The only sound now in the kitchen is my own breathing.
I take out my phone and call the regular number for the Cross Rivers police, and not 911.
It’s Burt Webb who answers. Another way of my world telling me it just keeps getting smaller, almost by the minute.
“Burt,” I say. “It’s me. Silas. Is Taylor supposed to be working at the diner tonight?”
I wonder if he can already hear the tension in my voice, like a band that’s about to snap because it’s being pulled too far and too hard.
“Why?”
“Because I’m here,” I say. “At Scobee’s. And the lights are on and the front door is open and the griddle is still heated, but ain’t nobody home.”
There is a pause now on his end. I reach over to turn off the griddle and then stop myself, unable to keep my mind from also going to the place wherethisplace might now be considered a crime scene.
“Taylor’s home,” Burt says. “Usually, we both try to work the same overnight shift, but she swapped shifts with Molly Brendle and then someone else called out sick.”
Another pause.
“Molly’s supposed to be working tonight, pretty sure,” he says.
“Molly Brendle. High school senior.”
“Molly’s not here.”
“No sign of her?”
“No, sir.”
Then I pause before saying, “Burt, what’s going on here?”
“Maybe they took another girl,” he says in a voice that’s barely audible, and then says he’s on his way.
FIFTEEN
YOU ALWAYS HEAR the expression “high school sweethearts.” Everybody does. It refers to couples, and Burt Webb and Taylor McCarter sure fit the bill because that’s exactly what they’d been.
But Burt had also been a sweetheart in high school all by himself. For as long as I’d known him, he was the glue guy, not just on our football team but for what felt like the whole school.
Burt was the one who drove people home when they’d had too many beers. Or came and got you and gave you a ride home when you needed one and couldn’t get a cab or an Uber. He was the one who broke up a fight.
He played left tackle, which meant he was the one who was in charge of protecting my blind side. And if, God forbid, somebody got past him and got to me and got me on the ground, he was there to help me up and promise it wasn’t going to happen again that day. It rarely did. Maybe it was because he was older. He’d always acted like my football big brother.
None of us knew he’d end up a cop someday, but when that’s where his life took him and that’s the choice he made, it wasn’t as if any of us were surprised. Now he polices the town in an officialcapacity, with a gun and a badge, and people treat him like he’s already the chief.
He arrives at Scobee’s in less than ten minutes, and in uniform. I’m waiting for him in the front room.
“Hey,” he says, shaking my hand.
“Hey, man.”
He looks around a room empty except for the two of us, as if taking in the whole scene at once, and I know we’re feeling the same thing, feeling the emptiness of the diner that’s always been one of the main plazas of Cross Rivers. A happy place that is anything but right now.
“Molly’s not home,” he says. “Her mother says she dropped her here at the usual time, right before ten o’clock, and hasn’t heard from her since and hasn’t been able to raise her on her phone. Her dad’s a long-distance trucker, took off two days ago for Nevada.”
Burt takes out his own phone now, looks at it, shakes his head in frustration or anger, or both.
“Dorie—that’s Molly’s mother—gave me the kid’s number,” he says. “I texted her before I left the station and asked her to please text me back. Nothing. Called the number twice on the way here and went straight to voicemail.”
