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He rubbed the hair on the top of his head as though trying to scrub it off. “Naomie went out for a walk around five o’clock, and she hasn’t been back. That isn’t like her.”
“She went out for a walk after what happened to Madison?” Jo asked. “Why?”
He pulled his phone out, tapped at it, and thrust it at her. “This is what she sent to me.”
Jo read the text showing on the screen, sent at five twenty that evening:Had a stressful day, can’t seem to shake it. Gonna go for a walk to re-center. Shepherd’s pie needs an hour in the oven, pull it out if I’m not back.
“So about half an hour before sunset. She didn’t say where she was going,” Jo said, and scanned the cars in the driveway. “Is one of these hers?”
Chris pointed to a champagne Lexus 500h. “That one. When she goes for walks, it’s usually at Haptin Pond. There’s a trail just down the road that leads right to it, about a quarter mile away.” He gestured north, where Jo could see a narrow, paved path marked by two wooden posts disappear into a copse of trees.
“Does she go for walks often? How long do they usually last?”
“She used to go all the time, but lately she’s been doing a prenatal exercise class instead. When she does, it’s about half an hour.”
Jo considered the time. Nine-fifteen, which meant she’d been gone for over four hours, far longer than any walk would warrant. “And you tried calling her?”
He tapped the phone and held it up again. The display showed five calls to Naomie beginning at six-fifteen, interspersed in the last hour with several calls to other numbers. “She didn’t answer. I left several messages asking her to call me back as soon as possible.”
“With the pregnancy, is there any chance she stopped to rest and fell asleep, something like that?” Arnett asked.
“When Chelsea got here, she waited while I checked along the main path. I didn’t see her anywhere,” he said.
“That’s when I told him I thought we should call you,” Chelsea said. “I don’t understand why she would do this. Why would she go out for a walk alone after what happened to Madison?”
Julia wrapped her arms across her chest, gripping her upper arms. “Crone Ridge is in a much more— She wouldn’t have considered this area unsafe. I know I wouldn’t have.”
Chelsea shook her head incredulously. “Because you’re not pregnant. I’ve barely been able to sleep with the nightmares I’ve been having about getting abducted.”
Julia’s fingers dug into her arms. “Naomie’s always thought she can do anything. And mostly she can.”
“But there’s something else,” Chelsea said. “I forgot to tell you this until I mentioned it to David the other night. There was a man watching us in the parking lot of the smoothie bar the other night.”
Jo’s jaw mentally dropped, and she struggled to keep her annoyance from showing. “A man watching you?”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know for sure he was watchingus,” she hedged, “but he was sitting in his car, like looking down in his lap. It gave me the creeps.”
“Why didn’t you mention it before?” Arnett asked.
“I—um—I didn’t think too much of it. He didn’t follow us out of the parking lot, but maybe he did from a distance and I just didn’t notice.” Her eyes looked everywhere but their faces.
“What did he look like?” Jo asked.
“I couldn’t really tell. He had a cap on, and dark glasses, and he was looking down.”
“Dark glasses at night?” Jo asked, her mind flying back to Hailey’s description of the man at The Volcano.
Chelsea shifted her weight from foot to foot. “It was hard to tell. It was dark, so they might just have been regular glasses. But I couldn’t see his eyes.”
“And you didn’t happen to see the license plate?” Jo asked.
Chelsea shook her head.
Jo turned to Chris. “Could Naomie have had an errand to run, something like that?”
Chris pointed back to the house. “Like her text said, she had a shepherd’s pie in the oven, and intended to come back for dinner.”
“And she doesn’t forget things like that,” Chelsea said.
