“This isn’t healthy for her,” Edison says, breaking me out of my thoughts. “All this going back and forth between her dad and me.”
I rub gentle circles on his biceps to let him know I’m here and that I’m listening. But I don’t ask questions or interrupt him, because I want to hear his unbridled thoughts. The closer we get to New Year’s Eve, the more studiously I collect every precious moment with him.
“Maybe I should be better about discouraging her from coming around,” Edison goes on. “She’s going to be in high school next year. It’s time she makes some friends and puts herself out there. Stops being so shy.” Even as he says the words, I know he doesn’t believe them. He’s willing to relinquish Sadie to her father even as it breaks his heart, because he thinks it’s healthier for her.
Sadie is thirteen to Edison’s twenty-nine years. His late wife came to him with a ready-made family. And as Sadie gets closer to high school her dilemmas and heartaches will only magnify. But still, when he could just as easily foist her off onto her own father, Edison tries to fill the empty space left by her mother’s death. He picks up when she calls; he worries about where she is and if she’s safe whenever he watches the evening news.
He goes quiet as we turn onto his street.
“You’d make a great dad,” I say. He smiles at the road ahead, but he doesn’t correct me and say that he already has a daughter in Sadie. For all his love, he knows that she doesn’t belong to him. He knows that she will eventually have to stop coming to him at times like these.
There aren’t any lights on inside the house when we pull into the driveway. Edison is the first to the door, and I’m a step behind him. When he tries to turn the knob and realizes it’s locked, for the first time since the hiking trail, I see the worry starting to ebb into his features.
“Here.” I unlock the door and push it open.
Even before we’ve crossed the welcome mat, I know the house is empty. It’s too quiet, and Sadie is always orbited by her own cloud of noise. Muffled music blaring from her headphones, shows she’s streaming on her iPad, theclack-clack-clackas she sends infinite texts.
“Sades?” Edison’s muddy shoes squeak against the hardwood. He goes down the hall, knocks on the bathroom door, checks the guest room.
I cross the kitchen and open the sliding door that leads to the backyard. Edison said there was a spare key. If Sadie came by while we weren’t here, she might have taken it, stayed for a while, maybe grabbed some money from the change jar to buy herself something at the gas station. This would have to mean she left before the rain clouds formed. She’s waiting for the rain to let up before she comes back.
Edison isn’t one for lawn ornaments. There are no potted plants or semiconvincing fake rocks. Apart from a capsized patio umbrella, there’s nothing but the glazed ceramic toad with a chip in its left eye that looks like the reflection of light. Edison is lucky he lives in a safe neighborhood. I’ve never seen anyone so blatantly lax about home security.
The key is there where Edison left it, and judging by the outline it leaves on the concrete when I pick it up, it hasn’t been moved in a long time. Sadie hasn’t been here.
I don’t know anything about her friends. Edison says she’s shy, but she must have someone. She’s always texting when her phone is out. She may have reconciled with her boyfriend, the pushy freshman. I don’t know how I’ll tell Edison about him. Sadie will hate me and I need her to trust me. I’ll need her when it’s time for an alibi. But telling Edison something that leads to Sadie’s safe discovery—in the arms of her idiot boyfriend—will deepen his endearment to me.
“Jade?” he calls from somewhere in the house.
“The key’s still here,” I tell him. This will only worry him, but it’s for the best, I think. This is one for Sadie’s father. Let him go snooping through her things and find some clue that leads him to the boy’s house. Sadie’s father will drag her out of there by the arm, positively apoplectic, and be the bad guy while Edison remains her knight in shining armor.
Edison turns on the patio light, filling the yard with its feeble orange glow. He’s in the kitchen now, pacing as he calls Sadie and listens to her outgoing message. Her phone is off; it doesn’t even ring.
I should go in and console him. I’ve been thirteen and angry enough to run away from my foster placements and group homes. I always came back alive. Edison doesn’t know the real story of my life, but I can channel this into something fictional.One day, my parents were arguing and I ran away...
But the story comes to an end even before I can finish the thought, because my eye has caught something just beyond the reach of the patio light. The fence is locked from the inside, latched by a small black bar. Just below that, in a shallow puddle and filling with rain, is a single neon pink Converse.
—
I MAKE MYSELF SCARCEbefore the police arrive. I tell Edison I’m going to take a drive around the block and look for her, and he hands his keys over without question.
I don’t want to leave him. His broad frame is sunken, shoulders hunched, and he looks so small standing in the doorway. He watches me as I back out of the driveway. He’s holding the phone to his ear and there’s a bewildered look in his eyes as he talks to the police. It’s happened. It’s finally happened. How many times has he told her itisn’t safe for her to be out there alone? Doesn’t she know a man went missing?
A teenage girl might run off without her phone or her umbrella, but she needs her shoes. Especially in this downpour. Even Edison could see what must have happened. The front door was locked and she was scaling the fence to get to the spare key. Her left shoe, loosely laced and tied, made it over. The rest of her didn’t.
There wasn’t a drop of blood or a tuft of pulled hair. There were no frantic smeared footprints in the dirt, which tells me that whatever happened was done before the rain started. I know that I won’t find her pacing this suburban grid, bemoaning her overbearing father and wearing one shoe. She could be anywhere by now.
But still, I drive to all the places she might be as I turn this mystery over in my head. There are two gas stations in walking distance. One she would have passed on her way to Edison’s, the other she only would have gone to if she’d kept walking. The cashiers at both haven’t seen her. I hold up my phone with the picture I took of her scrunched against Edison in the diner booth, a bright green silly straw between her lips, and I make them really look. Still no.
I’m parked beside the gas pump with the rain drumming on the roof, and I pull out my phone and search for the freshman high school lacrosse team. It takes a bit of scrolling to find an article that’s of use to me, dated four months ago. I scroll through the article about the team’s latest win until I find the name Chris. There’s only one student on the team with that name.Chris Byrne stands off with his opponent in the final...
I’m on Whitepages looking up the address of the only Byrne in this zip code. The information is behind a paywall, but the map below it is all I need. A red dot rests on the intersection of West and State roads. I turn the key in the ignition.
Little girls don’t disappear into thin air, especially not in a place like Rainwood, where the last reported murder had been in 2001. Before the murder in June, the last cold case was a teenage boy who vanished in 2005. Drugs may have played a factor, his friends said. He probably wandered off into the desert, got lost, and died of exposure.
I find Chris Byrne’s house. His parents are loaded. It’s a two-story modular with stone facing and a wraparound porch. There are a Mercedes and a Jeep parked beside each other in the white driveway with their mirrors inches apart like two lovers holding hands. The motion lights illuminate one by one as I pass.
Chris’s mother comes to the door with the relaxed, pleasant expression of someone who is used to having unannounced visitors. She doesn’t even waver when she sees me, wearing a tank top and muddy sneakers, looking like a drowned rat.
