Free Summoning the Night by Jenn Bennett Page A

pressing the photo to my breast as he tried to pry it out of my hands again. “Stop! This picture makes my heart flutter. Can we take it with us, please?”
    â€œThere’s several photo albums’ worth of the same thing at home,” he said.
    â€œYou promise?”
    He nodded and gave up the fight, returning his attention to the pile of papers in front of him. “I can’t believe Jupe hasn’t forced them on you already.”
    â€œAny from the time you were in the seminary?” I asked.
    â€œThat sexy Jesus thing again?” he teased without looking up. “You’re a filthy girl, you know that?”
    â€œI’m being serious.”
    He grunted, then answered after a time. “Maybe. My hair was short in the seminary.”
    I tried to imagine a devious nineteen-year-old Lon with short hair, playing at being pious. What a shock it must have been for his instructors to realize what Lon really was.
    I slipped the photo into the stack of bulletins as he stared at a photocopy he’d found inside a file folder. A strange look bloomed on his face. “Read this list and tell me what’s wrong,” he said as he handed the piece of paper to me.
    It was a wrinkled copy of a handwritten journal entry dated October 29, the year the first group of kids was taken. A few things were illegible, crossed out. Seven names were written in bold caps. “Jesus. These are the original kids’ names. Do you think this is a copy from Bishop’s journal? I thought Dare burned all that stuff.”
    â€œCould be. What about the last name on the list?”
    â€œCindy Brolin . . .” I read. “Wait, that’s supposed to be—”
    â€œJanice Grandin.”
    He was right. According to old newspaper articles we’d perused in the banker box Dare had given us, Janice Grandin was the last kid taken, not this Cindy person.
    â€œThe other names are all the same, right?” I asked.
    â€œYeah, I think so.”
    â€œDid you know Cindy Brolin?”
    â€œNo. I didn’t know any of the kids. I went to private school. Back then, all the missing kids were from the public school.”
    A reverse of what was happening now. After a few moments of staring at the piece of paper, I noticed something. “Janice Grandin was taken on October thirty-first. This was dated two days before.”
    â€œHuh.” Lon pushed the box away and looked at me, his brow knotted. “If Cindy Brolin was originally on the Snatcher’s wish list, what happened to her?”

Moved out of town.
    Cindy Brolin apparently left La Sirena shortly after the original seven teens disappeared. Lon made some phone calls to the La Sirena police, but they didn’t have a crumb about this mystery girl in their records. She was never part of the original investigation, and there was no mention of her in any of the newspaper clippings—nothing online either.
    We almost chalked her up as a dead end until a broader search uncovered one Cynthia W. Brolin listed at a downtown address in Morella. Before my 4:00 shift the following day, Lon followed me into the city in his SUV and parked at my house. We took my car and headed downtown.
    Morella is a sprawling, flat city. La Sirena’s coastal cliffs are only about ten crow-flying miles to the west, and the Santa Lucia Range cradles the land to the southeast. On a clear, smog-free day, you can see beautiful crinkled mountain peaks stretching around the city in the distance. Most days, however, all you see is concrete and steel.
    Cindy didn’t live in the best part of town. On her street, we drove past abandoned storefronts plastered with sun-bleached posters for psychic phone readings, two sketchyCircle Ks, and a rim shop with barred windows and doors. If I thought the Metropark garage near Tambuku was bad, the one attached to her high-rise apartment building was downright sinister. It reminded me that I needed to rework the