandy Lake but the summer tourists loved the place. Susan developed recipes and cooked. Tom was front of house.

Before moving to Sandy Lake himself, Packard had last seen Susan at her wedding. She and Tom, both avid cyclists, had biked from the hotel where the wedding party was staying to the park where the ceremony was held, then stood before an officiating friend in cycling kits—all black for the groom, all white for the bride—proving Susan had a sense of humor after all; you just had to be patient to get a glimpse of it.

He’d only had one social visit with his cousin and her family since arriving in town. Last summer he’d gone to the Sweet Pea and sat at the bar with Tom, who had recently been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. Tom wore a baseball cap to hide where they’d shaved the top of his head and implanted a reservoir under his scalp that would deliver drugs right to his cerebrospinal fluid. He talked like a man with miles of road ahead of him, offering to help Packard remodel his house and to take him ice fishing in January. His daughter, Jenny, was waitressing that night—a pretty girl with short brown hair and a spray of freckles who took her phone out and looked at it every time she stopped at the end of the bar to pick up an order.

Susan was cooking the whole time and only stopped by long enough to bring Packard his food and ask Tom if he was feeling okay. When he said he’d had enough, Packard drove him home.

The next time he saw Susan and Jenny was at Tom’s funeral.

Packard made some notes on his pad. “What did you do when you saw she wasn’t in her bed at six forty-five?”

“I called her. No answer. I texted her and asked where she was and told her she better not miss school.”

“No response?”

Susan shook her head.

“Then what did you do?” Packard asked.

“I went on my bike ride.”

“Did you stop anywhere?”

“Not really.”

Not really was not really an answer. That and the sudden slump in her shoulders told Packard she was lying. He pushed back. “You know as well as I do that when kids go missing, the first people scrutinized are the parents. If you were with someone this morning who can corroborate any part of your story, you might want to tell me.”

Susan sat up straighter. “I rode about forty miles and then I stopped to see Sean White Cloud in St. Albans. I was at his house for an hour or so before I rode home.”

Packard knew Sean White Cloud. He was an EMT. Young American Indian guy with a chest like a whiskey barrel and a big smile. They’d worked a number of emergency calls together.

Sean was also on the sex offender registry.

“How do you know Sean White Cloud?”

“He was our in-home nurse while Tom was in hospice. When it was all over, I told him to come to the restaurant so I could cook for him. He came by a couple of times.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean, ‘And then what’?” Susan asked.

“I mean what’s your relationship now?”

Susan was getting visibly frustrated with his questions. “What does this have to do with Jenny?”

“It establishes your whereabouts at a critical time. It gives me another potential source of information from someone who knows you.”

She gave him a hard look and very purposefully said, “The second or third time Sean came to the restaurant, he sat at the bar and we talked after the rush ended. We had a couple of drinks, and I asked him to take me back to his house and fuck me to a fare-thee-well. He has continued to do so, upon my request, for the last couple of months.”