Sunshine and the Shadowmaster Read Online Free PDF Page B

found no clues as to where Mark might be now.
    â€œSomeone should be here to answer the phone at all times,” Jack said, “just in case Mark decides to get in touch.”
    Since Heather had to work, she called around until she found someone willing to sit by the phone all day. Tawny, who was Heather’s Aunt Amy’s teenaged sister, arrived ten minutes after Heather called her. Meanwhile, Lucas contacted his house in Monterey and gave instructions that the phone there was never to be left unattended.
    Next, Jack took Lucas down to the sheriff’s station, where Lucas filled out a missing person’s report. Within an hour from the time Jack Roper had arrived at Heather’s house, there was an all-points bulletin out on the missing boy.
    Jack mobilized the local search and rescue unit and they set to work in teams, looking for signs of Mark in the woods surrounding North Magdalene. Meanwhile, the sheriff’s deputies had the job of knocking on doors all over town, branching out from Heather’s house, asking anyone and everyone if they had seen Lucas Drury’s ten-year-old son.
    Heather produced a recent school picture that Mark had sent her. They managed to make a fairly good photocopy of it on the copy machine over at the North Magdalene School, so they could put together a flyer about Mark. The deputies carried copies of the flyer with them, passing them out to everyone they interviewed. And before Heather went in to work, she walked up one side of Main Street and down the other, tacking up a flyer on every available surface.
    Sheriff Pangborn assigned Jack the job of personally interviewing Marnie Jones, Kenny Riggins and Oggie Jones, the three people in town most likely to have more information about Mark. Lucas wanted to be there for those interviews.
    Jack reluctantly agreed. “All right. But you’ll be an observer and that’s all.”
    Lucas swore that he’d keep his mouth shut.
    * * *
    They went to see Marnie Jones first.
    From a chair in the corner of Regina Jones’s big, old-fashioned living room, Lucas studied the girl. She had short-cropped brown hair, blue eyes, a pugnacious nose and a dirt smudge on her cheek. A quick, ruthless intelligence shone in her eyes. And “pint-size hell-raiser” seemed to be written all over her. Lucas’s guess was that this girl would be fiercely protective of anyone to whom she’d given her friendship.
    He wondered at his quiet, well-behaved son. How strange that he’d have chosen this feisty Jones kid as a pal. But then it struck Lucas: Marnie Jones was exactly the kind of friend he himself would have chosen when he was a boy—had anyone in this gossip-ridden, inbred town been willing to be his friend.
    Guilt pierced Lucas, twisting deep. Heather had said Marnie and Mark were real buddies. But until today, he’d only been vaguely aware of Mark’s friendship with the girl. His sister-in-law, who’d spent two weeks with Mark last winter, seemed to know more about his son than he did.
    â€œMarnie, I want you to tell us where Mark is,” Jack Roper instructed.
    â€œI don’t know, ” Marnie replied tightly. “I told you, I haven’t seen him since last January.”
    Regina Jones, Marnie’s stepmother, stood behind the girl. She put her hands on Marnie’s shoulders. “You must tell them whatever you know, Marnie. It’s very important.”
    â€œIt’s the God’s truth, Gina. Last winter’s the last time I saw him. And I don’t know where he is or where he went. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
    Regina looked at Jack. “She’s telling the truth. I’m sure of it.”
    Lucas, silent in his corner chair, thought so, too. He wrote fiction for a living, after all. And to be good at that, you had to have a handle on body language. Marnie sat with one ankle hooked across the other knee and both hands wrapped around her raised leg.