“Of course.” It was snapped almost in unison by everyone but Monica, who merely sobbed again.
“Okay, you all know the conference room is next door. There are several phones as well as legal pads and pens. Coffee too. I called before I got here and had two of the high school yearbooks left in there. Stuart is a senior and Amy a junior, so you can divide up the list like that if you want; even if you don’t know names, look for faces you’ve seen with your kids more than others. However you choose is fine with me. Just please write down who you call and what they said. Jean’s getting a list from the school with phone numbers, home and cell.”
And it was a good thing Jean and Jack Rollins, the school principal, were . . . very good friends. He’d been willing to leave his coffee and his snug, dry house and slosh out to the high school for numbers he’d fax back to the police station.
There were, Jonah had thought many times, benefits to living in such a small town that virtually everyone knew everyone else. The downside, of course, was that nearly everyone knew everyone else’s business. So if they didn’t already, the whole town would soon know of an elopement that apparently didn’t go as planned.
Jonah personally got the parents settled in the conference room and then returned to his office. All his instincts told him he wouldn’t get much use from whatever the parents found—except to spread the news faster—but they needed to be busy, procedure needed to be followed, and he needed them out of his hair while he tried to think.
Sarah tapped on his door and came in. She didn’t look the least bit wet, so either they had beaten the storm back, or water just slicked off her like a duck. It was something he had thought before.
She held a thumb drive in her hand. “You need to look at this.”
“Ah, shit,” he groaned. “Don’t tell me this whole thing is even stranger than I think it is.”
Without another word, she went around his desk to the credenza behind it, plugged the thumb drive into his computer, and called up the pictures on the drive.
“Take a look for yourself. I got every shot before the rain started.”
Jonah swiveled his chair around and stared at the large screen of his computer. He stared for a long time, his gaze moving from photograph to photograph, each one clear, correctly lit, expertly focused. Very professional, obviously taken by an expert.
Except . . .
“Did you close the car doors?”
“Not until after I took those pictures,” Sarah said calmly.
In each shot of the car, the doors were closed.
“And the footprints?”
“They were just as you saw them, same as I did, when I took the shots. The camera is working fine; I checked it as soon as I saw these. What the hell, Jonah?”
He really didn’t know. Because there were no footprints in any of the shots. None. And he could tell from the wide shots Sarah had included that she had taken the pictures where they had both seen muddy footprints of two people.
Footprints totally gone. Gone as though they had never been there.
TWO
May 12
Judge Phillip Carson had called Serenity home for most of his life, minus the years away at college and law school and a five-year stint at a big legal firm in Atlanta.
He’d hated Atlanta. Hadn’t thought much of the firm either.
Coming home to Serenity had suited him perfectly. Even a small mountain town of hardly more than five thousand people could always use another lawyer—and had definitely needed a judge. Since the county in which Serenity resided could claim only two other towns, both also small and with small populations, it had been more or less tacked in a judicial sense onto the larger circuit that was literally on the other side of the mountain. And that one contained several large towns, which made for a busy judge.
So it hadn’t been very difficult for Judge Carson to convince the powers that be that it would just be a good idea all around for this smaller county to become a single district, and for the judicial circuit to have its own judge residing in Serenity. Unless something really unusual came up, he only had to leave Serenity to hold court in one of the other small towns maybe once or twice a month.
Holding court in Serenity—in the single courtroom on the second floor of the small police department—tended to consist of mundane traffic violations, the occasional half-assed assault between two drunks, and rare property damage from the handful of troubled high school kids they had to contend with seemingly every year.
But all in all, it was a peaceful town. That was what he liked about it. He had lots of leisure for his favorite sport, fishing. And though it looked hardly more than a wide creek, there were plenty of fish, so the stream that was less than a mile from downtown Serenity suited him perfectly. He’d staked out his special spot—which everyone in town knew and respected—and the walk out there and back two or three times each week was what he considered to be sufficient exercise.
Today, rod and tackle box in hand, he stopped in at the police station. “Is he in?” he asked Jean at the reception desk.
“He’s in, Judge, but I’ve seen him in better moods.”
“I’m not surprised.” The information didn’t deter the judge, and he passed through the nearly deserted bullpen to the chief’s office. He didn’t let the closed blinds deter him either.
He walked in without knocking, saying briskly, “Nothing new, I take it?”
Jonah looked up from the usual clutter on his blotter with a frown, but it was a general expression of mood rather than anything directed at the judge. He looked very tired and a bit haggard. “Nothing. I’ve reached out to every law enforcement agency in three states, issued a BOLO, and took Sully’s dogs out for miles around on three different days even though there wasn’t much hope after that damned rain.
“There’s been no ransom note. We’ve personally interviewed every single high school student in Serenity, plus all the teachers and the guidance counselor, and contacted distant relatives of both kids. We’ve searched both their rooms and their lockers at school. Everything points to a deliberate and well-planned elopement, nothing else. An elopement that just . . . stopped . . . near the edge of town.”
“Nothing in the car?” The judge sat down in one of the visitor’s chairs, setting the tackle box at his feet and propping his rod against the other chair.
“Nothing unusual. Once we went over everything and got it all out of the car, I had the parents back here sorting what belonged to who. Some stuff was obvious, but not everything. And nothing stuck out as not belonging to a couple of reckless kids taking off without much in the way of planning for the future.” He didn’t add that Monica Church had sobbed the entire time the parents had sorted their kids’ belongings.
Jonah drew a deep breath and leaned back in his well-worn chair until it creaked. “Those two kids might as well have vanished into thin air for all the evidence I’ve found.”
“Maybe they were just smart enough to lay down a false trail,” the judge suggested.
Thinking of the vanished footprints that, so far, only he, Sarah, and Tim knew about, Jonah said, “From all I’ve been told, Amy was the brains of that pair—and she wasn’t that smart. All she wanted was to get out of Serenity and out from under her parents’ thumb, and it was the same for Simon. I’m betting they hadn’t thought much beyond just getting out of here. No elaborate plan. They had relatively little money, relatively few skills, and like most teenagers, they thought they could build a life on that foundation. Somewhere other than Serenity.”