I dried my hands and joined him, pulling up a chair.
“I’m not even close to as good as you are with your sleuthing, but we don’t have anything else to do tonight,” he said. “What do you say we do a little searching and see what we can find?”
“I think it’s a great idea.”
Giovanni tapped a finger on of the keys, and the screen lit up, its soft glow washing over his face.
“All right,” he said. “What do we search first?”
“Start simple,” I said. “Try typing in the words ‘Anne Cambria woods.’”
He typed in what I’d said, hit enter, and a list of search results filled the screen.
“Not much information here,” he said. “We have an Anne who runs a gift shop, an Anne who writes poems about tide pools, and an article about a woman named Ann without an E who leads some of the birdwatching tours in town.”
“Nothing stands out about any of them,” I said. “Try searching ‘Anne locket California.’”
He cleared the search bar and typed again.
“Still nothing,” he said.
I stared at the screen, my frustration building.
Given the bone fragment we’d found, I wondered if there was more to Anne, and my thoughts turned to more sinister events.
“Maybe we need to cast a wider net,” I suggested. “Let’s say Anne does exist. She may not live in Cambria.”
“Good point.”
“Try ‘unsolved cases San Luis Obispo County’ and add a time frame, let’s say in the past thirty years.”
He typed in what I’d suggested, added dates, and the results were different this time. As we read down the page, I pointed to one entry in particular. “There, click on that one, ‘local teen still missing after twenty-five years.’”
Giovanni clicked on the link.
The article opened with a grainy photo of a girl with shoulder-length dark hair and a wide, hopeful smile. Her name was Anne Fontaine. Anne had grown up in Morro Bay, and at the age of seventeen she’d vanished while spending the summer with her aunt in Cambria.
No body, no witnesses, and no arrests.
But now I was certain Anne Fontaine and the locket Logan sketched were connected to Audrey somehow.
As I read further, the article went on to explain that Anne’s aunt, Glinda Potts, lived in the Harvest Creek subdivision at the time, a fact that made my skin prickle.
“Anne stayed with her aunt the summer she went missing,” I said. “And her aunt just so happened to live in the same subdivision Audrey’s parents live in now. It’s a big coincidence, isn’t it? What are the odds Audrey and Anne both hiked in the same forest?”
“I’d say the odds are high.”
I stood, pacing the room, thinking.
A few minutes later, a theory came to light.
“I believe Audrey visited the cabin at least once, but I’d guess it was more often than that. When she was there, she carved Logan’s initials into the wood. She also tidied up, maybe thinking she’d turned the old cabin into her own private sanctuary. While cleaning, she found a locket inscribed with Anne’s name, and I bet she also found the initials AF carved into the wood.”
“Seems plausible to me.”
“What if, while Audrey was cleaning, she started digging around in the hole beneath the bed and she discovered what we did—a bone, or multiple bones even. She tells Logan about the bone and the locket, which is why he sketched it. Maybe the two of them started doing some investigating, and they figured out the locket belonged to Anne Fontaine, the girl who went missing.”
“If you’re right, and I’d say you are, I understand why Logan left when he did.”
