But the truth is that I’m not going to blow my chance to see you one last time. I can’t. I need to understand you and the things you’ve done. The need is dark and deep, twisting at my insides. If you disappear now, I know I’ll never see you again.
“I’m going to go through these documents,” I say, keeping my voice light.
“Okay,” Bailey says. “I’m going to go look for Rick Javits, find out about his client.”
I’m no detective but that does seem like a lead. “Go for it,” I say.
His eyes linger. It seems like he wants to say something. He shoves his hands in his pockets. “Do we—uh—need to talk?”
“About what?” We do need to talk. Of course we do. But not now. I can’t let whatever feelings I might have for Bailey Kirk deter me from my goals.
He offers a slow nod. Then, “Stay in touch, Wren.”
It sounds like a warning as he exits and leaves me with my past. I stare at the door, fighting the urge to go after him. I could tell him what’s happening. Ask for his help. But no. This is my errand alone.
When Bailey’s truck rumbles away, I text back the strange number.
He’s gone.
The response comes right away, an error message. I try again but only get the same. I scroll back through the texts, searching for a meaning I might have missed. But the words are stripped and bare, offering no trace of you. Frustration is a taste in the back of my throat. These games. You dangle the line. I reach. You yank it away.
I open one of the binders and travel back in time, looking for—I don’t know what. Me. You. Some piece that connects then to now. I get lost wandering through my family’s past—old photographs, birth and death records, marriage certificates. All the little pieces of paper that mark the passage of a life, all the images of moments frozen and preserved. There are even some letters from my grandfather to my grandmother while he was off to war. Every day there’s horror, but every night I dream of you.
I don’t know how much time has passed when my phone vibrates again.
It’s a series of directions and simple commands: Write this down. Delete all traces of me from your text messages. Destroy your phone.
My skin tingles as I scribble the directions on to a pad of paper Joy has left for me. There’s something quiet about it, final, that placing of pen to paper. I tear the sheet from the pad.
Then I leave without saying goodbye to Joy, get in my car and start to drive.
thirty-eight
“I want you to come in, Bailey.”
Nora was annoyed with him, and he could understand why. He’d failed her. Failed his client. Failed a girl who had, in all likelihood, fallen victim to a predator.
“I have a lead. A solid one.”
“Tell me.”
He told her about the Realtor, about the client looking to buy the Carson property, about how he had an address and was sitting outside the Realtor’s house that very minute, ready to go knock on the door.
“It’s almost midnight.”
“Since when does that matter? There’s a missing woman, a ticking clock.”
She issued a sigh. “Look,” she said, her voice tinny over the car speaker, “Thorpe fired us. He’s hired someone else. So you’re officially costing me money right now.”
She didn’t care about that. Neither did he.
“Just one more day. Twenty-four more hours.”
Silence.
“I’ll take it as a vacation day.”
The neighborhood he’d stopped in was modest; tidy houses, well-kept, tree-lined. Nothing special, no grand McMansions, no run-down shacks. Basketball hoops and late-model cars in the driveways. It had the look of an organized neighborhood—block parties and coordinated decorating, maybe candles in brown bags at the curb on Christmas Eve. What did they call those things? Luminarias, that was it. It reminded Bailey of the way he grew up—a kind of all-American, ride your bike out to meet your friends, home when the streetlights came on, soccer on Saturdays, picnics, vacations to the beach upbringing. Rick Javits’s house was a neat little Craftsman with a picket fence and postcard-sized front yard.
Nora was talking again.
“You know, sometimes we get wrapped up in these things for our own reasons. It stops being about the client, and becomes about something inside us that needs resolving. And when that happens things get murky.”
“We’ve had this talk.” Whenever he talked to Nora late at night, which was often, he always imagined her in gray silk pajamas and a cashmere robe, drinking a glass of wine. He wasn’t sure why; he’d certainly never seen his boss in her pajamas.