Love You More: A Novel

“Me, too!”


Bobby stopped yelling. He breathed heavily instead. D.D. took a moment to expel a frustrated breath. Bobby ran a hand through his short hair. D.D. mopped back her blonde curls.

“We need to talk to Brian Darby’s boss,” Bobby stated after another minute. “We need a list of any friends, associates who might know what he’d do with his stepdaughter.”

D.D. glanced at her watch. Ten a.m. Phil had scheduled the call with Scott Hale for eleven. “We gotta wait another hour.”

“Fine. Let’s start calling gyms. Maybe Brian had a personal trainer. People confess everything to their personal trainers, and we need a confession right about now.”

“You call gyms,” she said.

Bobby eyed her warily. “Why? What are you going to do?”

“Locate Juliana Howe.”

“D.D.—”

“Divide and conquer,” she interjected crisply. “Cover twice the ground, get results twice as fast.”

“Jesus. You really are a hard-ass.”

“Used to be what you loved about me.”

D.D. headed for her vehicle. Bobby didn’t follow her.





16


Brian and I had our first big fight four months after getting married. Second week in April, an unexpected snowstorm had blanketed New England. I’d been on duty the night before, and by seven a.m. the Mass Pike was a tangled mess of multiple auto accidents, abandoned vehicles, and panicked pedestrians. We were up to our ears in it, graveyard shift swinging into day shift even as additional officers were being summoned and most emergency personnel activated. Welcome to the day in the life of a uniformed officer during a wintry Nor’easter.

At eleven a.m., four hours after I would’ve normally ended my shift, I managed to call home. No one answered. I didn’t worry. Figured Brian and Sophie were outside playing in the snow. Maybe sledding, or building a snowman or digging for giant purple crocuses beneath the crystal blue April snow.

By one, my fellow officers and I had managed to get the worst of the accidents cleared, about three dozen disabled vehicles relocated, and at least two dozen stranded drivers on their way. Clearing the Pike allowed the plows and sand and gravel trucks to finally do their job, which in turn eased our job.

I finally returned to my cruiser long enough to take a sip of cold coffee and check my cellphone, which had buzzed several times at my waist. I was just noticing the long string of calls from Mrs. Ennis when my pager went off at my shoulder. It was dispatch, trying to reach me. I had an emergency phone call they were trying to patch through.

My heart rate spiked. I reached reflexively for the steering wheel of my parked cruiser, as if that would ground me. I had a vague memory of granting permission, of picking up the radio to hear Mrs. Ennis’s panicked voice. She’d been waiting for over five hours now. Where was Sophie? Where was Brian?

At first, I didn’t understand, but then the pieces of the story emerged. Brian had called Mrs. Ennis at six a.m., when the snow had first started falling. He’d been watching the weather and, in his adrenaline junkie way, had determined this would be a perfect powder ski day. Sophie’s daycare was bound to be canceled. Could Mrs. Ennis watch her instead?

Mrs. Ennis had agreed, but she’d need at least an hour or two to get to the house. Brian hadn’t been thrilled. Roads would be getting worse, yada yada yada. So instead, he offered to drop Sophie at Mrs. Ennis’s apartment on his way to the mountains. Mrs. Ennis had liked that idea better, as it kept her off the bus. Brian would be there by eight. She agreed to have breakfast waiting for Sophie.

Except, it was now one-thirty. No Brian. No Sophie. And no one answering the phone at the house. What had happened?

I didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Refused to picture the possibilities that immediately leapt into my mind. The way a teenager’s body could eject from a car and wrap around a telephone pole. Or the way the steering column of an older, pre–air bag vehicle could cave in a grown adult’s chest, leaving a man sitting perfectly still, almost appearing asleep in the driver’s seat until you noticed the trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. Or the eight-year-old girl, who’d just three months ago had to be cut out of the crushed front end of a four-door sedan, her relatively uninjured mother standing there, screaming how the baby had been crying, she’d just turned around to check the baby.…