Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(24)

Kendall had known that from the beginning, but Peter hadn’t known until later, after their mother told them to go to their room and stay there.

“What does gone mean?” Peter had asked. “Will we still be able to see Daddy on weekends?”

Kendall had explained. “It means he’s dead.”

“Like Coon you mean?”

Coon had been the family dog, a bluetick hound, one with long floppy ears and a very cold nose. Daddy had brought Coon home as a puppy the year Kendall was five. Coon was supposed to be Kendall’s dog, but he had really belonged to Peter more than he did to her. He slept at the foot of Peter’s bed, and when they were home, he was always nearby. When Daddy left, he was going to take Coon with him, but Peter had cried and begged for the dog to stay with them, and he had. Then, a few weeks later, Kendall had come home from school and found Peter on the bed with his head buried in the pillow, crying like crazy.

“What’s wrong?” Kendall had asked.

When Peter had come home from school that day, Mommy had told him that Coon had somehow gotten out of the yard, been hit by a car, and died. She said the vet tried, but he couldn’t save him.

Kendall had never believed that story. If Coon was dead, it had more to do with the fact that Mom’s new boyfriend, Randy, hated him than it did with Coon getting out of the yard. But she didn’t mention that to Peter any more than she had told him earlier that their father was dead, even though she’d known that long before their mother got around to telling them.

As soon as she’d heard that first gunshot, she’d made Peter hide under the bed. After that the shots had come thick and fast. When they ended and the screaming started, Kendall had tried the door only to discover that it was locked from the outside. Wanting to know what had happened, she’d climbed up on top of the dresser and peeked out the window. The moment she saw Daddy lying on the porch with a big patch of blood spreading on his shirt and with his eyes open and staring at the sky, she knew he was dead. She’d seen dead people before, but only on TV, not in real life. This was definitely real. Daddy had told her that he was going to fix it so she and Peter could come live with him, but now she knew that was never going to happen.

After Mrs. Ambrose left, Mommy had told Kendall and Peter that people were coming over that night and they needed to stay in their room. Randy was there, and some other people were there, too. Kendall could hear them laughing, talking, smoking, and probably drinking, too. Mommy did that a lot. It sounded like it was a party, which didn’t seem right, not with Daddy dead.

In the meantime Kendall and Peter lay on the floor in their bedroom with Peter’s Spider-Man coloring book between them. Peter was weird and liked to color upside down, so he was on one side of the book and she was on the other, listening while he jabbered away about which color he was going to use next. She was glad that her brother was busy and talking. Then he said something that caught her attention.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

Kendall had hoped that that late-afternoon hamburger had been enough. Now she knew that it wasn’t. She also knew that leaving their bedroom wasn’t an option. She’d done that once when Mommy had friends over. She tiptoed out of the room and had been creeping down the hallway toward the bathroom when she saw some man she didn’t know going into Mommy’s bedroom. She must have made a noise. Just then Randy turned up behind Kendall, grabbed her by the shoulder, and spun her around. She’d never liked him. Randy had mean eyes and a nasty way about him, but that night was the first time he’d really scared her.

“Don’t make a sound,” he told her, giving her a stiff shake. “You go back to your bedroom right now,” he’d ordered, hissing the words and shaking his finger in her face. “And don’t you come out again either. Or else.”

Kendall didn’t know what “or else” meant, and she didn’t want to find out. She didn’t want Peter to find out either. So when there were evening visitors at the house, the kids usually stayed in their room no matter what—hunger included.

Even before Randy and his pals started hanging around, there’d been times when Mommy sent them to bed without remembering they hadn’t had any dinner. As a result Kendall had taken to sneaking food—cookies, crackers, and sometimes even dry cereal—into their room and hiding the items away in the closet in case they were ever needed. Tonight they were.

“How would you like a marshmallow sandwich right here in the room?” Kendall asked.

Peter shook his head. “There’s no such thing as a marshmallow sandwich,” he said.

“Yes there is.”

“Is not. Show me.”

And so Kendall did. After making Peter close his eyes, she got up from her place on the floor and went over to the chair by the door where she had dropped her backpack. Daddy had always loved cooking outside on his Weber grill, and once he moved out and went to live in Whetstone, the grill had gone with him. When Kendall and Peter would go to stay with him on weekends, that’s what he would make for them to eat—burgers, hot dogs, or sometimes even steaks—all of them cooked on the grill. And after dinner he always made s’mores for dessert.

Last night when Mommy told them to go to bed, she and Daddy had still been in the living room. On their way through the kitchen, Kendall had spotted a partially used bag of marshmallows and several unopened packets of graham crackers sitting on the counter. She’d gathered them up and carried them into their bedroom. She’d used one of her scrunchies to close the marshmallow bag before stuffing it and the packets of graham crackers into her backpack. She produced them now, pulling them out of the backpack one by one with the same kind of flourish a magician might use when pulling rabbits out of a hat.