“She won’t talk to me now. Won’t take my calls. I don’t know what happened, what I did. The only thing I can think of is that you said something to her, and after she had time to think about it, she decided she was finished with me. What did you say to her?”
“Don’t change the subject, Ray. Do you think I give a shit about your stripper girlfriend right now? Didn’t you hear me? Luke is fighting for his life. What have you gotten us into, Ray?”
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered.
He had an official party line, and he was sticking to it. She changed the subject. “Where’s the Standing Man, Ray?”
His sharp intake of breath told her she’d hit on something important. When he spoke again, there was naked fear in his voice. “Josie,” he said. “This is very important. You need to walk away from this. Leave it alone. All of it. I’m begging you.”
She’d hit the right nerve. It was time to keep pushing.
“Why did you lie to me about the acrylic nail? I know it was Isabelle Coleman’s. She’s wearing the nails in the video her friend took of the two of them on the day she went missing.”
“Listen to me, please. You need to stop this right now. Do you understand? I can’t protect you.”
“Protect me from what?”
His voice was barely audible. “Them.”
“Who, Ray? How far does this go?”
“Far. Very, very far. You have no idea. I am begging you, Jo. As my wife. Please walk away.”
His words were like barbs in her heart. Her voice cracked again. “How much do you know?”
“Enough.”
“You know I can’t walk away, Ray. I’m not built that way.”
He whispered, “They’ll kill you, Josie.
“Then I have to stop them. Where’s Isabelle, Ray?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ray.”
“I’m serious. I don’t know.”
“Did you know? When she went missing?”
“Not at first. I suspected that… that they were involved. No one said anything outright. Everyone kept looking for her. Then the searchers found her phone in the woods—I think it was purposely missed by our guys. I think… I think maybe someone was supposed to get rid of it, but they didn’t do it in time. The chief started calling it an abduction. I think he knew where she was. I think a lot of them did.”
“Where, Ray?”
“I can’t tell you that, Jo. You’re in too much danger as it is. I don’t even know for sure.”
“But you think they are behind her abduction.”
He didn’t speak, but she could hear him breathing.
“Ray.”
“I don’t know. I—I think they could be.”
“Do they have her now?”
“No.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Ray said. “And I don’t think any of them do either.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
For a few seconds, Josie felt like she was suffocating. Searching around, she sat on the nearest bench, closed her eyes, and concentrated on her breathing. Something had been niggling at the back of her mind after Ray’s reaction to her mention of the Standing Man. He knew where it was, obviously, though she had no memory of it from her shared time with Ray. But she knew she had seen it before, which meant she had to go back before Ray. She skipped over the horrors of her time with her mother, going back further to her time with her father. Her tiny hand in his as he led her away from a white house and into the woods to look for cardinal flowers. They were wildflowers that grew on long, weedy stalks, with red petals that looked like fingers and a stigma like a tiny periscope shooting out of the center. Josie loved them, almost as much as she had loved hunting for them with her father in the woods. There was only one place they’d ever found them.
She opened her eyes, took in a deep breath, and dialed Lisette again. Voicemail. Again, she dialed the front desk at Rockview. Again, a nurse told her Lisette was taking a nap.
“I’ve been calling for a couple of days now,” Josie said. “She hasn’t called me back. I’m getting concerned.”
There was a beat of heavy silence. Then, “Well, hon, like I told you before, she has been pretty down since the business with Sherri, and without her here, Alton has been on a rampage, harassing the ladies like nobody’s business. Nobody wants to come out of their rooms. Sherri was the only one who could keep him in check. It’s like a funeral home around here. We’re all traumatized, to tell you the truth. I mean, the way she was killed…”
Come to think of it, it was just like Lisette to take Sherri’s untimely death to heart. Josie remembered the way Lisette had reacted to the newscast on Isabelle Coleman’s abduction. “She’s probably thinking of poor Sherri’s mother,” Josie mumbled.
“Oh well, Sherri’s mom passed on a few years ago,” said the receptionist.
“Did she?”
“Yep. Cancer got her. She was quite old though. Had some dementia too.”
“Really?” Josie said.
“Yep. Do you want me to wake your grandmother up, hon?”
Something was emerging in Josie’s mind, like a fogbank clearing. “No, no thanks. I needed to ask her something, but I just remembered what it was I needed to know. I’ll stop by to visit her as soon as I can.”
She hung up and used her phone to log in to the Alcott County Office of Property Assessment website. It took a few minutes to search the database, but she found what she was looking for. She was closing the browser when her phone rang. It was Ray. She sent it to voicemail. He called back immediately. Again, she sent his call to voicemail. She stood on shaky legs and sat back down immediately. She didn’t know if the dizziness was from shock and anxiety or dehydration and sleep deprivation. Maybe all of those things.
Her phone chirped with a text from Ray. Don’t shut me out. Please.
She turned her phone to silent, dropped it in her jacket pocket, and closed her eyes again. Even in the darkness behind her eyelids, the entire world seemed to spin. It was all too much. Luke near death, Ray a liar and now… a criminal? Because that’s what he was now. She had no idea just how much he knew, but he knew enough to implicate himself in something big. Something horrific. If he was sitting on even the slightest suspicion of where Isabelle Coleman was being held, he was every bit as guilty as whoever was keeping her. The thought made her sick to her stomach.
She wondered if he expected her to lie for him, because she was his wife or because she was a cop? Or both? How could he? Ray had always been good and decent, honest and loyal. It was those qualities that made him a good cop. What happened to him? How had she missed it? Maybe she hadn’t been paying attention at all during their marriage.
He had said that he suspected early on that “they” were involved in Coleman’s disappearance, which meant he had reason to believe that his colleagues were involved in something bad before Coleman even went missing. How long had he known? Had he known about June Spencer all along? They had worked together side by side for five years. What had Josie missed? Or had he been privy to things she wasn’t because he was a man? The good old boys’ club. She searched her memory banks for a moment in their marriage when he started to act differently, but she couldn’t think of anything. Their jobs could be stressful; sometimes you would catch a call or a case that left you on edge for weeks.
Nausea clenched her stomach again, but there was simply nothing left for her to expel. How had things spiraled this far? Three weeks earlier she had been a respected police detective in Denton, a town she loved, with a beautiful new house, and an exciting new relationship. Now she was suspended, broke, and quite possibly in mortal danger. Her soon-to-be ex-husband—her high school sweetheart—was a criminal, and her fiancé was barely alive, his insides shredded, and an innocent teenage girl was still missing. How did things get so bad, so fast?
Her eyes snapped open.
“June,” she said aloud.
She pulled her phone back out and scrolled through her contacts until she found Noah Fraley’s cell phone number. As she listened to the phone ring, she wondered if he too was involved. Sweet, shy, bumbling Noah? But yesterday she couldn’t imagine Ray being involved either. She could trust no one.
“Fraley,” Noah said after the sixth ring.