Chapter Twenty
Rachel pulled her minivan into the pickup line with ten minutes to spare.
Though she should have set an alarm to remind herself to leave sooner, she at least hadn’t gotten so caught up in her online research that she’d forgotten the time.
The searches had definitely distracted from her dictation work, where she’d made it through only a single day of recordings.
If she wasn’t careful, in addition to everything else they were facing, she would be the second Hoffman out of a job.
She put the van in Park but left it idling, the interior not fully warm after the short drive.
Grabbing her phone, she tapped out a text to Mick.
She’d missed him this morning. Even eight hours later, she didn’t know what to make of the strange emptiness that had filled her when she’d descended the stairs and found the couch unoccupied, the stack of blankets and sheets carefully folded and resting on one end.
Her timing had never been great, but she couldn’t have picked a worse time to have become attached to him.
Found a few answers but a lot more questions.
She waited for the blinking dots that would show he was responding, but only the “Delivered” line appeared beneath her message bubble. At least some people were working during office hours today.
The school’s obnoxious trio of chimes sounded just like it did every day, and the chaos of racing children began with the usual small army of skilled adults doing their best to hold all that enthusiasm in check.
After a half-dozen big yellow buses pulled from the lot with their precious cargo inside, the walkers and the parent-pickup kids were released from their holding corral inside the gymnasium.
The children spread out along an invisible barrier that ran the distance of the front walk, waiting for a school official who could match them with the parents or guardians authorized to drive them off school grounds.
From this distance, she couldn’t see the twins, but that wasn’t unusual. Even with the matching pink coats they’d begged for, she sometimes had a difficult time picking them out until the crowd thinned.
Like all the other drivers, she inched forward as educators on bus duty brought the children out of the line, one by one, and helped them into other vans and SUVs anywhere along that curb.
They even helped buckle them in since parents weren’t allowed to climb out of their vehicles during the pickup process.
Rachel still hadn’t placed the girls once she was close enough to have a fairly good view of the whole line.
Her leg, suspended where her foot was stationed on the brake pedal, trembled.
She was overreacting, she told herself, as she shoved back a wave of dizziness and reached down to still her shaking thigh. The twins were out there somewhere.
Only they weren’t.
Her heart was beating its way out of her chest when she reached the front spot. She could barely keep her foot on the brake.
A sturdy paraprofessional she only knew as “Mrs. B.” stepped to the van and then took a good look around. She was smiling when she gestured for Rachel to open her passenger window.
“Good afternoon, Miss Hoffman. I don’t see the girls. Did they accidentally take the bus this afternoon? I apologize if there was a miscommunication. That does happen occasionally.”
“Miss Hoffman?” the woman repeated.
Clearly, she expected an answer, but Rachel couldn’t breathe, let alone speak.
“They never ride the bus,” she finally managed, her hands tight on the steering wheel.
The movements of all the people around outside the car were suddenly jerky, their voices too loud. Her brother had ended up under investigation. Was this what happened to her and her girls when she’d failed to heed warnings to stop digging for the truth?
“Well, let’s see what we can find out from the office,” Mrs. B. said.
Though the woman’s voice remained calm, her wide eyes gave her away. She took a few steps back, lifted the walkie-talkie to her ear and mumbled something into it.
With a smile pasted on her face, Mrs. B. held up a finger, asking for Rachel to wait. She couldn’t wait, but she couldn’t move, either, as her heartbeat pounded in her ears.
“They’re checking,” she assured Rachel through the open window.
Behind the van, other parents took turns driving up, waiting for their children to be buckled in and pulling around her and out of the parking lot. They were oblivious to the tragedy unfolding in front of them.
The para didn’t help with any of the other children or parents.
As the other educators hurried from student to student and occasionally sent curious looks her way, Mrs. B.
stared down at her walkie-talkie, cradled between her gloved hands, as though willing a voice to speak through it.
But nothing happened. It was as though the whole school staff had gone radio silent.
Unable to control herself any longer, Rachel shouted through the window. “What aren’t you telling me? Are my girls…missing?”
Mrs. B. held up her index finger again and looked nervously over her shoulder.
Rachel grabbed her phone and typed in 911.
But just as she started to tap the button that would initiate the call, she caught movement out of her side vision.
The phone slid from her hand as the middle-age pixie of a principal, Mrs. Sumpter, rushed toward her minivan, her coat flapping behind her.
The situation was so bad that they’d sent out the principal herself?
“Miss Hoffman,” she said when she stopped by the window. “I’m so sorry—”
“Where are my girls?”
The woman raised both hands to ask her to stop, a motion she probably used for school convocations, but it wouldn’t work on her.
“What have you done with them? Who did you release them to?” She pretended not to notice the adults sneaking peeks at her or the few remaining children watching her with scared eyes and gaping mouths.
“Miss Hoffman,” Mrs. Sumpter said again, her hands gripping the edge of the van’s open window like claws.
Rachel shook off her fog, and people, cars and even trees began to return to focus. She must have suddenly appeared reachable, as the administrator’s stern expression softened.
“There, now,” she said with a nod. “Your girls are safe. They’re in my office, coloring pictures and eating sugar-free lollipops. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Lollipops? Mind? What are Carly and Carissa even doing in there?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
So why don’t you pull off into one of the visitor spots up there and come into the building.
” She gestured the same instructions with a wide curve of her arm.
“Just hit the buzzer and show your photo ID to the camera, like always, and Mrs. Zielinski will let you inside.”
Somehow Rachel was able to pull into a spot and park without causing a fender bender with one of the other cars.
She grabbed her purse, tucked her phone in her pocket and hurried to the door.
The principal’s assistant hit the buzzer before she could even put her driver’s license in front of the camera.
Already standing at the entrance to the main office, Mrs. Sumpter guided her into the room with a nameplate on the door.
There, like the woman had told her, the twins were set up at a small table in the corner, a stack of coloring sheets and a tub of crayons centered between them.
They weren’t wearing their coats as though they’d been there a while.
Those were piled in a visitor’s chair across from the principal’s desk.
“Hi, Mommy,” Carissa called out when she looked up from her colorful sheet.
Carly pulled a red lollipop from her lips and held it out to show Rachel. “Hi, Mom. Mrs. Sumpter gave us suckers. We told her it would be okay with you.”
“It’s fine.” Then she couldn’t help herself. She rushed at them and leaned down so she could wrap her arms around both at once over the top of the table.
The girls grunted and tried to wiggle free. Rachel had to force her arms to relax so she could release them.
“Mom,” Carly said, stretching the word out until it became two syllables.
Her sister, usually more up for public displays of affection, frowned at her and crossed her arms. She’d embarrassed her girls? Well, too bad.
Rachel was still staring down at them and willing her racing pulse to slow when Mrs. Sumpter cleared her throat.
She took an automatic step back from her daughters’ artist station.
Now that Rachel had stopped yelling at her, the principal offered her a compassionate smile.
She probably thought she’d handled situations like this one before, but she was wrong
“Now, why don’t we let the girls finish their masterpieces in here while we step into the copy room next door for a chat. Mrs. Z. will keep an eye on them for a few minutes.” She lifted a file folder off her desk and moved to her office’s side door.
“I don’t know,” she began, but at the other woman’s firm nod, she followed her into a narrow hall and then another room in the office suite, no more than fifteen feet away.
Once they were inside the room, with two fancy copy machines on one side, a wall of staff mailboxes on the other, and two school chairs oddly placed in the middle, the principal closed the door.
“Let’s sit.”
Mrs. Sumpter indicated the two chairs. Rachel did as she was told, taking the seat facing the front window, while the administrator took the one with a clear sight of the door, a narrow window offering a peek at the hall.
“Now, I’m guessing that something went wrong with our protocols today, and we want to make sense of it so that it isn’t repeated,” the principal said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You clearly had reason to suspect that your daughters might have been abducted.”
“Well, they just weren’t out there like they were supposed to be, and—I don’t know what I thought.”
“Miss Hoffman, our goal is always to keep our students safe. We can only do that if we have all relevant information.” The woman waited as though she expected Rachel to fill in a blank.
“Like, for example, if there’s a problem we should know about regarding your daughters’ noncustodial parent.
There was nothing about that in the girls’ records. We checked.”
She tapped the folder she’d rested on her lap.
“Noncustodial?” She shook her head, none of this making sense. “There’s no problem with him. He’s not involved in the twins’ lives—or mine—in any way.”
Mrs. Sumpter nodded, her carefully blank expression suggesting that she didn’t believe her.
“Then has there been a falling-out with any members of your family? A reason for your reaction?”
She didn’t say overreaction, but it was implied.
“Instead of tiptoeing around it, could you please just say whatever it is you’re trying to?”
“Thirty minutes before the end of the school day, our office received a call, requesting for a change in today’s pickup. I don’t have to tell you that this is highly irregular since those requests are expected each morning.”
“Who called?” she managed though it felt as if someone was choking her from behind.
The woman’s eyes narrowed before she continued.
“As I was saying, we received this call, letting us know that there was a family emergency and an alternate person would be picking up the girls. Even then, he said he would be about ten minutes late, so he asked if we could keep your daughters until he arrived. If it were much longer, I would have been forced to leave them in the after-school care room and charge—”
The principal stopped and glanced over her shoulder to the parking lot as though she still expected this tardy driver to arrive. All the cars were gone now, except for those of a few straggling staff members, parked in the angled spots.
“Mrs. Sumpter. Please. Who called?”
Rachel pressed her elbows tight to her sides to stop the tremor that started at her center and forced its way out. She didn’t know what the administrator saw in her expression, but it caused the woman’s eyes to widen.
“Your brother, Mr. Hoffman, of course.”
At Rachel’s gasp, Mrs. Sumpter flipped open the file and produced one of the same green emergency cards that Rachel had to complete in duplicate at the start of each school year.
She pointed to the lines where parents and guardians could list up to three names of other responsible adults to whom the school could release their children.
This year, Rachel listed just one name: Riley.
Since her father’s death, she had no one else.
“I don’t understand.” The principal pointed to Riley’s name. “I’ve heard some rumors that your brother might be having personal problems. This is a small town, after all. But if you wanted us to remove him from your trusted-adults list, you needed to—”
“Mrs. Sumpter, my brother is absolutely still a trusted adult in my children’s lives. One of only a few.” She let those words sink in before continuing. “But right now, Riley’s also inpatient at Forward Path Rehabilitation Center. He only occasionally has access to a phone.”
The principal blinked several times, her lips forming the word what, but she produced no sound.
“That doesn’t make any sense. Was it a prank?
” She shook her head and continued. “They couldn’t have made it out of this building with those sweet girls without showing proper ID and putting their names in the sign-out book, but why would they even try… ?”
“That I don’t know, but I will try to figure that out,” Rachel said. “All I can tell you is whomever your staff member spoke to, it wasn’t my brother.”
Pressing her lips together, the principal nodded.
“And for the time being, my children are to be released to no one—not even the name on my emergency list—except me.”