Six
Thea rarely saw Mikey in the bookstore unless he was passing through to the basement on podcast days, so when he turned up on Friday morning, wide-eyed and hair a loose nest of straw atop his head, clutching a newspaper, Thea sensed something was wrong. He didn’t stop to tell her what; instead giving only a nod towards the backroom before disappearing through it, down, she presumed, into the basement.
She told her mom that she was taking an early break and rushed down after him with her apron still on. When they weren’t recording, the dank basement was eerie, lifeless; and Thea crossed her arms to shield herself from the unexpectedly cool air. Mikey stood behind his desk, newspaper sprawled in front of him.
That wasn’t a good sign. Nothing good had come out of newspapers recently.
“What is it? What’s going on?”
“Where’s Bryce?” he asked.
“Here,” a rough voice called from the top of the stairs. Bryce made her way down quickly, looking grumpy as ever at being summoned before ten in the morning. She punched a cobweb out of the way on the bottom step just to make sure the spiders knew it, too. “Just to be clear, we’renotmaking these early meetings into a habit. You get myTuesdaymornings. That’s it.”
Thea rose to defend herself. “Don’t blameme!”
“Oh, I don’t.” Bryce shot Mikey a glare that Thea wished to never be on the receiving end of.
“Hannah is missing!” Mikey bellowed above it all, leaving them both to freeze where they stood.
“What?”
“Shit,” breathed Bryce at the same time, hunching over the desk to read the newspaper. She showed it to Thea a few moments later, fingers trembling against the bold-type headline.
‘Local Girl Goes Missing Days After Second Stone Grange Murder.’
Dread seized Thea’s stomach as she eyed the photograph beneath, because she was more than just acquainted with the victim. Hannah was pictured, clear as day, less made-up than Thea was used to seeing her and seeming less than happy to be posing with birthday balloons on her twenty-fourth birthday.
She’d been detached from it before. The victims had been barely more than strangers to Thea, people she had seen in passing or lost touch with. But Hannah… Thea had seen Hannah not a few days ago, cleaning up crystals and gemstones with Mikey in Leather ‘n’ Lace. And before that, laughing in the Bloody Mary. Alive.
“She never came home from work on Wednesday.” Mikey’s throat bobbed with grief. The concern in his eyes left Thea feeling splintered and tender. Wrong. “We have to try to find her.”
“Mikey.” Exhaustion seeped into Bryce’s voice, her body language, as she sighed and raked a hand through her still-damp hair. She’d probably been taking a shower before work this afternoon. “They have police for that.”
“And look how well they’re doing!” He was more emotional than Thea had ever seen him, his entire body quaking with panic. Not the awkward, gangly boy Thea had always seen him as, but a man worried for a person he cared about. They may not have known each other that well, but Mikey had cared about Hannah. Everyone had been able to see that. “Two murders, Bryce.”
“We don’t know it’s connected,” Bryce tried to argue.
Mikey scoffed and shook his head. “So whenyoutwo want to play Sherlock for a bit of fun, it’s all good, but when I’m trying to find someone I care about —”
“We’ll do it,” Thea interrupted, flashing Bryce a determined glance. It was met only with weariness, uncertainty, and Thea felt guilty for it, but she couldn’t stop imagining how it would’ve felt if it was Bryce who’d gone missing. It was too painful to contemplate. “You’re right. If we can help, we should.”
“Thank you,” he breathed. “They’re holding search parties all over town, but nobody’s found anything yet.”
“Do you know where she went missing?”
“Her car was found on the edge of the woods off Vermillion Drive.”
It didn’t sound good, and Thea tried not to wince. She knew what happened to people whose cars were left abandoned beside overgrown, forgotten woods. She’d done more than enough podcasts about it. “Give me the paper.”
Bryce did, sucking on her cheek as annoyance blazed in her dark eyes. She didn’t want to be a part of this, and Thea understood why. But Mikey was their friend, and they couldn’t sit here and do nothing.
“There has to be some sort of pattern.”
A map of Stone Grange had been printed in everyGazettesince 2007, when Mrs. Walters, a local farmer, had watched her sheep give birth to a set of conjoined lamb twins, which had consequently sparked an influx of tourists. She tore it from the rest of the paper and flattened it on the desk, snatching a whiteboard marker from a mug of pens by Mikey’s computer.
“All right. Officer Harmer was found around here.” She circled the junction in the center of town, where Thea knew yellow crime scene tape still sullied the local parents’ school runs. “Do we know where he was last seen?”
“On patrol not too far from the arcade,” answered Bryce, pointing to a couple of blocks down to the short strip of shops, casinos, and the arcade not far from the River Yarn.