Once she followed Josiah into the house, he proceeded to lead her to a living room right off the entryway. She didn’t know if the location was deliberate, but it was an effective strategy to appear cooperative and at the same time severely restrict what she saw of the house. She would have liked to get a better sense of the layout—the knickknacks that could reveal so much, dog-eared books or magazines, scattered shoes or jackets. Figure out if Eliza had a presence in the common areas or not.
A broad-shouldered woman sat waiting on the couch, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes on the window. Behind her the wall held dozens and dozens of picture frames filled with roughhousing boys at various ages, the family wearing holiday clothes paired with stiff smiles, Josiah and a few other men on horses, smoking cigars. Eliza made an appearance in a few, as did a woman who could have been her twin.
“Cora.”
Lucy’s eyes snapped to the woman on the couch. Rachel Cook, in all likelihood. “Excuse me?”
“My sister, Cora.” Rachel pointed up toward the photo Lucy had been studying. “Eliza’s mother.”
When Lucy’s gaze drifted from Rachel’s face to the picture and then back again, Rachel laughed, not with humor but in a rueful way that signaled she was in on the joke. “I know, we look nothing alike. She’s the spitting image of our grandmother, though.”
Lucy bit back an inappropriate “I’m sorry,” not quite sure why the apology was her first thought. It couldn’t have been easy growing up with someone who was as stunning as that, though, when Rachel was thick bones and dishwater-ashy hair. There was no bitterness in the twist of Rachel’s lips, just a sadness that matched the softness in her eyes.
“Please sit, Agent Thorne,” Rachel directed Lucy as Josiah angled his body close to his wife, his arm behind her back, the two of them presenting a united front. “We are well aware why you’re here. We want to help in any way possible.”
Lucy wouldn’t say that went as far as surprising her, but it was notable. The fact that they hadn’t lawyered up, hadn’t rushed to circle the wagons the second they’d found out about Eliza being held in FBI custody spoke of an emotional detachment Lucy wouldn’t have expected from a couple who’d raised the girl for more than ten years.
“Can you tell me a little bit about Eliza’s behavior over the past month or so? Did you notice anything different?”
“No,” Rachel said, shaking her head as if confused but adamant. “She was moody sometimes, sure. But there’s nothing unusual about that.”
“Moody in what way?” Lashing out was quite different from retreating into silence.
Rachel chewed on her bottom lip, glancing at Josiah as if for confirmation. “Sulky.”
“And she was homeschooled?” Lucy asked.
“Like a lot of the teens in our community, she took online classes.” Josiah’s voice deepened, defensiveness layered beneath the otherwise calm tone. “She was far ahead of where she would have been in a public school.”
“Of course,” Lucy murmured consolingly. “And your sons are no longer living here, correct? So it was just her in the house?”
“Yeah, our boys are grown.” Josiah turned to look at the pictures on the wall behind him. “Beau is the oldest, then Mark and Aaron are the twins.”
“They’re older than Eliza?”
“By about ten years. Cora was much younger than me,” Rachel said. They worked in tandem, these two, so that it was almost like having a conversation with one person. There was no talking over each other, no contradictions. Either they’d rehearsed this or that united front ran deep, borne from decades of a solid marriage.
“Are your sons still around? Does Eliza see them?” There hadn’t been much about the boys in the file. Names, ages. Everything so dry and clinical. That’s not where motives were found. They were found in the words that would never be put on the page, the resentments, the secrets, the betrayals.
“Aaron and his wife bought the property next to ours, but they’ve left on a cattle-buying trip for the next two weeks,” Rachel said. “Mark lives in town and Beau is overseas. Army.”
The son leaving town wasn’t necessarily suspicious, but Lucy made a note to have the details checked out.
Josiah shifted. “I wouldn’t say they’re particularly close with Eliza. She’s so much younger. She was just a kid when they were teenagers.”
“Didn’t want anything to do with a little girl at that age, you understand,” Rachel added.
Perhaps a dead end then.
“Does Eliza have any close friends?” Lucy asked, thinking of the girl who’d run away. Molly.
“There are a handful of kids her age in the Church,” Josiah said, his attention on Lucy, but his fingertips were dug in deep on Rachel’s upper arm. “We can get you a list of them. But no one . . . no one really close.”
Rachel nodded along with her husband, already reaching for the notepad on the side table.
Lucy tamped down the frustration. Despite knowing it had been too optimistic, she had been hoping there would be an obvious trail to follow to a potential accomplice. The fact that Rachel and Josiah couldn’t name one didn’t mean the person didn’t exist. They could be protecting someone, as well. Or they could just be too oblivious to realize they were ignorant of the day-to-day life of their ward.
So Lucy kept pushing. “Out of that group, she doesn’t have someone whom she spends most of her time with?”
“Eliza keeps to herself, Agent Thorne,” Rachel said, looking up from the short list on her lap. “We liked to encourage her to go to the social gatherings—Bible studies and such. To spend time with people her age. But mostly . . .”
“Mostly, she hid away in her room,” Josiah finished for Rachel. “We keep an open-door policy in this house, but her bedroom is toward the back, so it’s not always the easiest to monitor.”
Which brought Lucy back to the awkwardness at the coroner’s. The missing two days in the timeline. “Do you know her whereabouts between Monday afternoon and Wednesday night?”
Josiah and Rachel shared a look.
“Apparently, we did not know her whereabouts as well as we thought we did,” Rachel said, regret and guilt evident in the strain in her clasped hands. “But she had told us she wasn’t feeling well. She . . .”
“Stayed home,” Josiah jumped in. “From the search for Noah. She didn’t join the search.”
Lucy wouldn’t have been surprised if Eliza had gone looking for Noah—killers often joined in the efforts to find their victims, usually under the guise of being earnest volunteers. But something untwisted in Lucy’s gut at the information that Eliza hadn’t. There was something uniquely terrible about the practice that left Lucy emotionally hungover.
“You didn’t suspect anything was off with her then?”
“It was . . .” Rachel paused, glanced at Josiah, and then squared her shoulders. “She said it was her time of the month. I didn’t push.”
Lucy almost had to give Eliza props. That had been a smart tactic—few people would ask follow-ups to that excuse.
“When was the last time you saw her?”