Everett immediately opened his text app and typed out everything he’d found for Josephine.
OMG! Did these girls all go to school here??? she wrote back immediately.
Not sure. There are three high schools in the county??? I’ll try to check it out.
First things first, though. He looked up the man’s address online. He knew the names of only a few streets in town, and as he zoomed out, he didn’t recognize anything. After shifting the map around a bit, he finally spotted a highway down the road. From there, he found his own street.
Frowning, he glanced back and forth between the two spots, then requested directions from his address to Alex Bennick’s. Weird. It said the drive time was fifteen minutes, but on the map it looked so much closer.
He zoomed out again, tilting the map in a different direction, and suddenly he saw it. “Holy shit,” he whispered before racing into his mom’s room for the phone. “Josie,” he panted as soon as she answered his call. “This guy lives on the other side of my field! Less than two miles away! He’s right there!”
“No way. And he’s still alive?”
“I think so.”
“Everett, he’s so close to you! That’s scary! What if there are bodies in his house? Oh my God, what if there are bodies in the storage unit?”
Everett blinked in shock, then blinked harder. “No. There were some boxes, but I’d be able to tell, I think. There’d be a . . . smell?”
“Yeah, that’s true. We’ll find out more tomorrow, for sure. Send me everything you find on the missing girls. I’m in full detective mode now.”
He hung up the phone, then stood there, caught off guard by Josephine’s renewed insistence on helping investigate. He didn’t really want to go back into the locker. What if this man actually was a killer? But if he was, shouldn’t they find out? Tell somebody? They could solve a half-dozen cases. They’d be famous. Maybe there were even rewards.
When the phone blared in his hand, Everett dropped it, then jumped back when it hit the floor with a hard crack of plastic. “Oh no,” he whispered, crouching down to examine the damage. But only the battery case had popped off. The ringer kept going. When he turned it over, an unknown number appeared. It wasn’t Josephine. He snapped the case back on and set it on the charger. It finally stopped ringing, though it started again before he left the room. Everett closed the door and backed away.
That was weird. He’d just called his friend to talk about a murder, and now someone was being creepy.
He sat down at the computer, and when he searched for Lynn Cotti, he found the digital version of the exact article he’d hidden beneath his bed. He googled the next name he’d written down: Yolanda Carpenter. The articles about her were shorter, and he’d read most of them on Josephine’s phone.
He was pasting both links into an email for her when the phone began pealing again. Eyes darting toward the sound, he clicked SEND and then slowly rose to his feet to face his mom’s bedroom door. The electric chirp shrieked over and over. Finally it stopped.
He held his breath, waiting. Nothing happened. It was just a telephone call after all. “Wuss,” he scolded himself when he finally let out a breath. But when the phone rang again, he jumped, his whole body jerking into the air in shock.
Heart hammering, he took one careful step toward his mom’s door, then another.
When he heard his mom’s voice outside the window, talking to someone just before the gate squeaked open, Everett felt stupidly relieved.
He wiped his search history, closed the windows, and then retreated to his room to hide behind his closed door until dinner.
Tonight was game night, and they’d already agreed on Monopoly. For once, he felt glad his mom had read too many articles about quality time with kids. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone once it got dark.
CHAPTER 8
Lily had Thursday afternoons off, and she woke that morning with a desperate need to get out of the house and off this track of worry over Jones. She just wanted to leave behind her churning thoughts of what he might be up to and think about herself for an hour or two. She also had a half-price coupon for her favorite café, and that was as luxurious as her world got these days.
The Silver Spoon at 12:30? she texted Zoey.
When Zoey texted back with an enthusiastic YES!, Lily cracked a relieved smile and finished up her morning chores. She even sent Everett off to school in a good mood, handing him a couple of dollars for an extra slice of pizza at lunch.
Spring had definitely sprung, and the seventy-degree forecast inspired her to put on a yellow skirt and a shirt that wasn’t made out of sweatsuit material. To add to the excitement, the Silver Spoon had a new summer menu, and Lily was scrolling through the choices as she hiked a bag of office trash up and shoved her way out the front door.