Drawn Into Darkness(49)

And who could have shot Schweitzer? Unbelievable.

Was this e-mail maybe a hoax? Mom was capable of doing outrageous things, such as the time she painted her car with quotes from her favorite philosophers interspersed with daisies, or another time when she had accumulated a variety of concrete animals on the front yard and dressed them up in fancy finds from Goodwill. Could she maybe have sent this e-mail herself as a weird kind of comeuppance to him for not answering her calls?

The reaction she desired from him being, of course, a phone call.

Damn. Trapped. He brought up his mother’s name on his cell phone and, feeling doomed, he thumbed the green button with every expectation of hearing her answer ever so innocently, “Oh, hello, sweetie!”

But he didn’t even get a ringtone. Just a recorded voice nasally informing him that the subscriber was unavailable.

Huh. Not good. Quinn pondered a moment, drumming his fingertips on his desktop, then swung into serious action. Stepping up to the plate was what had gotten him early promotion to the position he held. He looked at the e-mail’s addressees and decided to call his brother first. Grandma and Grandpa might not have seen the e-mail yet; they didn’t check every day. Uncle Hi (Hiram, the Hi Clymer) and Uncle Rocky (Rockwell, the Rock Clymer) were not likely to give a shit. For that matter, Grandma and Grandpa would dismiss the situation as “one of Liana’s shenanigans” when they heard. Quinn called his brother, who lived on the fringes of the megalopolis in New Jersey.

Forrest answered his cell phone on the first ring. “What’s up, Suit? Wait, I bet I can guess. You just got around to reading that weird e-mail from Mom. Or about Mom. Whichever.”

“Yeah, well, when did you read it?”

“This morning. I put it off. Like you.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“At first I figured maybe it was her trying to do a number on us.”

“Same here. So I tried to call her—”

“And her phone seems to be shut off,” Forrest finished for him. “Which would never happen. Unless maybe she let her battery funk out—”

“As has been known to happen.”

“True.”

“So what do we do about it?” Quinn asked with more than the usual New York City edge. He had always been quick, and his younger brother had always been—not slow, exactly, but in no damn hurry, and it had always annoyed him that Forrie seemed to do just fine in his lackadaisical way.

“I been thinking about that,” Forrie drawled, and Quinn could have sworn his kid brother was intentionally trying to irritate him. “So I called the Sheriff’s Office down there in Maypop.”

“Did you?” For Forrest, this was an impressive show of initiative. “What did they say?”

“They say yeah, Mom seems to be missing, but they haven’t done anything because they need a family member to request an investigation.”

“I’m going down there,” Quinn said. “Where are you now?” An oblique way of asking whether Forrest could go along, or even wanted to.

“Out at a bridge site in a hard hat,” Forrie said, “but I can get to Newark Airport in a couple of hours.”

“Have you spoken to Jeb and Derry?” Meaning Deb and Jerry: Mom’s mom, Deborah, and Mom’s dad, Gerald. Speaking of the Clymer grandparents so unceremoniously helped Quinn keep them safely distanced, emotionally if not geographically. Jeb and Derry’s fieldstone farmhouse south of Philadelphia was not nearly far enough away. Even before the divorce, going to visit there had felt like walking into a thicker dimension in which his childhood, which he wanted to leave behind, hung somehow preserved as if caught in Jell-O.

Forrie said, “Hell, no. You think I’m going to tangle with those two old chain saws?”

“Well, one of us has to call them and tell them we’re going to see about Mom.”

“They won’t care. They’ll be glad they’re off the hook.”

Silence, because this was too true.

“All right,” Quinn said finally, “I’ll flip you for it when we get to the airport.”

“Call me when you know which airline.” Anyone else would have been concerned about tickets and airfare, but Forrie was content to leave everything up to Quinn.

“Right. Get moving.”

Hanging up, Quinn knew he ought to get moving himself, arranging to take personal days, delegating his workload, finagling project extensions, persuading colleagues to cover for him, providing for the care and feeding of his job as if it were family. After which the biological family, his grandparents and his two uncles, would be happy to stay at home all smug and virtuous.