Emily Locke 01 - Final Approach

person, much less another skydiver, who’ll care about that like you.”
    Care about that like me. He meant “identify with” that like me, but wouldn’t say so. He didn’t have to—he knew I couldn’t
not
become involved, even if it meant putting my mental health on the line all over again. I was being manipulated, and we both knew it. The jerk.

Chapter Two
    I’d never gotten very good at winter driving, but I managed. By February, sounds of snow crunching under tires and wipers scraping ice were as familiar as the voices on my morning radio show. Like most northern Ohio winter days, the sky was overcast and dumping snow. Flakes the size of dimes sank heavily and swiftly, the way real dimes fall through fountain water. I imagined I was in a high school play, that the snow was a stage effect, and that thousands of pimply faced teenagers were in overhead rafters shaking boxes of this crap down on my car. I hate winter.
    I drove home from work that morning, struggling to control my car and the emerging situation with Richard, who’d apparently reinvented himself as a private investigator. This wasn’t our first brush with a missing kid. We’d met after my friends’ son disappeared. Richard worked their case; he was a cop then. Their boy, Mattie, came home, but justice wasn’t served to the man who’d snatched him. I’d always suspected Richard had a hand in getting that guy off.
    My wipers pushed aside a fresh coat of flakes and my house came into view on the other side of the wet, streaked windshield. Four stark elms cloaked in a thin layer of ice jutted out of my desolate yard. In warmer months, they shaded my place. That day, they looked like a strange weather experiment someone had left on my lawn as a prank. I pulled into my driveway, past a snow-capped mailbox still marked for “Jack and Emily Locke,” and pressed the button to raise my garage door.
    The dashboard clock said 10:47 a.m. In the two hours since my ladies room meltdown, I’d managed to speak face-to-face with both Richard and my group manager, Peter “The Abominable” Bowman—undertakings that, each alone, could dampen a day. Doing both in one morning had annihilated it.
    I parked in the garage, scooped up my purse and scarf, and headed toward the house. My phone was ringing on the other side of the wall. I squeezed between my front bumper and recycle bins and made it over a pile of old newspapers before catching my toe on a box and stumbling. The contents of my purse clattered at my feet.
    I swung open my kitchen door and lifted the cordless from its wall mount. It was Jeannie.
    “You sound frenzied,” she said.
    “I had to run to catch the phone.” I headed back to the mess in the garage.
    “How’d it go with Bowman?”
    “I told him I needed some discretionary leave.”
    “And?”
    Next to my car, I knelt to collect my spilled things and dump them back into my purse.
    “You know Bowman.” I palmed my compact and car keys off the freezing cement floor. “He’s not okay with any absence unless your entrails are dragging between your feet.”
    “But you’re home now, so you worked something out.”
    “I told him it was only for a couple of days and reminded him I haven’t taken leave for years.”
    “Did he ask why you’re leaving?”
    “I said it was personal.”
    My lipstick had rolled behind the hot water heater, and when I saw the spider webs and dusty funk back there I decided to abandon it forever.
    “Mmm,” Jeannie said. “What was your concession?”
    “What do you mean?” My purse back together, minus the lipstick, I stood and went back inside.
    “I know he didn’t let you walk out of there with a pat on the back and tell you to enjoy a few days off.”
    She knew him better than I thought.
    “I said I’d work remotely.” I headed for my hallway. “Laptop’s in the car. I’ll lug it down there with everything else.”
    I tugged the rope that hung from my hallway ceiling and extended the folding ladder to my attic. Its hinges were stiff. They squeaked when I stepped on the first rung.
    “Down where? Where are you going with Richard Cole?”
    I tried my best southern drawl. “Texas,
y’all
.”
    An empty backpack and three stuffed Christmas bears careened past my shoulders and landed on the hallway floor.
    “What are you doing over there?” she asked. “It sounds like you’re in a washing machine.”
    “Packing,” I grunted, and eased an unwieldy American Tourister down the