How far could a fifteen-year-old girl go with no money or even a phone?
A thought entered my mind, and I spoke it out into the silence of the kitchen.
“The father. She could be hiding with him. If only I could find out who he is.”
I sat by my laptop, then went on Instagram to see if I could find her profile. I found her through Christine’s followers and scrolled through her posts. She hadn’t posted anything new in a long time. The last post was a picture of her in a bathing suit on the beach that was obviously taken before she became pregnant. I read through the comments, then saw one from a boy. He wrote that she was gorgeous. I clicked his profile and looked at his pictures. Lots of them had Amy in them, and in one, they were kissing.
Bingo!
He had to be her boyfriend. I could tell he was a kid from the high school since he was wearing a hoodie with the Cocoa Beach High logo on it and had posted pictures of him playing for the lacrosse team. He couldn’t be hard to find. It took me all of three seconds to find out he lived on a side street from Minutemen Causeway, our main road. He wasn’t in Christine’s grade level since I knew most of the kids there. He looked older, too, so probably a year or two above was my guess.
He had to be Owen’s dad, I thought to myself. Was that where Amy was hiding? It was certainly possible.
I stared at his face on my screen when an email popped up and took my mind elsewhere. It was from my dad. He was an extremely skilled hacker, and I asked him to help me find the surveillance footage from Park Avenue in Winter Park three years ago when Sarah’s boyfriend, Tommy, was struck by a car.
He wrote:
HERE YOU GO. PIECE OF CAKE.
Piece of cake, yeah, right! I thought to myself. It was three years old; it couldn’t have been easy to obtain. Most traffic cameras deleted footage after as little as twenty-four hours, so it had to have been from a store or maybe even from the police file. Not that I wanted to know. We had an agreement that he didn’t tell me how he got the things for me since it could get me in trouble if his ways weren’t done entirely by the law. I didn’t have to know about it.
He ended the email:
SEE YOU THIS WEEKEND.
I sighed. I had completely forgotten that I had said yes to my dad, grandmother, and half-brother to come down and see the baby this coming weekend. With the house a complete and utter mess and our living situation chaotic, to put it mildly, I wasn’t sure I could manage that. I hadn’t even had my own mother come over. I had been going to her place, so she wouldn’t see and criticize our living situation. If they all came down from Amelia Island, were they expecting to stay with us?
Probably.
“If they don’t mind sleeping on the couch and mattresses on the floor of the living room, I guess we could make it work, but Matt is going to kill me,” I mumbled to myself, then opened the file my dad had sent me and poured myself another cup of coffee to keep me going.
Chapter 26
“Scott. Come in. Hurry.”
Scott looked at me with his usual smirk, the same one that always made me weak in the knees.
“Someone’s excited to see me,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
I closed the door behind him, then pulled him to my laptop and poured him a cup of coffee that I handed to him. I waited for a second to make sure the babies were still sound asleep, and when I heard nothing, I looked at him.
“I came as soon as you called,” he said. “What’s going on?”
His green eyes sparkled in the light coming from the window. He had very, very nice eyes, and lips, and…
Stop it, Eva Rae!
I removed my gaze from his gorgeous face, then looked at the screen instead. His elbow touched mine as he moved closer to be able to look over my shoulder. It was odd to feel him this close to me again. He smelled just like he had back then. I tried hard not to, but I couldn’t help blushing.
Would you give it up already? You’re getting married, remember?
Shaking away my own weakness, I focused on the screen in front of me and the video I had just watched.
“This is surveillance footage from the day that Tommy was killed by a hit and run,” I said.
Scott looked like he wasn’t sure he followed me.
“The guy who dated Sarah when she lived in Winter Park?” I elaborated, trying to get him up to speed. “The guy the brother told us about?”
“Ah, yes, of course.”
“Now, I’m going to play it for you. It’s tough stuff, so brace yourself. You’re about to see a man die. Can you handle it?”
He smiled. “Of course, I can.”
“Okay, here we go.”
I pressed the space bar, and the video started to roll. On the screen, we saw the main street, Park Avenue, and I pointed.
“There. This is Tommy. Now, look at him as he continues to walk down the street.”
Scott nodded and leaned forward, brushing up against me. It felt like it was almost on purpose. What was he playing at?
“Anyway, look at him walking down this part of the sidewalk, and then there…he decides to cross the road, then look at the car here.”
We both watched as Tommy glanced briefly over his shoulder, then decided to cross the street. In the same second, a car came toward him and hit him head-on.
Scott made a squeal that made me stop the video. I looked at him and saw that his eyes were terrified. I recognized that look. Seeing someone get killed, knowing it was real, could be a lot to handle.
“Are you okay?”
He placed his hands on his head, then nodded after a few seconds of silence. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, I knew it was going to happen…but…”
“It can still be a lot,” I said. “We don’t have to watch more.”
He grimaced. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine. I just…”
“Let’s take a closer look first at what went on before he was hit,” I said, then scrolled back in the file and started it again. “See, when I first watched it, I only focused on the hit itself and when the car leaves the scene like the police probably did. But you can only see the front of the car in the corner of the video, and it’s not visible as it drives away—at least not enough to identify it. But then, I went back a few minutes on the timeline and saw something interesting.”
“What?”
I played it. “Here, we see Tommy a few minutes before he’s hit, still walking down the sidewalk. And look at what is right behind him.” I pointed at the screen where the front of a car was poking out in the corner. “Doesn’t that look like the same car?”
He stared at it, and I started the video again. “Now, Tommy goes into this store here, and a few seconds later, he comes back out, but see what happens in the meantime. The car drives past the store; tell me that isn’t the same car,” I said, and Scott nodded.
“It sure looks like it.”
“When Tommy comes back out, look who just happens to drive up across the street from him and stop.”
Scott stared, eyes wide. “Waiting for him.”
“Yes, and now that he continues, it follows him, parking behind him every time he stops to look at store windows. And then, when he crosses the street?”
“It accelerates,” Scott said, “and hits him.”