Chapter Callie
CALLIE
She and Devereaux walk along the edges of the trail in the waning light, Callie calling Jenna’s name until she goes hoarse.
She circles the place where the bag was left behind, but there are no signs of her mother anywhere.
No footprints in the sandy soil. No trace of clothing.
Not a strand of red hair tangled in the understory.
They get as far as the Buttonwood camp, where she shows a few hikers her mother’s photo, but they only shake their heads over their tin-can dinners.
Callie stalks away from them, grinding her teeth. “Chief,” Devereaux says tentatively, raising his eyes to the darkening sky.
He doesn’t have to finish the rest of the sentence.
They won’t find her tonight if they haven’t already.
Worse, they’ll end up lost in the woods themselves.
The forest is dense and fickle and all these trails can go tricky.
One step off them and you can walk for an hour thinking you’re in a straight line when really you’ve been making a big circle, covering the same ground over and over again.
Back at the station she asks the troopers to send in K-9 units but they say they can’t get out until the next day.
If Jenna had been drunk or high, she couldn’t have gotten far.
It stands to reason that they would be able to track her down.
Callie had been bracing for the worst out there.
Jenna still and quiet among the trees. Lips blue, skin pale.
The same way she found Layla. Except for Jenna it would be too late.
Next she calls hospitals and shelters on the off chance Jenna got dropped off somewhere by a civilian. She gets someone on the line in Voorhees who reports a single Jane Doe heroin OD, but this woman is described as having tattoos on her arms. Not Jenna, then. Some other sorry soul.
Callie drives to Jenna’s house again, this time not hesitating as she lets herself in.
She searches through the drawers of Jenna’s nightstand, in her dresser, rifles through the medicine cabinet in her bathroom—nothing stronger than Tylenol.
She drops to the floor, crawling through the living room on her hands and knees to check underneath the furniture.
No vial caps. No glassine baggies in any of the garbage cans.
Not even booze in its usual hiding places—in the back of the linen closet, behind the extra sheets. In the cabinet above the refrigerator.
She drops onto Jenna’s couch and plugs in the dead phone that had been found in the purse, taps her foot while she waits for the screen to chime to life.
Almost all of the notifications that flood in are her own messages and calls.
Most of Jenna’s recent outgoing texts are to coworkers hoping to trade off shifts or bitching about the new back of house staff at the diner.
But there’s one person she seems to be in touch with daily: someone named Steve Wilkins.
Their messages are sparse—Can we talk in an hour?
How are you doing today? See you tomorrow?
—but the call log tells another story. Sometimes they spoke for an entire hour.
Jenna has saved his picture—an older man smiling through a bush of white beard, a red bandanna tied over his head.
A boyfriend? Looks too nice to be Jenna’s type, but Callie dials him and he picks up on the third ring.
“Jen? I’m glad to hear from you.”
“I’m sorry, this isn’t Jenna. It’s her daughter.”
“Callie?” A pause, and even over the phone she can hear this man choosing his words carefully, the way Deveraux had. “Is she—”
“She’s missing. I hadn’t heard from her in a few days and then her belongings were found abandoned off of a walking trail.”
“Oh,” Steve says, and in just that syllable the sorrow is unmistakable.
“It looks like she was in touch with you quite frequently. Can I ask what your relationship is to her?”
“We’re friends.”
“You talk an awful lot. It’s not romantic?”
“No, no. I’m married.”
“Does your wife know you spend hours on the phone speaking with my mother? Texting her?”
“That’s not really—”
Callie cuts him off. “Mr. Wilkins, I have a sense you aren’t telling me something. Let me impress upon you the seriousness of this call. This is a missing persons case. It’s not looking so great that she spent hours on the phone with a married man every week and now is nowhere to be found.”
Steve Wilkins clears his throat. “I’m her sponsor. AA.”
Callie shuts her eyes. A sponsor. She was really doing it. Really trying.
“Did she tell you about her relapse? She was brought into the station the other night. DUI.”
On the other end of the line Steve exhales heavily. “I didn’t know that, no. I called her when she didn’t make the meeting the other night. And then every day after that.”
“Park police found her purse and there were drugs in it. Heroin. Do you know if she had used before?”
“We talked about it, when we first started working together. No drugs for her. Said it was only ever that one love, booze. I feel like she would have told me, if she were struggling with that. I … I don’t really know what to make of it.
But you see people make all kinds of choices in this life when they are hurting. ”
“Yeah. I was surprised too. Okay, well. I have her phone but if she calls you, could you call me down at the Pine Lakes station? Right away.”
“I certainly will. I’ll be praying for her.” She doesn’t believe in prayer or God—too close to superstition—but his kindness touches her all the same. “And, Callie?”
“Yes?”
“She’s very proud of you.” Callie fights off the prickle of tears, even as she wonders if he’s telling the truth. The Jenna she brought in a few nights ago would beg to differ. Callie can’t get that raw-throated cry out of her head. The shame of my life. The last thing her mother said to her.
“I’m glad she has you. Thank you, Steve. Please do let me know the second you hear anything. It seems like she trusts you.”
The most recent number in Jenna’s outgoing call log wasn’t saved in her phone. Callie searches it on Google first—she doesn’t like calling someone without knowing who she is taking to.
The first result is a business listing. William Fauver’s Autobody shop. Dialed at 8:05 A.M. on Thursday morning. Not long after she had been released.
Looks like she knows her first task for the morning, then.
She rises at the first hint of daylight, scarfs a half-crushed granola bar from her bag.
She spent the night on the lumpy couch in her office, up late printing off a stack of missing posters, a picture of Jenna from one of the women she worked with, from their holiday party last year.
Callie uncovers a cheap plastic hairbrush in the bottom of her desk drawer and does her best not to look like a woman who slept with her face on her blotter.
It rained in the night, a loud insistent pounding that woke her with a start.
The kind of rain that will scour the woods clean, make it impossible for the dogs to find Jenna’s scent today.
“What the hell have you done?” Callie asks the picture of Jenna on the flyer, her voice rising, breaking, her throat still raw from shouting in the woods the night before.
When Devereaux and Latour get in she hands them a stack of posters and tasks them with putting them up on every telephone pole and supermarket bulletin board they can find within a twenty-mile radius.
“Is this the best use of our time?” Latour asks. “Department resources on a missing person with a history of substance abuse? Who is probably trying to skip out on her court date?”
The anger that rears up in her is huge, total.
“You seem to have a hard time grasping that you report to me. That your time is my time, Latour. From the second you walk in that door to when you leave at night, you’re mine.
Understand? And hey, you’ll need this.” She pulls a staple gun out of her pocket, whips it at him a little harder than she needs to so that he has to snap his hands up to keep it from clocking him in the jaw.
“Glad those reflexes are still good. You’ll need that if you get bounced off the force and need to go back to breaking up bar fights at the Lodge, like you did when you failed your test at the academy the first time around.
Don’t think people don’t know about that.
I know plenty about all of you. How you got here.
How you spend your free time. You probably want to register that second hunting rifle you’ve been taking out. ”
Next to him Devereux suppresses a smile while Latour’s face goes white, his eyes narrow.
But the last thing she’s afraid of is a simple man’s anger.
Maybe it will mean more shit talk behind her back.
Maybe it will mean more dead animals in her mailbox.
But she won’t hear one more person implying, one way or another, that Jenna’s life means nothing.
She’s still fuming as she walks out to her squad car, but when she sees someone on the ground stretched out it alongside it, she loses it.
“What the hell is this?”
Luke casts her a look over his shoulder. He’s got the car up on a pair of jacks, the front left wheel on its side next to him. He’s in a T-shirt, tools laid out on the back of a flannel shirt he must have just taken off.
“You said your brakes were loud. I’m replacing the brake pads. Totally shot.”
“You came all the way over here to replace my brake pads?”
He shrugs. “And maybe I was delivering some new red bark cedars for a landscaping project nearby. But you mentioned at dinner the other night that it was getting on your nerves.”
“If I didn’t find you out here, were you going to come in and tell me? Or just let me think the brake fairy paid me a visit in the night?”
“Guess so.” He wipes his hands on a grease-streaked cloth.