Page 33 of Obsession

“Evidently I didn’t push him hard enough.” But it seemed the harder she pushed, the more he drank. “If I could just find him and know he’s all right.”

Sam was quiet for a minute. “Do you think he could be dead?”

“No!” She refused to even consider that scenario. “Even as kids we always felt each other’s pain, and if he’d died, I would know it.”

“Okay, tell me what you’ve done to find him.”

“That’s just it. Nothing other than badger Sheriff Carter for as long as he was sheriff to send out inquiries, but I don’t think he ever sent the first one.” Every time she thought about Carter, her blood pressure rose. “All we had was what the sheriff told us—that he’d run away. Carter said he’d tracked him to Memphis through a credit card purchase at a liquor store and that the Memphis police had found his Mustang stripped in South Memphis. That’s where the trail ended.”

“Do you have Sheriff Carter’s report?”

“No, but last year, I asked Trey about it and the night Ryan disappeared.”

“What did he say?”

“He kept putting me off.”

Sam cocked his head. “When did you and Trey start dating?”

She gave him a wry shrug. “Right after I asked about Ryan. He offered to discuss it over coffee, and then we dated a fewmonths. We were never serious. At least I wasn’t, especially after he became so controlling.”

Sam lifted an eyebrow. “Controlling?”

“He didn’t like my clothes or my lack of makeup ... that sort of thing.”

“Did he remember anything significant about the night Ryan left?”

“Not really, other than they’d left him at the Hideaway right after you went to help your sister. Trey said Ryan had gotten obnoxious.”

“He wasn’t a crying-in-your-beer type of drinker.” Sam stood and paced in front of the closed blinds. “I’ve gone over that night so many times in my head. Gordy was drinking pretty heavily too, but he tended to just get quieter. Trey was pretty well sober when I left,” he said, “and Mary Jo was arriving with someone.”

“Are you sure? I never heard that,” she said.

“I couldn’t swear to it, but there’s a hazy memory of a guy ... let me think about it.”

“That would be awesome,” she said, her pulse increasing. “I was always led to believe Ryan was the last person known to see her. You weren’t questioned?”

“Sheriff Carter questioned me once, but then I went back to school in Arizona.”

She couldn’t believe Sheriff Carter had only interviewed Sam once. “The sheriff never would give my parents a copy of the investigation report. My thinking now is he either bungled the investigation ... or was covering up something. I tried to get a copy of the report after Carter retired four years ago, but the new sheriff just blew me off. He didn’t last long, and I thought when Nate was elected, I’d get the report. But when I asked him about it a week ago, he said it was missing.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Nate looked for the file, but it wasn’t there,and with Sheriff Carter’s Alzheimer’s, we can’t ask him where it is. Trey claims he knows nothing about the report or the case.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I do about the report,” she said. “Trey was still in college at Ole Miss when all of this happened—it was four or five years later that he went to work for his dad. And Nate has no reason to reopen the case unless something new surfaces.” Like her brother returning to Natchez.

Sam picked up his coffee cup. “Would you like more?”

“I better not. I’m already wired.”

He walked to her kitchen and refilled his cup, then stood at the island. After a minute, he turned around. “I wish someone like a private investigator had conducted a second investigation.”

“That would be nice.”

Sam tilted his head. “Do you know if there was any type of physical evidence linking Ryan to Mary Jo’s death?”

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