The Water Keeper(29)
“Done?”
She waved her hand across the boat, the water, and what lay before us. “This.”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“But you’ve searched for . . . people?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve found them?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Officially?”
“Yes.”
“Several.”
“How many? Exactly?”
“One hundred thirteen.”
“And how many have you not found?”
“Ninety-nine.”
Confusion spread across her face. “Do you work for the government or something?”
“Or something.”
“And the ones you found, were they in as bad a way as Angel?”
“Some.”
Summer began sobbing and rambling about how this was her fault. I put an arm around her. She leaned into me. White as a sheet, soaking me with tears.
I’d been soaked before.
I tried to comfort her, but I had little to offer. “Boats like these have an incentive to make it as far down the coast as they can. They want more girls, but they want a specific type of girl. More time in the ditch allows them more time to do their homework and pick up people with no history. Loners who escape to the Keys—”
She interrupted me. “Impressionable girls fighting with their overprotective, helicopter moms.”
I waited until she turned toward me. “Never beat yourself up for loving your daughter.”
The enormity of what faced her began settling in her chest. I continued, “They’re looking for people who won’t be missed. Best thing you can do is keep calling Angel and leaving loving and apologetic voicemails. Chances are about a hundred and ten percent that they’re monitoring her phone when she’s passed out. Listening to you talk to her. So you need to tell her you miss her, but you need to sound like you’re giving her freedom to figure it out. They need to think you’re a long way from this water. That you’re not chasing her. Otherwise . . .”
“Otherwise what?”
“They’ll shoot her veins full of antifreeze and drop her body in the ocean. To them, she’s just property.”
She crossed her arms and held herself.
“These people are pros at psychological warfare. They will tell her repeatedly that she is free to leave anytime, but they will give her every possible reason and incentive not to. To stay on that boat. And that includes money and prizes. They’ll make her feel safe and secure and wanted and appreciated. They will send her on day trips, maybe a jet ski ride under the guise of freedom. Possibly an overnight. A one-off. And they will buy her nice things. Stuff that glitters. Actually, the gifts aren’t new. They’re just recycled from the last girl. Most of these girls have or had absent fathers or they were abused by a man they once trusted, so they have this man-size hole that these sick bastards like to fill with counterfeit. They’ll cause her to trust them like she’s never trusted another human being.” I paused. “They are masters at deception—at assessing and extracting value. Right now they own her. She’s not free to leave. She can’t. They’ll never allow that. They have too much invested. Too much at risk.”
Summer shook her head. “I can’t call her.”
“Why?”
“A few days ago, she canceled her number. When I dial it now, it just says, ‘This number no longer in use.’”
“How were you talking to her on the dock in St. Augustine?”
“She called me from somebody else’s phone.”
“And that record of a received call is now at the bottom of the IC.”
She nodded but said nothing. That caused me to wonder if I had put my sat-phone number into Angel’s old phone or a new one her mom didn’t know about. I let it go. Telling Summer about that might just produce false hope.
She spoke through the tremble. “How do I get her back?”
I tried to deflect. “We have to find her first.”
She stepped in front of me. Blocking my exit. “And after we’ve done that?”
I weighed what to say. And what to keep. “Just help me find her.”
Chapter 11
Tabby wagged happily when we stepped back onto Gone Fiction. I was about to work my way out of the marina when the sight of Summer caught my attention. She looked too much like me. We needed to find her some proper clothes.
By any standard, the Halifax Harbor Marina is huge. Used to catering to a lot of people with varying tastes from all over. Just like the stores that surround it. A clothing store shouldn’t be too tough to find. Feeling a walk would do us good to stretch our legs, I tied up in a day slip and the three of us began walking the boardwalk north along South Beach Street. An ice-cream store, a hamburger joint, an electronics store, a hair and nail boutique, and finally a women’s clothing store.
Summer hurriedly selected clothes with a singular criterion: price. Then she laid them on the counter without trying them on. The sales attendant was a girl in high school. When she saw what Summer had collected, she lifted an eyebrow. I stepped around the side and held up her selections. “Can you help her find something . . . that is not this?”