Page 88 of Playing With Fire

Chapter Fourteen

The long day wound to a dispiriting close. This time of year the sun set early, and by four o’clock Jodi could see the long shadows of afternoon falling across the park.

She shivered, wishing she had taken the time to go home and get a heavier coat. Her linen pants looked like rags after tramping through multiple large and small parks in Temple Mountain.

“Judah! Joshua!”

Jodi’s voice was hoarse. A dog barked somewhere in the distance and she heard the high, excited cries of children playing in the school playground. Her stomach rumbled but she had had to force herself to eat the sandwich slapped together by a silent Hattie back at the rectory. Jaime and Alma had shared a bowl of Cheerios into the corner of the family room.

Silas had barely stopped to eat. He was glued to his cell phone as congregation members checked in.

No news.

So grim and sad was the atmosphere that in the end it had been a relief to get back to Jodi’s solitary hunt, stomping through dirty snow and drifts of conifer needles. Prairie grass, sedge, groundcovers, and even ferns had left their slushy mark on her trouser hems, and bare raspberry canes had snagged her jacket.

“Come on boys! Just come back home, please. We can sort this out!”

Jodi bit off an unladylike and unprofessional curse. She looked around at the silent, dank shrubbery and stark trees, and knew that she was wasting her time here.

“Of all the bull-headed stiff-necked teenagers in the world, you boys really take the prize,” she muttered.

Didn’t the twins understand that their foster parents, that Jodi and Ricky and most everybody in the Temple Mountain Community Church and the retirement home...were on their side? That the people who loved them were desperately anxious?

Of course they didn’t. And why should they?

Jodi sat down on a grubby park bench. She pulled out her cell. Dougie, who seemed to be holding the fort remarkably well at The Monitor, was anxious for an update.

Jodi fired off a text. Nothing yet.

But how long could she hold the fort, she wondered, keep resisting Dougie’s appeals to broadcast the news of the missing boys through their social media channels.

Not yet, Jodi had said, ruthlessly abandoning the golden opportunity to position The Monitor at the edge of breaking news. They would wait with all the other media outlets for Chief Browning’s scheduled press conference this evening.

Heads would roll. Her head would roll.

She gazed at a crushed beer can, quickly looking away when she spotted a used condom. Her cell vibrated. Her finger hovered over the graphic of a firefighter.

I’m just about done. Def no signs of kids anywhere. They must have slept somewhere last night.

Jodi leaned back and closed her eyes.

She thought about the destroyed backpacks and the charred shoes.

She thought about cats, and about two boys who were so allergic that their foster mom had to give away the kitten they’d been given.

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