16. Penny
PENNY
Possible child abduction. Six-year-old female. Last seen in the front yard. Family requesting immediate response.
Briar Fork doesn’t get calls like this. We get domestic disputes and DUIs and the occasional break-in at the feed store. In twelve months on this job, I’ve filed exactly zero missing-kid reports that turned into anything worse than a toddler who wandered two houses down to pet somebody’s dog.
I’m in the cruiser as dispatch finishes reading the address, lights on, gravel spitting behind my tires as I pull out of the lot.
The drive takes me past the edge of town where the pavement gives up, and the road turns to washboard gravel, trees crowding in tight on both sides.
I grip the wheel and force my brain to focus on the turns instead of the fact that I haven’t slept right in two days, that every time I close my eyes I feel a mouth on my throat and hear my own name whispered against my collarbone.
Not now. Not today.
I kicked him out of my bed. That should count for something.
It doesn’t feel like it counts for anything, not with the memory of his hands still distracting me, but I shove all of it down into the same place I keep everything else I don’t have time to feel, and I turn onto Miller Ridge Road with my jaw set.
The house sits at the end of a long dirt drive, single-story, vinyl siding gone the color of old teeth, a swing set rusting in the side yard.
Johnson’s cruiser is already parked at an angle near the mailbox, lights still flashing though there’s nobody out here to warn off traffic.
Two other units pull in behind me as I cut my engine, and somewhere past the tree line I hear a dog barking itself hoarse.
The mother meets me at the sidewalk before I’ve got my door shut. Thirty-something, hair scraped back same as mine but nowhere near as neat, mascara tracked halfway down her face in two dark lines.
“She was right there.” Her voice comes out ragged, climbing toward a register that isn’t quite words anymore. “She was right there in the yard, I just went inside to get her juice, I was gone two minutes, maybe three—”
“Ma’am.” I get both hands up, palms out, and slow my own voice down until it’s steady enough to work as an anchor. “I need you to breathe for me. Can you do that?”
She doesn’t. Not really. But she stops talking long enough to suck in air, and that’s enough for now.
“What’s her name?”
“Addison.” The word cracks in half. “Addie. She’s six.”
“Okay. Addie.” I keep my tone level, the same one I’d use walking a jumper back from a ledge. “I need you to walk me through everything. Every detail, even the ones that feel small.”
The father comes out behind her, a big man gone soft around the middle, phone still in his hand like he’s been staring at it for the last twenty minutes willing it to ring.
He’s got that look men get when there’s nothing physical to fight, no door to break down, no threat to put his fists through—just helplessness, raw and useless, eating him alive from the inside.
“She was playing on the swing set,” he says. “I was inside watching the game. Heard the door open and shut and figured she came in for water.”
“She didn’t.”
“No.” His jaw works. “She didn’t.”
I walk the yard first, slow, cataloguing everything the way I was trained to.
The gate at the side fence hangs open, swinging a few inches in the breeze, latch busted enough that a good gust could’ve done it on its own.
No obvious drag marks in the grass. No signs of a struggle near the swing set itself, no overturned toys, nothing knocked loose in a scramble.
She might have wandered out. Or someone coaxed her away without a struggle. I can’t rule out either yet.
That thought sits cold in my gut while I walk back to the porch.
“Does Addie have any relatives who visit regularly?” I ask. “Grandparents, aunts, uncles? Anybody with standing custody arrangements or visitation you’re not thrilled about?”
The mother shakes her head hard, too hard, like the question itself is an accusation. “No. It’s just us. Her daddy’s family’s two states over. My side’s all local, but nobody’s got a problem with us, nobody would—”
“I’m not saying anybody did anything wrong,” I say, gentle. “I have to ask. It’s usually somebody the family knows. Not always a stranger.”
“There’s no one.” Her hands twist together, knuckles white. “I swear to God, Officer, there’s no one who’d want to hurt her.”
“Any new people around lately? Repairmen, neighbors who moved in recently, anybody paying her more attention than felt normal?”
The father’s the one who answers this time, slow, like he’s dragging the memory up from somewhere he didn’t want to look. “There’s a man two houses down. New renter. Been here maybe a month. Addie waved at him a few times when we walked the dog. Never talked to him myself.”
I write it down and ask which house.
We canvass the road for the better part of an hour.
Johnson takes the houses on the left side while I work the right, knocking on doors, asking the same questions over and over until they start to blur together—did you see anything, did you hear anything, do you know a man renting the blue house down the road.
Most people haven’t seen a thing. One elderly woman offers me sweet tea I don’t have time to drink and tells me she saw a car she didn’t recognize idling near the mailbox around one-thirty, dark sedan, gone before she could get a plate.
By the time we’ve got a partial description circulating and a BOLO out on the sedan, my shirt’s stuck to my back with sweat and my head’s pounding hard enough that I can feel my own pulse behind my eyes.
I find Johnson leaning against his cruiser near the end of the drive, notebook in hand, and something in the way he looks at me when I walk up makes my stomach tighten before he’s even said a word.
He’s not looking at his notes. He’s looking at me, sideways, the corner of his mouth doing something that isn’t quite a smirk but isn’t friendly either.
“What,” I say, flat, because I don’t have the patience for whatever this is right now.
“Nothing.” He goes back to his notebook, too quick.
“Johnson.”
He glances up again, and this time he doesn’t bother hiding it. “Heard you had a date the other night.”
My whole body goes still. Small-town gossip. Of course it made it to him too.
“That’s not relevant to anything we’re doing right now,” I say.
“Wasn’t saying it was.” He shrugs, but there’s an edge under it, something deliberate. “Just heard The Depot cleared a table on a Friday for Officer Carpenter and a Wicked Sinner. Kind of hard not to have an opinion about that.”
“I don’t remember asking for one.”
“No, you didn’t.” He shuts his notebook, turns to face me fully now, and whatever restraint he’s been holding onto for the last hour evaporates.
“But I’m gonna give it to you anyway, since apparently nobody else around here’s willing to.
You’re out here knocking on doors trying to find a missing six-year-old, doing good work, real work, and then you go home and climb into bed with the enemy. ”
“He’s not—” I stop myself, because I don’t actually know how to finish that sentence in a way that sounds true. “That’s not what this is.”
“Isn’t it?” Johnson’s voice climbs, sharp enough that one of the other officers glances over from near the porch. “He’s VP of a club running guns, Penny. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it, we just can’t prove it, and now you’re what, dating him? Sleeping with him?”
“My personal life is none of your concern.”
“It is when it’s the whole department’s problem.
” He steps closer, and I hold my ground, because I’ve had exactly enough of men in this town deciding what I owe them an explanation for.
“You want to throw away your career over some biker you dated in high school, that’s your business.
But don’t expect the rest of us to pretend it doesn’t matter when half our open cases run straight back to that clubhouse. ”
“We are not doing this. Not here. Not while there’s a child missing off this road.”
That lands, at least. He looks away first, jaw tight, and I take the half-second of silence to get myself back under control before I say something I can’t walk back.
“We’ll finish this conversation,” he mutters.
“No,” I say, “we won’t.”
I turn and walk back to my cruiser without waiting to see his reaction, boots crunching hard against the gravel, hands curling into fists at my sides before I make myself unclench them.
Behind me I hear him say something else, low, probably to one of the other officers, and I don’t turn around to catch it.
I get into the car and shut the door harder than necessary, and for a second I just sit there, both hands on the wheel, staring at the dashboard while my pulse hammers loud enough to hear.
He’s not wrong. That’s the part that makes my skin crawl worse than his tone did.
He’s right about the conflict, and I already knew every bit of it before he opened his mouth, sitting on my floor two mornings ago with Thunder pressed against my side, running through the exact same argument in my own head.
I let Evan Cole back into my life. Into my bed.
And I did it with two open files sitting on my desk that could end my whole career if anybody ever traced the line between them, and I did it anyway, because seventeen years of telling myself I was over him turned out to be the worst lie I’ve ever managed to convince myself of.
I start the engine.
Somewhere out past these trees, a six-year-old girl is missing, and that’s the thing that actually matters right now, the only thing that should be sitting in my chest instead of Evan’s hands or Johnson’s smug, righteous little speech about enemies and badges.
I pull out onto the gravel road, radio crackling with updates on the BOLO, and I drive back toward town with my jaw clenched so tight it aches, furious at Johnson for saying it out loud, and furious at myself for not having a single good answer when he did.