Born To Be Wild by Patricia Rosemoor Read Free Book Online Page A

rumbling into the lot. They were out of the truck before the bus was parked. When the door opened, Micah was standing there. He stepped in front of the door before the first kid could alight.
    “Hey, move!” the anxious kid said.
    “Hold your horses, hotshot.”
    The driver, an older woman, asked, “Sir, is there a problem?”
    “There is. Our daughter is missing,” he told her over the cacophony of noise made by disgruntled kids who wanted off.
    Isabel scrunched up next to him. “Lucy never got on her bus yesterday. We want to ask these kids if maybe they saw her.”
    Her desperate tone got to him, as did the fact that she was pressed up against his side, but Micah forced himself to remain stoic. If he tried to comfort her, Isabel would surely break down and he didn’t want to cause her more grief.
    The bus driver shook her head. “I’m so sorry.” Then she turned to the busload of kids and gave a sharp whistle. “Listen up! These people are looking for their child! She never got on her bus to go home yesterday and now she’s missing!”
    Voices lowered and fell silent. Micah could read outright fear in some of the kids’ expressions.
    “Do any of you know Lucinda Falcon?” Isabel asked, holding up one of the missing posters to show them. “Lucy Falcon?”
    A few hands raised.
    “Did you see her yesterday?”
    “I did in class,” a girl said.
    Another nodded. “Me, too.”
    “Out here in the lot,” Micah specified. “When you were getting on your buses to go home. Did any of you see her, then?”
    Kids shrugged and shook their heads and began talking among themselves.
    “If anyone remembers anything,” Isabel said, “please tell your teacher.”
    Micah added, “Ask your friends, too.”
    Another bus was just pulling into the lot, so Micah backed out and quickly approached it. Isabel went straight to a third bus. And while he was questioning the kids, even more buses arrived. Unable to keep up, he and Isabel stood together in the midst of the parking lot with kids running by them. Isabel appeared crushed.
    A dark-haired woman dressed in a navy pantsuit approached them.
    “That’s the principal, Gloria Rivera.”
    “Ms. Falcon.” The woman turned her dark eyes to Micah in question.
    “This is Lucy’s father, Micah Wild. Micah, Principal Rivera.”
    They shook hands and the principal said, “I assume you haven’t found Lucy.”
    “I’m afraid not,” Micah said. “We asked some of the kids on buses if they saw her, but there were simply too many coming in at once to catch all of them.”
    “I can assemble everyone in the auditorium—”
    “That’ll take time.” Time they could use to track down any leads, Micah thought. They’d been here for an hour already. “It’s most likely the kids who know Lucy are in her class. Maybe that’s the way to go.”
    “Fine. You have my permission to address her class yourselves. The bell will ring in ten minutes. I see you have flyers with Lucy’s photo. If you can leave copies, I can send a student aide around to all of the other classes with posters and a note to the teachers to ask their own students if they saw your daughter after school yesterday.”
    “Sounds like a good plan,” Micah said, forcing up a smile for the woman as he handed over a handful of flyers.
    His smile didn’t last long. Talking to Lucy’s sixth-grade class proved to be as frustrating as talking to the kids on the buses. No one had seen Lucy in the parking lot other than her friend Brittany, who didn’t have anything to add to what she’d already told Isabel.
    Once they left the classroom, the principal intercepted them, her expression worried. “I don’t know that there is any connection, but we seem to have another student unaccounted for.”
    “Who?” Isabel asked.
    “A seventh-grader named Sam Donovan. If a child doesn’t show up and the parents haven’t called in, we automatically call the parents. We couldn’t get them at home, so we’re trying to