Lauren was gone. Nicole didn’t know where Ethan was. He could be on the way to Columbus, for all she knew. They were years beyond his owing her an explanation for his decisions, but disappointment mingled with irritation that he hadn’t at least sent a text by now. On Saturday night, she didn’t see how he could go home without knowing what happened to Quinn. But five days changed that. No one could put life on hold indefinitely. If she hadn’t broken her ankle, Nicole would be wrestling with the same decision. Was it time to go back to work and wait for news from the authorities?
Nicole adjusted the pillow under her foot and picked up her phone from the side table. She wasn’t used to how quiet her phone had been without the frenzy of an active story to work on for the St. Louis newspaper that employed her. No sources to confirm, no facts to check, no quotes to capture, no long text message threads with the detective who was her first contact on any crime story. The only project she brought with her when she left St. Louis was a tame background story on St. Louis history that wasn’t due for another two weeks. She’d already done the interviews and research she needed in order to write it, and the latest information from Terry, the administrative assistant, was that the editor no longer wanted it. The lack of an investigative assignment didn’t explain the silence from Nicole’s editor—especially since Nicole had left multiple messages about her injury. She could believe no one had time to be chatty on the phone, but she at least expected a sympathetic e-mail. Nicole lifted a finger to call again but changed her mind. What good would one more message do? They knew where she was.
Mentally Nicole reviewed the facts surrounding Quinn’s absence, as if organizing them for a story and searching for the overlooked detail that would unlock the mystery. She looked across the room at Quinn’s unyielding computer, and frustration welled. Computers were like brains, she mused. They held memories and evidence of fleeting thoughts and the language that distinguished one person from another. She’d never had a story where she got access to a computer and didn’t find something—a new fact, confirmation of a suspicion, a downloaded photo, a revealing Internet search history, a deleted e-mail thread that still existed in the ghostly interior of the computer’s memory and came to life in the hands of a computer specialist. Usually, though, she had help discovering what a computer held.
She’d never stolen a computer before. She told herself that in Quinn’s neighborly spirit he’d never denied her the loan of any of his belongings. Ethan had guessed that Quinn’s computer was at least seven years old—ancient by technology standards. No wonder it didn’t have the energy to cooperate with her inquiry.
Before she left, Lauren had pushed the recliner closer to the window with the remark that Nicole might enjoy a better view that didn’t require twisting her spine. Now Nicole turned her head to the window and the brightness of the day. The whole week had been stunning, stirring in her a craving to be outside. Each day, though, rattled Hidden Falls. Nicole was used to finding answers. People called her persistent—or downright stubborn—but no one would describe her as patient.
Main Street was full of memories, some of them welcome and some less so. Nicole could see the bench across the street, where in his grief her father had once left her and forgotten to come back. She’d waited and waited, clinging to his promise that he’d be right back. In the end, it was Quinn who found Nicole shivering in fear and warmed her with the jacket that swallowed her as she plunged her face into the inner panels that smelled most like Quinn.
Nicole took a deep breath, wishing she could find the place in her own brain where that smell was stored so she could inhale it again and peek up at Quinn’s reassuring face with his amber eyes and ruddy cheeks. Her father loved her, but it was Quinn who made her feel safe.
Was he safe now?
A store now heralded by a sign about natural organic foods had once been a sweets shop, an irony that made Nicole smile. The sweets shop had been there for decades and featured old-style display cases and dispensers that Nicole hadn’t seen anywhere since she left Hidden Falls. St. Louis had its share of business history, but perhaps she was no longer in the habit of seeking out quaint little shops. As a child, if she had a dollar of her own, Nicole went into that store and calculated carefully what she could get. As a teenager, when she had money from babysitting or working for Marvin Stanford at the Dispatch, Nicole enjoyed surprising her friends with small gifts of fancy handmade candies. Quinn had always been partial to cherries covered in dark chocolate. Nicole gave him a box of twelve every Christmas, and every year he offered the first piece to her and then took one himself. They grinned at each other as they synchronized the first bites.
Did any place in town sell handmade chocolates now? Or did Quinn have to go to Birch Bend to search out his favorites?
She watched the park across the street. It looked the same as it always had, with a clump of towering maples at the center and evergreen bushes around the edges. The bricked path circled the park with an outlet on Main Street and another on the next street south. The cast-iron benches required minimal maintenance and contributed to the sensation that the little park was a vestige of another era. Perhaps once it had been larger before businesses built up around its edges. Nicole’s mother used to let her run on the brick path as long as no one else was in the park. In the weeks after her mother’s funeral, Quinn twice took eight-year-old Nicole to the park to run the small circle as many times as she needed to, sitting patiently on one of the benches where she could wave at him as she came around the curves.
Had she ever said thank you for any of it?
A pit of regret deepened in Nicole’s stomach. She took Quinn for granted as a child, and in the last ten years, she took him for granted as an adult. She’d never imagined Quinn wouldn’t be there if she reached out for him.
Five days.
Now it might be too late. She’d written enough missing persons stories to know the odds of a good outcome—the outcome loved ones yearned for—dropped with each day. Someone gone five days might never come home.
Nicole banished the thought. He could be sitting in an airport in San Francisco, for all she knew, or in New York waiting for a flight to France. He could be anywhere.
In the park, a little boy in a brown-and-green jacket ran the circles Nicole used to run. She doubted the day’s temperature required a winter jacket, but its bulk didn’t hold him back any more than it would have restrained Nicole when she needed to run. A young woman Nicole presumed to be his mother met him on each lap with a hand outstretched for him to slap as he passed.
Nicole sat up and put a hand on the windowsill. Cooper Elliott was walking through the park. Probably he was simply using the park as a shortcut from the sheriff’s station up to Main Street. He seemed in no particular hurry. Considering that Quinn was missing and his car smashed, Sylvia’s store had been burgled, and Dani’s boat was sabotaged, it seemed to Nicole that anyone on the sheriff’s staff should look busier. Whatever their usual routine was, they should all have plenty to do this week. As the most senior of the handful of deputies working from a base in Hidden Falls, Cooper in particular should be swamped. So why did he look so unflustered?
Nicole made a mental note to track down Cooper’s cell phone number. Lauren’s aunt would have it. Cooper had seemed like a nice man when he was at Lauren’s with Ethan and Sylvia for dinner on the day Nicole broke her ankle, but if his work ethic would benefit from a little pressure, Nicole would be happy to supply it. She wondered if he’d looked over his shoulder to see that his brother was not far behind him with a white bakery bag and hesitant steps. Cooper turned one direction on Main Street, and a few minutes later, Liam turned the opposite way.
Nicole watched the little boy take three laps before the mother grabbed her son’s wrist and guided him off the path. She immediately saw why. An old man shuffled on the bricks. His gait didn’t look particularly unsteady, but given his age and frail appearance, any mother would have been sensible to make sure her child was not the cause of harm.
The old man raised his hat in the kind of greeting he must have learned as a young man. No one did that anymore. But the gesture revealed his face just long enough for Nicole to recognize him—the man from the cemetery on the western edge of Hidden Falls.
Even when Nicole was a child and her mother died, he had seemed old to Nicole. He had guided the mourners to the gravesite, where the minister had said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Now he was unquestionably at least eighty, maybe older.
Tom. Was that his name? It didn’t sound quite right. Nicole fished deeper into her memory.
Not Tom. Dom. “Old Dom,” people had called him.
Short for Dominick. Nicole wasn’t sure if that was his first name or his last name, but it didn’t matter.
She picked up the photo of Ethan’s lookalike and set it on the arm of the recliner. In her lap, she positioned her iPad and opened an Internet search.