Samantha Sanderson Without a Trace (13 page)

“About then, give or take a day or so. Then, he put a note in my locker on Tuesday to reply with a note in his locker if it was all still okay for him to come over on Wednesday morning, so I did.”

The mysterious note. Now its meaning made perfect sense. Sam nodded. “You're J.T.”

Jared gave her a funny stare. “How'd you know?”

“I know about the note.”

His eyes widened. “Tam told you?”

“No, I saw the note. The police have it. They're trying to figure out who J.T. is.” She frowned. “Hold up . . . your last name is Hopkins.”

He grinned. “Jared Thomas Hopkins, Junior. My mom calls me J.T. since she calls Dad Jared.” He stopped smiling. “Wait a minute. The police have my note?”

Ohmygummybears
! She couldn't believe this. “So where's Tam now?”

“I don't know.” Jared looked like he'd just swallowed a bug.

“What do you mean, you don't know? He hung out at your house. Where did he say he was going when he left?”

“That's just it: I never saw him that afternoon. When I got home from school, he was gone. He'd cleaned up after himself like I'd asked, so there was no trace of him. There wasn't any sign of him.”

“Where did you go after school?” Sam asked.

“I didn't go anywhere. I went straight home from school and when I got there, he wasn't. I figured he'd just left early or decided to ‘fess up and went home to tell his parents.”

Sam shifted her weight from one leg to the other. This was getting more and more crazy by the minute. “What was the original plan?”

“We'd talked about how my mom gets home from work around five and my dad gets home a little after that, so they'd just assume he came home from school with me for dinner.”

“Your parents let you just have friends over without getting permission first?”

“I do it all the time. Don't you?” Jared asked.

“Uh, no.” Her mom was extremely lenient when it came to friendships, but even she wouldn't be thrilled if Sam just had someone over without asking first. Unless it was an emergency or something.

“Oh.” He gave her an
I feel sorry for you
look, that she chose to ignore.

“Anyway, the plan was for Tam to have dinner with you and your family?” Sam struggled to get back on track with the story even though she struggled with accepting it. All of it was so totally un-Tam-like.

Dad was so right: you can never really know somebody. She would've never thought Tam capable of this.

Jared nodded. “We were going to have dinner with my parents and then Tam and I were going to do homework. His plan was to head home by ten. He said that would give him more than enough leeway for the three hours.”

“The three hours?”

“Yeah, I don't know what that was about. He just said he'd call his mom a little before ten and she'd come get him.”

“Even though he had skipped school and made her worry?” Sam couldn't get the mental image of Mrs. Lee in the office, wringing her hands with worry over her missing son, out of her mind. Her respect for Tam dropped several levels. Putting his mother through such agony. In the back of Sam's mind, she couldn't help but wonder if this was all still some big hoax on her. “If he skipped school, he wouldn't have had any homework to do.”

“I guess. He said he needed to work on his EAST project.”

Wasn't that the truth?

There was so much about Tam that she'd had wrong. She'd thought him responsible and considerate, someone who wouldn't skip school or ask for secret meetings or who wouldn't have an important part of their project done. There was nothing in his EAST project files and only random data in Mrs. Shine's. Facts on tween Internet stats. Missing children and how the first three hours—wait a minute!

Sam grabbed Jared's forearm. “Three hours? You're positive Tam said three hours?”

Jared nodded. “Yeah. I thought it was odd because school gets out just before four, so from then until almost ten is double that: six hours.”

Unless he was allowing time for his mother to realize he was really missing and call the police.

Surely he wouldn't have gone so far? She let go of Jared's arm, gripping her own upper arms as she crossed
her arms over her chest. “But once you saw my article and then went to the assembly with the deputies and knew Tam was missing, why didn't you come forward with all this?”

“First off, Tam had made me promise not to say anything until he explained everything. How am I supposed to know if this isn't all part of his plan?”

“What?” Had Jared lost his mind? “How could being missing be part of his plan?”

“What if he had plans to go to someone else's house?”

“Then why make plans to eat dinner with you?” she volleyed back.

“Maybe something came up and that's why he left early.”

No, she thought she'd figured out what Tam had been up to, and that didn't fit. “I don't think so.”

“He was supposed to meet Darby that morning. Maybe he'd planned something else and since she didn't show, that changed his plans.”

Maybe. “But he's been gone so much longer than planned now. All day Wednesday, Wednesday night, Thursday and Thursday night, and now all day today. That's way longer than he'd intended. Why not tell everyone now, especially since they've issued the AMBER Alert.”

“That's why I'm telling you now.”

“Have you told your parents or the police?” Sam
asked. How could he not have come forward? Tam had deviated from the plan and had been missing three days and two nights. What had Jared been thinking?

Jared widened his eyes and gave her a hard stare. “Really? You think I'm just going to walk up to the police and announce my friend ran away and I helped hide him? Seriously?” He shook his head. “I don't know if that's a rule violation or something, but I'm pretty certain Mrs. Trees would have me on her watch list if she knew I'd helped someone skip school. And that's not even going into how much trouble I'd be in with my parents.”

Sam recalled how the deputies had acted at her house at midnight . . . he had a valid concern. But Tam's disappearance was more important. “Well, you've got to tell them now.”

Jared shook his head. “I can't.”

“Jared, you have to.”

“I came to you, Sam, because I figured you might be able to figure out what Tam was up to. And since your dad's a cop and all . . . I can't get into any more trouble. I'm already seriously grounded until spring break. If I mess up before spring break, my parents said we'd cancel our vacation to Disney.”

A vacation over the safety of a friend? Sam wanted to be indignant, but knew in her heart, if the friend wasn't Makayla, she might hesitate coming clean too.

“I have to break it to them gently—in a way they'll understand I was just being a friend.” Jared looked more
nervous than BabyKitty when Chewy wanted to play. “I have to talk to my mom first. She'll help me break it to Dad.”

“Let me think for a minute.” Okay . . . considering everything she knew now, she needed to write it all down. Look at it.
See
the connections, as her mother had taught her. “Look, I'll try to buy you some time so you can tell your mom first. I'll keep your name out of it for now, but you have to tell them today. I won't be able to not tell the police. I'll stall them as long as I can.”

Once she figured things out.

“Thanks, Sam.” Jared hustled back over to sit beside Paul Moore. He glanced back over his shoulder at her and smiled.

Sam returned to her station.

“What was up with that?” Felicia asked.

“Hang on.” Sam pulled out her cell phone, mentally thanking Ms. Pape for allowing them to use their smart-phones in class.

She pulled up the notes she'd made last night and added in what she now knew to be the facts:

— Two weeks or so ago, Tam asked Jared if he could hang out at his place while he skipped school. (Sam still had the hardest time with this fact. There had to be a reason, a good one. There just
had
to be.) They made plans not only for Tam to hide out there all day, but to stay until almost ten that evening. (Again, this was the part that Sam had the hardest time accepting.)

— Tuesday during activity period, Tam asked Darby French to meet him before school on Wednesday, on the side of the building, because he wanted to give her something, but she says she has no idea what that was.

— Tuesday, Tam put a note in Jared's locker to confirm whether everything was set for him to go to Jared's house on Wednesday morning. Since it was, Jared put a note in Tam's locker that said everything was set for the morning.

— Sometime Tuesday, since Sam's dad didn't say, someone on Tam's laptop went into a message board under the screen name
mathhater
and had a conversation with
cooltutor
. This might or might not have been Tam, but Sam was leaning toward not.

— Tuesday night, Tam got in an argument with his parents about spending the night at Luke Jensen's. He posted about the disagreement on Facebook, but Luke said he sounded more disappointed than angry with his father.

— Wednesday morning at seven fifty, Tam's mother dropped him off at school.

— Wednesday morning about eight, Jared took Tam to his house and let him in. He told Tam to pick up after himself and he'd be back after school.

— Wednesday after school, Jared returned home and Tam was gone, leaving no note or anything. He'd just disappeared. Jared had no way of knowing when Tam left, where he went, or what was going on at this point.

Felicia looked over her shoulder and read. Sam didn't try to stop her. It wouldn't really do any good to say anything at this point since Felicia was a speed reader and was probably already finished anyway.

Sam looked back over her notes, trying to remember everything. There was something she was missing . . . the three hours! She needed to see exactly what Mrs. Shine's notes in her EAST documents were. There was an explanation there, Sam just had to find it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

M
rs. Shine!” Sam burst into the EAST lab.

All the students and Mrs. Shine looked up. “Sam, what can I help you with?” Mrs. Shine motioned Sam to approach her desk.

“I need to look at your documents for Tam's project. I think his disappearance might be connected to his project.”

Mrs. Shine accessed her documents. “Students, keep working,” she said to her class. “What's going on?” she whispered to Sam.

“I went into Tam's files to see what he was working on.”

“Sam.” Mrs. Shine tried to sound disappointed, but it didn't quite work. Everyone knew Sam was Mrs. Shine's star student.

“All his files are empty, Mrs. Shine. All of them. There's nothing there.”

“That can't be.” Mrs. Shine opened her file.

“I double checked. I'm positive.”

“Let's see what I have in my notes.” She clicked on Tam's name. “Well, there's not much. Let me print it.”

Sam grabbed the paper as soon as the printer spit it out. She read aloud in a whisper. “Awareness to possible danger is critical to the safety of children. Awareness of physical surroundings, potentially suspect people, and Internet safety measures should all be integral teachings to children.” She glanced at Mrs. Shine. “Approximately eight hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen were reported missing, of that, more than two hundred thousand were abducted by family members. Ninety-three percent of teens, ages twelve to seventeen, use the Internet, eighty percent use it over three times a week. The first
three hours
are the most critical when trying to locate a missing child.”

Sam's hands shook as she held the paper. “Mrs. Shine, Tam's disappearance
is
his project.”

“Explain, Sam.”

She showed the teacher her notes on her phone. “Tam was proving his point for his project—that there is a need for a mandatory safety education for all students of upper elementary school. He did the research and I would bet he has an entire project nearly complete, just not on the school's servers. He didn't want anyone to figure it out before he proved his point.”

“I think perhaps we should take this to Mrs. Trees.”

Sam nodded, but her mind kept racing. “I'll meet you at the office after school, okay? I need to go get my stuff from the newspaper room.”

“Okay.”

Checking the time on her phone, she realized she needed to move. She walked as quickly as possible to the classroom then went directly to her station.

“What is going on, do-gooder?” Felicia asked.

“Hang on. I've got to get the article up before school lets out.” Sam looked over the monitor to see Aubrey staring at her. Sam dropped her head behind the computer screen. “Y'all keep Aubrey busy, please.”

“My pleasure,” Felicia said, standing up. “Hey, Aubrey . . .” she started as she walked across the classroom. Lana followed her closely.

Sam opened up the posting program and began to type. The article title: “Where Is Tam Lee?” Her first sentence would grab everyone's attention:
Did he go too far to prove his project's point?

Her typing increased as she let the story explode out of her. How Tam carefully planned. How he followed through. The meeting with Darby was the only thing she left out, because she didn't see the connection. She mentioned visiting a “questionable” message board to
set up the basis of Internet security. She mentioned he deliberately had words with his dad over a long-standing family rule he couldn't break, then posted it on Facebook so everyone would know, making his disappearance seem like running away. She told of his plan to stay at a friend's house, even though she did leave Jared's name out, it was only a matter of time before someone figured it out and he was busted.