Sunset Beach(89)

She walked into the kitchen, spat out the bite and retrieved another near-beer from the fridge. “What do you say we go over to my place?”

“Okay, but why?” Corey asked.

“Because I’m super hungry from my workout and you don’t have any food fit for human consumption in your house.”



* * *



Drue produced a box of chicken burritos from her freezer and placed them on the counter while Corey looked on in horror.

“You’re not seriously going to eat that, are you?” he asked.

“Don’t be such a food snob. They’re very delicious. And the label says they’re non-GMO so in my book that’s healthy.”

She rummaged around in the refrigerator until she found a bottle of spring water, which she handed to her guest.

Corey had seated himself at the kitchen table and was idly leafing through the thick black binder that had taken up permanent residence there. “Hey, what’s this?”

“Just another friggin’ mystery,” Drue said. “I found this in a box of my dad’s old law school textbooks, stuck way in the corner of the attic.” She gestured upward, then slid Colleen’s black-and-white high school graduation photo out of the binder.

“Pretty. Is that your mom?”

“No. Her name was Colleen Boardman Hicks. She went shopping and then to dinner with a friend in downtown St. Pete in 1976 and has never been seen since.”

“What’s it doing up in the attic of your grandparents’ house?”

“That’s what’s been keeping me awake a lot of nights,” Drue said. “I don’t know if I told you this, but my dad was a St. Pete cop when my parents were first married, and my grandparents let them live here in the cottage for cheap. They moved into town before I was born, and then, after my dad got out of law school, they split up. That’s when my mom and I moved to the east coast. I guess my mom must have stored her stuff here after the divorce. The box I found the binder in had her handwriting on the outside of it.”

She put the burritos on a plate and stood in front of the microwave oven, holding the plate aloft. “Last chance. Sure you don’t want to get in some of this fiesta of fabulousness?”

Corey made a gagging noise. “I’d rather eat Bitzy’s energy bites.” He tapped the cover of the binder. “You know, you really should consider getting yourself a hobby.”

“You mean an obsession? Like doing an Iron Man?”

“Touché,” he said. “So was this one of your father’s investigations from when he was a cop?”

“I asked him that, and he said it wasn’t, because he was still just a patrol officer. But he did go to high school with Colleen Hicks, although he claims they didn’t run around with the same crowd of friends.”

Corey still looked puzzled. “Did he have any idea how this file would have ended up here, with a bunch of his stuff?”

Drue placed a plate, napkin and cutlery on the table, carefully pushing aside the binder, and poured herself a glass of wine. “I told him I found a file of old newspaper clippings about the disappearance, in my mom’s stuff, but I didn’t mention finding this thing.” She nodded at the binder.

“Why not?”

She took a sip of wine. “I’m not sure. Maybe because I’m still not a hundred percent sure I trust him. There are just a lot of unanswered questions, you know?”

“Like what?”

The microwave dinged. Drue transferred the hot plate onto the kitchen table. She took a bottle of Cholula sauce from a cabinet and doused the burrito in it.

“To start with, what’s the official police file doing in a box in my grandfather’s cottage, more than forty years after this woman vanished? Who put it up there? I’ve read through it. There’s no mention of Dad’s name in any of the reports.”

She tasted a forkful of her dinner, paused, then sprinkled more hot sauce atop her burrito.

“But I’ll tell you whose name is in the file—and that’s Jimmy Zilowicz, who everybody calls Jimmy Zee and who is not only my dad’s oldest friend but a former St. Pete police detective, and currently case investigator at the law firm.”

“Coincidence?” Corey asked.

“I asked Zee if he had a theory about the Colleen Hicks case. He said his role was minor, that he just did some legwork.”

“And did he have a theory?”

“He said that Colleen Hicks and her husband were into some kind of kinky stuff. And that right before she vanished, she cleaned out their joint savings account. Allen Hicks, that was the husband, was a control freak, according to Zee. He says she probably disappeared on purpose.”

Corey leafed through the binder, pausing at the black-and-white photos in their clear plastic envelopes. “Do you believe him? Do you believe it’s possible that she’s alive?”

She poked at the burrito with her fork, took a bite, chewed and swallowed. “If she’s still alive, she’d be around my dad’s age now. Why would she stay hidden all these years?”

“Suppose she did start a new life? Remarried, maybe had kids, now she’d have grandkids. Whatever happened to her husband?” Corey asked.

Drue reached for her cell phone and typed the name Allen Hicks into the search engine. The search yielded more than three dozen citations. She pulled up the first two and read them.