Hidden Falls (54 page)

“Not again,” Lauren muttered.

“Not again what?”

Lauren waved a hand across her face. “Just a wrong number. They keep calling.”

“Then why don’t you answer it and tell them they’ve got the wrong number?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Lauren Nock, you tell me what’s going on.” Nicole rotated in her chair as best she could to look more directly at Lauren. A minute ago Lauren’s face flushed with pleasure in the fair. The color that rolled through it now was anything but pleasure.

“I’ve gotten these calls,” Lauren said. “Actually, I don’t think they’re wrong numbers. It’s somebody’s sick idea of fun. I’ve been through it before, and I’ll get through it again.”

“Have you told Cooper? If you’re being harassed, he might be able to help.”

“No, I haven’t told Cooper. I hardly know him.”

That might have been true a week ago, but Nicole wasn’t blind. Although Cooper was supposed to be running his own booth, all day long he still managed to show up wherever Lauren was with impressive frequency. Nicole could see it all from where she sat—and it seemed to Nicole that Lauren was glad to see him. Lauren had come a long way from the reticence of the evening Cooper showed up with Sylvia at Lauren’s apartment bearing dinner.

“If you’re not going to tell Cooper, then tell me,” Nicole said.

Lauren crossed her legs. “There’s not a lot to tell. Somebody with an Oklahoma number keeps calling me, but they never say anything. Sometimes there’s noise but nothing I can identify.”

“So you stopped answering.”

Lauren nodded. “Voice mail kicks in. They still don’t say anything. I just get a message of strange sounds.”

“The same number every time?”

Lauren tilted her phone’s screen toward Nicole. “See? I didn’t answer, and now there’s a notice I have a voice mail. I’m just going to delete it again.”

Nicole reached for the phone. “Put in your password and let me listen to the message.”

“I’m telling you, it’s nothing. Street noises, whistling. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s not on purpose. It’s like someone is pocket dialing me. Maybe they don’t even know it.”

“Just let me listen.” What could it hurt for Nicole to hear the message? At worst, she’d be as puzzled as Lauren. At best, she’d have an idea for how to stop the bothersome calls.

Lauren tapped a few buttons on the screen, and Nicole lifted the phone to her ear to listen to the automated voice announce one unheard voice mail.

The message began—and Nicole’s heart crashed into her throat. She screamed.

Lauren snatched the phone out of Nicole’s hand.

“No!” Nicole nearly tipped over her chair lunging for the phone. “Don’t delete that!”

“Why not? What did you hear?”

“Have you deleted all the messages from this number?”

“Yes, of course.” Lauren’s finger was poised over the phone.

Nicole groaned. “I want you to listen to this one and tell me if you’ve heard that sound before.”

Lauren moistened her lips and then complied.

“Yes,” she said. “Not exactly the same. This was somebody whistling. Last time it sounded more like a tinny out-of-tune piano. But it’s the same tune.”

Sylvia Alexander rushed toward them. “I heard a scream. Is everybody all right?”

Ethan came out from behind the screen and hurriedly handed a form to a parent. “What happened? Your foot?”

Nicole shook her head. “Give me the phone, Lauren. I’m going to call that number back.” Trembling, she found the number in the phone’s log and tapped it. A few seconds later it rang four times. No one answered, and no one’s voice invited a message. In an unsteady hand, Nicole scrawled the number across the top of one of her note pages and checked it three times.

Nicole handed the phone to its owner. “Lauren, have you ever heard the tune before these calls started?”

“No.”

Nicole looked at the trio of expressions locked on her face. “Well, I have. It’s Quinn’s tune.”

“Quinn’s tune?” Sylvia echoed. “What are you talking about?”

Nicole could hardly breathe. Her pulse hadn’t raced this hard in a long time.

“After my mother died,” she said, “my father was so bereft he didn’t know what to do with me. But Quinn was there. He knew I was scared and lonely, and one day he said I needed a song.”

“What kind of song?” Ethan asked.

“A song that was just mine,” Nicole said. “It didn’t even have to have words. We sat at his piano and I picked some random notes. Quinn turned them into a few bars of music. After that he whistled them to me when he knew I was feeling low. Even in high school, when he saw me in the hall, he whistled those notes.”

Six eyes around her widened into stunned discs.

“That voice mail is someone whistling Quinn’s tune. It’s not Quinn—I would know his whistle—but no one could know that tune if they don’t know Quinn.” And it would have to be someone Quinn trusted. Why else would he share something that was just between him and Nicole?

Fifteen seconds passed before anyone spoke. Finally, Sylvia took control.

“We need to have a meeting, and we need to do it soon. We’re all circling each other with pieces of information that might be relevant, and it’s time to get everything on the table.” Sylvia checked her watch. “I want all of you to find a way to get away from your stations and meet me over behind the auction tables in thirty minutes.”

Nicole nodded.

“Lauren,” Sylvia continued, “get Dani, Jack, and Liam. And Cooper. Everybody we need is here today. Don’t take no for an answer.”

Ethan left to see another child waiting to have his tonsils examined, and Sylvia pivoted to march across the lawn to the silent auction.

“What just happened?” Lauren’s face blanched.

“You’ve been walking around with a clue for days.” Nicole stilled the shaking in her limbs.

“I didn’t know! I thought it was the guy who bullied me in high school.”

“No one’s blaming you,” Nicole said. “But Sylvia’s right. It’s time to find out what everyone knows.”

Lauren jaunted across the lawn and halted in front of Liam’s table.

Nicole hadn’t trusted anyone else to find Quinn, but she hadn’t found him, either. All of her digging through information hadn’t revealed why Quinn would leave Hidden Falls. It was Dani’s skills that turned up the lead that Quinn had been in St. Louis. Could he be in Oklahoma now?

Ethan dismissed his patient and came back around to kneel in front of Nicole. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know what to think, what to feel.” Breath was still elusive. “This could be big.”

“I hope it is. I hope it breaks Quinn’s disappearance wide open.”

Nicole’s stomach hardened. She didn’t want to hear what was coming next.

Ethan put a hand on her knee. “I have to leave as soon as the fair wraps up.”

“I know.”

“I hope you also know I don’t want to.” Ethan leaned toward Nicole. “Especially now.”

Nicole swallowed. “We’ll find Quinn. I’ll make sure he calls you.”

“Nicole.” Ethan’s voice thickened. “No regrets, right?”

She welcomed his kiss but felt the good-bye in it.

1:16 p.m.

Not everyone seemed eager to be there, but that didn’t deter Sylvia. She needed only enough cooperation to glean information.

“We don’t have much time.” Sylvia made no suggestion that anyone should sit down, not even Nicole. They stood a few yards away from the end of the silent auction table because it seemed like the best option for staying out of major traffic flow around the lawn while still observing the fair. Already Lauren had positioned herself to look out on the activities she felt responsible for.

“What are we doing here?” Liam looked like he could barely stand up.

“I’ll get right to the point.” Sylvia met each gaze around the circle. “You may not all know each other, but we all want to see Quinn come home. I’ve had enough conversations with each of you in the last few days to suspect that if we all threw our thoughts against a canvas, we might be surprised at the picture that resulted.”

Jack looked lost and defensive.

Liam clearly was exhausted by something other than Quinn’s disappearance.

Nicole’s face was white with intensity.

Ethan’s was full of remorse. Or dread.

Dani, as usual, wore a deadpan expression that meant she didn’t intend to invest herself in this conversation.

Lauren paled with confusion.

Cooper’s stance next to Lauren appeared protective.

“No offense, Cooper,” Sylvia said, “but we need to speed up the process of sorting things out. You and your team might not even be aware of some of the information floating around, so you can’t possibly evaluate whether it’s worth investigating. As mayor, I believe this conversation will be in the best interest of the whole town.”

“Please proceed, Your Honor.” Cooper crossed his wrists in front. “I respect both your authority and your wisdom.”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Sylvia said. “One at a time, I’m going to ask you to share with the others what you’ve shared with me—or anything else you know that may be relevant. Think of this like a brainstorming session. There are no wrong answers. Every idea matters. We get everything out there, and then we decide what to do with it.”

Sylvia wasn’t sure whether the squinting in some faces was because of the sun—which wasn’t as bright as it had been earlier—or doubt about the usefulness of the analogy. As mayor, Sylvia had led enough meetings to understand that people don’t always know what they know and that how the pieces fit together mattered more than individual agendas.

“I’m depending on you to be straightforward,” Sylvia said. “Even if you think I already know something, the point is to tell everyone else. Understand?”

Heads nodded.

“Liam.” She pointed at him. “You first.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I think what the mayor has in mind is my accidental discovery that Quinn uses a UPS box in Birch Bend. The number is similar to mine, and I mistakenly got a piece of his mail.”

“Why does he have a UPS box?” Cooper asked.

“That’s what we don’t know,” Sylvia said. “Keep going, Liam.”

He wrapped his arms across his belly and grasped his own elbows. “You mean the pictures?”

Sylvia nodded.

“I took pictures of the envelope before I turned it in, and I gave them to the mayor. I thought she might know something about it.”

“But I didn’t.” Sylvia turned her attention. “Jack? You were going to investigate the return address.”

Jack shrugged. “Sorry, I didn’t come up with anything. Whatever it is, it’s buried pretty deep.”

Sylvia saw Liam’s eyes flick toward Dani. “Liam, do you know something?”

“Only what Dani told me.”

All heads turned toward Dani, whose eyes had taken on a glare.

“It’s not buried so deep,” Dani said. “The envelope is a small holding of a detective agency. My guess is Quinn’s looking for someone and got the box in Birch Bend because he didn’t figure it was anybody’s business. Which it isn’t.”

“That fits.” Nicole adjusted the stance of her crutches. “He’s been doing genealogy research at the cemetery. You wouldn’t believe the books Old Dom has out there.”

Interest flickered through Dani’s eyes. “But at the cemetery he’d be looking for someone who is dead, someone who died in Hidden Falls. I don’t see how that fits with a detective agency in Pennsylvania.”

“I wonder if he went to Pennsylvania,” Sylvia said. “He came from back East somewhere.”

“Doubtful,” Jack said.

He was posturing because his own efforts had turned up nothing, and it irritated Sylvia. But she had said every idea mattered, and she held herself to her own instructions and didn’t comment.

“Jack is right,” Ethan said. “Quinn didn’t go east. He went west, to St. Louis.”

Sylvia felt her own eyes widen. This was the first she’d heard about St. Louis.

“He was there a few days ago,” Ethan said. “Right, Dani?”

Dani held up both hands, palms out. “It wasn’t my idea to snoop.”

“Snoop where?” Cooper asked.

“Just a quick peek at Quinn’s bank account,” Nicole said. “It was my idea. If it matters to anyone, Dani didn’t want to do it and she stopped almost immediately.”

“How exactly did you gain access to this information?” Cooper asked.

“Nicole stole Quinn’s computer.” Dani’s statement assigned no blame, simply provided facts.

“And I twisted Dani’s arm into hacking in,” Ethan said.

Cooper rolled his eyes. “I see the Hidden Falls crime spree has been more widespread than I realized.”

“I agree,” Jack said. “If Quinn’s privacy has been invaded, he will have solid grounds for legal action.”

If Jack thought Quinn would take legal action against his worried friends, he didn’t know Quinn at all. In fact, Jack didn’t seem to know anything. Maybe it had been a mistake for Sylvia to invite him to this gathering. There was no telling what he might do with what he learned.

“Back to St. Louis,” Sylvia said.

“Quinn bought gas and a meal,” Nicole said. “Or at least someone with his debit card did. The transactions are right there on his bank account.”

“When?”

“A few days ago.”

“Where has he been since then?” Sylvia asked.

Nicole shrugged. “Dani shut down the computer. As far as I know, she hasn’t looked again.”

Sylvia turned to Dani. “Have you?”

“Of course not. Quinn was fine and safe in St. Louis, probably having dinner with a friend.”

“But what friend?” Ethan shifted over a few steps to stand closer to Nicole. “The friend who visits him every year?”

Adrenaline rolled through Sylvia’s stomach.

“What friend who visits him every year?” Liam asked.

“Dani knows him.”

Dani seemed to know a great deal today, Sylvia thought.

“I do
not
know Quinn’s friend. All I ever said was that a guy comes to see him in the late fall, and they go fishing. Sometimes they used my boat.”

Sylvia fought the blanch draining her cheeks. How could she be so close to Quinn for more than thirty years and not know who visited him in Hidden Falls every single autumn? Quinn rarely mentioned any old friends, and never with any suggestion that an old friend was still active in his life. Sylvia was his oldest friend. His closest friend.