Hidden Falls (22 page)

“I’ve left messages on both numbers. Multiple times.”

“She’s probably up at the lake.” Lauren sipped her coffee.

“Ignoring your phone is an aggravating way to run a business.” Sylvia reached for the sack in Lauren’s hand. “I smell tuna.”

“Take half.” Lauren released the bag.

Jack watched the two of them move in synchronized familiarity. They were a lot alike. He could see the family resemblance in their features and gestures, even the timbre of their voices. Either one—preferably both—would make a great client. He would even be willing to handle mundane matters for them to build their confidence in him and be able to count them as clients.

“Why don’t I drive out to the lake for you?” Jack turned his palms up and brightened his eyes. “Dani has a cabin, right?”

“Yes, but you don’t have to go to that trouble,” Sylvia said. “Dani will either call me back or I’ll find someone else to do the work.”

“It’s no trouble,” Jack said. “I would be happy to do it. I’ll just go home and get my car.”

He didn’t wait for her to decline but reversed his direction and covered the blocks between downtown and his home. Getting on the mayor’s good side would never be a lost effort. Smelling Lauren’s tuna sandwich, though, made Jack hungry. At home he could grab a quick sandwich himself. As Jack let himself in the front door, the house felt empty.

“Gianna?”

No answer came. His wife’s absence was not completely unexpected. She stayed on top of shopping and errands and every loose end while the kids were in school so she could be in the house when they came home. Gianna had been the same way when she worked as a paralegal, always anticipating the next step and finding order and logic where no one else did. Any attorney she was assigned to was lucky to have her. If Gianna were an employee, Jack could assign her to dig through the files in his office and be confident she would come up with something that would help build his business. As his wife, though, she would tell him he was wasting his time. So he flipped through the files on his own, pausing to read carefully if something out of the ordinary grabbed his attention. Quinn’s disappearance two nights ago gave Jack a new trail to trace. When he figured out where Quinn had gone, Sylvia Alexander would be in his debt.

Jack was in the kitchen smearing mustard on two slices of dark rye bread when his wife and youngest daughter burst through the back door. Brooke was in tears, and Gianna’s patience teetered. Her jaw was clamped shut in that way that meant one more wrong comment would break the dam.

Fresh sobs smashed over Brooke’s face as she ran from the room.

Jack abandoned his sandwich in the making and looked at Gianna. “Did something happen at school?”

“She never made it to school.” Gianna tugged off her jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair. “This morning I asked her to take Roxie out to do her business one last time, and she let her off the leash.”

“So the puppy—”

“Is lost. And she ran in front of a car, which terrified Brooke. I heard the squeal of brakes myself. Apparently Roxie kept running and Brooke lost sight of her. We’ve been looking
all
morning. I’m glad you’re home. It’s your turn to do something now, Jack.”

Jack wasn’t sure what Gianna wanted him to do. Comfort Brooke? Promise another puppy? He resumed working on his sandwich, laying deli turkey on one slice of bread and positioning the other on top before picking it up.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “Then I have something on my schedule. I have to meet someone.”

“Call whoever it is and reschedule.” Gianna opened the fridge, stared for a few seconds, and closed the door without removing anything. “Your daughter needs you. Now is
not
the time to ignore her.”

Jack bit into his sandwich. It was just a puppy. They’d only had her a few weeks, and he was sure they could get another one.

“I’m serious, Jack.” Gianna fixed her eyes on his. “Brooke needs you, and I need you to take a shift looking for the dog. She’ll be hysterical if you don’t.”

“Fine.” Jack would take Brooke out looking for a few minutes, talk some sense into her, and get his day back on track. He carried his sandwich as he left the kitchen. Brooke was curled tightly on the couch, gripping the dog’s leash and wiping tears.

“Come on,” Jack said. “We’ll go look a little longer.”

“We have to look until we find Roxie.” Brooke sat up. “Even if something really bad happened to her, I want to know.”

Jack chewed. “Do you want something to eat first?”

“No. Every minute counts.”

Jack swallowed. “Then let’s go.” He crammed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.

“Where will we go?”

He had no thought. “Where do you think we should go? Which way did Roxie go?”

“She runs so fast.” Brooke zipped her purple fleece-lined hoodie. “She must have thought it was a game.”

“She probably saw a bird or a squirrel.”

They stepped outside the front door.

“Maybe she’ll come back.” Brooke’s voice trembled with hope. “Dogs do that sometimes, don’t they?”

“Sometimes.”

A gray-haired woman power walked toward them on the sidewalk. “Did you find your dog, Brooke?”

“No, Mrs. Winters. Not yet.”

“I hope she turns up.” Mrs. Winters charged on down her route. “How do you know that lady?” Jack asked.

“She lives three doors over from us, Dad. She goes for a walk every day after breakfast and again after lunch.”

Jack had hoped Brooke would not pick up that mannerism from Gianna, the tone that said,
You should know this.

Brooke cupped her hands around her mouth. “Roxie! Roxie! Come here, girl!”

Jack scanned the view and saw no sign of the Airedale.

“We have to look in everybody’s yards.” Brooke started to march up a driveway.

“Whoa.” Jack pulled her back with a hand on her shoulder. “That’s trespassing.”

“I just want to find my dog, Dad.”

“I know. Let’s knock on doors, and if someone is home, we’ll ask permission to look around.”

“And if no one’s home?”

Jack hesitated. Brooke’s eyes pleaded with him to be a father, not an attorney. “Then we’ll look really fast.”

Thirty minutes,
he thought.
Then she’ll have to face facts.

2:32 p.m.

“I just need a day or two.” Speaking on the phone to her assistant, Nicole flipped a purple pen back and forth between her first two fingers. “I have my interview notes, and I can work on the rest of the research from here.”

The knock at the door was the same rhythm Ethan had always used.

“Terry, I’ll have to call you back,” she said. Nicole set the phone down on the coffee table and crossed to open the front door. “Anything yet?”

“Nothing.” Ethan stepped in and pulled his camera from around his neck. “I can’t think where else to look.”

“You want coffee?” Nicole picked up her empty mug and headed for the kitchen. “I broke down and bought some beans this morning.”

Ethan followed her toward the coffeepot and reached into the cupboard where the mugs had always been. Earlier Nicole had discovered there weren’t as many now. Her father had taken the favorites with him when he moved out of the house.

“How about you?” Ethan held his cup under the stream of liquid Nicole poured. “What have you turned up?”

“Eerily little.” Nicole filled her cup and leaned against the counter. “Oh, it didn’t take long to find Quinn’s name listed in property tax records and the school faculty. Those things are public records, but I didn’t come up with anything else.”

“No birth certificate? Military record?”

Nicole ran her finger around the rim of her mug. “Do you realize we don’t even know his first name?”

“Ted. You know that.”

“Is it Ted? Or is it Theodore? Theo? Or Edward? Or even Edwin?”

Ethan blew across his coffee. “I guess it could be any of those.”

“And what about a middle initial? Or the city he was born in?”

Ethan shrugged.

“I need more to go on if I’m going to find someone who knows him outside of Hidden Falls.” Nicole reached into a grocery sack, pulled out a bag of chips, and yanked it open. Along with the coffee beans, she’d also bought juice, milk, yogurt, apples, bananas, granola bars, and chocolate cupcakes. If she was going to stay in Hidden Falls for a couple of days, she would need something to eat.

“The mayor must know something,” Ethan said.

“
We
should know something.” Nicole put four chips into her mouth. “Are you still leaving at midnight?”

“That’s almost ten hours,” Ethan said. “Anything could happen.”

Or nothing could happen, and Ethan would still leave and Nicole would be on her own to track down Quinn.

“We can’t waste time jabbering here.” Nicole brushed crumbs from her hands. “I’m going to the newspaper office. What about you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll find someplace else to look.”

“Think fast,” Nicole said. “Go back out to the lake. Ask around and see who might have seen him on Saturday—or even Friday night. Maybe he said something to somebody.”

Ethan downed his coffee. “I’ll try. Let’s meet for dinner in town.”

“Or sooner if you hear anything.”

“Right.”

They exited the house, got into their cars, and drove in separate directions. Nicole parked her Hyundai in front of the newspaper office where she had worked after school for her last two years of high school. She pulled open the door to the
Dispatch
and stepped inside, waiting for the old editor of the weekly to look up at her over his glasses.

“Why, it’s my star beat reporter!” Marvin Stanford pushed his glasses all the way to the top of his now bald head and came out from around the desk to hug Nicole. “Is it true that you’re working on a paper in St. Louis?”

“Your sources are impeccable, as always.” Nicole kissed Marv’s cheek. “Investigative reporting. Local political dirt, white-collar crime, that sort of thing. In between the juicy stories, I cover whatever they put me on.”

“A good reporter digs up her own stories.”

She waved a finger at him. “I learned that from you.”

“What brings you into my humble establishment?”

“I’m returning to my roots. You were the first one to teach me about the trove of information a newspaper’s archives can be.”

“The paper is a hundred years old. Just how far back are you planning to go?”

“To the year Quinn came to town.”

“Ah. So you’re sleuthing for our mutual friend.”

“It’s been almost forty-eight hours.” Nicole dropped her bag into a chair that hadn’t moved from the spot she remembered. “We have to find him, Marv.”

“My resources are your resources.” He waved a hand around the room. “You know where everything is.”

Nicole looked around. The arrangement looked the same—exactly the same. A wall of wide file cabinets divided the office area from the small printing press in the back. While the view was nostalgic, it made Nicole’s stomach sink. This was going to take a lot longer than she had allowed.

“I see the microfiche is still in the corner,” she said.

Marv repositioned his glasses on his nose and looked over them. “You were hoping we had digitized, weren’t you?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Sorry. Not that far back. Hidden Falls is still Hidden Falls, not the big city.”

“It’s no problem.”

“No money. No time.” Marv shuffled back to his desk chair. “Everybody wants us to live in the digital age, but they don’t understand how expensive and time-consuming it is to get there.”

“It’s all right, Marv. It’ll all come back to me.”

“Anything in the last fifteen years is digital, but it’s not on the web, so you’ll have to use the computer here to search the database.”

The dust on the machine told Nicole no one had hunted through microfiche files in quite some time. It wasn’t even plugged in. She fished under the table for the cord and found the outlet before pushing the O
N
button. While she waited for the
whirr
of the warming machine, Nicole tried to recall the last time she searched microfiche. It was at least five years ago, in a small Missouri town a lot like Hidden Falls.

In the meantime, Nicole started with the digital files. In high school she routinely tagged articles with key words or topics, never imagining that someday she might come back to use her own system. But she remembered it well enough to search quickly for articles mentioning Quinn. Once she found them, she would have to read every word of each one. A sentence or two used to fill out a column in the paper might now yield a clue she could chase down.

Announcements about school plays Quinn directed. A charity event to which he donated time. Quotes from students acknowledging the role Quinn played in their academic success. References to small speeches he gave at local events.

In other words, practically nothing.

Nicole turned to the microfiche and pulled the first reel from the year she knew Quinn moved to Hidden Falls. She had lost her touch and didn’t control the speed of the reel at a consistent rate. Every time she spun past something without being able to read the headline, she backtracked. As the years moved forward toward the time Marv started keeping digital files and the ground Nicole had already covered, two things struck her.

Quinn was mentioned in small ways in plenty of articles, but the articles were never about Quinn himself. Considering how people in Hidden Falls felt about Quinn, this was a curious omission.

She raised her second question with Marv. “Why isn’t there a single photo in the paper of Quinn?”

“If you look in the old files,” Marv said, “you’ll find some black-and-white prints. But Quinn would never let me use them.”

“What do you mean, ‘let’ you?”

“Anytime I had a photographer at an event, I’d get a call from Quinn the next day asking me not to run the pictures. I used to argue with him about freedom of the press, but he was politely persistent. He didn’t want his picture in the paper. Eventually I stopped shooting him.”

Nicole leaned back in her chair. “That’s odd.”

“Did you ever notice he’s not in the yearbook, either?”