Part 58 (1/2)
”The way it's supposed to be, darlin',” he said as Jenna heard the m.u.f.fled sound of another voice vying for his attention. ”Look, Jenna, I gotta go.”
”Yeah.” She blinked rapidly.
”See ya later.”
”I'm counting on it, Sheriff,” she teased, her eyes suddenly hot, tears of relief close to the surface as she clicked off, then pulled herself together. This wasn't the time to fall apart. Her girls were safe. Her life with Shane more secure and filled with more honest love than she'd ever thought possible.
Yet she couldn't help worrying about Dani Settler. Where the devil was she?
Travis felt as if something inside of him was about to explode. He jogged to the front doors of the school and swung them open. The halls were nearly deserted. No laughing children, no teachers, just a custodian wheeling a large garbage can down a hallway.
Inside the gla.s.sed-in office, a secretary was sitting behind her desk. Reading gla.s.ses were propped on the end of her nose, a phone was pressed to her ear and she was reading from a computer printout. She looked up at him as he approached. ”Oh, Mr. Settler. I'm glad you're here.” She offered him a forced smile. ”Danielle didn't show up for physical education, the last period of the day. I was just making the call to your house. She'll need an excuse for-”
”What do you mean 'she didn't show up'?”
”Just that. Mr. Jamison had to mark her absent and...”
”Then where is she?” he demanded, his heart thudding in his ears.
”That's what I was going to ask you.” Behind her reading gla.s.ses, the woman's eyes changed from taciturn to worried.
”The last time I saw her was when I dropped her off this morning,” he said, a dark clawing fear sc.r.a.ping his insides. Images of Dani flashed, like ruffled cards in a deck, through his mind. Dani as a newborn, downy-haired and red-faced, Dani as a three-year-old with an impish smile and tumbling curls, Dani without her front teeth at Christmas when she was seven, Dani at her mother's funeral...Oh, G.o.d, where the h.e.l.l was she?
”I think we'd better call the princ.i.p.al,” the secretary said. She disconnected her phone and clicked a speed-dial b.u.t.ton.
The princ.i.p.al, the police, the National Guard. Call whoever it took. In his peripheral vision Travis noticed Jenna and Allie walking toward the office. Both had strained expressions on their white faces and Travis Settler knew despair as deep and black as all h.e.l.l itself.
Jenna and Allie stepped through the door, Jenna's hand protectively on her daughter's shoulder. ”What did they say?” she asked.
The truth of it hit him like a sucker punch. ”They don't know where she is,” he said, remembering Blanche Johnson's dead body, the weird bloodstained message scratched into the wall and the grease fire with its thick smoke. He swallowed hard and felt as if the very life had been squeezed out of him. All his darkest fears congealed. Life as he'd known it had stopped abruptly. ”My daughter's missing,” he said and knew, without a doubt, that his worst nightmare had just begun.