Winter Flower Read online

  “Slow night, huh?” I said.

  “Dead,” Linda replied.

  In a sharp tone, I said, “Then why hasn’t the parking lot been swept? Why’s the floor dirty in here? You’re telling me you can’t get your job done on a ten-hour shift with just a hundred bucks in sales?”

  Dakota and Linda winced, and Linda said, “Sorry, boss. I’ll take care of it now.” Both of them got up from their seats.

  “Good. And this needs to be the last time I have to say this. I’m getting tired of repeating myself.”

  Shaking my head, I walked down the line, checking supplies and food. I was working myself up into a rage. Eggs pans were dirty, and dishes were piled in the dish pit. Linda had only done a half-assed job of cleaning back here. I could see dirt and grime built up underneath the dish pit, and a fork on the floor underneath was clear evidence she’d only deck-brushed along the line, not bothering to get underneath the equipment. The grills had been done at least, but a glance up close showed the filters were getting dirty again. I’d spent two hours scrubbing them just four days ago, and left instructions to clean them every shift.

  I pushed into the back room.

  “Morning,” I grunted to Julie, one of the first shift waitresses. She stood in front of the mirror next to my office door, doing her makeup. Julie was in her late twenties, an attractive lady with a good smile. She had tied her apron tight enough to emphasize her body’s curves, which were pleasant. She hadn’t been working here long, but long enough that some of the regulars … at least the old men who came in here to flirt with the waitresses … actively sought out her section. That was starting to cause drama with the other waitresses, which was not what I needed. She was leaning into the mirror putting on mascara. I had to turn away.

  “Morning,” she replied as I unlocked the padlock to the office.

  I checked my watch. Twenty to seven. Over the next fifteen minutes I changed the drawer, while Dakota and Linda rushed to finish the jobs they’d had ten hours to complete. Once that was done, I took a minute in the office, leaning against what passed for a desk, looking out through the one-way glass at the restaurant.

  Two years ago I’d managed a twenty-million-dollar data center with thirty highly-paid professional employees. People I didn’t have to micromanage, because they were excited and motivated to do their jobs. I still sometimes couldn’t grasp the transition to this fucking life.

  On the other hand, I kept in touch with a lot of my former coworkers, a few of whom were still unemployed after the company’s collapse. I’d missed that collapse: I was already gone by then.

  A couple minutes before seven, Linda stopped at my office door. “Sorry about that, boss. It won’t happen again.”

  I looked at her and nodded, then said, “Linda … I just need you to remember, you’re supposed to be running this shift, okay? That means you’ve gotta take some initiative. If Brian had come in here, you can bet I’d be hearing about it.”

  She frowned at the mention of our division manager. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “All right. You ready to get paid?”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  She tapped the numbers on the time clock, and I pulled up the payment module on the computer then unlocked the safe. Her name popped up on the screen, and I tapped through until her pay stub printed.

  One hundred thirty-three dollars. I counted out the cash and handed it to her then passed her the clipboard to sign for her check. As she was signing, I glanced over the pay stub. Her check was thirty or so dollars smaller than usual, because she’d been out sick one day, and we didn’t have sick leave.

  “While you’re in there, can you print my last four weeks’ pay stubs?”

  “Sure,” I said. This wasn’t an unusual request. Most of my employees were on some form of public assistance and needed to periodically prove their income to whatever county or state agencies they were dealing with.

  Linda had two teenagers at home, and raising two kids on less than six hundred bucks a month couldn’t have been easy. My rent was eight hundred dollars a month. I knew she got a little help from her daughter, who worked for us on the weekends, but that probably only brought in an extra forty bucks a week.

  On the other hand, maybe if she did some work during her shift, she’d be making more money. Maybe she wouldn’t be stuck working as a third shift cook in a crappy restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

  She double-counted the money then put it away in her purse. Less than a minute later, Dakota appeared at my door. She looked sheepish. “Sorry, Cole. Berry was sick and I didn’t get no sleep yesterday. I’ll do better tonight.”

  I sighed. The seventeen-year-old was normally one of my hardest workers, and she’d done a lot to improve our third shift sales. In a quiet tone I said, “I know it’s hard, Dakota. Just keep trying. I know you normally work hard.”

  She smiled and clocked out. I’d have liked to have told her it gets easier when they aren’t infants anymore. But that’s not true. The problems get bigger; the dangers get bigger.

  I locked the safe and headed out to the front of the restaurant. Julie was out front now, chatting with one of our coffee-only customers at the bar. Even though shift change was at seven, the other two waitresses wouldn’t be in until eight. I had to shave every dollar I could, and bringing them in a little later saved six dollars off my payroll.

  I took half the egg pans to the dish pit and started scrubbing them with steel wool. These pans were probably twenty years old and beat up as hell. Carbon tended to build up on the back if they weren’t scrubbed every shift.

  I listened with half an ear as Julie told her customer, Larry, a story about her last job. She’d been a customer service manager for a custom home builder, but since the recession started, there weren’t exactly many custom homes being built around here.

  I kept scrubbing. It would be half an hour or more before we started to get many customers.

  ***

  The moment I knew Brenna wasn’t coming home was the evening of her disappearance, when Detective Hunt showed up at the door. He’d knocked, and we’d answered together, both of us on the verge of panic.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Roberts,” he said. “Do you recognize this?”

  It was as if he’d designed the moment to be as traumatic as possible. He held up Brenna’s phone—it had to be Brenna’s, I gave her the Black Flag phone case. The screen was covered with spiderweb cracks.

  Erin had staggered back, a gasp turning into a wail. I grabbed her before she fell down, and Hunt came in the room with another man we hadn’t met.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Roberts—my name’s Stan Wilcox. I’m with the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team.”

  At those words, my chest seized in some kind of a painful spasm. I winced, and I watched as Erin raised her fist to her mouth and bit, hard.

  Wilcox continued. “About an hour ago, local police in Winchester discovered a VW Beetle parked behind a pawn shop. It’s your daughter’s car—the phone was on the ground beside it.”

  “Oh my God,” Erin said. She was starting to hyperventilate.

  Through the window, I could see blue lights as more police cars showed up, the flashing illuminating the living room. Hunt got up and opened the door as Wilcox continued to speak.

  “The CARD team is going to establish a mobile command post, and we’re releasing an Amber Alert for your daughter shortly.”

  Erin met my eyes. I reached out and grabbed her hand. “We’ll get through this,” I said, urgently. “We’ll get her home.”

  She nodded, her eyes glassy. I looked around, but I didn’t see Sam. Had he gone to his room?

  Wilcox began to brief us. Mobile command post. Amber Alert, all-points bulletin. Chase had been arrested and was being questioned already.

  Wilcox said, “Her computer showed she’d been chatting with a guy named Rick. His Facebook account has been deleted. Have you heard of this guy?”

  Erin swung her face toward mine, eyes wid
e. I shook my head. “No. Rick? I’ve never heard of him. What’s his last name? Did he go to school with her?”

  Wilcox shook his head. “No last name that we can identify yet. Our team is contacting Facebook to try to get more information. We don’t even know if we’ve got the entire conversation. But she’s been chatting with him online a lot over the last four weeks or so. Complaining about her boyfriend, among other things.”

  Erin frowned. “That doesn’t make sense … she’s really obsessed with Chase.”

  I leaned forward, running my hands through my hair. What the fuck was she doing online? Who were these people?

  Chase. What if she was talking to this guy, this Rick guy, and Chase found out?

  Erin

  I didn’t sleep the night after Brenna disappeared.

  In the hours after the Amber Alert was issued, we stayed in the kitchen, listening as well as we could. Stan Wilcox was running the response team right out of our kitchen, staying on the phone and radio with a bunch of FBI agents as well as local and state police. I called my parents, and Cole called his, and we worried, pacing, nibbling at the edges of terror we couldn’t wholly digest. Angela arrived with several bags of assorted takeout Chinese, which we spread on the main dining room table. I didn’t feel like eating, but the various police could, and Sam needed to eat something; he was so small for his age.

  The traffic in and out of the house was more than I could handle. I stayed close to Lori and Sam, anchors in the chaos, while Cole paced around like a trapped tiger. It was loud, at times half a dozen people on the phone at once. Then, less than forty minutes after the Amber Alert was issued, the first news van rolled up in front of our house. Thankfully, Detective Hunt had posted a uniformed officer to guard the gate of our driveway, or they likely would have driven right in. But that van was soon followed by another, and another, until there was a crowd of satellite vans crowding the street outside our fence.

  “What do we do?” I had asked Wilcox. “Do we talk to the press?”

  “Damned right we do,” Cole said. “Get them to put her picture out everywhere.”

  Wilcox nodded. “At this point I’d recommend it. The first few hours count the most.”

  This comment brought on nothing but rage. “We’re already past the first few hours,” I said. “Maybe we’d have her back if you’d taken this seriously to begin with.”

  Cole ran his hand through his hair, frustration showing on his face. “What about Chase? Is he talking yet?”

  Wilcox shook his head. “At this point we’re questioning him … he’s a person of interest. But we don’t have any reason yet to believe that he’s involved with her disappearance.”

  “Bullshit!” Cole’s face was red as he blurted out the word. “Who else is there? Of all the fucking incompetent—”

  “Cole…” I interrupted. “That’s not helping.”

  He bunched his fists and closed his eyes, leaned his head back, dragging his fingers through his hair in frustration. I’d seen that mannerism before. Once when we were visiting Georgia, his mother had been in a particularly nasty mood and had hectored Cole for nearly forty minutes about nonsense. Cole had finally stood up, his face a grimace, and dragged his fingers against his skull just like this. Then he walked out as she was speaking, mid-sentence. Cole had a reputation at work for being a brilliant engineer and executive, but he wasn’t a popular boss. He had too little tolerance for mistakes or anything he viewed as incompetence.

  Watching him, Angela’s eyes widened. A flash of judgment passed over her face—and for the first time since we’d met on the first day of college, I hated her.

  Cole took another deep breath, opened his eyes, and dropped his hands to his side. “Let’s do this press thing then.”

  For the next twenty minutes we sat down and made a plan. Lori came downstairs—she’d been upstairs with Sam for the past hour. Both had red eyes from crying. As we sat down at the table, Lori said, “Mom and Dad are on their way up.”

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t know if that was a relief or not. I didn’t have the mental space to worry about it one way or the other. Cole’s parents were also on their way from Georgia, and while we had room for everyone, the competing sets of in-laws could be a lot to take. And honestly, I wanted to focus on finding my daughter, not placating parents. They would all have to fend for themselves. But if Virginia started in on Cole, as she was sometimes prone to do, then she and Jim could go find a goddamned hotel.

  “The thing you need to remember is that the media will maybe cover thirty seconds of what you say if you’re very lucky,” Wilcox said. “More often than that, you’ll get a maximum of ten to twenty seconds of airtime. It’s important that you maximize that time … so you need to focus very carefully on what you’re going to say.”

  “What are the most important things to say?” Lori asked.

  “Sometimes families focus on putting up a reward for information. If you’re able to do that, it’s worth mentioning it. But the key thing is getting the public looking for her. Get their sympathy … ask for their help.”

  I met Cole’s eyes. Most of our money was tied up in stock options that hadn’t matured yet, and with our mortgage payments being what there were, we had precious little free cash at any given time. But we did have some investments.

  Cole cleared his throat. “We can put up a hundred-thousand-dollar reward.”

  That was all we had. No … it was more than we had. It would have to be enough. He said quietly, “Daddy will probably put up some of it.”

  Shock ran through me. In our life together, Cole had never asked his parents for anything. It wasn’t exactly bad blood between them—we went to Georgia for holidays some years, and they periodically came to visit us as well. I think it was pride more than anything. Cole had quit Georgia Tech over his father’s loud objections. He had to prove he could make it on his own.

  But this? It changed everything.

  Sam

  After the press conference, Mom and Dad disappeared into Dad’s office with Lori and Mom’s friend Angela, who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. I’m not sure they even noticed I was still standing there—not that my being invisible was unusual—so I followed them back inside and started to my room.

  I felt—scared. Numb. Empty. I couldn’t get my mind around what they’d said. Her phone smashed, car abandoned. Brenna missing. It was like saying the ground was missing. It just didn’t make any sense. How could Brenna be missing? She was my world.

  “Sam?” I turned around. It was one of the cops, a white guy with curly hair. He’d been talking as we planned the press conference, but no one bothered to introduce me to him.

  “I’m Stan Wilcox. I’m with the FBI.”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “Can I ask you a few questions, Sam?”

  “Of course.”

  He smiled, maybe trying to reassure me. It didn’t help. He gestured toward the living room. “Can we sit in here?”

  I followed him in and sat down in one of the chairs. He sat down opposite me. He looked tired, his suit jacket gone, tie untucked. It didn’t look like he’d slept either.

  “Sam, I need you to know that these are routine questions. Part of my job is to explore any possibility for what might have happened to Brenna. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  He smiled. “Good. I’m glad you understand. So … tell me about your parents. Do they get along?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. How do you tell a complete stranger that your family has been falling apart? That you’ve lost your trust in your father?

  Then I thought of Brenna, somewhere out there possibly in danger. If it could help her, I would tell him anything he needed to know. I took a deep breath, then said, “It’s not just lately, it’s the past couple of years. They’ve never told us what it was about, but there was a lot of fighting and screaming.”

  I felt a twist in my stomach. I wasn’t going to say it. But then I thought—what
if there was something important? What if there was something I didn’t know, some tiny detail they needed to find my sister and bring her back to me? I took a deep breath. “I’m pretty sure Dad had an affair.”

  Wilcox’s eyes widened just a little. “I see. Did you and your sister talk about that much?”

  “A little. Both of us were tired of them fighting all the time.” I swallowed and looked away. “It seemed like … like maybe things were getting better lately. Like … they weren’t fighting quite as much. And … they were even nice to each other at the birthday party.”

  Wilcox made some notes in a small pocket-sized notebook. “Did Brenna get along well with your parents?”

  I shrugged. “I guess. She fought sometimes with Mom. Especially about Chase. “

  Wilcox tilted his head. “Why was that?”

  “Cause … he’s pretty old compared to her. He’s like, twenty.”

  “Did those fights ever turn physical?”

  I shook my head. “No. Of course not. It wasn’t like that.”

  “And your dad?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he fight with Brenna?”

  “Not really. He and Mom argued a lot when he was home, but he’s been traveling a lot the past couple of years. We don’t see him that much.”

  “Oh, that’s tough,” Wilcox said in a quiet tone. “How do you feel about that?”

  I shrugged. That was a stupid question.

  Wilcox leaned close to me. “Listen, I know Detective Hunt has already asked you a lot of questions. And I have too. But if you think of anything, I want you to call me. I promise you, we’ll do everything we can to find your sister.” As he finished saying the words, he passed me a business card.

  So weird. It really said, in all capital letters, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.

  I needed to be alone. “Can I go now?”

  Wilcox nodded, and I fled to my room.

  Erin

  After two years, the days immediately following Brenna’s disappearance were a blur to me. My parents showed up in the early morning hours that Monday. I was awake … we all were. None of us slept the first forty-eight hours. The press maintained their vigil outside, and her picture was spread on all of the networks and cable channels. Her case had all of the sensational elements that the media loves to sensationalize: a young, pretty white girl missing from an affluent family just outside the nation’s capitol; the mystery of the crushed phone and abandoned car. The phone rang off the hook all day Monday, and Lori stationed herself next to the house phone to screen calls for us.