Chapter Four
“Sheriff Kenyon,” she said, holding the phone to her ear. Outside her office door, she could hear Gloria chatting with Jason about something—judging by their laughter, it had nothing to do with the case at hand. There was nothing to laugh about there. Just the uneasy feeling that Mandy Crawford’s vanishing act might not have been her own doing.
The person on the other line gasped. A crackle. Then, silence.
“Are you there?” Emily asked.
Another crackle.
“Hello?”
“Sheriff Kenyon? This is Hillary Layton. Mandy’s mother.” There was anguish in every syllable.
Emily had been expecting the call. She both dreaded and longed for such calls. They were always enveloped in worry, regret, and heartache, but they were necessary to move any investigation forward. She’d left messages at Luke and Hillary Layton’s Spokane home. The answering machine indicated that they’d be “in and out” but would be checking messages. Mitch Crawford had told Emily that Mandy’s parents were vacationing in Mexico and he had no way of knowing how to reach them.
“Mrs. Layton,” Emily said, “I’m so sorry.”
It wasn’t much, but it was heartfelt, and really, all she could say. Right then, they had not a scintilla of evidence pointing to Mandy’s whereabouts. The rest of the conversation would be driven by the mother of a missing young woman.
“Any sign of my daughter?”
Emily could tell that the woman, so far from the snowy Northwest, was about to shatter into a million pieces. “Nothing. But we’re working every lead we can. Where are you?”
“Puerto Vallarta. Mandy and Mitch sent us down here for a week—they have points in a timeshare. I didn’t want to go, because she’s so close to her due date. But she wanted us to go. She was so insistent. I can’t believe that she’s left him. She never told me anything.” Mrs. Layton took a deep breath. “Just a minute.”
Emily heard Mandy’s mother put her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone and say something to someone standing nearby. The break in the conversation gave Emily a split second to collect her thoughts. She wondered why Hillary Layton would leave her daughter with her first grandchild due any day. It seemed peculiar.
“That was my husband,” Hillary said, getting back on the line. “He wants me to tell you that he doesn’t trust Mitch as far as he can throw him.”
A man’s voice could be heard in the background. It was the heavy growl of a big man. An angry man.
“The guy’s a self-centered sack of crap!”
“Shhh! Luke. That’s not helping!”
Emily tried to defuse the anger, with a calming tone. “Mrs. Layton—”
“Hillary, please.”
“Hillary, then, where do you think Mandy might have gone? Are you close?”
“I don’t know where she is. And yes, we are extremely close. I saw her once a week and we talked on the phone almost every day. We’re as close as a mother and daughter can be, yet still have our own lives. After I got your message, I called her girlfriends, Sammy, Dee, Caroline, and Sierra. No one knows anything.”
One name caught Emily’s attention. “Who’s Sammy?”
“Samantha Phillips, her best friend. She lives on West Highland Drive. Married to a dentist.”
Emily knew who Dr. Dan Phillips was. He’d taken over Dr. Cassidy’s dental practice—the one that had seen half of Cherrystone through their first cavities in grade school to the trauma of impacted wisdom teeth in college. Cherrystone was more than a six-degrees-of-separation type of town, she thought. More like three degrees. Emily seized on Samantha’s name because she never heard it mentioned before. When Mitch gave Deputy Howard a list of those with the tightest bonds to his missing wife, Sammy’s name hadn’t been among them.
Emily’s eyes landed on the photo of Mandy that the women from the county clerk’s office had brought in for a missing persons poster they’d made. She wondered when the photo had been taken.
“When are you coming back?” she asked.
“Tonight. We’re leaving PV tonight. First flight we could get seats on. Alaska Airlines through LAX.”
“All right. We’re doing everything we can to find her. I want you and Mr. Layton to come to my office when you get back home.”
Hillary Layton finally lost her fractured composure and started to cry. “Sheriff, do you think she sent us away because she wanted to leave Mitch? Or maybe…you know, something really bad happened to her.”
Emily had worked missing persons cases in Seattle. She knew that the first hours were crucial, and in the absence of any reason for Amanda to flee, chances were that she was either abducted or injured somewhere. Or dead. Few people went missing longer than a day without one of those reasons accounting for their disappearance.
Yet to the mother on the phone, hope was essential just then.
“Hillary, please, don’t think the worst. Right now, we have to turn every stone. We need to focus our energies on finding your daughter. That’s what we’re doing. We’re rolling on this at one hundred miles an hour.”
Hillary stopped crying. “Thank you, Sheriff. My husband and I will see you tomorrow.”
Emily hung up and picked up the photo. She felt a small surge of hope. If Mitch Crawford was, in fact, involved with Mandy’s disappearance, then he’d made his first mistake. He’d lied when he said he didn’t know exactly where to reach his in-laws. Even if there was some reason that he didn’t know which timeshare unit they’d been sent to, he surely could have tracked them with a call to the resort company’s customer service center. After all, Mr. and Mrs. Layton were using his resort points for their stay.
It was a stupid lapse, all right, but it made Emily smile.
There was also the matter of Sammy Phillips, Mandy’s closest friend, another oversight on Mitch’s part. He’d never mentioned her.
The Phillips residence was everything Mitch Crawford’s house could never be. It wasn’t in a gated community, with the pretentious accoutrements of a wannabe estate. It was grand and authentic, a vintage home decked out in holiday finery that was subtle and respectful for the season. The two-story white colonial had an oversize gilded eucalyptus wreath on each of the double doors. Tiny faux candlelights were set in each of the fourteen windows on the street side of the house.
It was dusk when Emily arrived. She parked on the street, slick with melted snow. She’d never been inside the house; however, she knew its history. No matter how long the Phillipses would live there, Cherrystone old-timers would always call it the Justin House. It was named for Herbert Justin, a banker who’d had it built and lived there with his wife, Matilda, until he died at eighty-one and she was shuttled off to a rest home in Portland to be near her kids.
It was sold three weeks after the old lady was sent packing “for her own good.”
Samantha Phillips was a stunning blonde with green eyes. She stood in the doorway as Emily made her way up the steps, wrapping her arms around her black-cashmere-clad torso and shuddered at the cool air.
“Come inside, it’s getting a little more than brisk out here again,” Samantha said, looking out across the sky, which was dark with the threat of rain or snow.
Emily followed her into the two-story entryway, across blue Persian rugs with a pile so deep that it nearly sucked the heels off her shoes. Samantha had a teapot on a tray with some of the delicate rolled cookies that Emily knew were krumkake, the same that her mother had made for the holidays. The room was dominated by a ten-foot-tall tree that, by fragrance alone, indicated that it was a real Balsam fir.