“This is Roxane,” Shelby said, “she’s a friend of my dad’s and she’s a private investigator—”
He laughed, but it seemed angry. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Veronica is not missing. We both know that she’s just being inconsiderate. She doesn’t think about how her actions affect other people. She’s probably sitting in homeroom right now.”
“No she’s not,” Shelby said, her voice thick with more tears.
I took a step forward, shielding her slightly with my arm. “Sir, is your wife at home?”
“She took a sleeping pill last night. I didn’t wake her up yet,” he said, cold. Then his tone went from chilly to condescending. “Shelby, does your father know you haven’t gone to school?”
I could see why Shelby said he sucked and why Joshua had complained about him too. “Yes,” I said quickly, although he didn’t yet, “and right now, I think you should be more concerned with Veronica than with Shelby.”
“Who are you again?” he snapped.
“Who is it?” a voice said behind him. Then Veronica’s mother appeared over his shoulder. She was tall and a brittle kind of thin, her hair frosted blond and somehow styled already even though she was wearing a bathrobe. She took in Shelby and me, her expression going suspicious.
“Mrs. Wexford,” Shelby said quickly, “we don’t know where Veronica is.”
The woman widened her eyes, then narrowed them at her husband. “What?” she said. “Joseph. Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I didn’t want you to worry, you know how you get,” Mr. Wexford said.
I wanted to punch him, but instead I thrust out my hand. “Ma’am,” I said, “my name is Roxane Weary, I’m a friend of Joshua and Shelby and I’m also a private investigator and I think you might want to call the police—”
“Oh my God,” Mrs. Wexford said.
“Now, just calm down—” her husband said.
I cut him off. “Look, I’m not trying to alarm you, but Shelby hasn’t heard from your daughter for about twelve hours.” Mrs. Wexford covered her mouth with her hand when I said twelve hours, but I kept going. “We have reason to believe she went to see a band play at Insomnia, but we don’t know why she didn’t come home. Shelby says that it’s not like her to not answer her phone. So we should act quickly here, find her as soon as possible.”
“We?” Veronica’s stepdad snapped. “Do you even know Veronica?”
“Can we come in, please?” I said.
He opened his mouth as if to say no, but his wife put her hand on his shoulder and begrudgingly he stepped away from the door.
TWENTY-TWO
Officer Meeks was the first to arrive at the Wexfords’ house. He sat on the sofa talking with Veronica’s mother—Amy—while her husband, Joseph, banged around in the kitchen, allegedly making coffee for his wife. I stood with Shelby at the front door. She kept looking outside for her friend or her father, who was on his way home from work. He’d asked me to stay with her till he got back. I didn’t blame him, given what was going on, given what had already happened. Joshua knew, perhaps better than anyone, what could occur if you chalked up someone’s absence to being inconsiderate.
“She’s going to be so mad at me,” Shelby murmured to the glass panel in the storm door. She kept going back and forth between feeling certain that something was terribly wrong to convinced that her friend would hate her forever for blowing her cover. A self-preservation impulse, that. But there was no harm in it, or at least not yet.
She turned back to the street as a silver Toyota pulled up and squealed into the driveway of her house, shocks crunching as it clipped the edge of the curb. Joshua jumped out of the car, eyes frantic. Shelby ran outside and across the yard and Joshua grabbed her hard in a hug that looked like it hurt. Their relationship was sweet. But it was entirely foreign to me. My father had been the last person I’d ever reach out to for comfort. I had to turn away.
“No,” Amy Wexford was saying to Meeks, “her last name is Cruz. C-R-U-Z. Joseph is my second husband.”
“Okay, Cruz, I got it. Is her father in the picture?”
“They’re not close. He lives in Dayton.”
“Has she ever done anything like this before?”
Amy nodded. “We’ve had problems. My daughter has a form of bipolar disorder. But everything has been pretty good for the last year. She’s stable when she’s on her medication.”
I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. It was only getting worse. In a regular missing persons case, Veronica’s age and the history of mental illness would flag her as high-risk, a critical missing—suicide, some kind of break with reality, or risky manic episode. All very real concerns. But I knew, like I had known about the rocks under the bridge at Clover Point, that this was something else.
“Is she on it right now?” Meeks said. “Her medication.”
“Yes,” Amy said. “She knows it helps her.”
I listened to them discuss Veronica’s stats for a few minutes: seventeen years old, five-eight, one-ten, dyed red-violet hair, brown eyes, ears pierced three times each, no tattoos or birthmarks, vintage coat with fur collar. When Amy got up to look for a photograph, I motioned Meeks over to me.
“I need to tell you something,” I said quietly. “It’s going to sound a little out-there.”
“Shoot.”
I took a deep breath. “I think something is very wrong here.”
He gave me a reassuring policeman smile. “Look, we get this all the time—”
“No,” I said. “Something is wrong in Belmont. The body we found the other day. That didn’t happen in a vacuum. There are others. Shelby, Veronica’s friend? Her mother Mallory Evans was murdered sixteen years ago and her body was found in the same woods. In both cases, it was assumed that they left home voluntarily.”
His brows inched toward each other.
I went on. “And there’s another girl who’s been missing since 1999, Sarah Cook. So I don’t think anyone should be wasting time thinking this is just a case of irresponsible-teenager syndrome.”
He sighed at that. I shouldn’t have said wasting time. Or maybe I shouldn’t have dumped the whole mess on him at once. “Are you saying you have a better idea than talking to her mother?” he said.
I knew I should stop there, but I couldn’t. “Do you know the Brayfield family?”
“Yeah, of course, why?”
“Okay, this is the crazy part,” I said.
He put a hand up. “Do I want to hear this?”
“You need to hear it.” Based on his expression, I figured I had another minute before he wrote me off like Lassiter had yesterday. “Kenny Brayfield can be connected to the three girls I just mentioned. He dated Mallory Evans and didn’t come forward with that information after she was murdered. He was good friends with Sarah Cook’s boyfriend. And he works with Colleen Grantham’s father. These girls, all blond, who all went missing—”
“I don’t—” Meeks started. “Kenny Brayfield? What are you even saying? Sarah Cook was the daughter of that family, they were killed ten, fifteen years ago. The guy who did it is in jail.”