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“‘The front door was off the latch. I pushed it open. Two teenagers were sleeping in the living room. One was lying on a sofa, fully clothed in jeans and boots. Another was curled under a coffee table with a jacket thrown over his, or her, head. Popcorn and chip crumbs were ground into the carpet.
“‘I followed the sound of vacuuming to the dining room, where I found Lexi. Her makeup was smeared and she was wearing lounge pants and an oversized gray T-shirt. Her feet were bare. There was a wine stain on the carpet near the dinner table. I glanced at it. She blushed like she’d been caught red-handed.
“‘She said it wasn’t her fault. That they’d come uninvited and she couldn’t get rid of them. It sounded to me as if she’d beenpracticing her excuse for most of the night. I asked her to tell Kelly to come downstairs. She looked at me as if I was crazy. She said something like, “Kelly?” And I said, sort of sarcastically, “Yeah, Kelly, my daughter. Don’t tell me she’s still asleep?” Lexi looked confused. She told me that Kelly wasn’t there. That she’d gone home the night before.’”
Rachel paused to pour boiling water into her mug. She added creamer and sugar and stirred as she remembered the pain in Dan Moore’s voice as he struggled to find words to explain what had happened on the morning his family’s charmed life changed for good.
“‘I panicked,’” Rachel continued reading to Pete. “‘We hadn’t seen any sign of Kelly coming home. Usually she leaves lights on, or dishes in the kitchen. She always leaves her keys on the hall table. Her keys weren’t there. The house had been exactly as we’d left it when we went to sleep the night before. I asked Lexi how Kelly got home. That’s when she got real weird. Swallowed. Went pale. I could tell that she felt guilty about something.
“‘Lexi rambled about how she’d heard from other people that Kelly and some kid from school, Harris, left the party on foot. I asked Lexi which direction they’d walked. At first she shrugged and then she said she guessed they took the shortcut through the field. She said that’s the way Kelly had arrived. Lexi opened the hall closet and gave me Kelly’s bag.
“‘When I saw that Kelly had left behind her backpack with her things and her phone, I knew that Lexi had thrown her out. Kelly would have called me to pick her up if she’d had her phone. I never liked Lexi much. That girl has a vicious streak a mile wide.’”
Rachel turned to the next page and took a sip of coffee. She remembered how Dan had stood up abruptly and paced across his study when he’d told her the next part.
“‘We had to retrace Kelly’s footsteps as quickly as possible. Time was working against us. I drove the car down to the field. I saw muddy footprints at the start of the path. There were more than one set of footprints in the mud. If Kelly had been there, then other people had been there, too. I panicked. That isn’t at all like me. I’ve seen combat. I don’t panic. But when it’s your little girl gone missing, well, that’s a whole other story.
“‘I threw the car keys to Christine and told her to drive home to look for Kelly while I retraced her footsteps through the field. A person could disappear in that long grass. I didn’t see any sign of Kelly. But I saw things that scared me: a row of beer cans nailed into a log, with holes in them from air rifle pellets. That told me more than I wanted to know about the sort of people that hung out there. The thought that my little girl had walked through there at night made me physically sick. By the time I got home, Christine was sitting on the porch steps crying. Kelly’s bed hadn’t been slept in. We searched the house from the basement to the attic. The backyard, the garage, the shed. Christine even checked the alarm system computer logs. Nobody had come into the house during the night. That told us for sure that Kelly never arrived home.
“‘I sat down next to Christine. We held hands and put our heads down in prayer. Our daughter was gone and we had no idea what had happened to her.’”
Rachel tossed her notebook on the bed. “That’s more or less everything Dan told me,” she told Pete, eyeing the alarm clock next to her bed. “I better get going. I have so much to do today. If there’s time, I want to find out more about Hannah’s sister’s death. Somebody must remember something.”
“You know that I don’t like this one bit,” said Pete. “The way she’s been leaving those letters for you crosses a line. You don’t know anything about her.”
“That’s exactly why I want to talk to Hannah.”
“Look, Rachel,” said Pete carefully. “The trial starts in, what, four days? Put this Hannah thing aside and focus on the podcast. We can always look into it later.”
“Don’t worry,” said Rachel. “The podcast is my first priority. I wrote the script when I returned from meeting Dan Moore last night and I’ve booked the studio to record this afternoon. It would really help if you would keep digging for information on Jenny Stills. Anything you can find.”
“I’m digging, believe me,” said Pete. “In fact, that reminds me of something interesting. Hannah Stills has no digital footprint. No birth certificate. No social media accounts. It’s almost as if she doesn’t exist.”
“She probably uses her adoptive parents’ name. I’m betting those records are sealed,” said Rachel. “What about the local newspapers? I ran a few searches but didn’t find anything. Were you able to check the regional newspaper databases? Did the local papers print any articles on Jenny’s death?”
“I couldn’t find a single thing online.”
“I’ll stop at the Neapolis library this morning. See if I can find old newspaper editions in the reference section.”
“Rach, I still don’t get why you’re so obsessed about this thing. Because Hannah stood you up at the jetty?”
“No,” said Rachel. “Because I let her down. She wrote to me, desperate for help, and I ignored her. Just like people ignored Kelly Moore when she stood outside that party waiting for help. I won’t be indifferent, Pete. I can tell Hannah is desperate. Otherwise she wouldn’t be trying so hard to get my attention.”
“You can’t save the world, Rachel,” said Pete quietly.
“Maybe not. But I can save one person at a time.”
15
Rachel
Neapolis’s central library was a light brick building with enormous windows overlooking a brick-paved plaza of cafes and specialty stores.
Rachel took her place fourth in line at the information counter. The librarian on duty was showing an elderly lady how to use the automatic book-borrowing machine. Eventually, the librarian gave up and scanned the books for the lady before returning to the counter to assist with the next query.
“Where can I find your newspaper archives?” Rachel asked.
“We’re now a lending library only. Not a research library,” the librarian explained. “All our archives and research materials have been moved to the City Hall archive. It’s open two mornings a week. Today until noon and Friday morning.” She looked at her watch. “If you want to go there now then you’d better hurry. It closes in an hour. Otherwise you’ll need to wait until Friday.”
