Changing Fortune Cookies Page 6

  But Joshua had apparently not gone to see his brother. Or if he had, then things had fallen apart and something had happened.

  “Do you really think that it’s just something innocent? That he’ll show up again and everything will be okay?”

  Terry considered, scratching his stubbly jaw. “We don’t have enough information yet to make that kind of judgment. If it was just a prank, then it is surprising that he hasn’t shown up again yet. It’s been two days. But if he ran away for another reason, it could still be voluntary.”

  “But why would he?”

  “You never know all of the reasons someone might choose to run away.” He gave her a half-smile. “I’m sure you’ve seen that, living in foster homes. You must have known a few runners.”

  “Kids that run away chronically, sure. But that’s not Joshua. He isn’t a troubled kid who has grown up in half a dozen different homes or has had to fend for himself or defend himself against an abuser. He’s a kid living with his mom, who he’s always lived with. She has a good job and looks after him. He goes to school and was trying to get his grades up again. He’s not involved with a gang or drugs.”

  “But you are a casual outside observer. How much of that do you know to be true?”

  Chapter 11

  Even though she didn’t want it to grow from a discussion to an argument, Erin wanted to defend her position. She knew Joshua. She knew Mary Lou. She knew that Mary Lou gave Joshua a good home.

  But what did she really know? The way a family looked from the outside was not necessarily an accurate representation of what was really going on. Abusers could act sweet and caring in public. Molesters could be upright citizens, making good money and acting like responsible parents. They could be women as easily as men.

  Mary Lou was tough, Erin knew that. She wanted Joshua to shape up in school and to get back on track. Campbell had come from the same home, and he had dropped out and moved to the city, essentially running away from home, before turning eighteen. He was possibly into the drug culture and was close enough to street life and organized crime that Beaver—Federal Agent Rohilda Beaven—used him as a confidential informant.

  Erin didn’t know how bad things had been when Roger was still living at home, but she didn’t imagine living with a confused, increasingly violent parent had been fun for either of the boys. They had worked hard to help support the family and take care of their father, a lot to expect from a couple of teenage boys.

  “Well, you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors,” Erin admitted. “I don’t think that Mary Lou was too strict with him, but… she’s not an easy woman to get along with. But we at least know that he wasn’t running with a bad crowd or involved with drugs.”

  Terry raised an eyebrow. Of course, he might know details that Erin did not. He wouldn’t be in a position to tell her if he knew that Joshua had been caught with drugs or was suspected of being an addict or dealer. He had dropped out of his sports teams and extracurricular activities. His marks had plummeted. He’d spent a lot of time at home alone. All classic signs of a kid involved in drugs. Or human trafficking. Or both.

  “I’m sure he wasn’t,” Erin protested. She had seen his honest reactions when they had gone looking for Brianna. Joshua had been shocked at what he saw in the city, at the state of the girls they had talked to. If he were taking drugs, it was still at a recreational level. He hadn’t seen addiction like that before. “And he was working on bringing his marks up. He was in Whitewater to do interviews for the paper. It wasn’t drugs, it was just everything else that had happened in their family lately. All of the disruption. The stuff with Roger and Campbell.”

  Terry got up from the table to grab some dishes and set the table. He took a jug of water from the fridge, stood staring into the open fridge for a few long seconds, then closed it, returned to the table, and arranged things the way Erin liked them.

  “I heard from Mary Lou about him going to Whitewater. You saw him while he was there?”

  “Yes. He came to talk to me. To ‘interview’ me for background on the contest and… on Beryl. He was more interested in what happened to Beryl than in the cooking contest.”

  “Of course,” Terry nodded. “I would be too. Cooking is interesting,” he allowed, “but not nearly as compelling as someone showing up dead in a freezer.”

  Erin shrugged.

  “But why do you say ‘interview,’ like that.” Terry used his fingers to put air quotes around the word.

  Erin hadn’t meant to use that inflection. It had just come out that way. “Well… because I didn’t really want to be interviewed for his article. If he wanted to know things about the contest, that was great, it would be good publicity for the contest and for us. But he wanted to ask me about finding Beryl and what I thought… and I really didn’t want to talk to him about it.”

  “Ah.” Terry nodded. “Makes sense. How much did he manage to worm out of you?”

  “He was good,” Erin admitted. She smiled at Terry. “Not as good an interrogator as a policeman, of course…”

  “I wouldn’t expect so. Though some reporters would give the police a run for their money. Have you read Joshua’s article?”

  “No. How was it?”

  “Good. He did a nice job on it. Didn’t come off as a kid’s school essay. Good clear language, well thought out. He’s not an investigative journalist, but he made a good start.”

  “I’ll have to read it.” Erin usually flipped through the copy of the Bald Eagle Falls weekly paper that was delivered to her, but with everything that had been happening, she hadn’t yet had the chance.

  Josh really needed to get home. He needed to wake up, get himself out of bed or off of whoever’s couch he was sleeping on, and get home. If his mother had already woken up and discovered him missing, he would be in big trouble. There would be a lot of explaining to do.

  Or not very much explaining, since he couldn’t remember for sure what had happened or where he was. But he would have to come up with something.

  Josh opened his eyes. They were gritty and blurry, and he couldn’t really see anything around him except darkness and darker shapes in the darkness. It was still night. So maybe he still had time.

  But his body told him that it wasn’t night. There was a part of his consciousness that was growing increasingly alarmed each time he woke up. It had been too long. It couldn’t still be night. He had known several wakenings ago that dawn was coming.

  He groaned and tried to move. As before, he couldn’t seem to move anywhere. His arms and legs did not respond the way that they should. He’d really gotten messed up on whatever he had indulged in. Had it been a party? He was beginning to think that someone had roofied him. That would explain why his memory was so patchy.

  The thought both relieved him—because it meant that he hadn’t chosen to get so screwed up—and made him more anxious. He felt violated and anxious. It made him angry. Who would do something like that to him? One of his friends, thinking it was a good prank? Someone else who had wanted to steal from him or get something out of him? The joke was on them, since he was dirt poor and didn’t even have a dime in his pockets.

  He didn’t think that it was to take advantage of him physically. That didn’t happen to guys.

  Did it?

  He tried to sort out the sensations of his body, worried. But he couldn’t sort out all of the sensory inputs. It was dark, that he knew for sure. He couldn’t move his hands to take out his phone and look at the time or at his camera roll in case he had recorded something.

  He kicked his feet, trying to turn his body over and look around. Nothing would move the right way. He thrashed around in the blankets, unable to control his position or to right himself.

  “Stop that,” a hoarse whisper came out of the darkness.

  Josh froze. He scanned the layers of darkness for a human figure, but could not see anyone and could not turn over to check the rest of the room. “Who’s there? Who are you?”

 
“The person who’s in charge here. The person you need to listen to.”

  He couldn’t build a picture of the owner of the whisper. It wasn’t a voice he recognized, but he wasn’t sure that meant anything, because it was just a whisper, with no tone or pitch. He couldn’t tell whether it was male or female, old or young. He didn’t detect any particular accent.

  “Where am I? What time is it?”

  “None of that matters.”

  Joshua tried to clear his throat. His mouth was dry as a bone. He needed a drink. Not alcohol, just water. He was dehydrated. Maybe that was why his head hurt so much. He tried to move again.

  “I can’t… I’m tangled up here,” he told the voice, embarrassed. He tried to get free of the blankets once more. “I’m just trying to get up…”

  “You’re not tangled. You’re tied.”

  Josh stopped moving. He tried again to find the dark figure in the shadows. “What?”

  “You are restrained.”

  Joshua tried to move his hands, and finally figured out why they were not moving the way they were supposed to. They were bound together. Any time he tried to move one of them, the other was dragged along with it. He moved his feet slowly, and found that his left foot followed his right when he tried to move it to the side.

  He fought the restraints. Tried to bring his wrists up to eye level so he could look at them. He couldn’t get them up to his face or see the restraints that held him. He couldn’t feel what they were, but didn’t hear any jangling, so assumed it wasn’t handcuffs. Maybe zip ties or duct tape. Who would do that? Was it a joke?

  “What’s going on? Why am I tied up?”

  “So that you can’t leave.”

  Joshua couldn’t help himself. He fought the restraints, trying to rip his hands away from each other, to kick out with his feet to hit something. He tried to squirm around to turn over but couldn’t.

  “Quit fighting.”

  “Let me go! What are you doing? This is kidnapping! You can’t tie someone up! This isn’t funny.”

  “Nobody’s laughing.” There was a strange noise, and Joshua wondered if his captor was, in fact, laughing in a whisper. “This isn’t meant to be funny.”

  “You can’t go around kidnapping people. Where am I?” Joshua blinked, trying to bring his surroundings into focus, but still all he could see was darkness and shadows. It wasn’t home. He had known that for a while. But he couldn’t figure out where he was.

  “Stop thrashing around.”

  Joshua kept kicking and trying to turn over. What was the whisperer going to do? He couldn’t stop Joshua from trying to escape his bonds. Josh wasn’t going to be quiet and compliant and do whatever his captor told him to.

  There was movement nearby. Behind him. He couldn’t turn his head all the way around to see. He tried anyway, straining. The noise moved closer.

  “Who are you? Tell me what’s going on!”

  A cloth fell over his eyes. Josh tried to pull away from it, but it was tied tightly around his head, snagging bits of hair and pulling them tightly into the knot of the blindfold.

  “No! No, I’ll listen to you. You don’t need to blindfold—”

  He shouldn’t have opened his mouth. The gag went in next. A round ball of cloth that felt and tasted like rolled-up socks, and then a rope of something that went into his mouth, pulled tight around his head so that it pulled his lips taut and his jaw slightly open. But it kept the packing material in his mouth and prevented him from opening and closing his mouth to speak. Josh tried to protest this treatment, but he couldn’t get anything coherent out.

  “Next time, maybe you’ll stop when I tell you to,” his captor whispered.

  There was a pain in his thigh.

  He felt dizzy and lightheaded.

  And that was all.

  Chapter 12

  Their dinner was a quiet affair. Both were thinking about Joshua Cox and what might have happened to him. Erin hoped that it wasn’t something awful. She hoped that the note had just been left by his friends to cover for his absence when he had gone off to see a girl or on a road trip or one of the many other things that a stressed-out teenager might do to escape his life for a few days. Maybe Joshua didn’t even know about the note left behind. He wouldn’t have caused Erin extra grief, but the same would not necessarily be true of his friends at school. Who knew how many of them had been affected by Erin’s investigation at Christmas. There might be several who resented the attention she had drawn to them and the school even if they hadn’t been implicated in the police investigation.

  “I should call Mary Lou,” she said, as she scraped her fork along the bottom of her plate. She licked off the last of the gravy. “Did she have anyone over there with her, when you were there?”

  “Women were coming and going.” Terry rolled his eyes. “Do you know how hard it is to run a police investigation when women are coming in with casseroles every few minutes? It’s not the forensics I’m talking about. We kept things sealed up until the techs were done looking for evidence, but the constant interruptions. Trying to ask all of the important questions while people keep knocking on the door, ringing the bell, or yoo-hooing, and walking in on the interview.”

  Erin shook her head, suppressing her smile as much as she could. She was surprised that Terry hadn’t taken Mary Lou to the police department where he could question her without interruption. Only maybe she hadn’t wanted to go there. He couldn’t force her to leave the house and she probably didn’t want to leave in case Joshua showed up or one of his friends stopped in with news.

  “Well… I’m glad that people are trying to look after her, but I’m not sure casseroles are what she needs.”

  The last Erin had seen, at Thanksgiving, Mary Lou already had a freezer full of food contributions. And with it just being her and Joshua, they probably hadn’t made much of a dent in it.

  And now it was just Mary Lou, and she didn’t eat very much, trying to watch her weight. One casserole would last a couple of weeks.

  “You can give her a call. She’ll probably go to bed early; she was pretty tired last I saw her. Not that you stay up late anyway.”

  “She probably sat up waiting for him all night.”

  Terry nodded. “She had police there all night, so even if she had wanted to go to bed, it would have been difficult.”

  Erin licked off her fork once more, sighed, and put it down on her plate. “I’ll call her once I’ve cleared everything away, then.”

  “Leave the dishes. I can do that. Go call now, then it’s done and you won’t spend the rest of the evening worrying about her.”

  Erin left Terry in the kitchen and went to her bedroom to make the call. She shut the bedroom door and sat down on the bed. She wished she were more eager to make the call. She wished that she knew ahead of time how it would go over. The dinner sat like a lump of lead in her stomach.

  But procrastinating wasn’t going to make it any easier. Erin forced herself to unlock her phone and pull up the contact entry for Mary Lou. She tapped it and listened to the ringing. Mary Lou might already be asleep. If she hadn’t slept for two days, she might have fallen asleep in front of the TV or while trying to do something else. Or she might have talked with enough well-meaning people that she really didn’t want to deal with anyone else.

  Erin wasn’t sure whether to leave a voicemail. As the phone continued to ring, she tried to script a message in her head. I was just calling to see how you are… let me know if you need anything… Everything sounded so lame. The woman’s son was missing. What was the appropriate response to a disaster like that?

  There was a soft click and Mary Lou’s well-measured tones. “Erin. Hello.”

  “I’m sorry. I hope you weren’t sleeping.”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to come over and sit with you? I can tidy up if the police left anything in a mess, or figure out what to do with all of the casseroles.”

  “No. I don’t want anyone else here tonight. It
’s been like Grand Central Station.”

  “I could come tomorrow and help with whatever you need.”

  “I only need one thing, and that is to have my son back.”

  Erin swallowed. “I wish I knew where he was. I wish I could help with that.”

  “The note says to ask you.”

  “I know… I don’t know why it says that, because I have no idea. If I did, I would tell you. I swear.”

  “I don’t think it literally means to ask you where he is,” Mary Lou said in a studied tone. “I think it means that this has happened because of something you did.”

  “I didn’t—” Erin broke off. How could she be sure that it hadn’t happened because of something she had done? Actions had consequences. Not always things that could be foreseen or controlled. Every action sent out little ripples over a growing area. And Erin had thrown some pretty big rocks into the pond. “I don’t know what I could have done that would have had any impact on Joshua. I really don’t.”

  “Well, we know that’s not true. You had him hauled into the police station.”

  Erin cleared her throat. Mary Lou knew that what she was saying was an exaggeration. It wasn’t Erin who had interrogated Joshua. It wasn’t her fault. Not really. It was Harold who had mentioned Joshua and his friends to Erin.

  Do you know about them?

  He hadn’t asked if she knew Josh, but if she knew about him. And Erin had been left to wonder what Josh and his friends were doing that she should know about. She had mentioned it to Terry, and Terry had been the one who had invited Josh in for questioning. That wasn’t her fault.

  Rocks thrown into the pond.

  “And you were the one who went with him into the city. I still don’t know what happened there, but I have a pretty good idea that it wasn’t the innocent little trip that you and Vic would have me believe.”