Page 24 of Trapper Road

Connor shakes his head. “Nope.”

I frown. Girls keep secrets all the time — lord knows I have plenty — but there’s always a reason why. I keep secrets because I don’t like people knowing my business and trying to tell me what to do. What reason did Juliette have to keep this boy a secret from her two best friends? Unless he was the kind of guy she’d get in trouble for hanging out with.

“So she and this dude could have run off somewhere together in some kind of stupid star crossed romance kind of shit,” I point out.

He shrugs. “Possible, but seems unlikely. According to her parents, she snuck out once but left a note behind so they wouldn’t worry if they came into her room and saw she was gone. Doubtful she would run away without giving them some indication she was okay.”

I prop my feet against the dashboard and drum my fingers on my knee, thinking it through. “What happened in the Shadow Shack?”

“Nothing. Apparently they looked around. Hung out. Then left.”

I snort. “No one goes looking for a broke-down cabin in the woods just to hang out and leave. They’re hiding something for sure.”

“You think so?”

“Trust me, I know trouble just as sure as I know sneaking into the woods. There’s definitely more to that story.”

He doesn’t seem to believe me.

I twist in my seat, looking at him. “Didn’t y’all have shit like that in the woods near where you grew up?”

“We grew up in Wichita. There weren’t really any woods around our house. Also, I was seven when Dad was found out.”

I roll my eyes. “But after that. When you were bouncing around or at Stillhouse Lake. You can’t tell me those woods up behind y’all’s house weren’t full of that kind of shit. Didn’t you go exploring?”

“And give Mom a heart attack when she couldn’t find us?”

He has a point. Gwen keeps a pretty tight leash on her kids. Not that she doesn’t have reason to. It’s totally understandable. But I can see why it might have made them hesitant to go galivanting off on their own. Which is a shame. Some of my best memories growing up were of being lost in the woods around our house, making up stories to entertain myself.

I decide to move on. “So the two girls — Mandy and Willa — they just walked home?”

“Yup.”

“Anyone see them?”

He frowns at that and clicks through the files on his laptop. “Not that I remember. But there are a ton of interviews, and I skimmed a lot of them.”

“Did either of them text or call Juliette afterward?”

He has to fact-check that one as well. “Yeah. Looks like they both did.”

“And there are no leads.”

“None at all,” he confirms.

I nod. I think about the picture of the girl, Juliette, staring confidently with that practiced, ambiguous smile at the camera. I’m not dumb; she’s probably dead and gone. I’m sure that’s what most people think, at least.

But I can’t forget the two girls we found trapped in the basement of that old lawyer’s house in Wolfhunter. They’d been missing for long enough that folks had given up looking. What if that’s Juliette? What if she’s being held somewhere in a basement, chained up until she’s boring and someone else takes her place?

She needs to be found.

6

GWEN

Juliette’s father’s name is Cliff and her mother is Patty. I study them as I follow them into the house. The man’s in his late forties, paunchy, with big arms and callused hands that make me think he works outdoors a lot, contracting perhaps. Even so, he seems pale and tired.

His wife, on the other hand, doesn’t make much of an impression on me; she has her eyes cast down, and there’s nothing really noteworthy about her. She’s medium everything, no distinguishing features at all. Even her hair is a dusty brown. Given the designer yoga pants she’s wearing she may have once been much more chic, but they now sag off her hips as though what she looks like is the farthest thing from her mind. I can understand.