This was why Sara hadn’t brought up the subject before.
“Not that this has anything to do with Will, or how you feel about him, or why you’re not talking to him about getting married, but I can help you sort through Jeffrey’s stuff if you want,” Tessa offered.
“No, go home and get some rest.” Sara finally reached out and touched one of the boxes. She felt a warmth spread through her fingers. “I’m going to be reading all night.”
“Four eyes are faster than two.”
“It’s a lot of jargon, technical stuff.”
“I can read technical stuff.”
Sara caught her sharp tone too late. “Tessie, I know you can—”
“I’m not Amelia Bedelia. I understand jargon. I know basic anatomy. I’ve been reading a lot of blogs on midwifery.”
Sara tried to hide her laughter in a cough.
“Are you laughing at me?”
Sara stifled another laugh.
“Jesus H. Christ.” Tessa pushed her chair back from the table. “I have to listen to this bullshit from Lemuel. I’m not taking it off you.”
“I’m sorry. Tess.” Sara laughed again. “I didn’t—I’m sorry. Please don’t—”
It was too late. Tessa slammed the door behind her.
Another laugh slipped out of Sara’s mouth.
Then she felt the sinking guilt that came from being an inexcusable asshole. She should’ve gotten up and followed her sister into the hall, but her legs wouldn’t move. She looked back at the boxes. Three in all. Jeffrey had labeled them eight years ago. Before he was back with Sara. Before they had rebuilt their lives together. Before she had watched the life slowly drain from his beautiful eyes.
REBECCA CATERINO BOX ONE OF ONE
LESLIE TRUONG BOX ONE OF ONE
THOMASINA HUMPHREY BOX ONE OF ONE
Sara found a pair of scissors in the kitchen. She carried the bottle of Scotch back to the table. She found the remote and turned on some soft music. She had a legal pad and pen in her briefcase. She sat down at the table. She cut open the first box.
Was there a smell attached to the pages?
Jeffrey had used oatmeal lotion on his hands when he thought no one was looking. He didn’t wear a cologne, but his aftershave had a wonderful, woodsy scent. Sara could remember the rough feel of his skin at night. The soft touch of his fingers tracing slowly down her body. She closed her eyes, trying to summon the deep baritone that had thrilled her, then infuriated her, then made her fall in love with him all over again.
Was this cheating?
Were her memories of Jeffrey betraying Will?
Sara put her head in her hands. She had started to cry. She wiped her eyes. She poured herself a drink. She pulled the first stack of pages out of the box and started to read.
Grant County—Wednesday
10
Jeffrey studied the contents of Rebecca Caterino’s case file. The paperwork on the accident in the woods covered his desk. Witness statements from her dorm mates. Lena and Brad’s reports. Frank’s summary. Jeffrey’s own recollections. Photos from Lena’s BlackBerry. Sara’s notes on the resuscitation. Some scrawled preliminary lines from Dan Brock, who was still officially the coroner on the case, even though a coroner wasn’t needed.
Not yet, at least.
He closed the file and dropped it in the cardboard box behind his desk. The label read GENERAL, but Jeffrey didn’t feel right about filing the girl away. Actually, his didn’t feel right had turned into a straight-up felt wrong.
He wasn’t quite sure what had tipped him over the line. Maybe the fact that the only person who might be able to fill in some details about the accident was currently missing.
Leslie Truong had left the Caterino crime scene around six yesterday morning. The one-and-a-half-mile trek back to campus would’ve taken her twenty, maybe thirty minutes. The rainstorm had rushed in around that same time. Jeffrey told himself that Truong had taken cover under a tree or slipped in the woods. A twisted ankle. A broken bone. That was the only reason she hadn’t made it to the nurse’s office. She was waiting for someone to find her.
Half of his patrol force and several volunteers from the college had spent the night trying to locate the missing woman in the woods. Jeffrey had participated in his share of grueling searches for missing teenagers, but this was different. Truong was an older student, a senior who was close to graduating with a major in chemical polymers. When the woods hadn’t panned out, Jeffrey had driven to her off-campus apartment. Truong’s blue Toyota Prius had been found parked in the lot behind her building. Her purse was locked inside her bedroom. The three students who shared rooms there had no idea where she was. The list of friends that they gave him had all been dead ends.
Truong had taken her phone with her into the woods, the same phone she’d used to call 911 to report finding Caterino. The battery had died, or maybe the phone had gotten wet. No calls could get through. According to Lena’s official report, Truong had been upset about discovering Caterino, but not so much that she’d needed an escort to see the school nurse. Lena had offered to find her a ride. Truong had said she preferred to walk back to campus.
Of course, that was according to Lena.
Jeffrey still had men in the woods, trying to take advantage of the fresh daylight. The biggest obstacle was that they had no idea which path Truong had taken. There were several options winding through the dense forest. And that was making the assumption that Truong followed a path. It was possible she’d run through the tangle of vines and briars because she had just seen a body and she was desperate to reach a safe, familiar setting. He let himself think about her waiting under a tree. It was possible someone was finding her right now.
Or it was possible none of that was true and someone had taken her.
Jeffrey’s thoughts kept swinging along the same pendulum as they had with Rebecca Caterino. Throughout the night, Jeffrey had vacillated on the reason behind Truong’s disappearance. One minute, he was thinking that she was hiding out somewhere after the trauma of finding the body. The next minute, he was thinking that something bad had happened and the girl had been abducted.
He had no idea why a bad thing—any bad thing—would happen to either of them. As with Caterino, Truong was well-liked on campus. Jeffrey had talked to her roommates, her boss at the coffee shop, and her building super, a woman who came across more as a house mother. Bonita Truong, who lived in San Francisco, had not heard from her daughter in days. This was not unusual, a fact that the mother seemed fine with. Jeffrey had to think there were two reasons that a student would go clear across the country to school. Either they were trying to get away from their parents or their parents had raised the kind of kid who spread her wings on her own.
Jeffrey felt strongly that Leslie Truong fell into this latter category. If he had to describe the missing student based on what little information he’d gleaned, he’d say she was level-headed, hard-working and stable. Four to five days a week, she was up at the crack of dawn, walking two miles to the lake to do tai chi. Lena had described her as woo-woo, but she definitely didn’t come across as the type of girl who disappeared into the night. Then again, Truong had never before found what she assumed was a dead body lying in the woods.
What bothered Jeffrey was a stray detail that could mean something or could mean nothing at all. On the phone last night, Bonita Truong had told Jeffrey that her daughter was angry with her roommates. Some of her clothes were missing. Someone had borrowed her favorite headband and hadn’t returned it. Apparently, Leslie used the pink band to pull back her hair as she washed her face every night, which was something that Jeffrey was familiar with from living with Sara. They had often argued about the blue headband she’d left out on the sink basin, an area that offered little space to begin with. Jeffrey had even bought her a basket to store some of her crap in. Sara had ended up using it to hold dog toys.
Jeffrey turned his chair to look out the window. The Z4 wasn’t there to taunt him. His watch read just past six in the morning. The clinic didn’t open until eight. He looked at his calendar. It was the last Wednesday of the month, so Sara wouldn’t be at work anyway. She usually stayed home and plowed through the mountain of paperwork she’d accumulated over the previous month.
He looked at his watch again. Bonita Truong’s plane from San Francisco would be landing in three hours. The drive from Atlanta would take another two. He needed to rotate out some of the searchers so they could get some sleep. The station was empty but for Brad Stephens. The young officer had volunteered to babysit the prisoners in the holding cells. Jeffrey imagined if he went back to holding, he would find Brad asleep, too. So Jeffrey would not go back into holding.