Lily had been left with a son, a foreclosure, forty-five thousand in credit card debt, four civil lawsuits to settle, and an entire town that hated her. Not to mention years of questioning and surveillance from the police.
The least she could do for Everett was stop his father from damaging him the way her dad had damaged her. Promises broken over and over. The absolute heartbreak of realizing he just didn’t love you enough.
No. Better for Everett to know a simpler truth: his father had broken the law and he’d run to avoid arrest. He was in hiding, and he couldn’t come out.
Her son barely remembered his father now, and Lily meant to keep it that way.
CHAPTER 7
“Thanks for coming to dance practice with me,” Josephine said as they made their way slowly back to school from the small dance studio off Main Street. “It was cool to have an audience.”
“It was way more fun than doing chores.” Everett had called his mom from the office before his last class of the day and begged to go to an after-school meeting for a new robotics club. She’d immediately said yes, of course, thrilled at even a hint of interest in STEM and asking what time she should pick him up.
Everett wasn’t the least bit interested in engineering, so he had no idea when the robotics club met, but it had bought him a free afternoon to walk to Josephine’s class with her and use her iPhone while she practiced.
He’d hoped to drum up the nerve to tell her about the storage lockers and the missing women, but so far the idea of it stuck in his throat like dry rice. Still, the afternoon had paid off. He’d been able to research the missing girls’ names on Josephine’s phone and confirm that he wasn’t crazy and the bulletin board wasn’t a joke.
“Hold on,” Josephine muttered. “It’s my dad.” She stopped on the sidewalk to type out a text. “I’ve got to meet him at the station in ten.”
She walked on, but Everett felt frozen to the cement, caught between the desperate need to share and the terrible fear of doing so. “Can you keep a secret?” he blurted out, skin burning with hot regret before the words were even finished.
That got her attention. Josephine jerked to a stop and spun toward him like she was still in front of studio mirrors. “Are you kidding? Heck yeah, I can.”
“I mean a real secret. Something that could get me in trouble.”
She raised a hand to touch the little gold cross at her neck. “I swear,” she said solemnly. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Everett glanced around as if someone might be lurking nearby hoping to eavesdrop on two sixth graders. “I found something weird in one of the storage units,” he whispered.
“Weird?” she whispered back.
“Yeah. Sometimes people don’t lock their units. And sometimes I . . . go in them.” When her lips parted in shock, he shook his head quickly. “I don’t take anything. I wouldn’t do that. I’m not a thief.”
“Okay,” she breathed. “But what did you find?”
“I opened a new locker this week, and . . . well, there’s a bulletin board inside, just leaning against the wall, and it has all this stuff on it about missing women.”
Josephine gasped, her hand flying to cover her open mouth. “You mean like Unsolved Mysteries?”
“Yes. Exactly like Unsolved Mysteries.”
“I love Unsolved Mysteries!” she squealed into her hand.
“This morning I snuck into the unit to write down their names, but I couldn’t do much more than that.” He could have done more, but he’d felt paranoid and vulnerable, sure every time he turned his back that when he looked again, the locker’s owner would be standing in the doorway. He’d scrambled out and sprinted through the gate and toward the bus stop as quickly as possible. “I think they’re all still missing,” he said. “The girls. And they’re all from Herriman.”
“What? How is that possible? I’ve never heard anything.”
“It was a long time ago. Like 1999, 2000.”
“How many are there?”
“Five, I think. Maybe just four. The fifth one maybe ran away.”
“Is it police detective stuff? Old records and files?”
“I’m . . . I’m not sure. There were a lot of boxes and some furniture. I don’t know who owns it.”
Josephine grabbed his arm, and in that moment he knew he’d done the right thing, telling her. Telling someone. He wasn’t alone with it now, which made it seem cool instead of scary. “I want to see it,” she said.