“Yeah, I did,” Ash confirmed. “I’m sure you know by now, since I already told Fox this, but we argued the last night I saw him. He was drunk. Maybe the most drunk I’ve ever seen him in my entire life, which is saying something.”
Ash shifted in his chair, jaw clenching. “I left the house and I went to Callie’s. I was there late in the night until she closed. You can ask her. When I got home, my dad wasn’t there. I don’t know where he went, but I never saw or heard from him again.”
“Until now.” Emersyn’s stare locked on mine. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.” It was an automatic response. “I’m shaken up, but okay.”
Emersyn’s mouth thinned, a look of doubt crossing over her face.
I needed to try harder, needed to pretend that I was at work, convincing an audience with my smile.
“Do you have any idea why he would contact you like this?” Emersyn asked.
My gaze momentarily darted to Fox. “No. I haven’t had any contact with him since I left his house when I was eighteen.”
“But he knows where you are,” August said.
“Someone was tracking the GPS on her phone.” Fox’s tone was venomous. “I should have checked her phone earlier. If someone was willing to mess with her computer, why wouldn’t they have gotten to her phone?”
“Howdidthey get to my phone?” I wasn’t much of a tech person. I knew enough to get by, but the stuff that Fox did was beyond my scope of comprehension.
Fox gritted his teeth. “If they had control of your computer, and if your computer is connected to your phone, they could have gotten remote access from there. Or they could have gotten hold of your phone somehow.”
I grimaced. “I don’t think I’ve ever left my phone unattended.”
Fox shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll have a new phone now.”
“Do you think it was Charles messing with all your tech?” Emersyn asked.
I started picking unconsciously. “I have no idea,” I said. “He was just a cop. He had a computer, sure, but this seems like advanced stuff.”
“We can’t rule out that he could be working with someone,” Fox added.
“Do you know anybody who could do things like this?” I asked my brother.
Ash looked at Fox. “Just one.”
Fox narrowed his eyes. “Your father didn’t have any colleagues or friends who were into tech?”
Ash frowned, his gaze drifting off to the side as if in thought. “I mean…not that I know of. He didn’t have a lot of friends, maybe one or two I could name off the top of my head. He didn’t share a lot about his life with me.”
August was taking notes on a tablet. “Could you give me those names?” he asked. “And do you have the computer he had at the time he disappeared?"
“I can give you the names,” Ash said. “But I don’t have the computer. He must’ve taken it with him. Some of his things were missing, too. Clothes and personal stuff. He packed a bag.”
August nodded and jotted something else down.
“I still don’t understand why your father would call you and threaten you like this,” Emersyn said. “Especially after all this time? Why now?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“He wanted you to stop looking into Jane Doe, right?” Graham chimed in.
“I don’t understand why he would care…”
August and Fox shared a look. The two of them almost had a secret language of their own. Like they could understand each other without speaking.
“You’re trying to figure out if Jane Doe could be your mother,” August said. “We can only assume he knows that. If he is the one who hacked your computer, we can guess that he knows everything you’ve been doing and working on since you got back to Ember Hollow.”
