Doom with a View (16 page)

“How’s she doing?” she whispered into my ear.

I whispered back, “I’m worried.”

Cat nodded, her own eyes pinched, but she mouthed back, “She’ll be okay.”

I sighed as I looked absently around again at the flowers and the mourners getting soaked in the rain. I wanted to take Candice away from this somber scene as soon as possible and have her curl up on my couch, where it was warm and dry and I could take care of her, so I didn’t notice right away when someone new joined the gathering.

Among the mass of white and blue hair, my gaze belatedly picked out a familiar face and I literally gasped in surprise. Candice’s head lifted and her eyes looked at me. “What?” she asked.

I squeezed her hand and nodded to our right. “Harrison is here.”

Candice’s tired lids blinked in confusion, but she followed my head motion as I indicated him on the other side of the grave. “Huh,” she said, her tone flat and lifeless. Gaston had sent flowers and a card to my house, probably hearing from Dutch that Candice was staying with us, and he’d sent his condolences and regrets that he couldn’t attend the funeral, as he had business in Washington. I’d been very touched by his thoughtfulness, but for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine why Harrison had come.

Candice didn’t seem to dwell on it either. Her blank stare returned to her grandmother’s casket as it settled into the bottom of its earthen cradle. The priest made the sign of the cross over his chest and concluded the service, thanking everyone for coming and offering his final condolences to Candice.

As the crowd solemnly dispersed, I linked my arm through Candice’s and gently pulled her away. “Come on, honey, let’s get you home.”

Candice stayed with us for the next five days. At first I worried that she wasn’t going to pull out of the deep well of sadness that she’d settled herself into. As she sat on our couch, refusing food and my attempts to get her to go outside for a run or at least a brisk walk, I became increasingly concerned that she wasn’t going to come back to herself.

But on the evening of the third day I noticed that my friend began to make idle conversation. It started with the weather and moved on to the news and current events. Finally on the morning of the fifth day she found me in my office, poring over Bianca’s journals. “Hey,” she said meekly.

I’d been so engrossed I hadn’t heard her come in and I jumped a little in my chair. “Hi there,” I said, smiling a little at my own reaction. “How ya doin’?”

Candice shrugged and came to sit in front of my desk. I tried not to stare at the pronounced collarbone peeking out of her shirt while her clothing hung on her like a sack. I knew she’d barely eaten anything in the last week and the girl had undoubtedly lost more weight than was good for her, but the dark circles under her eyes looked a bit less prominent today and I took that as a good sign at least.

“Have you found anything?” she asked into the silence that followed her sitting down.

I rolled my head from side to side, trying to relieve the stiffness after being hunched over so long. “Not really. I keep looking for clues around her spring-break adventures, but the girl didn’t do the usual thing on her vacations.”

“The usual thing?”

I nodded. “No beaches, boys, and bedlam for Bianca. Last year she helped build a row of houses for Habitat for Humanity. Her senior year she attended a conference with her dad, then helped organize a cleanup along the Rouge River.”

Candice shook her head. “She was a good kid.”

“One of the best,” I said sadly. “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”

“Did you go back to her spring breaks from prior years?”

“You mean back through high school?” When Candice nodded, I said, “Nothing that points to anything. She went to London with her mom her junior year, and that’s as far as her journals take me.”

“I called Jeremy Lovelace after we got back from MSU to ask him about Bianca’s big story. He said she never mentioned anything about working on something like that with him, and further, he insisted he never discussed anything that might be inappropriate about his colleagues with Bianca. Also, he was under the distinct impression that she wasn’t very interested in local politics in general. She liked bigger stories with broader scope, like foreign wars, global warming, etc., etc.”

“It sounds like that’s a dead end, then,” I said, feeling totally frustrated with this case.

“Yep,” Candice agreed. She then ran a hand through her hair and sighed, looking around the room like she needed a distraction before her eyes found mine again. “I think I’m hungry.”

I grinned. “Come on,” I said, getting up quickly before she had a chance to change her mind. “Let’s go find you a good meal.”

Twenty minutes later we were seated in my favorite Thai restaurant as two steaming plates of pad Thai were placed in front of us. Candice and I ate in silence for a little while before she worked up the energy for more conversation. “I think we need to change direction.”

I swirled my rice noodles thoughtfully with my chopsticks. “Where are we going?”

“It’s not so much where as who,” she said. When I cocked my head and looked at her quizzically, she explained, “We’re not making any headway following Bianca. Maybe it’s time we switched our focus.”

“To one of the other kids,” I guessed.

“Yep.”

“Which one?”

“Which one does your radar suggest?” she asked, turning it back on me.

I thought about that for a minute. “The boy,” I said, feeling it deep in my gut.

“Kyle Newhouse,” Candice said thoughtfully. “Okay, I’ll do a little research and maybe we can plan a road trip to Columbus.”

“You up for that?” I asked carefully.

“It beats hanging out on your couch and feeling sorry for myself,” Candice said with the smallest of grins.

Mentally, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, so glad to see a bit of my friend coming back to life. “I’m game,” I said.

Candice and I left for Columbus two days later. Armed with several pages of notes and a map of OSU, we arrived on campus midafternoon. I wasn’t sure how Candice had obtained Kyle’s school schedule, and thought that the fewer questions I asked about her methods, the less I might have to fess up to if I happened to be asked under oath about it later.

We parked on the street just down from Kyle’s old dorm and walked to the front door. Again we’d both dressed very casually. We even came with backpacks to make ourselves blend in. “How did you want to work this?” I asked.

“The same way we tackled Bianca’s disappearance,” Candice replied. “We’ll walk his schedule backward and see if your radar can come up with anything.”

We spent much of the next three hours going from hall to hall walking the way we thought Kyle would have gone. On the trip from the last class back to Kyle’s dorm, my radar finally dinged. “Hold on,” I said, swiveling my head from side to side as I took in my surroundings. We weren’t far from the library. In fact we were just on the other side of the parking lot from it.

“What’s up?” Candice asked me.

I’d been carrying around Kyle’s photo all day, trying to link my energy in with his, and this was the first time I felt a connection. “Over here,” I said, hurrying toward the edge of the lot near a few huge buckeye trees.

I could hear Candice following me and I stopped next to the last tree. “What are you getting?” Candice whispered, coming alongside.

I put my hand on the tree and looked down at Kyle’s picture. A range of emotions went through me and a connection that I hadn’t expected. “Candice?” I said slowly, still feeling out the ether.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember the name of the third missing girl?”

“You mean Leslie Coyle?”

“Yes.”

“What about her?”

“She was here.”

Candice didn’t speak, so I looked at her and noticed she was squinting at me. “What do you mean, she was
here
?”

“She and Kyle were together right here,” I explained, pointing to the ground.

“So you’re still convinced they knew each other?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“And she was the only one out of the three that you think hasn’t been murdered?”

“Her picture was too fuzzy to say for certain.”

“What do you think now that you’re feeling her energy?”

I looked up at her and met her eyes. “I think she’s alive.”

Candice stared at the tree we were next to. “Do you think they were abducted at the same time?”

“No,” I said, remembering the meeting we’d had in D.C. “Remember? Albright said Kyle was the second abduction and Leslie went missing five days later.”

“Albright also said Kyle disappeared on his way to the library,” Candice mused. “So maybe he got to right here and Leslie showed up.”

“What’s the connection?” I asked, puzzling over it.

“Maybe she came here to warn him,” Candice said.

“Or lure him somewhere,” I suggested as a chill went up my spine.

“Does your radar say she was in on his murder?”

I mentally checked that. “I don’t think so,” I said, scratching my head. “But there has to be a link between the three of them. Something that ties all this together.”

“Well, so far we know that at least two of the kids knew each other,” Candice offered. “The missing puzzle piece is how Bianca fits in.”

“And that’s what I can’t let go of,” I admitted. “I’ve been going around and around with all the clues she gave me when we met with her parents, and none of them
go
anywhere. So I have to ask myself why she would tell us to look in places that were all dead ends.”

Candice grimaced. “No pun intended, though, right?”

I gasped, realizing what I’d just said. “Oh, God! I didn’t mean it that way.”

The corners of Candice’s mouth lifted. “I know you didn’t,” she said kindly before she glanced at her watch. “I say we call it a wrap for today. It’ll take us a couple of hours to get home and it’s already after two.”

On the drive back I sifted through Bianca’s journals again. There was a clue in there that was staring me in the face, but what it was I couldn’t seem to find. My radar kept physically tugging backward, and that, for me, is a symbol to go to the past, so I didn’t argue; I dug around in her journals from the beginning of her freshman year and kept feeling that backward pull, so I switched to her senior year of high school, and the tugging stopped, but I couldn’t find anything that seemed like it fit.

I picked up the first journal I had from Bianca’s senior year of high school and I felt a strong tug forward. “Grrrr,” I growled out loud.

“Problem?” Candice asked from the driver’s seat.

I rubbed my eyes and laid my head back against the headrest. “I feel like I’m supposed to focus on the latter half of Bianca’s senior year of high school, but every time I go through that journal, nothing much pops out at me.”

“Is there a specific section that you think you might want to focus on?”

I closed my eyes and concentrated. In my mind’s eye I saw an Easter egg. “Easter’s usually in April, right?”

“Usually,” she agreed. “Right around spring break.”

I remembered that strong feeling I’d had at the task force meeting about a spring-break connection, so I flipped back to that section of her journal and began to read aloud the paragraphs that I’d nearly memorized. “ ‘Dad and I are at the MWCFC and this conference is totally cool. There were some interesting presentations and we’re meeting all these amazing people and there are tons of kids my age here. I’m hanging out with three kids mostly. They’re totally cool.’”

“Things appear to be totally cool,” Candice remarked.

I ignored her and kept reading. “ ‘ We’re going to hang out in L.’s room tonight and watch movies. I think she totally has it bad for N. H., but I don’t know whether he likes her back. Anyway, we’re going back home the day after tomorrow, which totally sucks, because then I’ll have to deal with the twenty questions from Mom about Dad’s new girlfriend. . . .’ ”

“Hold on,” Candice said.

“What?”

“Go back up to that part about hanging out in L.’s room.”

My eyes scanned the page to that section. “Yeah?”

Candice glanced over at me. “Do you think L. could be Leslie Coyle?”

My brow furrowed. “Maybe,” I said. “But who’s N. H.?”

“Newhouse,” she said simply. “Kyle was a jock, right? He probably went by his last name like most jocks his age.”

“Ohmigod!” I yelled as a thousand bells seemed to ding in my head. “
How
did I miss that before?”

Candice smiled. “I think we’ve hit our first jackpot,” she said, reaching for her cell phone and clicking through some screens until she came up with the number she wanted. She had the phone on speaker and we both heard it ring before being answered.

“Representative Lovelace,” Jeremy said.

“Hello, sir, it’s Candice and Abby.”

“Hello, ladies,” he replied. “Have you found anything?”

“Maybe,” Candice said, then motioned for me to talk.

“Mr. Lovelace, do you remember a conference that you attended with your daughter two years ago during her spring break?”

There was a pause, then, “Sure. She and I went to a caucus for Midwestern politicians. It was held in Chicago, and members of the state legislature were encouraged to bring their families. Bianca had a blast.”

I could feel a surge of adrenaline pumping through me. “Sir, do you remember who she hung out with during the caucus?”

There was another pause and then he said, “I don’t remember their names, but I do remember one young man was from Ohio. I think his name was Kevin or something. He was a good-looking kid. Then there was a girl. Lisa or something, and another young man that I only shook hands with once. I don’t remember his name or where he was from.”

Candice and I exchanged a look. “At that caucus did anyone personally threaten you or take a special interest in the group your daughter was hanging out with?”