I had stumbled into the house after ten, my face red and puffy from crying the whole way home. I hadn’t told any of them where I had been and still didn’t plan to.
“It was a crappy night,” I told her, and she looked at me sadly. She opened her mouth to ask something else but was interrupted.
“It’s time,” my father said. We all got ready to go, gathering stacks of missing-person posters, maps, cases of water. Tommy buried his face in his hands as he walked toward the door, and Suzannah reached for him. “How are you feeling?”
He blinked abruptly, giving her a nasty look. “How do you think I’m feeling, Suzannah?”
I faltered. It was a tone Tommy never used with his wife. In fact, it sounded more like me than it did him. Suzannah’s eyebrows shot up.
“I was just checking on you,” she replied, her tone making it clear that she was irritated. “This is a very traumatic situation for everyone. It’s okay to talk about how you feel and be aware of any triggers.”
Tommy and I both hated when Suzannah got all woo-woo. She had been raised in the type of family who shared their feelings at every meal and journaled. We had not, and it made us uncomfortable.
“Now is really not the time for the weaponized therapy terms, all right?” Tommy said. “My sister is missing. We don’t need to workshop it.” He stalked out the door.
I’d never seen Tommy and Suzannah fight before, and the sight was jarring. Granted, I wasn’t ever home to see if they did, but it still felt wrong. This was really getting to all of us. We needed a resolution, one way or the other. We couldn’t go on like this.
“Sorry,” Suzannah said, turning to me. “We’re all a little stressed out.”
I squeezed her arm. “I get it. I’ve done and said way worse.” She gave me a sympathetic smile.
The park was only a few minutes away from our house, a five-minute drive into the depths of Loxahatchee. Suzannah and I were silent in the back of the truck as Tommy and my father discussed strategies for our search from the front seats. I stared out the window at the tiny Methodist church and the pond I’d seen so many times.
My chest constricted as we got out of the truck and I noticed the volume of people around. There had to be close to two hundred. We headed toward a spot in the middle of the field that was densely populated with people, tables, and cops. I was used to crowds—living in Manhattan made them a daily reality, but the crowds there had an anonymity to them. No one knew me or recognized me, and everyone was free to do exactly what they wanted.
Here, everyone in this crowd knew me.Personally.These were groups of people who had grown up with me and now made it part of their personality to dislike me. People who hated Will and believed he was a coldhearted killer and I a mentally disturbed, money-hungry opportunist. But they were here now because of Hazel. She was the best of us all. Beautiful. Kind. Philanthropic. She loved animals and volunteered. She always said please and thank you, and was polite to the people who loathed us.
I walked behind Tommy and Suzannah. My father was taking his time locking the truck and inexplicably fiddling with the key fob.
“Go ahead,” he called, rooting around in the glove compartment. “I’ll come find you.”
I wondered if he was hanging back to avoid the people looking at him. Was it common knowledge that he was a suspect?
“Come on, Rose,” Tommy said, nudging me forward across the grass. It seemed like Hazel’s entire school was here. Several of the girls were crying. They all had their phones out. From the corner of my eye, I saw the familiar golden hair of Victoria Hopely. She stood on the edge of the park, in a matching lavender workout set, talking to a man I didn’t recognize. We made eye contact for the briefest second, her lips pursing. She had to be here for Hazel, not for me. Not that I blamed her. But I had a new respect for her after what Pullman had told me.
Pullman. Or should I sayNick. Just the thought of his name straightened my spine, and I started searching the crowd for him.
People were lining up to grab water bottles, fliers, maps, and colored strings from the cops seated at the table. It took me a few minutes to realize they were dividing everyone into groups to search different areas. I was distracted, looking past people’s faces for the detective.
“ … so, take this,” the cop nearest to me was saying. “There’s a code on each piece of paper. It takes you to an app for group messaging. Yup. Please text that number if you find anything. We’ll be reconvening here at twelve for lunch. Yes, that’s right. Publix is catering. Yup. So take that purple string … Yup, you’ll be searching there in that purple quadrant. Yes, thank you so much.”
I didn’t see Detective Pullman, or Newbury for that matter, anywhere. Should I try to find another officer to talk to about what I knew? Suzannah interrupted my thoughts before I could decide, handing me a colored bracelet.
“Come on, you’re with Tommy and me,” she said. “Let’s go.”
I had a difficult time with the search. It was so hot that the air felt like it was both full of water and simultaneously on fire. We scanned the ground as we walked and checked the bases of the trees, tapping into my true-crime intel. Anytime I saw anything on the ground, I felt a sharp stab of excitement, quickly followed by fear and panic and disappointment when it ended up being nothing. Just a clump of bushes or pinecones. Two hours in, we found an abandoned shoe. I almost threw up before Tommy pointed out it was size eleven men’s.
By the time noon rolled around, my arms were covered in scratches and my scalp was sunburnt where I’d parted my hair.
“Doesn’t make you miss Florida, does it?” Suzannah asked as I poured water on the top of my head and shuddered at the coldness of the droplets on my scalp. It was so unbearably hot but it was still only April.
“Not at all.”
I didn’t want to stop for the scheduled group lunch—I doubted I could stomach anything anyway—but Tommy reminded me it was important to be present. People could have information.
What he didn’t want to say was that people also wanted to observe us. As payment for helping us search for Hazel, they wanted front-row seats to our grief. And if giving them their very own tragedy porn would keep them engaged and searching, I couldn’t argue. We needed to cover as much ground as possible.
I’d been jumpy the whole morning, searching for Pullman around every corner, and I was starting to get fed up with his absence. It seemed like I was going to have to go to the station and confront him there directly. Maybe it was finally time to loop my family in to what I’d found and what Hazel had been doing. If I could convince them to come with me, maybe the sheriff’s office would take us more seriously.
