He pedaled hard down the road, but his roiling emotions wore off quickly. Maybe he’d overreacted. Five minutes later he just wanted to go back home.
When a loaded pickup passed him and turned into the storage facility, Everett circled back hopefully, imagining she’d be too busy to notice him.
Sure enough, the pickup was stopped in one of the front spaces. His mom would be occupied with a customer for a while. Perfect.
Everett biked back through the pedestrian gate. His mom might see him, but she couldn’t follow him when she had a customer. He parked his bike against an RV and tugged a flashlight from a small pouch at the back of the seat; then he sprinted toward the locker in question, tugging the sticky note from his pocket before he even got there. He’d checked the camera’s feed yesterday while his mom was working. Only the very edge of this door was visible, and only if you looked closely.
The lock opened with a click, and Everett raised the door a few feet and ducked inside before closing it behind him. His pulse sprang into panic in the second before he fumbled the flashlight switch on, and it wasn’t completely calmed when the circle of light appeared. Flashlights were pretty creepy in his opinion, creating way too many shadows that shifted and writhed with any movement. It was a hell of a lot better than the dark, but he really, really wished he could leave the door open.
He’d had bad nightmares as a kid, and he still sometimes “forgot” to turn off the light after a late-night trip to the bathroom. He liked the comforting glow sneaking under his door.
As he swung the beam of light over the unit, he frowned a little. It looked like most of the others he’d seen. Lots of cardboard boxes stacked up like little condos for spiders and silverfish. A few pieces of old furniture. Some plastic storage bins. It surprised him how many people were willing to spend money on keeping things like these instead of throwing them out.
He walked a little deeper into a narrow pathway between boxes, sliding his light over every surface. When he caught sight of a woman staring at him, he yelped and jerked back, the beam shaking, shifting her face from smile to sneer to mad-eyed grin.
“Aah!” he cried out as he grabbed the flashlight with both hands to hold it steady. It still shook, but he could see that the woman stared flatly from a photograph; it wasn’t a ghost or even a creepy mannequin.
“Oh, thank God,” he whispered, then tried to catch his breath and calm himself down before his heart burst right out of his chest like the Alien monster.
When something tickled his neck, he jumped and slapped at it, anticipating a dangling spider, but finding only sweat. The light shifted, and there was another woman. A girl, actually, smiling weakly against the sickly blue background of a school portrait. There was a third picture too. And a fourth. He couldn’t see the rest of the board they seemed attached to.
He cleared his sticky throat, took a deep breath, and picked his way through the forest of boxes toward the wall. It wasn’t only photos. It looked like a big old-fashioned bulletin board, filled with pictures, notes, and newspaper clippings.
Everett bent closer, squinting to read the small print of one article.
An area woman reported her sister missing after she failed to show up for her scheduled shift at a chicken-processing plant for the second week in a row. Bridget Baumgarter says that her sister, Yolanda Carpenter, told her she was going to catch a ride to visit a friend in Salina. The friend has since reported that she never arrived. Yolanda Carpenter, age 19, was last seen leaving the Baumgarter home on October 2, 1999, at 3:00 p.m. She was wearing jeans, a red T-shirt, and a jean jacket. She is 5’5”， about 120 pounds, and has long blond hair. If anyone has any information, please contact Lieutenant Nord at the Herriman Police Department.
He scanned another thumbtacked article and glanced at a third before stepping back to shine his flashlight in a wider circle.
There were five photographs of five different girls, and all of them were missing.
CHAPTER 3
She’d forgotten to make the cookies. Their first teenage-level fight complete with yelling and storming off, and all Lily could think was it wouldn’t have happened if she’d made cookies.
Nodding at the long story her customer was telling about a flooded basement, Lily hit PRINT on the contract and tried to concentrate on her work instead of on guilt and hurt feelings and that aching loss of watching the easy connection with her son begin to crack with brittle age.
“Of course,” the woman continued, “the good news is I’m finally getting the basement refinish I wanted. Greg kept telling me the indoor/outdoor carpet and wood paneling were just fine, because who the hell ever saw it but him? And I kept telling him no one else saw it because no one else wanted to go down there! If—”