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An uneasiness settled in Rae’s stomach, but she shook it off. It wasn’t completely unheard of for there to be bad actors within the kink community, especially after popular books and films like the laughable Fifty Shades series increased interest in BDSM. In truth, there were as many women under the delusion that they could be a submissive to a billionaire as there were asshole men who preyed on the vulnerable women obsessed with the fantasy. Rae only hoped the missing woman was off having a consensual escape into bad sex with a faux Dom before reality set in.
The unease spiked again as Rae stirred the meat in the skillet, memories trying to erupt. She knew all too well how easy it was to slip through the cracks of society, never to be heard from again.
CHAPTER 3
ECHO
2009
Echo woke up in the motel room with a horrible kink in her neck. For a moment, she forgot where she was or how she’d gotten there. She stared at the mauve-and-teal curtains pulled tight, the sun fighting to break into the tiny room, and remembered how she’d tossed and turned all night, scared someone would try to bust down the door. She held back the tears wanting to resurface. She had cried herself to sleep shortly after paying for the room in cash, and her eyes felt gummy and swollen.
The room, thank God, had a single-serve coffee maker and two mugs, so she brewed herself a cup so she could take one of the prenatal vitamins. She then ran the coffee maker again to get hot water. She mixed one of the packets of instant apple-cinnamon oatmeal she had bought at the store in the other mug and sat on the edge of the bed to eat since there was no table in the room.
Echo was afraid to turn on the TV. She didn’t want to accidentally see the news, the possibility of her face splashed onto the screen, although she knew she was being paranoid. There would be nothing onthe news about Clint, or Bobby, or anything that had happened. There would be nothing reported, because to the outside world, Echo Phalin was just another teen runaway, now an adult, gone for four long years with no one searching for her.
Especially not her mother. And her dad?
She swallowed a bite of oatmeal, forced it down over the swell in her throat. Thoughts of her dad always made her think of the time before her mother left them, when Echo was about to turn fourteen. He was so different then. A wide smile perpetually brightened his face, his blue eyes always sparkling with a new dad joke he was itching to tell her.Hey, lil bunny, what kind of tree can fit in one hand?He wouldn’t even wait for her answer.A palm tree!
He kept Echo laughing however he could, even when things with her mother got worse, her absences from the house growing longer and longer until one day she took all her things and never came home.
Then, it was like a switch turned off in him, and everything went dark. No more jokes, no more watching B horror films on the weekend with a giant bowl of popcorn mixed with Reese’s Pieces between them on the couch. No more impromptu picnics at the park or feeding the ducks and geese at the big pond close to where they lived, the same pond they once tried to skate on one winter. They had just watchedLittle Womentogether, the version with Winona Ryder, and Echo had wanted nothing more than to ice-skate on a pond just like in the scene with Jo and Laurie, but without falling through the ice like Amy’s character. Her dad had inched out onto the ice about two feet from the pond’s shoreline when they both heard the cracking. He scrambled back to her, failing to keep the disappointment from his face. She knew how he hated to let her down in any way, and she never knew how to assure him he wasn’t, so she tried to lighten the mood by starting a snowball fight.
But after her mother left, her dad could no longer keep up the charade of everything being okay. Echo started noticing the pill bottleson her dad’s nightstand—pain medications for ailments she didn’t know he had. He didn’t show signs of having an injury, yet the bottles became a constant, and then they disappeared. She thought the dark days were coming to an end and her happy dad would come back, but that was when she discovered the syringe. Echo had tried to help more with the chores to ease her dad’s burden, so she had washed and folded the laundry and was putting her dad’s clothes away when she found it in an empty cigarette carton her dad had hidden in his sock drawer. She hadn’t even known he’d smoked.
She had wanted to confront him about it, but she was too scared he’d get mad at her for prying into his things and leave her like her mother did. So many times, she wished she had said something. If she had, she probably wouldn’t be in a shitty motel room, alone and pregnant with no place to run.
Except, she did maybe have a place to go, but it would mean making the hardest call of her life.
She finished her oatmeal and coffee, both now cold, and took out the burner phone she’d bought the night before. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand: 8:19 a.m., so two hours ahead in Oklahoma. It was Saturday, and she hoped that increased the chance of someone answering.
Slowly, she pushed the ten digits she had memorized. Echo was sure it wasn’t the right number after the line rang for the third time. Maybe she had a digit off, or maybe it was someone else’s number now, but then a groggy, familiar voice answered.
“Hello?”
“Mom?”
A pause. “Who is this?”
“It’s . . . it’s me. Echo.”
Another pause, so long Echo thought the line disconnected. “Why are you calling? How did you get this number?”
She had used an online white pages search to find her mother’s new number and address. It was during her computer-technology class before she’d dropped out of school her sophomore year.
“Mom, I ... I need help.”
“Why don’t you call your father?”
Echo closed her eyes, swallowed hard as tears wet her lips. “He d-died. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh ... of course. I remember. Your call woke me up.” Her mother let out a long sigh. “So, what do you need from me?”
“I’m in trouble.”
“Is it because of that drug dealer?”
Her mother had met Clint only one time, during a brief lunch, shortly after Echo’s dad had died four years before. Echo somehow thought her mother would magically change after their lunch, that she’d hold her and tell her she’d take care of her now with her dad gone. But, during their meal at Braum’s, her mother only stared at Clint’s tattoo sleeves and low-slung jeans, the huge diamond stud in his left ear. As they were leaving the place, her mother pulled her aside and said, “You can’t live with me, but if you go with him, you’ll end up dead.”
