“So what made your parents move to Napa from Florida?” he asked.
“You mean, aside from the Sunshine State going to shit and no longer being a safe place for their gay son to visit?”
He exhaled his agreement as he nodded. “Understood.”
“Also, you know, both Jon and I moved out here,” she continued. “They came out to visit and really loved Napa. LA’s really not my dad’s style. He’s a teacher. High School English.”
“What does your mom do?”
“She’s a librarian. And a writer. Well, mostly a writer these days. She’s working on her fourth book.”
“Whoa,” Luc said. “That’s not at all intimidating.”
“Don’t worry,” she said grinning at him. “They love Dave, so they’ll love you, too. I know it.”
Chapter Thirteen
Friday
Jon wasn’t in the shrubbery or spreadeagle on the lawn.
And even though it was barely 0600, Casey’s parents were awake and dressed, their modest bungalow lit up like the missing-person HQ it had unhappily become.
Casey’s mom came to the front door before Rio and Casey were even out of the car.
Meeting Casey’s parents was surreal. And massively awkward. But really only for Rio, since he was the only one in the room who knew that he was a total lying liar.
It was one thing to be someone’s fake boyfriend to fool their asshole ex. But it was another entirely to continue the subterfuge right in the face of said asshole ex’s kind and loving family.
Fortunately, everyone was too busy being worried about Jon to pay Rio much attention.
Casey’s mom—Tina, tiny but endlessly energetic, with a sweet, round face and thick, grey-streaked dark hair cut shoulder-length—gave Rio a hug, saying, “We love Dave so much. We’re so glad he’s happy,” before turning her attention to the street map her husband—Jorge—had unfolded across the kitchen table.
Jorge was tall and lanky, sharply angular to Tina’s soft roundness, with a rather fierce full grey beard that seemed a defiantly humorous so what response to the fact that the hair atop his head was long gone. After briefly shaking Rio’s hand, Jorge had returned to the stove where he was scrambling a mountain of eggs in a decadently large frying pan.
“His wallet and phone were found here, in the Sprouts parking lot.” Tina tapped on a circled area of the map that looked to be a walkable distance from their house, which was also marked on the map with a circle and a large H.
“Who found the phone?” Rio asked. “And when? Do we know that?”
“Her name is Susan Fetterling,” Tina told them. “She works at the Sprouts. They close at ten, and she was taking out the trash around 9:30 when she heard it ringing.”
Casey had picked up Jon’s phone and was clearly trying to figure out his lock code. “He’s got a million missed call notifications.”
“Most of them are from me,” Tina said, shaking her head in an impatient no when Jorge offered her a heaping plate of eggs and toast.
“That’s too much, Dad. I’ll serve myself, thanks.” Casey turned down the plate, too, which meant it was finally Rio’s turn.
He took it eagerly. “Thank you, sir.”
Casey continued her conversation with her mother. “But all these notifications means he wasn’t just ignoring you when you called. His phone was probably out there—out of his possession, at least—for a while.” She kept trying to unlock the phone, but failing. “Weird no one else heard it ringing.”
“Not weird,” Rio said.
“Yeah, it is,” Casey countered, giving up on the phone. “Sprout’s parking lot is not that big. Maybe we should look harder at the woman who says she found it—Susan.”
“She heard it when she was taking out the trash,” Rio reminded her, “So it probably wasn’t sitting in the main lot, but was back near the dumpster. Generally, that’s behind the store.”
As Rio continued to devour his eggs—damn, they were good—he met Casey’s worried gaze, and he knew what she was thinking. Back behind most stores generally meant hidden from the street. The perfect place to meet your dealer. As opposed to meeting, say, a Grindr hookup. Also, the likely possibility that Jon had lost his phone in the middle of the day was making the hookup-gone-bad theory less and less likely.
