Chapter 15
Erin finished the last call on her list. Mrs. Larson, Connor’s mother, was running out of patience, she could tell.
She tried not to be a nuisance, but it wasn’t like she could quit looking.
She’d even tried texting, knowing a lot of people preferred that method of communication, actually including her, but somehow she needed to hear other human voices.
When she had realized people were getting irritated—something she didn’t quite understand, given the circumstances—she’d broken the names down into two lists and rotated them, so she only called each person every other day.
But lately her calls had been going straight to voice mail, and a couple of people had even blocked her.
Sometimes, when she was exhausted after a sleepless night of worrying, she wanted to ask them how they’d feel if it was their own child who was missing.
But she knew it would come out angrily, probably almost hysterically, so she bit back the words and reeled in her temper.
Or tried to. She needed their help, not their antagonism.
When she caught herself pacing the living room floor repeatedly for the third time today, she broke.
She had to do something. She couldn’t go see the people on her lists and irritate them even further, but she could revisit the places she knew about, that Ethan hung out.
Or at least, where he used to hang out, before he got sucked into whatever he was into now.
She didn’t expect to turn up anything, but at least she’d be doing something.
She had to try, or she’d go mad. Besides, the odds of Ethan showing up after all this time seemed beyond slim to her.
And she suspected making her stay home was just as much—if not more—that Blaine didn’t want her with them.
So she spent a couple of hours going from place to place to place and finding out nothing, before she got to the commercial block that was last on her list of possibilities.
She parked in the first spot she found, mentally making a list of all the places she could think of that Ethan might have gone to.
The first two, first only because they were the nearest to where she’d parked, turned up nothing.
She’d not expected anything, but the next she had higher hopes for.
There was a new cashier at the small game store she knew he used to visit. The girl, who looked about eighteen, shook her head at Ethan’s photograph. “Nope, never seen him.”
“You’re sure?”
The girl, whose name tag read Hannah, nodded.
“I’ve only been here a few days, so there’s not a lot to remember yet.
But I pay attention.” She glanced around, as if to see if anyone was close enough to hear, before adding, “We get some guys coming in here who scare me. As in already looking for another job scare me.”
Erin’s breath caught before she recovered and asked, “You mean gang types?”
“Yeah. Well, younger, like junior high age, but the same look.” She grimaced. “Like those gangsters are something to emulate.”
Erin had to calm her breathing, and wished she could do the same for her pulse rate, which had just kicked up.
It was the first connection she’d found, the first location that both Ethan and the gang wannabes had in common.
Assuming, of course, this group was the same one he’d gotten tangled up with.
She asked a few more questions, got a couple of descriptions that might be useful, and the interesting news that none of that group had been in for almost a week.
Almost the same amount of time Ethan had been gone.
“Good luck finding that other job, Hannah,” Erin said, meaning it as she handed the cashier her business card with her phone number.
“Thanks. I hope you find your son.” The young woman smiled. “And I’ll call if I see him come in.”
She exited the store and headed back to where she had parked, a couple of blocks down. She was both up and down, up that she might have confirmed at least the likelihood of a connection between Ethan and those other boys, and down for the exact same reason.
She’d known early on that that connection was a possibility, but she kept hoping it wasn’t true, so she hadn’t spent much time considering what might happen if it was.
Something Blaine’s intimidating friend had said, about the attorney he’d talked to, came back to her now.
He can help with any aftermath issues for Ethan as well.
Aftermath issues.
It hadn’t registered at the time but it did now.
He meant legal trouble. He meant if Ethan had been lured into breaking any laws while in the company of those kids she’d hoped against hope he wasn’t involved with.
She’d been so focused on worrying about his safety, and whether their relationship had been fatally fractured that she hadn’t even thought about other kinds of repercussions.
For instance, ending up having to visit her son in some juvenile detention facility.
The very thought made her faintly nauseous. Images rose in her mind of prison jumpsuits and a glass wall always between her and Ethan. And that was what she was lost in thought about when she was jolted out of the reverie by a sharp exclamation of her name.
“Erin! What are you doing out here?”
She snapped out of the fog to see Blaine headed for her, now barely six feet away. When he reached her he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to the narrow grass parkway that ran along the side of the street, out of the pedestrian lane.
“Let go of me,” she snapped, not because he’d hurt her or even because he’d made the decision to move for her, but because his touch still had that crazy effect on her and she hated the fact.
“Sorry,” he muttered, releasing her instantly with an exaggerated movement of his arms, his hands wide-open now. As if she’d burned him. As perhaps she had.
It was a moment before he asked again, “What are you doing out here?”
“What do you think?” she asked, waving the photo she’d shown to Hannah. “Looking for my son.”
She saw a flicker of something in his eyes. Pain? Belatedly she realized it was at her referring to Ethan as her son, not our son. But he didn’t call her on it. Instead he just said, “We’re doing this. Why aren’t you at the house?”
“I didn’t realize I was under house arrest!”
She hated the way she sounded even as the angry words left her mouth. What was it about him that just broke all her governors?
“You’re not,” he said, more gently than she deserved. “It’s just someone needs to be there, just in case. And we’re the new eyes, with a bit more experience in search and find.”
She only noted he didn’t use the more traditional phrase search and rescue, and for some reason that really registered. Maybe because it told her he, too, was trying to avoid thinking the worst.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “Really, Blaine, I am. I was just going crazy sitting at home, waiting, not doing anything about finding him.”
Something flickered again in his gaze when she said his name. But it was different this time. As if it had nothing to do with their son and everything to do with them.
Before she could get lost down that rabbit hole, she said quickly, “But don’t be mad. Because I found something. Maybe.”
“Come on,” he said. “Rafe and Cutter are just up here.”
He gestured in the same direction she’d been heading, and they started to walk.
He said nothing more, and the silence seemed more tense to her than it probably was.
She was floundering in her mind, trying to think of something to say when she saw the tall, rangy man and the distinctive dog exiting a shop a few doors down.
The pet store, she realized, and for some reason that made her smile just as Cutter apparently spotted them, his head coming up sharply.
Rafe seemed to react almost as quickly, and they both headed toward them at a fast walk.
“Erin says she found out something,” Blaine said to the man without preamble.
She felt a little uncomfortable at the way that sounded.
“It’s not much,” she said hastily. “But I know Ethan likes that game store back there, and I just talked to the clerk. She’s new, and hasn’t seen him, but she said that some other kids about the same age have been hanging out there, and they make her nervous because they look like a younger version of some adult gang types she’s seen in the news. ”
“So we have the same sort he’s reportedly hanging out with frequenting one of his regular locations,” Rafe said.
She nodded, grateful that he hadn’t dismissed the tiny tidbit as useless. And that was what made her say, “I know it’s not much, but it’s something.”
Rafe nodded, then said, “I got a little something, too, thanks to Cutter here.” At her startled look a slight smile crossed his face.
“I thought he was just being a dog when he wanted to go into the pet store. But he insisted, and I’ve learned not to say no when he gets that way.
Anyway, the guy who owns the place was there, and he recognized Ethan from the photo. Said he comes in fairly often.”
Blaine let out an audible breath. “So this is definitely an area he frequents.”
“I should have thought of checking there,” Erin said, upset at herself. “He’s always wanted a pet of some kind, but the timing was never right.”
“For who?” Blaine asked.
The two words stabbed at her as if they’d been obscenities. Because she knew he was right. She had been the one who hadn’t wanted the added responsibility of an animal when she was barely hanging on as it was.
She was grateful when Rafe stepped in before she could think of a thing to say to the question that had seemed an accusation.
“He told me when Ethan first came in a couple of months ago, he was asking about a hamster they have that he seemed to like, asking if they made any noise.”
“Noise?” she asked, puzzled.
“Probably wondering if he could keep it hidden,” Blaine said. There was no accusation in his tone this time, but she knew that if he’d finished that sentence it would have been with “from you.”
She wanted to be angry at him for the sniping, but how could she when he was absolutely right?
“There’s more,” Rafe said, cutting off her unwelcome thoughts.
She obviously didn’t know the man well, but something in the way he said it sent her pulse up a notch and made her almost afraid to breathe.
“He said that Ethan was in looking at the hamster again, with a couple of other kids he didn’t like the look of. ”
So that proved it. Ethan had definitely hooked up with the last group of kids she’d have ever wanted him involved with. She felt that faint queasiness again, but fought it down.
“Rafe?” Blaine said, looking at the man as if he sensed something else was coming.
Rafe’s gaze shifted from her to Blaine, then back as he added quietly, “That was yesterday.”