hair from her eyes.
“I’m sorry, but I have some more questions.” Laura set her mini-cassette recorder on the kitchen counter.
“I know you have to ask your questions. We want to find the guy who did this.” She said this last brightly.
“Mrs. Parris, do you know if she used a computer at school?”
Her brow wrinkled. “I think so.”
“She never talked about it? You know, texting her friends?”
“I wouldn’t know email from a hole in the wall. I’m not the least bit technical.” She stared at the oven. “Jessica loved to bake cookies. That’s why I’m doing it today. Kind of in her memory.”
“Where’s Cary?”
“Cary?” Linda Parris looked stunned.
“Her boyfriend. Doesn’t he live here?”
“Oh.” She floundered for a moment, as if she’d dropped a thought and had to consciously pick it up again. “We’re kind of like his foster parents, even though there’s nothing official. You must think that odd, but it really isn’t. He needs us. We love him as if he’s our own son.”
“He and Jessica were boyfriend and girlfriend, though?”
“I know what you’re thinking. We had very strict rules, her father did. Cary lives in our travel trailer out back. Not in the house. But he’s a nice boy.”
“Were they sexually active?”
Defiance. “Yes. I found out about that a couple of months ago. And you know what I did? I marched her down to Planned Parenthood and got her birth control pills. You might think I’m a bad mother, but I did what I had to do, and I didn’t want our child
“I’m not judging you, Mrs. Parris.”
“Please don’t say anything to her father. He’d have a fit if he knew.”
Laura thought that he probably did know. “I see no reason to tell him. So you don’t know where Cary is?”
Mrs. Parris frowned. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Since Jessica was missing?”
“I’m not …” She didn’t finish her thought.
“You don’t know when he was here last?”
“He comes and goes. He has an uncle in Tucson—sometimes he stays there weeks at a time, especially after —“ she stopped. Her eyes widened slightly.
“After what?”
“After a fight.” Linda Parris looked past Laura, out the window.
Laura took note of the present tense and decided to stick with it. “With Jessica? Do they fight a lot?”
“No, no, nothing like what you’re thinking. Just arguments. Jessica can be—she could get dramatic. Cary just stayed out of her way, let her cool down. That’s all it was.”
“When was their last fight?”
“I know they weren’t talking earlier in the week.”
“And you haven’t seen him since?”
“It’s not like that. David and I would never bring someone into our home that we thought would be dangerous to our daughter.”
“Mrs. Parris, I have to know. When was the last time you saw him?”
“I think it was … two, three days ago. But it’s not what you think. He keeps to himself a lot, likes to go for long walks. Sometimes he stays with friends. That’s what Jessica loves most about him, even though it drove her crazy sometimes. She said he was a free spirit. I know what you’re hinting at and you’re wrong. We would never put our own daughter in danger.”
“I understand that, but it’s important I talk to him. It’s very likely he doesn’t know Jessica is gone. Don’t you agree he should know?”
She nodded reluctantly. Laura asked for the uncle’s address and phone number, and Linda Parris found it in her address book and copied it on paper from the memo pad stuck to the refrigerator, a flag at the top above the phrase “United We Stand”.
Linda moved back to the sink and carefully washed the mixing bowl and set it in the dishwasher. She stared out the window again. “We had so many good times. Last Saturday we spent the morning weeding. Jessie and her dad went to the Arctic Circle for hamburgers. She got mine with mustard, but not ketchup—she knew I didn’t like ketchup. That was a great day.”
She continued to stare out the window.
Something brushed Laura’s ankles. She looked down. A Siamese cat rubbed against her trouser legs.
Laura was attracted to animals the way some people were attracted to babies. She hunkered down and stroked the cat.
“That’s Princess, Jessie’s cat,” Linda Parris’s voice broke. “Jessie found her in a dumpster at the school. Half- starved, sick. Her father told her Princess was her responsibility—she couldn’t keep her unless she did everything.
