LITMIR.BIZ

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dirt. A pre-teen girl walked blindly with her eyes glued to a cell phone, her belly exposed through the dirty shirt she wore. An old man two trailers down was lying on the ground, peering up under a lawnmower with a wrench in his hand and oil on his pants.

      Ellington knocked on the door and it was answered almost instantly. The woman that answered the door was pretty in a plain way. She looked to be in her fifties and the strands of gray in her otherwise black hair stood out in a way that was almost like decoration rather than the signs of age. She looked tired but the smell that came off of her breath when she said “Who are you?” made Mackenzie pretty sure that she’d been drinking.

      Ellington answered but made sure not to step in front of Mackenzie when he did so. “I’m Agent Ellington and this is Agent White, with the FBI,” he said.

      “FBI?” she asked. “What the hell for?”

      “Are you Tammy Manning?” he asked.

      “I am,” she said.

      “Can we come in?” Ellington asked.

      Tammy eyed them in a way that was not suspicious but something closer to disbelief. She nodded and stepped back, allowing them in. The moment they walked inside, the thick smell of cigarette smoke engulfed them. The air was filled with it. A lone cigarette burned in an ashtray of dead butts on an old coffee table.

      Another woman sat on the couch on the opposite side of the coffee table. She looked a little uncomfortable. Mackenzie thought she actually appeared a little grossed out to be sitting there.

      “If you have company,” Mackenzie said, “perhaps we should speak outside.”

      “She’s not company,” Tammy said. “This is my daughter Rita.”

      “Hi,” Rita said, standing to shake their hands.

      It was apparent that this was Delores Manning’s younger sister by about three or four years. She looked very similar to the photo of Delores that Mackenzie had seen on the back cover of Love Blocked.

      “Oh, I see,” Ellington said. “Well, maybe it’s a good thing that you’re here too, Rita.”

      “Why?” Tammy asked, plopping down next to her younger daughter. She plucked the cigarette from the ashtray and took a deep inhale.

      “Delores Manning’s car was discovered abandoned with two flat tires on State Route 14 late last night. No one has seen her or heard from her since then. Not her agent, not any friends, no one. We were hoping you might know where she is.”

      Before Ellington was done, Mackenzie had gotten the answer from the look of shock on Rita Manning’s face.

      “Oh my God,” Rita said. “Are you sure it was her car?”

      “We’re certain,” Ellington said. “It was complete with half a box of her latest book in the back. She had just come from a signing in Cedar Rapids.”

      “Yeah,” Rita said. “She was…probably on the way here. That was the plan anyway. When she didn’t show up by midnight, I figured she just decided to stay at a motel somewhere.”

      “Had you made plans for her to stay here?” Mackenzie asked. She was looking at Tammy when she asked it, but Tammy appeared to be more interested in enjoying her cigarette.

      “Sort of,” Tammy said. “She called me last week and said she’d be in Cedar Rapids. Said she wanted to come by to visit, so I told her that was fine. I let Rita know and she got here yesterday right after lunch. Sort of a surprise.”

      “I drove all the way up from Texas A and M,” Rita said.

      “When was the last time you spoke with Delores?” Ellington asked Rita.

      “About three weeks ago. We usually do an okay job of staying in touch.”

      “What state of mind was she in the last time you spoke?” Mackenzie asked.

      “Oh, she was on cloud nine. She had just signed on to do another three books with her publisher. We made plans to go out on the town drinking the next time she was in Texas.”

      “You’re a student, I take it?” Ellington asked.

      “Yes. A senior.”

      “Mrs. Manning,” Mackenzie said, making sure the mother knew that she was being spoken to and not the daughter, “if you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem too bothered by this.”

      She shrugged, exhaled a mouthful of smoke, and then ground the butt out in the overflowing ashtray. “I guess someone from the FBI knows more about how I should feel about something like this than I do?”

      “I wasn’t saying that, ma’am,” Mackenzie said.

      “Look…we’re talking about Delores here. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. I’m sure she called Triple A or some shit when the tires went flat. She’s probably already halfway back to New York by now. Making money, traveling the country. If she was in some kind of trouble, she would have called.”

      “So she wouldn’t have been embarrassed to call for your help?”

      Tammy actually thought about this for a minute. “Probably not. She would have called for help and then raised hell if I asked even one question. It’s just how she is.”

      The resentment in her voice was almost as thick as the smoke in the air throughout the tiny trailer.

      “So you have no idea where she might be?” Ellington asked.

      “None. Wherever she is, she didn’t bother calling me to tell me about it. But that’s not too big of a surprise. She never really tells me much of anything.”

      “I see,” Ellington said. He looked around the room with a frown. Mackenzie could tell that he was thinking the same thing she was thinking: That was a wasted hour-and-ten-minute drive.

      Mackenzie looked directly toward Rita, currently a little pissed at the lack of help from Tammy. “We’ve got Bent Creek PD on it, as well as agents from two different offices. From what we know, she’s been missing for roughly twenty-nine hours. We’ll be in touch the moment we find anything.”

      Rita gave a nod and a soft “Thank you.”

      Both Mackenzie and Ellington paused a beat to give Tammy a chance to add anything. When she did nothing more than light up another cigarette and reach for the TV remote on the coffee table, Mackenzie headed for the door.

      When she was outside, she breathed the fresh air in deeply and walked straight for the car. She was already opening the passenger side door when Ellington finally made it down the steps.

      “You okay?” he asked her as he approached the car.

      “I’m fine,” she said. “I just can’t stomach people that have no concern at all for the safety of their own flesh and blood.”

      She was about to get into the car when the front door of Tammy Manning’s trailer opened. They both watched as Rita came down the stairs in a quick little jog. She came over to the car and let out a shaky sigh.

      “Oh my God, I’m so sorry about that,” she said. Mackenzie saw that Rita also seemed to be breathing much easier now that she was outside. “Things with Mom and Delores haven’t been the best ever since Dad died. And then when Delores became this well-to-do writer, something about it almost offended Mom.”

      “You don’t have to explain personal problems,” Ellington said. “We see it from time to time.”

      “Be honest with me…this thing with Delores…do you think she’ll be found? Do you think she might be dead somewhere?”

      “It’s far too early to tell,” Mackenzie said.

      “Was it…well, was there anything like foul play?”

      Mackenzie recalled the spray-painted glass. She was pretty sure she still had some of the black flakes of the paint under her fingernails. But it was far too soon in the course of events to give such information to family members—not until more information could be obtained.

      “Again,

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