Free B009QTK5QA EBOK by Jeff Shelby Page A

of you.”
    I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure what it was. I thought that sometimes Lauren would’ve preferred to never hear from me, to never provide any sense of hope or information about Elizabeth. That’s why I’d always left it up to her to initiate contact. If she ever decided that she didn’t want to talk to me anymore, I wouldn’t push her. I’d let her have that peace if she decided she needed it.
    “What are you going to do today?” Isabel asked, settling into the chair behind the desk.
    “Going over to the school to start,” I said. “See where that leads.”
    “School can’t release records,” she said.
    “I know. I’ll need to be persuasive.”
    “How?”
    “Don’t know yet. Probably have to be a jerk or something.”
    She shook her head, smiling. “Hang on a sec.”
    “Not anxious to go back out in the cold, so okay.”
    She tapped at the keyboard, stared at the screen, her lips scrunched together in concentration. She squinted for a moment. “Okay. Don’t go to the school.”
    “I’m going to the school, Isabel.”
    “Go to the district office,” she said, scribbling on a piece of paper and glancing at the screen. “And ask for Tim Barron.”
    She slid the piece of paper to me. A number and address were scrawled beneath the name.
    “And since you didn’t wait to talk to Tess like I asked, I’m emailing him now, telling him you’re coming to see him.”
    “He’ll talk to me?”
    “Should,” she said, tapping again at the keyboard. “He’s a pretty good guy. He’s helped me out before. He’ll have access to records that are probably more thorough than the school’s anyway.”
    I folded the piece of paper and slipped it into my pocket. “Thanks.”
    “You’re welcome,” she said, then nodded at her screen. “Email sent. He’ll know I sent you.”
    “Can you get us an address for Codaselli?” I asked.
    She pursed her lips, then sighed. “Yeah, probably.”
    “We should talk to him. Today.”
    She hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Come back after you talk to Tim. I’ll find the address by then. And we can go.”
    “You don’t sound excited.”
    She shook her head. “To talk with Peter Codaselli about his missing son? No. I’m not.”

TWENTY-THREE
     
     
    “Isabel’s been quiet lately,” Tim Barron said, leaning back in his chair. “She doing alright?”
    The district office was an easy find with GPS. I’d asked for Tim at the front desk and he showed up in an elevator less than two minutes later. He took me up the elevator to the third floor and I followed him to his office, where everything appeared to have been organized by a professional organizer. No piles of paper, no overstuffed file drawers. It was the antithesis of what I expected to see in a public information officer’s office.
    “I actually haven’t known her that long,” I said. “But she seems okay, yeah.”
    He nodded. He had close-cropped orange hair and a flurry of freckles on his face. Somewhere in his thirties, he was slightly built. He wore standard office attire, his blue-striped tie loosened at his neck.
    “She tries not to abuse me,” he said with a soft smile. “Which is why I like her so much. She only comes to me if she really needs me.”
    “She seems sharp,” I said.
    “She is,” he said. He crossed his legs and folded his hands behind his desk. “Now. She said nothing about why you’re here. What can I do for you?”
    “I’m looking for my daughter,” I said.
    “She’s a student in our district?”
    “I believe she was at one time,” I said. “But I’m honestly not sure what name you’ll find her under.”
    He raised both eyebrows. “You lost me.”
    I gave him the briefest explanation I could, an explanation that ended up not being very brief at all. Trying to explain how I’d gotten to the place I was at was never an easy task and it often made the listener more uncomfortable than it did me.
    “Wow,” he said, when I finished. “I’m