Joule had slept hard and woken up worse. She felt as if she were crawling out of a deep crevice in the earth, fingers clenching at the dirt that kept giving way. She slid back down into restless sleep more than once.
The fog above her cleared in stages and she felt groggy, achy. Sucking in a breath, she finally came fully awake, if not fully alert. Her memories replayed the nightmares she'd had the night before.
She dreamed of the Night Hunters following her down the street—not so much the kind of dream that an analyst could ask her about, but more a distinct, straightforward, terrifying memory.
In another snippet, she’d dreamed of being in the car with Sarah, then Sarah disappearing from behind the wheel, vaporizing like dust in the wind. Joule dreamed of getting lost in the streets of El Indio, somehow managing to take four right hand turns and not winding up back where she'd started. Each time she saw a street she recognized and headed that direction, only to find out it wasn't at all what she'd expected.
It didn't take a therapist to tell her what it all meant.
She rolled over slowly, the ache in her upper back making her feel older than she was. This rental bed wasn’t her favorite. How long until she turned thirty? How long until her father had been gone for a decade? That one was closer on her calendar.
The back of her jaw ached, like when she ate sugar too quickly. Joule wondered again if perhaps she and Cage should have worked harder to find their father. She'd been the one who argued and argued that Nate was dead. Even now, she hated the idea that he might be alive even though she would love to have him back more than anything. She simply couldn't fathom how he could have left his children for so long.
Nathaniel Mazur would not have left the twins to do this on their own. She knew that in her heart. So once again, this morning, she convinced herself that her father was dead.
She could not convince herself the same of Sarah. And she refused to entertain the thought that Sarah might remain missing forever.
The sound of voices from elsewhere in the tiny house had her getting dressed in a hurry. As she exited the bedroom heading for the small bath, she saw the barstools at the high table were occupied. Cage, Malcolm, and Aurora all looked over their shoulders at her. The Walkers must have shown up early.
“Good morning,” she told them realizing after the words had tumbled out of her mouth that it wasn't good. And it might not even be morning.
No, it still was. She'd seen the number eight on the alarm clock provided with the bedroom when she'd rolled over. Or at least she was pretty sure it was an eight; it had been fuzzy from the blur of her gaze.
Still, she headed into the bathroom. She needed to brush her teeth, splash water on her face and wake up before she went out to have any intelligent conversation. She arrived at the table a few minutes later, a plate of toaster waffles waiting on her.
With just the first bite down, her stomach began to settle. She turned to the Walkers. “Did you get any sleep last night?”
Aurora only offered a sad smile. “I don't think I've slept in days.”
Joule nodded. If not for nightmares, she wouldn't have known that she had gotten any either. She certainly hadn’t gotten any rest.
“Did the police tell you anything useful?” she asked between bites. But the couple shook their heads again.
“They told us what they're going to do.” Joule waited. “They're going to send the car to San Antonio, where the evidence team can look it over. They were mad that the two young ladies had taken it apart.”
Joule understood that. But Brooklyn and Amber offered to hand over their photographs as evidence.
“I think the police actually took the one girl's phone,” Malcolm Walker said, shrugging. He didn't seem that mad about it.
The good news, Joule thought, was that Amber and Brooklyn reported that there were no obvious bloodstains. No signs of a struggle. They’d found and photographed Sarah's purse, which had been pushed up under the driver’s seat. But there was no cash in the wallet, no driver's license. Her health insurance card was also missing.
Joule had seen the photographs Brooklyn had offered up after the police left and she logged into her online repository.
In Sarah’s wallet—Joule remembered seeing it before—there were slots for each of those things. Given the arrangement of the other cards, receipts, and such that were still left inside, it appeared Sarah had plucked them before she went wherever she went.
“There were fingerprints on the door handles,” Aurora said. “They told us that just from looking. But that’s the same as the two young ladies said.”
Brooklyn and Amber had even commented that there were more on the trunk that they'd been able to see with just the flashlights. Joule hoped the car was crawling with prints and that some would turn up useful. She took several more bites of her waffle.
In the silence that prevailed around the table, she sat uncomfortably, the only one eating. But she knew she needed to. She missed tasting food. Missed Ivy’s chili. Missed Kayla’s secret formula cookies. She missed that she hadn’t really tasted them yet after Dr. Brett had died and now here she was, eating dust again.
“We should be getting the records from the phone company today,” Malcolm Walker told them, breaking into her melancholy thoughts. “Do you two want to see them?”
“Absolutely,” Joule answered, swallowing the bite of waffle. With each subsequent bite, it had become more and more of a chore to chew. It settled in the back of her throat and she tried again to get it down.
“I'm going to call Dr. Murasawa,” Cage announced. “Now that we know where Sarah’s car is, we have a new central point to look from. And that point isn’t at her apartment, like we thought.” He paused a moment. “Also,” he added “we need drones. I'm hoping Helio Systems Tech has some we can borrow.”
It was a good idea, Joule thought.
Malcolm Walker pulled out his phone as it beeped and buzzed at him. He put on his glasses to check the screen, a move that would have been Hallmark-movie worthy had this situation meant anything other than what it did. He tapped at the image, his finger briskly landing on something before he jumped back, almost as though it might bite him.
A good number of taps later, he announced to the room at large, “It's the phone company . . . they said they moved our request to a priority because she's officially a missing person now. But we have Sarah's phone records.”