Missing Pieces (21 page)

Chapter 89

One day turned into two,
then three, and when we reached the weekend I gave up hope of ever hearing from the DNA guy. But on Monday when I got home from school Mom told me, “Mr. Deavers called. Wants you to call him right away.”

I held my breath and my fingers shook when I dialed. Waiting for him to answer was like waiting for Christmas, but he finally picked up.

“I suppose you’d like to know what I found,” he said.

Why do adults always do that?
“I can’t wait!”

“Well, I’m not sure why there was peanut butter all over one strand, but the two hair samples you sent match genetically.”

“What does that mean?”

He laughed. “It means they come from blood relatives. These two are mother and daughter.”

I screamed, jumped up and down, thanked Mr. Deavers, and hugged Mom. Christmas had finally come.

Mr. Deavers said he would send the results overnight. I went to tell Bryce, but he was still at the police department. Mom was just as excited as I was, and we hugged each other and danced around the kitchen. I was about to call Mrs. Garcia, but Mom pointed at the clock. “Tutor time. Anyway, this is something you need to tell her in person.”

I was still afraid of Mrs. Z, but I had to walk into that school. I guessed I’d know soon enough if Maria/Danielle had told her “mother” about the hair sample. Neither was in sight when I got there.

I found Angelique, but I could barely think, let alone concentrate on her work. She showed me the page I had given her the last time we’d met, and to my surprise, she’d gotten almost all of them right. But she didn’t seem very excited when I told her she was improving.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

Her little lip turned up. “Bad news. Mrs. Z and Maria are gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“She quit and they moved away.”

I ran to the office and found the receptionist. “Is it true?” I said. “Mrs. Z is gone?”

She scowled. “Yes. She gave notice Friday. Really put us in a bind.”

“Do you know where she went?”

She shook her head. “I think she has relatives in Arizona, but I’m not sure. It’s sad. The kids are devastated.” She cocked her head. “You’re not Ashley, are you?”

I nodded, and she pulled out an envelope with my name scrawled on the front. “Maria came to me Friday with tears streaming. She said she didn’t know your last name but that you came to tutor a couple of times a week.”

I thanked the woman, said good-bye to Angelique, and headed outside to be alone. I sat on a stone bench, waiting for Mom and staring at the envelope. I couldn’t believe I had gone from being so happy to so sad in one afternoon.

I opened it and pulled out a lined piece of paper, the kind they teach you how to write on in second grade. The handwriting was small and took up only a few lines.

Dear Ashly,

Mom says we have to go away. The bad people are coming. I dont know where we going. I wish I could talk to you again. Your nice.

Love,
Maria

I put my head in my hands and cried.

Chapter 90

It was pretty cool of Randy
to not hold it against me that I had suspected him. I was afraid he and Leigh would both stop talking to me, but Randy treated me the same as before, and as far as I know, he didn’t even tell Leigh. Or maybe he did and she didn’t make a big deal of it.

Not long after that the phone rang, and Sam handed it to me. It was the same officer I had talked with. He said they had gone out to Boo’s house, but he swore he didn’t know anything about the mailboxes.

“When we pulled out the bat you gave us, he went white as a sheet,” the officer said. “He finally broke down and confessed that he had done some of the bashing and that someone had given him fireworks that he used in Mrs. Watson’s mailbox and some others on her street.”

“But he couldn’t have done all that alone,” I said.

“Right. He gave us two names of some older guys. They’re in some trouble.”

“What will happen to Boo?”

“We’re trying to work out something with his parents. He might actually have to go to the detention center.”

I felt bad for Boo. The detention center housed kids who were 10 times meaner than him. I hoped he wouldn’t find out who had turned him in.

It felt good to know the truth, finally, but not as good as when Ashley handed the DNA results to Mrs. Garcia. The woman burst into tears and had to sit down. Mom and Sam told her they’d do anything they could to help her find her little girl.

When Mrs. Garcia finished looking at the letter from the DNA guy, she grabbed Ashley and hugged her. Then she hugged me. If you would have told me two weeks before that the Lunch Lady would be hugging anybody in our school, I would have said you were crazy.

Epilogue

A month later the phone rang
while Bryce and I were trying to finish the waterfall puzzle. We were talking about how we dreaded having to go back to school in the fall, though we both thought eighth grade would be kind of cool.

Mom answered and talked for a while, though she kept looking at me. Finally she hung up. “They found Maria,” she said. “Mrs. Z applied at a school in Wyoming, and the authorities tracked her down. Mrs. Garcia is going there to meet her daughter for the first time today.”

The next day
The
Gazette
from Colorado Springs ran a long story about the reunion, and it was all over the network news too. Mrs. Z was in jail, and Danielle was returned to her real mother. Tonya confessed to taking the child after she learned she couldn’t have children of her own. She had lied about being pregnant, then had taken Mrs. Garcia’s baby and started the fire to cover up the crime.

The paper didn’t explain how Mrs. Garcia had found her little girl, and that was okay. It was enough for me to see the picture of them together, hugging and smiling and crying.

Dr. Alek changed my medicine one more time and said we’d have to keep working on it. I guess you just have to live with some things, and with Jeff’s help I saw that God could be drawing me closer to himself through all the bad stuff going on in my life.

Bryce and I finished the waterfall puzzle after working on it for weeks, with help from Sam, Leigh, and Mom. We put our last piece in on a Sunday morning before church and realized there was still one missing.

Dylan ran through the room giggling, and later we found out why. When Mom changed his Spider-Man underwear, she found the last piece in there.

Finally a puzzle that won’t have to live with a missing piece.

About the Authors

Jerry B. Jenkins
(
jerryjenkins.com
) is the writer of the Left Behind series. He owns the Jerry B. Jenkins Christian Writers Guild, an organization dedicated to mentoring aspiring authors. Former vice president for publishing for the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, he also served many years as editor of
Moody
magazine and is now Moody’s writer-at-large.

His writing has appeared in publications as varied as
Reader’s Digest, Parade, Guideposts,
in-flight magazines, and dozens of other periodicals. Jenkins’s biographies include books with Billy Graham, Hank Aaron, Bill Gaither, Luis Palau, Walter Payton, Orel Hershiser, and Nolan Ryan, among many others. His books appear regularly on the
New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal,
and
Publishers Weekly
best seller lists.

Jerry is also the writer of the nationally syndicated sports story comic strip
Gil Thorp,
distributed to newspapers across the United States by Tribune Media Services.

Jerry and his wife, Dianna, live in Colorado and have three grown sons and three grandchildren.

Chris Fabry
is a writer and broadcaster who lives in Colorado. He has written more than 40 books, including collaboration on the Left Behind: The Kids series.

You may have heard his voice on Focus on the Family, Moody Broadcasting, or Love Worth Finding. He has also written for Adventures in Odyssey and Radio Theatre.

Chris is a graduate of the W. Page Pitt School of Journalism at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. He and his wife, Andrea, have been married 22 years and have nine children, two birds, two dogs, and one cat.