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"It was fourteen years ago. Shortly before her nineteenth birthday. She went walking, and she never came back."
Cold shivers chilled their way up and down May's spine. This was identical to Lauren's situation. Identical! Just longer ago. Fourteen years back, as opposed to Lauren's ten.
Had someone taken Harriet too? But if so, then how had Harriet been doing the filming and leaving the threats?
Nothing made sense to May. It was all even more of a mystery than it had been to her before she'd arrived.
"You never heard from her again?" she asked.
"We reported it. The police searched. They said she was probably a runaway. They asked about drugs, boyfriends. But I knew there was nothing like that going on. My daughter wasn't like that. But it was never solved. To this day, I don't know what happened. And I have no idea where she is."
But she'd left threats! She had to be somewhere.
"Did she have a video camera?" May asked.
"Yes, she did. She was studying photography. She loved videoing things. Everything went up on her personal media. She had the camera with her when she disappeared."
She'd used it since then. May knew this with a shiver of certainty. She'd used it—or else, someone else had.
"You never heard from her again?" May asked.
Nan sighed impatiently. "She disappeared. My own daughter. Of course I’m sure. You're sounding like you think I'm hiding something. Well, I'm hiding nothing. I wish I knew where she was. But I . . . I've accepted she's gone. That she died."
May didn't feel like it was the right time to tell her about Lauren. She didn't want to complicate things any further. Butfor now, it seemed that this was an unexpected, infuriating dead end.
"Thank you for your time," she said woodenly. "Please, stay in touch if you do hear anything. And I'll let you know if I find anything on her. We are looking because it forms part of a related case."
The woman shrugged. Not a vestige of hope was in her eyes.
May turned away, feeling discouraged and sad, and even more confused than she had been when she arrived. There was even silence from her earpiece. It seemed that even Kerry had nothing to say after this devastating and final outcome.
Then May's phone rang, and as she headed back to the car, she grabbed it from out her pocket. She wondered if it would be Kerry, calling to do a postmortem on the disappointing meeting, but she saw it was Sheriff Jack.
Quickly, May took out her earpiece and picked up the call, knowing that if her boss was getting in touch this early, it was going to be some kind of crisis.
"Morning, Jack," she said, climbing into her car.
"Morning, May. I need you to get to the South Acres trail head as soon as you can."
"The trail head?" May said curiously. It was a scenic trail a few miles from Fairshore. Had something happened there that represented the start of a new case?
"Yes. We've had a report just called in. It's . . . it's strange. And troubling. We need to try and make sense of it. I’ll meet you there, and we can go to where the witness saw things on the site."
This sounded intriguing. Where was the site? What had happened here? It didn’t sound like a murder had occurred. But it sounded inexplicable as even Sheriff Jack wasn’t sure what was playing out.
"I'll be there in ten minutes," May said, starting up her car and speeding away from the sad farmhouse where there had been no answers waiting.
CHAPTER TWO
"I should have called you earlier," the young man blurted out, his gaze flickering from May to Sheriff Jack. May noted how her graying-haired boss remained calm as he approached, the lines in his forehead deepening only slightly as he waited for this witness to explain more.
The trail head looked like a dark archway leading into the woods. And the young man himself, dressed in a black padded jacket and beige chinos, was staring anxiously at them and rubbing his hands in a worried way over his short, ginger beard.
Without a doubt, May knew, something had gone badly wrong.
"I was camping out here last night. I do wildlife photography and left a few cameras in locations where I know the animals roam, to update on the nocturnal wildlife in the area," he explained breathlessly. "And when I checked the cameras first thing this morning, I found . . . I found the most disturbing footage on one. I called you straight away."
"Let's take a look," Sheriff Jack said.
