AllFreeNovel
Share Us
* * *
“Is he going to let us watch it?” My mom fretted while she drove from the strip mall back to the house for the third time that day. She looked utterly exhausted.
Before my dad could answer, she shook her head. “I don’t want to step on his toes, but we have a right to know, don’t we? If you hadn’t seen the camera, it would be too late. We’ll know if there’s something weird going on better than he will, right?”
I could see the relief on both their faces when the officer asked for a laptop as soon as he got out of his car.
This time, there was no needle-in-a-haystack search.
Clear as day, at 4:07 p.m., they watched me wave at the driver in the car—it wasn’t possible to tell the vehicle color, since the security footage was in black-and-white—and get inside of my own free will.
I felt disgusted with myself. I had voluntarily gotten into a stranger’s car. Because he didn’t feel like a stranger.
My mom turned pale while she watched me talk to the dark figure inside the vehicle. “No, baby,” she said as I took a step closer and he flung open the door.
The cop paused the footage, and my parents panicked. “Keep going,” my dad growled.
“Do you recognize that man?” the cop asked firmly, pointing at the man’s shadowy face in the poor-quality camera footage. “And do you recognize this car?”
My mom shook her head frantically. “No. I mean, I don’t think so. I can’t tell. Why would she go with him, why was she talking to him at all?”
The officer made a note in his phone then asked, “Is it possible she was seeing someone you didn’t know about?”
My dad made that growling sound again. “I don’t think Skye had ever been on a real date.” He looked at my mom. “Right, Mari? She was shy.”
This statement stung, somehow, even though it was true. The officer nodded again slowly. “Can I see the other security footage?”
* * *
It was the officer who noticed the same Kia Sorento cruising through the parking lot every couple of hours that afternoon.
He zoomed in on the plate. 2C 3405. I felt a fizz of excitement that I wrestled under control as I watched the computer screen blink erratically.
There was no license plate visible in the FroYo video. The officer shook his head in frustration. “I’m ninety percent sure that’s the same car. But since we can’t see the color in either video, and we can barely see the driver in the Daily Grind footage, I can’t say for certain.”
I waited for the blow that would follow. The bad news. There was nothing he could do here.
Instead, he said, “I do think we have something, though. Your daughter doesn’t sound like the type to disappear. And I’m pretty sure that is the same car. I’m going to need both of you to come with me into the station so we can get a written statement about any details that might be relevant. I’m going to update the status on Skye’s case to a ‘missing person, possibly endangered.’ We’ll start by pulling her phone records and finding that car.”
The relief on my parents’ faces was tainted with a pallor of fear. And my excitement was tempered with a sense of dread.
I wanted them to find him.
I wanted them to find me.
But there would be no relief in revealing what had happened.
19. MEGHAN
Oquirrh Mountains, Utah
9 months before
I stared in disbelief when I saw the police car slowly crest the dirt road.
The man wearing the Forest Service uniform hadn’t stayed longer than it took him to snap a few photos of the shoe, make a note in his tablet with the coordinates, and trudge back to his dusty white truck bearing the Forest Service decal. He didn’t look around. He didn’t follow the nearly invisible fork in the road through the overgrown sagebrush and bent pines. He was doing his job, and nothing more.
Still, I stayed by the shoe like a sentinel after he left. I missed Grandma Rosie. I wanted to meet my uncle. To meet my great grandparents. To see my friend Kiley who had died in a car accident in the fourth grade. To be seen by people who could see me. But I was afraid to drift. Afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back again, like Bubbie had warned.
