Page 10

“I dropped them off.” Felix nodded toward his wife and child. “I had a couple more hours of work to do. I’m a mechanical engineer. I went to the factory to review some schematics, then left around seven and met Ruth and Pamela at the river basin.”

Emmy did the math. That was more than a couple of hours. Maybe they were wrong about their predator profile. It wasn’t lost on her that a father whose daughter and her best friend were missing had a shaky alibi.

“Why are you wasting time with minutiae?” Ruth had found her voice again. “Whatever happened, Madison is the one who got them into this. Cheyenne never got into trouble until we moved to this backwater. Felix! Tell them!”

Felix was shaking his head. But then he said, “She’s right. Cheyenne changed when she met Madison.”

“When was this?” Gerald asked.

“Two years ago.” Ruth gave a startled laugh, as if she couldn’t believe it was that recent. “Two years, and she ruined our damn lives.”

Emmy tried to check in on Pamela, but the child was staring at the ground. This was not a conversation to be having in front of a ten-year-old. And the neighbors. Emmy could see lights on in the surrounding houses. She wondered why her father hadn’t suggested they go inside.

“Sheriff,” Felix said, “are you sure she didn’t run away?”

Gerald asked, “Do you think she ran away?”

“I thought—” Felix stopped to swallow. His composure was slipping. “We were talking about—before this—we were talking about moving back to Iowa. To be closer to family. And Cheyenne didn’t want to do that. She said she would run away if that happened.”

“Had you made any firm decisions?” Gerald asked.

“No.” He glanced at his wife. “No, we didn’t.”

“You don’t know!” Ruth yelled. “She could’ve run away!”

“No,” Gerald said. “The girls didn’t run away.”

“How can you be sure?” Ruth demanded. “Whose blood did you find? Maybe Madison attacked her. Maybe they’re both hiding somewhere.”

“Mrs. Baker,” Gerald said. “Tell me about the changes in Cheyenne.”

Ruth’s mouth opened, then closed again. She didn’t answer because she wanted to hold onto the fantasy that maybe the girls were playing an awful game.

Felix cleared his throat. “It was so fast. She met Madison, then practically overnight, she was different.”

“How?” Gerald pressed.

“In every way possible.” Ruth tried to use the hem of her shirt to wipe under her eyes, but her hands were shaking too hard.

“Before Madison, Cheyenne was our perfect little girl. Then suddenly, she didn’t want to be seen with us anymore.

Refused to go to mass. Started skipping school.

Everything was a secret. Then the lying started.

Lying about where she was going, who she was going to be with.

Spending a lot of time alone in her room. Being very unkind to Pamela.”

To Emmy’s thinking, that sounded a lot like the behavior of a teenager.

Gerald asked, “Were there any boyfriends?”

“No.” Ruth sounded emphatic. “Never.”

Emmy would’ve missed Pamela’s furtive look had she not been staring directly at the child.

Felix added, “Cheyenne isn’t allowed to date. She’s not old enough.”

Emmy bit her lip. Hannah had reported spotting a hickey on Cheyenne’s neck on more than one occasion.

Gerald asked, “Do you have any family members in the area?”

Felix shook his head. “They’re all in Iowa.”

“Did Cheyenne have other friends?” Gerald asked.

“No,” Ruth said. “She was popular when we first moved here. But then her circle got smaller and smaller until …”

Emmy watched tears roll down the woman’s face. Ruth’s throat was visibly strained as she swallowed. She had exhausted all of the blame and excuses. Now it was just cold, hard facts: her daughter was missing. She might never come home.

“Okay,” Gerald said. “My deputy would like to search Cheyenne’s room. Felix, could you show her the way?”

Felix looked surprised that the request was directed toward him. He’d assumed that the sheriff would want to talk to the calmer parent. He didn’t know this sheriff understood that people who were calm tended to be careful about what came out of their mouth.

Gerald had noticed that Felix’s alibi was shaky, too.

“Of course.” Felix reached for Pamela’s hand. “Ready, sweetie?”

Pamela’s eyes lingered on Emmy a moment too long before she let her father lead her up the driveway.

Emmy matched their slow pace. She thought about Pamela’s furtive look when Gerald had asked about boyfriends.

The girl was five years younger than her sister.

There were twenty-two years between Emmy and her brother, but she had treated Tommy as a full-on subject of interest. He couldn’t send an email or make a phone call without her Veronica Mars-ing his ass.

Emmy had known he was going to ask Celia to marry him before he did.

It had to be worse with sisters.

“Sorry.” Felix used his key to unlock the front door. “We didn’t have time to clean up.”

“No problem.”

Emmy scanned her surroundings as he took her up the stairs to the main level.

She could’ve drawn the floorplan standing at the curb.

Almost every house in the neighborhood had a similar design.

Decades ago, some distant Clifton cousins had built split-levels all over Verona.

The engineers at the factory loved the twentieth-century modern look.

Their wives detested the basement floor laundry room and two sets of stairs you had to climb to get from the garage to the kitchen.

The Bakers’ house wasn’t messy, considering two busy adults, a tween and a teen lived here.

The furniture was nice if mostly bland. The couple seemed to favor variations of browns and whites.

Emmy could see the same color scheme in the kitchen, the hall, the powder room.

There didn’t appear to be any pets. Only a few paintings hung on the walls.

There were no rugs to warm things up or even throws and pillows to make people feel at home.

If Emmy had to use one word to describe the place, it would’ve been temporary .

The family hadn’t started talking about moving back to Iowa because of Madison Dalrymple. Ruth had clearly refused to set down roots here. She was looking for any excuse to go back home.

“This way,” Felix nodded for her to follow.

All the doors off the hallway were closed.

Emmy guessed that was an Iowa thing. The hardwood floors were old and cupped from the humidity.

Every footstep was accompanied by a particular kind of squeak.

She imagined it was difficult to sneak out of the house at night.

She also imagined that Cheyenne had figured out a way to do it.

Felix paused at the last closed door on the right. His hand wrapped around the knob, but he didn’t open it. Emmy let him have a moment.

“Dad,” Pamela whispered, like she was embarrassed that he had forgotten how to open doors.

“It’s okay, sweetie.” He gave a self-conscious laugh. “Your sister’s going to be furious when she finds out I let a stranger go into her room.”

Emmy heard the shakiness in his voice. She gave him some space to make the decision. Opening the door meant that Cheyenne was really missing. That she might not come back. That someone had probably hurt her.

Felix took a deep breath, then opened the door.

She had been expecting the usual teenage mess, but Cheyenne’s bedroom was next level cluttered.

Unlike her mother, she’d set down deep roots.

Posters of every band and singer you would expect had been taped on the walls.

There were multiple sets of collections—stuffed animals, horse figurines, perfumes, lip glosses, earrings, dried flowers, candles, Harry Potter , the Twilight series, make-up sets, so many clothes and shoes that the closet door wouldn’t close.

Felix gave a dry laugh. “She likes her stuff.”

“Most girls do.”

“I yelled at her this afternoon,” he said. “I wanted her to go with us to the river. I told her it was important to do things as a family.”

Emmy gave him some grace. “It’s hard raising a teenager.”

He gestured toward the eyeshadows and blushes strewn across the desk. “We gave up the battle over her make-up. Ruth said she was too young, but she would put it on as soon as she left the house, so …”

Emmy heard his throat work as he swallowed.

“Cheyenne was right,” he said. “She told me I wouldn’t be at the river anyway. That I would get tied up at work, and that I would be late, so what did it matter if she was there or with Madison.”

Emmy studied his face. She felt his regret was genuine, but she didn’t have the luxury of giving people the benefit of the doubt. “Did she have a laptop or—”

“Ruth took away her laptop last year.” He shrugged. “Cheyenne figured out a way around the parental controls. We didn’t want her using social media. She’s only allowed to use the desktop downstairs for homework.”

“Can you get the laptop for me?”

“I’m sorry, I think Ruth donated it to the church. The nuns have a program for underprivileged youth.”

“That’s okay.” Emmy would follow up on it later. “What about her phone?”

“It’s an old flip phone I tossed in a desk drawer a few years back.

Ruth was furious at her for scratching her initials into the plastic …

” His voice trailed off as he seemed to realize that he’d wasted too much time being angry over stupid things.

“We monitored all of her online activity. She wasn’t allowed to have internet access outside the house or at school.

There are so many bad people out there that … ”

Emmy watched his face collapse as he realized that the bad people had gotten to his daughter anyway. She told him, “I should get started.”

“Of course.” Felix clasped his hands together. “Do you need my help with this, or—”

“The sheriff probably has more questions for you.”

“Right,” he said. “Right.”