First Girl Gone(77)

She went to her laptop to check what time the sun would set, but the screen froze. Charlie drilled her fingers against the keyboard and swiped at the touchpad. Nothing happened.

For an anxious moment, she worried over the fate of her master case file if her computer finally bit the dust. Then she remembered it was backed up on her cloud drive. The file would be safe.

With the machine still frozen, she forced a hard reboot. The laptop went quiet, and Charlie was suddenly struck by how silent it was in the apartment. Allie hadn’t uttered a single word since Charlie had found the body that morning.

A chill ran up Charlie’s spine.

Was that right? She ran through it all in her mind: finding the body, calling Zoe, waiting for the police and the coroner to show up, watching them hoist the stretcher laden with the body bag into a van. Allie had been mute through all of it. Then there’d been everything at the station: hauling Gibbs in, Will showing up to represent him, the start of the interrogation. Nothing from Allie. Not a peep.

Charlie considered calling out to her, and then felt silly. Most of the time she couldn’t get Allie to shut up. Maybe she should count this as a blessing. With what she had planned for tonight, there was enough on her plate.

The login screen for Charlie’s computer came up. She typed in her password and signed in. Everything seemed to be in order. She opened her browser. It wouldn’t be dark for another two hours.

She sighed, tapping her toes in a rhythmless beat. There was no way she could stand sitting around the apartment for two hours. The stillness would be unbearable.

Her eyes fell on a calendar she kept pinned on the wall next to the kitchen cabinets, which she mostly used for keeping track of Frank’s chemo schedule. He didn’t have chemo today, but there was another reminder scrawled under yesterday’s date.

Refill Frank’s RXs.





Her mouth dropped open. Frank’s prescriptions. She’d forgotten to pick them up from the pharmacy.

A surge of guilt welled in her belly as she realized that she’d been so wrapped up in the case that she hadn’t even checked in with Frank for several days.

Hurrying to the door, Charlie slid her shoes on and grabbed her coat. There was still time to drop off Frank’s meds before her other plans for tonight. The hard part would be not telling him what she intended to do.





Chapter Sixty-One





Frank’s face looked drawn and tired when he answered the door. Charlie had hoped the fried chicken she brought along with his freshly refilled prescriptions would perk him up, but after making a show of eating one drumstick and half a biscuit, he pushed the rest away. This would have been a sacrilege to the old Frank. He didn’t believe in leftovers.

Charlie spotted a pan of brownies on the kitchen counter as she put away the uneaten food.

“Who made the brownies?”

“Oh, those are from Tootsie,” Frank said, lowering himself into his trusty recliner with a groan. “You know, from down the street? You should have one. They’re a delight.”

Mouth watering, Charlie helped herself to one of the fudgy squares. She chewed, studying her uncle. His posture seemed especially stiff today, and he kept reaching up to massage his neck.

“Are you feeling OK?” she asked.

“Eh, just my neck. Must have slept wrong or something. It’s so stiff I can barely turn it.”

Charlie grabbed a paper towel to use as a makeshift plate and went over to sit on the couch.

“You fell asleep in that chair again, didn’t you?”

“I can’t help it. Half the time I can’t sleep for shit because of the chemo. But when I do doze off, I’m out,” he said. “Dead to the world.”

He watched her take a bite of brownie.

“I ever tell you about the time I accidentally ate half a pan of magic brownies?”

Charlie laughed.

“Explain to me how someone ‘accidentally’ eats half a pan of brownies.”

“Well, OK. The eating of the brownies was intentional.” He held up a finger. “I didn’t know they were pot brownies, though. That was the accidental part.”

“How’d that work out for you?”

“I was high for a good twenty-four hours. Extremely high. Practically hallucinating. And I had the worst case of cotton mouth. At one point my throat felt so dry, I actually started to think I might die from it.”

That got Charlie giggling.

“It’s funny now, but back then? Harrowing.”

She finished off the brownie then licked the crumbs from her fingers.

“How’s the case going?” Frank asked then. “Your missing girls.”

Charlie had skirted the topic, hoping to avoid the subject altogether. She should have known better. Frank had a sharp mind. Gears always turning. She wondered if he sensed that she was holding something back.

“I’ve got a few leads,” she said. “Avenues I haven’t explored yet.”

Even though she had no intention of telling him about her plot to snoop around the Gibbs property, she hadn’t planned on withholding the information about finding Amber Spadafore’s body. But now, seeing how tired and frail he looked today, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. It was too much. Too connected to the past, to what happened to Allie. He was fighting his own battle with the leukemia, and this seemed like too great a burden to put on him now.