Pretty Little Killers by Geoffrey C. Fuller Daleen Berry

licensed adult in the car. However, he also knew she’d drive just enough to take him to work and then go to her own job. She’dcome straight home after her shift. That was their agreement. The Neeses saved on gas and Dave always checked the odometer to make sure she was sticking to the arrangement.
    After getting no reply, Dave went to the hall closet and grabbed a coat hanger—the door locks in the apartment easily popped open. But when he peered inside Skylar’s bedroom, she wasn’t there. Her unmade bed looked like it had been slept in, so Dave first assumed she must have gone shopping with a friend. Then he remembered her door had been locked from the inside. He called his wife at work.
    â€œMary, did Skylar tell you where she was going?” Dave’s voice rose as he spoke. He paced the small kitchen, feeling his worry build.
    â€œJust calm down.” Mary knew how close to the surface Dave’s emotions ran. “Don’t flip out. She probably went shopping with one of her friends or something. She never misses work.”
    â€œThat’s what I thought, but her door was locked.”
    â€œShe probably just accidentally hit the button closing the door in a hurry. You know how she does.”
    â€œOkay, maybe. But I’m going to look for her.”
    Dave rushed back to Walmart, a few minutes away, and told a supervisor he had to take the rest of the day off. “Listen,” he said, “I can’t find Skylar. I don’t know where she’s at, but I gotta find my kid.”
    He decided to check at home once more to see if she’d returned while he was gone. Skylar was largely a responsible teenager, and although she might forget to let her parents know where she was going, she would usually remember at some point to check in. But she was also fearless and willful, and that concerned Dave.
    Skylar still wasn’t at the apartment when he returned. Dave walked through the kitchen and out onto the small balcony for a smoke. He wanted to think, to plan his next steps. That was when he noticed a small black bench sitting at the base of the back wall of the apartment complex, just around the corner from Skylar’s first-floor room.
    Dave flipped his cigarette into the round ceramic bowl he and Mary kept for cigarette butts and went back through the apartment,out and around to Skylar’s window. The screen was leaning against the wall, her window open a finger’s breadth. That was the moment he knew: Oh, my God. She snuck out .

nine

    On the Verge
    On that Friday afternoon when Dave came home to find Skylar gone, the Neeses discovered Skylar hadn’t learned her lesson about sneaking out, like they had thought after her joyride with Floyd and friends.
    Thinking about the bruises she used to sometimes see on Skylar’s thighs, Mary realized she had missed some clues. At the time, she and Dave believed Skylar when she said she got them at work. Looking back, Mary said, “We fell for it. She really got them from sliding down the windowsill.”
    That terrible July 6 day was when her parents realized Skylar hadn’t learned a thing. Just the opposite. In fact, as the Neeses would discover from one friend of hers, then another, in that first month after she disappeared, Skylar snuck out a lot.
    When she recalled Skylar’s lies, a shadow passed over Mary’s heart, no doubt brought on by thoughts of what she and Dave should have done differently. Should have seen. All the red flags they’d missed.
    Looking back, Mary couldn’t help but criticize herself for not keeping a closer eye on Skylar. She was confronting the difficult realization almost all parents eventually face: children who have been open and truthful in the past can, as teenagers, become deceptiveand intensely wrapped up in their own worlds. They have extremely private lives and keep secrets from their parents. Skylar’s disappearance brought many of her secrets