Five Days in Summer

Sarah nearly cried. “That’s the problem. She’s gone .”
    This was the first time Amy had confronted a family in anguish without the armor of her uniform, and she felt naked. But she knew her job. She reminded herself that fear was disorienting. They didn’t have the answers about Emily Parker’s whereabouts, but Amy had been trained in the questions. “It’s a matter of procedure,” she said, “to search the home.”
    When Amy got back to the station house, Suellen handed her a stack of phone messages.
    “That’s the most calls I’ve gotten since I was promoted.”
    Suellen offered her crooked smile. “Honey, it hasn’t been that long.”
    There were twelve messages in all, nine of them in response to Sarah Goodman’s sign. Amy detoured to the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee, then sat down at her old desk in the report-writing room in the patrol division; she was still waiting for her desk assignment in the detectives division. She started dialing.
    Right off the bat, most of the messages didn’t panout. The information was off-key or just plain flat. But two of the conversations interested her.
    One was a guy who must have had kids, because Amy heard them in the background. He sounded like someone who had plenty better to do than spend his time pulling the chain of his local police department. He told her he’d been returning movies at the video store the day before, and when he drove around to park at the grocery store to run in for a quick shop, he’d noticed something that caught his attention. He saw a man with white hair and pale skin driving away in an old silver Buick Skylark. He said that a lady was with him, blond hair, but that was all he could see, except that she didn’t look too happy. When he saw the Missing sign he’d decided to call. Luckily the caller remembered a partial license plate number. Amy wrote it down and read it back to him to confirm.
    The other call was from a man who refused to give his name. Amy didn’t like that, but she listened as he described an older white-haired man with a younger blond-haired companion driving out of the parking lot at just the time Emily Parker went missing. But this Mr. White was driving a vintage Ford with dealer plates; it was the color of “salmon coral reef.” Funny description, Amy thought, but she got the point.
    There were two Mr. Whites.

Chapter 9
    The neon sign in the window of Lizzy’s Boxcar Diner flashed EAT HEAVY. Geary pulled his car into the parking lot and looked around for Bell’s blue Nissan: nowhere in sight. Armed with a newspaper from one of the vending machines out front, Geary went inside. He took a booth by a window, ordered a tuna melt on rye, pushed aside the skinny blue glass vase with its one red carnation, and unfolded his newspaper to start the wait. In the decades they’d known each other, not once had Bell gotten anywhere on time. Geary had seen the man walk in late to meetings, trials, classes, even FBI conferences when they had to catch some psycho whose personal time clock said he had to strike again in maybe two minutes.
    Geary read the front page of the Cape Cod Times . Some pilot whales had beached themselves off Well-fleet. A nine-year-old boy had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle in Yarmouth and was in critical condition in a Boston hospital. The schools were getting ready for the new year. And a big photo front and center told just how the locals felt about the Labor Day exodus of the summer folk: departing vacationers jammed in traffic along Route 6 were treated to hand-scrawled banners telling them to Get Lost; Good Riddance; I’llTake Your Money, You Run; Come Again But Don’t Stay Too Long . Geary didn’t like it; he was still a newcomer and he sided with the people who had saved all year to afford the ridiculous summer prices on the Cape. The article under the picture was by one Eric Smith, who made no bones about how happy everyone was to see the locusts leave behind their “big coin.”
    Big coin. Geary felt his ire surface. He had thought the price he’d paid for his house was a little steep, but he hadn’t figured the locals were laughing behind his back.
    “Ah, the annual lovefest.” It was Bell’s deep voice, booming into Geary’s airspace. “They love to see the summer people go home.”
    Geary looked up. “Why do I feel like summer people? I live here.”
    “You’re a washashore, John. A step up.”
    “Doesn’t make me feel too