Free The Off Season by Colleen Thompson

couldn’t both be hallucinating.
    “ Someone did,” her sister said. “And she claimed to be—she said it wasn’t her fault, what happened to us that night.”
    “What—what else?” Christina asked, too shocked to admit she’d experienced something similar. And uncertain whether to be relieved or horrified that she was no longer so alone.
    “She claimed that she was forced to leave us.” Annie’s voice trembled. “She told me she was taken.”
    “Taken,” Christina echoed, her stomach knotting with the memory of her daughter using the word murdered instead. Or had it been the baby monitor she’d really heard that night, too, instead of a twenty-eight-month-old toddler? The idea took hold, and once more, she imagined some criminal deliberately hacking into the device, someone eager to game both her sister and herself.
    Was it for money? But Christina’s thoughts turned to her car and the crude word carved into its side. The malice in that act made the silence from the floor below even more unnerving.
    “Yes, taken ,” Annie said as Christina hurried to the staircase. “I tried to get her to say more, at least to tell me if she’s safe now. But all she said was that she n-needed us to come find her.”
    Christina’s heart stuttered as the familiar words sank in. “Find her where?”
    At the sound of her feet on the treads, Max came wagging from the family room to meet her on the landing. Ignoring the big dog, Christina edged past him.
    “I don’t know,” said Annie. “I couldn’t think. I didn’t—”
    “So what did you say to her?” Christina headed for the kitchen, then reached for a scrap of paper left sitting on the counter. She recognized Renee’s loopy handwriting, still girlish as ever, at a glance.
    “I told her I needed her , that we both needed her back then. But not now, and that the last thing I have time for in my life is someone playing sick games.”
    Christina skimmed Renee’s note, her stomach unclenching at its promise to be home from the Kid Zone by two o’clock or so.
    “You still there?” Annie asked, doubt spilling back into her voice.
    “Good for you,” Christina said, proud that her sister had grown past the days when she’d dreamed up childish stories of their real mother, making her out to be the kidnapped princess in some dark fairy tale. “But did you ask her name? Did she say?” Just in case this nutcase really is our mother . . .
    “She just kept begging me to listen. I—I was so upset, I cut her off, and when she tried to call me right back, I turned off my phone. Do you—was I wrong to do it?”
    Christina cringed at this cry for approval. But she couldn’t deny it to her sister. She never had been able to.
    “Of course you weren’t wrong,” Christina said, falling back into the familiar habit of rescuing Annie—and her sister’s of looking to her to do so—that had been permanently ingrained in each of them so long ago. “But we’re going to need more information. Did you look back to see the number? Maybe we can track her down.” Or maybe, Christina thought, she should call back the private investigator she’d hired and have him deal with this lunatic.
    And there was always Harris, though the thought of trusting him with the story she’d told only to her husband turned her stomach.
    “I—no, I didn’t,” Annie said. “I didn’t think. I just tried to pull myself together. But in the end, it was no good. I had to go to bed.”
    “I wish you’ll called me right away.”
    “I—I was worried you might be mad I hung up on her.”
    “Why would I be upset?” Christina asked her. “We have no idea who this woman really was or what she could’ve wanted. But maybe I should try to find out, in case she decides to hassle you again. Did you get the phone number?”
    “I—no. I didn’t notice.”
    “Could you check your phone’s recent calls, then, while you have me on the line?”
    “I’m not sure how to do it. Let me