Fourteen
I CAN SEE the bright neon colors of the Scobee’s sign from more than a mile away. But when I pull off the road, and even with all the lights clearly on inside, there are no cars in the small lot out front.
If Taylor is working, it might just mean that Burt dropped her off.
Once I’m out of the truck, though, and walking toward the door, I can’t see a single customer at the counter, or in any of the booths.
But even at this time of the morning, there are always a few stragglers at Scobee’s, trying to get some coffee in them if they’re on their way home from a bar—coffee or food or both.
Or people just looking for company. Or conversation.
When they’re the ones who don’t want to be alone.
I’m starting to think that this is one of the rare nights when they’ve closed up early, and somebody just forgot to turn off the lights before locking up.
Only, the front door is open. I hear the familiar jingle as I walk through it, feeling in that moment as if I really am stepping into a way-back machine and on my way all the way back to high school.
“Taylor McCarter Webb,” I call out. “If you’re here, I want some cherry pie and I want it now.”
I wait.
No response from the kitchen.
“Hey, Tay!” I call out again. “Do you remember the time I told you that the two most beautiful words in the English language were more pie?”
Still no answer.
There is the unmistakable smell of burger in here, like one had been cooked up not long ago. And as I pass the counter, on my way into the kitchen, I see half a glass of lemonade, with a clear red lipstick smudge on it, the ice in it not melted.
When I’ve made my way through the swinging doors and into the kitchen, I can see that the griddle is still on.
I stand very still in Bess Scobee’s kitchen, all of my senses on high alert, all of my instincts telling me that something is very wrong here.
It’s like the feeling I used to get when my pocket was breaking down and I knew pressure was coming even if I couldn’t see it, from behind me or from my blind side. Vince used to call it my “sick sense.”
And in this moment my brain, almost on its own, goes right back to what I’d heard on the radio on my way into town about another girl having gone missing.
Taylor is no longer a teenager, the way all of the other missing girls have been teenagers, but she sure could still pass for one.
The only sound now in the kitchen is my own breathing.
I take out my phone and call the regular number for the Cross Rivers police, and not 911.
It’s Burt Webb who answers. Another way of my world telling me it just keeps getting smaller, almost by the minute.
“Burt,” I say. “It’s me. Silas. Is Taylor supposed to be working at the diner tonight?”
I wonder if he can already hear the tension in my voice, like a band that’s about to snap because it’s being pulled too far and too hard.
“Why?”
“Because I’m here,” I say. “At Scobee’s. And the lights are on and the front door is open and the griddle is still heated, but ain’t nobody home.”
There is a pause now on his end. I reach over to turn off the griddle and then stop myself, unable to keep my mind from also going to the place where this place might now be considered a crime scene.
“Taylor’s home,” Burt says. “Usually, we both try to work the same overnight shift, but she swapped shifts with Molly Brendle and then someone else called out sick.”
Another pause.
“Molly’s supposed to be working tonight, pretty sure,” he says.
“Molly Brendle. High school senior.”
“Molly’s not here.”
“No sign of her?”
“No, sir.”
Then I pause before saying, “Burt, what’s going on here?”
“Maybe they took another girl,” he says in a voice that’s barely audible, and then says he’s on his way.