Three Days Missing: A nail-biting psychological thriller with a killer twist!

5 hours, 57 minutes missing

Outside the cabin, a big body in work boots comes clomping up the stairs with a gait I’d recognize anywhere. Dawn looks up expectantly, but I pop off the couch, lurch to the door and yank it open, right as Lucas raises a fist.

He looks like hell. His skin is pale. His shirt is untucked. He needs a haircut and a shave. Under the frayed orange rim of his ancient University of Tennessee baseball cap, his hazel eyes are crinkled with strain.

But he’s here and I fall into him, even though Lucas is the kind of guy who’d sooner put me in a headlock than a hug, and I’d sooner punch him in his stomach than throw my arms around his waist. As unaccustomed as I am to this embrace, I’m awfully glad for it. I press my face into his chest and fall apart.

“You gotta stay strong, Kitty Kat.” A nickname I haven’t heard from him since my high school days. He drapes a big palm on the back of my head. “For Ethan. You have to stay strong for him.”

I tip my head back, look up at Lucas through my tears. His face may have a few more wrinkles, his once-thick hair thinned out on top, but for me he’ll always be that solemn-faced man-boy who lived across the street, the one who took me in after my mother’s death made me an orphan at sixteen. “You would get eaten alive by foster care,” he said to me then, and Lucas would know. He spent more than a decade in the system, and to this day, the only thing he’ll tell me about it is that it was no place for a girl like me.

“I am. I will be. I’m just so glad you’re here.”

“Yeah, well, those two cops down at the turnoff didn’t make it easy on me. It would have saved me some trouble if you’d told them I was coming.”

I don’t ask how he got by, mostly because I don’t care. All that matters is he’s here.

He untangles us, heaves a battered duffel from the porch floor and walks me backward until we’re both inside the cabin. Behind him, the rain has stopped. A hazy mist rises up from the woods, smoky puffs that hang suspended in the air like ghosts.

While I mop up my face with a paper towel, Lucas introduces himself to Dawn. Like pretty much every other red-blooded female on the planet, she eyes him with interest. “Dawn Whittaker,” she says, shaking his hand.

I toss the towel in the trash and point to the duffel in Lucas’s fist. “What’s that?”

That is no overnight bag. It’s a bag big enough to carry every pair of jeans, T-shirt and sweater in Lucas’s very meager wardrobe, but a clinking of metal on metal sounds from inside the canvas. He drops it on the floor, where it lands like a chunk of concrete.

“My tracking gear. GPS. Night goggles. That kind of stuff.” Lucas pulls out a chair, flips it around and sits on it backward, his big body facing me. “What’s the word? You never texted.”

I fall onto the couch while Dawn spouts off acronyms I only vaguely recognize and will never be able to remember: NCIC and BOLO and GBI. She gives him a quick rundown of everything we’ve learned until now, which is frustratingly little. That there was a fire just outside the cabin while everyone was sleeping. That Ethan disappeared somewhere between the rush outside and the chaperone putting out the fire. That the dogs had some trouble catching his scent at first, until one of them led searchers a mile and a half through the woods, where it dried up at a road. Lucas’s reaction to the last one makes me grip the table tighter.

“Sounds like a trap,” he says, and Dawn doesn’t argue. She thinks it sounds like a trap, too, and honestly, who wouldn’t?

I turn back to Lucas. “They think it might have been Andrew.”

He frowns, but he doesn’t look particularly surprised. “Of course they suspect Andrew. Don’t you ever watch Law & Order? It’s always the parent.” He turns to Dawn. “Did you call him? Did you send somebody to bust down his door?”

“Yes to the first, but we can’t do the second without a warrant, which the Atlanta PD is working on. By now they’ve knocked on his door often and loud enough to wake the neighbors on either side. It looks like nobody’s at home.”

He curses.

Dawn examines him carefully, her pen stilled. “It doesn’t seem like I need to ask whether or not you think Andrew would be capable of kidnapping his own son.”

“Hell yeah, I think he would. He’s smart, he’s sneaky and don’t even get me started on that man’s mental state.”

That Man. The Wife Beater. Captain Douchebag. Just a few of the nicknames Lucas has coined for my soon-to-be ex so he would never have to say Andrew’s name again.

But Lucas is right about one thing: don’t get him started on Andrew. Lucas is the kind of man who makes a decent living off sweat and elbow grease. Who values pulling your own weight, making an honest buck and taking care of your own. God. Country. Family. Maybe he could have respected Andrew if he’d built his company from the ground up instead of using a significant chunk of his parents’ life insurance settlement. The other half he sank into our six-bedroom home on a half-acre lot in Dunwoody, where he now lives alone. Lucas has never been shy with his opinions, and he’s always had a long list of reasons I should have never married Andrew: too self-important, too focused on the material, too headstrong and controlling. Later, after his drinking had become a problem, he was too quick-tempered and unpredictable. By the time I saw what Lucas did in Andrew, it was too late. We already had Ethan.

But the last thing I need right now is to rehash yet another I told you so. “So now what?”

Dawn pushes up from the couch. “Now I need to do a quick check-in with Sheriff and the team over at the dining hall. In the meantime, I want you to start making those lists we talked about. Places Ethan goes on a regular basis, people he knows and interacts with, websites he visits and people he talks to. I want the names of every adult Ethan has come into contact with in the past year. People he knows well. People he knows not so well. We want to take a look at anyone he might have formed an attachment to.”

I know what she means.

She means anyone who might have formed an attachment to him.

She points to the legal pad balanced on the arm of the couch, where she scribbled a phone number across a fresh page. “That’s my cell. If you need me, I can be back here in less than five minutes.”

Lucas watches her shrug into her coat and collect her things, jaw clenched. Muscles and tendons twitch under the cotton of his T-shirt.

Dawn slips out the door, and he turns to me. “What do you need me to do?”

I don’t hesitate. This is the reason I called him here, to bulldoze the woods and search for clues, to follow my baby’s footsteps through the terrain. As much as I want him to stay here and comfort me, I need him to find Ethan. Never have I needed anything more.

“Find him, Lucas.” I hold his gaze, and his eyes glisten with marching orders. “Go out there and find Ethan for me.”

Lucas jumps up, swipes his duffel from the floor and disappears out the door.

* * *

As soon as Lucas is gone and I’m alone in the cabin, I try Andrew’s numbers but get flipped to voice mail again. The sound of his voice after all these months scrapes across my nerves like a patch of stinging nettle.

At the beep, I take a deep breath.

“Andrew, this is Kat... I’ve been trying to reach you for hours now. Ethan’s missing. If you had anything to do with it, if he’s there with you right now, I’ll do anything you want. I’ll give you anything. I’ll cancel the restraining order. I’ll beg the judge to give you fifty percent custody. I’ll take out a full-page ad in the AJC and tell everybody you never laid a hand on me if you want me to...” My throat threatens to funnel shut, but I force myself to shove the words over my tongue. “Just please. Don’t take Ethan from me. I’m begging you. Please don’t take my baby away.”

I hang up just in time, right before a sob pushes up my throat and steals my voice. I toss the phone on the table, cover my face with my hands and let the tears come, the images flitting through my mind like a horror show. Ethan on the backseat of Andrew’s Mercedes, wondering where they’re going. Andrew laughing every time he sees my name pop up on his cell phone screen. Are the police tracking it? Are they watching the blips move farther and farther away on some computer screen? It’s almost nine. They could be halfway to Mexico by now.

I jump out of my chair and begin pacing.

I think about what it would be like to never see Ethan’s face again, to live the rest of my life not knowing, never finding answers. I think about Ethan, blindfolded and bawling, in the back of some unmarked van. His little body, mangled beyond recognition. My thoughts are wild things, chasing me around the tiny room.

“No.” My voice is thin and reedy in the cabin, and I try it again, this time louder. “No.” I can’t do this to myself. I swipe the legal pad and pen from the couch and force myself to sit still long enough to make a list of names.

The first dozen or so come without much effort. Lucas. Izzy and two—no, three of her ex-boyfriends, none of them lasting more than a few months but long enough that Ethan remembers their names. Our old neighbor, Mrs. T, who still drops by on Christmas with hand-knit socks nobody ever wears. Andrew and our old friends, most of them people I haven’t seen since the afternoon outside the CVS. Are they still in his life? Are there new friends I don’t know about? I have no idea.

And what about my neighbors? I don’t know their names, but I know I don’t trust them. Ethan is not allowed to play in his own front yard without me there, a lioness watching her cub. Though why would any of them drive all the way here to steal the kid who lives across the street?

I make a list of places we go—school, the Publix down the street, the deli on the corner where Ethan once asked me why a homeless man was rummaging through the Dumpster. “Because he’s hungry, I guess.” Ethan gave the man his sandwich. Fresh tears prick my eyes, because that’s the kind of child I have, one who is constantly reminding me there are people in the world who have it worse.

I think back to what Dawn told me earlier, about roadblocks and neighborhood canvasses and all those strings of letters that sounded straight out of a crime show. One pops miraculously in my mind: BOLO. Be on the lookout for. But did she mention where they were looking? Which direction? I wish I’d thought to take notes.

The questions beat an insistent drill in my skull. Where else are they looking? How many police officers are on the case? Has the media been alerted? What about an AMBER Alert? Are there other state and national alert systems for missing children? Are there others working to spread the word, too?

I flip to a clean page, start jotting down the questions before they can flit away. I’ve barely recorded one before the next one thrums its way into my consciousness. Before long, the paper is covered in blue ink and scribbles. I flip to the next sheet and keep going.

What about the teachers and chaperones? How certain are the police that they were where they said they were? Have they all been questioned, accounted for? What about the camp staff, the other kids? Surely somebody heard or saw something. Who’s talking to them?

And then there are the more sweeping questions about missing children, morbid generalizations I can’t help but consider. What are the statistics on the first few hours, the first few days? If we don’t find him soon, what does that mean for the likelihood of finding him at all? At what point will Dawn sit me down and tell me to start preparing for the worst? After two days? After three days missing?