Part 1 — CHFR The Phone Call That Made My Blood Run Cold
The phone call came on a Tuesday afternoon.
I was sitting at my desk, half-listening to a coworker explain something about a deadline, when my phone lit up with the name of Emma’s elementary school.
My stomach tightened immediately.
Parents know that feeling.
A school rarely calls in the middle of the day to tell you everything is wonderful.
I answered before the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Carter?”
“Yes.”
“This is Emma’s teacher. Can you come to the school?”
I was already pushing back my chair.
“What happened? Is Emma okay?”
There was a pause.
Just long enough to frighten me.
“Emma is fine.”
I closed my eyes for half a second.
Then her teacher lowered her voice.
“But you need to come here. It’s about the man who picks her up.”
Every argument my husband had made over the previous three weeks came crashing back into my mind.
Every warning.
Every suspicious look.
Every time Ryan had told me I trusted people too easily.
And suddenly, for the first time, I wondered whether he had been right.
The man who had been walking our seven-year-old daughter home from school was Travis.
Our neighbor.
My longtime family friend.
And, to anyone who didn’t know him, probably the last person they would expect to see waiting outside an elementary school.
Travis was thirty-six, well over six feet tall, tattooed from his wrists almost to his shoulders, and usually dressed in black jeans, heavy boots, and a leather vest.
He rode a motorcycle.
He played bass in a local rock band.
If you saw him approaching you in a dim parking lot, you might instinctively move a little faster.
But that wasn’t the Travis I knew.
I knew the teenager who had lived a few houses from my family when I was growing up.
The guy who had spent an entire Saturday helping me repair my first car and refused to take a dollar for it.
The man who appeared at my mother’s house after my father died and quietly fixed a broken porch railing because he knew none of us had the energy to deal with it.
