At the Quiet Edge(9)
“Aah!” he cried out as he grabbed the flashlight with both hands to hold it steady. It still shook, but he could see that the woman stared flatly from a photograph; it wasn’t a ghost or even a creepy mannequin.
“Oh, thank God,” he whispered, then tried to catch his breath and calm himself down before his heart burst right out of his chest like the Alien monster.
When something tickled his neck, he jumped and slapped at it, anticipating a dangling spider, but finding only sweat. The light shifted, and there was another woman. A girl, actually, smiling weakly against the sickly blue background of a school portrait. There was a third picture too. And a fourth. He couldn’t see the rest of the board they seemed attached to.
He cleared his sticky throat, took a deep breath, and picked his way through the forest of boxes toward the wall. It wasn’t only photos. It looked like a big old-fashioned bulletin board, filled with pictures, notes, and newspaper clippings.
Everett bent closer, squinting to read the small print of one article.
An area woman reported her sister missing after she failed to show up for her scheduled shift at a chicken-processing plant for the second week in a row. Bridget Baumgarter says that her sister, Yolanda Carpenter, told her she was going to catch a ride to visit a friend in Salina. The friend has since reported that she never arrived. Yolanda Carpenter, age 19, was last seen leaving the Baumgarter home on October 2, 1999, at 3:00 p.m. She was wearing jeans, a red T-shirt, and a jean jacket. She is 5’5”, about 120 pounds, and has long blond hair. If anyone has any information, please contact Lieutenant Nord at the Herriman Police Department.
He scanned another thumbtacked article and glanced at a third before stepping back to shine his flashlight in a wider circle.
There were five photographs of five different girls, and all of them were missing.
CHAPTER 3
She’d forgotten to make the cookies. Their first teenage-level fight complete with yelling and storming off, and all Lily could think was it wouldn’t have happened if she’d made cookies.
Nodding at the long story her customer was telling about a flooded basement, Lily hit PRINT on the contract and tried to concentrate on her work instead of on guilt and hurt feelings and that aching loss of watching the easy connection with her son begin to crack with brittle age.
“Of course,” the woman continued, “the good news is I’m finally getting the basement refinish I wanted. Greg kept telling me the indoor/outdoor carpet and wood paneling were just fine, because who the hell ever saw it but him? And I kept telling him no one else saw it because no one else wanted to go down there! If—”
“Here we are!” Lily slid the contract across the counter and handed over a branded pen. “One month up front, and then hopefully by month two you’ll be ready to move into your gorgeous new basement!”
“Did I tell you we’re putting in a craft room? I’m so excited. Greg gets his home theater, and I get my craft room, and a full bathroom for when my sister comes to visit with her whole brood. Four kids. Can you imagine? But now I’ll just be able to throw them all downstairs and say good night!”
“It sounds amazing. Bring pictures when you return to move your stuff back home.” The woman’s cheeks went pink with excitement at that, and she signed the contract with a flourish before grabbing the lock she’d purchased and practically jogging out to the big red pickup where her husband waited.
Lily gave them a moment to drive deeper into the complex; then she hurried outside to see if she could spot Everett. His bike was still gone as expected, so she moved past the open gate to look up and down the road. No bike there either.
Still, it was better that he was gone and not wandering the grounds when Amber was hiding. She’d promised not to crack a window or door, but people did thoughtless things sometimes, and kids were so curious.
The business road dead-ended past the storage facility, and Lily headed that way toward the thin dirt paths that snaked through dried grass and mounds of construction debris. The developer had made big plans for this business park ten years earlier, before a couple of local manufacturing companies closed down and shipped overseas. Now the existing buildings were surrounded by lumpy, barren fields, power lines to nowhere, and some distant copses of trees.
Still, this part of their world had been heaven for Everett and his best friend a couple of years ago. They’d even managed to scrape some of the dirt into small ramps for their bikes. They’d built forts. Lived out entire epics of battles and wars and entrenched siege life, complete with picnic lunches Lily had packed for them. The landscape had provided a scene as idyllic as one could imagine in an abandoned construction area.
Lily climbed up on one of the tiny hills and gazed over patches of grass just starting to green up. There was a lot of mud and a few wide puddles, but no bike and no boy. Sighing, she told herself he was fine. She nagged him to go ride his bike nearly every day, and now he was out there. He’d wear himself out and come home, and she’d apologize for pressing him so hard about that stupid texting app.
But were kids really saying he was living in a storage unit? Were they teasing him? Making up cruel stories?
Everyone had problems. It wasn’t the end of the world. But it killed her that he might be embarrassed by her choices. Her job. Her status. It was bad enough he had to be embarrassed by his father. Not that he talked about that much.