“A three-foot-tall gray fellow?”
I pressed my lips together thinking about Nina—about the snarl in her lip as she said that Miranda smelled like “stale blood and something like Windex.”
“Do you think Janitor Bud did this? Do you think his sabbatical was a fake?” I stood, considering. “Oh my God, Will, Bud could be the guy we’re looking for. He fits—it fits, right? He has close ties to campus, he could—he could hate the girls and want to exact revenge.” My heartbeat started to speed up. “Think about it—Meadow, Meadow from Simply Charming, said that Fallon came in with her grandfather. Or someone she thought was her grandfather, but she said Fallon called him something like her ‘buddy.’ Maybe she just called him Bud. They’re working together. They’re partners. It’s Janitor Bud. It has to be—that’s the only thing that makes sense!”
Will was silent for beat. “I don’t think Bud is the only thing that makes sense.” He looked at me hard until I sat down again.
“What are you talking about?”
“Think about it, love—”
“Miranda? You think Miranda—what? Did this to herself? How dare you! Did you see that child? She has no friends. Basically has no family. And she was beaten, Will. There were words carved into her flesh. She didn’t do that. No one would do that to themselves.” I could feel the heat zinging through my veins. I knew I was yelling, clipping my words, but I didn’t care. “It’s not possible. It’s just not possible.”
“You’re certain?”
I nodded before I could think otherwise. “Absolutely.”
Will and I were nearly nose-to-nose, his arms crossed in front of his chest, my fists on my hips in a sort of Guardian-Guardee stand-off. We were still huffing into each other’s faces when my cell phone split off into a crazy Latin beat. I slid it out of my pocket and held up a finger.
“It’s Sampson. What do you think he wants?”
Will cocked an eyebrow. “I bet if you answer the call, he’d be willing to tell you.”
I rolled my eyes and slid the phone on.
“Hey, Mr. Sampson.”
“Sophie.”
He had barely finished saying my name when the chill ran through me. “What’s wrong, Sampson?”
There was a pause—it must have been for just a beat, but it seemed to stretch on as the sound of my own blood rushing through my ears filled up the room, punctuated only by the thud-thud-thud of my heart.
“Another girl has gone missing.”
Fear, like a gnarled fist, unwound in my stomach. I could feel the cold fingers reaching every part of my body. “Another girl, missing? That’s not possible,” I heard myself say. “That can’t be.”
I could hear Sampson breathe on his side of the phone and I wanted to be there to shake him, to tell him he was wrong.
“That’s not the pattern,” I mumbled dumbly. “That’s not the pattern.”
“It was another Mercy girl.”
I was shaking my head now, stunned and numb. Somewhere, a thousand miles away, I could hear paper rustle and I knew that it was Sampson, bringing police files closer to him. He cleared his throat.
“Her name was Kayleigh Logan. She was a junior.”
My whole body began to tremble and my lips felt impossibly swollen and weird. “I know Kayleigh. I know her. She’s not missing. She was in school today. I saw her. I saw her,” I repeated, somehow hoping that could change anything.
Sampson breathed slowly. “It happened after school. She was riding her bike and she just vanished.”
I thought of Kayleigh sitting in the back of my class, snapping her gum and batting those thick, heavy eyelashes. She laughed when Miranda choked on her speech, the high, tinkling laugh of someone with no cares, and her blond hair fell in a perfectly glossy cascade of face-shielding curls when she leaned over to whisper something to Fallon.
Had they made future plans?
Had she told Fallon she was going away? Had she known?
“Are there any details? Are they sure she didn’t just leave on her own?”
“A witness said she saw Kayleigh approach a car—a blue sedan.” Sampson paused for a beat. “Not a really good description. The woman said she was working in her garden, saw Kayleigh stop her bike to talk to the driver of the car, she looked back to her plants and then heard the tires squeal and both Kayleigh and the car were gone.”
I chewed my bottom lip. “Well, how did they know Kayleigh didn’t get in willingly?”
“She left her bike.”
I frowned. “Hey, wait a minute. The witness said she heard the tires squeal. Is that what she said?”
Sampson spoke slowly, probably reading from the police report. “Witness: ‘I heard the squeal of tires and that made me look up.’”
“So Kayleigh didn’t scream. If the driver nabbed her, she would have screamed and then the tires would have squealed. So maybe Kayleigh wasn’t afraid of her kidnapper.”
Sampson sighed. “She must have known him.”