She wobbled a little, and the officer helped her over to the hood of her car, and she leaned against it. She stayed that way as more and more police showed up. Asher and Joey tried exiting the back seat again and were banished for a second time.
After a half hour of spectacle, Rachel climbed into her car and backed out of the driveway and followed a single cruiser out of the neighborhood while several others trailed behind. Then they were gone, and all was quiet again on the Loop.
That was how Rachel Barren and her boys were found, and how she learned her husband had been murdered.
They always say what you’re trying to find is in the last place you look. Well, it was doubly true with Rachel and the boys, since no one under the sun had thought to look at Sadie Gardner’s house out in the foothills.
It made total sense later when I thought about it. I’d seen the two women talking at the farmers market the day Rachel and the boys vanished. Sadie, the no-nonsense woman who’d finally had enough of getting beaten by her husband and put him in the emergency room. Sadie, who owned a farm completely off the grid with no real means of communication with the outside world. Someone Rachel knew well enough to ask for a favor but not well enough for anyone to check with when Rachel and the boys went missing. Rachel also knew that given what she was dealing with at home, Sadie Gardner couldn’t very well turn her away.
The rift in the Barren household became a gaping chasm the night before Rachel and Sadie made their agreement, when Joey came home and told her what Father Mathew had made him do that day in his office. Rachel told the police she’d been completely blindsided and devastated when she finally understood what her son was trying to explain, what he’d been holding in for months. All of the boy’s anxiety and behavioral problems suddenly made sense. When she went to David with the news and the declaration she would be calling the police, everything had fallen apart.
Because, of course, David already knew what was happening up at the school on the hill. He’d helped engineer it in a way. Maybe he actually believed Father Mathew hadn’t touched his son again after the day he’d caught them together and begun his blackmail scheme, but if he did, it was a blind belief. It was looking the other way while pretending everything was okay.
David told Rachel that she most certainly wouldn’t be going to the police, and if she did, who did she think the authorities would believe? A troubled little boy and his anxiety-stricken mother? Or a well-respected business owner and a prominent man of faith? Would they listen to the woman who got a little too tipsy at some of the community functions? Someone who had fallen into a drug-addled sleep in her yard while she was supposed to be watching her sons? Who had let her two-year-old almost get hit by a car in front of the entire neighborhood?
David had told her that nothing was going to change, unless she never wanted to see the boys again. Because he could do that. He could make sure he gained full custody, make sure she became a pariah in the community. His parents would back him up, and he was pretty sure hers would as well.
He’d assured her everything would work out now since their loan agency would be saved by Ryan’s untimely death. David would be receiving a large sum from the insurance company, and things would be fine again.
Unless she went around shooting her mouth off, then her world would come crashing down. And she didn’t want that. Did she?
No. No, of course not. That’s what she’d told him.
That night she’d formulated a plan to get away, create some space between her and the boys and David. She’d known Sadie’s story, known she would probably have a soft spot for an abused woman and her children. Would open her home as a refuge where they could hide away for a time without the interference from the outside world. Away from corrupt husbands and chiding parents. Away from the news about what was happening on the Loop in their absence.
So that’s what she’d done. After I’d spoken with her at the farmers market, she’d gone grocery shopping, picked up the boys from school without incident, and never gone back home. Instead she’d driven straight to Sadie’s house, where they’d stayed for over a week. Enough time for Rachel to decompress and formulate a plan to confront David, to ask for a divorce. Because there was no way she was continuing to put her son through the hell he’d been enduring for months on end. No way the sick charade David had concocted would continue.
But when she arrived home, the house had been empty. David had been dead for a week, and the whereabouts of her and the boys were the great concern of the community as well as one heartsick fool who lived down the street.