The Last Place You Look (Roxane Weary #1)

“What did you do?”

“We confronted her right away, full throttle—that was probably the first mistake. We got her seeing a therapist, grounded her. But the whole idea of grounding a kid, it just doesn’t make sense. She was still going to school, still seeing those same friends. So it didn’t make a difference. When she was sixteen, she broke her ankle—jumping off the bleachers at the stadium, she’d been drinking. She needed surgery and they had to put pins in it, it was all very serious. And she was prescribed some narcotic painkillers, and that’s when we really started to get it, that she had a problem, a real problem. But you always think you have more time to make it right.”

I shifted in my chair, uncomfortable. “I know,” I said. She didn’t ask me how I knew, but she nodded before speaking again.

“We did what we could. We sent her to one of those scared-straight-type boot-camp programs the city puts on. We got her into a residential treatment facility that our insurance covered, but she got kicked out. For, well,” Erin said, lowering her voice a little, “having sex with other patients. She was a girl out of control. After she came home from that, she was barely speaking to us. Do you have kids?”

I shook my head.

“People would say to me, How can you let this go on? If Colleen was my daughter, I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. How can anyone say that?” she said. “Even after she left, people would still tell me that. Like it made them feel better about themselves somehow.”

“You know what,” I said, “fuck those people.”

“I mean, seriously. What were we supposed to do? Physically chain her up in the bedroom?” She picked up the photo from the table and stared at it like she didn’t recognize the girl at all. Maybe she didn’t. “When she turned eighteen, she stopped going to school. She came and went as she pleased. Curtis tried to set some rules, like, if she wasn’t going to school, she needed to get a job, start paying rent. He never understood what we were dealing with where she was concerned, he really didn’t. Colleen said fine, she’d get out of our hair.”

It was clear that Erin needed to talk about her daughter with someone. “Just like that,” I said.

Erin nodded. “Just like that. A few weeks after her birthday, that’s when she left.”

“You weren’t surprised?”

“I don’t know how many times I told her I loved her, and she just looked at me,” Erin said. “It was like she didn’t want to be loved. I made sure she knew that she always had a place in our home. But it wasn’t enough. And no, I wasn’t surprised. It still hurt. It hurt in ways I can’t even describe, that she would just walk out.”

I hoped I never had to find out just how much something like that would hurt. “How did it happen?”

“It was a Sunday morning. Curtis and our other girls, we went to church. When we got back, Colleen wasn’t home. Her purse was gone. There was nothing unusual about that. It seemed like she just went out for the day. But then she never came home.”

I thought it over, not sure what I’d do in a situation like that. How were you supposed to know this time was different from every other time? “How long until you started worrying?”

“I was worried right away,” Erin said, “because I could never stop worrying about her. But it wasn’t until the next day that we started to feel like something was going on. She always came back in the early morning, four, five o’clock. But she didn’t. We filed a police report, but she was eighteen and they said she could come and go as she wanted. And given the history we’d had with her, it wasn’t exactly a secret she wasn’t happy at home.”

That sounded an awful lot like Mallory Evans’s story, with the police not caring enough to allow for the possibility that something was actually wrong here, to take some action. “What else did you do, besides filing the police report?” I said.

“We made signs. We posted online. We tried asking her friends, or all the friends we knew she had. Curtis went through the phone bill and we called every single number to ask if anyone had seen her or heard from her or knew about her plans,” Erin said. “But no one did. There was all this uncertainty, the kind that feels like it’s about to end, but it didn’t—and this is going to sound awful, but I have two other children, younger, and I have to be a mother to them too. I couldn’t fall apart. It wasn’t an option. I had to believe that she didn’t want me to find her.”

I wondered what my own parents would have done if I had disappeared like that at age eighteen. Even though my father was a cop, I suspected he would’ve been more angry than concerned, at least at first. “Where did you think she went?”

“She always talked about going out west,” Erin said. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were wide and bright with tears. “I’m sure it sounds like I didn’t even care, like we didn’t even look. But, of course, we looked. We did everything we could think of.”

I knew she cared. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be talking to me now. “I understand.”

“So now, thinking that maybe she didn’t just walk away—it’s—I don’t want it to be her. But at the same time it would be such a relief, to know after so long. And I know, regardless, that the—whoever it is, if it isn’t Colleen, she was still someone to another family. So there is no happy ending here.”

Curtis came back into the room and just stood there without saying anything. His eyes were red.

“I think it might be best if you left now,” Erin said, her voice breaking. “Let me write down our number.” She patted at the surface of the end table, looking for a pen but not finding one. “Curt, hon, can you just give Roxane one of your cards?”

We both fumbled through our pockets for our respective business cards.

“Take care,” Erin said. “And good luck.”

Outside I sat in the car for a few minutes, not sure what to think. I pitied Erin Grantham for the impossible position she was in. She was right—there would be no happy endings, at least not for her. Either her daughter had been murdered and buried in the woods, or her daughter was still missing. Her husband didn’t appear to be of much help, though in my experience, no one was, not when it mattered. I wanted to be of help but I didn’t know how. Mallory and Colleen—if it was Colleen—were connected by where their bodies had been found. And Mallory and Sarah were connected, loosely, through Brad. But I couldn’t connect Sarah or Brad to Colleen, and I still had no idea how Sarah’s parents factored into all of it. It wasn’t even a theory at this point, and barely even a story. I needed lunch, caffeine, and a stroke of divine inspiration, and not necessarily in that order. I reached into my pocket for my phone and pulled out Curtis Grantham’s business card along with it, and that was when I noticed:

He worked for Next Level Promotions.





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