Storm by Aria Ray

Chapter Four

Zoe

Iparked my car as near to the airport as I could get. It was still way too early for the airport’s employees to let me in. Eventually, I realized I didn’t need inside after all.

I found Alison’s phone inside a trash can on the side of the road. The app had led me straight to it. Shaking now and bordering panic, I fished it out.

There was no legitimate reason why Alison would have thrown her phone into a trash can; more importantly, into a trash can that was all the way out here. This was nowhere close to her dorms or the college. If Alison was supposed to meet someone here, I was pretty sure she would have told me about it. We were that close. We told each other everything. She would have told our mom about it, too.

I refused to believe that she had secretly come to this location and then left her phone in a trash can. She would never do that! Something was wrong. From here, I didn’t know where to start looking. First, I had to call our mom, even though I didn’t want to.

“Zoe? Is Alison okay? Did you speak to her?” Mom didn’t sound like she had gotten a wink of sleep since I last spoke to her.

“Mom, I think you should call 9-1-1.”

She gasped, on the verge of breaking into tears. “What? Why?”

“Nothing has happened. We don’t know if she’s in any danger yet. We have to keep believing that she’s okay, that we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

“Zoe, what are you talking about? Where is she?”

“I don’t know, Mom, but I found her cellphone dumped in a trash can near Redding Airport. There are no other clues here.”

Mom gasped again and I was genuinely worried she was going to faint.

“My baby!” she screamed. “My baby girl!”

“We don’t know what’s going on, Mom. We can’t afford to panic right now. We just need to focus on the facts; Alison is supposedly missing, but she could be fine. She could be with a friend, and her phone could have gotten stolen.”

Mom seemed to calm a little when I explained it like that, but that was all it was—just an explanation. And not a great one at that.

“Okay,” she said, sounding as disheartened as I felt. “I’m going to call 9-1-1 and report her missing.”

“Okay. I’ll stop by her dorm and then head over to you. Just stay calm, Mom.”

I ended the call and got into my car with the intention of driving to Alison’s dorm, but I couldn’t move. My hands were locked and frozen around the wheel. I couldn’t get them to function. A dark chill was seeping into my bones.

Something didn’t feel right.

At Alison’s dorm, I had to wake up her roommates because it was still very early. Her bedroom was empty. Her sleepy roommates claimed they hadn’t seen her all evening. They said they weren’t too alarmed since she said she was going to be busy working on an essay.

Nobody seemed to know where she could have disappeared. I tried to keep it together. I needed to stay calm so I could find her. And I would find her. I just had to focus.

I tried looking in all the places on campus where she could have gone to study, hoping she just needed some quiet time to herself. The library, the park where she used to like to read. It was too early in the morning. All these places were deserted, and there was no sign of her.

When I got into my car again, I dialed Dad’s number. It was the only other option I had at the moment. Alison had been talking about him. What if she’d gotten in touch with him, and they had agreed to meet? What if he knew exactly where she was right now?

When Dad answered the phone, he sounded groggy. We hadn’t been on speaking terms lately, and he didn’t expect me to call.

“Did you see Alison last night?” I asked right away.

“Ali? I haven’t seen her in weeks. Why? Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” Panic threatened to set in, but I refused to let it.

“What do you mean you don’t know? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know where she is, and I’m trying to contact her. Her phone… Well, I found it in a trash can near Redding Airport. I have no idea why it was there.”

“Wait, hold up. You found her phone in a trash can?”

“I don’t have the time to hash this out with you, Dad. I need to find her.”

“Zoe… I just want to know what’s going on with my daughter.”

He sounded angry with me, but I didn’t care. I had only called him because I needed information, but he had none. He was no help.

“If you’re that concerned about the welfare of your daughters, then you should have made an effort to be a part of our lives.”

“I do want to be a part of your lives, Zoe.”

I ended the call abruptly. I didn’t need to hear anymore. I had to get to Mom’s place and find out what the police had to say. The more I had to deal with my dad, the more pissed off I was going to get.

I started driving again, with Alison’s phone sitting neatly on my lap. I was just hoping that the phone would ring. She’d be on the other end, laughing at me for making a big deal out of nothing.

I wasn’t overreacting, though. I could feel it in my soul; something had happened to my baby sister. I needed to find her.

The hours after I discovered Alison was missing went by in a frenzy of phone calls. I handled them while crying, shaking, and trying to keep it together.

When I went to see Mom, she was an absolute mess. I found her in the middle of the kitchen, lying in a heap on the floor. We had endured one blow after another. Ever since we found out about what my dad had been doing all these years—his infidelity and secret family—things had been spiraling downward for us.

And now Alison was missing.

Mom was a lost soul.

She had always been a giver, the kind of person who put her family first. She had loved Dad, doted on him. She had given up her life and career for him, so she could stay home and raise his children. He had betrayed her in the ugliest way possible.

Through her tears, she managed to tell me that she’d spoken to the police. They were a dead end, not considering this an important report because she had been missing for less than twenty-four hours.

I couldn’t wrap my head around this. In the past two years, our town had developed a problem. People were going missing. Why had they not considered that?

My sister would not become just another part of the statistics. It was too soon to write her off as Unsolved. We had to keep hoping that Alison could be found.

I was also hoping for a simple explanation.

At this point, I didn’t even care if she had a few secrets she was hiding from me. Maybe she had a boyfriend who she hadn’t introduced to us, or a drug habit that I hadn’t picked up on.

I just wanted to find her safe and sound, no matter what.

Eventually, I managed to get Mom into bed and told her she needed to stay there until I got back. I left the house to go talk to a few of Alison’s friends from school. My best bet right now was to retrace her steps from the previous day and to figure out all the people she had spoken to and seen. I had plans on calling her phone’s network provider and requesting a call log, although I suspected I wasn’t going to come by it very easily. They didn’t just dish out that kind of information to everyone who asked.

I hadn’t even arrived at the school before Mom was calling my phone again.

“Mom, you need to rest,” I scolded her when I answered.  “You need to take care of yourself! I said I’d call you the minute I heard anything.”

“It’s happening, Zoe. This is really happening.” Her voice sounded hollow and like she was shaking. After everything she had lost, she couldn’t bear much more.

“What’s happening, Mom? What are you talking about?”

“They called Larry. They called your Dad. The kidnappers. They said they have Ali, and they want half a million dollars in ransom.”

Dad was at the house when I arrived there just minutes later.

Apparently, he had rushed over to see Mom the moment he received the package in the mail.

I needed to put my personal opinions about him aside for the moment and just focus on finding Alison. I still found it difficult to get past my pure hatred for him. Everything we had endured and were still putting up with was all his fault. He was the reason why this was happening to us, and I didn’t know how to make him pay.

“They sent a letter and a photograph,” he said, handing me the package.

Mom was sitting in a chair, sobbing into her hands.

The letter was typed up on a nondescript piece of paper. It said they had Alison, and they wanted half a million in cash in exchange for her. They also warned that we couldn’t get the police involved and if we tried anything, Alison would be dead.

The photograph they had sent along with the letter was a polaroid of Alison sitting on the edge of a bed in what appeared to be a dingy motel room. Her hands were tied, and she was looking directly at the camera but from under very heavy lids. I looked closer and saw marks on her face. They looked like big purple bruises. Sweat glistened on her forehead. She had obviously been drugged, was intoxicated, or both.

My little sister. Afraid my heart would just stop beating, I had to look away from her image. There was no doubt in our minds now. She had been abducted.

Something cracked inside me. All the strength I had managed to gather since three in the morning came crashing down around me. Keeping it together was impossible. My worst nightmare was coming true.

I covered stories like this all the time as part of my work. Whether I liked it or not, how I would cope was always in the back of my head. What would I do if something like this happened to me? If it happened to someone I loved?

Now I knew.

I would completely fall apart.

Dad grabbed me as I fell forward, crumpling the photograph in my hand. I yanked away from him, commanding him to let me go. I didn’t want him touching me.

I didn’t want anyone touching me.

I just wanted my sister back and nobody could do anything to help me.

“I’m going to get the money. We’re going to get Alison back,” Dad said in an attempt to calm me. I glared at him bitterly. Nothing he said would make any difference.

I had researched and studied enough cases like this to know that they rarely ever had a happy ending. All the money in the world wasn’t going to get Alison back to us.

Not unless I did something about it. Not unless there was a different route to take.

I rummaged through the notes in my bag like my life depended on it.

Maybe Alison’s life did depend on it.

Somehow, in the past few minutes, I had managed to pull myself back together again. Mom had already fallen apart. I didn’t consider Dad to be a useful contributor to the situation. He’d been standing at the kitchen window chain smoking this whole time.

The only thing I could do now was work. It was the only way I knew how to keep myself sane.

“What are you looking for?” Mom asked.

I tipped all the contents of my bag on the floor. I was looking for a notebook. It had to be somewhere in my bag.

“I don’t get it. I just don’t get it,” I mumbled, more to myself than to her. She came closer to me.

“What are you talking about, Zoe? Do you have something?”

“I don’t get why the cops haven’t been looking into this. How have they not made the connection yet?” I asked.

Mom tried to grab my shoulders, to get my attention.

“Made what connection? You’re not making any sense!”

“Almost all these kids who disappeared in the past two years went to OCC,” I said, holding up the notebook I’d been looking for.

Mom’s eyes narrowed, and she gulped. Finally, she was beginning to see what I was getting at.

“There has to be something there, something that I’m missing, right?” I mumbled to myself, flipping through my notes. OCC was the Overland Community College. The same one Alison was going to. She’d had her pick of schools, but she’d insisted on OCC. I’d even attempted to talk her into choosing differently, but she refused. If most of these kids who disappeared went to the same school, that was the connecting link. The school had to have something to do with their disappearances as well as my sister’s.

Why weren’t the police paying attention to this?

I finally found the note. I’d scribbled it hastily into a corner of a page just yesterday. I had made that note to remind myself to look into the situation later when I had a chance.

Just yesterday, another student had been reported missing by his mother. His name was Daniel Gentry, and the reason why this piece of information had particularly caught my interest was because I recognized that name.

Through my previous investigative journalism for a local magazine. Dark Slayers, a biker club, was our target. Gentry was one of the names associated with that club, and it was the kind of last name that we didn’t see around here too often. This kid, Daniel Gentry, had to be related to someone in that biker club.

According to their President, I was still very unfamiliar with the world of bikers and motorcycle clubs. I was wracking my brain on what to do.

“You think Alison’s disappearance is connected to all these other kids going missing?” Mom asked, interrupting my thoughts.

I blinked at her and tried to stop thinking about all I’d learned from my research. My mind was running a mile a minute. If I could only talk with her freely about my work. She wouldn’t be able to handle a lot of the details, though. Realizing that I hadn’t answered her question, I nodded.

“It all lines up,” I said.