“Will you please call me when your parents get back?”

“Will do,” he says, looking at the card, “Detective Carpenter.”

Ruth is suddenly very quiet. I assume she’s still processing the trauma and worry of wondering where her sister and brother-in-law are. Considering the chilly rain outside, Mexico should be a relief, even the source of a little sisterly envy. That is, if envy wasn’t a sin—which it was in any Bible I’d read in a hotel room.

I face her. “Are you going to stay with your niece and nephew?”

“No,” she says, snapping herself out of her stupor. “As I said back at your office, I have to head back to Idaho for the church caucus.”

“Right,” I say, though I know she’d told me no such thing.

I turn to Joshua and Sarah.

Ruth tugs at me.

“Let’s go now, Detective.”

Four

Ruth doesn’t utter a word until we are back on the gravel road. Her jaw is clenched, and I watch her grasp her hands and press them between her knees. I crack the window. Her wintergreen deodorant is working overtime.

“I’m sorry you came out all this way,” I say. “The kids should have called you or something.”

“Something’s wrong,” she says. “I know it.”

I try to calm her. “The fact that their parents left them alone is wrong in my book, but Joshua is old enough to look after his sister.”

I don’t tell her that my own parents were far, far worse. I survived.

“Something was missing,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense.”

I take my eyes off the road and glance at her for a split second.

“I haven’t been out here for several years. Maybe six. My sister always had her wedding portrait hanging in the front room. Next to the kids’ latest photographs.”

“Okay,” I say.

“It was gone. I think that’s weird, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “Maybe.”

I don’t tell her what I thought was out of place.

The T-shirt.

Maybe it was something Joshua had hidden and wore it only when his parents were away. Miller High Life didn’t fit the Wheaton family at all.

“I’ll check with the orphanage in Mexico,” I tell her. “Name?”

“La Paloma.”

“All right,” I say. “If it checks out, we’re good. If they aren’t there—though I’m sure they are—then we’ll fill out the paperwork and report them missing.”

“My sister never said they were going there,” she says. “She would have told me.”

“Do you share everything?”

“Yes. Everything.”

I look at her eyes.

“Does she know you wear mascara?”

Ruth turns away.

“No,” she replies, her voice hushed. “I only do that when I travel. I like to fit in when I’m outside of my church group.”