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But the library first.
The Wolford library wasn’t crowded, but I had to apply for a library card to access the computers, which chewed up about ten minutes. Since I’d already done a search for Ricky Morris and hadn’t seen anything about any fires, I looked up house fires in Lone County. There had been multiple house fires over the past few years, but only three had been labeled as arson. There weren’t any follow-up articles on the arson cases, but I wrote down the information, planning to ask Louise to pull the sheriff’s reports.
No question about it, she was going to hate me before this case was done.
Next, I looked up business fires in the county, surprised to see quite a few of them. Over the past two years, eight of them had been arson. A few had been solved, but five of them had not. I printed off the articles, making note that two of them were mechanic shops, one was an auto body shop, and two were salvage yards—all within an eight-month period.
That seemed suspicious as hell.
A quick glance at my phone told me I had forty minutes before I needed to be at the LaRue house, so I paid for the print job and headed out to my car. I had just enough down time to stop by the liquor store and get back to Jackson Creek.
The sales clerk nodded to me as I walked in. I was familiar enough with the store to know where the whiskey was shelved, so I headed right over, grabbed two bottles and brought them to the counter.
The older gentleman rang me up and told me the total as he started placing them in paper bags.
“No mini-bottles today?” he asked matter-of-factly.
Holding back a cringe as I placed my debit card on the counter, I said, “Not today.”
Admitting you had a problem was the first step to getting help, and while I knew drinking tiny bottles of vodka to deal with difficult things wasn’t right, I was giving myself some grace. I was going through a lot. How was alcohol any different than Xanax?
Deep down, I knew there was a difference. I just didn’t want to admit it.
I needed to find Ava first, and then I’d sort through this drinking situation and figure out my life.
I entered my PIN, relieved when the sale went through. I needed to check my bank account, but it was too depressing to look up the figure now.
I’d put that off until later too.
I carried the bottles out to my car and put them in the trunk so I wouldn’t be tempted to open one and take a few sips.
I didn’t need it. Interviewing people was like riding a bicycle.
But as I drove back to Jackson Creek, a slew of doubts began to slither into my head, and I worked myself up into enough of an anxious state that I considered stopping on the side of the road and opening one of my whiskey bottles. I could only imagine what my mother would say if she knew what I wanted to do.
“Your problem is your lack ambition, Harper,” she’d told me more times than I could count. “You never live up to your full potential.”
Not like Andi was a given, understood by everyone in our now family of three.
And I’d lived with the guilt ever since, alternating between wanting to prove my mother wrong and not giving a shit what she thought. Every failure fed her voice in my head, telling me I’d never be enough. Every victory had her telling me it still wasn’t enough.
No matter what I did, it would never be enough to replace the life snuffed out twenty-one years ago.
I would never be enough.
By the time I was back in town, I wasn’t sure I could work any case, let alone find Ava. But I was the only person looking for her, and I couldn’t quit now.
The LaRues lived a few miles outside of downtown, closer to my parents’ house, in a neighborhood that had been developed in the nineties. Andi and I had made a few friends who lived in the neighborhood, but I hadn’t been back here since I was in high school. The trees were taller and the landscape around the houses was more developed. Memories of Andi came rushing back, stealing my breath. Riding bikes. Talking late at night when we were supposed to be asleep.
That day.
She’d been gone longer than she’d been alive, but I still missed her, sometimes so much it hurt straight to the depths of my soul. Sometimes it didn’t feel right that she was gone and I’d been left behind. Of the two of us, she was the better person. The sweet one. The one who tried to make our mother happy. I was the one with a mouth. I was the one who pushed all the wrong buttons.
Parking at the curb in front of the LaRues’ house—a two-story standard stucco house from the nineties—I sucked in a breath and held it, trying to become more focused.
Grabbing my notebook and pen, I got out of the car and walked up to the front door. The curtains in the one of the front ground floor windows fluttered, and the door opened before I could ring the doorbell.
A woman in her early thirties hung to the side of the door as though trying to hide herself. Her blond hair brushed her shoulders, and even though she wore full makeup, dark circles underscored her blue eyes. “Harper?”
