“Ms. Jenkins, we’re in a time cr—”
I pivot around, the fury that’s been growing in me like a tumor erupting in a voice that is not my own. “Where’s Miss Emma?”
The sheriff and detective raise matching brows at my tone, but neither of them answer. Their clothes drip matching puddles onto the rickety floorboards.
“His teacher. Where is she?”
My hatred for that woman is a hot, pulsing thing inside my chest, shocking me with its sudden intensity. I want to slap her, to tear at her shiny hair, to scream at her until this rickety building shakes on its cinder block foundation. I want her to look me in the eye and tell me how she let this happen to my son.
The sheriff moves to one of the picnic tables, grabs a towel from a pile, tosses it to the detective and takes another for himself. “I know you want to cast blame,” he says, his face disappearing behind the scratchy material, “and believe me, so do we. But first things first. Let’s focus on finding your son. We can sort out all the finger-pointing later.”
“I deserve answers.”
He whips the towel over a shoulder. “And you’ll get them, but right now we’re wasting daylight. Sun’s been up for over an hour.” He drops onto a bench and hollers into the empty room, “Dawn, you in here?”
A ponytailed woman in a Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office T-shirt leans her torso around the corner of the industrial kitchen that runs along the entire back side of the building, separated from the rest by a low wall and a metal prep table. “Just making a fresh pot of coffee, sir, and then I’ll be right in.” Her gaze catches mine, and she gives me a warm smile, then disappears back behind the wall.
Detective Macintosh nudges me toward the table, and we sit.
“Now,” the sheriff says once we’re settled. “We’ve moved the kids and chaperones over to the Days Inn on Chestatee for questioning. The last thing we need at this camp is a bunch of scared and hyped-up eight-year-olds. The woods are already a ragbag of scents from when they were out there earlier. Some kind of scavenger hunt, apparently, which is part of what’s holding up the dogs.”
“Is the scent holding?” I say.
“Let’s just put it this way. I’d do cartwheels down the center of this room if someone told me the rain stopped an hour ago.” He points a finger up at the metal roof, still being hammered by a loud and determined downpour. My heart sinks at the sound.
The sheriff searches through the pile of papers on the table, maps and printouts and scribbled notes scattered across the wooden surface like a tornado dropped them there. They’re held down with a couple of soggy towels and a handful of foam cups, the rims chewed and stained with what smells like burned coffee. Nobody seems bothered by the chaos, but I am. What kind of operation is this?
Finally, he locates a yellow legal pad, then flips to a fresh page. “All righty. Let’s start with any personal identification marks Ethan might have. Birthmarks or scars. Something that’s unique to your son.”
I touch a finger to my right temple, just under the hairline. “He has a scar on his forehead, right about here, and a birthmark on his left thigh. It looks like two overlapping nickels.”
“What about medical conditions?”
“He’s allergic to peanuts. He carries an EpiPen.”
The sheriff’s pen freezes on the notepad, and he and the detective exchange a look. “How allergic?”
“That depends on how much he eats. Trace amounts typically only result in hives and wheezing, but a spoonful of peanut butter could kill him. He’s had the allergy all his life. He’s well aware of what he can and can’t eat, and he knows how to use his EpiPen.”
Sheriff Childers curses under his breath. “Dawn,” he barks so sharply that I startle. “Get his teacher on the line. I want to know why this is the first time we’ve heard of this allergy. And reconfirm there were no pens found among the kids’ stuff. I want to be one hundred percent certain that Ethan’s is still in his backpack.”
Her voice calls out from the kitchen. “On it.”
The sheriff makes a scribble on his notepad, then turns back to me. “Does Ethan know how to swim?”
A new terror seizes my heart, squeezing it to a standstill. Ethan can swim, but he doesn’t like to go where he can’t touch the bottom, and he has the tendency to panic. I think about the pond we passed on the drive up, the way the raindrops shimmered on the smooth, dark surface, and I feel sick.
Sheriff Childers must read the answer on my face, because he writes NOT A SWIMMER in big block letters across the top of the page. “What about sleepwalking? Does he ever get confused in the middle of the night, start wandering around the house?”
“No. Never.” My gaze bounces between the sheriff and Detective Macintosh seated on the bench beside me, and I remember his advice in the car. To share every detail I can think of about my son. To question every fact presented to me. “How did Ethan get out of the cabin? Wouldn’t somebody have heard him? Wouldn’t the chaperones have been guarding the door?”
Suddenly, it occurs to me that these are the kinds of questions a good mother would have asked prior to signing the permission form. Who’s manning the exits? What are the safety precautions? How do you know—absolutely know with 100 percent certainty—that my child won’t disappear in the middle of the night?
“There was a fire,” the sheriff announces, and my heart gives a hard kick. I have so many questions I don’t know where to start. I open my mouth, but the sheriff waves me off with both hands. “I know, I know, but let me just get through this, and then I’ll answer every question you’ve got. Like I was saying, there was a fire just outside the cabin. Not a big one, but big enough to wake up some of the kids. The father chaperone—” the sheriff checks his notes, flipping back a few pages for the name “—Avery Fischer ran back to the offices for assistance while Ms. Quinn rounded up the kids. She conducted an initial head count at that time, and the numbers checked out. Every child was accounted for. Once Mr. Fischer returned and the fire was put out, she did another one, and this time she came up one child short. Ethan was gone.”
The only thing I know about Avery is that he runs the school’s capital campaign, one he’s called me for a number of times, even though my answer is always the same. If he’s as dogged with his chaperone duties as he is with funding the front office renovations and Promethean boards in every classroom, I have no idea. What kind of mother doesn’t know the people responsible for watching her child?
The detective is the first to jump in. “Was the fire intentional?”
“Yes. Whoever set it used an accelerant. An arson investigator is already on the way, but she’s coming from Chattanooga so we’ve got another hour before she gets here.”
“And the teacher remembers seeing Ethan at the first head count?”
“Negative,” the sheriff says, and I force myself to focus on his words, and not the way his eyes are tight and strained. “She remembers counting eighteen bodies, but according to her last statement, she can’t one hundred percent guarantee that one of those belonged to Ethan.”
I shake my head, trying to clear the cobwebs, but I still don’t understand. “Who else could it have belonged to? Surely she wouldn’t have counted another kid twice. And what about the other kids? Doesn’t anybody remember seeing him?”
“Some do, some don’t. It was dark and the kids were in a tizzy. The chaperones, too. We’re still in the process of questioning everybody,