sandandwater | [For Rory]

When Pippa didn't show up for her Tuesday night shift at Last Call, the owner came in to make sure set up and opening was completed. Then he started making phone calls. No answer on her cell phone. No answer on her home phone. Mike left messages on both voicemail systems: Pippa, where are you? You're on the schedule for tonight in case you forgot. Call me, dollface.

She didn't return his calls or even show up at the bar. By the time the musical act of the night started their second set, Mike was getting worried. Not agitated. Pippa wasn't the irresponsible type. Where some of the other girls might simply pull a no-show for a shift, Phillipa Kerr had never once done that in the almost three years that he'd known her. Not once.

A thought occurred to him and he went back into the storeroom/office and pulled out the binder that held contact information for the bar's bookings. Pippa was dating one of the musicians that played at the Call regularly. Rory, wasn't it? The Irish guy...Stone. Finding the cell phone number for the man, Miked dialed. Maybe she'd been whisked off somewhere. Or maybe Rory knew where she was...hopefully.

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Mike picked up the note of worry in Rory's voice and unfortunately had a hard time trying to tell himself the guy was overreacting. This wasn't like Pippa. "You do that. And give me a call when you find you find her. I'm too old for this shit."

He tried to make light of it. He really did want a return call saying she was just home, sick with the flu.

"Will do, Mike." Rory ended his call with the bar owner and shoved his phone back into his pocket, already headed for the front door. After pulling on his leather jacket, he reached for his helmet -- and paused.

Hell with this. Taking a deep breath through his nostrils, he shifted into the borderlands and flowed into his stallion form. Normally he wouldn't bother with fey travel for such a short distance, but it cut the transit time down to minutes. Whatever had happened to Pippa, he needed to know now.

But what he found when he let himself in did nothing to answer his questions ... or quell his rising nerves.

He keyed in a call back to Mike with one hand and tried to soothe an anxious Mr. Beaker with the other. "Mike? I'm at Pippa's. Her things are still here, as near as I can tell, and so is her puppy. It doesn't look like he's been fed, watered or walked today."

Mike hadn't been expecting a return call so fast, then again with cell phones these days who the hell could judge where a person was while you were talking to them? And what he was being told made him frown. Even if he could believe that Pippa took off for parts unknown and unannounced, there was no way in the world the redhead would leave her dog behind. Mr. Beaker was nearly all she talked about, besides Rory and his band.

Between the noise in the bar and the noise of a yipping, barking dog on the other end of the line, Mike spoke up as he responded, "What about her car? Is it there?"

Rory had checked on his way in. "No, it's not." Car missing, but nothing else, no provisions made for her pet. It was getting harder and harder to say that this was nothing to worry about.

"Mike, I have a few other phone calls I'm going to make, but do you know of anyone else I should contact? Anyone who might know something?"

He thought for a long moment. Even as long as he's known Pippa, he didn't know much about her personal life. It wasn't that she had an issue with honesty, she was simply a very private person. It was hard to say what she did in most of her off hours. Although..."Her grandmother lives on Martha's Vineyard. She's a fairly feisty old woman from what little Pippa's said about her. Maybe she took off last minute to see her?"

It sounded far-fetched to him, still the issue of the dog.

"She doesn't much about family, I'm not sure she's particularly close to them..."

Possible, and yet nothing about an emergency visit to her grandmother would prevent Pippa from calling both him and Mike to keep them up to date. Surely she would have at least called to ask him to look after Mr. Beaker.

Rory sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I'll try to find some contact information here." Unlikely, and even less likely that he'd find anything for any of the rest of her family, but he'd try. "Just ... call me if you hear anything, okay?"

"Right." Mike hung up the phone and decided he was going to ask some of the waitresses yet again if they knew of anywhere or anyone Pippa might go to. Setting his jaw, he also decided that he'd ask if there might be anyone who had a grudge against the young woman, though that thought was almost as unlikely as her taking off somewhere. People just didn't not like Pippa Kerr.

A search for other contacts proved as fruitless as Rory had suspected. After feeding, watering and cleaning up after the Doberman pup, Rory braced himself for the next round of calls he had to make. The police likely wouldn't care about a woman who'd been missing for less than twenty-four hours, but he knew his family would take him seriously.

But first he tried Pippa's cell once more, gritting his teeth when he got her voicemail again. "Pippa, love, I'm at your place. What's going on? Please, mo muirnín, call me. Please."

Mike didn't just ask the staff once more for ideas, he also asked them when they last saw Pippa. If she left work early, if she stayed later than anyone else. Didn't anyone make sure she got to her car safely after locking up?

A few of the waitresses looked genuinely concerned. One of the bartenders looked guilty as hell for leaving early and letting Pippa lock up on her own. Mike chewed his ass for it and then some.

Still, none of this got him any closer to an answer about where she could be.

[For Rory]

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