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Jade refused to answer Ben’s questions until she could start actively helping with the search. Once she was bundled and outside, Ben began his interview.
“Your friend told me you received a threatening letter. Can you tell me exactly what it said?”
“Yes, I can.” Jade hid her hands inside her coat sleeves since she didn’t have any gloves. “It said, Sorry about your dad. You better make sure your little girl’s not next.”
He watched her fidgeting with her sleeves and then handed her his own gloves. She was too tired and cold to refuse them.
“What did the reference to your dad mean? Did you understand that part?”
“Yes,” she answered flatly and stared at Ben. He was the real reason why she hadn’t shared that part of her testimony at church.
A trooper car pulled into the church parking lot, and Ben excused himself to fill his colleague in. Not a moment too soon. Jade caught Aisha standing under a street lamp and hurried toward her.
“What’s going on?” Jade asked.
Aisha’s teeth were chattering. “We’ve looked in all the cars, under all the cars, and around the church. I don’t know what else to do but start searching along the road and behind the buildings.”
“She wouldn’t have come out here. Not without her coat.” Jade shook her head. This search was a waste of time. Her daughter had probably found some hiding place in the church, maybe even fallen asleep, and she was going to be grounded until her eighteenth birthday if she didn’t show herself soon.
Aisha frowned sympathetically. “Are you doing okay? Do you need anything?”
Jade shrugged. “I need to find out what that girl is doing. I swear, she can be so stubborn.”
Ben raced back up. “We’ve got two men coming out now, and the search and rescue team is standing by in Fairbanks.”
“Fairbanks?” Jade wished she could explain what she already knew. Dez wouldn’t be out here in this cold.
Ben nodded. “It’s a cold, long night. We’ve got to act fast.”
“Well, thank you, Mr. Optimism,” Jade muttered under her breath before turning away.
“Wait a minute.” Ben reached out his arm, shying away just before touching her elbow. “I still need to know more about that note. You were saying something about your father.”
Jade cast her glance over to Aisha, but her friend was already heading off to join the volunteers in the wooded area behind the church.
“What do we need to know about your father?” Ben asked. “What’s this letter mean?”
Jade wanted to tell him to mind his own business, but everything regarding her dad was public record anyway. If she told Ben everything now, it’d free up his time to keep looking for her daughter. She took off, following Aisha toward the woods, and Ben hurried to keep up beside her.
“You were listening when I was talking tonight, I assume?” Jade asked, hoping she could save even more time by not having to repeat everything she’d gone through earlier.
“Yeah. I’m so sorry for what happened to you.”
Jade didn’t have time for sympathy right now. Not from a cop. “My parents went to the police. They pressed charges against the pastor of Morning Star.”
“Good,” Ben inserted forcefully.
His comment derailed her concentration, and it took a second to remember what she was saying. “Well, we did it all. Went to the police, talked with the lawyers. They looked for other witnesses to come forward, but everybody else refused to testify against him.”
“They weren’t brave enough?”
“No,” Jade replied. “They weren’t stupid enough. Pastor Mitch had connections all over the Mat-Su valley. The longer the pre-trial period spread out, the more we realized he was going to get away with it. If we got ourselves a miracle, he might get charged with statutory rape, but even that didn’t seem too likely. With Pastor Mitch being on a first-name basis with nearly everyone in Palmer, my dad lost hope that he’d ever see the inside of a jail cell.”
“That must have been disheartening.”
Jade wondered if Ben had taken police training in the art of understatement.
“It was ridiculous,” she spat. “And the whole time, we were getting death threats from the people we thought had been our friends, even from some of the parents of girls who went through the exact same thing I did. They treated us like we were turning our backs on God, like we’d lose our salvation if we testified against a monster like that.”
Jade gritted her teeth. This wasn’t the time to get weepy and weak. This was the time to be angry. Angry, determined, and focused.
“So what happened?” Ben asked the question so softly, Jade wondered if he already knew or maybe suspected the answer.
“My dad attacked him. Confronted him one night when he was coming home and assaulted him with a baseball bat.”
She paused to see if Ben had any interjections, if he was going to lecture her about the need to let justice follow its own slow course of action. He remained silent, which wouldn’t make telling him the rest of the story any easier.
She was trying to figure out how to continue when someone called out, “Hey, over here!”
Jade raced ahead, panting by the time she made her way through the snow to where the maintenance man was shining the flashlight of his cell phone. “Does this look familiar?” he asked.
Jade’s heart was pounding as she stared at the red scarf in the snow. She studied it for a full second before answering, “That’s not hers.”
“You sure?” Jerry asked, as if Jade might not recognize her own daughter’s scarf.
She nodded, too disappointed to think up any caustic remarks. “And look.” She pointed at the lower fringes. “It’s been out here a while.” She tried to pick it up, but it was frozen to the snow. “See?”
Jerry nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. False alarm.”
Jade stared around at the towering spruce trees. The snow lay in uneven heaps, without any trace of footsteps. They were wasting their time. “I don’t think she’s back here.”
Jerry shined his flashlight around. “Yeah, I thought she might have left some tracks, but I don’t see any.”
Jade swallowed hard. “No. No tracks.” She had to keep control over her emotions. She had to be strong. It was the only way she was going to find her daughter again.
Lord, show me where she is, she prayed and thought about that letter she’d gotten in last week’s mail.
Sorry about your dad. You better make sure your little girl’s not next. Would someone from Morning Glory come all the way out to Glennallen from Palmer to hurt her daughter? Was that the way the church was going to get back at Jade for speaking up against their pastor after all these years?
It was far-fetched. It was insane.
But right now, it sounded like the most plausible explanation.