The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(57)

After the meeting disperses, Vic brings me a massive breakfast and stands over me while I eat it, then hands me a hot chocolate and some acetaminophen.

“Do I want to ask what happened?” Yvonne asks in an undertone after he’s left.

“Nope.”

“Eliza—”

“There was an accident. I am fine. And I’m sorry, because I know you’re concerned and you mean well, but I really don’t want to discuss it yet again.”

“But you’re okay.”

“Yes. Or I will be, and today I’m treating that as the same thing.”

“You’ll let me know if that changes.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

The day crawls by. Gala and Yvonne have written a solid program to compare names across all the different files, but it’s bogging down under sheer quantity. The problem is that so many people get interviewed when a kid goes missing, there’s just a deluge of names, and that’s assuming the officers or agents wrote down the name every time. When you’re talking to that many people that quickly, with that much pressure on you to hurry and find the kid, names can be the first thing to go.

Which is stupid, because we need the names, but that’s what happens.

I text Bran twice to see how he’s doing, and get back one-word replies, so I think it’s safe to say he’s still struggling under the weight of the monstrosity that was yesterday. Over lunch—yes, Vic, an actual lunch that did not have to be put in front of me by someone else—Priya texts to ask how I’m doing.

Can I ask you to run some errands for me? I reply.

Absolutely. I’m at Mercedes’s with the girls, and Jenny said I can have the van all day, so just give me a list.

Bless Priya, and Jenny too.

Watts sends Cass and Mercedes back early, or early-ish. Before her own team, at any rate, and Mercedes just shrugs. “We’re exhausted,” she admits. “I don’t know what Vic told her about last night, but it was also pretty obvious we were struggling. How’s the comparison?”

“Still working on it. We’re manually compiling the names so the program can just run the lists rather than search the files.”

“Jesus.”

“Or something.”

“Come on. My place, pizza.”

“Mind the girls staying with us?”

“Of course not. They’re there anyway, and always welcome.” She glances at Eddison’s desk, and the two framed pictures on the cabinet. “We can’t—”

“Talk about the case. I know.”

“Which means we can’t actually talk about Faith either.”

“Yeah.”

When we get to Mercedes’s cottage, The House visible behind it, the girls are sitting on the porch swing finishing drinks from Starbucks. There’s a plastic bag of clothing at Priya’s feet. “So, it’s not too cold tonight,” Priya says instead of hello, “and it’s supposed to be clear. Can we set up around the firepit?”

“Isn’t the firepit Eddison’s?” asks Inara.

“It’s a joint-custody firepit,” Priya and Mercedes answer together. Mercedes grins at her. “I think it’s a great idea,” Mercedes continues. “We need to change, and we’ll get the pizza ordered. Then we can start the fire.”

Victoria-Bliss beams in a very discomfiting way.

“Is Eddison coming home anytime soon?” Cass asks.

“Jenny and Marlene said that Ian is feeding him,” Priya replies. “Apparently he took Eddison out running for the second half of the day.”

“Ian was running?”

“No, just making Eddison run, from what I understand.”

Right.

I pull on Bran’s Devil Rays shirt again, because it’s soft and it smells like him and I’m worried about him, and I want a better memory for the shirt than I had last night. Mercedes insists on checking my burns, slathering on more cream before she does the bandage back up. It’ll take the blisters a while to go down if I don’t lance them, but if I lance them, they’re more likely to get infected and scar. While we’re doing that, Cass heads out back to start the fire.

We trudge across the grass as the evening settles into twilight, aiming for the ring of wicker-and-cushion couches abutting Bran’s back porch. The pit isn’t especially deep, a curved bowl carved out from a single large stone surrounded by other stones to form the porch extension. Cass has the kindling glowing, kneeling next to the pit to slowly add in more fuel as well as some larger pieces.

Some of those larger pieces look suspiciously like cabinet doors missing their hardware.

“Does he know you’re cannibalizing his kitchen?” I ask as I settle down onto one of the four curved two-seaters.

“He needed to remodel anyway.”

The girls laugh, Priya a breath behind the other two, and I get the feeling she picked up more from Vic’s end of the phone calls than she let on.

It’s a nice evening, strangely. There’s pizza and hard cider, and for a while we all make the choice to leave the more serious topics behind. Things have a way of turning, though. Maybe it’s the quiet that comes of night, or sitting around a fire. Maybe it’s because tomorrow is Halloween, Inara’s birthday, and the destruction of the Garden, and that has weight in this circle.