The Burning Girl Read Online Free Page A

missing wife, Stephanie. She’d simply failed to come home from work one night. Schaffer suspected foul play, had various theories that he had gone over in depth with Ray. But lacking any hard evidence, the police had closed the case. Tim had hired no fewer than five other private detectives since—one a year. He refused to give up on the woman he loved.
    There were so many cases like that, thousands of people a year who just went missing and were never found—though it was getting increasingly hard these days simply to disappear. When people couldn’t be tracked through cell phones or credit card use, the police generally assumed that they were dead. Possibly an accident—car off the edge of a cliff, maybe. Maybe a stranger crime—a seamless abduction, murder, and body disposal—though it was less likely. Or suicide—though most suicides left a note.
    But sometimes the missing person had actively sought to disappear. Which wasn’t a crime. An adult has the perfect right to walk off the edge of his or her life and never look back. Of course, most people don’t walk out on spouses, kids, relatives, jobs. Most people cling to those things. But some just toss it all away—depression, mental illness, or maybe they just get fed up with the day-to-day grind. For them, running away is the answer to those crushing questions: Is this it? Is this all there is?
    Ray wanted Eloise to meet the client, and she had agreed. She got in her car and drove to Ray’s office on the ground floor of a restored town house near The Hollows Historical Society. She usually didn’t love interfacing with clients, and Ray wouldn’t have asked her unless he was unsure about something. But today, Eloise was just happy to get away from the smell of smoke.
    She parked and walked up the tree-lined street, climbed the porch steps, and went inside. The office was a two-room space, consisting of an anteroom where a receptionist might sit, but in which there were only two folding chairs and a magazine rack containing back issues of National Geographic and nothing else. A doorway led to Ray’s space, which was furnished sparsely with a desk and chair, computer, phone, locked filing cabinet, and two more folding chairs. Eloise thought he should fix it up—paint, hang some art, get a few pieces of nice furniture.
    “Why?” he’d asked. “Are we hurting for business?” He had a point. Ray Muldune was a low-overhead kind of guy.
    She felt Tim Schaffer before she saw him. He gave off an unsettling kind of frenetic energy. When he shook Eloise’s hand, he pumped it as if he were trying to draw water. Eloise felt her shoulder crack.
    “Our life was perfect,” he said to Eloise when she sat down across from Ray’s desk. “We had just bought a house. We both had good jobs. We were talking about starting a family.”
    Schaffer never stopped moving, pacing, gesticulating as he ran down the details Ray had already shared. How his wife had simply not come home from work on a Wednesday night five years ago. She’d taken no money from their accounts, had never used their credit cards. Her car had never been recovered. His energy wound down as he finished his story, until finally he slumped his tall, lean form into the chair beside Eloise. His eyes kept moving, though, drifting from one point to the next, hardly ever settling until they eventually rested on Eloise.
    “Are you getting anything?” he asked her again. His hazel eyes bored into her.
    “It doesn’t work like that, Mr. Schaffer,” Ray said. “What Eloise does—it takes time. She may not get anything at all. I do the work of a private detective, and if Eloise gets something, it can be a big help.”
    “But are you?” he asked. He leaned so far forward, Eloise thought he was going to topple his folding chair. “Getting anything?”
    Eloise shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
    Schaffer was a man on broadcast, one of those that only talked and never took anything