Chapter 8

THE MACMILLANS lived in a quiet cul-de-sac. Everything about the exterior seemed the polar opposite of the Greene home. Margaret Macmillan was clearly serious about maintaining the two-story building, and the house was the picture of Nantucket perfection, with white-and-blue shutters and a neatly trimmed yard.

She certainly put out better snacks than the last few places we’d been. We sat at her fancyass table as she served us fancyass tea and little cookies with a fancyass name. I couldn’t remember what the fancy name was, but that didn’t stop me from having six. Maybe I wouldn’t be so hungry if my partner believed in lunches. And bathroom breaks.

It helped distract me from our marked lack of progress. Frankly I didn’t know how many versions of the same answer I could handle. Everyone we spoke to seemed to have gotten ahold of Stock Answers for Suspicious People and memorized that shit, cover to cover.

“No, I had no idea where Amy was headed the day she disappeared. No, we didn’t have any problems. No, she didn’t have any issues with anyone. Everyone loved Amy.” My all-time, down-home, fan favorite? “She didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

I quietly observed Jenna as her mother steamrolled her and answered yet another question that hadn’t been directed at her. In her high school photos, Jenna sported short, spiky blonde hair and excessive black eyeliner. This Jenna, with the shoulder-length brown hair and muted makeup, was a complete one eighty from the Jenna of five years earlier. She looked like exactly what she was—an elementary school teacher. Fresh-faced. Clean-cut. Trustworthy.

She didn’t make much eye contact and busily doctored her tea with cream and sugar as though it were brain surgery. She hadn’t said much since we’d arrived. Hell, she didn’t need to say anything with her mother serving as her mouthpiece. I started to understand why she insisted on meeting with her mother there.

I cut in on Margaret midramble. “Jenna, did Amy tell you anything about being unhappy at home?”

“Absolutely not,” Margaret broke in and pushed the plate of cookies closer to us both to silently remind us to partake. “Amy was a happy, well-adjusted girl. Of course she had the normal teenage gripes—she hated having to babysit her younger brothers, she wanted more allowance, a bigger room, her own bathroom… nothing out of the norm. She was planning on going to college, you know.”

“So if Amy had any plans to run away, would she have shared them with you?”

“Of course not,” she said sternly. “Jenna would’ve dissuaded anything like that immediately.”

Litany. I puffed out my cheeks. Heard it all before. If someone would come up with something new, I would give them a thousand bucks, cash, on the spot. “We’d like to hear that from Jenna, if you don’t mind.”

“If she was going to take off, I would’ve known.” Jenna risked a glance up from the table. “She was my best friend. She had plans…. Amy was going to be an art major…. You should have seen some of her stuff. She was wonderful with acrylics and watercolors.”

I smiled. “I saw some of her work in her bedroom.”

“Then you know. And that’s not even her best stuff. You should talk to her art teacher at the Annex. Robin, I think?”

“We spoke with her yesterday,” I said. “She said Amy was thinking about going to Pemberton?”

Jenna shook her head slowly. “Never heard of it. But she was definitely entertaining some scholarship options.”

“Would you mind telling me what you and Amy spoke about on the night of her disappearance?”

Jenna shrugged. “We talked briefly on the phone before she went to work.”

“How did she seem? Nervous? Angry? Had she gotten into a fight with anyone?”

“She was her usual self.”

“Do you remember what you spoke about?”

“Not much.” She shrugged again. “We didn’t talk for long.”

“It was a forty-two-minute conversation.”

She sent me an exasperated look that was at odds with her milquetoast personality. “I don’t remember. Okay? It was a long time ago. I’m sure it was just the normal crap teenage girls talk about.”

Danny sent me a warning look. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’d already been kicked out of a house twice. Might as well go for the hat trick. Besides, those other two had been Danny’s fault, not mine.

“Dr. Christiansen forgets that not everyone has perfect recall,” Danny said dryly. “Why don’t you tell me what you do remember?”

I scowled as Margaret began to ramble on again and talked over her daughter. Shows what Danny knew. My memory was good, but hardly eidetic. I listened as long as I could, but broke in right around the time Margaret told us about Jenna’s graduate school acceptances. “Can I use your restroom?”

“Of course.” Margaret nodded toward the hallway. “Through there and to the right.”

I escaped the table and left Danny to suffer without a smidgen of guilt. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to hurry back.

I USED my alone time to make a nuisance of myself and poke around upstairs. It wasn’t a difficult task—Margaret’s voice carried like she was using a megaphone, and she clearly wasn’t concerned about an FBI agent loose in her home. Probably because there was nothing to find. It looked like a 1980s bed-and-breakfast. Even though the décor was old-fashioned, everything was neat and well-tended. And covered in flowers. Big, yellow flowers. I grimaced at the busy wallpaper. But bad décor was not a crime. Unfortunately.

I peered in the doors that were either ajar or wide open and catalogued them as I passed. There was a master bedroom that clearly belonged to Margaret—again with the giant fucking flowers decorating every possible surface. Jenna’s room was two doors over, clearly still a monument to her high school years. Posters, ribbons, and awards littered the walls. A few volleyball trophies lined the dresser. Stuffed animals nearly covered an entire shelf—keepsakes from the looks of them, preserved in dust covers.

There was only one closed door in the hallway. To judge by the undisturbed layer of dust beneath the door, it hadn’t been open in some time. I paused before I opened it and glanced back a few times to make sure the coast was clear. I heard the murmur of conversation, so I knew I had a few more minutes to myself.

What I thought was a guest room was clearly a child’s room. The floor looked like a baseball diamond, complete with bases and a pitcher’s mound. A beanbag chair in the shape of a pitcher’s mitt was angled near the picture window to match the pitcher’s-mitt lamp. Rounded wooden letters spelled out the name Aaron above the twin bed.

My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I fished it out as I continued to inspect the display of glass baseballs. “Christiansen.”

“Did you miss me?”

“Do you really want an answer to that, Chevy? An honest one, that is?”

She chuckled. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Do you have anything else about the insurance policy?”

I could almost hear her eye roll. “No. I’ve only been able to unearth serial killers, track fugitives, liaison between the BAU-3 and other departments, and every other crazy request that you’ve been able to come up with for four years. But no, I wasn’t able to find out anything about a single insurance policy.”

“Yes, but can you do all of those things without attitude? That particular trick I haven’t seen yet.”

Her huff could have been annoyance or laughter. “Dinah has two insurance policies on Amy—one for 100K and one for 25K,” she said. “Either way that’s a hell of a lot of insurance on a healthy kid.”

“When did they mature?”

“About a month before her disappearance.”

“Any other beneficiaries?”

“Nope. But no worries—she took one out on the step-pops too. I also found records of two other insurance settlements in her past—a fire that burned down the family home and another fire that destroyed her car ten years ago.”

I clicked my teeth as I pondered that. It certainly put a new spin on things. “So she could be a lifelong con artist rather than a killer.”

“Jury’s still out. You want to put a unit on the stepfather? You know, so he doesn’t end up facedown in a river somewhere?”

As much as Luke Greene might deserve that fate, I figured I should do something. I was pretty sure protecting people was in some oath I’d taken or whatever. “I can give you a tentative yes on that. I want to run it by Danny first, and then I’ll text you,” I said begrudgingly. “You can set it up with Kevin St. James.”

“St. James. You mean that yummy detective back in Brickell Bay?”

“He’s married.” I did so love to douse her joy with a bucket of cold water.

“Aren’t they all?”

She clicked off with a disgruntled noise, and I slid the phone back in my pocket. I stood for a moment in the silence and analyzed the few threads of energy that remained.

“Another room frozen in time,” I murmured as I picked up one of the signed baseballs. “But for whom?”

“This room belonged to my brother, Aaron.”

I didn’t need to turn around to know Jenna was behind me. I turned anyway and hoped I didn’t look as guilty as I felt for snooping. “I thought you said you were an only child.”

“I thought you said you had to use the bathroom.” She scowled. “The bathroom is downstairs.”

“I got turned around.” I shrugged. “What happened to Aaron?”

“My brother died when he was ten.” She plucked the baseball from my hand and set it back on the dresser. “He was coming home with a friend, and they were in a car accident.”

“I’m sorry.” I felt lower than dirt for even asking. “I didn’t mean to bring up any bad memories.”

“It’s fine. I guess it’s your job or whatever.” She folded her arms across her chest. “So who’re you going to talk to next?”

“We’re seeing where the investigation takes us. Who do you think we should talk to?”

“Maybe you should talk to Brock. That was her boyfriend.”

I nodded. “He’s on the list. Anyone else?”

“Rachel, maybe. They used to be close. Maybe Amber. They used to live on the same street. Amy would give her a ride to school sometimes.”

“She’s on the list too.” I didn’t want to destroy the equanimity between us, but I wanted to get some straight answers before Margaret-the-mouthpiece showed up again. “Are you sure there’s nothing you can tell me that I might not already know about Amy?”

“I’ve told you everything I know.” Her blue eyes met mine steadily, but her body language said something different.

“Do you know where she could’ve been earning extra money?”

She blinked. “Extra money?”

It clearly wasn’t what she expected me to ask. Which made me wonder. What had she expected?

“She had a job at the gas station.”

“I’m talking serious money.” For a teenager who worked part-time anyway. “Like a couple grand.”

“Grand?” She shook her head. “No. I have no idea.”

I nodded. “Thought I’d ask. What about her relationship with her parents? Was everything copacetic?”

“Far as I know. I will say that she was getting….” Jenna trailed off, and looked apprehensive.

“She was getting what?” I prodded.

“She was getting a little curious about her father. Her real father,” she clarified. “Wanted to know who he was, at least.”

“Did she talk to her mother about finding him?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t pleased. Told her to stop digging up long-buried business.”

My brow furrowed. I’m sure that went over well. “And did she?”

“Did she what?”

“Stop digging.”

“That’s not exactly Amy’s style,” she said wryly. “Of course she kept digging. Just behind her mother’s back.”

“Do you know if she spoke to anyone about it? Hired anyone?”

“As far as I know, it was mostly internet searches. I don’t think she got all that far. She told me his name was John Travis.”

I sighed. The internet. Oh, goody. That should really narrow down the pool of weirdos. “Anything else you need to tell me?”

She sent me a glare. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

Because you seem shady as fuck. I smiled tightly. “No reason.”

I WAITED until we were in the car to fill Danny in. He listened without interrupting, and the only sign of his impatience was the tapping of his long, square fingers on the steering wheel. Even then it wasn’t an impatient tap. More of a thinking tap. It’s one of the reasons we always worked so well together—he knew when to jump in and when to step back and let me do my thing.

“So this John Travis person,” he said, when I finally wound down. “You think he’s bad news?”

“I don’t know. He’s definitely someone we need to find,” I said as I tapped a message into my phone.

“Easier said than done. I wish we had her computer.”

“We don’t need her computer. I have Chevy.”

“I have a Ford,” he said blankly. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Chevy,” I said, as though saying it louder would make more sense. “As in my agency contact. If she can’t find him, he wasn’t meant to be found.”

“Fobbing off legwork on someone else? Count me in.” He stared off into space for a moment and then shook his head. “I’ll never understand why people go hunting for the parents who gave them up. For whatever reason. Some things are better left alone.”

“Spoken like someone who knows exactly where he came from.”

“Unfortunately.” His mouth twisted. “Most times the person they’re hunting for is a person who walked away without a second glance. People don’t change.”

“Some people do.”

I could feel his eyes on me as I typed, but I didn’t expound and he didn’t ask. He broke the silence first, voice purposefully neutral. “We should head back. Maybe grab some dinner?”

I paused. “I was thinking about eating at Sky’s. Did you want to—”

“No thanks.” Danny’s mouth twitched. “There’re many things I’ve forgotten over the years, but your sister’s cooking will never be one of them.”

“I’ll give her your compliments,” I said with a grin. “I need to get my butt over to her house before she comes looking for me. So, when I return, I’ll probably smell faintly of honeysuckle candles and narcotics.”

He chuckled. “It’d better be faint. I’d hate to book you, Rainstorm.”