“Hello? You said I can ask you anything, right?” I said, grabbing his arm. “So what does she know? Where’s she going?”
My chest was about to burst in frustration, but Joaquin remained silent. I turned to Tristan. “Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Rory—” Tristan started.
“Dude, now is not the time,” Joaquin said warningly, grabbing Tristan’s shoulder. “We have to go.”
Tristan’s face flushed with color. “You have to be kidding me. Now you want to shut her out? This is her sister we’re talking about!”
My pulse pounded in my very eyes. What were they talking about? What were they keeping from me?
“This is different, Tristan,” Joaquin said through his teeth. “This is DEFCON One. Something’s wrong. The girl wasn’t ready yet. We have to get inside. We have to tell them what’s going on. You know this.” He turned to me, his jaw clenching and unclenching. “I’m sorry, Rory,” he said, his tone all business.
Then he turned and started off in the direction of Tristan’s house. At least, I thought his house was off that way. In the fog, it was almost impossible to know for sure. Tristan looked at me and pressed his lips together, clearly desperate to speak. I felt like I was being folded inside out.
“Come on, dude,” Joaquin said, his voice coming from somewhere deep within the fog.
Tristan took one step back, one step away. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Tristan, no. Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Please, just tell me what’s going on. I know you want to. Just tell me!”
He shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “Not yet.”
“What does that mean, not yet?” I cried, tears streaming down my face. With one last, regretful look, he turned and walked away from me, the mist swirling around him. “Wait! What does that mean, not yet? Tristan! Tristan, come back! Don’t just leave me here!”
But Tristan didn’t come back, and I was left alone in the fog, holding my sister’s sweater.
I was right on my father’s heels as he shoved open the doors of the Juniper Landing Police Department and barreled into the freezing cold lobby, slipping his Yankees baseball cap from his head.
“It’s my daughter!” he shouted. “She’s—”
We both stopped in our tracks in the center of the wide room. There were about fifty people gathered there in dark blue JUNIPER LANDING jackets, and they all fell silent and stared. Most of them were gathered around the counter, where it looked like the police had laid out a map of some kind. I heard a rustling, and suddenly the heavyset officer from that morning stepped out from behind the counter, hiking up his pants at the back.
“You must be Mr. Thayer,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Police Chief Grantz. We already know about your daughter, sir. We’re putting together a search party.”
He gestured around the room, and a few of the people around us nodded. A man with white hair tucked a piece of paper behind his back, and I thought I saw a glimpse of Darcy’s face on it. I glanced around quickly and saw a few other people shove photos into their pockets as well. Where had they gotten a picture of Darcy?
“Thank you, but we don’t need a search party,” my father said gruffly. “What we need is to call the FBI.”
A murmur went through the crowd and quickly grew into a din. Chief Grantz looked around nervously.
“Let’s go back to my office and talk, shall we?”
The chief gripped my father’s arm and ste
ered him back behind the counter. I followed, feeling dozens of pairs of eyes trailing me as I went. We skirted a few neatly kept desks in the center of the room, and then Grantz opened a door, waiting until we’d stepped inside before he closed it behind him. The chief’s office was small and square, with a metal desk in the center and a huge JUNIPER LANDING PD emblem on the wall behind it. There were no filing cabinets, no high-tech equipment. Nothing but a phone and a coatrack with a jacket and one hat hung on it. In the center of the desk was Darcy’s senior photo from school. My blood ran cold. How had they gotten that picture? No one on this island had that picture except maybe my dad, and if he had it, it was in his wallet. The chief saw me staring at it and shoved it into a drawer.
I glanced at my father, but he didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss. In the next room, a pair of tense voices argued, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“There’s no need to be alerting the feds, sir,” the chief said quietly. “Your daughter has been missing less than an hour.”
“But there is a reason,” my father said, shooting me a wary, bolstering look as he wrung his baseball cap in his hands. “My family is here as part of the witness protection program. My daughter Rory was attacked by a serial killer named Roger Krauss just last week and as far as we know he was never caught. There’s a possibility he has Darcy now.”
The man stared at us. There was a long, drawn-out pause, and I felt like I could hear the gears in his head working through this information. “Sir, that’s highly unlikely.”
“I don’t care how unlikely it is!” my father shouted. “I want them called in, now!”
The police chief took a step back and for once in my life, I was glad that my father was so scary when he was pissed off. In the next room, something slammed and there was a shout of surprise.