Eerie Read online

  “Of course,” said Hailey, not wanting to admit she didn’t really recognize any of them.

  “I’m your Uncle Johnny,” said the next as he hugged Hailey so tight, her feet came off the floor. He was amazingly strong for a geezer.

  Wimp came in last and simply kissed Hailey on the cheek.

  Hailey closed the door and followed them into the kitchen where Pix was pouring cups of coffee and handing them around. When he got to Dale, who was still wrapped in his rug and using both hands to hold it closed, Pix grumbled.

  “Well, go sort yerself out,” Pix ordered. “Yeh look like a fool in a rug.” He pointed to the laundry room.

  Moments later, Dale emerged, fully clothed and motioning for coffee.

  The brothers stood around the kitchen sipping from their mugs while Pix filled them in on Holly’s disappearance. Hailey didn’t care to hear the details again, so she left them to it, closing her bedroom door quietly behind her.

  From her room, she heard a sharp knock at the front door, and a muffled Uncle Pix offered the greeting he reserved for all uninvited guests.

  “Who are yeh?” he growled.

  Hailey shook her head and went back to her internet search. Just as she found what she was looking for, Uncle Pix stuck his head inside her room. “May I come in?”

  “Sure,” said Hailey, untroubled by his tip-toeing. She looked up in time to see his lips press together and his eyes well.

  “She’ll need one of these when she gets back,” said Hailey simply. She pointed to the screen and scanned the specs on a prosthetic foot with hydraulics.

  “Alright, Hailey.” Pix’s voice was shaky. “The detective is here, dear. He wondered if you would talk to him and go and look at some photos at the department.”

  “Just a second,” she said, waving him off as she studied a carbon fiber model. “I’m ordering information on this one now.” She turned her head slightly as she read. “It’s designed for dancers, and it takes four weeks to make. She’ll have to have it fitted . . .” She looked up at Uncle Pix matter-of-factly. “Holly will want to start dancing right away when she gets home.”

  Pix nodded, his chin trembling, and he left her to her project, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Hailey tapped the keyboard, nodded triumphantly, and joined the crowd in the kitchen, where a tall, broad-shouldered man, sporting a sandy blond flattop and wearing a suit and a badge stood in the middle of the brothers, who formed a half circle around him and took turns pelting him with questions. Except for Wimp, who stood quietly with his coffee, looking thoughtfully from brother to detective to brother and back again.

  Hailey slid into the kitchen unnoticed and stood silently against the counter, safely out of the line of fire as the conversation heated up.

  “I can assure you, Mr. Sullivan,” said the badge in a loud, slow voice, “we will follow up on every lead that comes in.”

  Hailey cringed as her uncles exploded.

  “Yeh feckin eejit!” Johnny bellowed over everyone, his face red with rage. “You wouldn’t know a feckin lead if it bit yeh on yer arrogant arse, ya—”

  Uncle Pix clapped him on the shoulder and took over in a more civilized but equally aggressive tone. “Detective Toll,” he said, pushing his sleeves up as he moved into the man’s personal space. “We want some information is all. Who are you lookin’ at for starters?”

  The detective shook his head. “Mr. Sullivan, even if we had a suspect, which we don’t, I certainly wouldn’t release a name—I know you’d go after him, and the last thing we need here is a band of vigilantes.”

  That was definitely the wrong answer. Even Hailey knew that.

  There was an audible silence followed by another explosion.

  Dale yelled and cussed; Skeet shook his fist; Pix grabbed a cast iron argument ender off the stove and held it high; Johnny threatened to kill the detective with his bare hands, and Wimp sipped his coffee, but with a white-knuckled grip on his mug.

  Detective Toll seemed remarkably unruffled by all this.

  “We will continue to use every resource available to find Holly. When we have new information, I will tell you, and—” He stopped when he finally noticed Hailey standing against the wall, and everyone turned to look at her.

  It was like a bucket of ice water had hit her uncles. They immediately straightened up and adjusted their language to “lady-friendly.” No more swearing. No more yelling. It was a whole new crowd in there.

  “Hailey,” said Pix in his fatherly voice, “come and meet Detective Toll. He’s heading up the search for Holly.”

  Uncle Pix turned to the detective. “Detective Toll, my niece, Hailey . . .Holly’s sister.”

  She didn’t realize she was trembling until she reached to shake his hand.

  “Hello, Hailey,” he said politely, and she swallowed hard. “If you’re feeling up to it, I’d like you to come down to the station with me and tell me about your sister . . .maybe look through some photos?”

  “Of course,” she said nodding. Finding Holly was the only thing on her to-do list.

  “That’s my Hailey,” said Uncle Pix proudly. “She’s a right strong young lady. Smart too. She could probably tell yeh the exact time Holly stepped out the door and the exact weight of the bag she was carrying.”

  Five fifty-eight pm and just under twenty pounds. She had looked at the clock over the door as Holly passed under it and had helped her stuff mostly paper into the bag with just a few scrapings from dinner.

  Hailey followed Detective Toll outside to his car, which had a radio, a computer, a printer, a notebook, and a shotgun all mounted in the front seat. His lunch, coffee cup, gym bag, and some papers were piled on the passenger seat. Hailey had to slide his stuff over and be careful not to sit or step on anything when she got in.

  Good thing I’m small, she thought as she closed the door.

  “I’m sorry,” said Toll. He rushed to move some things out of her way. “I should’ve moved this stuff earlier.”

  Grabbing up a stack of folders, he looked around for a place to put them, which he wasn’t going to find inside that car.

  “Here, hold these,” he said, handing them to her.

  Hailey took them without a fuss, setting them on her lap. She didn’t really know what to say to a detective, so she just held on to his folders and looked out the window while they drove. Over and over, she picked up her sister’s shoe in her mind, and as the scenery sped past, over and over she searched her memory for the critical clue that would lead her straight to Holly.

  “Is one of these Holly’s file?” she asked, surprising herself.

  “They’re . . . all . . . Holly’s files.”

  Hailey looked down at them.

  “All of this?”

  Toll glanced at the files, pressed his lips together, and sighed without answering.

  He was holding something back. And if he was going to keep secrets, she was just going to find out for herself, so she opened the folder on the top of the pile and started reading.

  “You told Uncle Pix you didn’t have any information,” she said as she scanned the pages.

  There was a ton of information—measurements from skid marks left in the parking lot, which they’d matched to a specific tire and wheel base. That narrowed their pool of suspect vehicles to seven possible models, three of which weren’t even registered in the tri-state area.

  “I told him I didn’t have any suspects,” he clarified.

  “You lied.” There were three names on a page labeled “Suspects.”

  “Close that file.”

  He made a quick grab for the papers and missed.

  “Pay attention to the road,” she shot back.

  She pressed herself against the window, reading as fast as she could as they pulled into the station.

  There were also some
flecks of paint recovered from a smashed utility box at the corner of the parking lot exit. Hailey scanned the lab report, which included a list of manufacturers that used that specific paint.

  She deduced that the police should be looking for a white Ford Explorer with damage to the passenger side.

  Detective Toll put the car in park and ripped the pages out of her hand.

  “Don’t go getting the wrong idea about the stuff you just read,” he chastised. “It’s all preliminary. You shouldn’t have read that.”

  “You handed them right to me.”

  “I didn’t tell you to read them,” he said, getting out of the car.

  Detective Toll hugged the folders to his chest with one hand and opened the door to the station with the other, motioning Hailey to lead the way. As soon as they crossed the threshold, Toll dropped his folders and vaulted over a tall desk to assist an officer who was on the floor, wrestling with the biggest man Hailey had ever seen.

  A pair of handcuffs swung from the man’s wrist as he landed punch after punch. He was on top of the officer with one hand squeezing the officer’s neck and the other tugging on his service pistol, which, thankfully, was stuck in the holster, when Detective Toll pulled him off.

  Hailey watched them wrangle the giant’s hands back into a set of cuffs. Then she stared at the folders on the floor.

  This is too easy.

  She fell to her knees, scanning each page, committing them to memory. There were interview notes and lists of names and locations as well as photos from the pub and a few of Holly’s shoe (foot and all), which Hailey quickly covered.

  One folder was particularly interesting. It was darker brown than the others and stamped CONFIDENTIAL in big red letters. Most of the pages inside had several lines of fat black marker running across them, obliterating a lot of the text. A visible word here and there indicated the pages had something to do with the fire that had killed her parents.

  She knew she’d guessed right when she uncovered some pictures of her childhood home.

  She puzzled over them.

  One photo showed the house before the fire and one after—both from the same vantage point.

  That’s weird, she thought. Why would they take a picture of her house before it burned down?

  Holding one of the papers up to the light, she discerned the outline of an acronym through the magic marker:

  D.O.P.P.L.E.R.

  Footsteps. Someone was coming. Hailey gathered the folders, put her butt in a chair, and folded her hands.

  When Detective Toll came back out—not over the desk, but through a magnetically locked door—he carried a binder and found Hailey sitting in the lobby like an angel with the papers straightened and submissively tucked inside their folders.

  He eyeballed her suspiciously, and Hailey looked innocently back at him.

  “Bit of excitement,” he said holding his hands out.

  “Is everyone alright?”

  “Mostly.”

  She handed him the folders, and he actually counted them. Right in front of her. Did he really think she would take one, she wondered, half offended and half amused that he’d underestimated her speed-reading skills.

  “Hailey, I have to make a quick call, and it’s a mess in there,” he said apologetically. “Can you look through these mugshots out here for a few minutes? Make a note of anyone that looks familiar, okay?”

  She nodded obediently as he waved a card in front of an invisible sensor. The door clicked open, and he disappeared inside.

  As Hailey opened the binder, a television mounted to the ceiling in the corner of the lobby blared the morning news, which began with the channel logo flipping around on the screen with some bonging drums and a few dramatic notes from a shrieking horn. Enter the perfectly coiffed and annoyingly chipper morning news anchor.

  Her voice was hard to ignore, and Hailey winced when she introduced their top story.

  “Good morning, everybody. First up, a gruesome discovery in the parking lot of a local business last night has residents on edge, and just in this morning—a second local woman missing in as many days. Melissa has more.”

  Hailey leaned forward, breathless.

  “That’s right, Megan, you’ll recall that workers at the Hullachan Irish Pub, a favorite watering hole for many in this area found the bloody shoe of one of their waitresses in the pub’s parking lot last night. Since then, no one has seen or heard from the owner of that shoe—Holly Hartley. And this morning, another 19-year-old girl—vanished. The search for both South Side women continues. Take a listen.”

  The video cut to an interview with a woman wearing a suit and a badge, which hung from a lanyard around her neck.

  “At this point, we have no reason to believe the two incidents are related—”

  “That statement from the Pittsburgh Police only adds to the intrigue surrounding these vanishings.”

  Hailey was nauseous.

  She felt like a four-year-old, plugging her ears with her fingers in the middle of a police department, but she couldn’t bear to hear anymore.

  Another girl missing?

  Staring at the mugshots in her lap, she listened to herself breathe. She counted twenty-seven intentionally loud breaths before Detective Toll finally poked his head into the lobby and motioned her in.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, holding the door for her.

  “Was it something to do with Holly? Or this other girl that’s missing?”

  Hailey pointed to the TV.

  “No,” he sighed as he led her through the squad room. “News can’t get anything right. This other disappearance they’re chasing is a 20-year-old known drug user with a history of near-fatal OD’s. She’s probably passed out in a motel again.”

  “Oh.” Did that mean they weren’t looking for this other girl? Hailey wasn’t sure if she felt more compassion for the drug user or relief that the police weren’t diverting any energy from their search for Holly.

  “Anyone look familiar?” He pointed at the binder.

  Hailey shook her head.

  Leading her into his office, Toll motioned her to a chair facing his desk, which was a good old fashioned mess, piled with papers and photos and folders and notebooks with yellow sticky notes everywhere.

  He sat down and blew his cheeks full of air.

  “So tell me about last night.”

  “I already told the officer last night—there . . .it was . . .” Hailey sighed, her mind racing, her heart keeping pace. She shook her leg but resisted the urge to bite her thumbnail as she filled him in on everything from stuffing papers into the trash with Holly to preparing to dance.

  “And then Mrs. Lash walked into the bar with Holly’s cell phone—” Why hadn’t she thought of this before? “Maybe Mrs. Lash saw who took Holly!”

  Toll shook his head. “She didn’t.”

  Hailey’s shoulders fell. “Where do you think she is?”

  She wanted to know what he knew. She wanted him to tell her exactly when Holly would come home. She wanted him to say that they knew where she was, that she was safe and sound and just waiting for the police to come and pick her up and bring her home.

  He said none of that.

  “I don’t know, Hailey.” He frowned. “We’re working on it.”

  “What have you got so far?”

  “Not much. We’ve got a timeline and some physical evidence, as you know.”

  Maybe she already did know as much as he knew.

  “We’re working on a suspect vehicle make and model . . .” Nope. She knew more. He obviously hadn’t read the papers in his precious folders.“ . . .which we should have soon . . .”

  Hailey couldn’t stand it.

  “You’re looking for a white Ford Explorer with damage to the passenger side,” she blurted, and the detective’s mouth fell open.


  The clock on the wall ticked twice, before he closed it again.

  He grabbed up his notebook and pen. “Did you see the vehicle?”

  “No,” she said, pointing to his precious files. “I read the acceleration mark analysis and compared it to the analysis of the paint scrapings. That narrows your pool to one possible vehicle—a white Ford Explorer.”

  “I left you alone for five minutes,” he said as he flipped through his stack of papers. “You read all that in here?”

  “Didn’t you?” she fired back. “And it was seven minutes.” This guy was never gonna find Holly.

  “No,” he said, “I haven’t read all this, yet. Just got most of it this morning on my way to your house.”

  At least he’s honest.

  “What else did you read in these files that you weren’t supposed to even look at?” he asked, annoyed but interested.

  Just then a uniform knocked twice on his door and poked his head inside.

  “Sir, we finished that analysis you asked for,” he said. “Looks like a white Ford Explorer.”

  “Thanks,” he said sarcastically, and he turned back to Hailey. “Well? Anything else you’d like to share?”

  “Why do you have a file from our house fire?”

  “I just . . .” He pulled the confidential folder from the pile and opened it. “This is every scrap of info we had that relates to Holly. This file is . . .what . . .thirteen years old?” He raised his eyebrows as he thumbed through it, and then he closed it again. “I’m looking at everything,” he said simply. “ . . .anything that could point us in the right direction.”

  “What’s DOPPLER?”

  “Doppler?” He started flipping through the papers again.

  “Never mind,” said Hailey. He didn’t know.

  Toll clicked his pen and put his notebook on top of the chaos that was his desk.

  “Does your sister have any enemies?”

  “No. Everybody loves Holly.”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody you can think of that wanted to hurt her?”