27. Jessika
TWENTY-SEVEN
JESSIKA
Nova was supposed to be home by four.
That was the deal we had made that morning over burnt toast and lukewarm coffee, she could take her bike down to Pelican Creek to photograph the herons for her science project, but she had to be back before dinner, before the sun started dipping below the tree line and turning the marsh gold.
She had rolled her eyes at me the way only a thirteen-year-old can, like the weight of my worry was some personal inconvenience she had been saddled with unfairly.
I had kissed the top of her head anyway. She had let me.
By four-fifteen, I was watching the driveway.
By four-thirty, I was outside.
By five, I was in my car.
I told myself it was nothing. Nova was thorough, she got that from me, and thorough children lost track of time when they were chasing something worth chasing.
She probably found a great blue heron nesting low and couldn't bring herself to leave.
She probably had a flat tire and was walking the bike back up Millbrook Road right now, annoyed and dusty.
I told myself all of this while my hands went tight on the steering wheel and my chest did that hollowing-out thing it has done ever since her father left, that particular kind of dread that settles in the sternum and refuses to move.
The road to Pelican Creek cuts through the lower edge of the Hargrove industrial corridor, a stretch of chain-link and concrete that most people in Briar County had stopped paying attention to years ago.
Holcomb Waste Solutions had operated out of the old processing facility there since I was in high school, and Environmental had a satellite office next door, which had always struck me as either ironic or a very deliberate arrangement.
I had been looking into both of them for three months.
I knew things about those two companies that their lawyers would have paid serious money to keep quiet.
But that evening, driving toward the creek in the fading light, I was not thinking about the investigation. I was thinking about my daughter.
I found her bike first.
It was lying in the tall grass at the edge of the access road, the one that runs along the back of the Holcomb property toward the water.
Nova's camera bag was still looped around the handlebars.
My stomach dropped so fast I had to grip the car door just to stand upright.
I called her name and the marsh answered me with wind and the distant cry of something I couldn't see. I called again. Nothing.
I picked up the camera bag with shaking hands. The camera was still inside, and when I turned it on and scrolled back through the last few photos, my blood went cold.
Nova had photographed them. Holcomb and Collins, Dale Holcomb himself, broad-shouldered and silver-haired, the kind of man who shook hands at charity galas and had a building at the community college named after him, and beside him, Deputy Collins, who served on the county water board and sent Christmas cards to every family in the district.
They were standing at the edge of the drainage culvert where Pelican Creek narrowed before it fed into the reservoir.
Between them was a tanker truck, its hose snaking down into the water.
The photos were timestamped forty-seven minutes ago. In the last image, both men were looking directly at the camera.
Directly at my daughter.
I don't remember dialing 911. I remember the dispatcher's voice asking me to slow down, to repeat myself, and I remember being unable to do that because there was no slower version of what I was feeling.
I remember walking the perimeter of the access road while I talked, scanning the treeline, calling Nova's name between sentences until the dispatcher asked me to please stay calm, and I wanted to ask her what calm was supposed to accomplish right now, what calm had ever done for anybody in a situation like this one.
Deputy Marsh arrived twelve minutes later.
He was thorough and kind in the way that careful people are when they're managing someone else's panic, and I appreciated it even as it made me want to scream.
He photographed the bike. He bagged the camera.
He asked me about Nova's clothing, her height, whether she had a phone, she did, and it went straight to voicemail when I called it, straight to voicemail every time, that cheerful recorded voice of hers that I had always found slightly embarrassing and now felt like a gift I hadn't known I was holding.
"The men in those photos," I said to him, when he asked if I had any idea why someone might want to harm my daughter. I handed him the camera. "Look at the last six images.”
I watched his face change as he scrolled.
"Ms. Vance?—"
"Nova saw them," I said. "She saw what they were dumping.
She was there with her camera, and they saw her see it, and now she's gone.
" I said it plainly, the way I would have said anything I knew to be true, because the alternative, the version of this where I let the fear make my voice shake, felt like a door I couldn't afford to open.
"Whatever is in that water, they put it there tonight, and my daughter has photographs of it, and you need to find her.”
He called it in. More cars came. Someone from the county sheriff's office arrived, and then someone who didn't introduce himself but who took the camera bag and made a phone call that seemed to change the temperature of the whole scene.
I stood at the edge of the access road and looked out at the creek, at the dark water moving slow and certain toward the reservoir that fed three counties' worth of taps and wells and drinking glasses, and I thought about all the months I had spent building a case from public documents and secondhand sources, trying to prove something I couldn't yet prove.
Nova had proven it in forty-seven minutes with a borrowed camera and a science project.
My daughter had always been faster than me.
Sharper. She got that from me too, or so I liked to think, the part of me that had existed before I learned to be careful, before I understood that evidence meant nothing without the right audience, that the truth was only as powerful as the people willing to act on it.
Nova didn't know any of that yet. She had ridden her bike to the creek to photograph herons, and she had seen something wrong, and she had done the most instinctive, courageous, reckless thing imaginable: she had held up her camera.
I pressed my hands flat against my thighs to keep them steady.
"We're going to find her," Deputy Marsh said, appearing at my shoulder.
"I know," I said. And I meant it, not as comfort, not as a thing people say to fill the silence, but as a statement of pure, ferocious intention.
Because whoever had taken my daughter had made the worst miscalculation of their lives.
They had spent years managing what got into the water, what got into the record, what the public was allowed to know.
They had cultivated silence the way other men cultivated reputations.
They had looked at my daughter through the lens of their own self-preservation and seen a problem to be solved.
They had no idea who her mother was.
The creek moved in the dark below me, carrying whatever it carried now, and I stood on that bank and made Nova a promise in the only language I knew how to use: I would find every document, pull every thread, and burn every careful thing they had built until she was back in front of me, rolling her eyes at my worry, alive and intact and mine.
I took out my phone and called Grant.