Free Hide by Lisa Gardner

for Missing and Exploited Children. I was greeted with photos of three small children who had been declared missing in the past week. One boy, two girls. One was from Seattle, one from Chicago, the other from St. Louis. All cities where I used to live.
    I wonder sometimes if this is what got my mother in the end. That no matter how much we ran, we still ended up running again. If you want to get technical about things, there’s no safe place to raise a child. Crime is universal, registered sex offenders live everywhere. I know; I check the databases.
    The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hosts its own search engine. I entered
female, Massachusetts,
and
missing within 25 years.
I clicked on the arrows to launch the search, then sat back and chewed on my thumbnail.
    Bella came out from the tiny kitchenette, having just scarfed down her dinner. Now she regarded me reproachfully.
Run,
her gaze said.
Outside. Get a leash. Fun.
    Bella was a seven-year-old purebred Australian shepherd, her leggy, athletic body a mottled mix of white splashed with patches of brown and blue. Like a lot of Australian shepherds, she had one blue eye, one brown. It gave her a perpetually quizzical look she liked to use to her advantage.
    “One moment,” I told her.
    She whined at me and, when that still didn’t work, flopped onto the floor in full doggy snit. I had received Bella in lieu of payment from a client four years ago. Bella had just destroyed the woman’s favorite pair of Jimmy Choo heels, and the woman had had enough of the dog’s high-strung behavior. Truthfully, Australian sheepdogs aren’t good apartment dogs. If you don’t keep them occupied, they do get in trouble.
    But Bella and I did all right. Mostly because I liked to run and, even entering the middle-aged phase of a dog’s life, Bella thought nothing of whipping out a quick six miles.
    I would have to take her out soon, or risk losing one of my favorite throw pillows or perhaps a beloved bolt of fabric. Bella always knew how to make her point.
    The search was done. My computer screen filled with a scrolling column of bright, happy faces. School photos, close-ups from the family album. Photos of missing children always showed them happy. The whole point was to make you hurt worse.
    Search results: fifteen.
    I reached for the mouse and slowly worked my way down the column:
Anna, Gisela, Jennifer, Janeeka, Sandy, Katherine, Katie…
    It was hard for me to look at the pictures. Even with my doubts about my father, I always wondered if I might have become one of them. If we hadn’t moved, if he hadn’t been so obsessed.
    I thought again about the locket. Where had it come from? And why, oh why, had I given it to Dori?
    Her name did not appear on the list. I allowed myself to exhale. Bella perked up, sensing the release in tension, the possibility of beginning our normal nightly routine.
    But then I noticed the dates. None of these cases were older than ’97. Despite the open search parameters for time, the database must not go back that far. I chewed on my thumbnail again, debating options.
    I could call the hotline, but that might raise too many questions. I preferred the anonymity of Internet searches. Well, at least the appearance of anonymity, since God knows the proliferation of spyware probably meant Big Brother, or at least a marketing mega-machine, was following my every move.
    I knew another site to try. I didn’t go there as much. It made me sad.
    I typed into my Internet search engine: www.doenetwork.org. And in two seconds, I was there.
    The Doe Network deals primarily with old missing-persons cases, trying to match skeletalized remains found in one location with a missing-persons report that might have been filed in another jurisdiction. Its motto: “There is no time limit to solving a mystery.”
    The thought gave me a chill as I sat, one hand now clasping the vial of my mother’s ashes, the other hand typing in the search