Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

The food on the menu looks very good, but I’m not hungry anymore. I was before, but now I can’t make it happen. After considering what healthy thing I should order to tempt myself, I tell MacKenzie I’d like some fries to go with the beer and coffee and call it a day.

The thing that keeps going through my mind—as I walk, as I sit, as I nibble: What am I doing here? Not in the restaurant, but in the town. On this chase. What do I hope to accomplish? What do I bring? I am no super sleuth and I have no extraordinary finding skills that I am aware of. I have finally gotten good at not losing my keys, but that took some doing. I find my keys only by practice and rote. I don’t think any of that will help in this situation. It is one thing for me to take out a target: someone at a known location when I have received instructions, sometimes down to fine details. But this is something else again. I think about badgers in holes or other even smaller animals, that’s what this feels like. Atwater has gone to ground. It is all too far out of my control and, in any case, the professionals have gotten here ahead of me. Journalistic professionals like Curtis Diamond and even actual police and FBI types. Surely, with all their experience, they will find him first. This has been a lark. Possibly even a diversion. But probably I should just pack up my shit and get out of Dodge.

I am sitting, sipping at the final mouthful of beer, nibbling at the last of the perfect French fries, when I feel the buzz and energy of the restaurant shift. It is almost a physical thing.

“What is it?” I ask MacKenzie as she passes. I can see that the hands on the tray she is carrying are not quite steady. “What’s going on?”

“Arden’s daughter is missing,” she says, indicating a petite redhead with a stricken expression just inside the doors. The redhead is talking to a small group and wringing her hands. I can see that decisions are being made.

“Missing,” I repeat.

“She disappeared from her day care.” MacKenzie’s voice has risen an octave. The fear she is expressing is real. “Arden just got a call.”

“How old? The child, I mean.”

“She’s just five. The whole town is spooked right now, right? It could be anything. It’s not necessarily …”

“She’s thinking Atwater?”

The girl nods. Drops her voice. “I mean, Ashley wouldn’t have just wandered away. She’s just this little kid, you know?”

MacKenzie bustles off and I sit and consider. As I do, it comes to me: fate or kismet or dumb blind luck has led me to the hottest point in the search. And I am here before everyone else: before the police or the occupants of the media trucks or the experts from the media circus’s front lines. It seems crass to try and speak with the upset mother, but I don’t have anything to lose. I figure maybe she doesn’t, either.

“Hey, Arden,” I say as I approach her.

The young woman turns saucer-like eyes to me.

“Yes?” Whatever else is true, she is scared as hell. I can practically smell it on her.

“MacKenzie just told me. About your daughter. I’m … I’m working on a book …”

“A book?”

“On …” I find myself reluctant to say the name.

“On him?”

“Yes. And I have discovered things about him. I know some things. Maybe I could help.”

“Help find Ashley?”

“Maybe. I mean … I’m here, right? Maybe for a reason. I could try.”

She turns wild eyes on me and looks me up and down. She looks at me like I’m speaking a foreign language or like I’m a freak, and in the shadow of her glance, that’s exactly how I feel.

“My daughter is missing,” she says. And there is dignity and fear and contempt in her tone. And I feel all of that, too. “I’m not interested in helping with your book.”

Maybe something else was said. I’m not sure, because I slink back to my table, with my head down, keep my eyes to my computer. Address again the last of my beer; my fries. The dregs of my coffee are long gone, but I suddenly wish for at least the solid hit of a caffeine buzz.

For the balance of my time in the restaurant, I try to continue the research I’d been doing online, and think about where I will go now, where I will aim the rental. After a while, my mortification eases, and I get into balancing out places on the map with Google street views and local images and other things that help me build a picture of the place I’m about to go.

“She disappeared from day care.” The voice at my elbow startles me. It is unexpected. I try not to show it.

“That’s what MacKenzie told me,” I say. “That’s terrible.” I say it with compassion, and I don’t have to work hard at it; it’s right there.

“Yuh.” She surprises me by swinging down into the seat opposite mine. I give her my complete attention. Now that she is sitting across from me, I can see she has remarkable eyes. They are slate gray and rimmed with brown-gold. Just now her pupils are dilated, most likely with fear. Fight or flight. She wouldn’t have to say anything for me to know that, whatever else is true, she is scared as hell.

“Ashley’s day care called me,” she says in a whisper that feels like a scream. There isn’t much sound, but the reverberation from the words takes a long time to die. And she’s desperate, I can see that, too. I figure that’s the reason she is now sitting across from me. “I’m trying to decide what I should do.” And then, “I mean, I have to do something, right?”

“Have the police been called?”

She nods. “Yeah. They told me they called the cops