The Missionary by Jack Wilder

happened to her? Where would she go? We have to find her! Please!” Emily was sobbing now, trying not to and failing.
    Stone swore under his breath. “Where are the others you were with?”
    “There.” She pointed to two guys, sophomores at UV with Emily and Wren.
    The guys weren’t crying, but they were clearly upset. “What happened?” Stone demanded.
    Doug told a version of Emily’s story. “We were like, a hundred feet from the hostel, and I turned around and realized Wren wasn’t with us. She just…she just vanished, man! I don’t know what happened. She didn’t say anything, didn’t make a noise, just…poof, gone.”
    “Show me where you realized she was gone.” He pointed to other two. “You two, back to hostel. Tell John I said no one leaves. No one, for anything.”
    Doug brought Stone to a spot a few hundred feet from the hostel, a random location on the sidewalk, just like any other. No sign of Wren, no clues. He stood and tried to think. Wren wouldn’t just run off without telling her friends. If she’d been hurt, she would have told them, made a noise. There wasn’t any blood anywhere, no dropped articles. Just a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, an electronics shop, and the entrance to an alley, dark, wet, and smelly.  
    “Anything else you can think of? Anything?”  
    Doug shook his head, long blond surfer-style shaggy hair flopping. “No, man. Nothing.”
    Stone took a few steps into the alley. The concrete was wet and rucked and puddled, a dumpster on one wall, bags of trash and an abandoned men’s shoe, a broken wooden crate.   A rusted, red-metal doorway led into the electronics shop on the left side, and on the right, a blank stone wall. At the end, another street, cars passing intermittently. Power lines overhead.  
    He turned in place, desperate for any clues, anything.  
    There. A cigarette butt on the ground. Crushed underfoot, but the white end of the cigarette was still white, recent. Not mud-stained or faded.  
    “Did a vehicle come out of this alley?”
    Doug started to shake his head, then stopped. “Actually, yeah. A van or a truck or something. I don’t know. I was looking for Wren, but I do remember seeing some kind of vehicle pull out of here. I only noticed it because I was facing the alley, wondering if she’d gone back for something.”
    Stone guided Doug back to the hostel, then found Pastor Nick and John, a parent volunteer and one of the deacons of the church. “Wren is missing.”
    Nick paled. “What? What do you mean she’s missing?”
    Stone didn’t try to mask the anger in his voice. “She and three other students went to the corner store to buy water, and Wren vanished on the way back.” He looked at John. “They said they asked you first, and you let them go, against the policy we’ve gone by for the last three weeks.”
    John nodded numbly. “They told me they were just going to the corner. It’s not even half a block. I thought it would be fine.”
    Nick wiped his face with both hands. “What’s the next step then?”  
    “Contact the US embassy, file a missing persons report. I’ll look for her while you do that. John, you stay here with the students. Gather everyone and stay together. No one goes anywhere. Not ten steps out of your sight.” He stabbed John in the shoulder with a finger. “I mean that, deadly serious. Not one person takes one fucking step out of your sight. Not for water, not to pee, not for anything.”
    John nodded, his eyes wide with fear. “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
    “Nick, go to the embassy. Give them Wren’s information, show them her picture.”
    “Don’t you have contacts in the embassy?” Nick asked.
    “I’ll follow up with them later if I need to, but for now I need to look for Wren. Every second counts.”  
    “What do you think happened?” Nick kept his voice down, but his worry was palpable.
    “I don’t know. Maybe she just got turned around or something.” He met Nick’s eyes, and knew he