AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“None,” Steve affirmed sadly. “I’m sorry.”
Steve agreed to send along the file of messages just in case anything triggered Claire’s memory. Just before they got off the phone, Claire remembered to ask, “How is California?”
“It’s okay,” Steve said. He sounded sad. “I’m getting a nice tan.”
Claire wasn’t in the right place to dig deeper into her brother’s psyche. That had to come later—after Gail was found. She sighed. “Take care of yourself, Steve. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Claire clutched her phone to her chest, took a deep breath, and called Abby’s name. She was reminded of crying out her girls’ names for dinner when they’d been upstairs together, playing with Barbies, falling through imaginative worlds.
Abby appeared a moment later, her eyes shadowed. She strung her skinny arms together, putting up what seemed to be a classic teenage wall. “What’s up?”
“Could you sit down, please?” Claire gestured toward the chair opposite the couch along the wall, the one nearest the window. She wanted to look her daughter head-on; she wanted to study the glint in her eyes, to look for potential clues. Ultimately, she wanted to see if her daughter was lying. She couldn’t rule anything out anymore.
Claire sat across from her daughter, her palms flat on her thighs, and decided to just come out with it. “Do you know someone named Nathan Rodgers?”
Abby flinched as though she’d been smacked. It was clear she knew him.
“How did you…?” Abby stuttered.
Claire raised her hand to stop her. “Just tell me who he is.” She sounded formal, as though she conducted a job interview or a police investigation.
Abby pulled her hair, and her eyes glinted. “Ugh. I hate that guy.” Abby’s words held a surprising amount of vitriol behind them.
“Abby. Come on.” Claire wanted to scream. “Tell me who he is.”
“Nathan is a master’s student at the University of Massachusetts,” Abby explained. “He’s studying literature.”
“Master’s student?”
“Yeah. He’s like twenty-three or something,” Abby sniffed. She said “twenty-three” as though it were as old as fifty-five.
“And he knows Gail?”
“We technically met him on the same night. I guess that was late September or early October,” Abby said. “It’s totally rare to get invited to a house party off-campus as a freshman, but my friend Tiff’s brother has a house, and we ended up there one night. It was like a college party you see in the movies. Gail was so impressed.”
Claire’s brain twisted with technicolor fears. She imagined her darling twins drinking disgusting cans of domestic beer around men as old as twenty-three. She imagined them doing things they regretted or didn’t remember. Her heart felt heavy.
“And Nathan was there?”
“Yeah. He’s friends with Tiff’s brother, somehow.”
“Tell me everything, Abby,” Claire ordered. “Everything he said when you met him.”
Abby’s eyes widened. “You think Nathan took Gail?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Claire could have repeated this mantra forever until she went crazy with it.
Abby folded her lips. “Gail and I were with Tiff on the couch, listening to music and talking.”
“Did you have anything to drink?”
“Mom. Of course.” Abby shot Claire a look. “But not very much, okay?”
Claire filled her lungs with air and told herself not to freak out.
“Tiff’s brother came over to us to make sure we were okay. We were the youngest people there, and he was being protective. Nathan wasn’t far away, and he started teasing Tiff’s brother about it. I remember one of us shot back at Nathan. It could have been any of us. But after that, Nathan came over and started chatting us up. Because he was a master’s student in literature, Gail latched onto him pretty quickly. You know how she is with books.”
