“This is my daughter, Jenny,” the woman said, her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “And I’m sorry, I’m Nadine.”
Jenny managed a half-smile and I nodded.
“Jen, these people are looking for another girl with our last name,” Nadine said, then glanced at me. “Morgan, correct?”
I nodded again.
“I wondered if you might know her from school,” Nadine said, her gaze moving back to her daughter.
Jenny Thompkins studied me warily. “She’s in my math class. Our teacher gets us mixed up, like, every day.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?” The flicker of hope was back.
The girl nodded. “Which is, like, ridiculous because we look nothing alike. But I guess the last name thing is too hard for him.”
Nadine frowned at her daughter’s scornful tone but didn’t say anything.
“She’s a cheerleader,” Jenny said, rolling her eyes. “I am not.”
The way she said it told me she was glad about that.
“But you know her?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Sure. Everyone knows her. She’s popular. And she’s nice. For a cheerleader.”
“You know where she lives?”
“Yeah,” Jenny said. “Her parents are gone all the time so she’s always having parties at her house.” She glanced up quickly at her mother. “But I haven’t gone to any. She invited me to one but I didn’t go.”
Nadine patted her shoulder and nodded, letting her daughter know she wasn’t in any kind of trouble.
“She lives in The Bird,” Jenny said.
“The Bird?” Lauren asked.
“It’s like two minutes from here,” Jenny answered. “Her neighborhood is named after a bird so everyone calls it The Bird. Really big houses. Her dad is some Internet guy or something. Pretty rich.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Soaring Eagle? That’s her neighborhood?”
Jenny nodded. “Yep. That’s it.”
EIGHT
Ten minutes later, Lauren and I were back in front of the home with the putting green in Soaring Eagle. I’d knocked on the door again, got no answer, and went back to the car. I slipped back behind the wheel and shoved my hands in front of the heater.
“Now what?” Lauren asked from the passenger seat.
I turned the heat down to a lower setting. “We wait. Nothing else to do.”
She sighed and leaned back in the seat. “Great.”
I understood her frustration. Our daughter, the daughter we’d been missing, the daughter I’d been searching for for nearly ten years, was with this girl. Morgan. I wanted to rip the town apart, call out an APB, do anything I could to locate them. But I couldn’t. The only thing either of could do was wait.
“If we leave, we might miss her,” I said. “If we…”
She held up a hand. “I got it. I don’t need an explanation.”
I pushed the button on the side of the driver’s seat and it complied, reclining slightly.
“Sorry,” Lauren said after a few minutes. “Didn’t mean to cut you off.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m just frustrated.”
“I know.” I was, too. But I was used to it.
“I know there’s nothing else to do,” she said. “I’m just worn down from this chase. Or whatever you want to call it.”
“I know.”
“Is this how it always is?” she asked. She didn’t look at me, just played with her fingers, picking at her nails, rubbing her thumb over her knuckles.
I shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s easier.”
“How is it ever easier?” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t see that.”
I stared at the house for a long moment.
“I was in Dallas, maybe two years ago,” I said. “I can’t even remember why I was there initially, but I ended up helping this woman find her son. He was a college kid. All she knew was that he’d had a fight with his girlfriend. Hadn’t checked in with his mom in a couple of days and she was freaked out. Understandably. I went and talked to the girlfriend. He wanted her to come home with him for the summer. She wasn’t sure her parents would be okay with that. It was a fight over nothing. But she knew when he got frustrated he’d go up to this lake in Oklahoma and camp by himself, just to get away. And they had a deal. If she ever really needed to get ahold of him, an emergency or something, she could text him with a code word and he’d call. She texted him. He called back in about thirty seconds. She told him his mother was worried, that I was looking for him. He felt terrible, apologized to her, to me and immediately called his mom.” I shrugged. “That was pretty damn easy.”
“They weren’t all like that,” she said. She didn’t pose this as a question, just stated it like something she knew to be true.
“No. But some were. You just never know.”
“I wish we had a secret code,” she said, her voice wistful.
I reached out and briefly touched her hand. “Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”
She smiled at me, a sad smile that tore at my heart. As much as I wanted to find Elizabeth for me, I wanted to find her for Lauren, too. For both of us. I glanced out the front window, my eyes scanning the road. Every car that passed us on the street gave me a little twinge, wondering if it was the one that might be carrying Elizabeth. But each one continued by, either headed toward another gigantic house or out of the subdivision.
“Was that night in San Diego weird for you?” Lauren asked, shifting in her seat.
“Which night?”
“Me and you,” she said. “The hotel.”
I’d been in San Diego two weeks prior, helping out an old friend, when I’d gotten the photo of Elizabeth that set this entire search in motion. In the middle of helping my friend, Lauren and I spent the night together in the hotel where I was staying. It was the first time we’d been together since the divorce. And there hadn’t been time to discuss it.
“Weird?” I asked, then shook my head. “No. It was the opposite of that.”
“Opposite?”
“Familiar,” I said. “Comfortable. Right. I don’t know how to explain it.” I paused. “We got divorced because we went different ways. Not because we didn’t love each other. At least, that’s how I’ve always looked at it.”
She nodded in agreement. “Me, too. And I’m not trying to rehash any of the old stuff. We’ve done that.” A faint smile drifted on to her face. “And it felt the same way for me. Familiar. In a good way. I needed it.”
I smiled back, unsure what else to say. At that moment, I’d needed it, too. Needed to be comforted and loved and with her. Not someone random, but her.
“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we were still together?” she asked. “Like, if we’d gotten through her disappearance somehow and managed to stay together?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’ve thought about it. Probably wished for it.” I traced my finger along the steering wheel. “My anger hasn’t always been about Elizabeth being taken. It was also about what her being gone did to you and me. Whoever took our daughter also took our marriage.”
Her lips pursed. “Yeah. Yeah.”
“I will always be angry about that,” I said. “No one can give us that back, you know?”
Lauren started to say something, then stopped. Then she turned to me. “You think we’d have had another child?”
My smile was genuine. Instantaneous. “Yeah. Without a doubt. We said we always wanted two. And that we wanted some space in between them, to enjoy them. So, yeah. I think so.”
The smile found her face again. “Yeah.” She started to say something else, but her eyes shifted past me and the smile disappeared. “Car. In the driveway.”
I turned to see a white Ford Explorer stop just short of the garage door. I could see a driver.
And no one else.
I pushed my door open, the warm air of the car interior replaced by a cold, sharp wind. I stepped onto the sidewalk and Lauren was right behind me.
The girl wore black yoga pants and a hot-pink thermal vest over a long-sleeve black T-shirt. Her long black hair was expertly woven into a tight French braid and adorned with a thick hot-pink headband. She scurried around the front end of the Explorer, heading to the front door of the house. She froze when she saw us.