Page 112 of Our Daughter's Bones

“She didn’t tell you how she figured that out?”

“No. She told me nothing!” he cried. “I begged her to. Then, about a month ago, she came up with a plan. She said she needed proof that Bill hurt Erica. She couldn’t live with herself not doing anything. No one was going to believe her theory without any evidence. Especially when she was accusing the Pride of Lakemore. She knew he had a cabin—football players bragged about using it in the summer. She found out where it was.”

“Then what happened?”

His voice trembled, like he knew the more he talked the more trouble he was in. “She said that whatever Bill had to hide, it must be there. Deep in the woods. I told her it was a bad idea. She didn’t even know what exactly to look for. But she said she had to try to do something. She said if there was anything even suspicious, then it would help us. The police wouldn’t listen to something this ridiculous without proof.”

“So, she planned her disappearance?”

“Not exactly. She told me she was being threatened. Someone would leave her notes, text messages, or follow her on her way home from school. She saw shadows outside her window. One time someone tried to break into her house too when her mom was at work. She wasn’t safe. But no one was going to believe her. It would just be dismissed as someone playing pranks on her.” He held his face in his hands. “Whydid I agree to this? I had a bad feeling. Iknewsomething would go wrong!”

“Max. What happened next? Focus.”

He took a shaky breath. “She decided to go after Bill Grayson alone. I warned her something might go wrong. But she didn’t listen. She said she would be safer if she disappeared. That way, she could be the one to follow Bill instead of the other way around. She believed it would be easier to collect evidence against him. She had some leads she wanted to follow up on. But she couldn’t do anything when she was being watched the entire time.”

“But if she disappeared, she could get around. Hunt, instead of being hunted,” Nick said.

“Exactly.I didn’t like it, but I understood. Still, we needed a backup plan. In case something went wrong, and Bill caught her. She gave me some pages from her diary.”

“Her personal journal?Youhad them?”

“She was always writing in her diary. She said she had written about Bill when she realized what he’d done. She obviously always wrote in code. In case it fell into the wrong hands. She… she gave me some of her entries and told me to hide them in the secret drawer in her woodshop station.” He blew his nose into his sleeve. A string of snot hung between his nose and his T-shirt. Cringing, he wiped his nose again. “She told me that if she didn’t return in fourteen days, then I should make sure that the police found the pages. She was certain that the police would crack the code in her diary, and they would be led to Bill.”

“How were you planning on making sure we got the pages?” Daniel asked.

“I was supposed to send in an anonymous tiptoday. But I found out you were at school two days ago, going through the woodshop. You got there first, and I figured that Abby would be back sooner than planned.”

“Abby was supposed to be at the cabin?”

“Yes! She was! She said that if she didn’t return by today then that meant Bill had got her. That she was in trouble. And the only place we thought he could keep her was in that cabin. But I don’t know what happened. Where did he take her to?”

“Did Abby ever mention anything about Erica’s phone?” Mackenzie asked.

“No. Why?”

“Anything about needing money?”

“I lent her two hundred. She didn’t even want it.” A dreamy look crossed his face. “She wanted to do everything by herself. Too stubborn to ask for help. I doubt she would have included me at all if it weren’t for my persistence. It kills me that no one sees how much she cares, how much she is ready to sacrifice.”

Mackenzie’s vision began to swim. She wasn’t blinking, but the sight of Max talking kept collapsing into blackness repeatedly. The edges began to blur. The shape of his head and shoulders merged with the blue of the room. His voice grew soundless even though his lips moved. She pushed herself off the chair and wobbled out of the room.

Blindly, she tried to grab the wall and keep her eyes open. The white lights from bulbs above cast a halo that quickly expanded until her vision was a bright explosion.

Then everything went black.

Sixty-One

1997

“Wakey, wakey, Micky,” her father’s voice sang.

One. Two. Three.Mackenzie kept her breathing even. Her toes curled underneath her blanket.

“Why aren’t you waking up, Micky?”

Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.

The pungent smell of Scotch slithered up her nose. She wanted to squirm away. She wanted to scream at him till his ears bled.