Amanda burst through the door of Duke University Hospital’s emergency room, staring wildly at the crowd of patients and families. She’d continued to call Jared and Frank over and over, but neither of them had answered. Finally, she’d phoned Lynn in frantic desperation. Her daughter was still at Lake Norman, a few hours away. Lynn had broken down at the news and promised to be there as quickly as she could.
Standing inside the doorway, Amanda scanned the room, hoping to find Jared. She prayed that her worries had been for nothing. Then, to her bewilderment, she spotted Frank at the far end of the room. He stood and began walking toward her, appearing less injured than she’d assumed he would be. She peered over his shoulder, trying to locate her son. But Jared was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Jared?” she demanded when Frank reached her side. “Are you okay? What happened? What’s going on?”
She was still barking out questions when Frank took her arm and led her back outside.
“Jared’s been admitted,” he said. Despite the hours that had passed since he’d been at the club, his words were still slurred. She could tell he was trying to sound sober, but the sour smell of booze saturated his breath and his sweat. “I don’t know what’s going on. No one seems to know anything. But the nurse said something about a cardiologist.”
His words only amplified the anxiety coursing through her. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Jared going to be okay?”
“He seemed fine when we got here.”
“Then why is he seeing a cardiologist?”
“I don’t know.”
“He said you were covered in blood.”
Frank touched the swollen bridge of his nose, where a black-and-blue crescent surrounded a small cut. “I banged my nose pretty good, but they were able to stop the bleeding. It’s no big deal. I’ll be fine.”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone? I called a hundred times!”
“My phone is still in the car…”
But Amanda had stopped listening as the weight of everything Frank had said sank in. Jared had been admitted. Her son was the one who was hurt. Her son, not her husband. Jared. Her firstborn…
Feeling like she’d been punched in the stomach and suddenly sickened by the sight of Frank, she marched past him, heading straight for the nurse behind the admitting desk. Doing her best to control her rising hysteria, she demanded to know what was going on with her son.
The nurse had few answers, repeating only what Frank had already told her. Drunk Frank, she thought again, unable to stem the tide of rage. She slapped both hands down on the desk, startling everyone in the waiting room.
“I need to know what’s going on with my son!” she cried. “I want some answers now!”
Problems with her car, Abee thought. That’s what had been bothering him about his earlier conversation with Candy. Because if her car was having problems, then how had she gotten to work? And why hadn’t she asked him if he could drive her to work, or back home?
Had someone else driven her? Like the guy in the Tidewater?
She wouldn’t have been that stupid. Of course, he could call her to find out, but there was a better way to get to the bottom of this. Irvin’s wasn’t very far from the small house where she lived, so he might as well swing by to check if her car was there. Because if it was there, it meant that someone had driven her, and then they’d definitely have something important to talk about, wouldn’t they?
He tossed a few bills onto the table and motioned for Ted to follow. Ted hadn’t talked much during the dinner, but Abee had the sense he was doing a little better, despite his poor appetite.
“Where we going?” Ted asked.
“I want to check something out,” Abee answered.
Candy’s place was located just a few minutes away, toward the end of a sparsely inhabited street. The house was a ramshackle bungalow, fronted with aluminum siding and hemmed in by overgrown bushes. It wasn’t much, but Candy didn’t seem to care, and she hadn’t done much to make it any homier.
As Abee pulled into the drive, he saw that her car was missing. Maybe she’d got it working, he reasoned, but while he sat in the truck and stared at the house, he noticed that something wasn’t quite right. Something was missing, so to speak, and it took a few minutes before he figured out what it was.
The Buddha statue was missing, the one she kept in the front window, framed by a gap in the bushes. Her good luck charm, she’d called it, and there was no reason she should have moved it. Unless…
He opened the door of the truck and got out. When Ted glanced over at him, he shook his head. “I’ll be back in a minute.”