Page 9 of Be Courageous

“Not me, honey.” Sonja slipped a loaded spoon into Mary Mae’s mouth. “Has he ever done this before?”

Faith thought back. “No. Never. It’s just…he hates his new middle school.” She crossed to the nearest window and tried to imagine where Grayson might be. Turning around, she started for the front door in the adjacent living room. “I’m going to take my old horse for a spin around the property. Grayson might be up at the creek.”

“Hope you find him.”

Their dried-up Christmas tree, which she had planned to drag out of the house over her lunch hour, taunted her as she burst out the front door and returned to the barn to saddle up Otis. The three therapy horses watched her, clearly curious to know why Otis was about to get ridden and not them. She mounted him in the middle of the barn and rode him out the open front doors. The billing and note-taking she ought to be doing would have to wait, as would her lunch, which she still hoped to eat before her next client showed up.

After rounding the house, she urged Otis into a trot. “Grayson!”

Her voice carried in the still forest. But all she heard over the horse’s hooves was the distant screech of an osprey.

Otis carried her through the woods along the path leading to the creek. Faith had grown up in this forest of pine, cedar, and dogwood trees playing hide-and-seek with Grace, her only sibling and Grayson’s namesake. All her life, Faith had a best friend—first Grace, then Jerry, then most recently Fitz. Isolation wrapped cold fingers around her heart.

“Grayson! You don’t have to hide, honey. It’s cold out here. Come on home. I won’t take you to school today.”

But no one answered her. She came upon the creek at last, just a narrow, little estuary comprised of mudflats and marsh grass. Taking in the leaden sky and the naked limbs of the surrounding trees, Faith suffered a sudden certainty that Grayson wasn’t here. She was wasting time.

Wheeling Otis sharply about, she headed back toward home. Her heart had begun to thud. Her innards congealed with fear. Where could Grayson be? Should she call the police first? Or Fitz? He would know what to do.

She returned Otis to his stall, rushing to remove his bridle and saddle. With just half an hour left before her next client arrived, she put a call through to Fitz while pacing in her office. The Christmas lights still strung across the wall of windows lent a kaleidoscope of color to her peripheral vision.

Fitz wasn’t going to answer. Then again, this was his cell phone number, and he couldn’t take it into the office. She hung up and dialed his office number, gratified when he answered on the second ring.

“This is Fitz.”

“Hey, it’s Faith.”

* * *

With four ongoing investigations, Fitz didn’t have time for a phone call, let alone a call from the woman he was trying to purge from his thoughts, but her tone alone made all thoughts about work vanish. “What’s wrong?”

“Grayson is missing.”

The news didn’t alarm Fitz. He waited for more details.

“He apparently missed his bus this morning. His friend Cameron alerted me first and then the school. I hopped in the van to see if he was walking to school, but he wasn’t. Then I came home and took Otis out to the creek, thinking Grayson was just hanging around and avoiding school. But he’s not anywhere.”

Fitz pictured the way Faith looked right then, her long, straight hair swirling around her shoulders. Her soft brown eyes would be huge with worry, her wide mouth ruddy from the cold.

“Don’t worry.” He wanted to soothe her fears. At the same time, he wished she hadn’t called him at all, stirring up emotions that had settled to the bottom of his soul like sand. “He’s probably hanging out at somebody’s house. He’ll be back when he’s hungry?—”

“No.” She cut him off firmly. “He doesn’t have any friends here besides Cameron. Something isn’t right. He wouldn’t just vanish like this.”

Fitz scraped his teeth over his lower lip. “I hear your concern, and I can give you some advice, but it’s the local police who need to get involved. The FBI can’t touch abductions until twenty-four hours have elapsed.”

“Who would abduct him?”

The panicked question made Fitz want to kick himself for even mentioning the possibility. “Look, he’s probably fine. Does he have his cell phone on him?”

“Yes, but he’s not answering it.”

“Did you set up theFind My Phoneapp when he first got his phone?”

Her silence told him the answer wasno. He could tell her composure was slipping. “That’s something Jerry would have done. I didn’t do it.”

He could hear her self-recrimination. “Faith, it’s okay. The police don’t need that app to find him. They can still locate him using pings off the cell phone towers. Do you know if his phone is fully charged?”

“It should be. He charges it overnight.”

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