Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13) Matt Lincoln (chrysanthemum read aloud .txt) 📖

been resting on her husband’s shoulder where they still sat on the couch. “There has to be news.”

I surveyed the whole room. Dr. Osborne was still sitting in the chair across from Curt and Annabelle, while Jackson was huddled in a far less comfortable looking chair in the left-hand corner of the room. He was pressed up against the wall like he was trying to be as far away from the other two as humanly possible while remaining in the same room.

“Yes, there is,” I said with a curt nod, pulling up a folding chair from against the wall and taking a seat next to Dr. Osborne.

“No,” Curt said, shaking his head at the expression on my face, his voice breaking. “No, don’t say it, don’t tell us that.”

“Don’t worry, Mikey’s still alive, as far as we know,” I said quickly, knowing even as I said it how ridiculous it was to tell parents in this situation not to worry. “We do have some new information, though. The good news is that all three of you have been cleared.”

“Cleared?” Annabelle repeated, shaking her head in confusion. “What do you mean by cleared? Cleared of what?”

“Cleared of doing this,” Jackson said darkly from the corner. “It’s not just me who was a suspect, then, was it?”

“Suspect!” Curt roared, looking over at his wife. “Us? How dare you think…”

“Curt, Curt, please,” Dr. Osborne said, holding out her hands to silence him. “You have to understand how these investigations usually go. Just like Agent Marston told you before, ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s the parents who are behind this kind of thing. And failing that, it’s someone known to the v—I mean Mikey.”

I was sure that no one failed to notice how Osborne stumbled over the word “victim,” but at least she caught herself before she said the whole thing.

“I thought you thought it was him, though!” Curt cried, pointing almost violently in Jackson’s direction, though he made a point of not looking at the other man.

“That was what we thought,” I said, nodding slowly. “But we couldn’t rule anyone out as a suspect until now. It was nothing personal, I assure you.”

“Nothing personal?” Curt repeated, his anger clearly unabated. “You seriously expect us not to take it personally that you thought we could do this to our own son!”

I glanced over at Dr. Osborne, who reached out and placed her hand lightly on Curt’s knee to silence him.

“Curt,” she said quietly. “You have to understand—this is our work. We see these things every day. People lie to us every day. We don’t really know you the way that a close friend or family member would or how you know each other. Our priority isn’t you. It’s Mikey. We couldn’t close the door on any possibilities for his sake.”

For a moment, I thought that this was a little too honest, that Curt would push Osborne’s hand away and react even more poorly to her words than he had to mine.

But Osborne was excellent at her job, excellent at reading people, and she knew Curt and Annabelle well enough by then, despite what she said, to know what would work on them. And it turned out, the truth worked just fine, to the couple’s own credit.

Curt opened his mouth as if to respond but then closed it again, his shoulders slumping slightly as if he was giving in to something.

“Yes, of course,” he said, running a hand across his face and practically wiping away his anger. “Of course, that’s your priority. And we appreciate that. We do. I just… I don’t like the idea of you wasting any time looking for Mikey where he isn’t.”

“We know you’re not, though,” Annabelle said quickly, her eyes wide with fear that we would misunderstand her husband. “Wasting time, I mean. We know you’re doing everything you can for Mikey and that you have to pursue the most obvious leads first. It’s just that we know we didn’t take him, so we don’t want you spending time on that when you could be looking for him elsewhere.”

“That’s what Jackson said earlier, just about,” I said, smiling at the man in the corner. “And we understand. This is the most difficult thing that any parent can go through. You don’t have to apologize to us.”

Jackson nodded to me in thanks. I doubted, based on all three parents’ body language, that they’d done much to mend fences even though they’d been cooped up here together all day.

“So?” Osborne asked, leaning into me. “You said there’s news?”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then launched into as delicate a retelling of what Nina and I had learned from Justin as I could manage. There was no way to deliver this news well, though. Throughout the whole story, Jackson, Curt, and Annabelle took turns gasping, yelling, and crying. Eventually, we made it to the end, though.

“That’s it?” Curt asked when I had finished, throwing his hands up in the air. “You don’t have anything else for us?”

I knew how he felt, in a way. I didn’t like that we didn’t have anything else yet, either. The story didn’t exactly end on a happy note, with Mikey adrift out at sea with a madman who may or may not harm him in some way as the best-case scenario, the worst case being that the boy was already dead.

“I’m sorry we don’t have more for you at this time,” I said honestly. “I didn’t want to keep this from you until we did, though. We’ll let you know as soon as we have anything else.”

“We… we appreciate that,” Annabelle managed through her tears, which had been falling for some time then. “We’re glad you told us.”

She winced as she said this and bit her lip like she wasn’t quite sure this was true. That maybe she would’ve preferred it if she still didn’t know what might be happening to Mikey, that her blissful ignorance from moments before seemed a lot better