“Are you going to help or not?”

“What if I say no?”

“Then Mom’s going to be alone with the girls. And she won’t know why I’m not there, because I’m not calling her or anybody else. In five minutes I’m going to disappear.” She drew in an audibly ragged breath. “This is the last call I’m making on my cell phone.”

“What am I supposed to tell her?”

“You’re the journalist. Come up with a story.”

“Wendy—”

The line went dead. If I tried calling back, I knew she wouldn’t answer. As far as Wendy was concerned, we were finished.

Where had she called from? I’d heard background noise as we spoke, cars passing on what might have been a highway. Last year after Wendy lost a cell phone, I’d helped her place a tracking app on her new one. Now I went through the steps to locate her, but the app had been disabled.

I zipped down to recent calls and hit Wendy’s number just to be sure. I waited until I heard her voice again, but as I had predicted, this time the voice was a recording. She told me, in the sweetest, most genuine way, that she was sorry to miss my call, asked me to leave a message and wished me a good day.

Of course nothing about the recording was true. Wendy wasn’t sorry to miss my call, and she’d made it clear there was no point in leaving a message.

Worst of all? I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have any good days, not a single one, in the near future.

CHAPTER TWO

I’m only a mediocre liar. Although Wendy graduated from Seabank High, our parents sent me to Catholic schools, my education culminating in an all-girls academy one town away. The nuns and lay teachers were as relentless as my mother, and I quickly learned they could spot any lie unless it had a large dollop of fact mixed in. Since lining up facts and bending them slightly is tedious, most of the time the truth is the easier path.

Unless I’m working.

Now I remembered that lesson as I tried to come up with a story to tell my mother. Mentally I listed facts I could use. Arlie Gracey adored her older daughter. She was sinfully proud of Wendy’s accomplishments. Like my father, my mother also hoped that one day Wendy would take over the family business. Finally, she adored her grandchildren and wanted the best for them.

So far so good.

Then I listed facts I couldn’t use. Wendy was afraid she was about to be arrested for murder. She wasn’t coming home anytime soon because she planned to disappear. While she’d made her phone call to me from Phoenix, I had no idea where she planned to go from there.

Of course the facts I couldn’t use were the ones Arlie would most want to hear.

I was still considering my story when my cell phone blasted Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” my tongue-in-cheek ringtone for Mom. I didn’t want to answer until I had my story straight, but we had no time to spare.