Finding Claire Fletcher by Lisa Regan Read Free Book Online Page B

great couple. Real down to earth and funny. Rick and I used to fish together. Our kids were near the same age—I have a son too, he’s in college in Colorado. So I used to bring mine down sometimes and they’d hang out with Claire, Bree, and Tom while me, Rick and Jen shot the shit. My wife died shortly before I came out here, and Rick and Jen were great friends to me. I needed it then. Jen helped me a lot with Holly. With her mother gone, someone had to do the woman-to-woman stuff and I wasn’t exactly fit. A few years after I met the Fletchers, I retired, went private.”
    “Then Claire went missing,” Connor said.
    Farrell drank the rest of his beer and rose to get another. He glanced at Connor’s bottle, which was still half-full. “Help yourself if you want more,” he said as he resumed his seat on the couch.
    Mitch continued. “Like I said, after a while the police backed off. Jen begged me to keep working the case. She would have paid me but I wouldn’t let her. You see all this time, even to this day, Jen has never given up hope that Claire will come home. She still believes with all her heart that Claire is alive. Even keeps her bedroom exactly the way it was the morning Claire left, right down to the dirty clothes strewn on the floor.”
    Connor smiled. Then his heart gave an uneven thud. Quickly, he sucked down the rest of his beer and rose to get another. He thought of Claire, of the Claire he’d met and spent the night with. She’d asked to see Denise’s room. Well, the dining room which Connor had always considered Denise’s territory. A room he hadn’t gone into since Denise left him.
    He remembered the way Claire had walked around the room. So slowly—taking in everything, skimming her fingers over the furniture, the lines of her tensed body a mixture of curiosity and sadness.
    Had she wondered if her own bedroom remained in the same fashion, ten years’ worth of dust lying heavily on all of her old things? She must have known the Fletchers still lived there. She’d given him their address.
    Mitch popped the cap off Connor’s second beer and Connor took a sip. “Go on,” he said.
    “Well, I couldn’t turn Jen down. I mean what if it had been my Holly?” Mitch smiled lovingly at the photo of his daughter.
    “So I agreed to do whatever I could, which hasn’t been jack shit in the last ten years, I’m sorry to say. But me doing it seemed to give Jen some peace, so I kept on. Rick, on the other hand, he couldn’t hold out day after day the way Jen could. Hoping like that every day. After a couple of years, he kind of gave up. He really believed Claire was dead and he just wanted to grieve her and move on with his life. That didn’t suit Jen.
    “Eventually he left. Took off to Maryland. Been there ever since. He looks after Holly for me now and then. They never did get a divorce, Rick and Jen. I think they still love each other. They just can’t live in the same reality, I guess.”
    Mitch snorted. “The kids, they’re the same, you know? It’s funny that way. Tom sticks by his mother, never says a word to dampen her hope. Brianna, on the other hand, is just like her father. She can be a real wrecking ball, that girl.”
    Connor gave a little hmmph of understated agreement, remembering Brianna’s unholy glare.
    “She thinks Claire is dead. In a way I think she even wants Claire to be dead so they can all move on. She won’t hear a single word on the possibility of recovering Claire alive. It just pisses her off.”
    “You don’t say,” Connor interjected.
    Mitch laughed. “Oh yeah, I forgot you’d met her.”
    “God save me from her wrath.”
    Mitch laughed uproariously, and his genuine affection for Brianna, wrecking ball or no, was evident.
    Connor set his beer down and looked curiously at Mitch. “What do you think?” he asked.
    Visibly sobered by the question, Mitch turned his brown gaze toward Connor. “I don’t know,” he said.
    Connor pressed on. “You’re a