“Did you suspect anything was strange in Molly’s case?” she asked.
There was a hesitation there. But when he answered, it was firm. “No.”
She’d find a way to get him to answer something. “How did you hear about it?”
“Someone mentioned she had left, so I stopped by her parents’ place and the Cooks’, too, for good measure. Informally, of course.” His voice was detached, unemotional. She wondered if he knew he did that when he had something to hide.
“Found nothing suspicious then?” she asked lightly.
“They always clam up around me,” Hicks said, managing to dodge the question in that roundabout way of his.
“They really don’t like you, huh?”
“Most of them don’t care enough not to like me,” Hicks corrected. “To them, maybe at most, I’m a gadfly that’s best ignored. The ones who do care, though . . .”
“Care a lot,” Lucy guessed.
He tilted his head, opened his mouth, then closed it. He’d been about to say something else. But in the end all he did was smile slightly and nod.
Lucy cursed herself. That had been a rookie mistake. She took a swig of coffee, hoping to banish some of the fuzziness in her head. “So you dropped by Molly Thomas’s home to check things out.”
“The parents said they just woke up one morning to a note that she was heading to Nevada.” Hicks shook his head. “Didn’t say why Nevada.”
That was a weird enough quirk that it made the note seem more real. Not LA or New York, but Nevada. If she were forging a note from a sixteen-year-old girl, she wouldn’t have thought to put that.
“No signs of foul play?”
“You’d think I’d mention that had there been,” Hicks said, the brusqueness from yesterday morning back, a burr in his tone that had been sanded down without her even realizing it.
“You think I’m wasting my time with this?”
He didn’t say anything for a bit, just passed a man on a tractor with a wave before turning down a dirt road. The house was small, in the distance. Driveways were long around here.
“I used to ride bulls,” Hicks said. “You’d get thrown all the time.”
Lucy nodded, already seeing where this was going. She was no stranger to rodeos.
“One time, I was facing down a mean sonabitch, and everything about him said he was going to come in hard on the right. That I should roll left,” Hicks continued.
He was quiet again until he parked in front of a house that was almost the mirror image of the Cooks’. He leaned his elbow on the wheel to look at her from beneath the brim of his hat. His eyes were hidden. “Everything said I should roll left.”
“You rolled right.”
“Gut instinct,” Hicks said. “The mean bastard was feinting. If I’d gone left, I’d have ended up with two thousand pounds of pissed-off asshole on my chest.”
“Gut instinct,” she echoed.
He shifted again, staring out the windshield. Shrugged once. “I get it.”
“You think I’m wasting my time,” she said again, this time not a question.
Hicks lifted his chin so that he could meet her eyes. “I think you shouldn’t care what I think.”
If it were only that easy.
She got out of the truck just as Frank Thomas hurried down the steps of his front porch.
Frank was a wiry, twitchy man with a full, untamed beard and a missing tooth. He blinked too much and couldn’t seem to remain still, shifting his weight forward and back, side to side.
On someone else his behavior might have pinged her radar as suspicious, but Lucy got the impression he was just a nervous soul.
And there was nothing calculated about the way he led them through the rooms of the somewhat small rancher, pointing out pictures and bronze trophies and framed paper certificates—all Molly’s. The note Hicks had mentioned was taped to the front of the fridge. It was brief and handwritten, feminine if Lucy was relying on stereotypes, but that could be faked easily enough.
Bottom line was that it all checked out. Frank Thomas painted a convincing picture of a man whose child had run away, a man who hadn’t quite accepted that she was gone, who would probably keep the shrine to her long after everyone else forgot she used to live there.
Maybe he was a good actor. But logic said otherwise. Logic said this was exactly what it looked like, coincidences be damned.
“Would I be able to check her room a bit?” Lucy asked. It didn’t even feel like testing her luck. He’d been so open with the rest of it.
He nodded, weathered cheeks red, eyes damp, those bird arms up and hugging his chest. A pitiful sight, a believable sight.
“Had you noticed a change in her behavior before she left, Mr. Thomas?” Lucy asked as she followed him to a nice little bedroom just next to the main one. It was decorated in light purples and ivory, a flower pattern that was much more pleasant than Eliza’s stark decor.
“No, nothing. Nothing. She was always a good girl.” Frank had stopped at the doorway, letting them go in but not following.
Lucy thought about what Annie had said. Troubled. “Was she . . . ?” Lucy glanced at Hicks for help with the right word, but his attention was caught by the books on the bedside table. “Courting? With someone?”
Frank’s voice went raspy, a little high. “None of that, none of that.”
Lucy nodded and continued toward the desk. It was the answer she’d been expecting. It was unlikely Molly would have told her father she was seeing someone, especially if the person was outside the Church.
The top of the desk was empty of any clutter, just one mug filled with pencils and a math workbook that had been left open, some of the answers filled in. Odd that it was half-finished if Molly had been planning on leaving.
Lucy opened the left-hand drawer.
There, beneath several other textbooks, was a slim purple diary, the kind that had a cheap lock that could be broken easily, the key already slotted in place.
After putting on a latex glove, Lucy grabbed the edge of the journal, shifting it free from the pile. She laid it on the desk, then used one of the pencils to flip open the cover.
The inscription at the front was in solid block writing. Different from the note on the fridge.
“Property of Molly Shannon Thomas. Keep out.”
Lucy smiled at how very teenage girl it was. She lifted a few of the pages, scanning them quickly. It was painfully mundane—details about her day, what she ate, whom she talked to. Eliza’s name cropped up over and over again, but even those mentions revolved around seeing the girl at service or stopping by the diner for a soda. On paper, Molly Thomas led a very boring, devout life.
Lucy spared a second to wonder if that was the diary’s purpose. Sitting in the drawer, key in the lock—it was all but begging someone to snoop.
Teenage girls were a lot cleverer than people gave them credit for.
“Mr. Thomas?”
“Hmm?” Frank finally stepped into the room, but there was a hesitancy in his movements, like he was pushing through some unseen barrier to cross the threshold.
“Would you say you’re familiar with your daughter’s handwriting?”
“Maybe?”
“Is this her normal style?” Lucy stepped aside so he could get a better look.