“The usual. Did I know Olivia? Where was I last night?” He added rum to his mug. “Aaron was there.”
Of course he was. “He’s probably the one who told the sheriff to question you.”
“Probably. He didn’t have much to say, though he did tell the sheriff that you verified that I was here all last night.”
“That was big of him.”
“I always felt bad about busting you guys up. You seemed really happy with him.”
“You didn’t bust us up. And it’s just as well. I got to see his true colors.”
“I guess you wouldn’t have made a good cop’s wife.”
But she could have been a good wife to Aaron. If he had been a good man.
“I’ll never forgive him for putting you in this position a second time,” she said. “When Scott Sprague told me they had arrested you—”
“They didn’t arrest me. They questioned me. And not just about Olivia. They asked other stuff, too. They wanted to know if I had seen anyone else with Olivia. And they asked about Trevor.” He picked up the mug and eyed her over the rim. “Why didn’t you tell me he died? I found out when I showed up this morning that he drove his car into a canyon. They think it was suicide.”
“The search and rescue call yesterday morning.” She sat across from him and cradled her own mug. “That was a friend of yours?”
“Yeah.” He sipped the tea.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Why were they asking about him? They don’t think you had anything to do with his death, do you?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. They were asking when I saw him last, did he seem upset or depressed, stuff like that.”
She sipped the tea, not even caring that it scalded her tongue. “I can’t believe this is happening again,” she said.
“It’s going to be okay. No one can say I was with Olivia because I never even knew her.”
“Did they say anything else about Olivia? Did they say what they found that had everyone so agitated? Was it something that belonged to her, or some other kind of evidence?”
“They didn’t say anything about that. Someone at camp said it was a shirt or something. And that it had blood on it.”
“What do the people at camp think happened to her?”
“No one knows. At first, people said she must have run away. Kids do that, sometimes, I guess. But if they found blood…” He shook his head. “There are some bad people out there.”
She couldn’t do anything to stop those people. All she could do was try to protect the people she loved. The only family she had left.
Daniel and Sylvia Pryorhad the shattered look of people everywhere dealing with loss and uncertainty. They sat in two chairs in the sheriff’s office Tuesday morning, untouched coffee cups in front of them.
“Olivia was happy at the camp,” Sylvia said. “Every time we talked to her, she was excited about everything she was doing. All the fun she was having.” She glanced at her husband. “We hadn’t heard her that happy about anything in a long time.”
“Her counselor told us she was sent to the camp to get her away from an older boy she was seeing,” Travis said.
“Yes,” Daniel Pryor said. “He was sixteen. Olivia was barely thirteen. We felt she was too young to be that serious aboutanyone. We caught her sneaking out to see him and felt we had to do something.”
“Olivia was very upset with us at first,” Sylvia said. “But she came around. After her first week at camp, I could tell she was really happy. It was like…like we had our little girl back.” Her voice broke and she looked away.
“Who is this boy she was seeing?”
“Jared French,” Daniel said. “As soon as the camp called to tell us Olivia was missing, I called Jared to find out if he knew anything. He swears he hasn’t been in touch with Olivia. His parents believe he’s telling the truth.”
“And Jared is at his home now?” Travis asked.
“Actually, he and his family are in Michigan, visiting family,” Daniel said. “So we know he and Olivia didn’t run away together.”
