Free The Forgotten Girl by David Bell Page A

Whatever you want to call it.”
    “It’s not important,” Jason said. “There’s nothing to tell.”
    “Nothing?” Sierra asked.
    Jason shifted around in his seat and put the car in gear. “We should be getting home. Nora’s going to be getting off work, and it’s kind of been a longday.”

Chapter Nine
    Nora wasn’t home yet, and when they came into the house, Jason tried to get Sierra interested in something else. He offered to watch a movie with her, and when she said no to that, he told her that there was a baseball game on TV. Sierra said she was going to go read, and she trudged up the stairs, her footfalls sounding heavier than Jason thought possible. He suspected she’d be sitting up there, reaching out to her mother, sending texts or making phone calls.
    Jason tried to distract himself by reading as well, but he couldn’t concentrate fully on the book in his hands. He felt heavy and bloated from the Owl, and he kept thinking about the message Hayden had sent to Sierra. Like Sierra, Jason fixated on that one word.
Always.
Did it mean anything more than what it said on the surface? Twenty-four hours remained. If at the same time the next night Hayden hadn’t reached out to them, he’d figure out what to do.
    Then he remembered the job Nora had assigned him. The dead cat.
    “Shit,” he said.
    He went out to the back door and undid the lock. Before he pulled the door open, he wished again that a predator had comealong and removed the cat the natural way. And then he hoped that Nora had simply been wrong, that the cat had been sleeping or injured and had since risen to its feet and wandered off.
    But he knew he was engaging in wishful thinking. He expected to find a dead cat on the patio, and he did. Not only did he see the dead cat, but he recognized it as well.
    “Pogo,” he said.
    Pogo belonged to the family next door, the Nelsons. They had three children—two boys and a girl—and Pogo, their orange cat, used to wander through Jason and Nora’s yard. He’d scratched the cat’s ears on a few occasions, and once set out a bowl of water on a blazing summer day.
    Jason stepped out and studied the body. What prompted Pogo to up and die on their back porch? Did cats drop dead of heart attacks like people? Was that what happened to Pogo?
    But something about Pogo’s posture didn’t seem random. He was on his side, his legs straight out as though someone had placed him there, almost gently. He didn’t look like the victim of a larger predator or even an accident. And then Jason noticed that some blood had trickled out of Pogo’s mouth and dried around his head.
    “Gross.”
    Jason jumped.
    “Jesus,” he said.
    “Sorry.”
    He turned as Sierra stepped out onto the porch, her feet bare, the Ohio State hoodie zipped up to her chin.
    “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.
    “This dead cat just creeps me out,” he said. “And now I have to go tell the neighbors their pet is dead. They have little kids. I see their daughter, Victoria, carrying this cat around all the time. She’ll be devastated.”
    “What killed it?” Sierra asked.
    “I don’t know.” Jason turned to go inside and get a bag, but then Sierra spoke.
    “Wait,” she said. She crouched down, studying the cat from a lower angle. “Did you see the blood?”
    “I did.”
    “Isn’t that weird?” she asked.
    “No weirder than the dead cat being here in the first place.”
    “No, really.” Sierra stood up and placed her hand on Jason’s arm. “What if this is about Mom?”
    “The cat?”
    “What if someone killed the cat to scare Mom or something? Or to scare us? Did you think of that?”
    “No, I didn’t. Look, Sierra, the cat probably got hit by a car and limped back here. Or it fell or something. No one hurt the cat on purpose. It isn’t even ours.”
    “But it lives next door.”
    Jason put his arm around the girl, the same way Nora had the night before. “I know you’re freaked out about your mom. I