“Oh my gosh, Devyn. Are you okay?”
As Quinn rushes toward us, her husband stumbles down from the trailer following her.
“I’m fine. Um, did you happen to see Larsen? Tessa said that she is here.”
Spinning on her heels, the wholesome woman seethes toward her husband. “See, I told you that was her!”
With their eyes locked on each other, I feel like an interlude in some strange sexual mind game that they have going on. But my urgency to find Larsen grows higher with each second, my patience wearing thin.
“Quinn, did you see which way she went?”
She gives her husband one final squinted glare then turns back to me as if we’re standing in a field of daisies.
“I saw her try to get to you. She was frantic. Maybe it was because of her accident, but she went so far as to start scaling the fence. After that, I lost her.”
“Is there anyone else that may have seen her or spoken with her?” My heart is battering against my chest, striking the bones with full force with every beat.
Stepping into our group, Trevor wraps his arm around his wife’s shoulders, but his eyes are hard, calculating. “When we first arrived, she was speaking with Elena. Let me get my gear and I’ll go with you.”
“No, no. You stay with Quinn. I’m going to grab Tommy and see if we can figure out anything.”
“Guys,” Tessa chimes in, her nose almost buried against the screen of her phone. “She’s in a car traveling north on Interstate 5.”
A woozy feeling falls over me, the people around me growing hazy and my body feeling the force of gravity. “She left?” I ask.
But why would she leave after traveling all this way?
“Maybe? I don’t know, De
vyn, but something isn’t adding up. And if she was going to leave, she’s heading in the wrong direction. We flew into LAX.”
“Keep tracking her car. I’m going to get Tommy to see if Elena knows where she might be heading and I’m going to get out of this suit. Meet back here in fifteen, okay?”
Tessa frantically nods and rushes off to find a vehicle while I text Tommy to meet me in my trailer.
Quinn reaches out and her small smile wobbles knowing that my worst fear may be coming true. She doesn’t need to say anything, words are useless and time-consuming at this point, but I nod in understanding before heading toward my trailer to get out of this racing suit.
Fifteen minutes later, we reconvene in the parking lot, none of us any wiser to Larsen’s whereabouts. All Tommy learned from Elena was that the two has spoken and she told her that her own sister is severely scarred from burns. Elena and Michael were in a rush to get back to her trailer.
As a group we decide to follow Larsen using Tessa’s app. Tommy brings around the towncar and Tess and I slip inside.
I sit in the back seat, hating being chauffeured when I’d much rather press the accelerator to the floorboard to catch up to Larsen as quickly as possible. But Tessa needs to sit up front to help Tommy navigate.
“We’re about an hour and a half behind her. The car just passed through Fort Tejon Park.”
So much time. Time for me to run through scenarios in my head. The good. The bad. The ugly. Thoughts where Larsen surprises me in some way. Thoughts where she was the one that cut the brakeline in the car. Thoughts where someone has taken her.
While I was getting changed, I had texted her uncle to learn if he knew of her plans, but the conversation had come up short. No one knew anymore than I did.
Twenty minutes later, I still don’t know anything. Celebrity is supposed to offer you some sort of special privileges – free clothes, compensated meals, penthouse suites, but the things that truly matter, the things that require answers, you’re no different than anyone else.
The landscape grows more mountainous, the terrain jagged and rough on either side of the road and I aimlessly watch the scenery unfold before my eyes.
“Devyn.”
“Hmm?” I ask, turning my gaze toward her. My eyes burning from the unshed tears.
“Her car has stopped. It’s at an old airplane hangar just outside Wheeler Ridge.”