Bone Cold Read Online Free PDF Page A

what she knew.
    Seven missing children
.
    Sarah trudged up the steps toward her front door, the exhaustion boring deeper. It felt suffocating, overwhelming. Crushing.
    “Sarah!”
    She whipped around at the sound of the female voice on the street behind her. Her heart bumped hard against her sternum in the three seconds required for her to recognize the voice.
    Carla Parsons stood at the bottom of the steps, her face dimly lit by the ancient street lamp. She looked much older than she had the last time Sarah saw her. How long had it been? Eight or nine months? They talked by phone from time to time but not recently. Those dark memories she worked so hard every waking hour to keep at bay, whispered inside her, chilling Sarah to the bone.
    “Carla.” Sarah waited on the landing separating the twin sets of steps that led from the walk to her front stoop. “Are you all right?” It was two a.m. Had there been a break in her son’s case? One Sarah hadn’t heard about? Whatever it was, Carla obviously couldn’t wait to share it.
    “I’ve been waiting for you to come home.”
    The waif thin woman climbed another step, careful to keep her gaze steady on Sarah as if she feared she might disappear. As she neared, Sarah noted the new lines on her face. The loss of her son had taken a heavy toll. No one lived through the loss of a child without suffering the visible as well as the invisible costs. Sarah knew that better than anyone.
    “Waiting? How long?”
    “Since around eight.”
    Sarah sat down on the landing, too tired to do this standing up. “Carla, why didn’t you call my office? I could’ve warned you that I wouldn’t be home until late.”
    The other woman’s shoulders slumped with her own exhaustion as she took a seat next to Sarah. “I didn’t want to talk on the phone. I needed to do this in person. Waiting wasn’t a bother.” She looked at Sarah, hope mingling with the desperation that usually inhabited her sunken eyes. “I’d use just about any excuse not to go home.”
    Carla’s son had been missing for five years, like Sophie. Josh Parsons had been six at the time. Sophie was only five. They’d disappeared a week apart. Since Sarah hadn’t been able to work the case she and Carla had taken every possible step behind the scenes to find their children, including joining a support group. The longer their children were missing the more they fell apart. Sarah had taken a leave of absence from work for those first few months. Carla had been fired from her job.
    Months and years passed and nothing changed except the other faces in their support group. New parents, fresh from losing a child, would wander into a meeting. Others would give up and stop coming. Sarah and Carla had stayed with the meetings longer than most. Then Carla’s husband had died. Eventually Sarah’s had decided to move on with his life. Tom, the man she had married seemingly a lifetime ago, had tried to make Sarah see that at some point they had to start living again. She couldn’t do it, not without Sophie.
    Sarah had promptly slipped over the edge after that. Even she had recognized the downward spiral but she hadn’t been able to stop it. The crash and burn wasn’t her husband’s fault. She’d been on the brink for a while. The trip into that dark abyss had earned Sarah three months in a ritzy place with a fancy name that had been nothing more than a mental hospital. She’d come out no closer to being healed than when she’d gone in. There was no true recovery from the loss of a child. A part of her was broken and it couldn’t be fixed.
    The very day Sarah had been released Carla had overdosed. In truth, Sarah had been contemplating the same thing. Ironically, Carla was the one reason she hadn’t. For two days after the overdose Sarah had sat in that hospital room next to Carla’s bed. She’d held the other woman in her arms and begged her not to give up. A promise that Sarah would always be there for her was the only