Free Too Young to Kill by M. William Phelps

know that his angel wasn’t inside one of those cars he’d passed. It made for an excruciatingly painful, long day. He’d stop and call Jo periodically: “You hear anything?”
    “No. Sorry, honey.”
     
     
    There was another part of this drama playing out almost nine hundred miles south of East Moline, in Gregg County, Texas, where Adrianne had lived for most of her life with her biological mother and, at times, a stepfather.
    Prosecutors in Gregg County, hearing now for the first time that Adrianne Reynolds, a juvenile they knew quite well, was missing, instantly wondered, said an article written by Barb Ickes, a Quad-City Times reporter, if the teen’s parents in Longview, Texas, were somehow involved in her disappearance.
    From all reports, it appeared there was a lot about Adrianne’s life back home in Texas that Jo and Tony Reynolds had never heard about.

14
    Adrianne was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, an industrial town mainly run by oil companies, in the deep south-central part of the state, nearly on the Louisiana border. It was 1988, the year George H. W. Bush was elected, taking over the Oval Office from Conservative superhero Ronald Reagan, and also a year that brought the opening of the Berlin Wall’s west end that November. Tony Reynolds was living in El Dorado. He had met the woman who would become Adrianne’s grandmother, Beverly, and they hit it off. At the time, Beverly had a teenage daughter, Carolyn, who was pregnant (with Adrianne). Tony didn’t have kids. They all lived together in the same house. After Adrianne was born, just a few weeks after Carolyn’s sixteenth birthday, Tony and his wife welcomed the baby into the home.
    Soon it was decided that Tony and Beverly would adopt Adrianne from Carolyn, who was admittedly too young to take care of the child herself. Tony and Beverly were in their late twenties, ready to be parents, anyway.
    When Adrianne was two months old, Carolyn signed over parental rights to Beverly and Tony, who was now Adrianne’s legal father.
    “We all got along pretty good,” Tony said. “Eventually Carolyn met some guy, moved out, and went on with her life. Adrianne stayed with us. Bev and I done raised her from that point on.”
    According to Carolyn, giving up Adrianne wasn’t something she did willingly, or as simply as Tony had explained it later.
    “I had wanted to live out on my own,” Carolyn later told me. “It was supposed to be a temporary thing—that they (Tony and Beverly) were going to keep Adrianne until I could get on my feet. And things got kind of hard. They got attached. And didn’t want to let her go. But the adoption was done because Adrianne’s [biological] dad was trying to fight me for custody . . . and we were worried he would get custody.”
    Tony turned thirty that October. He had just purchased his first house. He was manager of a tire company, a job he’d had for over a decade. He had a child. Things were going all right. Tony and Beverly enjoyed Adrianne. Life was not perfect, but it was getting better every day.
    As time went on, however, problems between Tony and Beverly started. Then verbal fighting became the norm. Like many households, the center of their arguments was about finances. Tony felt Beverly wasn’t managing the family money the way he wanted. One day, he told Bev, “Look, if I cannot trust you with my money, I sure as heck can’t trust you with anything else!”
    The disagreements between them continued, and silence replaced the trust a marriage needs to survive. “We parted ways,” Tony recalled. “She went hers. I done went mine.”
    Beverly took Adrianne. (If you’re keeping score, this would be the second time Adrianne had had her young life racked by separation—and the kid was just about old enough to start talking.)
    In the divorce decree, Tony was obligated to pay child support. Adrianne was three years old. It was 1992.
    “Bev and I remained good friends, as far as being exes an’ all,” Tony