Sasha said, and the approval in her tone warmed him. “Tell me what’s happened. Was there trouble at home?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Not the kind that would make her take off. My folks are great.”
“You’ve always said so,” Sasha said. “But sometimes siblings see things differently.”
He shook his head. “Trish got along fine with them. No fights, no blowups. Just the usual teenage stuff. She thought they were overprotective, but so did I.”
“Sometimes,” Sasha said again, this time carefully, “parents are different with girls.”
Ryan considered this for a moment. “My dad was, a little. Extraprotective. But Trish could get around him, too, in a way I never could.”
“Girls and their daddies,” Sasha said. “It’s a fact of life.”
“Yeah. I envied her sometimes, when I was still at home. There she was, seven years old, wheedling things out of him that I couldn’t get at seventeen. But it was hard to stay mad at her when she…” He trailed off awkwardly.
“When she adored her big brother?”
A sheepish smile curved his mouth. “Yeah.”
“That’s the natural order of things, too,” Sasha said.
There was a pause as the waitress took their order—she still went for his own favorite cheeseburger, which likely meant, given she hadn’t changed at all, she still worked out like a triathlete—and then she continued.
“You said it’s been a week.”
He nodded.
“And she just turned eighteen?”
He nodded again. “On the ninth.”
“Any reason to think she didn’t just take off on some celebration of her newly gained adulthood?”
And there it was, Ryan thought. The same wall they’d run into with the police. “Concrete reason? Like something I could show you?” He sighed. “No. The opposite, in fact.”
“Opposite?”
“She left a note.” To her credit, Ryan thought, her expression didn’t change. “Not a suicide note,” Ryan said quickly, since that was the first thing the cops had asked.
“I assumed it wasn’t, or you wouldn’t be talking to me, the police would be investigating. Are they?”
“No.”
She merely nodded. “Do you have it?”
“No. My folks do.” He shifted in his seat. “They didn’t know I was going to call you.”
“Will it bother them?”
Not nearly as much as it bothered me, he thought.
“I don’t think so. They just want somebody looking for Trish, and obviously the police won’t unless we come up with some evidence something’s wrong. I mean they took a report, but it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to go far.”
“They have some big limitations,” Sasha said. “So what did the note say? Any clues?”
“Thank you,” he said impulsively. At her questioning look he tried to explain. “For not…instantly writing this off. For not giving me that look the cops did, the minute I told them about the note.”
Although she looked pleased, she waved his thanks off with a gesture and refused to bash the police. “They have different priorities, and too darn many rules. We don’t. And we have access to Redstone’s resources. That’s why we’re so successful. So what did the note say?”
“Just that she had to go somewhere, not to worry, and she’d call when she could. But she’s supposed to start college in the fall, at U.C. Davis. She wants to be a vet.”
“And did she? Call, I mean?”
“No. And she’s not answering her cell.”
“Didn’t even call friends?”
“Her best friend is spending the summer in Australia. Graduation present. She said she didn’t know anything, even laughed at the idea of Trish taking off on her own.”
Sasha nodded thoughtfully.
“Boyfriend?”
“No. She never dated much. She was focused on school. She was seeing one guy a year or so ago, but they broke up. I don’t know why.”
“Nasty break?”
Ryan looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I only barely knew about the guy.”
“Would your parents know?”
“Probably. They keep a close watch—” He stopped, as if realizing that however close his parents had watched their daughter, it apparently hadn’t been close enough.
“I’ll talk to them about it,” Sasha said. “And I’ll want to see the note.”
“There was nothing in it about where she was going, or how long she’d be gone, or even if she’d be back. Nothing,” he repeated in obvious frustration.
“Did she have a car?”
“Yes, my dad’s old one, but it’s at home still.”
“How about finances? Credit card?”
“She had a checking account, and savings, but that’s it. My folks wouldn’t let her have a credit card, afraid she’d do the kid thing and get in way over her head.”
“She’ll get a million credit card offers once she gets to college,” Sasha pointed out, refraining from stating her opinion on that common practice.
“They knew that. They just flat out told her she couldn’t have one while she was underage and they might be held responsible for her irresponsibility, and that if she got one once she left the house, they wouldn’t help her with it.” One corner of his mouth quirked upward. “I got the same lecture at the same age.”
“Good for your folks.”
“I knew you’d say that,” Ryan said, but with a smile.
“She’s never expressed a desire to take off when she was old enough, see the country or the world?” Sasha asked.
“Trish? Hardly. She didn’t even like going on family vacations. She’s never even talked about wanting to go anywhere. She was looking forward to going to school, but she was even a bit nervous about that, it being so far away. In her eyes, anyway,” he amended, as if realizing that to many people, especially those connected to a worldwide entity like Redstone, a distance of less than five hundred miles was almost negligible.
“So she’s a homebody?”
