The Missing Place Read Free Page A

long stretch of four-lane highway, lined with gas stations and restaurants and lumberyards and storage facilities. A huge Walmart looked like it was open for business despite the hour and the weather. They passed two motels, both with brightly lit NO VACANCY signs and parking lots full of pickups.
    Dave hadn’t actually met the woman he was taking Colleen to see. He only knew where to find her because his wife’s sister worked at the same clinic as the woman who’d rented the other mother her motor home.
    â€œBut how can she be staying in a motor home in this weather?”
    â€œGenerator.” He didn’t seem inclined to say anything more on the subject.
    Dave pulled onto a street lined with shabby ranch houses at the edge of town; the cars and trucks in the driveways looked old and battered. He drove slowly, reading addresses on mailboxes. Televisions flickered in windows.
    â€œThis’ll be it,” he said at the end of the block, pulling in front of a small house with white siding. Parked at the side of the house was the motor home, several feet of snow piled on its roof.
    Colleen felt her stomach twist. “Would you—I mean, you’ve done so much for me already, and I insist on paying you, of course . . .” She dug in her purse for her wallet. “But could I ask you to come with me? To make sure she’s here?”
    â€œPut your money away,” Dave said roughly. “Of course I’ll go with you. Let me come around, it’s a big step down.”
    Colleen’s stomach growled as she waited, and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything since a protein bar in the Minneapolis airport, many hours earlier. Dave offered his hand and she took it, letting him help her out of the cab.
    He got her suitcase from the back and waited for her to walk ahead of him. Colleen’s boots made neat prints in the snow that had fallen since the drive was last plowed. She tugged her scarf tighter around her neck so that only the center of her face was exposed to the bitter chill. Once she got close, she could hear voices from inside the motor home. She took a breath and knocked on the door.
    It opened almost instantly. Standing inside was a small woman in a navy blue sweatshirt several sizes too big for her, printed with a tornado and the words FAIRHAVEN CYCLONES FOOTBALL. Bleached, kinked hair was loosely piled on top of her head; much of it hadcome loose and cascaded around her shoulders. She had startling blue eyes ringed with thick black eyeliner. Colleen got a whiff of the air inside—pot and pizza. The television was on; that’s where the voices were coming from.
    â€œBrenda called over,” the woman said. “You must be Whale’s mom.”

    THE WOMAN ACROSS the tiny table looked as though a tap with Shay’s little pink craft hammer would shatter her into a thousand pieces. Which you might expect, except Colleen Mitchell looked like she’d been this way forever, long before the boys went missing. You didn’t get lines as deep as the ones between her eyebrows and around her mouth in a single week.
    â€œYou’re lucky you found someone to drive you,” Shay said. “We’re supposed to get six more inches by morning.”
    â€œLucky,” Colleen echoed, like the word was in a foreign language.
    Dave took off as fast as he could without being rude. Shay knew how that went too. Most people didn’t like to be around bad luck; it was as though misfortune was contagious. But the men here in Lawton had surprisingly old-fashioned manners. In the three days since she arrived, strangers had opened doors for her, let her cut in line at the coffee shop, and even offered to carry her groceries to her car.
    â€œI know what you need,” she told Colleen.
    â€œOh, I—I couldn’t,” Colleen said quickly, eyeing the bottle on the table. Shay had been drinking weak Jack and Cokes, smoking and thinking, before