When Sheri shrugged her acceptance, Amanda closed the laptop and picked it up. She scanned the room, but there were no telltale maps or brochures, and the only books in the bookcase were dog-eared thrillers and university texts from his global development studies.
No sound of a cellphone ringing, either.
Tucking the laptop under her arm, she went back downstairs, with Sheri at her heels. “Let’s check the shed.”
Like their house, their backyard was neatly kept. The grass was lush and mowed, the perennials trimmed and mulched. Gladioli were swollen with buds, and purple asters and nasturtiums spilled over their beds. Phil’s kayaks and small aluminum fishing boat were stacked on racks beside the shed.
As unreliable as Phil was with people, he had always taken excellent care of his physical space, as if it at least was under his control. Amanda opened the shed door. Inside, garden tools and bicycles hung on walls, and supplies and equipment were stored on shelves. Hockey and ski equipment was suspended on the beams overhead for next winter. A mower and snow blower took up one corner, a stack of winter tires another.
All the usual equipment of a middle-class homeowner. Nothing unusual struck her. He had an entire cabinet of fishing paraphernalia, but no guns or hunting gear. Phil had grown up in rural Manitoba with an annual family tradition of duck and deer hunting, but since his first encounter with tribal violence overseas, he had rejected all guns.
But that was before Nigeria.
Amanda turned to Sheri, who was examining his supply of fishing rods. “Did he have a gun?”
Sheri whipped her head back and forth. “He hates them now more than ever. My … my friend wanted to take Tyler moose-hunting last fall — that’s almost a Newfoundland rite of passage — but Phil blew a fuse.” She paused, fingering the long, slim rods. “He’s taken two of his salmon rods and his wading gear. That’s not much help, since salmon brooks and rivers are everywhere.”
“That’s good, though,” Amanda said. “It shows he’s still following a plan.”
Her cellphone had gone to Phil’s voicemail again so Amanda dialled a third time. From deep in the farthest corner of the shed came the muted sounds of a trumpet call. Both women rushed over. The sound was coming from somewhere in a pile of equipment beside the fishing cabinet. They tossed aside a folded tarp, dug out a bag of fertilizer, and began to shove aside the stack of tires. The trumpet trill grew louder. Finally, half hidden beneath the tires, Amanda found the phone.
The front screen was completely filled with notifications, most of them text and phone messages from Sheri and Amanda, none of them even opened, let alone answered.
Sheri craned her neck over Amanda’s shoulder to catch a glimpse. Seeing the unread messages, she swore.
“Oh, spectacular! So now he doesn’t even have a phone!”
Still squatting in the corner, Amanda glanced around the shed. How had the phone ended up buried under the tires? Someone had to move a tarp, a bag of fertilizer, and four heavy tires in order to hide it there. That made no sense. If Phil had simply put his phone down while collecting his fishing gear, or if it had fallen out of his pocket, it should have been sitting in plain sight, on top of the tarp, not underneath.
It was almost as if he had hidden it on purpose. But why go to all that trouble? If Phil wanted to get rid of the phone, so that no one could reach him or track him, why not just throw it in a Dumpster on his way out of town?
She tried to imagine the twisted path of Phil’s reasoning. He had discarded his phone, but rather than throwing it away, he’d left it within easy earshot of the house. Had that been deliberate? Had he known that a little ingenuity and detective work would discover it? Was he counting on that? Was he counting on the confusion and worry that discovery would provoke?
Amanda held the phone in suddenly nerveless fingers. Did he want Sheri to find it, she wondered? And to know that he had chosen to cut all ties? Did he want her to know that he was beyond reach? Beyond salvation?
The ultimate revenge.
She stood up, bumping into Sheri in her haste to turn around. “I think you better call the police.”
Chapter Three
To Amanda’s surprise, Sheri balked. She leaned over to peer at the spot where the phone had been found. “He could have just dropped it and it slid down there.”
“But he would have looked for it.”
“Maybe it fell out of his pocket while he was getting his fishing gear, and he didn’t even notice until after he left. Phil’s like that, you know. Mr. Unreliable, remember?”
“But he’d have a checklist. All those years of training —”
Sheri set her jaw and headed out of the shed. “He would hate it if I called the cops on him. Even if he did leave the phone behind on purpose, so what? He just needs his space and time. This is a small town, and people have sharp tongues and long memories. He’s having a hard enough time fitting in without having this written on his forehead. He’ll come back when he’s had time to sort himself out.”
Amanda hesitated. She didn’t want to scare Sheri by pushing the panic button prematurely, but Sheri’s denial of the darker possibilities seemed odd. “I’m not so sure. He’s been walking the edge a long time, and I don’t think he’s thinking clearly. God knows what he’ll do if he’s desperate.”
They were crossing the grass toward the house, and Sheri turned to search Amanda’s face. “He would never hurt Tyler.”
Despite her words, there was uncertainty in her eyes. Amanda didn’t respond. Desperate people hurt their children all the time, sometimes from the depths of a depression so black they believed they were saving their children from an impossible world and other times from a vengeful wish to hurt their partner by taking away the thing they loved most. “But what about hurting himself? Has he ever talked about ending it all?”
Sheri gulped a sharp breath. She strode inside, checked the house phone and the street yet again. Her jaw worked. “There was a time, this winter, when he asked me to hide all the axes and knives. I wasn’t sure if it was to protect me, or him.”
“Did he go for help?”
“Ask for help? Phil? Besides, here in Grand Falls, what kind of help is there? Trauma counsellors falling out of the sky, are they?”
Amanda came to her side and put a gentle hand on her arm. “I know this is scary, but we have to consider it. Because I think maybe it’s what this is all about. He said he forgives you and he hid his cellphone where we would eventually find it, but only once he was too far away for us to stop him. I bet if we search it, or decipher the password on his laptop, we’ll find a note.”
Sheri’s chin quivered. She snatched the cellphone from Amanda’s hand and tried to thumb through links. Once again a password stymied her. Frustrated, she shook her head. “Goddamn Nigeria! It made him so paranoid! It swallowed a wonderful, caring, trusting man and spat him back, destroyed. But Phil is a strong man. He’s a fighter. Even if he’s on the edge, he’s not going to quit on Tyler. He’s seen too many children suffer …”
“But would he quit on you?”
