Hidden Falls (16 page)

W
HERE ARE YOU?
she typed. C
AN WE CHAT?

Sylvia held her phone in her hand and ventured into the corridor that led to the staff offices, hoping Lauren had not already bolted from the building. “Come on,” she muttered. “Turn your phone on.”

Just when she was about to concede that Lauren had switched off her phone before the worship service and had not yet reconnected to the world, Sylvia’s phone vibrated.

I
N MY OFFICE,
was the reply.

A
LONE?

A
T THE MOMENT.

W
AIT FOR ME.

Sylvia paced in a businesslike manner she hoped would communicate she didn’t intend to stop for chitchat—a strategy that successfully carried her past two ushers bearing offering plates to the office to count and Raisa Gallagher cradling a baby while chasing a squealing toddler. If Sylvia offended anyone by not being sociable, she would make amends later. At Lauren’s office door, Sylvia saw through the slim window that her niece was inside.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Sylvia demanded as she closed the door behind her. “Why does Henry Healy know where you spent the night before your own aunt?”

Lauren sank into her desk chair. “It was late. You were exhausted. If you were asleep, I wanted you to stay asleep.”

“I’m the mayor.”

“Officer Elliott pointed out that a car accident is a legal matter, not a civic matter.”

Sylvia swallowed the anxiety gathered in her throat. Cooper was right. Technically. But Cooper had to know how she would feel about learning her niece had discovered Quinn’s car under precarious circumstances—and Quinn nowhere in sight. She composed herself and sat in one of four chairs at a round table.

“Tell me what happened,” Sylvia said. “I want every detail.”

Her brow furrowed as Lauren recounted leaving the banquet hall, opting to stroll an indirect route home, coming upon Quinn’s car, looking up to see Nicole scrambling around the car, and spending half the night telling the same details to Cooper Elliott. Dizziness took hold behind Sylvia’s eyes as she tried to make sense of it all.

“Quinn had some kind of emergency.” Lauren rubbed each temple with two fingers. “What was so important that he didn’t think he could wait one more day—or even a couple of hours? And leaving his car makes no sense. He should have called 911 or the sheriff’s office.”

Sylvia sighed. “He probably didn’t have his cell phone. He’s always going off without it.”

“He could have waved somebody down on the road,” Lauren said. “If he was uninjured and could walk away, then he could just as easily have gotten someone’s attention.”

“He didn’t want anyone’s attention.” Sylvia put a finger on the tabletop and drew idle circles on the waxy surface to help her think. Didn’t Quinn know he could tell her anything? Disappointment mired her anxiety.

“How in the world did he get away from the banquet hall without anyone seeing him?” Lauren stood up and began to pace behind her desk.

“It’s like a magician’s trick,” Sylvia said. “Everybody was looking somewhere else.” It disturbed her that no one could say for certain whether Quinn was on his X when the prop cannon fired backstage while she was introducing him.

“He lost control of the car,” Lauren pointed out. “Maybe we should be asking what happened to make him lose control even before we ask why he would leave the scene of an accident.”

Sylvia snapped a tissue out of the box at the center of the table and blew her nose. She knew Quinn better than anyone, cared for Quinn more than anyone. She ought to be able to sift through the workings of his mind and come up with more than questions. They needed answers. The thought of Quinn being the object of gossip threatened to pound through her forehead. He would hate that.

A commotion burst out in the hallway. A child screamed and a woman shrieked.

“Raisa Gallagher.” Sylvia jumped to her feet and opened Lauren’s door. Henry Healy was awkwardly holding a fussing baby while Raisa grabbed a fistful of tissues from a box and dabbed at the flow of blood from her toddler’s forehead. The child thrashed against her mother’s efforts, and Sylvia stepped in to hold the little girl’s hands out away from the wound.

“I’ll find Bruce.” Lauren ran down the hall, returning a moment later to report that Raisa’s husband was pulling the car up so they could go straight to the hospital. She ran back into her office and produced a fleece blanket, and between the two of them, Sylvia and Lauren bundled the girl in a way that bound the girl’s arms.

“It’s a lot of blood,” Sylvia said, “but I don’t think it looks too bad.” The little one would probably scream through the stitches she needed, but the cut was at the hairline and not on the eye as Sylvia had first thought.

“What happened?” Lauren asked.

“Kimmie wanted Quinn,” Raisa said. “I kept telling her he wasn’t here today, but she ran off and fell against a table.”

Bruce Gallagher broke into the huddle and scooped up his daughter. Raisa took the baby from a startled Henry. In another moment, the Gallaghers were gone and the hallway was quiet again. Sylvia and her niece retreated into Lauren’s office.

“An emergency,” Lauren repeated. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Sylvia wished it were that easy. If Quinn had a medical emergency, he shouldn’t have been driving himself anywhere—and the road where his car was found was not on the way to the Hidden Falls hospital. What other kind of emergency could he have? He had no family, at least not any he had spoken of in years. Everyone came from some sort of family, Sylvia realized, but Quinn’s ties were loose enough to be confined to memories he seldom felt a need to express. Something a teacher once said to him. A class he hated in college. The cousin who died from a rare brain tumor when she was three.

Quinn’s life was in Hidden Falls. All of it. Sylvia was sure of this. Everything that mattered to him was in this town.
I’m here.

So where was he racing to?

Lauren stopped pacing and looked out the windowpane in her office door. “Nana is out there.”

Sylvia looked up to see Nicole standing behind Emma, shrugging. “I don’t think she remembers Nicole very well.” Sylvia stood up and opened the door, slightly irritated. She’d wanted more time to talk with Lauren.

“Your mom was anxious to know where you were,” Nicole said. “It was her idea to look here.”

“I’m not anxious,” Emma said. “I’m just getting hungry. You know I eat breakfast at the crack of dawn.”

“I’m overdue for some of your Saturday morning chocolate chip pancakes,” Lauren said.

“Come next Saturday,” Emma said. “But you might have to bring the chocolate chips.”

“Next week is the health fair, Mom,” Sylvia said. “Lauren will be busy all day.”

“I thought Quinn was in charge of that,” Emma said.

Sylvia and Lauren looked at each other.

“He was a big help,” Lauren said, “but it’s my job to make sure everything comes off according to plan. I’m responsible.”

“Especially now that Quinn is gone, I suppose.” Emma sat down at the table with Sylvia.

“Well,” Lauren said, “we all hope Quinn will be back long before Saturday.”

“That’s rather hard to predict, isn’t it?” Emma said.

Sylvia watched her mother’s face. Though she still prepared her own meals and ate heartily, Emma had difficulty remembering what she had for lunch on any given day. She called Sylvia every morning on a precise schedule, but then she had trouble remembering what was on her calendar for the day. But in the moment, in a conversation, Emma still made accurate connections.

“We’re going to be positive, Mom,” Sylvia said.

“I think I’ll head on home now.” Nicole still stood in the doorframe.

“When are you leaving town?” Lauren took a seat at the table across from Emma.

“Not until I find Quinn.”

The determination in Nicole’s voice puddled Sylvia’s jumbled emotions.

“So we’ll see you again,” Lauren said.

“I’m sure.” Nicole met Lauren’s eyes, and then Sylvia’s. “I wish our reunion was under better circumstances.”

“We’ll have a real celebration after Quinn’s home safe.” Sylvia had trouble recalling a time in the last fifteen hours that her thickened throat had not threatened to cut off her airway.

Nicole stepped out of the office.

“Quinn’s disappearance is so curious.” Emma set her purse on the table and smoothed her skirt. “I was getting ready to tell Sylvia a story earlier. You might find it interesting, too, Lauren.”

“What’s it about?” Lauren asked.

Sylvia had hoped to avoid another halting round of this story at least until after lunch.

“Some families who used to live in Hidden Falls a long time ago, when I was a girl.” Emma tilted her head in thought. “I’m not sure when they disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Lauren said.

“Well, they left town suddenly and never came back,” Emma said. “No one knew where they went, either. That sounds like disappearing to me.”

“Me, too.”

“During the Depression, I think.” Emma leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Yes, not too long after the Crash.”

Sylvia stood up. “Mom, you said you were hungry. Why don’t we go back to my house? I’ll make you some lunch.”

“I feel like ham.” Emma picked up her purse.

“I just bought some.” Sylvia turned to Lauren. “How about you? Hungry?”

Lauren shook her head.

“We should all eat,” Sylvia said.

“I need sleep. And I want to call Raisa and see how things went for Kimmie. But if you hear something—”

“I’ll call.”

12:07 p.m.

The old Adirondack chair was still on the Sandquist back porch, weathered but sturdy. Ethan angled the chair away from a view of the Jordan home next door and eased himself into it. Trees planted along the property line when he was a small boy towered now, with broadened branches and thickened trunks. Burnished leaves trembled against the threat of plummeting to the ground, obscuring the line of sight between the two houses, but Ethan didn’t want to take any chances. The size of the chair would disguise his form lest one of his parents happen to step outside the Jordan house and glance toward the Sandquists’ back porch. Sitting on the front steps would have left him exposed, and Nicole would pull her car around to the back even if she didn’t bother with the garage. Ethan’s Lexus was parked up the street.

He jiggled one foot while he waited. Church was at nine thirty. It was after twelve now. What was taking her so long?

His phone buzzed. “Hey, Hansen. What’s the word?”

“I can help you out.”

“That’s good news.”

“It’s only one day,” Hansen said. “And you’ll still have to deal with Gonzalez.”

“Rounds are covered tomorrow. That’s all I wanted.”
One day at a time,
Ethan told himself as he pocketed his phone.

Finally, he heard the engine of Nicole’s white Hyundai purr into the driveway. He’d been right. She did pull the car to the back. Ethan sat still, listening to the sounds of her opening the car door and shuffling some bags. The door slammed and Nicole made her way along the path of narrow cement rectangles embedded in the ground. When she reached the edge of the porch, Ethan stood up.

She met his eyes and shifted a pair of paper sacks in her arms. “I stopped for food. There’s nothing in the house, obviously.”

“You knew I would be here, didn’t you?” Ethan took one of the sacks from Nicole.

“You don’t walk away from things, Ethan Jordan.” Nicole fumbled with her keys and moved toward the back door.

He had walked away from her ten years ago, or more like slithered away.

Nicole unlocked the door. “The food is from Fall Shadows Café. I got the pot roast you used to like. You’ll have to tell me if it’s the same as it always was.”

Ethan could think of no other person in his life with whom he could slip into old habits so comfortably. “It’s good of you to feed me.”

Nicole laughed. “Says the boy who is secretly relieved that the girl is not going to try to cook again.”

“Have you given that up?” Ethan set the sack on the kitchen table, a flimsy maple set with four spindled chairs.

“Mostly.”

“My recollection is you were starting to get good at it.”

Nicole shrugged and lifted a Styrofoam container from one bag. “I live alone. It doesn’t seem worth the bother.”

He owned the zing she hadn’t meant to shoot. Nicole stated a simple fact, but if Ethan hadn’t slithered away, they could have been married, and she wouldn’t be living alone.

“The other one is pork, if you’d rather have that.” Nicole opened both containers on the table and pulled two iced teas out of the second bag. “Extra sweet, no lemon.”

She remembered everything. And she knew he couldn’t leave town.

“I only finagled one more day.” Ethan could stay until midnight on Monday and still be in Columbus in time for morning rounds on Tuesday and the surgery schedule that followed.

“Then we’ll have to find Quinn in one day.” Nicole opened a drawer, pulled out two dusty forks, and moved to the sink to rinse them. Old pipes rattled against the unexpected demand.

And if we don’t?
Ethan thought. He would still have to leave at midnight the next night or risk his residency.

“Do you keep the water on when the house is empty?” he asked.

“Quinn taught me to work a main valve when I was eleven.” Nicole sat down and handed Ethan a fork. “There’s something you should know.”

While they ate, Nicole relayed details of discovering Quinn’s car.

“Could he have an accident because he’s sick?” Nicole asked.

“It’s possible.” Ethan forked the last of the pot roast. “But if he was that seriously impaired medically, I’m not sure he could walk away and out of sight so thoroughly.”

“I want to start looking for him,” Nicole said. “We can check things out at his house, for starters.”

“I thought the police said he hasn’t been there.”

“A good reporter always double-checks her sources.” Nicole stuffed the empty food containers back into the paper sacks. “If we don’t find anything there, we can hike toward the falls.”

“Seems like an obvious place to go for a man who is trying
not
to be found,” Ethan said.