Page 42 of The Night We Lost Him

I start to shake, his phone still in my hand.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. Because I must be wearing it all over my face—my rising concern.

“Maybe nothing,” I say.

But I hand him back his phone and say a fast goodbye, running quickly back to the cottage.

In the living room, I find a flashlight in the coat closet and check the police report to make sure I’m correct.

Then I go straight into Sam’s room and shake him awake. “Where’s his cell phone?” I ask.

He rubs his eyes. “What? What are you talking about?”

I hold up the police report.

“They recovered his wallet and his glasses and a pen from his front pocket. But no phone,” I say. “Why wasn’t he carrying his phone?”

“Yeah, I don’t know…”

“He called Cece that night, right? We know that much. We know he had it with him. Did you see it anywhere at Windbreak?”

“No… I didn’t see it in his office,” he says. “We can ask Clark to double-check, but I don’t think it was there.”

“It’s possible that it got swept away on the beach,” I say. “Or it hit the cliff during the fall.”

He sits up, considering. “Or someone took it.”

I look back down at the police report, then up at my brother. I feel it moving forward, that thing that’s been coming at me, moving into the light. That thing I need to see clearly to get us somewhere better.

“Maybe you’re not entirely wrong,” I say.

“Of course I’m not. About what?”

“You keep saying Dad wouldn’t sell the company,” I say. “That he would never wake up one day and suddenly want to sell—”

“This doesn’t sound like the part I was right about.”

I ignore him.

“We’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle,” I say.

“Okay…”

“What if it wasn’t his choice? What if, for some reason, Dad was compelled to sell the company?”

He shakes his head, confused. “Compelled how?” he says. “The company was doing great. It is doing great.”

“Still, isn’t it possible there was something going on that you didn’t know about? That made him need to get out all of a sudden? It would help explain it. Dad’s absence. Why he was so off.”

He looks at me. “Like what?”

“I don’t know yet. All I know is trying to talk about him, to all these people, it feels like we can’t trust them.”

“Careful there, you’re starting to sound like me.”

“Well, Uncle Joe, Cece, Detective O’Brien. It feels like they’re all pushing their own agenda, like they’re sharing just a small piece of a puzzle that they don’t want us to solve. That’s the one thing I’m sure of.” I pause. “Trying to talk to them isn’t going to get us to the bottom of this.”

“Okay. So who should we be talking to?”

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