Day five I called Kayla. She didn’t pick up. Texted her. Nothing. Called again that night and it went straight to voicemail, and I started to feel something cold settle in my stomach that I couldn’t talk my way out of.

Kayla always answered. Kids that age, that phone is glued to them.

Day six. That was today. I was standing at the sink when my cell rang, a number I didn’t know, and something in me already knew not to want to answer it. “Mrs. Parker?” A man’s voice. A detective, off the county line. He asked if I was Lacey’s mother and I said yes and my voice came out so small I didn’t recognize it.

He said her car had turned up at a rest stop off the interstate, I-40, way past where she had any reason to be. Said the keys were still in it. And then he said the thing that knocked the air clean out of me. The phone was on the seat. Just sitting there on the driver’s seat. I started shaking right there at the sink because I knew, I knew, that girl would no more leave that phone behind than leave her own arm. Then he said there were signs of a struggle, and he said it real careful, the way they say things they don’t want to say.

He told me the cameras at the rest stop caught a van pulling up next to her car at 2:14 in the morning. He told me the last person she’d been messaging online was a man, a grown man, and that his name had already popped up in their system. He didn’t have to finish the sentence for me to understand what kind of system, and what kind of man.

He said they had 48 hours before the case changed into something else. I don’t think I have to spell out what something else means.