A few steps inside the apartment, he dropped his backpack on the floor and was heading toward the kitchen when his limbs froze at a terrible thought. What if that woman was here because of Everett? What if he hadn’t been careful enough about the cameras? What if someone had complained about missing items?
He stared wide-eyed at the fridge for a long moment before tiptoeing back to the door. When he pressed his ear against it to listen for accusations or hushed tones, he heard only the notes of normal conversation. The back-and-forth of questions and answers, then a moment of laughter. The woman said something about low carbs. His mom mentioned coffee.
Everything was fine.
Relieved, Everett grabbed a yogurt and headed for the computer. When he logged in to his email, he opened a note Josephine had sent earlier.
People are so gross, she wrote above a screenshot of a comment left on a Herriman High School reunion page.
Tiffany Miller? Did she graduate with us? She was in foster care or something. No parents. She never talked to no one except her pot dealer. Is that guy invited to the reunion? Haha! Not surprised no one tracked her down. She probably ODd on something, right??? Girl was always high. Hot ass tho. Hey Tiffany if you see this, message me or hit me up at the reunion!
Tiffany Miller. She’d been included on the board of missing women, but there had been no accompanying newspaper article. Even online, there was hardly anything. The girl had just vanished from the world sometime in 2000. Maybe she’d only run off from a bad situation.
Or maybe Alex Bennick knew something no one else did.
When the apartment door swung quickly open, Everett jumped, convinced for half a second that the cops were here.
“We’re doing a tour of the facilities,” his mom said. “Just call my cell if you need me.”
“Sure,” he answered, doing his best not to reach guiltily for the mouse to minimize the window. She couldn’t see the monitor from there, and she was already closing the door anyway. When he heard the office door open and both voices fade, he relaxed and started searching for Tiffany Miller online again, just in case he’d missed something the first time he’d looked. But the name was way too common. Maybe she was just one of the Tiffanys living in Minnesota or Iowa. He forced himself to look a bit more carefully just in case, studying pictures and birthdays.
When the phone in his mom’s bedroom rang, he ignored it until it stopped. Then it rang again.
On the third round of ringing, it occurred to him that it could be his mom trying to reach him. Maybe she was on the far side of the complex and needed something? Still anxious about how his own behavior could’ve caused her harm, he walked into her room. The ringing stopped. Then it started a fourth time.
Everett finally reached for the phone. “Hello?” he said, then thought better of that and tried again. “Hi, this is Neighborhood Storage.” He’d heard his mom on the phone often enough.
“Everett?” a voice asked after a long pause. Not his mom. A man, his tone deep and hushed.
“Yes?” Everett responded.
“Everett! Wow. It’s your dad.”
For a moment the words meant nothing. How could they? This wasn’t his dad, because he didn’t have a dad anymore. Then his brain ticked through a few notches of thought, and he realized it was a stupid prank call. “Yeah right,” he snapped.
“Everett, I’m serious. It’s your dad. I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Well, for months, really. How are you, little man?”
Little man.
That struck something that rang through his mind like a bell. Little man. Hadn’t his dad always called him that? The words were more solid than a memory. They were buried too deep to actually recall, but he could feel them trembling through his muscles, his bones.
And who would prank call a business line? Who would try to reach him there? “Dad?” he croaked, as the possibility expanded inside him, pressing too hard against his heart and throat.
The man laughed. Or . . . his dad laughed. “Jesus, I’ve missed you! You’re twelve now, right? You’re probably almost as tall as me!”
Everett shook his head and whispered, “Dad?” again.
“It’s really me. I’ve been hoping you would answer the phone, Ev. I wanted to hear your voice. I mean, jeez, what I really want is to see you, but that’s a bit harder to arrange.”
His eyes fluttered in blinks so rapid his vision looked like a stop-action film, so Everett turned his head away from the hard sunlight streaming past his mom’s bedroom curtains. It didn’t help. He still felt dizzy.