The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

“Flattened bullet taken out of my great granddad after a man who didn’t like him shot him.”

One could say, if I had a million guesses, I would not have come close to that.

“Why didn’t that man like him?”

“Because my great granddad was a US Marshal and there were folks still around who weren’t fond of his law-abiding ways.”

Righty ho.

Irrespective of how fascinating, I was done with that story for the time being.

“We had some excitement today, of the entertaining kind,” I told him.

“I heard.”

“Kimmy is life. I want to be her when I grow up.”

“I’ll take back the present I got for you and buy you fifty Christmas sweaters.”

My heart grew light. “You got me a present?”

He gave me a look.

He didn’t get me a present.

He got me a good present.

“I wasn’t referring to her wardrobe,” I clarified. “I was referring to her ability to get away with a justifiable assault in front of two officers of the law.”

His beard twitched again.

I hated to do it.

But I had to do it.

“You didn’t catch him,” I whispered.

He shook his head. Once.

“You okay?”

He nodded his head. Once.

“Want me to pull your hair?”

He lunged, plucked me out from the mess of paper scraps and ribbons.

And took me to bed.

Fifty-Two

He Agreed with Me

The boys came home early the next night.

If you call 8:45 early.

Jace and Jess bolted down Megan’s Mexican casserole glumly, and I watched closely, lest I need to save them from falling face first into cheesy-chili-chicken-tortilla deliciousness.

They were dead on their stools.

They dragged themselves to the basement where they were, for the time being, sleeping.

The Bohannan clan.

Circling the wagons.

Bohannan didn’t linger either. He went upstairs minutes after the boys went the other direction.

I gave him some time, and then Celeste wandered up with me.

At the top landing, we hugged, said goodnight, she hit her room, and I went to ours.

I was sitting cross-legged facing the bathroom in the closed-off-from-the-outside space when he got out of the shower.

He had wet hair and was in his pajama pants that he kept on the hook behind the door.

“I know you probably want to hit it,” I said softly, and I did know this because his eyes carried fatigue and his face was drawn. “But something occurred to me today, and I wanted to talk to you about it.”

Without a word, he came and stretched out across the bed before me, on his side, head in hand.

“I don’t know all the specifics of the case, but something you said the other night struck me,” I told him.

His chin moved slightly in what I was taking as a, Go on, and I was also taking this not as his usual “I’m feeling like silent badass communication,” but that he was too exhausted to speak.

So I hurried.

“It made me remember something I thought was weird. About Alice.”

His eyes flared with interest, but he said nothing.

“She was taken the day I moved in. A weekday. A Monday.”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t have an eight-year-old’s slumber party on a weekday.”

He pushed up to his forearm.

Yes.

Interested.

“If this guy knew her, if he lured her, if he planned this with her, he had to be able to get to her. And people like this, this guy maybe especially, they insinuate themselves into investigations and…” I didn’t want to do this, I was relatively certain I was wrong, because he was not the person I chased, or Robertson saw, but I had to do it, “…and Ray runs kids’ programs at the rec center.”

He expelled a breath and his hips listed back.

“When that guy came on the scene, and we knew he did what he did, that thought occurred to me. He’d already been interviewed by Harry after Alice was taken. So we took another look at him.”

I nodded.

“I don’t know why Audrey and Dale had the party on a weekday, outside it was Alice’s actual birthday. The girls were not supposed to be outside. Audrey took off work early, and with another mom, picked them all up from school. They had a thing at the Double D with sundaes, came home and watched a Disney movie, had pizza and cake and presents, watched another Disney movie and then they all went to bed. That other mom was helping her take them to school the next morning. Both Audrey and Dale gave the sense that Alice was a little spoiled. She got what she wanted, and she wanted to celebrate her birthday on her birthday.”

“Okay,” I replied.

“And then Ray came on the scene, and he works with a lot of kids, so like I said, I had the same idea as you, and we double checked.”

“Okay,” I repeated when he paused.

“All those girls were friends because they were in the same dance class, which is what they did a couple afternoons after school. A few of them, including Alice, also are watched by Betty, the mom who helped Audrey out. Betty is also one of the only friends Audrey has in town. Betty lives close to school, and she’s a stay-at-home mom. She picks them up, walks them to her house, or gets them to dance class. When class isn’t on, she watches them after school for a couple of hours before the other parents come pick them up. They pay her to do that. In the report, notes from her interview, she referred to it as ‘pin money.’ Alice was one of the kids she watched. None of them were in the rec center programs, which are mostly geared toward sports and physical fitness, for boys and for girls. Just not those girls.”