Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn #6)- Lisa Regan Page 0,15
the sill and clattered to the floor. The noise bounced off the walls of the small room. I felt a squeeze in my chest. I had been warned about making too much noise. She had told me not to watch the silver woman. “Don’t draw attention to yourself,” she always said.
When I heard her at the door, I scrambled down from my perch at the windowsill, scooped up my coin, and jumped back onto the bed. I pushed the coin under the pillow.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“I heard something in here.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“I heard you moving around. What did I tell you?”
I pulled my knees to my chest but didn’t answer.
“I know you remember. You have to be as quiet as you can or he’ll hurt us,” she said.
“I want to come out there with you,” I told her. “Pleeease.”
She gave me a pained smile. “I know you do. When he leaves, I’ll take you out there.”
He didn’t leave for a long time. Then she took me into the other rooms. I loved to explore them even though I had seen them many times before. They were at least different from my own room. I tried to discover a new detail each time: the one yellowing, chipped tile in the kitchen; the scrape of the brown fabric on the lumpy recliner chair against my skin; the large grease spot where his head rested when he sat in the chair and smoked. Beside the chair was a small table with a remote control that I was never to touch. Next to that was a round ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. My fingers lingered over the mound of discarded, smoked cigarettes. I wanted to touch them, but she shooed me away. I jumped on the couch instead and skipped around on the carpet until she snapped at me. “You have to be still. If you break something, he’ll—”
She stopped.
I stared up at her. “He’ll hurt us?”
“Or worse,” she said, whispering as though he was still there somewhere, listening in secret. She gripped my arm, squeezing hard. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you will do exactly as I say.”
I stared into her wide eyes. “I promise.”
Ten
At home, Josie showered and tried to clean up her face as best she could, but she already had two black eyes forming. So much for Chitwood’s idea for her to be the face of Denton PD. She fell into her bed, so exhausted that her entire body felt achy. She wished Noah had come home with her. Thoughts of Lucy Ross swirled in her head. God, she hoped she was wrong about the girl being kidnapped, but she just couldn’t shake the bad feeling sitting on her shoulders like a weighted cloak.
As she put her phone on to charge, she noticed several missed text messages. She swiped to bring them up, hoping they were filled with good news about Lucy. A sigh escaped her lips when she saw they were from her sister, Trinity. She sank onto her bed and read them.
Just heard you have a missing girl in Denton? What’s going on?
You there? Everything okay? What’s the scoop?
Please tell me what’s going on. I hope you find her soon.
Call me as soon as you get this message. Hope you find the girl soon. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.
Josie had no doubt her twin sister was genuinely concerned about Lucy, but she also knew that Trinity’s compulsion to chase a good story overcame almost everything else in her life. Trinity had started out in Denton as a roving reporter for the local station, WYEP, before rising to stardom on the national stage. Then a source fed her bad information, her career fell apart and, disgraced, she was banished back to Central Pennsylvania. She had clawed her way back to the national network stage, and was now a news anchor for a famous morning show. It helped that her hometown of Denton was a seemingly never-ending source of scandalous stories that captured the imagination of the entire country. Trinity wanted to talk to her about the Lucy Ross case because there might be a story worth mining. Three years ago, Josie would have wanted to strangle the woman. Now she knew that despite Trinity’s burning ambition to be at the top of her field, she did have people’s best interests at heart. More than once, Trinity’s reporting, research and ingenuity had actually helped people.