Fifteen
YOU ALWAYS HEAR the expression “high school sweethearts.” Everybody does. It refers to couples, and Burt Webb and Taylor McCarter sure fit the bill because that’s exactly what they’d been.
But Burt had also been a sweetheart in high school all by himself. For as long as I’d known him, he was the glue guy, not just on our football team but for what felt like the whole school.
Burt was the one who drove people home when they’d had too many beers. Or came and got you and gave you a ride home when you needed one and couldn’t get a cab or an Uber. He was the one who broke up a fight.
He played left tackle, which meant he was the one who was in charge of protecting my blind side.
And if, God forbid, somebody got past him and got to me and got me on the ground, he was there to help me up and promise it wasn’t going to happen again that day.
It rarely did. Maybe it was because he was older.
He’d always acted like my football big brother.
None of us knew he’d end up a cop someday, but when that’s where his life took him and that’s the choice he made, it wasn’t as if any of us were surprised. Now he polices the town in an official capacity, with a gun and a badge, and people treat him like he’s already the chief.
He arrives at Scobee’s in less than ten minutes, and in uniform. I’m waiting for him in the front room.
“Hey,” he says, shaking my hand.
“Hey, man.”
He looks around a room empty except for the two of us, as if taking in the whole scene at once, and I know we’re feeling the same thing, feeling the emptiness of the diner that’s always been one of the main plazas of Cross Rivers. A happy place that is anything but right now.
“Molly’s not home,” he says. “Her mother says she dropped her here at the usual time, right before ten o’clock, and hasn’t heard from her since and hasn’t been able to raise her on her phone. Her dad’s a long-distance trucker, took off two days ago for Nevada.”
Burt takes out his own phone now, looks at it, shakes his head in frustration or anger, or both.
“Dorie—that’s Molly’s mother—gave me the kid’s number,” he says. “I texted her before I left the station and asked her to please text me back. Nothing. Called the number twice on the way here and went straight to voicemail.”
“Can’t the mother do that find-my-friend deal on her phone?” I ask.
“She tried. The last place the phone was active was right here.”
“Shit,” I say.
“On a stick,” Burt says.
“Maybe the phone died,” I say, knowing as soon as I do how weak that sounds.
“Or she did,” he says in a voice that sounds much louder than it ought to at Scobee’s.
I look around myself and think about all the times when we were here after a big game we’d won in high school, or even one we’d lost.
“Maybe you know this and maybe you don’t, because you’ve had all your own stuff to deal with,” he says.
“But five girls have disappeared in this county since the start of the summer. Pardon me. Six, counting Allie Gonsalvo, the girl from here whose name we just released. Mom works at the nail salon. Dad has his own landscaping business. Good people.”
Burt Webb looked at everybody as good people until he had a reason not to.
“Maybe the girl saw there are no customers and turned her phone off before she snuck off with a date,” I say. “And is planning to come back.”
“Not Molly,” Burt says. “Tay says she’s a great kid for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them is that you can count on her, no matter what.”
“Sounds like she could be related to Tay.”
“Even looks a little like her, as a matter of fact. Like she could be a younger sister.”
He takes in so much air it’s as if he’s trying to suck in all the oxygen in the place. Even though he’d played on the offensive line, he isn’t as big as I am. But one thing we always said about Burt Webb is that he played a whole lot bigger than he was.
“They’ve all been pretty, Silas,” he says. “The ones who got taken.”
“Taken but not kidnapped?”
“Not one single call asking for ransom money,” Burt Webb says. “That’s the balls of it, and something that’s got my own balls in a vise.”
He looks around again. I hear sirens in the distance then, sounding as if they’re getting closer.
“Those girls just got gone,” he says.
I turn and see the flashing blue lights in the lot, even as the sirens get turned off.
A smallish guy wearing the same uniform Burt is wearing gets out of his cruiser and walks toward the front door of Scobee’s, where I’d shown up just a little while ago hoping to get myself a slice of pie and had walked into a world of trouble, and dread, instead.
Trouble that makes me feel as if I can fit my problems into the palm of my hand. Makes me sorry that I’d been feeling sorry for myself less than an hour ago.
Burt walks me back into the kitchen, instructing me not to touch anything. The crime-scene guys are right behind the cruiser.
“I think we might be dealing with a serial killer in our little corner of blue heaven,” he says to me. “And goddammit all to hell.”
Now I’m the one taking in a lot of air and letting it out as slowly as I can, a way of trying to calm myself, knowing there’s not much chance of that happening.
“You got any idea who might be behind something like this?” I ask.
Burt Webb gives me a long, searching look. Not something from my old high school teammate, or my lifelong buddy. Or even Taylor’s husband. This is a look that is all cop, through and through.
“You ever hear the expression ‘good crazy’?” Burt asks me.
I tell him I have.