That same dark blond, curly hair he’d seen earlier through the Honda’s windshield, splayed out on either side of the man’s face, parted in the middle and tapered from the bottom, looking like something from the 1920s, like Charlie Chaplin. The same cleft chin, blue eyes, grim expression.
Yes, it was the man he’d seen throughout the day.
The good news was that the guy was on the same side of the highway as Silence and the coffee shop.
The bad news was he was about a block and a half away.
But Silence sprinted after him anyway.
For a moment, Mr. Accord froze on his bench, like an animal caught crossing the road, foolishly staying in place, staring at its oncoming demise. Evidently he was stunned that Silence was even making the attempt, and for half a moment, this bewilderment cemented him in place, eyes locked on Silence.
And then the man jumped off the bench and bolted away.
But his hesitation had given Silence a chance to catch up. He was still far behind the man, but he was close enough to see the details—the back of his button-up short-sleeve shirt flapping, individual strands of his curly blond hair catching the sunlight.
Ahead, the man took a corner around a Hardee’s, and as Silence commanded his legs to push harder, faster, he glimpsed the area behind the restaurant—an open stretch of parking lot leading to one of the many strip malls, this one of the lower-end variety with a rundown chain hobby store and a bottom-tier home improvement store along with a hodgepodge of small shops. That big open space of parking lot would work in Silence’s advantage.
He made it to the Hardee’s, turned the corner…
And found nothing.
There were a lot more places for the man to have disappeared than he’d thought. Cars and trash receptacles from a renovation project at the far side of the strip mall, which had several abandoned storefronts, all of them places for Mr. Accord to vanish.
Pursuing the man any farther was a death wish for Silence.
He straightened his sport coat. Sniffed.
And turned around.
He would let Mr. Accord come back to him.
Chapter Sixteen
Jonah closed the door behind him.
A small, one-toilet bathroom. Maroon paint, low lighting. A stainless-steel handicap railing on the side wall. An overpoweringly pungent air freshener on the back of the toilet.
The floor was grimier than he would’ve expected from the chic coffee shop. And the mirror was littered with water spots and fingerprints. He regarded the cleaning sign-off sheet on the wall—dates and signatures. The last entry was attributed to M. Campbell. Campbell hadn’t been taking his or her sidework seriously.
He put his hands on the cold porcelain edge of the sink, lowered his head.
He remembered what he told Brett earlier, what he’d been telling everyone for weeks—that he’d already dealt with Amber’s death, already processed it inwardly because in his heart of hearts, he’d known that Amber was gone from this world.
But the part of him that didn’t know that she had died now had confirmation.
He’d seen the outline under the drape on the stretcher. Her outline.
Drugs in her system…
Had it been his fault? Had Amber turned to drugs after finding out that he’d cheated on her only months earlier?
He saw it again in his mind. The blanketed shape on the stretcher. The mound at the top that would be her face. A little valley and then another mound, breasts. A longer valley that culminated at the peak at the figure’s end, Amber’s feet.
A shape. A figure.
A body.
Amber.
She was dead. She was. She really was.
She was dead.
He didn’t have to tell himself that anymore. He didn’t have to convince himself, to believe somehow that he had a mystical connection with Amber, that he could intrinsically sense that she’d passed.
Now he knew.
She was dead.
Jonah bent at the knees and wept.
Chapter Seventeen
A full sheet of Amber’s notes. In her adult handwriting. Covering one of the blank pages at the back of The Secret of Summerford Point.
Gavin felt his mouth gape, and his gaze instinctively went to his brother, who had closed his eyes some time ago and hadn’t reopened them. His recliner was fully laid back, and the now-empty tumbler was on the end table beside it.
For the last several minutes, Gavin had flipped through the age-brittled pages, littered with Amber’s notes. Most of the notes were in her sloppy childhood scrawl, but he’d found several more in her adult handwriting sprinkled throughout. None of these made much sense to him—as they seemed highly connected to the content of the book—and none were as alarming as the first one he’d found:
I think I might be in trouble.
When he’d turned to the last page of the last chapter, he’d been frustrated—these adult notes of Amber’s could be something to help him figure out what had happened to her, but there were so few of them.
That’s when he’d slapped the book shut.
And gotten a glimpse of a page at the back of the book, a page the publisher had purposefully left blank, now covered with notes in Amber’s adult hand.
His eyes scanned over the writing. So many notes. Amber’s questions to herself. Observations. And not just her thoughts about the book.
Notes about Carlton’s former police district.
District C11.
What the hell had Amber been doing?
1971 to 1982
1980 to 1984
“refined” and “crude”
Florida State Highway Patrol
Oil Man = Warren
District C11 is like Summerford
The Well
There were several instances where Amber’s adult hand had mentioned the tactics that Kara, kid explorer, had used in the book, notes like:
How would Kara handle the “refined” angle?
Despite the pain, despite just finding out conclusively that Amber had passed, Gavin smiled. Because these notes about the protagonist of a children’s book exuded the personality of his niece.
This was the Amber he knew, someone who, as an adult, would still look up to the idol of her youth, seek the guidance of a literary child. Amber had a certain naïveté about her, a certain simpleness.
It was something that Gavin’s brother had
