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“Oh,” Rina breathed.
“What’s up?” Steve looked stricken.
Rina gestured toward her phone. “Gail only sent a few messages after January 6. And none of them give any kind of clue about where she is or what’s on her mind.” Her heart thudded with dread.
“What do they say?”
“One seems to be to a female friend, and it says, ‘I left all my Jane Austen books in my room; you can go through them if you want.’ Another is to the same friend and says, ‘Abby can be such a snake.’ And the last one is written to another female friend and says, ‘I mean, I’m an adult now. I have to act like it.’ But they dry up by January 9. Maybe whoever she was with told her to stop sending messages altogether.”
Steve furrowed his brow. “Or maybe they forced her to stop. Maybe this Nathan kid stole her phone.”
Rina’s heart pounded. “One thing we can confirm is that Gail knew she was going away. She wanted to give her friend her books. She wanted to act like an adult.”
“Why is it that young people think they’re adults the minute they hit eighteen?” Steve asked.
Rina sipped her cappuccino, remembering her own past—how she’d thrown herself into the abyss of adulthood as quickly as she could. How she’d ached to get away from her parents as quickly as possible. How she’d blamed herself for her sister’s disappearance, poisoning her soul in the process.
“What should we do now?” Steve asked.
“You need to call Claire and ask her about this Nathan guy,” Rina said, forcing herself back to the current reality. “He’s our best bet right now to find Gail.”
“Read the messages she wrote to Nathan,” Steve ordered. “Maybe they’ll give us a clue.”
But when Rina pulled up Nathan’s file, she found nothing but an embarrassing display of heart-on-their-sleeves affection, the sort that only teenagers were capable of, because they didn’t yet know the cruelty of the world. Gail sent numerous selfies, heart emoji, kiss emoji, and memes that expressed how much she was thinking about him. It seemed the two of them had met in early October and begun a sizzly affair—one that probably consisted of a lot of dates at the university dining hall.
“Did Gail ever have any high school boyfriends?” Rina asked, just as the server arrived with their platters of food. The steam from her pancakes filled the air between them.
“No,” Steve said, unrolling his napkin from his fork and knife and gazing across the ocean. “I remember Isabella talking about it. About how Gail, Abby, and Rachel never branched out from one another. She was afraid for them, wondering what would happen when they got to college and were forced to grow up.” Steve sniffed. “But she never could have envisioned this.”
“Nobody could have,” Rina agreed. “But we’re getting closer to finding her.”
Rina wanted to tell Claire it would be all right—but she began to have doubts about that. False hope was the worst kind of poison.
ChapterThirteen
Claire was at her mother and father’s when Steve called her about Nathan Rodgers. Standing in the sunroom with the phone pressed hard against her ear, she listened intently. Beside her was the Christmas tree her mother kept up all through January. Out the window, snow swelled over the sand dunes, and the ocean lapped against the sands. It all looked so ordinary.
“You’re telling me Gail had a boyfriend?”
“That’s right,” Steve said. “Rina suggests you talk to Abby about him. I’m sure she’ll know who he is.”
“Why didn’t Abby bring this up already?” Claire rasped, careful not to speak too loudly. Abby was in the kitchen with Kerry, washing dishes from lunch. She could hear the patter of their voices through the hall.
“Maybe they broke up,” Steve said.
“Do the messages indicate that?”
“The messages between Gail and Nathan end on January 3,” Steve explained. “Three days before she went missing.”
“So that means they weren’t talking when she left?”
“Rina thinks it’s possible they already had a plan in place,” Steve said. “Maybe they stopped communicating via text message just in case anyone was reading. Like us.”
The premeditation Steve and Rina suggested boggled Claire’s mind. Getting Gail to do her homework before the due date had been hard enough.
She must have really wanted to go.
“But none of the messages talk about Gail and Abby’s fight on New Year’s Eve?”
