Page 52 of The Kidnapped

“Yeah. But I don’t remember having a dream.”

“No big deal. We can continue with the cognitive stuff, or, if you’d rather we not, I can just ask you some questions and show you what I’ve got.”

“I can handle it if we need it,” Raleigh replied. “It’s just really hard to go back there. I do it all the time on my own in one way or another, but when you got me to remember her that morning, it got to me. She was just coloring… One minute, we’re having a normal morning, and I’m taking her to the park to play, and the next, she’s gone.”

“Why don’t we start with just some questions, then? Or, an update.”

Raleigh nodded and asked, “You have something to update me on?”

“Not any leads yet. I tend to work how everyone else does: eliminating people until I can’t eliminate someone,” Dylan told her. “It’s tedious, and I know it can be frustrating because it feels like I’m not moving the investigation along, but part of the reason you asked for my help is that I can offer a fresh set of investigative eyes.”

“It’s true.”

The voice came from the office door, which was now open. It was Ada.

“Hey. Sorry to interrupt,” she added. “I saw Dylan grab water and thought I’d see if you wanted a snack or something.”

“Oh. Thank you. I’m okay, though. I don’t think eating is such a good idea right now. My stomach is in knots,” Raleigh replied.

“No problem,” Ada said, walking in a few steps. “And Dylan is right about the fresh set of eyes. She sees things others don’t, and she’s able to put those things in context. It’s what makes her good at her job. And yes, I’m the wife, so I’m kind of supposed to say that she’s good at her job, but Dylan will tell you that I don’t tend to just say stuff when it’s not true. Also, she did that with me long before we were married, and I was just the sister of a kid who went missing.”

“Your brother,” Raleigh recalled. “I’m sorry. Dylan mentioned it at the diner.”

“I’m sure what she’s failed to mention was that she worked tirelessly for more than a decade to find him. When we met again, I was still so angry with her. Then, she told me everything she’d done to try to find him, and I couldn’t believe someone would be so dedicated to helping someone else.” Ada took a few steps into the room and stood behind Dylan, running her hand along the back of her wife’s shoulders. “She was the one who figured out that Noah wasn’t my biological brother. No one else had even thought to check that out. Once she knew that, though, she found Oliver, my biological brother.” Ada paused before adding, “And later, much later, she was still looking for Noah, and she found him.”

“Hikers, really, did–”

“Babe, you’re awful at taking compliments,” Ada stated. “And I don’t give them often, so you might want to just accept this one since it could be a minute before I drop another one.” She winked at Dylan then, letting her know she was just teasing.

“Can I ask what happened?” Raleigh spoke. “I avoided looking it up online. I didn’t want to be disrespectful when Dylan is helping me so much.”

Dylan wrapped an arm around Ada’s waist and said, “I’d checked everywhere in town so many times that I was certain he couldn’t be there. He’d gone missing at a lake when he and Ada had been playing near the water.” Dylan cleared her throat. “The woods surrounding the lake butt up against private acreage that we’d asked to search years ago, but the owner had denied it, and the judge wouldn’t issue a warrant because we didn’t have any evidence that Noah could be anywhere near that property. Then, a couple of years after he’d disappeared, we finally got a new judge to agree to a search, but we didn’t find anything there. So, we moved on. Anyway, there’s another property on the other side of that one. It’s technically in another jurisdiction, miles away from where Noah went missing. It was also more than a decade later, so I didn’t think we’d find anything, but I’d searched everywhere else around that lake.”

“And inside it,” Ada added.

“He wasn’t there, either, or I would’ve found him,” Dylan said. “So, if he’d been taken and then immediately… killed or left, he could only be on that other property. And if he wasn’t, I’d likely never find him. Whoever took him would’ve been long gone by the time we arrived on scene the day he’d gone missing. I have a friend of a friend who runs a ground-penetrating radar company. He volunteered his time, and we went over the property. It took days, and we still didn’t find anything. Then, on the last day we were there scanning, there were some hikers who were on the outskirts of the property on a county trail. They spotted a tennis shoe under some brush and thought it was weird that one shoe was just sticking out. One of them got closer, and they noticed that it wasn’t just a shoe.”

Raleigh watched as Ada turned away toward the wall.

“Anyway, the news had done a story about our search, so they called 911, and we checked it out. It was Noah.”

“God, I’m so sorry,” Raleigh replied, trying hard not to think of her own situation right now and just focus on Ada and her brother’s story.

“We still don’t know exactly what happened,” Ada shared. “If he’d been buried, it wasn’t deep. And it had been a long time, so there wasn’t much… left to…”

“We had to get a forensic anthropologist,” Dylan explained. “To look at the bones.”

“And all they could tell us was that he’d been hit over the back of the head with a blunt object,” Ada added.

“Like I told you and Hollis at the diner, he likely died that day or soon after, but it’s too hard to tell exactly.”

“Who took him?”

“We still don’t know,” Dylan replied.

“What about that property owner who wouldn’t let you search his property?” Raleigh asked.

“He was one of those gun-toting, ‘free speech means I can say whatever I want whenever I want,’ ‘my property,’ anti-government assholes,” Ada said.

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