out of my suspicions.
Dawn’s answer gets cut off by the unmistakable thud-thud-thud of helicopters—more than one—swooping over the camp, shaking the air and rattling the cabin’s wooden walls.
“Why are you trying to talk me into this?” I say once the sound fades. I feel jittery, keyed up, like I have to restrain myself from jumping off this couch and running out there to join them in the search for my son. Every second we sit here, yammering on about Andrew, is another second Ethan is not found. “Andrew would not try to steal his own son.”
“Have you considered the possibility that Ethan’s disappearance could have nothing do with your son...” She pauses, and that ever-pleasant half smile she’d been wearing disappears. “And everything to do with you?”
My skin goes cold, a chill snaking down my spine. “With me, how?”
“Let me put it this way. If Andrew were angry and hurt and looking for revenge, what do you think he would do? What would he see as your one biggest weakness?”
And just like that, I’m a believer. My one biggest weakness is Ethan.
5 hours, 57 minutes missing
Outside the cabin, a big body in work boots comes clomping up the stairs with a gait I’d recognize anywhere. Dawn looks up expectantly, but I pop off the couch, lurch to the door and yank it open, right as Lucas raises a fist.
He looks like hell. His skin is pale. His shirt is untucked. He needs a haircut and a shave. Under the frayed orange rim of his ancient University of Tennessee baseball cap, his hazel eyes are crinkled with strain.
But he’s here and I fall into him, even though Lucas is the kind of guy who’d sooner put me in a headlock than a hug, and I’d sooner punch him in his stomach than throw my arms around his waist. As unaccustomed as I am to this embrace, I’m awfully glad for it. I press my face into his chest and fall apart.
“You gotta stay strong, Kitty Kat.” A nickname I haven’t heard from him since my high school days. He drapes a big palm on the back of my head. “For Ethan. You have to stay strong for him.”
I tip my head back, look up at Lucas through my tears. His face may have a few more wrinkles, his once-thick hair thinned out on top, but for me he’ll always be that solemn-faced man-boy who lived across the street, the one who took me in after my mother’s death made me an orphan at sixteen. “You would get eaten alive by foster care,” he said to me then, and Lucas would know. He spent more than a decade in the system, and to this day, the only thing he’ll tell me about it is that it was no place for a girl like me.
“I am. I will be. I’m just so glad you’re here.”
“Yeah, well, those two cops down at the turnoff didn’t make it easy on me. It would have saved me some trouble if you’d told them I was coming.”
I don’t ask how he got by, mostly because I don’t care. All that matters is he’s here.
He untangles us, heaves a battered duffel from the porch floor and walks me backward until we’re both inside the cabin. Behind him, the rain has stopped. A hazy mist rises up from the woods, smoky puffs that hang suspended in the air like ghosts.
While I mop up my face with a paper towel, Lucas introduces himself to Dawn. Like pretty much every other red-blooded female on the planet, she eyes him with interest. “Dawn Whittaker,” she says, shaking his hand.
I toss the towel in the trash and point to the duffel in Lucas’s fist. “What’s that?”
That is no overnight bag. It’s a bag big enough to carry every pair of jeans, T-shirt and sweater in Lucas’s very meager wardrobe, but a clinking of metal on metal sounds from inside the canvas. He drops it on the floor, where it lands like a chunk of concrete.
“My tracking gear. GPS. Night goggles. That kind of stuff.” Lucas pulls out a chair, flips it around and sits on it backward, his big body facing me. “What’s the word? You never texted.”
I fall onto the couch while Dawn spouts off acronyms I only vaguely recognize and will never be able to remember: NCIC and BOLO and GBI. She gives him a quick rundown of everything we’ve learned until now, which is frustratingly little. That there was a fire just outside the cabin while everyone was sleeping. That Ethan disappeared somewhere between the rush outside and the chaperone putting out the fire. That the dogs had some trouble catching his scent at first, until one of them led searchers a mile and a half through the woods, where it dried up at a road. Lucas’s reaction to the last one makes me grip the table tighter.
“Sounds like a trap,” he says, and Dawn doesn’t argue. She thinks it sounds like a trap, too, and honestly, who wouldn’t?
I turn back to Lucas. “They think it might have been Andrew.”
He frowns, but he doesn’t look particularly surprised. “Of course they suspect Andrew. Don’t you ever watch Law & Order? It’s always the parent.” He turns to Dawn. “Did you call him? Did you send somebody to bust down his door?”
“Yes to the first, but we can’t do the second without a warrant, which the Atlanta PD is working on. By now they’ve knocked on his door often and loud enough to wake the neighbors on either side. It looks like nobody’s at home.”
He curses.
Dawn examines him carefully, her pen stilled. “It doesn’t seem like I need to ask whether or not you think Andrew would be capable of kidnapping his own son.”
“Hell yeah, I think he would. He’s smart, he’s sneaky and don’t even get me started on that man’s mental state.”
That Man. The Wife Beater. Captain Douchebag. Just a few of the nicknames Lucas has coined for my soon-to-be ex so he would never have to say Andrew’s name again.
But Lucas is right about one thing: don’t get him started on Andrew. Lucas is the kind of man who makes a decent living off sweat and elbow grease. Who values pulling your own weight, making an honest buck and taking care of your own. God. Country. Family. Maybe he could have respected Andrew if he’d built his company from the ground up instead of using a significant chunk of his parents’ life insurance settlement. The other half he sank into our six-bedroom home on a half-acre lot in Dunwoody, where he now lives alone. Lucas has never been shy with his opinions, and he’s always had a long list of reasons I should have never married Andrew: too self-important, too focused on the material, too headstrong and controlling. Later, after his drinking had become a problem, he was too quick-tempered and unpredictable. By the time I saw what Lucas did in Andrew, it was too late. We already had Ethan.
But the last thing I need right now is to rehash yet another I told you so. “So now what?”
Dawn pushes up from the couch. “Now I need to do a quick check-in with Sheriff and the team over at the dining hall. In the meantime, I want you to start making those lists we talked about. Places Ethan goes on a regular basis, people he knows and interacts with, websites he visits and people he talks to. I want the names of every adult Ethan has come into contact with in the past year. People he knows well. People he knows not so well. We want to take a look at anyone he might have formed an attachment to.”
I
