In the garage, the perfectly straight, organized, nary a spider or speck of dust in sight garage that attached to the back of their house through a covered walkway, Ethan stopped cold.
Her car. He’d forgotten to check her car. She’d left her keys...
A brief flash, an image formed, sending his heart to his throat, choking him with its intensity: Sutton, slumped in the front seat, engine running, a tube from the exhaust pipe into the front window. But when he got up the courage to look in her front seat, there was nothing. No one. The cupboard was bare.
Ethan drove a BMW 335i convertible, black with gray interior, latest model. He traded in his cars dutifully every two years. Sutton had a more practical forest green X5, or as she called it, the Official Williamson County Soccer Mom car. Not that they were keeping up with the Joneses. Not really. Ellen Jones drove an I3. Electric, sustainable, practical—Ellen to a T.
Ethan didn’t know why he was thinking about Ellen, other than he hadn’t looked in Sutton’s car on day one, which struck him as a Very Stupid Move. Clearly he needed to read more mystery novels; he would know better what to do to find his wife. Amateur sleuth he was not.
Steeling himself, he unlocked the door—they always locked their cars even in the garage, a theft deterrent—and looked inside. Empty.
Oh, the relief. What would he have said if she’d been here the whole time? It would have looked bad for him, very bad.
His search of the X5 was brief. Her car was as clean and organized as she was. Nothing out of place, no stray receipts or empty peppermint wrappers or barrettes. Everything in its place. There was nothing amiss.
He glanced at his watch, cursed, and jumped into his own vehicle. When he got back, he’d look at the GPS, see where she’d been last. Maybe that would give him a clue, though she usually walked most places during the day.
He tore out of the garage. Gentry’s Farm wasn’t far from their house, about a ten-minute drive in bad traffic. Which was always in Franklin. It was one of the reasons they walked everywhere, the constant traffic jam of locals and tourists. Tonight was no different—the roads were busy, the lights were barely synced, and his quick ten-minute jaunt was inching into twenty before he broke free of the melee and flew west down Highway 96.
He tasted bile every time he thought about Gentry’s Farm. Wilde knew exactly how to punish him.
It was their first trip out after the baby was born. They’d taken Dashiell to look at the pumpkins. Halloween was past, but there was still plenty of fall flora around, leftovers from the recent holiday haunted hayrides. Sutton couldn’t resist the idea of a baby in a cornucopia, à la Anne Geddes.
He had to agree, “Dashiell in the Field” was an unexpected pleasure. They’d almost filled the memory card on the camera, they’d taken so many shots. It was how they announced the birth of their boy, a photo of him snuggled in an angelic white sleep suit, surrounded by green-and-yellow gourds and bright orange pumpkins and a small haystack Sutton had laughingly constructed, the whole tableau dotted with the red-gold maple leaves they’d found in a tidy pile nearby. Their bountiful babe. Their bounty.
Colin Wilde knew about the photos. They’d put them on their social media accounts gleefully, racking up likes and comments. Surely that’s why he’d picked this place, to stick the knife in a bit farther, twist it inside Ethan’s intestines, make them jump and roil.
Ethan was going to kill the bastard. He knew this as certainly as he knew the moon dictated the tides.
It was simply a question of when.