Spirit Seeker Read Free Page A

say, “Look up the registrations under Sam and Nelda Garnett. You should be able to get the information. The cars in the garage were a Cadillac, two—maybe three years old—and a fairly new BMW.”
    When Dad hung up, he turned to face me. His shoulders drooped, and his eyelids sagged at theouter corners like crooked window shades. “I’m trying to help Cody,” he told me.
    “You’re not!”
    “If I do my job right, I will.”
    Mom put an arm around my shoulders and said, “It’s nearly four o’clock. Since it’s Saturday, we can sleep in, so let’s get back to bed. We’ll all think better when we’re rested.”
    I wanted to snap at her for using her teacher voice. “Don’t talk to me like I’m one of the kids in your fourth-grade class!” But my quarrel wasn’t with Mom. It was with Dad, and Mom did have a point. I needed time to think, to work out some kind of plan to help Cody. He’d need someone, and I wouldn’t let him down.
    As I got to my feet, a sudden thought struck me so hard that I gasped. “Dad!” I said. “What if Cody didn’t get to the lake house because … because he was at home when his parents were murdered, and whoever did it kidnapped Cody and used his car? What if …?” I couldn’t finish.
    Dad’s forehead crinkled, and I realized he’d been aware of this possibility all along. “Forget it, Holly. Don’t borrow trouble,” he mumbled. “There were no signs of a struggle.”
    “But it could have happened. That’s why you ordered an all points bulletin, wasn’t it?”
    “It had something to do with it.”
    My throat ached as I choked out the words “I’m sorry, Dad. I got so angry … I didn’t mean the things I said.”
    “No matter,” he answered and shifted uncomfortably. “We’d better do what your mother suggested, and go to bed.”
    I wished he’d reach out to me, but Dad has never been the kind of person to show how he feels.
    I wandered back to my room and shut the door. A snapshot of Cody was propped against the lamp next to my bed, and as I picked it up, studying it intently, I could feel his arm around my shoulders, his breath against my cheek, his lips against mine. In this photo Cody was dressed in swim trunks and a faded T-shirt and was leaning against a surfboard propped in the sand. His smile was broad, and I’m sure that a moment after the picture had been taken, he’d burst out laughing.
    “Oh, Cody!” I whispered, hurting for him. I gently put the photo back in place and flopped onto my bed. I knew I’d never be able to sleep. Was Cody dead too? Or was he alive somewhere, at the mercy of the person who had murdered his parents?
    I struggled to my feet and began to pace as I attempted to make sense of all I’d heard. There’d been no forced entry, Dad had said. No sign of a struggle. That meant Cody couldn’t possibly have been in the house when the murders took place. Cody was tall and strong. He would have put up a fight to try to save his parents. He never would have gone peacefully with the murderers, no matter what. Cody had told me he was going to the lake house, so that’s what he did, didn’t he?
    I shook myself. Of course he did. What kind ofa friend was I if I allowed myself to doubt him for even a minute? Somehow, in some way I didn’t understand right now, when the police had gone to the Garnetts’ lake house, they’d missed him. Cody’d be able to tell us why. In the meantime, I’d do what Mom had said. I’d go to bed and try to sleep.
    I visualized the Garnetts’ trim two-story brick house with bright borders of pink and white begonias around the front and down the walkway, the lawn a thick, smooth carpet of St. Augustine grass. “Mom’s the gardener,” Cody had told me the first time I’d seen his house.
    “It’s neat,” I’d said. “It looks like a painting.”
    But now there’d be yards of yellow police tape wound between the trees and over the lawn, a tangled web barring the doorway. If Cody,