Healing.I could use some of that. So I say again, this time more earnestly, “I’ll treasure it forever.”
“I don’t know…” Finn says skeptically. “This coming from the girl who just let a supposedly beloved memento go flying straight into the Grand Canyon.”
“Hey!” I smack his arm with a grin. “That was an accident!”
Finn’s about to retort, when suddenly my phone buzzes in my back pocket, interrupting us. “Oh my god,” I say, looking at the screen. “It’s Sybil.”
25
SATURDAY MORNING
(Wedding day)
“SYBIL! ARE YOU OKAY?”
“Ma’am?” A man’s voice comes through the speaker.
“Who is this? Where’s Sybil?” I can’t keep the panic out of my voice. Finn’s arm is around me in an instant, and I put the call on speaker so he can hear.
“Ma’am. Calm down. I’m Rick. I’m just a Lyft driver. This number was the emergency contact.” I’d forced Sybil to add me to her phone’s emergency settings when we’d moved to New York in case something happened to her, and it seems like she never changed it.
“Is she okay? Please, let me talk to her.”
“I don’t know, ma’am. I just found this phone in my backseat. She must have left it charging back there. I recognize the photo on her home screen. I picked her up from the airport Thursday afternoon.”
“The airport? What airport?”
“Harry Reid,” he says. “Las Vegas. I dropped her off at Caesars Palace around, oh, I don’t know, three p.m.?”
I think of us tracking Sybil’s phone, it pinging back and forth all down the Strip. It wasn’t Sybil herself, it was just her phone in the back of the car. But wait—how did her tracker start traveling toward Albuquerque? Rick the Lyft driver has an answer for that too.
“I did a bunch of Vegas rides on Thursday night, and then I had to go check on my mom’s cats while she’s traveling. She lives out in Santa Fe. I’m actually headed back to Vegas now to do some more runs. If you want your friend’s phone back, maybe we could meet up.”
My heart is pounding. The prospect of Sybil going out to Albuquerque to meet up with her problem ex-boyfriend Liam was worrisome enough, but now I realize we havenoidea where she is. She could be hurt or in danger. Finn senses that I’m starting to spiral and places a calming hand over mine. “If we get her phone, we can see if there’s any clues on there. Maybe we can find out why she was going to Vegas, or who she might have been meeting up with.”
I nod. “Are you anywhere near Flagstaff?” I ask Rick. “Can you meet us? I’ll text you an address.”
“Sure, give me an hour or so.”
There’s a Toyota Corolla idling in front of my dad’s house when we get there. A Latino man in his fifties in a red Diamondbacks hat steps out of the car.
“Hey, you’re on the home screen too!” He hands me the phone without hesitation.
I look down at the phone in my hands, and the four of us stare up at me: Willow, Nikki, Sybil, and me at golden hour with the Pacific Ocean in the background from three days ago in Malibu. It’s a photo we took moments before I went on my tequila shot crusade, and I realize that she must have set it as her phone background that night.
“I can’t thank you enough for this,” I say as Finn comes up beside me.
“No problem. I know my daughter would lose her mind if she lost her phone. You girls are about her age.”
I’m about to pump the Lyft driver for more information, anything he can remember about his brief interaction with Sybil, when I get a text from Nikki:
Sybil is on her way here.
I immediately call Nikki, but it goes straight to voicemail. So, I resort to what I do best: hammer until I strike a nail.
Nik
Nik
