difficulty coping with Nelson’s betrayal of her trust. She’d had less than a day to consider his apparent role in Richard’s death, Mason’s imprisonment, and Jenny’s disappearance. “You knew him for what he was!” she said to Caleb.
“No, Mom. If I had known, I probably would have killed him.”
By the time we had finished talking, I had a clearer picture of Giles, Nelson, Dexter, and her late husband, Richard. Police had told her that Dexter was being sought in France, and that Nelson appeared to have taken their trawler and headed to Mexico or places south.
“He’ll be back,” she predicted. “He travels, but Las Piernas is his comfort zone.”
If he had seen the look in her eye when she said this, I doubt he would have thought of Las Piernas in quite that way.
We left Caleb talking with his mom. I invited Ben back to the house for lunch. We had just started eating when Frank called. Ben’s pager went off at about the same moment, and he stepped outside to use his cell phone.
“I probably won’t be home for dinner,” Frank said. “I’m on my way to the San Bernardino Mountains to help out with the search for the Fletcher kids.”
“Where in the San Bernardino Mountains?”
“Half of us are going to Forest Falls-that’s where I’ll be. The others are going to Cedar Glen. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is going to be supplying most of the personnel-we think we’ve got a couple of leads on where they might be. The GPS on the vehicle left outside of Graydon Fletcher’s place had an address in Cedar Glen entered on it, but there was a map and a set of keys to a place in Forest Falls. They’ve already checked both places and came up empty, but we’re going to be doing some door-to-door work in the neighborhood, and we want to see if the dogs can pick up on a trail. The Las Piernas SAR dogs group is on the way, too.”
“Does this mean Anna’s going up there?”
“Our department specifically asked that she be excluded from this one, but she’s got friends in the San Berdu department, so who knows what will happen. She was pretty hot under the collar about being left out.”
He told me that more bits and pieces of information had been coming in as more people became aware of the story of Roy Fletcher and the missing children. One of Roy Fletcher’s credit cards had been used to buy gas, and videotape had shown the boys entering the gas station’s convenience market with him. Genie did not appear on the videotape, but the camera trained on the gas pumps had shown Roy talking to someone in the SUV before he got back into the driver’s seat, and the attendant remembered that Roy had asked the boys to choose a bag of chips for their sister.
“Where was the gas station?”
“In Riverside, near the interchange for the San Bernardino and the Riverside freeways.”
I tried to picture it. “Before Waterman Avenue?”
“Yes.”
“So from there he could have gone up any of the mountain resort highways?”
“Yes-Highway 18 toward Lake Arrowhead, Highway 330 toward Running Springs, Arrowbear, or Big Bear, or out to Highway 38 and Forest Falls. But he had directions to only two of them. So wish me luck.”
“Good luck. Any news about Troy Fletcher?”
“None of this goes to the paper, right?”
“Not my story now. And no, I won’t pass it along to anyone else-except-can I talk to Ethan, Caleb, and Ben?”
“Caleb and Ben won’t be a problem-they know the rules. Swear Ethan to secrecy. There will probably be a press conference later this afternoon, but I’ll be in deep shit if the Express gets it first.”
“I understand.”
“Okay. We believe his first name really is Troy, but his last name is Sherman. He was enrolled in a preschool run by a church. They have a program for children whose families wouldn’t be able to afford preschool otherwise. Smart kid, bad family situation.”
“How bad?”
“His parents each had more than a dozen arrests-mostly for theft, a few for possession. One day Troy didn’t show up for school. The school followed up, turned out nobody was home. The Shermans seem to have taken off- left without paying the rent. No one saw them leave, no one was surprised they were gone. Seems they had a habit of moving around.”
“So do you think they moved voluntarily?”
“I have a feeling that’s a question I’m going to be working on all next week, if not longer.”
“So how did the Fletchers learn about him? Is the minister of the church a Fletcher?”
“No. Catholic preschool, as it happens. Turns out Troy was tested by a woman named Jill Lowry, a school psychologist who volunteered to help assess the kids in the program. Guess who tested all three of the other kids?”
“Has she been questioned?”
“Reed and Vince are with her right now, which is why I’m the errand boy sent off to the mountains.”
His cell phone signal was breaking up, and we lost the connection at that point.
Ben was back inside, sitting at the table with Ethan. I noticed Ben’s sandwich was untouched. I came back to the table in time to hear Ethan say, “Poison. Pure poison.”
“Are you talking Ben out of eating the food I’ve prepared?” I asked. “Because I noticed yours is gone.”
“We weren’t talking about you. And yeah, my appetite is coming back-good sign, huh? In fact, if there’s any more…”
I got up to make him another sandwich.
“Trouble?” I asked Ben.
“That was Anna.”
“Oh?” I looked down and realized I had smashed the bread a little as I cut it.
“Wanted to know if I could talk Frank into letting her help with the search. Says she knows the kids and is worried about them.”
I’m afraid I took it out on the bread. “Really.”
“Told her I was sorry, but she knew as well as I did that I couldn’t help her out. Reminded her that I wasn’t going up with the local SAR team, since I’ve left it.”
“What did she say to that?”
“We argued. What did Frank have to say?”
I received the required oath of secrecy and quickly filled them in on our conversation, then handed Ethan’s second sandwich to him. He looked at its squashed edges and said, “Ten-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness.”
I ignored him and said, “Excuse me a minute-I need to get something out of Ethan’s room.”
As I went down the hall, I heard Ethan sigh and say, “My belongings, probably.”
I came back with the Thomas Brothers Guide for San Bernardino County and a set of USGS topographical maps. I went to the table that held the information Caleb had given me on Mason’s case.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
I asked him to pass my plate over to me. “I’m going to see where a hunch leads me. I keep thinking about what Elisa said about comfort zones.” He exchanged a look with Ethan, and they both went to work on their meals. They watched as I checked my notes and opened the Thomas Guide.
“The problem, I think, is that we’ve forgotten Mason. Well, we haven’t, but I think the police have.”
“What do you mean?”
“First of all, he’s alive.”
For a second or two, they looked at me as if I’d gone simpleminded. Then Ben said, “And we know that Cleo isn’t reluctant to kill.”
“Exactly. I think she was supposed to keep him alive, frame him for Richard’s murder and for Jenny’s supposed murder. If he stood trial and the public believed he did it, then no one was going to expect their neighbor kid to be Jenny.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that the last time anyone saw Mason Fletcher before he was found by Tadeo Garcia was the
