“You think he faked it?”
“It wouldn’t be all that hard to pull something like that together.”
“But in a split second? He couldn’t have known I was going to ask him for a GPS location screenshot ahead of time. And he couldn’t have known I was going to be in Mundy’s Landing. I didn’t even know it myself until twenty minutes before we left New York, unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Do you think he followed us up here?”
“No.” Barnes is decisive. “There’s no way. Half the time we were on the road, there was no one behind us at all.”
“Okay, but if this guy was responsible for Brianna Armbruster’s disappearance, he might have expected us to tie it to Julia Sexton’s and assumed we’d come here to investigate.”
“Or maybe he’s been here all along.”
“He lives in New Jersey,” she reminds Barnes just as her phone rings again. She hesitates only a moment before answering it.
Jin Kim again: “Are you ready for this?”
“I doubt it. What’s up?”
“We found Rick Walker.”
She sighs in relief. “Thank God. You traced the call? He was down there after all? Barnes and I were just trying to figure out how—-”
“No, wait, back up. That’s not what I meant. I just got off the phone with the New Jersey police. Rick Walker’s dead.”
“They killed him?”
“No. He died. In his apartment. Yesterday, maybe the day before. And it’s looking like a homicide.”
“But . . . if he’s dead, then who the hell just called me?”
“I don’t know, but he’s nearby. Watch yourself, Sully.”
Please, please, please let him call me back . . .
She clings tightly to her phone inside her coat pocket, willing it to ring. With blatant disregard for Miss Abrams’s restriction, Rowan left her cell phone powered on after the conversation with Jake.
It vibrates with an incoming call just as she’s leading the class back through a curtain of falling snow to the bus.
But it isn’t Jake.
Frowning, she steps away from the class to answer it, ignoring questions from the kids and blatant disapproval from Bari, who makes a comment about teachers who make a “big stink” about rules but don’t follow them.
“Rowan?”
“Yes . . . ?”
“This is Joe Goodall.”
Joe is the principal of Mundy’s Landing High School. Close to retirement age now, he was a student teacher at the middle school back when Rowan was in eighth grade, and had moved on to teaching science at the high school by the time she graduated. She never had him for class, but he was a hall monitor who handed her quite a few cut slips back in the day. They’ve laughed about it since but it’s always a little strained on her part, even though she’s long since redeemed herself, and Braden and Katie were stellar students.
“What’s going on, Joe?” she asks nervously.
“I need you to come over here as soon as possible.”
Once Noreen has crossed the Whitestone Bridge from Long Island to the Bronx, traffic is surprisingly light.
She makes it to Mundy’s Landing in record time, speeding the whole way, despite the snow that starts falling north of the New York City suburbs.
It isn’t that she’s eager to get to her hometown so much as she’s eager to leave her life behind for a little while.
Funny—-that’s the opposite of how she used to feel driving back to Long Island after visiting Mundy’s Landing when her father was still alive and ailing. She could never get home quickly enough to Kevin and the kids.
Now Kevin is leaving, and Sean is gone most of the time, and soon Shannon will be away too. The younger girls aren’t all that far behind.
What then?
She’s never lived alone in her life; nor has she ever wanted to. It was never part of any plan.
Her mother’s words, the ones Noreen had repeated to her son on his commencement day, echo in her head as she passes the chamber of commerce billboard welcoming her to Mundy’s Landing.