To Love and to Kill Read Free Page A

missing.”
    â€œMissing?” Misty answered. She felt her stomach turn. Her body now felt numb. Then that life-will-never-be-the-same-after-today feeling came on all at once. Misty felt it.
    â€œMissing”—the word that no one wants to hear. It sounded so final.
    So dangerous.
    So deadly.

CHAPTER 3
    MISTY KNEW HER cousin well enough. If Heather had gone off on her own, she would have called Misty, sent her a text or e-mail. She would have said where she was going. Even if Heather wanted to skip away under the radar, she would have told Misty.
    But maybe not? Perhaps Heather was embarrassed, or she just wanted some downtime, alone?
    Misty thought about another possible scenario. Heather had probably gone back to Josh. She didn’t want to admit it. She was ashamed. All this breaking up and getting back together. It went back a decade between them. Heather was locked in that revolving-door cycle with the father of her kids. She and Josh, despite fighting and threatening each other, having each other arrested, seemed to always find their way back into the same bed.
    Misty thought: I better call her work.
    Maybe someone there knew something.
    Within a few minutes, Misty got Heather’s boss on the phone.
    â€œHave you seen her?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHow long?”
    â€œOver a week ... and I’m deeply concerned.”
    Misty now went back to being seriously worried. That’s how these things go. The emotional seesaw effect: Your gut tells you the worst has happened. Your heart tells you to hang on—there’s a simple explanation for it all. You go back and forth.
    â€œGo ahead and call the sheriff’s department,” Heather’s boss suggested. It was time someone got law enforcement involved.
    â€œYeah . . . ,” Misty agreed.
    Officer Beth Billings from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) responded on February 24, 2009, calling Misty in Mississippi. Billings explained she had gotten a report of a missing person and was following up.
    â€œSince February fifteenth,” Misty explained to Billings, after the sheriff’s deputy asked when the last time she had heard from Heather actually was. “It’s unusual not to hear from her. We were keeping in touch daily.”
    They spoke about Josh next. Misty said Josh had been arrested in January 2009 for threatening Heather and her then-boyfriend. But they’d reconciled, Misty believed. What neither of them knew then was that Heather had apparently dropped the charges against Josh.
    â€œThey actually just got married [in December 2008], but had separated,” Misty explained, trying to give Billings a bit of background regarding how complicated the relationship had been.
    Billings said the MCSO would look into Heather’s whereabouts. Yet, she warned Misty that this would not be an easy mystery to solve. Missing person cases involving adults are tough to investigate. Nine times out of ten times, the adult chooses to go missing. She takes off, doesn’t tell anyone, moves to another town and starts over. Running is often an easier choice than dealing with the stressors life can sometimes bring. There have been cases of wives returning home from work, husbands doing the same, only to find their spouses gone. Vanished. Nothing afoul. Nothing even missing. But the spouse wanted to start another life, in another town, with another partner, and did not have the guts to say it.
    Although Misty and Heather’s boss felt different here, Heather was her own person. She had dreams. Goals. No one knew her completely. She kept things to herself.
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    MCSO SHERIFF’S DEPUTY Beth Billings drove to Lane Road in Reddick, just opposite Orange Lake, where Heather had been shacking up, the sheriff’s deputy had been told, with a guy named James 1 Acome, whom Billings described in her report as Heather’s “live-in boyfriend.”
    James had met Heather some years prior, when