AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He flashed a grin. “To be honest, I’m kind of having fun trying, aren’t you?”
It was true. They’d never been so physically connected, so on fire, as they had been since they started trying to get pregnant. Her thoughts briefly turned to that morning, a different kind of blush staining her cheeks as she remembered the feel of him against her, inside her. First, in bed. Later, in the laundry room.
“I can’t argue with that,” Josie answered.
“Hey,” Noah said, turning onto the Patchetts’ road. “Ask Gretchen if they checked the house yet.”
She returned her attention to her phone, typing the question out to Gretchen. Her answer came back in seconds. Josie read it off to him. “Yes, first thing. House was clear.”
Whenever they got a call for a missing child, procedure dictated that they search the child’s home even if that wasn’t the last place the child was seen. It was the unfortunate consequence of missing child reports turning out to be cases in which the children weren’t missing at all. Sometimes, they were hiding. Other times, they’d been harmed or killed by their parents and then hidden inside the home. Searching the house first eliminated these two possibilities. It also gave investigators a chance to observe the parents’ behavior. If their child was truly missing, they wouldn’t have an issue with the police searching their house. If something more nefarious was happening, they might object to the search or otherwise show signs of stress that could indicate they were involved in the disappearance.
The road narrowed, trees rising up on both sides like sentries. There were several residences along the way, but they were spread far apart, each one set on four or more acres with long driveways that snaked through pine trees. Most of the homes weren’t visible from the road, their presence marked only by mailboxes.
“This is it,” Noah said as they crested a hill and saw a Denton PD cruiser parked near a driveway. The uniformed officer stood outside his vehicle near a white mailbox. He waved to them as Noah turned their SUV into the driveway. A ribbon of asphalt cut through a large grove of eastern hemlock trees, curving to the left ahead. Noah followed slowly, around the bend and up an incline.
“I cannot even imagine how they deal with this driveway when it snows,” Josie muttered.
Noah banked to the right as another curve in the driveway appeared. “Someone has to plow them out.”
Finally, a house came into view. A two-story rancher with tan siding and a two-car garage. Josie recognized the red front door from the photo of the Patchett sisters. It overlooked a small front stoop bracketed on either side by flowerbeds freshly mulched and dotted with pink peonies and purple geraniums. A stone walkway veered from the stoop in the direction of the garage. A fastidiously cut front lawn lay between the house and more trees, mostly hemlocks and various species of pine. Beside the garage, on a concrete slab, sat an old pickup truck with a plow on the front.
“Must do the snow removal themselves,” Josie said.
She turned her attention to the other vehicles gathered at the front of the garage. Two police cruisers, Gretchen’s unmarked car, and a minivan. Nearby, a group of people stood in a loose circle. Josie recognized Gretchen’s short, spiky brown and gray hair immediately. While a few of the uniformed officers milled around, Gretchen spoke with a civilian couple. Josie knew they were a couple by the way they held onto one another. The man was tall and round. A baseball cap covered his head. A blue T-shirt that read “Soccer Dad” hung down over his wrinkled khaki cargo shorts. On his feet were a worn pair of slides. He looked like he’d been in the middle of changing when the police showed up. Or maybe that was how he always dressed. Josie recognized Kayleigh Patchett’s round cheeks, soft chin, and wide mouth in his face. On Kayleigh, they were far more pleasing. The woman clinging to his body was smaller and more smartly dressed in a floral-print silk blouse, black slacks, and a pair of tan ballet flats. Her curly brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail but a halo of frizz had escaped. Savannah Patchett was the spitting image of her mother.
Noah parked the SUV behind one of the cruisers and they hopped out, jogging over to the group. They produced their police credentials, offering them to the parents. They barely glanced at them. The woman looked back and forth between Josie and Noah, her eyes wide and hopeful. The man batted their IDs away. His voice boomed across the space between the house and the trees. “I don’t care who you are! Find my damn kids!”
FOUR
“Dave!” the woman admonished. Two circles of pink appeared on her cheeks. She tried to pull away from his embrace, but he held her tightly against his side, one meaty hand clamped on her shoulder.
“Shut up, Shel! I’m sick of all this talk. Talk, talk, talk. Where are our damn girls?”
Gretchen ignored his outburst altogether. She held her notepad in one hand and pen in the other. She used the pen to indicate the couple. “Quinn, Fraley. This is Shelly Patchett and her husband, David. As you know, their two daughters are missing. Kayleigh is sixteen, and Savannah is eight.”
“Both went missing at the same time?” asked Josie.
David Patchett rolled his eyes. “More damn talk!” he said under his breath.
“Yes,” Shelly said, her voice high and nervous. She looked toward Gretchen.
Giving a reassuring smile, Gretchen said, “While we’re waiting for the K-9 unit, why don’t you tell Detective Quinn and Lieutenant Fraley what you’ve told me.”
Shelly wiped a tear from her cheek. “This morning Dave and I got up late.”
“What time was that?” asked Noah.
“Around eight,” said Shelly. “We try to sleep in on weekends if we can. It’s usually impossible with games and practices. We had a rare morning off today. Dave and I went grocery shopping around nine. We came home around ten, maybe ten fifteen? The kids weren’t answering us.”
“Which is not unusual,” Dave said, calmer now. “They scatter when it comes to helping us unload groceries.”
Shelly shot him a disapproving look, extricating herself from his arms. This time, he let her go. “Savannah loves to help but Kayleigh will usually hide. Anyway, we got everything put away and they still weren’t coming when we called them. We found a note in the living room from Savannah.”
“Can we see the note?” asked Noah.
Gretchen produced it from the pages of her notebook. On a plain piece of copy paper, eight-year-old Savannah Patchett had written:
We went for a walk in the woods. Savannah.
