If you or anyone you know has any information on the young man, please call the sheriff’s department.
I read the article several more times, something cold creeping up my spine. The article said the girl hadn’t been injured, but in my flashback, she’d been shot and cut up. Was this the wrong girl? Wrong article? Although the details didn’t match up, something told me it was the right girl. But it still didn’t explain any of the other shit.
So I’d shot her, then saved her months later? After her initial injuries had healed? I had no concept of time in the flashback. For all I knew, the gunshot wound could have taken place after I saved her.
I scrubbed at my eyes. None of this made sense. And I wasn’t as good at piecing together research clues as Anna. Even Trev, the lying bastard, was better at this stuff than I was. If he hadn’t double-crossed us, I would have gladly taken his help right now.
I spent the rest of the afternoon reading every article I could find, starting a year prior to and leading up to the day I’d taken Elizabeth Creed to the ER.
There was an article about her and her mother going missing. Elizabeth hadn’t shown up for school for three days straight, and when the principal called her mother and got no response, he called the police.
They found the house torn up, like it’d been robbed, but only a few things had been taken. There was an investigation into the disappearance, but nothing turned up. The whole thing reeked of the Branch. Three months after the Creeds disappeared, Elizabeth’s father was found dead in his apartment. He’d shot himself.
I did a search on Jonathan Creed, Elizabeth’s father, and found tons of shit about how he was the number one suspect, that the police were building a case against him, despite the fact that he wasn’t even in town when the disappearance occurred, and that the little town of Trademarr had turned him into a pariah.
No wonder he shot himself.
Which left Elizabeth with no one after she’d been found.
I skimmed the newspapers after the date of Elizabeth’s return, but she was never mentioned again.
The problem with the information I did have was that I didn’t have any concrete dates to go off of. I had no idea how long I’d been in Trademarr. For all I knew, I could have been the one to kidnap Elizabeth on the Branch’s orders, and she could have been injured in the process. Then, months later, maybe my moral compass started working again and I saved her. That would explain why she’d been found uninjured once she was delivered to the ER.
That made a lot more sense than anything else I could come up with.
When I was done in the research room, I headed back to the librarian—the blond girl—and asked her if she knew Elizabeth. She gave me this look like, Who doesn’t know Elizabeth Creed? And then she went on for a good twenty minutes about Elizabeth’s life after the rescue. How she hopped from foster home to foster home, had several mental breakdowns in public, and was later diagnosed with PTSD.
“Do you know where she lives?” I asked, because I hadn’t found a current address listed for her, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she’d eventually left town.
The girl grew wary at that point, and said she didn’t feel comfortable telling me.
I gave a vague excuse, saying I was a distant cousin on her father’s side, but she didn’t budge.
By the time I left the library, it was just after six, and my eyes were wrecked from too much reading. I hit up the closest hotel I could find and rented the cheapest room they had. I just needed a few hours of sleep. Maybe when I woke—and after I had a drink or two—all the shit I’d found today would make more sense.
Maybe.
11
NICK
I WOKE AFTER DARK AND TOSSED BACK two shots of whiskey before leaving my room. Outside on the street, I headed north and walked for a while before catching the distant thumping of bass. I found a nightclub with a sign out front that read ARROW in big neon-green letters. The line was short, and my thirst for booze was large, so I decided the club was good enough.
Inside, the music was ratcheted up to toxic levels so that everyone had to shout to be heard. Colored lights circled the space, and a floor-to-ceiling projection screen behind the DJ flipped through random images.
The place was packed, which gave me the distinct impression this was the only club in Trademarr, therefore the only thing to do. The number of sweaty bodies packed into this place must have been half the town’s population.
I went straight for the bar. The bartender, a thirty-something guy with a buzzed head, checked for the neon-green bracelet on my wrist that said I was old enough to get plastered. When I passed the test, he asked for my order.