Page 66 of Long Gone

I glanced down at the phone in my hand. I started to tell him no, but then a text flashed on my screen.

Yes, there was a packed gravel road, and the land was cleared. My dad said the weeds made land looked too undeveloped and trashy. He hired a guy to mow it every few weeks.

I read the text to Malcolm, and as soon as I finished, another text popped up. I read that one too.

Dad wasn’t putting in a pool in Phase Two. He was focused on Phase One. Why do you ask?

“If I tell him, then I’ll be admitting to trespassing,” I said. “I doubt he’d tell anyone, but if someone finds out, they might have the property more closely watched.”

“Tell him you drove by the fence and saw the equipment,” Malcolm said.

The mixer wouldn’t be visible from the road, but I doubted Anton would fact check me, so I sent him a text with Malcolm’s suggestion. Seconds later, my phone buzzed with a call.

“Hey, Anton,” I said as I answered.

“Are you out there?” he asked.

“I’m at the county road,” I said, only slightly exaggerating. “I can see the hint of what looks like a concrete mixer about a few hundred feet from the road. It looks like it might be in the location where the pool was supposed to go.”

“That wasn’t there before,” he said.

“You mean before your father disappeared?”

“Yeah.”

“So maybe the new owners brought it in,” I suggested.

“Must be,” he said. “Because I was out there after he died, and it wasn’t there then either.”

“How long after he disappeared were you out here?”

He was silent for a moment. “The day he disappeared, of course, then every day for a few days after.”

“Only a few days after?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t bring myself to keep going out there.”

“What do you know about the fence that goes across where Phase Two opened to the county road?”

“The bank put that up,” he said. “The local teens were using it as a party spot.”

“Do you know when they put the fence in?”

“The summer after he disappeared. Toward the end. We had a lot of rain that year, and their cars kept getting stuck.”

“Thanks, Anton.”

“Anything I can do to help.”

I hung up and relayed the information to Malcolm.

“So, what’s the deal with that concrete mixer?” he asked.

“Let’s go find out.”

Chapter 16

Malcolm pulled up about twenty feet away from the mixer and turned off the engine. He hopped out, and I did the same after folding the map in half so I could bring it with me.

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