“You can ask your questions,” Darcy prompted, her voice still wobbly and small.
“Is your husband home, Mrs. Dawson?” Lucy started. It would be preferable to see them together, see how they interacted and also reacted. To see if they were like the Cooks—a united front. Or if there were fractures there, ones that were deepening, made worse by the death of a child.
And, apart from that, the fact that Liam was another connection to the Cooks couldn’t be ignored.
“Just Darcy. Please. And, no, Liam’s in town.” There was a pause where the only sound was the wooden spoon against the pot’s edges. Then: “Looking for work.”
“What about the Cooks?” It was Hicks who bit that particular bullet, and Lucy was thankful for it. The answer seemed obvious enough that it would have been bordering on aggressive or painfully obtuse for Lucy to ask it. Usually, she wasn’t one for partners, but there was something to be said for having someone else fulfill the bad-cop role.
“You think Liam would work for that family now?” Darcy all but spit “that family” out. “After what—”
She caught herself, stopped, sniffed, and the spoon slapped against the countertop where she dropped it. Her hands found her hips, her body bowing forward as if she’d just been kicked in the stomach. The grief that was evident in her curved spine turned the air in the room thick and syrupy, hard to breathe in. Lucy’s own shoulders hunched in sympathy, her muscles, her bones, her nerves reacting to the pure emotion before her logic could catch up and insist on maintaining a professional distance.
Then Darcy straightened, breathed deep, her rib cage lifting, collapsing—the effort of collecting herself uncomfortable to witness, so much so that Lucy found herself with her arms up, across her chest, defensive and protective without even realizing it.
Lucy tried to relax, but it wasn’t natural, wasn’t easy. Not with the hitched breathing that still broke the quiet of the room.
Finally, Darcy turned toward them. The pain hadn’t gone anywhere, but it was muted, a private kind that lived in the eyes instead of in the body.
So Lucy decided to rip the Band-Aid off. It was more humane that way—get this done, make it as quick as possible. “Do you remember Eliza and Noah crossing paths at all? Especially in the past few weeks?”
Darcy’s eyes darted to the sheriff at the question, but she turned her attention back to Lucy almost immediately. “No. Not more than a few seconds here or there in church.” She paused. “Noah played the piano for the mass sometimes. When he did, he’d wait in Pastor Cook’s office before the sermon.”
Josiah Cook again. His name was woven through this investigation in ways that Lucy was starting to notice beyond Hicks’s obvious dislike of the man. Of course, it would make sense that Eliza’s guardian was mentioned time and again, but there was that itch under Lucy’s skin. The one that had been born from experience with people in power. And if nothing else, Lucy was learning that Josiah Cook seemed to have a lot of power here.
“Would Eliza wait there, too? In the office.”
Once again, at the mention of Eliza’s name, Darcy’s gaze tracked over to Hicks. This time it held there for longer, before Darcy shook her head. “If she did, I didn’t notice.” Her words were heavy with exhaustion, slurring and blending together at the edges. “I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, though. Not enough to remember it.”
No one would have. Any witness who saw Pastor Cook’s niece and the boy who played the piano for mass talking would immediately forget it, their mind dismissing it as useless information.
“I’m sorry, I know this might be difficult, but can you take me through the last time you saw Noah?” Lucy asked.
“We’d just finished up lessons for the day,” Darcy said. “He went outside to play while I was taking care of Rosie.”
“Rosie?”
“My daughter. Noah’s sister,” Darcy said. “There’s not much out here, and Noah knows to stay near the house, so I didn’t keep a close watch on him.”
Her chin lifted, almost daring them to blame her. Lucy didn’t, wouldn’t. Who could have seen this coming? Who could have stopped it?
But it did raise a good question, one that had been bubbling up on the drive out to the cabin. One that got added to Lucy’s list of things that weren’t adding up.
How had Noah disappeared from here? The place was in the middle of nowhere, and that wasn’t just hyperbole. Lucy would have gotten lost at least four times if Hicks hadn’t been driving. And even for someone who knew the area well, it would have posed a challenge.
That was if Eliza had been able to even get a car in the first place. Considering that there didn’t appear to be one at her easy disposal, it seemed odd that part of her plan relied on transportation. Especially since she could have nabbed the boy elsewhere if they were part of the same tight-knit community.
Eliza would have had to plan it well. Had she found a service road to come up from behind the cabin unnoticed? Had she hidden in the woods and lured Noah to come to her?
Either scenario spoke of a well-plotted kidnapping rather than a crime of opportunity. If Eliza had simply snapped, had simply been looking for an easy-access victim, it certainly wouldn’t have been Noah. Not while he was out here.
Which meant that Eliza had been set on Noah in particular as her victim.
But why, when there certainly was much easier prey to be found?
What more could you want?
A motive would be nice.
“And that was Monday night?” Lucy said. “That he went missing.”
Darcy’s gaze skittered to Hicks, darted away, darted back. There was something going on here, something simmering beneath the cordial civility that Lucy didn’t have the backstory on. She thought about the evasive way Hicks talked about Eliza, the swerving truck when she’d pressed him for information on Liam and Darcy. Lucy would put money on the fact that there had been no rabbit darting out into the road like he’d claimed.
“Yes, Monday night,” Darcy answered. “I called the pastor then.”
“Not the sheriff?”
Hicks didn’t flinch. “The Church likes to take care of its own.”
Which meant in Hicks-speak that they deliberately worked around him when possible.
Darcy nodded along, a stubborn set to her chin.
“What happened after you called Pastor Cook, Darcy?” Lucy asked instead of plucking at that particular thread. Hicks clearly wasn’t the Believers’ favorite person.
“He started the phone tree.” Darcy pointed vaguely toward a piece of paper taped to the wall. “A good number of folks turned out that night. More the next day.”
“About what time did you realize Noah was gone?” It was the easiest of the many questions forming, splintering and piecing themselves back together in the tangled mess of synapses that was her thought process.
“Dinnertime,” Darcy said. “Around six, maybe.”
Lucy turned to Hicks again. “Did you come out that night?”
“Course. Word gets to me eventually,” Hicks said, and somehow his voice was free of any bitterness. She wasn’t so sure she would be able to do the same in his position. “My deputy came, too.”