And this is what took the happiness from his eyes, she realized.
He spent years searching for all these missing kids because his sister never came home. He’d been desperate to save that woman tonight because he couldn’t save his sister.
A lump formed in her throat, and it took everything she had not to cry for him, his parents, and this beautiful, lost girl. She couldn’t imagine losing one of her siblings; never mind, not knowing what became of them. They’d all driven her crazy at one time or another in her life, and she may or may not have contemplated choking a few of them, but she loved them all so much.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “No family should have to go through that.”
“No, they shouldn’t,” he agreed.
“That’s why you’re so determined to find Julie.” She held the book out toward him. “That’s why you’ve looked for, and found, so many of these other kids.”
“Yes. The loss of Maya tore my family apart. My parents didn’t divorce or anything; in fact, in some ways, it made us closer, but it destroyed large pieces of us. I know her disappearance didn’t cause my father’s lung cancer or my mother’s stroke, but it weakened them and turned them into an old man and woman overnight.”
His gaze went to the picture on the shelf. In it, Maya was seventeen, and he was sixteen. His parents were in their early forties. None of them would have suspected that in less than three years, their lives would irrevocably change, and for Maya, life would be over.
He tried not to think about what happened to his sister; when he did, his imagination ran wild with all the many atrocities that could have befallen her. All he could do was hope that whatever happened, it was quick and painless. It was the only hope he had left when it came to her.
“I never saw my father cry until she disappeared. I didn’t think he could cry. He was always so strong and confident. Then, one day, I walked in to find him sobbing at the kitchen table with her picture clutched to his chest like he was holding her. I had no idea what to do, so I backed out of the room. I’m not sure if he knew I was there, but leaving that room is one of my biggest regrets in life. I should have gone to him; Maya would have.”
Tears pricked Cassidy’s eyes as self-hatred filled his. “How old were you?”
“I was twenty when that happened, but I was nineteen and Maya was twenty when she went missing. We were extremely close. I mean, there were times when we tried to kill each other, but she was my best friend, and I was hers. We went to the same college; we had many of the same friends, and we were together the night she disappeared. We were studying in the library when some of her friends asked her to join them for ice cream.”
“What happened after that?”
“According to her friends, they went to a party, while Maya decided to return to her dorm. That was the last time anyone saw her.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “In the beginning, the police worked the case hard. She was a pretty, well-liked college girl who vanished into thin air. But the only suspect they had was a kid named Lewis Guthrie.”
“Who was that?”
“He was a kid we went to college with, and he had a big crush on Maya. He left school the same day she did.”
“That is suspicious.”
“Yeah,” Dante muttered as his eyes fell to the book in her hands. “But the police finally tracked him down and cleared him.”
“That’s still odd.”
“That’s what I thought too, but he had an alibi. He’d decided to quit college. He spent the day packing his few boxes of things and driving home with his friends Jim and Tom. They, along with his parents, corroborated his story. They used Jim’s Jeep to move his things home.
“By the time I became a police officer and could get my hands on Maya’s files to learn where he lived, Lewis’s family had already moved. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to track them down, but I’ve never found them.”
“They just vanished?”
“They moved to Texas and then Washington. After that, they left the country, and I lost them. I interviewed Jim and Tom multiple times over the years; they threatened to file a complaint against me while I was on the force, but their stories never changed.”
“Did you ever try to compel them before asking, so you knew they were telling the truth.”
He smiled grimly. “The last time I interviewed them a few months after I was changed. I decided to try one more time to get the truth out of them. Their stories remained the same.”
So it was another wall for him, she realized.
“And, after a while, with no new leads, some people, including some police, started to believe she took off. There were those at college, and on the police force, who wanted the case closed so everything could go back to normal. It was easier to claim she took off with a secret boyfriend her family wouldn’t approve of than to believe pretty, young college girls could vanish into thin air.”
“And what did you do afterward?”
“I quit college before the end of the semester. My parents needed me home, and I couldn’t stay there after everything. I kept looking for her, and thinking I saw her everywhere I went, on campus. I was scaring girls because I kept thinking they were her and chasing them down.”
Cassidy gulped down the lump in her throat as tears burned her eyes. She could picture his frantic desperation to believe strangers were her.
