“What time is it?” Darcy groans, rubbing her eyes.
Dusk colors the window deep magenta. Darcy bounds off the couch and double-checks if Hunter armed the alarm.
“You didn’t cook dinner.”
“Shit, I must have fallen asleep. Ask your sister what she wants and I’ll order a pizza.”
Hunter sinks his teeth into a pear and chews.
“She’s not here.”
Darcy pulls her phone out of her pocket. Jennifer hasn’t written.
“What do you mean she’s not here? Didn’t cheer practice let out at five?”
Worried, she dials Jennifer’s phone. It rings until the call transfers to voice-mail. Darcy fires off a text.
Where are you?
The seconds seem like hours as she waits for Jennifer to reply. When she doesn’t, Darcy’s head spins.
“She knew to come home after practice,” Darcy tells Hunter, who sends a second text to Jennifer. “I don’t understand why she won’t answer her phone. Where does she like to go after practice if she doesn’t come straight home?”
“Check Kaitlyn’s.”
“I don’t have her number. Do you?”
Hunter shakes his head as he sips from a glass of water.
“I know her Instagram. You could message her.”
“Could you do it, Hunter? I need to make a phone call.”
Hunter sends his message while Darcy phones Bronson. Full dark seeps out of the Atlantic and spreads toward the cove. Darcy explains the situation to Bronson, who slips on a jacket and snatches his keys.
“I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,” he says. “You know how kids are.”
“After the occurrences of the last twenty-four hours, the worry is justified.”
“Do you have a photo of Jennifer on your phone?”
“Yes.”
“Send it to me. Stay put. I’m going out to look for her.”
“I should call the police.”
“No. They’ll just tell you to wait a few hours. Kids take off with friends without telling their parents all the time,” Bronson says, stepping on the gas pedal. “Let me call. I’ll make sure they take this seriously.”
As Darcy hangs up the phone, Hunter throws a sweatshirt over his head and grabs the keys.
“Where are you going?”
“Kaitlyn isn’t looking at her Instagram. I’ll drive through downtown, then over to Kaitlyn’s.”
She wants to argue with him, but she needs another set of eyes looking for Jennifer. The door shuts, and footsteps approach from the hallway. Darcy almost forgot Amy, who’d slept even longer than Darcy. An oversized sweatshirt falls over the girl’s shorts.
“What’s all the excitement about?”
Darcy fills Amy in.
“I should have brought my car over,” Amy says, wringing her hands. “You could use another vehicle now.”
“God, what if the same guy who came after you targeted my daughter?”
Darcy and Amy are inextricably tied to Michael Rivers, and the profiler inside Darcy knows her daughter is a logical target. She sends another text to Jennifer, and this message drops into the bottomless pit that swallowed the others.
“She’s close to my age, yes?” Amy asks.
“Fourteen.”
Fear flashes in the girl’s eyes. Michael Rivers attacked Amy when she was fifteen.
“Jennifer’s phone might be dead. That would explain why she hasn’t answered.”
“But where is she? She’s impulsive and makes crazy decisions, but she wouldn’t take off without telling anybody when a killer is loose.”
An hour passes. They’re seated at the kitchen table now, Darcy unraveling fiber by fiber. She glares at the clock. By now, the post-dinner cleanup should be finished with Hunter and Jennifer locked in their rooms, finishing homework. How could things go wrong so quickly?
Then another half-hour. An overwhelming sense of dread deepens. Hunter checks with several of Jennifer’s friends, and none have seen her tonight. And then Hunter isn’t answering texts, either.
Didn’t Bronson call the police? A second call will light a fire under the GCPD. Darcy phones the station as the siren calls of the anti-anxiety pills tempt her.
Officer Faust, the female officer who accompanied Julian to the house after the threats against Hunter, knocks at eight o’clock. The officer’s presence makes Darcy worry the worst has happened, that the police found Jennifer’s body dumped in a dark alleyway. But Faust is here to ask if Darcy has heard from her daughter since she went missing. Over Darcy’s shoulder, Faust eyes the young girl huddled on the couch.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Gellar. Jennifer is probably with a friend, and you’ll hear from her soon. We have every cruiser in the village looking for her.”
“I don’t understand why it took you so long. If it were your kid, you’d want the police searching immediately.”
Faust gives her a confused look and is about to ask Darcy something when her radio crackles with a message from headquarters.
Faust’s presence does little to calm Darcy. The police have bigger problems with a murderer loose.
Dammit. She never should have let Hunter take the car.
Faust asks all the typical questions: who are Jennifer’s friends and has she ever disappeared like this before? The circle leads nowhere, and eventually Faust finishes her interview and departs to search for Jennifer.
The door closes. Then the cruiser’s motor guns and fades into the night. Sickness, terror, and helplessness gather around the solitude.
Too much to handle. The bottle on the nightstand warns Darcy to only take one pill every twenty-four hours. When she wills her hands to stop shaking, she pops two in her mouth and swallows. The effect hits her quick. The medication goes beyond dulling her senses and slurring her speech. It hollows her out and turns her numb.
It comes as a shock when the front door bangs open and Jennifer stomps inside.
Darcy yelps. Words cannot express the relief and confusion she feels as Jennifer rips her jacket off and slams it over a coat hanger.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Jennifer spins around. Anger twists her face. She swings the closet shut with a bang.
“Where have you been? I waited at the fucking field for over an hour for you to pick me up. Can you guess how stupid I felt standing there in the dark? Oh, and you owe me fifteen bucks for the Uber.”
“Then you misunderstood. I clearly stated you needed to tell me if you didn’t have a ride, and I’d get you.”
Jennifer squints.
“You’re taking the pills again.”
“I’m not crazy, Jennifer. I never told you I’d come get you.”
“You’re losing it, Mother.” Jennifer darts across the room and holds her phone in front of Darcy’s face. “Explain this message.”
Darcy swipes the phone from Jennifer’s hand and fixes her with a glare that would melt most teenagers, but her daughter is not an ordinary teenager tonight. Red-faced, Jennifer is the tremor before the ground opens.
Wait at the practice field. I’ll pick you up as soon as I can get there.
Darcy stares at the message as though doing so will make sense of the matter. The message appears to have come from Darcy’s phone, but that’s impossible.
“I never wrote this.”
“Your goddamn name is on the message.”
Darcy’s phone rests in her back pocket. She kept the phone in her possession all day. Calling up her messages, she confirms she never sent this text.
“Number one, if you curse at me again, I’ll ground you for the rest of the semester. Number two, this isn’t my message. And why didn’t you answer any of the texts I sent you in the last few hours?”