Page 53 of Echoes of Eternity

“Thanks, Steven.”

Exiting the grill, Ryan thought about Bill the whole way back home. Getting inside, he sat down at the table and split up the food. He prayed, and they ate.

After the kids left the table, he told Jason about what Vern had said yesterday about Bill’s plan to run them out of town. Jason confirmed the notion, having spoken with Bill personally.

“You didn’t tell him about Dad, did you?”

Jason stopped eating his chicken strip and shook his head. “Are you kidding? Why would I?”

“I don’t know . . .” Ryan shook his head. “He must’ve figured it out with his nephew. He just can’t let his vendetta against Dad go. He’s going to pull this whole town together to come against us.”

“He has a lot of sway, but I don’t think he can garner that much support.”

“I hope not.” Thinking of his daughter, Ryan sighed. “I need to find my daughter. Bill is a distraction that I need to ignore right now.”

Jason set his chicken down and pulled his cellphone out. He paused, appearing to read something. His eyebrows shot up.

“What is it?”

“I just got a text. I called that gas station that Emily said Jacob mentioned. The one the bus stops at. A bus came through last night. This woman saw a young lady get on the bus.”

Jumping up from the table, he was about to leave when Jason continued speaking. “But wait . . . they don’t have any information. The transactions are all online through a third party. They saw her through the glass in the waiting area.”

“That could’ve been her!” Ryan motioned for the phone. “Let me call this woman.”

Ryan called the number and asked for a description of the girl the woman saw.

“She had curly brown hair with a red ribbon in it.”

“That’s her!” Ryan jumped up and down. “That’s her! Where’s the bus go?”

“Spokane, and then connects out all over the country.”

While he hadn’t pinpointed his daughter’s exact location, it was a clue, something that gave Ryan hope.

Running upstairs, he shook Emily awake and broke the news to her.

She, however, didn’t take the news as well. Shaking her head, she looked into his eyes as tears welled. “Where is our baby girl going?”

CHAPTER 14

On the third day with no new information on the whereabouts of Elizabeth, Emily was numb. The pain, the heartache, the despair had all melted away and were replaced with a feeling of nothingness. The police were supposedly on the lookout for their daughter, but outside of the matching description of someone who looked like their daughter getting on the bus three days ago, there were no new leads. It didn’t matter how much she prayed, how much she pleaded with her Creator, God felt silent, a million miles away. Her hope was dwindling.

Emily had visited Spokane yesterday, spending most of the day in and around the bus depot asking if people recognized the photograph of her daughter she carried, but nobody had seen her. In the later part of the day, she visited all the hospitals around the city of Spokane and even the Grand Teton Mall in Spokane in case she had ventured there. No matter who she called or where she went and asked, there was nothing.

Lying in bed, unable to sleep, she rolled over to look at the alarm clock. It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning. She could hear the faint sound of her boys wrestling around in the living room down the hall and the soft sound of cartoons playing on the living room television. She felt as if her life had come to a grinding halt the moment Elizabeth went missing. And to make things worse, Ryan didn’t seem fazed in the slightest beyond the first night.

He had never stopped working on his websites and had only called people when she prompted him to do so. He seemed so unaffected by their daughter being absent from their lives.

It bothered her immensely.

Rising from the bed, she walked down the hall and into his study.

“How dare you, Ryan.”

Ryan furrowed his eyebrows and stood as he said to the person on the phone, “I’ll call you right back.”

He hung up and stood. “What?”

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