Chapter 37
EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING
“Clay,” Eva said over the loudspeaker the next morning. “There’s a call for you on line one.”
Clay moved to the phone on the wall in the back where he was testing out new batches of his cranberry hard cider.
“Hi, this is Clay,” he said. He’d rather just pick it up and say, “Ridgeway.” But that was rude and in his business he learned you had to play nice.
“Clay. Hi. You don’t know me, but my name is Cassidy Fields. I teach with Meredith. She didn’t come in today and hasn’t called in and isn’t answering her phone. Is she with you?”
“No,” he said. His cell phone was out of his pocket in a split-second, the camera up and looking around. Her car was out front, but he realized he never got the alert that she left for work this morning either or he would have known something was off.
He’d been so lost in his own misery and that she wasn’t returning his text last night that he gave her some more time.
“That’s not like her,” Cassidy said. “I didn’t know if she was sick. But she’d always call in. With everything that has happened…”
“I’ll look into it,” he said and hung up on her.
He waved his men over and told them he had to leave.
His father was coming out of the barn when he was driving to his house to get his laptop. He was going to want to look into her camera more, but he’d go check on her first. He couldn’t ever disconnect his mind from the worst-case scenario.
“What’s going on?” his father asked when Clay rolled the window down.
“Meredith didn’t show up for work. Her friend at the school just called me. Her car is there though.”
“Maybe she’s sick,” his father said.
“She’s not replying to messages either. I don’t like this. I’m heading there now.”
“Call Ford,” his father said.
“I will if I need to.”
Clay didn’t need to involve his brother in his messy dating life.
He was more concerned she might have tripped and hit her head, knocking herself out, and was lying on the floor unconscious.
The more he thought of all those possibilities, the faster he wanted to drive and skip his laptop.
He didn’t. Always be prepared and those extra few minutes to get it now might come in handy.
He raced to town, calling and texting Meredith from his truck and getting no answer.
When he pulled in front of her townhouse, her SUV was still out front like it always was.
The movement out of the corner of his eye had him turning to see the neighbor watching him from the upper window next door again. Dude needed to get a life.
Meredith had given Clay a key before, so he unlocked the door.
“Meredith,” he yelled. There was no answer.
He could see the whole first floor and there was no sign of her, so he raced up the stairs, looking in her room and bathroom, even the craft room.
Nothing.
Where the hell could she be?
He called her phone again, heard it ringing and went in search of it.
It was nowhere visible and he finally got on the floor and saw it under her chair.
No way. She’d never leave it there. She always had it on her, or by her.
Her purse wasn’t on the counter like she always placed it either.
The hair was standing on his arms, a tingling gathering at the base of his neck.
All the signs he’d been trained to notice on his body in the past when something was off.
He stood up and walked to the kitchen to see if anything was out of place.
Looking around, he saw the kitchen was as clean as it always was. No dishes in the sink since she hated that.
He opened the dishwasher to see if her coffee cup for the day was in there.
There were two, nothing more. One floral one. One brown one.
She only ever drank out of the floral ones, which meant someone else had to have been here.
Someone that she gave coffee to.
He picked up the mug with a paper towel to see if it was still wet. Nope. Dry. Rinsed but still dry, so not from this morning.
He kept looking around for anything out of place and landed on the curtain.
It was pulled further away on one side than the other, so he moved toward it and shoved it to the side, but when he saw the camera, he didn’t look up into the corner to focus on it, rather pretending to look out the back window.
He turned his head and walked into the living room. “Fuck!”
He didn’t know if there were more cameras in the house, so he left to go to his truck to call his brother.
This was no time for him to panic. Not that he ever did, but everything with Meredith ended up being more than was on the surface.
Clay took a deep breath. It was the only way he was going to get to the bottom of this. It was the way he operated when so much was at stake.
“Hey,” Ford said. “What’s going on?”
“Meredith is missing and I was just in her house. I found one camera in the kitchen. I left before I could look for more and am calling you from my truck.”
“I’m on the way.”
“I’m going to check footage from yesterday to see if I can find who might have been here, but someone was.”
He hung up on his brother, then turned his head when the damn neighbor came out again.
The guy was going to his car, dressed as if he was going into the office.
He rolled his window down. “Hey, Karl, right?”
“That’s me,” Karl said, his smile tight.
“Have you seen Meredith lately?” He wouldn’t let on to anything.
“No,” Karl said. “Sorry. I’m on my way to work, but her car is right there.”
“Yeah, I know. But she’s not in the house.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” Karl said. “I’m sure she’s probably out walking or something. Women never leave the house without their purse. Did you see if it’s on the counter?”
“Thanks,” he said, rolling the window up. The guy was always overly helpful and nosy, but this time something wasn’t right with the way the information was thrown out in a rush.
He snapped a picture of Karl’s license plate as the neighbor pulled out.
He was checking the camera on Meredith’s front window, but she never left after she came in yesterday morning from his house.
No one visited either.
Ford pulled in next to him and Clay got out of his car.
“Did you find anything?”
“No. No one came or left since she got home yesterday and I checked the backdoor for any signs of something suspicious. Doesn’t look as if the lock has been tampered with by someone trying to break in and only residences with a key can get behind the gate in the back.”
“You haven’t talked to her at all since then?” Ford asked.
“She left in a mood,” he said. “I was giving her space.”
Ford stared at him, but he moved past his brother into Meredith’s house.
“I’m going to check for more cameras now,” Clay said.
Inside the house, he closed the curtains to make it as dark as he could, pulled his phone out and put it on the camera mode. The one in the kitchen used infrared light, so his hope was any other would also. He’d see a reflection on his camera if that was the case.
Ford and he were looking around downstairs, but detected nothing else.
They went upstairs and the same. No other cameras.
“Do you know her password for her Wi-Fi?” Ford asked.
“Knowing her, it’s written on the damn router. Just need to find where it is. But someone was here yesterday. There are two coffee cups in the dishwasher. She only uses these ugly floral ones that a student gave her. A set of four. Everyone else uses a different one.”
“What?” Ford said. His brother opened the dishwasher and pulled the brown one out with gloves on. Did the same with the floral one. “How do you know that for sure?”
“Because I grabbed one once and she took it out of my hand and put it back. She said only teachers can use them. It was some joke or something.”
Ford opened cabinets looking around. “Did you say there are four of them?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“There are only two in here. The dirty one makes three. So one is missing. Not sure if that means anything.”
“Everything means something,” he snapped.
He stalked to the laundry room, in the cabinet with the detergent was the router, he pulled it out, looked on the bottom, and there was the damn password.
He snapped a picture with his phone and went back to his laptop.
“Does anything seem out of place? There are no signs of a struggle. Her purse is gone you’d said.”
“Her phone was under the chair,” he said. “As if something caused it to fall or be kicked there. I’m telling you something isn’t right.”
“I believe you,” Ford said. “I’m going to get a description and APB out on her.”
“Hang on, there are a bunch of Wi-Fi connections popping up.”
He scanned them: some had names, others had numbers. They were all locked.
“Anything?”
“I have to rule them out. She’s so close to the neighbors. Did you ever look into Karl Green?”
“The nosy guy next door?” Ford asked. “No. He had an alibi the day of the rock. We know it wasn’t him.”
“We know this wasn’t Richie who snuck a camera in here either. The guy could barely bathe, he sure the hell wouldn’t know how to set up a camera to spy on someone. The way Meredith has fallen into it lately, who the hell knows?”
“Could be the ex-boyfriend,” Ford said. “He was in the house before and maybe never got rid of it or set it up then.”
“Where does he work?” Clay asked, pulling his phone out. He’d get some answers out of the guy faster than his brother would.
“No,” Ford said. “You’re not rushing over there. I’ve got his number and I’ll call. You have to play by the rules here.”
“You can play by the rules when it comes to your woman. I don’t play by them for mine,” he snarled.
“Your woman?” Ford asked.
Clay glared at his brother.
Right now all he cared about was finding her. She wasn’t safe. He felt it. He knew it.
He wanted to rush but couldn’t. It’d be better if he looked at all angles and lined up what it could be rather than guessing, making mistakes, and wasting time.
His fist slammed on the table while he tried to think.
His brother was talking to Fredrick, asking him questions, and glanced over at him quickly. He heard the frantic voice of Meredith’s ex saying he’d never put a camera anywhere and he was sick of being accused of things.
Clay went back to the last twenty-four hours of footage on the camera he’d installed and panned out to see if he could see any cars coming or going.
Maybe she went outside for a walk and someone took her? She’d said she used to walk the grounds to get air, but hadn’t recently. And why not take her phone and leave her purse, not the opposite?
“Nothing?” he asked.
“No. He says it’s not him. He wouldn’t even know how to do it.” Ford moved to the back door. “This is locked. The front door was too?”
“Yeah.”
“All signs are showing she left on her own,” Ford said. “Locking the doors. Could she have walked to a store or something?”
“Why would she do that?” he asked. “The closest is a mile away.”
“What about visiting anyone here? Or a friend picking her up? A parent?”
“She’d go out the front door,” he argued.
“Not if she didn’t want you to see her leaving,” Ford said. “She knows the camera is still there. She could have left from the back, locked it, and not realized she didn’t have her phone with her.”
Which made sense. She was upset with him and wanted space. He could be overreacting, but his gut said he wasn’t.
“I should check with her mother. Cassidy called me this morning. That is one of Meredith’s closest friends. She’s mentioned no one else other than Gale.”
“If she was with Gale you’d know,” Ford said. “But I’ll check now.”
While Ford was talking to Gale, his brother was looking around the kitchen and Clay was checking footage.
A little after one in the morning a car was pulling away from the building. He zoomed in more and noticed it was the neighbor. Where the hell was the guy going in the middle of the night? It looked as if he was alone in the car, but it was hard to tell in the dark.
He fast-forwarded the footage and noticed Karl didn’t return for almost ninety minutes. That’s a long time to go out in the middle of the night for a guy who worked from home and went into his office today.
“Check into the neighbor for me,” Clay said. He was pissed he never followed up with this before.
“There are two empty Starbucks cups in the trash,” Ford said, pulling them out.
“The guy left in the middle of the night and was gone for ninety minutes. He visits all the time and always comes to the back door,” Clay said.
“Meredith has never felt threatened by him, has she?” Ford asked. “He’s been helpful every time we’ve been here and talked to him.”
“He’s helpful because he’s always watching. It doesn’t take much to move from nosiness into obsession. Do it now,” he said. “The guy always felt off to me, but I let Meredith tell me he was just lonely.”
Ford was on the phone with his office giving the information while Clay searched his own on the guy.
He wanted to go break into the house and look around while Karl was gone, but no way Ford would allow it. Could he knock his brother out to do it? Sure. But he wouldn’t.
He’d rather think he was overreacting and Meredith had just left out the back on her own, gone with a friend and was staying out of sight while she processed the past few days.
But his heart told him she wouldn’t be that irresponsible. At least not to her students.
That he should have listened to her comments more clearly for days about feeling as if things were done in the house that she didn’t do. He was willing to bet someone had been in here and he missed it.
He’d had his head in the clouds and didn’t protect her the way he should have.
“Clay.”
He lifted his eyes to Ford’s. It was the tone of voice that told him the world was going to crash at his feet.
“What?”
“Karl Green has a past restraining order against him from twenty years ago. Stalking a neighbor.”
“Fuck!” He stood up and pushed the table halfway across the floor, almost sending his laptop crashing down before Ford caught it.