Confident the windows in the room are secure, I close the door and hurry back into my bedroom. I sweep my phone off the bed and hold it between my shoulder and ear so I can answer while folding the laundry still sitting in a basket from the loads I washed this morning.
“As long as it isn’t fried chicken and doesn’t come from a convenience store, I’m fine with it,” I offer. “Actually, maybe fried chicken.”
“That sounds delicious, but looking for dinner plans isn’t why I’m calling you.”
The man’s voice isn’t what I expected to come through the line. My phone nearly slips from my grasp. I grab it with my hand and sit on the edge of my bed.
“Why are you calling me?” I ask.
“This is…”
“I know who it is,” I say, stopping him. “I saw your press conference on the news last night.”
The sheriff draws in a slight breath.
“Then that saves me the effort of explaining what’s going on,” he sighs. “You must know why I’m calling.”
“What do you mean?”
“I need your help.”
Air I didn’t realize I was holding rushes out of me.
“Why do you need my help?”
“There are no clues. No leads. Nothing. An entire community is terrified, and they’re looking to me to figure this out for them, but I don’t have anything to tell them. I’ve never dealt with anything like this before, and I don’t have any idea what to do next.”
“The Bureau hasn’t gotten involved in the investigation as far as I know. And if it has, I’m not part of the team assigned to it.”
“The FBI hasn’t been brought in. I’m not calling them for help. I’m calling you, specifically,” he says.
I get up from the bed and go back to folding the blanket in my hands to stop my mind from following that sentiment too far.
“I’m leaving for vacation tomorrow morning. I’ll be away for a week, then I’ll have a few days before I go back to work,” I tell the sheriff.
“That’s too long,” he says.
“I’m sorry. My flight leaves at ten tomorrow, and I’ll be back …”
“Emma, another child is gone.”
Chapter Eleven
The morning sunlight barely making it through the clouds promises a gloomy day. Overcast and gray, the sky has captured all the humidity and heat, pressing it down until it creates an oppressive, wet feeling in the air. I’ve heard the summertime weather in Virginia described in many different ways, but the one that’s probably the most accurate is that it feels like living in a rice steamer. Constantly hot and wet, the only release coming with the thunderstorms and the occasional floral scented breeze that breaks the stillness at night.
“Call me if you change your mind,” Eric says. “I’ll come back and get you anytime.”
“I know you will, thank you,” I say.
“You’re absolutely sure of this?” he asks.
I look through the windshield at the gathering storm.
“Yes. I’m already on my way. It’s going to be fine. I know it is.”
“And if it’s not?” Eric asks. “If you get there and everything else takes a major turn?”
“Then I figure it out. But for right now, this is what I need to do,” I tell him.
“Just be careful and if you need me, call me,” he says. “I can be to you in less than two hours.”
“I know. You’ve done it before. And I promise I’ll be careful.”
I press the end call button on my phone, where it’s attached to a stand on my dash. This isn’t how today was supposed to go. An hour from now, Eric is supposed to pick me up to take me to the airport so I can go on my much-needed vacation. Instead, he’s back in his apartment, and I’m on a lonely stretch of road on my way to the past.
As soon as I got off the phone with Sheriff Johnson last night, I knew there was no way I’d be able to go on my trip the way I planned. The thought of a third missing child gnawed on the back of my mind and made my stomach turn. One missing child is painful. Two missing children is a serious situation. Three missing children is a serial kidnapper. I’ve done this long enough to know that once a person hits the designation of being serial, whether it’s a killer, kidnapper, or a rapist, they’re unlikely to just stop. There’s a reason they collect as many victims as they do, and it’s not because they’re there. A serial criminal has a compulsion, and they have to follow it. It’s like their breath, their heartbeat, a primal element of themselves that pushes them forward.
Not every one of them is out of control. Most people would like to think that one human being who is capable of the torment, torture, and even murder of another human being, much less several of them, must have an inherent flaw. They want them to be irreconcilably mentally ill, or fundamentally damaged in a way that distinctly and readily identifiably separates them from other people. The reality is that’s not usually the case. There will always be the ones who are abnormal and suffering from trauma or illness that lead to their crimes. But the existence of those people doesn’t eliminate the reality of the others who commit their crimes purely out of their own desires. There’s a driving force, a motivation so appealing and offering so many rewards; it’s hard to resist.
That’s where the real fear begins. If there’s truly a serial kidnapper in Sherwood, it’s only a matter of time before another child is taken. Three in a matter of weeks is gut-wrenching frequency. The goal now must be not just to find the three children whose mothers are aching to hold them again, but to stop the next from disappearing.
Getting a phone call from Johnson was startling, and instantly, my reluctance to going back to Sherwood disappeared. It’s been a long time since I was there. So many years since I laid eyes on the town I for all intents and purposes consider my home.
The concept of home means different things to different people. For some, it’s wherever their family is. For others, it’s where they were born and raised. And for yet more, it’s wherever they happen to live at that time and is redefined as easily as they pack up their belongings and choose another house. I’ve struggled throughout my life with what I see as my home.
In a lot of ways, I never really had one. But Sherwood was always there. I was home if I was with my parents, but the physical location we lived at changed so often I sometimes forgot where I was. If my parents ever talked about where we were living at any given time, they would say ‘the house’ or ‘our place’.
If they ever talked about going ‘home,’ I knew they meant we were going back to the quiet town where my father grew up. We were going back to the tree-lined streets and family-owned businesses. Yards dotted with flowers or blanketed with the type of color-saturated foliage people flock to drive past each fall. Jewel-toned leaves that families leaned out of car windows to ogle at. That packed picnics so they could sit among them and absorb as much of their beauty as they could. That filled children’s hands and became piles to jump in.
That was Sherwood as I grew up, barely changing between the stretches where we lived there. We went back several times throughout my childhood and teen years. My grandparents’ house features in many of the memories I have of holidays, studying for tests, and feeling normal. I would stretch out on the couch my grandmother draped with a crisp, cool sheet brought fresh out of her linen closet just for me. There were times I lay on that couch, thinking we were done running. I thought maybe this was the beginning of a normal life.