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“Why don’t you want me?”
She sounded hurt. Dammit, why did she do this to him?
“Of course, I want you here, Mom, but I have things to do. People I need to talk to. I’ve taken the week off, I have plenty of sick time. I’m going to find her.”
“You’d better. Those kids are your children, my grandchildren, and she crossed the line.”
He finally got off the phone and stared at his empty house. He turned on the television to the sports channel just to have voices.
Where did Annie go? She didn’t have money, and if Margo Angelhart had money, it didn’t show. Maybe the bitch gave Annie money for a plane ticket, but what about a house? Food? Annie couldn’t support the kids. Were they going to be living on the street?
Or was Annie with another man?
Both ideas made him physically ill. He drained the bourbon, then went to the garage to toss the bottle in the recycling bin.
There had to be something here to give him an idea about where she had gone. He’d already searched the house, even the kids’ rooms. Peter stood in the garage and stared at her car. Maybe...maybe there was something in her car that could give him a direction. A receipt. A scrawled phone number. Anything.
He opened all the doors, looked under the seats, between the seats, in the glove compartment box, the middle console, everywhere. The car was immaculate.
He sat in the driver’s seat and thought. Where had she gone? How did she get there?
Credit cards.
He had logged in and looked at the last few days of charges, searching for hotel, airfare, gas outside of the area. There had been nothing. But what about months ago? What if she had this planned for months? He didn’t look at the charge details unless the bill seemed unusually large.
He slammed the doors, went inside and logged into their credit card account. He looked at every charge for the last six months and didn’t see anything unusual.
Then he checked their joint checking account. This was the card Annie used for gasoline and groceries. He went through each expense starting with her last one—she’d gone to Walmart the day before she disappeared and spent $229.31. Food? Clothing? It was a larger amount than normal. Buying stuff with his money in order to disappear?
He scrolled back, back, back, growing frustrated, angry, uncertain.
Then straightened when he saw something out of the ordinary.
Three months ago, on the last Sunday of February, Annie had filled up the car with gas at a station on Dunlap and Highway 17.
Dunlap was the exit he’d taken to get to Angelhart’s house.
His wife had been planning to leave him for three months. She’d plotted and schemed and lied to him for months.
He brought up a map of Sunnyslope, from the freeway to Angelhart’s house. Stared, trying to find another reason for Annie to have been down there. As he zoomed in, he saw it.
St. Dominic’s Catholic Church
He’d seen a calendar from the church in Angelhart’s office. That made sense—Annie liked going to church. She took the kids to one closer to the house, but Sunnyslope... This felt familiar to him.
Something in the back of his mind told him St. Dominic’s was more important than he’d realized yesterday. Hadn’t Annie told him that her grandparents had lived in Sunnyslope? That they’d been married in a little church there?
He needed to research the church, find out what connection, if any, there was to Annie or her family. Maybe that’s how she found the PI, through someone at the church. A secretary, a parishioner. A priest?
Would a priest take his children away from him?
Peter found the St. Dominic’s website and read about the parish and the people who worked there.
Did one of them know where Annie was?
He would find out.
Twenty-Nine
