Chapter 16

SIXTEEN

Gulf Shores, Alabama

Wednesday, September 18

8:39 a.m.

She'd taken as many of the photos from Samuel Thornton's closet as she could.

Like taking them would make it so Ruby Davis hadn't gone missing in the first place. Samuel would notice. He would realize someone had been in his house, had gone through his things. Learned his secret. He might even figure out he hadn't lost his spare key in the kitchen junk drawer. But that it'd been stolen.

Elyse shuffled through the photos from the edge of her bed. Not entirely sure why she'd removed them from the house other than she'd needed to convince herself she wasn't imagining any of it.

Was Ruby the one who'd been locked in the storage closet beneath the house? Had Elyse been too late? She'd recounted every second of the past two days, from the moment she'd found herself standing in her living room bleeding, to this morning in that house. Had there been signs she'd missed? Was the evidence right there in front of her and she couldn't see it?

She should turn the photos over to the police. To Detective Moore. But Gulf Shores PD had already branded her as a paranoid, concussed woman claiming she'd been attacked. Would they believe her this time? She'd warned Ava of telling lies all her life. Retold the story of the boy and the wolf countless times. There'd been so many nights her daughter wouldn't go to sleep, faking a stomachache when really separation anxiety had gotten its hold in Ava's heart. She'd just wanted Elyse to stay a little longer, and every single night it was the same story that ended in exhaustion and tears and yelling as Elyse had tried to pry herself out of her daughter's arms in frustration. Why couldn't Ava just go to sleep? And why had no one told her it would be this hard? Every morning Ava would wake up with a smile on her face. Not a single stomach issue. Until one night Elyse had set Ava in bed for the tenth time, tired after more than thirty minutes of battling her daughter's strong-willed intensity. And been thrown up on.

Though Elyse's claims weren't lies, Detective Moore had already dismissed them. Due to trauma, pain, memory loss. Fear. Only now she had proof, didn't she? Evidence that Samuel Thornton might have something to do with Ruby's disappearance. That he was at least watching her. Stalking her. Except police wouldn't be able to place these photos in his home. Not anymore. And how was she supposed to explain their existence without exposing her own breaking and entering? While Samuel Thornton hadn't pressed charges against her for trespassing on his property yesterday morning, she doubted he would be as agreeable when threatened with accusations of kidnapping.

She could mail them to the police department. Leave an anonymous note telling investigators where to look. But even then, there was no way to guarantee the photos would make it in time to help Ruby, and Elyse's fingerprints were all over the photo paper now. She couldn't go to jail. She wouldn't leave Ava in this world with a father more invested in his career than his family. Her daughter deserved better than how Elyse had been raised.

She piled the photos together and hid them beneath her journal in the nightstand. Somewhere neither Wesley nor Ava would ever look.

There was one other option. Leigh could help.

Ruby Davis had been missing for over two weeks. She was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl who had her entire life ahead of her, a family searching for her, friends who would do anything to find her. Elyse wound her way into the hallway and across the hall, tapping her knuckles on Ava's door. "Ava?"

She'd made her voice loud enough to carry downstairs. Just in case.

There was no answer inside, which was odd considering she usually couldn't get her daughter out of bed before ten. Unless it was for food. She tested the doorknob. Unlocked. As parents, she and Wesley had made an effort to support their daughter's right to privacy, but there were just some things a parent needed to know about their children. Right now, whether or not Ava knew Ruby Davis was one of them. Gulf Shores, for all of its tourist attractions, didn't have a large teenage population, with a total of less than eight hundred students graduating from high school every year. Ava didn't attend school in Alabama, but she'd found local friends over years of fall vacations. Girls she'd gotten close to since they'd bought this house. Some of them closer than the girls in their neighborhood in Virginia.

Elyse looked for a bare stretch of floor to walk, but a magnitude of clothing had taken over the floor from the door to the twin-sized bed. How the hell had her daughter even packed this much in her suitcase? She nudged a pile of dirty—were they dirty?—T-shirts out of her way with her shoe and scanned the room. "Give me something."

Ava's charger cascaded over the side of the white desk in the corner. No phone attached. Fourteen-year-olds of today had convinced themselves they would literally die if forced to put their devices down, but there was a chance her daughter had held on to physical notes of phone numbers or photos the past few years. Journaling was in. Even Polaroids were back.

Elyse started with the desk, pulling out drawers one after the other. Loose sticks of gum, hair barrettes, and random dried-up nail polishes cluttered the limited space. She moved on to the surface of the desk, to Ava's jewelry box. No luck. Next was the closet, to the shelf installed above the bar holding even more clothes. Her fingers tapped along the painted particle board. Nothing. Part of her was annoyed she couldn't find a single connection between her daughter and Ruby Davis; the other part was just… sad. That she'd resorted to snooping through her daughter's room for the slightest chance of a relationship that might have never existed, but a determination had bloomed in her heart. That she could help bring a missing girl home.

Was this how Leigh felt during one of her investigations? That she could make a difference? And at the same time that the odds stacked against her might crumble at a single touch? Of those eight hundred students at Gulf Shores High School, half of them were female, with a quarter of those close to Ava in age. That was one hundred girls, Ruby Davis being a single point in the crowd. Honestly, what were the chances she and Ava had known each other? That they'd been friends. Elyse was sure she would've remembered Ava mentioning her, that Elyse would remember that name, but there were a few things she'd forgotten over the past few days.

She studied her daughter's room, the stuffed animals pinned between the bed and the wall, the lavender comforter, and the cobalt-blue lava lamp on the nightstand. Her insides suddenly felt as empty as this room at the thought that Ava might've been the one to disappear. That she might be the one locked in that grimy, cold storage room underneath Samuel Thornton's beach house. That, lured by a man like that, Elyse might lose another child. The raw edges of pain where love for her second daughter had once resided ached, and Elyse physically put a hand over her sternum to keep herself in one piece.

"Mom?" Ava came through the door. She'd combed through her hair, changed out of her pajamas, regained some color compared to the last few days. She was starting to look like herself again. Like the girl Elyse knew. "What are you doing in my room?"

Elyse buried the truth deep down, where no one would ever find it. Especially her daughter. "I was looking for some photos of you and your friends from Gulf Shores. We haven't spent much time here in the last few years, but I was thinking of buying you one of those boards with the ribbons that you can hang on the wall. You know, to display your pictures. Make this place feel a little more like home."

That last word almost stuck in her throat. Gulf Shores would never be home. Too much sand. Too much of the unknown. But Ava didn't seem to notice.

"All my photos are glued into my journal." Ava made a beeline for her charger on the desk and plugged in her phone. A hint of annoyance surged into her daughter's voice. "I don't have any to display."

"Oh, maybe I could make some prints," she said. "I would just need you to send me some pictures from your phone."

"I don't have any." Ava—in all her pouty beauty—practically pole-vaulted herself onto the bed. The wood supporting the mattress popped straight down past Elyse's nerves.

Elyse let that answer sink in for a moment. "You don't have any pictures of you and your friends? I find that hard to believe."

"I deleted them all." A dark shadow spread across Ava's face, and suddenly, her daughter was the young woman of last week. When something had caused her daughter's entire world to come crashing down around her.

The details were there. On the edge of Elyse's mind. Right where the memories of going over that railing should've been. Just out of reach. No matter how many times she'd tried, that dark hole wouldn't budge.

"They were all posted to my Instagram account, so I didn't see the point in keeping them on my phone. They're gone, and I'll never get them back."

Elyse took a seat on the edge of the bed. Right. She remembered now. All those messages her daughter had been getting from strangers. Men. It was hard being fourteen. That space between a child and an adult. Where society expected you to be mature and yet biology had yet to catch up. She brushed Ava's hair away from her face, nearly a perfect twin staring back at her. "You know why we had to delete your social media. And mine."

It hadn't been enough to set Ava's account to private. The requests were still there. The photos. The invites. Elyse's gut knotted at the thought of all those parents who were still in the dark, who had no idea what it was like being a teenager in the digital age. How much these kids had to face alone. Out of misplaced shame and guilt. It was the senders who should've been ashamed. Guilty for trying to connect with minors.

"Yeah. I know. I just wish… I wish it'd never happened." Tears pushed into Ava's eyes, not for the first time, and certainly not the last. She swiped at them furiously, but it wouldn't solve the distress that'd created them.

"So do I, baby. It's just going to take some time to get over," Elyse said. "I'm sorry about your photos. I can ask your dad to look into whether or not we can recover them from the shared family storage. Okay?"

Ava nodded.

And there was nothing more to say. Not that hadn't already been said at least.

Would the police have taken down Ruby Davis's social media during their investigation? If she and Ava had been friends, there would certainly be photos to show for it, right? Elyse supposed there was only one way to find out while keeping Ava out of it. Her daughter had been through enough. "Get some rest. I'll bring up a snack in a few minutes."

She closed Ava's door behind her and headed for Wesley's office. He hadn't come to bed last night, and she hadn't seen him this morning, but his laptop sat exactly where she'd left it yesterday. She didn't allow the thought he might be with the woman he'd been calling in the middle of the night settle in. Because in less than a minute, Ruby Davis's Instagram profile filled the screen.

Showcasing an entire array of potential leads in her disappearance.