Page 39 of Good and Gone

“Did you see my email?”

“Which one?” I ask with a bit of playful snark.

“The one about the girl—Rosemary?”

“No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“She’s been trying to get in touch with you,” Lauren tells me. “I counted and there have been eighteen emails and six DMs just in the last week alone.”

“Hmmm.”

“Yeah. I was wondering if you wanted me to turn it over to Daniel?”

Daniel is one FBI investigator working my case. “What does she want?”

“She says she has information that’s important—information you need. I think she wants to meet with you.”

“Yeah,” I scoff. “Send it over to Daniel.” That’s what the authorities have instructed Lauren to do with anything that seems fishy, creepy, or out of the ordinary. Daniel’s in charge of filtering the leads that come in, and he determines whether they’re legitimate, before sending them to Barry. Again, I suddenly feel drained.

I know those men and their goons are out there watching me. I swear I saw one of them yesterday evening, right about sunset. He was standing out near Kenneth’s bushes, looking up at my window. I told my parents about it—and Barry, who’d stopped by—but when he went out to check, he said there was no one there. Barry seemed to think it was a good thing that the guy would come that close. He said we have better odds of catching him that way. But I can tell he didn’t exactly believe me about seeing him. He called them “flashbacks” and said it was normal to mix faces after a traumatic experience. I asked Tyler to install security cameras and he said he’d look into it. I know he’s never been a big fan of any kind of surveillance, but I’m guessing that has changed.

“Hailey?” Lauren says. “You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Did you hear me?”

“No, sorry. You cut out.”

“Something about this one seems different,” she says. “That’s why I wanted to check with you first.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. Like maybe she does have something that could help. She seems pretty adamant about it.”

“Adamant or desperate?” I ask.

She considers this for a moment and then says, “Adamant.”

Lauren has been my assistant for the last three and a half years. She has a good eye and a keen sense of good business. She knows a good deal when it’s presented. Lauren always seems to sense what’s what. She has helped my business grow so much that when she has a feeling about something, I know it’s best to take a second look. It’s a sort of unspoken thing between us now. We’re like a well-oiled machine. “You said her name was Rosemary?”

“She goes by Rose, but yeah, her full name is in her email address.”

“Can you send me everything she’s sent?”

“So, you don’t want me to send it over to Daniel?”

“No,” I say. “Not yet. I want to take a look.”

27

Tyler

Hailey thinks I’ve been sleeping on the couch, but I'm not sure anyone could sleep in this situation. Hailey swears she’s seen these men outside our home—or one of them, anyway. I don’t know what to believe. She’s fearful enough that it makes it difficult to think she’s wrong, but at the same time, everyone, including Dr. Bennett, says these behaviors are normal and to be expected.

That doesn’t offer me any solace, so I’ve been scouring the internet looking for cases like Hailey’s, cases where women were abducted and lived to tell about it. Most kidnapping victims are murdered within the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after they’re taken. Very few escapes. Fewer still remember almost nothing afterward. Barry Coburn has already told me all of this. He has decades of expertise under his belt, but I don’t care. Even if there’s just one out there, I know I have to try.

Unfortunately, I haven't come up with much—most of the stories seem too far-fetched to be true. But I have found a few that are eerily similar to my wife’s. Although most of those claim to be abducted by aliens.

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