“No!” Gary and Reyn said together.
For the first time in what seemed a long time, Gary smiled. It felt good but weird, wrong, and the smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Maybe it’s not her real name,” Reyn suggested.
He knew Joan. And the idea seemed ludicrous. But it was also the most benign possibility under the circumstances, and Gary found himself clinging to it.
Brian immediately burst his bubble. “My guess is that whoever wiped out her school records wiped out her DMV records, too. I don’t know who we’re dealing with here, but they seem like some serious dudes. With major firepower behind them.”
Gary imagined some sort of shadowy government agency, a black ops organization, and wondered why such a group would be interested in Joan.
Who is she?
The plots of a dozen recent thrillers flashed through his mind.
“Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity,” Reyn suggested.
Gary ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Jesus Christ!” He wanted to lash out, wanted to hit something, wanted to scream. How could this be happening to him? How could it be happening at all?
Reyn looked at his watch, which caused Gary to glance over at his own clock on the dresser and check the time. It was nearly nine.
“We’re not going to get anything done tonight,” Reyn said. “I suggest we all get some sleep. Tomorrow could be a very long day.”
Why? Gary felt like saying. Do you think we’re going to find Joan? And Kara? Is everything going to be solved and put right? But he simply nodded tiredly and saw his friends out, locking the door behind them and once more looking around his room, seeing it as it had been when he’d arrived back from Cayucos, his belongings strewn about and thrown onto the floor. He shivered, feeling cold, and on impulse he decided to call his parents. It was nearly midnight in Ohio and they were no doubt sound asleep, but he wanted to talk to them. He wasn’t going to tell them everything, but he needed to let them know what was going on.
In case something happened to him.
He was glad when his dad answered the phone. His father was much easier to talk to than his mother. He’d made the call too late at night to pretend he was just ringing them for a casual chat, so Gary told his dad that his girlfriend had disappeared on a trip with friends to the Burning Man festival. He soft-pedaled the drugging and didn’t mention Teri or his ransacked room, but he did tell his dad about Kara being missing as well.
He wasn’t sure what he wanted from his father. Advice? Suggestions about what he should do? Deep down, he probably wanted his dad to take over the situation, to fix things, to tell him everything was going to be okay and resolve all problems, the way he had when Gary was a child. But he wasn’t a child, and his dad was on the other side of the continent. The most he could realistically hope for were some encouraging words. He was momentarily tempted to tell his father everything, particularly when his dad asked sharply, “What are the police doing?”
But instead he said vaguely, “They’re working on it.”
“Do you want us to come out there?” his dad asked.
Yes! was his honest reaction, but plane tickets were expensive, his father couldn’t really afford to miss work, and, in truth, there wasn’t a lot that his parents could actually do once they got out here, so he lied and said, “No.”
“What’s going on? What is it?” In the background, Gary could hear his mother’s panicked reaction to his father’s side of the conversation, and he quickly told his dad, “Don’t make it sound too scary. Keep it light.”
“I always do,” his dad said calmly, and proceeded to explain what was going on, downplaying the seriousness of what Gary had told him, making it sound as though Joan could simply have had some family emergency that caused her to leave school without informing Gary.
Seconds later, his mom took the phone, and Gary repeated the same thing his dad had just said. Hearing the same story from both of them calmed her down, and after a few pointed questions designed to ferret out any duplicity, she seemed satisfied that nothing was too amiss. She started asking him about school and things in general, and for the next eight or nine minutes he chatted with his mother as though everything that had happened since the trip to Burning Man had not occurred.
After she passed the phone back, his dad waited a moment until she was not only off the line but out of earshot and said, “Someone called last night asking for you.”
Gary’s pulse was racing. “Who?”
“I don’t know. But there was something weird about him. He didn’t give his name or the name of a company or organization he might’ve worked for, but after I said you weren’t here, he started asking questions about you. Personal questions. Like how old you were and where you were born. I didn’t tell him anything. I just hung up on him.” There was a significant pause. “Do you think this could be related to your… situation?”
Gary could tell from his dad’s tone of voice that he thought it was. Gary did, too, but he said, “I’ve been getting a lot of those calls lately. They’re just surveys. I sign up for these contests, and sometimes they’re just scams to get you to join a gym or something. I think they sell my name and phone number to other companies.”
There was skepticism in his father’s “Oh,” but his dad didn’t push it. They talked for a few moments more, and then Gary said it must be getting late and he should go. His dad agreed but before hanging up told Gary, “Be careful. And if you need anything, call.” Which told him that his father had seen right through his efforts to minimize the seriousness of the situation.
That made him feel good.
Gary hung up the phone. After arriving back at his room and discovering the chaos within, he had placed the address book he’d taken from Joan’s parents’ house on his desk, forgetting about it in the ensuing confusion. He’d spotted it again while talking to his dad, and he picked it up now, opening its cover and looking carefully at each entry, turning the pages slowly. There were very few names or numbers listed, and most of those had the same local Cayucos area code. He would call those numbers, just in case, but he doubted the people behind them would be of much help or interest to him.
As he’d discovered back at her parents’ house, Joan’s dorm and cell numbers were listed next to the single word Daughter. That was strange. But stranger still was what lay two pages away, under the letter F.
Friend 1, Friend 2, Friend 3, Friend 4…
There were seven altogether. No names. Only the designation Friend, along with an identifying digit. Each had an accompanying phone number, and none of the area codes was the same. None was any he recognized, either. He continued looking through the rest of the book, but all of the remaining pages were blank.
Gary turned back to the list of friends, thought for a moment, then picked up his phone and called the first number on the page.
There was only one ring before someone answered. “Hello?” The voice on the other end of the line was female and sounded more like someone his parents’ age than his.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Gary Russell, and I’m, uh, Joan Daniels’s boyfriend.”