Jason looked down. He ran his hand over his head. "Okay. You'll find out soon enough. A girl, a student at Fields, went out for a bike ride yesterday. She hasn't come back. That's all I know, but I'll call you if I can."
"No. Wait. Tell me more."
"There is no more. She's probably just hurt or lost. It'll be okay."
But he didn't sound convinced. And Diana didn't believe him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When Jason was gone, Diana climbed out of bed and turned the radio on. She tuned in during a Wall Street Report, an economics professor from Fields droning on and on about petroleum futures and interest rates, and Diana felt sorry for anyone who had to sit through one of his lectures on a Monday morning. So while he kept talking, she took out the folder of articles from Kay Todd and starting paging through them, hoping something would jump out at her and make some sort of sense.
The articles were brittle and yellowing at the edges. Pieces of the old newspaper crumbled away when she picked them up. They confirmed the basic facts that Kay had already given Diana and added little more. The consensus of the police and the media seemed to be that Margie Todd—dissatisfied with her life and unhappy with living in New Cambridge—ran away.
"It doesn't make sense, though," Diana said out loud.
Runaways made some sort of plans. They prepared in advance. They at least took their identification with them and whatever money they could put their hands on. Margie Todd hadn't done any of these things. Sure, she'd had a fight with her mother and dropped out of school. But that was nothing unusual. It didn't add up.
The voice on the radio changed and announced a special report. Diana put the articles down and turned the volume up.
"Union Township and New Cambridge Police continue to search for Fields University freshman Jacqueline Foley who disappeared yesterday evening while on a bike ride."
"Ms. Foley, who is nineteen years old, was supposed to return before an eight o'clock meeting at her sorority house, Alpha Iota Mu, and when she didn't arrive, the police were called. Ms. Foley's parents have arrived in New Cambridge from their home in Columbus and have already established a $50,000 reward for any information that leads to the safe return of their daughter, who was believed to be riding her bike in the area west of town near County Road 600. In other news..."
Diana sat on Jason's couch, absorbing the information. The girl had already been gone overnight, not a good sign. She knew enough of these sorority girls from her time around the campus and the town, and she knew how seriously they took their commitments to their houses. Jacqueline Foley was a freshman, which meant she was newly pledged. No way she'd risk the wrath of her sisters by missing a meeting in September. Jason mentioned the possibility of being lost or hurt, and that seemed likely. There were a lot of lonely county roads around New Cambridge, many of them unmarked. It would be easy to get lost or misjudge a turn.
Or be taken.
For the first time since she'd given up her job on the police force, Diana wished she had it back. She could be in the center of things there and know, at the very least, as much as her fellow officers knew. The information wouldn't necessarily come to her directly. The higher-ups and the detectives liked to hoard their information, then dole it out on an as-needed basis in situations that only worked to their advantage. But in a small department, things leaked out, and Diana knew that eventually Jason would have information to pass on to her. She'd just have to be patient and wait for it.
Diana gathered the articles from the coffee table and started to carefully place them back in the folder, hoping that no more fell apart in her hands. Kay hadn't said so, but Diana imagined that the articles were sacred to the old woman, perhaps one of the few physical connections she still had to her missing daughter. Diana made it to the last of the articles, the bottom of the pile, when one caught her eye that she hadn't noticed before. She checked the date. March of 1985, one year after Margie Todd disappeared. The headline read, Still No Sign of Missing Fields' Student.
Diana scanned it quickly and saw nothing new, just a rehashing of the facts and a quote from Kay saying that she still held out hope her daughter would come home safely. But at the end of the article, the reporter included a quote from Officer Dan Berding, described as "the first officer on the scene the night Margaret Todd disappeared." And in the article, Dan said, "It looked to me like somebody took her. From the looks of things, there's no way this girl ran away."
What a difference twenty-five years makes, Diana thought.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN