In the driveway next to her Toyota was a maroon Forrester Mia didn’t recognize. After parking the Suburban on the street, she hurried onto the porch. The door wasn’t even locked, and when she went in, loud male voices were coming from the family room. Then Mia realized that they were laughing.
Gabe and three big teenagers she didn’t recognize were sprawled on the couch and chairs. Brooke was sitting on the floor in front of the TV set. Her little face was only six inches from the screen, which was showing someone making an ill-advised effort to jump a bike over a wooden fence.
One of the boys turned and saw her. He jumped to his feet and came over with his hand outstretched.
“Hey, you must be Mrs. Quinn. Sorry if we surprised you. We’re Gabe’s friends from the football team. My name’s Zachary Young, and that’s Rufus Sledge and Eldon Reid.” Eldon only nodded and gave her a sleepy smile, while Rufus slowly got to his feet. Rufus was a mountain of a boy, and even the other two made Gabe look small in comparison. Now the protein powder made more sense.
She felt uneasy that these boys she had never met before had been in her house. “It’s nice to meet you guys,” she said, smiling. “You can call me Mia.”
“Mia.” Zach nodded. “It’s great to meet you. Gabe said you’re a prosecutor, right? That must be a cool job, putting away the bad guys.”
“It can be.” Mia was impressed. Had any of Gabe’s friends ever talked to her about her job before? She almost felt a little misty. If Gabe’s friends were growing up, he must be too. She could only hope that with other adults, Gabe was able to rise to the occasion as this boy was.
“So I’ve always wondered—do you get to decide who to go after? Like, can you pick which bad guy you want to put away?”
And Mia had wondered if the kids on the football team would be less interested in academics. “My boss assigns cases, but there’s still something called prosecutorial discretion.” She tried to find the right words to explain it. “Sometimes what someone is charged with depends on the circumstances. Say the cops find a man standing over the body of his dead wife—and he has blood on his hands. Did he hit her over the head on purpose? Then he should be charged with murder. Did he get angry and push her, and she fell and hit her head? Then the charge should be manslaughter. But what if he’d just been talking to her when she slipped and hit her head and his hands got bloody when he tried to help her? In that case, he’s not guilty of anything. That’s where I come in. It’s my job to review the evidence, determine what happened, and decide what the charge should be. I mean, sure, I have a boss, but he doesn’t have time to go through all my cases. I get to make a lot of the decisions.”
Eyes shining, Zach turned to Gabe. “You should definitely have your mom come talk for Career Day.”
Gabe nodded. His cheeks were red, and he wouldn’t make eye contact with Mia.
“Well, we should probably be going,” Zach said, and Eldon heaved himself to his feet. They muttered good-byes as they passed her, and Eldon did some kind of fist bump thing with Gabe.
After the door closed, she turned to him. “Gabe, you need to be more careful about keeping the door locked and the curtains drawn when you’re home. Don’t ever let in anyone you don’t know. And I know I haven’t said anything about it before, but I really don’t feel comfortable with you having friends over when I’m not home. Same thing with you being over at a friend’s house. I don’t want you to be there if there isn’t an adult home.”
Gabe snorted. “What—you don’t trust me?”
“I do trust you. But kids take more chances when parents aren’t around. Sometimes they get stuck in situations and don’t know how to say no.”
His face reddened. “I know what the issue really is. You just don’t want me to have any friends. All you want me to do is watch Brooke. You already get home so late, and it’s been even later recently. And most of the other parents work too. So with your rules, now I won’t have any friends.”
Mia’s resolution to treat her son with kindness was forgotten. She gritted her teeth. “It’s about keeping you safe, Gabe. You may feel like you’re an adult, but you are not.” She went into the kitchen.
Half the cupboard doors were standing open, and on the counter lay the orange plastic wrapper from a block of Tillamook, holding just a sliver of cheese.
Her anger found an outlet. “Gabe, did you guys eat all of this cheese? That was a two-pound block.” She had been planning to make macaroni and cheese later in the week, the good, homemade kind, not the kind that came from a blue box.
“Sorry!” Gabe called.
She sniffed. “Come in here.” When he did, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “What is that smell?” It was sweet, oily, metallic—and it seemed to be coming from the basement. She had caught a whiff of the same smell, only not as strong, in the family room.
“It’s WD-40. Me and the guys were lifting weights in the basement. I need to bulk up and they were giving me tips. The leg extension piece was sticking, so we sprayed it.”
How big of a mess was it down there? It was embarrassing to think of strangers seeing it. She definitely had to hold the garage sale soon, in case Gabe kept having friends over to lift weights—when she was home, of course.
“I’m going to run out to the store and get bread and cheese. Is there anything else we need?” Maybe she would get a rotisserie chicken. That would save time making dinner.
“Can you pick me up some protein bars? All the guys say I need to eat more protein.”
And how much would those cost? Still, she nodded and jotted it down.
The next few hours passed in a blur of shopping, pulling dinner together, cleaning, giving Brooke a bath and putting her to bed. Everything took longer than it should have.
Mia had enlarged a photo of Scott and put it by Brooke’s bed, hoping that it would help him stay in her memory. Her chest ached when she thought of Brooke forgetting everything about her father. But tonight Brooke showed him a doll she liked, patted his face, and said good night, while Mia held back tears. When she bent over to kiss her daughter good night, she was sucking her thumb.
“Brooke—thumbs aren’t for sucking.” But they sure had been recently.
Obediently Brooke popped her thumb out of her mouth, but Mia was sure it would go right back in as soon as she left. She was a bad mother. She used to be a fairly good one, before Scott died, before Gabe stopped wanting to have anything to do with her. Now she needed to be mother and father both, and she was doing a poor job at both.
After she closed Brooke’s door, she stuck her head in Gabe’s room.
“Be sure to finish your history homework.”
“That’s what I’m working on.”
Maybe. But his computer was open too. Was he writing a report or checking social media? She thought about nagging some more but then changed subjects. “And be careful on Facebook, okay? Don’t ever say anything you wouldn’t in person.”
“I am careful, Mom.” He made an irritated grimace. “It’s like you don’t trust me anymore.”
“It’s not that, honey. It’s just that lately I’ve been seeing how much trouble someone can get into on Facebook. You have to realize that everything you do online, every place you go, every time you click on a link—it’s all being recorded and stored on a server somewhere. Nothing you do is private.”
“I know that, Mom.” Gabe rolled his eyes at her, and she gave up.
Mia made sure the house was locked up tight, the curtains covering every inch of window. What if the same person had killed Stan and Colleen? Was it possible he might be out there, watching the house? She didn’t want to give him any clues as to where she was. No one was going to shoot her through a window.
Finally she was in her bedroom with the printouts from Colleen’s computer and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos she had bought at the store and managed to sneak into the house under a pack of toilet paper.
She paged through Colleen’s documents. Most were mundane. A food diary that lasted for eleven days and then stopped. Tax forms that showed no surprises. A budget, a packing list, a family tree. She hadn’t kept a journal.
The most interesting were the notes from the dating site. Flirty, friendly, funny. Sometimes more R-rated than PG.
Mia fell asleep with her mouth tasting sour and spicy, her face pillowed on printouts.
At 12:13, Mia started awake.
Brooke was screaming again.