“She’s what?” Joule felt her whole body go into shock. Surely, she’d heard Deveron wrong. The phone had cut out or . . .
“Sarah is missing.”
No, she’d heard it right.
“Since Monday morning . . . her roommates don’t know if she went to work or not. No one who knows her has seen her since then,” Deveron told Joule, the worry evident in his tone.
“Hold on.” Joule frantically waved Cage over, grabbing his attention as well as that of Ivy and Kayla.
Joule had stepped into the dining room to have a private conversation, but that wasn’t happening now. The movie had been paused and three concerned faces crowded around her. Joule worried most about Cage. He knew Sarah. Ivy and Kayla had only heard of her through the stories the twins had told.
Still holding the phone up, she put it on speaker, then looked him in the eyes. “It’s Sarah, she’s missing.”
His face instantly changed from curious to horrified. “How long?”
It was Deveron who answered. “They think almost forty-eight hours now.”
Joule’s heart hammered. It wasn’t like Sarah to disappear or to even casually not pay attention to what she told those around her. If she was intending to miss work and be hard to get a hold of, she would have alerted someone.
Not again.
She watched her brother freeze. They couldn’t lose anyone else. The last death had hit her hard, and Joule could feel her muscles tightening, trying to protect her from loss. It never worked.
But Sarah wasn’t dead, just gone—at least as far as they knew. So, Joule asked the pertinent questions. “Are the police involved?”
“Yes.” Dev’s answer was clean. “They notified the local PD just after noon yesterday. When she was a half day late and not answering her phone.” There was a pause. “Someone suggested she was just hung over and missing work.”
Joule felt her eyes flick up to meet her brother’s. A tight shake of his head told her he thought the same thing. No way.
“Her car was gone, she didn’t answer the door.” A sigh. “But what do I know? I’m not there.”
He was an engineer, not an investigator. Joule knew the feeling. She’d become so many things—so many that she’d never intended to become—over the past few years.
“What did the police do?” Cage finally jumped into the conversation.
“They agreed with me, then questioned the neighbors and her roommates.”
There was a concerning pause. Then he added, “They said they weren’t sure if she had come home the night before.”
“What?” Joule practically yelped it. “And they didn’t call the police then? Or the next morning?”
Dev answered, “They didn’t know. Thought maybe she’d stayed out late and left early . . . It wasn’t like when we were rooming together.”
Apparently not. She hated the thought.
She and Cage had left the job, floated a little aimlessly, grieved Dr. Brett. But it hurt that Sarah had suffered for not having them as roommates. They would have been calling around as soon as Sarah wasn’t there for bedtime. Wouldn’t they?
It was so easy for Joule to believe she would have done the right thing. But she hadn’t been there. Maybe there was a reason the roommates hadn’t thought much of it. “Had her behavior changed since we were there?”
“A little. The last time we talked she said she wanted a new place and a fresh start. She always said she was busy, but I didn’t get the impression that she’d made some whole new group of friends or anything. I don’t know.”
“Is there any word yet from the police?” Cage asked.
Kayla and Ivy hung back, clearly concerned but not part of the conversation.
“They have a BOLO on her car but haven’t found it yet.” It was clear from his tone that he was worried, very worried.
The conversation—as it were—lagged. Joule felt her ribs caving in on themselves. Cage had hit this point a few apocalypses ago. She’d held it together, but now? She couldn’t lose Sarah. She couldn’t sit back.
Cage looked at her and mouthed the words, “Are we going?”
Joule nodded. Of course they were.