“What did he say?” I ask, going to him.
“The same things he’s said before. When we pointed out the discrepancies we’ve found, he couldn’t explain them. He said he didn’t know where the Benadryl came from and he doesn’t remember dreaming about a lost lunch. He only remembers having a dream that he was being taken.”
“What does that mean? Are you going to keep him here?” I ask, still wondering what Wyatt saw that night and why he’s keeping the truth from us.
“No,” he says. “He’s not under arrest. You can take him home with you. Listen,” he says, sensing my hesitation. “If anything happens, if you ever feel scared, there is an officer just outside the cottage.”
I avoid his eye. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it’s not what I wanted to hear.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asks. I want to be honest with him. I want to be able to tell him that I think Elliott is keeping something from me and that I do feel afraid living with Wyatt. But I think of how that would go, the consequences of telling the truth.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“You have my number,” he says, touching my shoulder with his hand. “You can call me anytime, day or night. I don’t mind. This is a small town, Mrs. Gray. I can be anywhere in just a few minutes.”
I nod, touched by his kindness.
That evening, I find myself sitting at the Matthewses’ kitchen table. Joanna invited Sam to sit with us, but he said, “I’m good here,” opting to stand instead, leaned against the countertop inhis work clothes. His shoulders round forward, and there are dark circles under his eyes that have probably been there for as long as Kylie has been gone. He holds a beer by his side by the neck. He offered me one too, which I took, sitting across from Joanna, telling them what I discovered about Daniel Clarke.
“You said he lives on Moon Road?” Joanna asks, her voice quiet over the sound of a ceiling fan whirring above us like white noise, which Sam turned on as we came into the kitchen.
I nod and her eyes become wet. She reaches for a purse lying beside her on the table, digging inside of it for a tissue that she presses to her eyes. “That’s where Kylie’s friend Abby lived too. On Moon Road. They don’t live there anymore, I don’t think.”
“The house looked pretty abandoned.”
“It might be,” Sam says. He’s soft-spoken, sedate. He looks different from the man in the photograph in the living room, the one making silly faces for the photographer. This man has lost weight. His face has thinned down and there is a sadness in his eyes. “From what I heard,” he says, “they were behind on paying their property taxes. I think they foreclosed on their home a couple years back. Abby’s parents may have gotten a divorce. They moved away. I think her brother is the only one who stuck around. I used to work with her father,” he says by means of explanation. “I didn’t know him well, but word spreads.”
Joanna says, “The police found Kylie’s bike not far from their house. It was about a quarter mile away, off some wooded road, lying maybe ten feet into the trees. The police thought someone tried to cover it up.” She pauses, thoughtful, and then says, “Kylie was at Abby’s house all summer,” staring down at the tissue in her hands. “She practically lived there. I knew that the two of them were close, inseparable even, but I never thought—” She stops all of a sudden and I feel weighed down by her guilt, by her grief. She closes her eyes, blaming a lack of mother’s intuition for not knowing that Kylie was most likelyspending so much time at her friend Abby’s house that summer not because of Abby herself, but because of the boy who lived across the street.
“Of course you didn’t,” I say, reaching across the table for her hand. “How would you have known?”
Joanna lifts her head. She says to me, “I should have asked her about it. I should have asked her why they spent so much time at Abby’s house and never came to ours. I should have invited Abby over more. There was a change in Kylie that year, one I knew instinctually had to do with boys. A change in the way she dressed and behaved. She had more confidence, but also more sass. At the time, I told myself it was the coming teen years, and I’m sure that was part of it.” She pauses, thinking back. “I remember that I found her looking up things on her phone.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like how to tell if a boy likes you and how to kiss a boy. I didn’t read too much into it because I kissed my first boy when I was ten on the school playground, because my friends dared me to.” She smiles, all of a sudden wistful, looking over a shoulder at Sam. She asks, “Do you remember?”
He takes a sip of his beer, and then he smiles back, nostalgic. “How could I forget?”
“It was Sam,” she tells me, though she doesn’t need to. She brings her eyes back to mine. “My first kiss. Love at first sight, or something like that. Though I don’t know thatIwashisfirst kiss, because all the fourth-grade girls liked Sam.”
“You were the only one I had eyes for,” he says, coming up from behind to set a hand on her shoulder, and she chuckles, reaching her own hand back to hold his. I look away. They’ve known each other their whole lives. I think of all that they’ve been through with losing a child, finding it remarkable that it hasn’t torn them apart but has maybe brought them closer together.
Joanna says to me, “I didn’t think it was unusual that Kylie would be curious about any of these things at her age. That’s normal, right?” she asks, as if for validation, and I tell her it is. It is normal for an eleven- or twelve-year-old to show an interest in boys. Joanna nods, as if relieved by my answer, but then, a breath later, a visible wave of panic and regret washes over her. She says, her voice changing, becoming higher in pitch, “I didn’t ask her about it though, about those searches on her phone. Maybe I should have asked her about them. Because if I knew they were in reference to someone much older than her, I would have—”
She stops all of a sudden, dropping her head into her hands to cry. Sam turns to set his beer on the countertop. He comes to her, squatting down beside her chair. He pulls her in, and as I watch, her head falls to his shoulder and he wraps his arm around her back.
“What would you have done?” he asks, stroking her hair, his voice tender and affectionate. “You would have stopped her, told her no, refused to let Kylie go to Abby’s house anymore?” He pauses for breath and then says, “Kids do what they want to do, Joanna. She would have found another way, and she would have resented you for it in the process.”
He pulls slightly back, lifting her chin so that she’s forced to look at him. He says, “You’re a good mom. You did everything you were supposed to do. There’s nothing you could have done to change what happened.”
I feel guilty making them relive this. But at the same time, they might be the only ones who can help me figure out what happened to Reese. And if I can do that, then maybe I can find out what happened to their daughter too.
I look away, giving them space to grieve. My eyes move around the room, finding three photographs of Kylie that hang by magnets on the refrigerator door. I push my chair back, standing from the table to go to them. In one, she’s dressed as a pirate for Halloween. In another, she’s on the beach, laughing as a wave crashes into her from behind. In the last one, she stands before the front door with a backpack slung over her shoulder like it’s the first day of school. I reach for that one, lifting it from under the magnet, bringing it closer for a better look.
