Collared(84)

Reyes must have picked up on my discomfort because she didn’t ask if I wanted to move; she just stood and waved me back down a hall. She offered either a break room or an interrogation room, and I went with the interrogation room.

The interview took less time than I’d expected, making me wonder why we couldn’t have just gone over her handful of questions on the phone.

As I start to push my chair back from the table, Reyes lifts her pen. The file stays closed. “Real quick—there was a solar panel salesman who came to Earl Rae’s house two days before your rescue. Do you remember that?”

I have to dig around in my head for a moment because I’ve been working on replacing those memories with the new ones I’m making. I don’t have to dig long because I haven’t managed to bury them very deep yet. “Yeah, I do.”

“You saw him?”

My eyebrows come together. “No, Earl Rae put me in the closet. He always did when anyone showed up at the house.” I know I’ve mentioned that before, so I’m surprised she’s asking.

“So you never saw the salesman?” She spins the pen between her fingers. “Was there any way he could have seen you?”

Unless he had Superman X-ray vision? “No. And no.”

Reyes nods and continues. “The black Converse you were kidnapped in. They had little hearts you’d penned onto the rubber toe?”

I nod.

“Where did those go?” she asks.

My favorite pair of shoes. I still miss them . . . and it wasn’t me who penned those black hearts on the toes—it was Torrin. “That was all gone when I woke up. I was wearing something else. He told me he’d burned it all.”

Reyes’s expression is flat, but that pen keeps spinning slow circles in her fingers like she’s working out something. “So those shoes couldn’t have been lying around the living room right around the time you were rescued?”

“No. No way.”

She makes a sound like she’s stumped and trying to work through a problem that won’t add up. She’s not really looking at me—she’s watching the twirling pen.

“Okay, so weird string of questions.” I curl my sweater more tightly around me because it’s cold in this room. Something about what I can almost feel Reyes is working out is making me cold too. “Why are you asking?”

She keeps watching the pen, and I start to feel like I’m twirling around the room with it. “Well, that solar panel salesman?” Her head shakes once. “He wasn’t exactly a salesman.”

My lungs go limp right before they feel like they’re about to burst. “Oh my god . . . it was him. Wasn’t it?”

She doesn’t nod, because she knows I don’t need a confirmation. I know it was him.

“After telling us what he remembered about Earl Rae at the gas station, he wasn’t happy that things weren’t moving at lightning speed, and we weren’t breaking down doors that day, so he decided to track down Earl Rae. On his own. Without telling us,” Reyes grumbles. “When he told us about his little covert op, he said that he’d caught a glimpse of you in the hall—along with your shoes in the front room. Two days later, we were breaking down that door.” Reyes looks at me. “That’s how we found you.”

I feel a lot of things right then. Mostly I’m just kind of overwhelmed from learning that it was him—he was that close—and that I might still be on the end of that chain of it wasn’t for him. But I also feel worry. This feeling grows as the other recedes. He lied. To the police. I know that’s never a good thing, and in certain cases, it’s a crime. I’m going to guess a lie about seeing a missing girl that resulted in the police assembling a couple dozen people to storm a house would fall into that category.

I stare at the table, hoping I’ll sound as convincing as I have to be. “You know, maybe he could have seen me. It took Earl Rae a little while to get me in the closet, and he could have seen me then.” I swallow and keep going. He’s saved me in so many ways—I have to get this right. I have to save him now. “And Earl Rae could have been lying about burning all my stuff. It’s not like I was ever able to confirm it.”

Reyes is silent for so long my hands start to shake. Why didn’t Torrin tell me? Why didn’t he tell me so I could change my story? Why didn’t he tell me? That’s the question that keeps playing through my head, but I guess the simple answer is that he didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to. For whatever reason—be it he didn’t want me to know or he didn’t want me to lie for him or he didn’t think it was that big of a deal—he didn’t tell me. That’s enough for me to accept.

“But he didn’t see you. Earl Rae had every single window in that house boarded up.” Reyes lets the spinning pen fall from her fingers. When it hits the table, it makes a sharp sound that echoes around the room. “And your shoes are ashes that blew into the wind years ago.”

I stare at the folder and wonder why it’s still closed. Why she isn’t making notes like she was earlier. “He found me.” I lean forward in my chair. “Does how he did it matter?”

“Well”—Reyes shrugs—“only if you believe in things like the law, and telling the truth, and not perjuring yourself in order to get a SWAT team to pound down the door of some guy you remembered saying something creepy to your girlfriend ten years ago.”