Page 59 of Remember Her Name

Gretchen got closer, until her stomach pressed against the bedrail. “We can come back, Jared. If you can tell us anything at all now, it will help but we’re not going to push.”

He found Josie again and she felt something spark between them. Did he recognize his own grief and trauma in her? Despite all the work she’d done to process it? All the therapy? “How?” he murmured.

She knew what he was asking. How was he going to live now? Get through the days? The nights? How was he going to survive the loss of his mother? Josie said the only thing she could thinkof—the way she’d survived Lisette’s death. “One minute at a time.”

Gretchen said, “Who can we call for you, Jared? Someone in town? Other family? A friend or neighbor?”

He told her the name of his grandmother, but he didn’t know her phone number. “It’s in my cell phone. He took it.”

Josie felt a brief stab of excitement. If the killer took Jared’s cell phone, they might be able to track his movements. She looked at Gretchen, who was already on her phone, firing off a text to Noah.

“That’s okay,” Josie assured him. “We’ll find it and get in touch with her.”

As he kept eye contact with her, the shaking in his fingers began to subside. “My mom called me. It was late, real late. Like one in the morning. She wasn’t, um, home. I work at Sandman’s restaurant in the summer. I help close, so I don’t get home till after midnight usually. That’s the only reason I was still awake when she called. I saw her before I went to work. At, like, four. She works at a bank. She’s usually coming home as I’m leaving.”

Gretchen scribbled on her notepad as he spoke while Josie kept the interview going. “How did she seem? Was she stressed about anything lately?”

“No. She was her normal self,” he said. “I mean, she’s, uh, always stressed about the bills and stuff, but that was it.”

“Was she having issues with anyone lately?” Josie asked. “Boyfriend, ex-boyfriend? Coworker? Neighbor? Anyone at all?”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend. Her ex just got married. He hasn’t been around in a couple of years. I don’t think she’s having trouble with anyone else.”

Josie didn’t correct his use of the present tense. “Did she say anything to you about being followed or feeling like someone was watching her lately?”

“No, nothing.”

“I assume you each have your own vehicle?”

“That’s right,” Jared said. “Hers was home when I got there but then she wasn’t and I thought it was weird. I started to get a little freaked out. I texted her but she didn’t respond. I waited a half hour and called but it went to voicemail. I was wondering if I should, um, call the police or something, but then she called me.”

Gretchen continued to take notes, documenting his account. Josie knew she was being quiet so as not to break the connection he obviously felt with her.

Under Josie’s hand, his fingers began to shake again. “She called you from her phone?”

“Yes.” He sucked in a deep breath and exhaled shakily. “I knew something was wrong from how, uh, high-pitched her voice sounded.”

He stopped, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Josie lightly squeezed his fingers. “Take your time. Stop when you need to and remember, the moment you tell us you’re done, we leave. Like Detective Palmer said, we can come back.”

Nodding, he continued. “She said that she was in trouble and needed me to come get her. She wouldn’t tell me what kind of trouble. She wouldn’t say much at all. Wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Just kept repeating herself. She was in trouble and needed me. It was really weird. I think—um—now I think that he made her call and that he was telling her what to say and what not to say because she would never ask me to come if he was there. She wouldn’t put me in danger like that. I was so freaked out that I went. I just…went.”

FORTY-FOUR

Josie squeezed his fingers again, putting more pressure on them until his shoulders relaxed slightly. “She told you where to find her.”

He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Yes. She said to come by myself, that she didn’t want anyone else to see her or know what was going on. I got really worried at that point but then she said she didn’t need the police or an ambulance or anything. Just me. Then she started crying and just begging me to do what she said, and she’d explain everything when I got there. She told me to come to Harper’s Peak. I was never there so she told me to park in any one of the lots and walk up to the church.”

Gretchen’s phone chirped. Quickly, she took it out and responded to a text before resuming her note-taking.

“Did she give you directions to the church?” asked Josie.

“Yeah. It was dark so I brought a flashlight. I kept expecting someone to stop me but no one did. There was some wedding going on in the one building and a concert happening outside some other building. No one even noticed me.”

“Were the lights on inside the church?” The church wasn’t visible from any of the resort buildings, as far as Josie knew. Even if it was, no guest would think anything of seeing lightsin the windows of a building on the edge of the resort. Since the church was closed off, staff members might have found it suspicious but according to the owner and managing director, no reports concerning the church had been made recently.

“Yeah,” said Jared. “She had told me to go in the back. The door was open. I called for her, but she didn’t answer. I went inside and—and?—”

He squeezed his eyes shut. The tremors went from his fingers up his arm. Soon, his entire body quivered. Josie hesitated. They were so close to finding out what happened, but she didn’t want to send him over the edge. He was already so traumatized. “Jared,” she said. “Breathe. That’s all you need to do in this moment. Breathe. That’s it.”

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