Calling Detective Harris
I called Detective Harris.
Six years earlier, he’d been one of the deputies searching the pond. Over time he’d made sergeant, but he still remembered Lily. He came to the farmhouse within the hour.
I showed him everything.
The cut sunflowers.
The white box.
The note.
The photograph.
The open back gate.
Harris crouched near the broken stems and studied the ground. The flowers had been cut cleanly with shears. Tire tracks marked the damp soil near the old gate.
That gate led straight to the sunflower patch.
Only family and a few old neighbors even knew it was there.
Someone hadn’t stumbled onto our grief by accident.
Someone had studied it.
Someone had chosen the one wound in our family that had never healed.
Harris asked me to call the number again, this time from his phone with the line blocked. He told me to keep the man talking.
So I did.
The same low, calm voice answered.
He repeated the demand for forty thousand dollars. Repeated the motel location. Repeated the promise that Lily was alive.
Then, in the background, I heard a bell over a door.
A woman called out, “Order for Ray.”
When the man hung up, Harris looked at me.
“Ray’s Diner,” he said.
There was only one near the Pine Crest Motel.
