refused to give in to tears, as if grieving would be disloyal. But the knowledge that her sister might not be all right, might in fact be dead, lurked at the edge of her consciousness, a horrible specter she wasn’t yet willing to confront.
It’s only been one day, she reminded herself. Jenny is young and healthy and smart. If she did get lost, she knows to stay put and wait for help. And she’s got a lot of people working to find her. The memory of Officer Spencer’s hand on her shoulder, a reassuring, comforting weight, returned and made her feel more settled. She believed he was doing everything he could to help her and Jenny. In the future, the sisters would look back on this time and laugh about the adventure.
She forced herself to stand and walk to the desk and power up the laptop computer. She knew the password—the same one Jenny had used for years—and soon was perusing her sister’s files and email and Facebook page. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. There was no journal detailing a secret worry or hurt, no anguished emails to friends, only the usual cheery greetings or gossiping about school or movies or weekend plans. She found a few emails from Eric Patterson, but they offered little insight into the relationship—invitations to dinner or confirmation of weekend plans. No words of love or secret scheming.
The sound of the front door opening startled her. “April, is that you?” she called. “I’m back here in Jenny’s room.”
“It’s not April,” came a man’s voice, and a moment later Officer Ryan Spencer filled the doorway of the bedroom.
Heart thudding painfully, Jana stared at him, caught off guard. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“The sheriff’s office gave us the information they had, but I wanted to see the place for myself.” He came into the room, and the already-small space seemed to shrink around them. “I thought it would help me get a better feel for your sister.”
Jana sank onto the bed again, fearful her shaking legs might not support her. Having the police here—in Jenny’s private space—made the magnitude of her disappearance that much greater. “This room is just like Jenny,” she said. She didn’t elaborate—let him make of that what he would.
His gaze roamed around the room. She had the sense that he was analyzing everything he saw, putting each item into a bigger picture he was forming of her sister. At last his eyes came back to her. “Have you found anything I should know about?” he asked.
She glanced toward the desk and the open computer. “I don’t know if it’s anything important,” she said. “But it’s something that struck me as odd when I was looking through her social media.”
“There are no pictures online of her with Eric Patterson,” he said.
“Yes!” She stared at him, impressed in spite of herself. “She has pictures of herself with other friends on her Facebook and Instagram pages, and here.” She indicated the bulletin board.
He nodded. “If you were engaged to someone, you would probably have lots of pictures of them.” He walked over to the laptop and hit a few keys. “There’s something else on this you ought to see,” he said. “Something I discovered looking at the copy of her hard drive the sheriff’s office made.”
“They made a copy of her hard drive?” She didn’t know whether to be comforted by their thoroughness or alarmed that the investigation was moving so quickly.
“We’ve learned the hard way that we need to take these cases seriously from the start,” he said. “There was a time when adults had to be missing for a while before law enforcement stepped in, but now we know the sooner we launch an investigation, the more likely we are to have a positive outcome.”
She nodded. “That makes sense. So what did you find?”
“Come look.”
Feeling steadier now, she stood and came to stand beside him, studying the screen, which showed a handsome, dark-haired man dressed in white, next to a blog post about the key to happiness. “What am I looking at?” she asked.
“It’s a blog by a man named Daniel Metwater. He calls himself a prophet and preaches a kind of back-to-nature spirituality a lot of young people find very compelling. Jenny’s browser history shows she had read quite a few of his posts and bookmarked his site.”
“Why is that important?” Jana asked.
“Because Metwater and his followers are camped very near where Jenny disappeared.”
Her stomach gave a nervous jump. “You mentioned wanting to question some people who were camped nearby. Did you mean this man, Metwater?”
“Yes, but I haven’t talked to him yet.”
“Why not?”
“I wanted to see what I could find out here first.”
“I want to go with you when you talk to him,” she said.
“No.” The word held all the finality of a slamming door, but she intended to push that door open.
“I can help you,” she said. “People will say things to me they won’t say to a cop.”
He shook his head, his jaw tense, blue eyes boring into her with an intensity that any other time would have been intimidating. But she had too much at stake to back down now. “If you don’t take me with you, I’ll go out there on my own,” she said.
“I can’t have you interfering with my case,” he said.
“This may be your case, but she’s my sister.” She hated the tremor in her voice as she said the last words and fought hard to control it. “I will do everything in my power to find her. I’ll talk to anyone and everyone who might have information that can help me find her, and you can’t stop me.”
“I could have you arrested for interfering with an investigation.”
“You could. But would you really do that? When we met earlier today, you didn’t strike me as a jerk.”
He actually flinched at the word, as if she had slapped him. “Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?”
“Take it however you like.” She lifted her chin and met his gaze, ignoring the tremor in her stomach as he leaned closer. She could smell the leather-and-starch scent of him, masculine and clean, and see the muscle jump along his jaw as he considered his answer.
“If I let you come with me, you can’t take part in questioning Metwater,” he said. “That has to be done by the book if we’re going to get anything we might be able to use in court later.”
“I understand. I thought I could mix with his followers. Find out if any of them know Jenny, or if she’s been in the camp.”
He rubbed his jaw, the scrape of beard against his palm sending another shiver of awareness through her. “You could talk to some of the women in the group,” he said. “I don’t expect them to be very cooperative with the police—they haven’t made any secret of their dislike of law enforcement. But they might be more sympathetic to you.”
She fought the impulse to throw her arms around him and kiss him—not so much because she thought he might object, but because she didn’t trust herself to stop with one friendly
