Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [72]
A minute later Milo was standing alone by his car on the darkened street. Terrified of a possible encounter between him and Christine (and Thick-Neck Phil), he climbed into his car and headed home.
He had matches to strike and a woman to find, and finally, he knew her name.
chapter 18
Cassidy Glenn, who might always be Freckles in Milo’s mind, was older than Milo had expected. Perhaps as old as he was. With more than a hundred feet still separating them, Milo couldn’t be sure. He was standing on the edge of the Mill Pond Park in Newington, his shadow long in the late-afternoon sun. Just moments ago, he had solved the final mystery of Cassidy Glenn, the one that had proven elusive during his Internet search the day before. Milo now understood what Freckles had meant when she spoke of a morning fight on tape number three, and with that final piece of the puzzle in place, he felt ready to return the camera and the tapes to the woman whom he thought he might know better than almost anyone else in the world.
Less than twenty hours had passed since Milo’s encounter with Officer Eblen and his hairy-knuckled partner, and during that time, he had placed eight unreturned phone calls to Christine, on both the home phone and her cell. Though this seemingly purposeful disconnect by his wife and the continued uncertainty surrounding Thick-Neck Phil left him uneasy, the free time that it had afforded had allowed him to locate Freckles and piece together much of her life.
Once he had the full names of Freckles and Mira, it had been easy.
To start, Mira had turned out to be Meera, an Indian or Pakistani name with which Milo had not been familiar. Combined with the last name Singh and his knowledge of the circumstances of her death, he had found several news reports of her accident with relative ease. Last October, Meera had been training at Bartolini Farm and Stables in Glastonbury, Connecticut, when the horse that she was riding refused to jump over a routine obstacle on an indoor equestrian course, throwing Meera from the saddle and onto the turf. The fall had broken Meera’s neck, killing her almost instantly; an incident that Milo discovered is not so uncommon in the equestrian world. This indicated that Freckles had begun her diary just six months ago, which thrilled Milo. It meant that in getting to know her through the tapes, he had gotten to know the Freckles of now, of today, and not some decade-old version of the woman.
Though the story about Meera’s death had not included any reference to Freckles, Milo had managed to find her the old-fashioned way: through the phone book. Searching through the listings of Newington (the town in which he had found the camera) and surrounding towns, he had found a Cassidy Glenn, the only one in the book, living about twenty minutes from his apartment, in the town of Berlin.
He was confident that he had his girl.
Milo had also managed to find information on Freckles’s runaway friend, Tess Bryson, or more specifically on her father, Sean Bryson. Milo hadn’t expected to find anything on Tess, given that she had disappeared more than a decade before the Internet had become ubiquitous, but in searching on her name, Milo turned up a story about Sean Bryson in which his daughter, Tess, was referenced. Sean Bryson, formerly of Millville, Massachusetts, was in year eight of a fifteen-year sentence at Walpole State Penitentiary, convicted for the sexual assault of his ten-year-old niece during a camping trip to the Berkshires. Though the writer of the story was professional enough not to explicitly link the possible disappearance of his daughter ten years earlier to his apparent predilection for familial pedophilia, she had included a short paragraph on Tess’s disappearance, trusting the reader to make the obvious connection.
Milo wondered if Freckles knew about Mr. Bryson’s current place of residence and thought not. Had she known, she too might have suspected that Tess had run away from more than just an unsatisfying social life or a failing grade in math, and that maybe her disappearance