The Missing Place Read Free Page B

Brenda called, and she hadn’t put the bottle away because there wasn’t anywhere to put it.
    â€œOh, no, I didn’t mean that, though a drink might not hurt. You need something to eat. I’ll make you something.”
    â€œNo, thank you so much, but I’m not hungry.”
    â€œYes, you are,” Shay said patiently, the way she’d talk to Leila. “Come on. You been on a plane since, what, this morning? Probably didn’t have any lunch?”
    â€œI had something,” Colleen said miserably. Her eyelids were crepey, makeup collected in the creases. Her lips were pale and flaking. She gave off a faint smell of fabric softener and sweat. And she looked like she was about to cry.
    â€œWell, now you’re going to have something else. What time is it in Boston, anyway? An hour ahead, right? That’s almost one in the morning.”
    Shay kept up a steady stream of conversation while she got the bread out of the little fridge, the ham, cheese, mustard, and put a sandwich together. Colleen answered a word or two at a time, her voice dull. Both plates were dirty, so Shay served the sandwich on a folded paper towel. She poured a glass of milk and set that down on the table too.
    â€œEat.”
    Colleen picked up the sandwich and took a bite, chewing with her eyes glazed. Shay doubted she tasted a thing. The woman still hadn’t taken off her coat and scarf, though the RV was so cold that Shay didn’t blame her; she herself wore long underwear and a sweater under Taylor’s old sweatshirt. And that was with the generator blasting almost constantly. Brenda had come over after work to complain for the second time that Shay was running it too high. But since weather.com said it would get down to minus three degrees overnight, she’d decided to just turn it back up and let the bitch complain.
    Shay gave the glass of milk a gentle push, and Colleen picked it up and drank. Like some kind of robot, like worry had taken awayher will. That wasn’t good. It was way too early for that, and Shay—veteran of crises since before she could walk, though nothing like this—should know.
    â€œOkay,” she said, keeping it friendly but firm. “So let’s figure this out.”
    Colleen set down the sandwich. A crumb clung to her bottom lip. “I didn’t even know there was another boy until tonight. That seems . . . I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your son and the way I came barging in here.”
    Shay shrugged. “The company doesn’t want you to know. Why would they? All it can mean is more trouble for them.”
    Colleen’s frown deepened, emphasizing the groove in her forehead. “I don’t understand.”
    â€œThe company? Hunter-Cole Energy? Look, think about it. How many accidents have you heard about up here in the last couple years? Workplace accidents, where they lost workers?”
    â€œAccidents?”
    â€œCome on, you use Google, right? I have an alert set up on Hunter-Cole.” Shay waited for Colleen to process what she was saying, because people like her never expected women like Shay to be able to do anything with a computer. Which admittedly had been true until a couple of years ago, when she started selling her boxes on Etsy, so there was that. “Any time a guy gets hurt on the job, they have this whole team that tries to bury the news, but it still leaks out if you know where to look. It’s hidden, but it’s there.”
    â€œYou mean like the man who had the seizure?”
    â€œWell, sure. That. But everyone knows about that one.” In August, a fifty-two-year-old grandfather had a seizure, his first, and fell from the platform. He died in the helicopter en route to Minot. It might have escaped national attention—Shay would bet the lawyerswere working their asses off doing damage control—but People magazine ended up doing an article. The man’s daughters were pretty,