Книга - Bringing Maddie Home

Bringing Maddie Home
Janice Kay Johnson


The moment Captain Colin McAllister sees her on TV he knows. She may call herself Nell Smith, but she is Maddie Dubeau—the girl who went missing from Angel Butte, Oregon, years ago.She’s haunted Colin, and now the adult version of her is so captivating, he needs distance. He wants to help her recover her memories—even solve her case—without crossing a professional line.But distance becomes impossible when the threats against her escalate. It’s clear someone is determined that Nell never remembers what happened to Maddie.Colin must keep her safe so that he can finally bring her home… to his home.







There’s always one case…

The moment police captain Colin McAllister sees her on TV he knows. She may call herself Nell Smith, but she is Maddie Dubeau—the girl who went missing from Angel Butte, Oregon, years ago. She’s haunted Colin, and now the adult version of her is so captivating, he can’t stay away. He wants to help her recover her memories—even solve her case—without crossing a professional line.

But distance becomes impossible when the threats against her escalate. It’s clear someone is determined that Nell never remembers what happened to Maddie. Colin must keep her safe so that he can finally bring her home…to his home.


She wasn’t safe

Somebody had recognized her. If this Captain McAllister was determined enough, he could find a way, legally or not, to get her fingerprints. The life Nell had built so carefully could collapse, like a house carried down the crumbling bluff by a mud slide.

A terrible sound escaped her, a shuddering cry.

I have to run. I can’t be here when he comes looking for me again. I can’t.

She sank down, right there inside the door, her back to it, and let her purse and the books fall. Her breathing was loud in the silent apartment.

What if he meant it? What if she could trust him?

What if she couldn’t?

Nell drew her knees up, hugged herself tight and rocked.

The most insistent voice in her head was the one that whispered, Am I Maddie?

Things are not as they seem in Angel Butte, Oregon. Read on to find out how Colin McAllister can help Nell unravel the mystery of who she is in this first book of a captivating new series from reader favorite Janice Kay Johnson!


Dear Reader,

Why do some places feel like home and others never do? I lived in central Oregon for only three years when I was a child, but writing this trilogy, The Mysteries of Angel Butte, felt like a homecoming to me. I’ve only been back to Bend, where my family lived, a few times as an adult, but the first thing I always notice is the smell. I think it might be the ponderosa and lodgepole pines, maybe the volcanic soil, but that part of Oregon smells different to me than anywhere I’ve ever been. I can roll down the car window and feel amazing, just breathing it in.

My memories of those years are vivid, too. My dad was a college professor who worked as a naturalist during summers. He set up the first interpretive center at Lava Butte, a volcanic cinder cone not far from Bend. Like Maddie, the heroine in this first book, I’d often go to work with him during the summer. I was happy feeding the chipmunks that lived in the crater and looked pretty darn healthy considering all the stuff tourists fed them! My father was a runner; we lived only a few blocks away from Pilot Butte, the smaller cinder cone that is right in the middle of Bend (needless to say, the model for Angel Butte in my stories), and Dad ran to the top nearly every day. Quite often, I’m not that interested in the setting for my books, but this was different from the very beginning. The town may be fictional, but I was writing about home, in a very real sense.

Of course, to my recollection no skeletons were recovered from beneath the cinders at either Lava Butte or Pilot Butte while we lived there, but think what a great place to hide a body that would be! Both the first two books in this trilogy have characters haunted by their memories of growing up in this town. Tapping into those memories turned out to be easier than I could have imagined, even though they were far darker than mine. I’d say enjoy your visit to Angel Butte—but really I’d like to keep you awake tonight, wondering if you dare go home….

Best,

Janice Kay Johnson

PS—I enjoy hearing from readers! Visit me on Facebook or write me c/o Harlequin, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, ON M3B 3K9, Canada.


Bringing Maddie Home

Janice Kay Johnson






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of more than seventy books for children and adults, Janice Kay Johnson is especially well-known for her Mills & Boon Superromance novels about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. Her 2007 novel Snowbound won a RITA® Award from Romance Writers of America for Best Contemporary Series Romance. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small rural town north of Seattle, Washington. She loves to read and is an active volunteer and board member for Purrfect Pals, a no-kill cat shelter.


Contents

Prologue (#u8c6c2756-0145-580f-95c4-8dabe5d924ea)

Chapter One (#u5434eaaf-75db-545c-be74-6b92ed18564b)

Chapter Two (#u8d01b8e6-a68c-5e79-beb8-29cdb72ade17)

Chapter Three (#ue1a1e7e0-6342-5420-9ed9-79dc91a95893)

Chapter Four (#ua03dafa3-fab8-55b5-b288-dda84ffcad3c)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)


PROLOGUE

SHE AWAKENED TO darkness, pain and nausea. Had she fallen? Somehow she knew she wasn’t in bed. She reached out blindly to explore and found an unyielding surface close above her. Movement and a rumbling vibration made her body sway from side to side. She flailed all around her, finding the walls of a box. Terror swelled in her, more powerful than the nausea.

I’m in a coffin. They’re burying me alive.

Before she could scream and hammer on the lid, consciousness slipped away.

The next time she surfaced, it was to the taste of bile in her mouth and the awareness that her stomach was heaving. Too late to get up and run for the bathroom. All she could do was fling herself onto her side before throwing up. Her head hurt so bad. She banged into something as she rolled. And it was dark. So dark. The surface she lay on was hard. Not bed.

Consciousness came and went a couple more times, her awareness fleeting, her thoughts chaotic. Once she surfaced to an awful smell, then to the realization that her cheek was resting in something sticky. Her own vomit. With a cry she hurled herself back and whacked something behind her.

Panic rose in her chest. Why can’t I see?

In her peripheral vision, there was a flash of red. She tried to turn her head to see what it was and flinched. Only one eye would open. She groped for her face and found her eyelid crusted shut. With something. The smell was bad, but it didn’t matter, not when she hurt so much. She closed her other eye and gave up.

Finally she awakened and remembered the other times. Not a coffin. Her questing fingers found cold metal, with strange dips and curves and even a few holes. She succeeded in rolling all the way over and almost passed out again. Her head wanted to explode. Blood, she thought. It was blood crusting her eye. I hit my head.

She’d become used to the vibration and the sounds that might have been occasional gusts of wind. Not wind, she finally recognized: cars passing on a highway. Her mind fumbled for understanding. She was in a car. Locked in the trunk of a car that was moving. Bewildered, she turned the notion over and over. Not knowing why this was so wrong, but also confused about where she should be. She couldn’t think. It was because of the headache.

Suddenly she slid sideways and barely managed to get an arm up to keep her head from hitting the side wall. She was being pitched backward despite herself. Oh, gross, into the vomit. The car was braking, that was it. Fear rose like the contents of her stomach had earlier, clogging her throat. Once the car stopped, she wouldn’t be safe at all.

But it had stopped. The engine turned off. She heard a door open, then slam. She squeezed her eyes shut. If she pretended she was still unconscious...

Footsteps came close and she flinched, but then they began to diminish. The driver must be walking away. She strained until she didn’t hear the footsteps at all, until the silence was absolute.

Then, frantically, mindlessly, she shoved upward with all her strength, despite knowing the trunk lid wouldn’t give way. Stupid, stupid. Think. Just like that, she had a picture of herself—it must be her—leaning into an open car trunk. She could smell fresh lumber, hear a man’s impatient voice.

“What are you waiting for? Push down the backseat.” Because she wasn’t very big, she’d had to all but crawl into the trunk before she could reach the latch to yank, then push the back of the seat until it flopped forward.

Panting now, she groped above her for a latch. Please, please, please let this car have seats that fold down. Her fingers closed around a familiar, plastic T-shaped piece dangling at the back of the trunk and she pulled. If there were other people in the car... If the driver hadn’t been alone...

There was a clunk and a sliver of light. She pushed, and half the seat folded down—not the whole one. It wasn’t what she expected. This wasn’t the car she remembered, then.

Through the opening and the windshield, she saw that it was night outside, and that there were bright lights. No one was in the car with her. Whimpering, she crawled right through the vomit and then the hole into the passenger compartment. Opened the back door and almost fell out onto pavement. She stumbled into a curb and lifted her head to see a gas pump. She wanted to run, run, run, but an inner voice told her to push the seat back in place, shut the car door. Maybe the driver wouldn’t know he’d lost her. While she carefully closed the door, the sound was so loud she cringed and crouched behind the fender, holding her breath to listen. But she heard no footsteps, no roar of anger. The car sat alone at the pumps.

She crept around the trunk and saw the mini-mart with a brightly lit ARCO sign. He must have gone inside to use the bathroom or buy something.

Run, run, run.

This time she did, her footsteps slapping on the pavement. Weaving like a drunk on numb legs, she fell once to her knees and skinned her palms but was barely slowed. Still no shout of alarm. She reached the windowless side of the gas station and kept going. Darkness lay beyond. If there was a moon, it must be low or behind clouds. The pavement gave way to dirt. She slammed into something rough, something that scratched at her face and had arms with clawlike hands.

Scrambling backward, she saw enough of an outline to understand. A tree. Her eyes were starting to adjust and she saw more trees, rows of them. Small, sculptural ones. An orchard maybe. She ran down the aisle between rows. Ran and ran, then cut between rows and ran some more, until the lights at the gas station were far away. Then, her stomach heaving again, she dropped to the ground and tried to shrink herself to nothingness so that she would fit behind the narrow bole of a tree. There she cowered, listening. Shivering. Shuddering as cold crept into her bones. Eventually hearing a car start up and take off. Others passed on the highway. Trucks with their heavier rumble. Vehicles came and went at the gas station. Night became the gray, pale light of dawn that left her feeling terrifyingly exposed. But no one came.

The sun rose until it was high in the sky, but gave little heat. The trees were bare of leaves, which meant it was winter.

Why don’t I know what season it is?

She didn’t know anything. Was afraid to let herself examine why she didn’t. She was nothing but an animal caught far from its burrow, horribly exposed. She was cold. So cold, despite the strange, too-large shirt she wore. At last it wasn’t so much courage as desperation that had her creeping slowly back toward the gas station and the highway. The worst was crossing the last open stretch onto pavement. The restroom doors were on this side. Hiding behind a big, white propane tank, peeking around it every time she heard footsteps, she had to wait almost forever before a woman came out of one of the restrooms and walked away, key dangling from a hand, without looking back. The door was just swinging shut and she raced for it. It was slamming when she slipped her fingers into the crack just in time. This hurt barely registered.

Hurry, hurry.

She hardly even examined herself in the mirror, beyond recoiling from the blood and vomit matting her hair and dried on her face and wondering why she was wearing this man’s shirt/jacket thing that was as long as a dress. With liquid soap, hot water and paper towels she scrubbed desperately at herself. She managed to get most of her head under the stream of water and used the hand soap to wash her hair, too. It hurt, hurt so bad, and the water kept running red no matter how many times she rinsed. She unbuttoned the olive-green shirt with an embroidered patch on the shoulder and scrubbed the blood and vomit off it, too. It had to be military, but it looked old, like somebody had worn it forever. Not her, she thought. Right now, it was all she had to wear, except for the thin cap-sleeved T-shirt beneath, so she wrung it out then put it back on wet. She’d be even colder, but that had to be better than being bloody and stinking with puke. Plus, wearing the shirt felt...necessary. Like it meant something.

The face she finally saw looked shell-shocked, but okay. Skin dead-white, her eyes dilated, but no bruises showed. The wound was on the right, near the back of her head. Touching it once had hurt, so she wouldn’t again.

She cracked the bathroom door enough to see that there was no one in sight, then rushed back behind the building.

Now what?

A thought shaped itself. She could go inside and ask for help. The clerk would call the police. Somebody, somewhere, would know where she belonged.

A whimper slipped out and she looked down to see that she was hugging herself again, shaking. There were faces, the same man she’d remembered telling her to put down the seat. And a woman, too, whose stare was so icy that the girl had shriveled and crept away.

No, no, no. If they were her family, she couldn’t go back to them.

Then...I must be running away. She calmed as she accepted a truth, something she did know. They had been cruel to her...or something. She rocked herself, trying to remember, and couldn’t. But she knew they weren’t to be trusted, not those people, whether they were her family or not.

For most of the day, she watched from behind the propane tank as cars and trucks arrived and left. Finally a U-Haul truck pulled in. She heard the metal scrape of the rear door being lifted and crept forward to watch as the driver checked the load. Leaving it open, he disappeared around the side of the truck. She ran again, faster than she’d ever run in her life, slap, slap, slap on the pavement, and slithered into the back of the truck, trying not to make it bounce with her weight. There wasn’t much weight, though, because she was small and skinny. Heart pounding, she lifted a quilted pad and shinnied beneath it, finding herself wedged beside a wooden dresser. Another squirm and she made it behind the dresser. Something—a chair leg maybe—pressed into her back. Then she waited some more, trying not to breathe, until the footsteps came, and the metal door was released to drop, bounce once, then stay down. She heard the man snap closed the padlock, then get in behind the wheel.

Once more, lying on her side in the darkness, she felt the vibrations of an engine and movement. But this time, she tugged the heavy quilt closer, buried her chin inside the collar of the damp shirt, and let the terrible fear slip away. She was...not safe, but safer.

Tears trickled down her cheeks, wetting the hand she’d laid beneath her head. Her last fuzzy thought before sleep claimed her was, I won’t go back, no matter what, even though she had no idea where she was going, and less of an idea where she’d been.


CHAPTER ONE

“SOME BONES HAVE turned up.”

Police Captain Colin McAllister lifted his head. “Bones?”

He’d waved Duane into his office a minute before. Lieutenant Duane Brewer headed Criminal Investigations, which meant that when he wanted a word, it was more likely to be about a corpse than a shoplifter. Still, it had taken Colin a moment to tear his attention from his computer monitor. He’d been trying to figure out how to plug holes in manpower without leapfrogging academy grads, with their shiny new badges, to detective. The problem was becoming chronic, and he knew who to blame. He’d known for ten years where the cancer lurked that was sickening the Angel Butte Police Department. He was just too damned stubborn to jump ship the way the others had.

He saved the work on his computer and leaned back in his leather desk chair, studying the man who’d been his mentor and whom he now outranked.

Fifty-four years old and thickening around the waist, Duane was the quintessential detective: patient, thorough and dogged. A loner, he liked what he did and hadn’t been happy about the promotion to lieutenant. Colin had begged him to take it.

“What’s the story?”

“You know those trees they’ve been taking out in the river park?”

Already feeling apprehension, Colin nodded. The infestation of pine beetles had become obvious when needles turned brown and fell. Some fungus had swept along in the wake of the beetles, taking advantage of the weakened trees. The city parks department had made the decision to cut out the infested ones before they fell in the next windstorm.

“They’re digging out the stumps, where they can get a bulldozer in.”

He knew that, too.

“Pulled one out today and some human bones came with it.”

“Not an Indian burial?”

“No. The foreman’s pretty shaken up. Hasn’t found a skull yet, but there’s a lower jaw. The teeth have fillings in them.” Duane ran a hand through his thinning hair, looking shaken. “Colin, I haven’t been out there yet, but it sounds like this isn’t more than a couple hundred yards from where Maddie was grabbed.”

Maddie Dubeau was Duane’s niece. Frantic at her disappearance twelve years ago, Duane had insisted on taking over the investigation, and nobody had been able to deny him. He’d let Colin, then a young officer who had been first responder, stay involved, going door-to-door with questions and searching the grid. They hadn’t talked about the case in years, but Colin knew that Duane had to be even more haunted by their failure to find her than Colin had been.

His own gaze shifted to a bulletin board where he kept a few photos. Victims whose killers had never been found. A two-year-old beaten to death by her father despite multiple calls to 911 from concerned neighbors, babysitters and medical personnel. Two kids who’d disappeared and never been found. Faces he wouldn’t—couldn’t—forget. Some were personal failures, some were department. He wanted their eyes watching him, even if he didn’t often look back at them.

Madeline Noelle Dubeau’s picture was one of them. It was her last school photo, taken her freshman year of high school. This was more flattering than the one on the learner’s permit he’d found at the scene but had bothered Colin in the same way. In it, she was smiling politely, as though the photographer had insisted, but her wide, cautious eyes weren’t happy. Looking at it, he thought that this was a girl who always stayed a step back, who didn’t expect the best from anyone. Just shy, he’d told himself every time he tried to delve into her secrets, but he couldn’t make himself believe it. He’d never asked Duane, who didn’t like talking about her.

Duane rose and went to the bulletin board, standing with his back to Colin’s desk. His shoulders hunched under his jacket. “I don’t keep a picture of her out. I can’t stand to.”

“Sometimes I’m convinced if I look long enough, I’ll be able to tell what she was thinking.” Impatient with himself, Colin grabbed his weapon from the top drawer and stood, then snagged his suit jacket from the back of the chair. “I’ll drive myself, but I want to see the site.”

“You won’t have any trouble finding us.” After taking one last, long look at the photo of Maddie, Duane flipped a hand and walked out. Colin followed, pausing only to let his assistant know where he was going.

Not until he was behind the wheel of his SUV did he think back to that night. He hadn’t been two months on the job when he’d been sent to the park to investigate an elderly neighbor’s report that she’d heard a woman’s scream.

Teenagers liked the park at night; even in his short time patrolling, Colin had already broken up keggers half a dozen times there. The park, a sizable one, was within city limits, and a stretch along the bank of the Deschutes River was manicured and included a picnic area and playground. Ten or fifteen acres had been left in wilderness, only a couple of dirt paths showing that kids cut from one neighborhood to another through the swath of forest. That night, though, he hadn’t been able to feel the presence of anyone at all. Kids weren’t good at being absolutely quiet. They were prone to giggles or nervous rustling or shushing each other. And he hadn’t known why, but the fine hairs at his nape stirred from the moment he stepped into the darkness, swinging his flashlight beam in an arc to pierce the darker shadows beneath madrona and snowberry.

Sitting here now, in the parking lot outside the police station, he let himself remember how it had been. The moment the yellow beam caught a glint of metal.

He’d been maybe twenty-five yards into the woods when he saw it. A good ten feet off the trail a bike lay on its side. He’d stepped close, squatted on his haunches to look closely and felt a chill. No, the mountain bike wasn’t just lying there, as if temporarily flung aside. One handlebar dug deep in the rusty-red soil and left a track two feet long. Maybe his imagination was excited by the deep night here under the ponderosa and lodgepole pines, by the eerie quiet, by the dispatcher’s description of the shrill scream cut off sharply. But Colin couldn’t help picturing the bike rider hanging on tight, trying to use the bike as an anchor, while someone wrenched him—no, her, if the neighbor had been right—off of it. The front tire rim was bent, the spokes mangled. He thought someone might have stepped right there, the way you might plant a foot on a pet carrier to yank a reluctant animal out.

Rising to his feet, he swept the flashlight beam in a careful pattern. Footprints wouldn’t show up well with the ground so dry, but he could make out scuffed vegetation. Closer to the path, furrows and imprints marked the soil. And a dark patch. He edged nearer, still trying to keep his distance. If this was a crime scene, he didn’t want to taint it and be given hell by the detectives.

Something had been spilled there, and was still wet. Colin had stretched out to his full reach and touched the edge of the spill, then brought his finger to his nose and sniffed. The acrid scent was unmistakable. Blood. A fair pool of it had been lost here. Not enough to suggest someone had bled out, but too much for an innocent accident, even a head wound.

He had just made the decision to go back and call this in when he spotted something else, almost hidden beneath a ceanothus. A wallet...no, a coin purse. Leather, in the shape of a cat’s face, whiskers, nose and eyes burned into the hide and colored. Cute. He tucked the flashlight beneath his arm, put on a pair of latex gloves and picked up the coin purse. Change rattled as he unzipped it and found folded bills in there, too, and a driver’s license. No, he saw, his stomach clenching: a driver’s permit, the kind issued to young teens.

He found himself staring at the photo. A girl’s face, young but somehow not hopeful. She was shy, probably, gazing warily at the camera. A few freckles scattered across a small nose. Instead of being youthfully soft, this face was thin, the wings of cheekbone too prominent, the chin too pointed, the forehead too high. Hair was scraped back into a ponytail. In this light he couldn’t tell what color her eyes were.

Brown, said the description. Hair brown, too. Her name was Madeline Noelle Dubeau. He remembered feeling stunned. He knew that name. Marc Dubeau was a prominent local businessman, a friend of the police chief’s. That last name wouldn’t be common in central Oregon. This almost had to be his daughter.

Madeline, he noted, was fifteen years old, turning sixteen on November 26, when she would be eligible to take the driver’s test for her license.

She was the same age as Colin’s sister, Caitlin.

He turned the flashlight beam again on that dark patch where blood sank into the soil. Anger and a sick feeling squeezed his chest. Would Madeline Dubeau ever have a chance to get that driver’s license?

Colin had tried to convince himself he was letting his imagination run away from him, that she’d had a friend with her who had already helped her make her way home. Or driven her to the emergency room.

But, however green behind the ears he’d been, he knew better. The prickles on the back of his neck said otherwise. Something bad had happened to this girl.

Now in the SUV he grunted, still staring ahead unseeing through the windshield, and remembered the chill when he found out her maternal uncle was a cop, a detective. The department had thrown everything they had at the case, but in twelve years, they had never found a trace of Maddie Dubeau. Unless, today, it was her bones that were wrenched from the earth along with the tree roots.

Shaking his head, he finally backed out and turned onto the street heading north toward the far end of the park.

Traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, was nothing like what it would be in another few weeks once ski season opened. Angel Butte brimmed with tourists during the summer and again when winter arrived. Right now was a lull, when locals took advantage of the chance to dine out or stop by one of the brew pubs without long waits.

Ten minutes later, he left his 4Runner behind a line of other police vehicles on the street and strode along the bulldozed road carved between the stand of woods and the fenced backyards of the nearest homes.

This was early November, with a bite to the air as the thermometer hovered just above freezing. The snow level on the jagged peaks of the Three Sisters and the greater bulk of Mount Bachelor to the north had dropped, a harbinger of the months to come. Colin had substituted a parka he kept in his SUV for his suit jacket. The pungent scent of pine was more powerful than usual, after chain saws and dozers had downed a dozen tall, ancient ponderosas, scarring what had been untouched forest. His every step kicked up the red-dirt legacy of the area’s volcanic past, coating his dress shoes.

He wasn’t thinking about the dust or the smell or the yellow equipment or the voices he heard. He was still caught in his memories of that night, and turned his head to orient himself. Just before he’d parked, Colin had noticed where the trail emerged. He was passing near enough to where he’d found the bike to hit the place with a well-thrown stone.

A chill traveled up his spine. What if Madeline—Maddie to her friends and family—had lain here all these years, waiting? So damn close?

What he couldn’t figure was why he was surprised that they might, at last, be finding her body. He’d expected that someday she’d turn up. After twelve years, dead was a lot likelier than alive.

“Damn,” he said softly, and kept walking. By the time he reached the crowd, he had made sure his face was expressionless.

Heads turned his way, some wearing hard hats. Others he knew: Duane, of course, and two detectives, Jane Vahalik and Ronnie Orr. Vahalik was good. Experienced, despite being only in her early thirties. She’d spent time on the Drug Enforcement Team and been a detective in Criminal Investigations for...he thought three years. Maybe four. Orr had moved over from patrol just a month ago and been assigned to her for training.

He nodded at all of them. Then, hiding his reluctance, he looked toward the vast root ball of the tree and the gaping hole left below it. Not a usual crime scene. The ground had been bulldozed and trampled beyond any hope of combing the top layers of soil for clothing or jewelry or, hell, a cigarette wrapper that might still hold fingerprints. The top feet of soil were heaped where the dozer had pushed them.

Some lucky folks were now going to be assigned the task of sifting through that pile of dirt and needles and branches.

Duane was already standing beside the bones that had been thus far uncovered. Colin joined him and crouched to see better. The pitiful collection was stained red by the soil. Flashes of ivory showed where some had been snapped apart by the violence of their unearthing. Most were unidentifiable to Colin, but he could make out a long bone in multiple pieces, a pelvis, half a dozen shattered ribs and the jaw with a couple of dental fillings.

“Those look too large to be Maddie’s.” He wanted to feel relief, to be sure, but couldn’t.

Beside him, Duane grunted. “I think you’re right. Assuming those pieces are part of a femur.”

Colin was studying the jaw. “Only a couple of small fillings. Molars are all in, but the wisdom teeth aren’t completely.” He glanced up. “Do you know about Maddie’s?”

“No idea. I don’t even know when they’re supposed to come in.”

“I think it varies. Sixteen? Seventeen?”

“A kid, then.” Duane paused. “Maddie was almost sixteen.”

Still feeling apprehension, Colin nodded.

He’d wanted a definitive answer. He had wanted to be told right here, right now, that this wasn’t Maddie Dubeau. Why, he couldn’t have said. Some kid, maybe a young adult, had died and been buried here. It wasn’t as if any good news was in the offing—say that this skeleton would turn out to belong to a scumbag drug dealer who would be unmourned. If—no, when—they figured out whose bones these were, a mother and father, a girlfriend, sisters or brothers, someone was going to be hit with the worst of all possible news. The end of hope. If not the Dubeaus, someone else.

He wondered if Duane held out any real hope Maddie was still alive.

“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “You know what to do. Keep me updated.”

Both men stood.

Colin said slowly, “Wasn’t it just last year that girl’s bones were found out near Prineville?”

Those had been in Crook County’s jurisdiction. “I wonder if they ever identified them?” Duane said thoughtfully. “There was that other girl three, four years ago, too. At the foot of Angel Butte. Wasn’t she yours?”

“Yeah.” Colin had been lead investigator. The small volcanic cinder cone rose right in the middle of Angel Butte and was another city park, where the marble statue of an angel had “miraculously” appeared in the late 19th century to overlook the town.

That girl had been identified. Turned out to be a runaway from Salem, a really sad case. She’d disappeared when she was only fourteen, turned up dead here just before her sixteenth birthday—Maddie’s age. She had been pregnant, they could tell that much, but her body was so decayed no cause of death was ever determined. They hadn’t gotten anywhere near to figuring out how she’d come to be buried beneath a foot of red cinders.

Duane was the one to shake his head. “No reason to look for connections yet. This may turn out to be male. Or older. Hell, he probably got knifed in a drunken fight.”

“Maybe.”

After a momentary silence, Duane said, “You have a hunch.”

Colin moved uncomfortably. “Why don’t I make a few calls? You have enough to do here, and you’re right. Chances are it’s a waste of time.” But he had to satisfy this uneasy feeling, and Duane, like any other cop, would understand.

After a moment, his lieutenant nodded and turned away. “All right,” he called. “Folks, let’s get pictures, and then we’ve got some work to do.”

Colin was reluctant to leave, but he was, essentially, an administrator now. He had to demonstrate trust in not only Duane, but also his detectives. Let them do their job. If he stayed, all he’d do was make them nervous.

He knew from experience, too, that more bones would be uncovered slowly. Officers and evidence techs wouldn’t be digging with shovels; they’d use trowels. From here on out, this would more nearly resemble an archaeological dig than a normal crime scene. It was going to take days, maybe weeks, given the scale of the damage wrought by the bulldozer.

But some answers should be forthcoming soon. With teeth, a femur—assuming that was one—and a pelvis, the medical examiner or a forensic pathologist ought to be able to nail down age and gender. A good guess at how long ago the victim had been buried would provide a starting point, too.

Walking away, he was surprised to feel a clutch of something like grief.

Don’t let it be Maddie.

Damn it, he thought, her parents would probably be relieved if these bones proved to be hers, if they knew at last, once and for all, what had become of their daughter. Who was he to want to prolong the agonizing, fading wisp of hope that she was only gone, not dead?

No one. He had no right to wish that kind of suffering for them. And, Jesus, he didn’t like to think about what Duane was feeling right now.

But it was his own memory, his own sense of failure, that caught at him now. Instead of going straight back to his SUV, he went to the trail and walked back into the park. Not far—just to the curve where he had found the bike that night. Voices and the sound of distant traffic were muffled here. He stopped, looking at the spot where her blood had soaked into the earth. He remembered the darkness, the thick silence. The crime scene tape that by morning had wrapped from tree to tree, the careful search for evidence never found. And the photos the newspaper had run, not only the one he had kept, but also candid shots of Maddie when she was younger.

Never smiling. Only in the school photo had her lips curved in an obligatory smile. Otherwise, her face was always solemn. Today, he felt the same unease he had then, the same sense that the common description of her as an introverted dreamer wasn’t quite right.

He stood for a moment, as if at a grave site, then finally, shaking his head, turned away. Some old wrongs could be righted. Some couldn’t.

* * *

COLIN SPOKE TO a Sergeant Fletcher in the Crook County sheriff’s department about the bones that had been found by a rock hound out past Prineville the previous year. “Nah, we never identified that kid,” Fletcher said. “Medical examiner’s best guess was that she was maybe fifteen, sixteen years old. She thought female, but you know that was a big maybe.”

Colin made a sound of agreement.

“Thing is, we never found the skull. Probably carried away by an animal. With no teeth to match to dental records, no fingerprints...” Probably he was shrugging. After a moment, he asked, “Have you thought about checking with other jurisdictions? I have this feeling Deschutes County had some bones, too.”

Goddamn. If I were a serial killer, Colin thought, I’d spread the bodies around, too. Good way to avoid anybody getting too interested, in case a few of those bodies were found eventually.

If these were related, the few that had been found almost had to be the tip of an iceberg. Think of how much empty country there was out here, with the high desert stretching to the east, the wooded, rugged mountains of the Cascade Range to the west. How many places to dump a body.

He didn’t like this line of thinking, but couldn’t avoid it. He thanked the sergeant and asked him to call if he thought of any more details or heard of anything relevant.

His gaze strayed to the bulletin board and Maddie Dubeau’s picture. Did this explain her disappearance? He didn’t want to think so.

Duane called a couple of hours later. “It can’t be Maddie,” he said baldly. “We’ll check dental records, too, but...Marge says this one is male.”

Relief was sharp, a jab to the chest rather than a gentler flood. Colin cleared his throat. “Age?”

“Can’t pin it down. Apparently some people get wisdom teeth real early, some not until their twenties, some never. Late teens, she thinks, but she wants more bones.”

Colin grunted. “I don’t have good news for you,” he said, starting with what the Crook County sergeant had told him. “Deschutes County had a kid, too, found four or five years ago, buried in the cinders on Lava Butte. Some teenagers were out there at night, drank a few six-packs—climbing up and sliding down, you know how it is—and they uncovered bones. A boy smashed the skull with his foot.”

“Bet that still gives him nightmares.”

“No shit,” Colin agreed. “That one was shot. There was an exit hole in the back of the head. Since, unlike Crook County, they had teeth, they were able to identify the victim. Another runaway, a girl from Vancouver last seen in Portland. Sixteen years old.”

“The one here in town was about the same age, too, wasn’t she?” Duane said thoughtfully.

“There are a hell of a lot of kids that age on the street.”

This wasn’t a problem they had much in Angel Butte. Winters were too cold in central Oregon for anyone to sleep in doorways or alleys year-round, and the town was too small for prostitution and panhandling to hide in shadows. But in larger cities, it was another matter.

“I called Bend, too,” Colin continued. “They didn’t have anything related. They think. A Detective—” he glanced at his notes “—Jacobs is going to do some research. He’s only been with the department for four years. Klamath County’s getting back to me.”

“If this one is a guy and those were girls, there’s likely no tie.” A serial killer was wired to choose victims to meet a certain need, usually at least part sexual, which almost always meant they were of one gender or the other.

“Probably not,” Colin agreed. Which didn’t mean these bones weren’t in some way connected to Maddie’s disappearance.

Duane gave an update on the search, which so far had turned up only a few additional small bones from a hand or foot.

The two men left it at that.

Colin rocked back in his chair. Well, the latest bones weren’t Maddie Dubeau’s. That was something.

She’d be twenty-seven years old now, if she were alive. Twenty-eight in a few weeks. He didn’t even have to think about it. His relationship with his sister wasn’t close, but he’d sent her a birthday card just last month. Like Cait, Maddie wouldn’t be a skinny kid anymore.

Some people didn’t change much from their early teen years, others so much so their own parents wouldn’t recognize them if they hadn’t been there every day while the transformation happened. The plain became pretty, the beautiful, ugly...or just ordinary.

Which way, he wondered, would Madeline Dubeau have gone?

He shook his head at his own foolishness. She was dead. She had to be. It was past time he quit clinging to the stubborn belief that she had somehow survived. How could she have? She had been a kid. A girl, small, fine-boned, physically immature for her age. Injured, snatched late at night and never seen again.

The very fact that she haunted him suggested that she was dead, didn’t it? The living left you alone in a way the dead didn’t. Just look at him; he didn’t give a damn about his mother, who was alive and well in San Francisco, but his father he still actively hated even though he’d been buried four years now.

Colin swung around in his chair to look out the window at a courtyard and the brick back of the jail. Despite the calls he’d made today, this investigation wasn’t his. It was Duane Brewer’s, Jane Vahalik’s, Ronnie Orr’s.

I’ll call Cait tonight, he thought. Arrange to get together with her when I’m in Seattle. He’d be there in two weeks, for a symposium Microsoft was holding on new technology for law enforcement personnel. Cait was his only real family. He could try harder. The fault was as much his as hers.

And right now, he had work to do. He swung back around to his desk and computer, and didn’t let himself glance at the bulletin board again.


CHAPTER TWO

“HEY, THE BOOK lady is here!” Aliyah cried.

Girls jumped up from the sagging sofa and miscellaneous easy chairs and rushed to crowd around Nell Smith. The music video on the TV was forgotten.

Katya, after barely glancing away from the television, said, “Big freaking deal.” Katya had appeared at SafeHold half a dozen times in the past two years. She never stayed for more than a week or two. She had to be nearly eighteen, and Nell worried she would soon be ineligible to stay at the shelter for homeless teens.

“Nell! Cool,” said Savannah, a wispy, pasty-skinned fourteen-year-old boasting three eyebrow piercings, half a dozen in each ear, a lip labret and a belly button ring. If there were other piercings in unseen places, Nell didn’t want to know.

“Did you bring me the new Vampire Academy book?” Kaylee asked eagerly.

More titles flew.

She grinned at their eager faces. “Yes, yes and yes.” All they wanted to read were paranormal romances, but Nell’s selections were written for teenagers, by talented authors.

She volunteered here on a regular basis, typically spending every Sunday afternoon and one weeknight evening just hanging out and talking to the girls. Girls were housed separately from guys, although the two buildings were linked by a courtyard and a shared kitchen and dining room.

Nell also came weekly to represent the Seattle Public Library, maintaining a shelf of books in each of the two buildings and filling special requests when she could. She’d packed other shelves with books that were weeded from the library collection, donated, or picked up at garage sales. Many of the kids who came in here weren’t readers and never would be. Others thought they weren’t but got seduced. Some laboriously studied for their high school equivalency exams, or to catch up with school—if they could be convinced to care.

What she loved most was encouraging reading for the pure joy of it. These were kids who hadn’t had much joy in their lives. She, like many of the other adults who worked and volunteered here, knew the bewilderment and fear and anger they felt. When she’d been where they were, books were her salvation. They’d offered her the world, filled her emptiness. Now she had a mission, one she never tried to disguise. Josef gave guitar lessons, Dex organized soccer games, Chloe taught computer skills. They all had something different to offer.

A couple of girls poked heads out into the hall, saw who was here and retreated in disinterest. Nell had already noticed two newcomers in the living room, neither moving from their seats, both watching the excitement with confusion. One was a black girl with her head shaved. Long skinny arms wrapped herself in a hug that was painful to see. The other girl was white, overweight and suffering from acne. Nell caught a glimpse of needle tracks on the inside of one elbow.

She smiled at both of them. “I’m Nell Smith. Otherwise known as the book lady. I bring library books regularly.”

“DVDs, too,” one of the girls said, already delving into today’s section. Her lip curled. “Sense and Sensibility? Really?”

“Try it. Guaranteed.”

There were a lot of rolled eyes. She grinned.

“Nell,” said a voice behind her. “Good. You’re here.”

She turned with a smile to greet Roberta Charles, the director, principal fund-raiser, cook and loving arms of SafeHold. Roberta had two other people with her today, though, one of whom sent a flash of dismay through Nell. He held a giant camera on one shoulder. A TV camera. He was already assessing the room, the shabby furniture, the excited clump of girls. Nell.

“Ah...I’ll get out of your way,” she said. “Just let me grab the books that have to go back.”

“No, no!” Roberta said. “You’re one of my best volunteers. Linda Capshaw is here from KING-5 to do a feature on us. She’s hoping to talk to staff and volunteers as well as some of the kids.”

Nell was okay with talking. The idea of chatting about what they accomplished here at SafeHold didn’t bother her; she’d done it before. It was the camera that spooked her. She was being idiotic; what difference would it make anymore if her face should appear somewhere? Probably none. Which didn’t keep her heart from pumping alarm through her bloodstream in quick spurts.

“Sure,” she agreed. “Not on camera, though. I’m shy.”

“I’m not.” Aliyah struck a pose, one skinny hip cocked. Giggling, three or four of the other girls flung arms around each other and tried to look sexy.

These, Nell knew, were the ones who weren’t hiding from anyone. The ones with no family to care that they’d gone missing. A few of the others were melting away or ducking heads to hide behind lank hair. Nell wished she didn’t have her own hair bundled on the back of her head. She’d have hidden behind it, too.

The camera was rolling. She turned her back and quickly put out the new books and piled the ones ready to go back into her plastic crate.

“Requests?” she asked.

Clarity, a shy thirteen-year-old who had arrived pregnant—too pregnant for abortion to be an option—and was awaiting foster care placement, leaned close and whispered, “Can you bring something about adoption?”

“Of course I will.” For a moment, forgetting the visitors, Nell smiled at the girl. “A lot of what’s written is for adopters, not birth mothers, but it would still give you some guidance. I’ll see if I can find some stuff written by kids who were adopted, too.” She took the chance of giving Clarity a quick hug. Thin arms encircled her in return. Nell’s eyes stung for a moment as tenderness and pity flooded her. God. What if she’d gotten pregnant back then?

Some flicker of movement pulled her back to the moment, and she took a suspicious look at the cameraman. He was currently half-turned away from her, sweeping the room, not seeming to pay attention. Respecting her wishes? How likely was that? But she could hope. Her fault for having left herself vulnerable for a minute.

The KING-5 woman looked vaguely familiar to Nell. Or maybe she was just a type: blond, exquisitely groomed, wearing a royal blue suit. “Do you have time to talk right now?” she asked.

“Just for a minute. I do have to get back to the library.” Under Roberta’s approving eye, she joined the women. It was fantastic that SafeHold was getting some publicity. Desperately needed donations always followed. But, while there were many things she’d do for these kids, appearing on air wasn’t one of them. The only picture she allowed to be snapped of her was for her driver’s license. Unavoidable, and barely resembling her anyway.

“SafeHold,” she told Linda Capshaw, who’d asked for permission to record her voice, “offers these kids hope in so many forms. Many practical, of course.” She elaborated, concluding with, “Sometimes, all we offer is sanctuary. We have at least one girl here right now who won’t accept anything else.” She carefully avoided glancing toward Katya. “But every so often, she shows up and has a couple of weeks here, where she knows she’s safe, where she gets enough to eat, where people are kind and nonjudgmental to her. Some of these kids have been abused and simple kindness means everything to them. Others need windows opened to give them glimpses of chances they never dreamed were there for them.”

“How did you become involved?” the blonde asked, sounding genuinely interested, although it was hard to tell for sure. Getting people to open up was, after all, her most essential job skill.

Nell took a deep breath. This was always hard to say. “I was a teenage runaway. Not in Seattle, somewhere else. I’d rather not say where. But I lived on the streets for over two years. A local shelter was my salvation. When I moved to Seattle and read about SafeHold in the Times, I called immediately. What’s that been?” She glanced at Roberta, even though she knew to the day when she’d first walked in the door. “Five years ago?”

The director nodded. “Just about, I think.”

“I work for Seattle Public Library, too. As a technician, not a librarian. I don’t have a master’s degree. But because of my involvement here, I’m the one who brings books, DVDs, whatever, weekly.”

They chatted for another ten or fifteen minutes, Nell keeping a wary eye out for the cameraman. Then she made her excuses and left, sooner than she would have liked to go. Usually she’d have made the effort to sit down and talk to the new residents, find out who, if anyone, was missing since Sunday. But she’d be back Thursday evening—soon enough.

Yes, she told herself while she loaded the crate of books and DVDs into the back of her old Ford, she was a coward. What else was new? It was smart not to take chances, that was all. She hadn’t grown up in Seattle, she knew that much, but she had no idea how widely local stations were broadcast. And her face...well, it hadn’t changed that much since she had first found herself alone and scared, on the streets, knowing that worse than starving, worse than having to sell her body, worse than anything, was the possibility of being seen by someone who knew her.

She was someone entirely different now. She’d created a life out of whole cloth, starting with nothing. But unless she someday had the money for plastic surgery, she couldn’t do anything about her face, and that hadn’t changed.

Nell almost laughed as she got behind the wheel and started the windshield wipers to combat the autumn drizzle. As if she’d want to be on camera anyway! There was a lot she didn’t know about who she’d been, but she had no doubt at all that she’d always been shy. Whatever dreams she’d had, being on television wouldn’t have been one of them. No one changed that much.

* * *

COLIN SPRAWLED ON the king-size hotel bed and reached for the remote control. He’d like to find something mindless. His brain was on overload after a day of listening to speakers talk about new technology undergoing trials in various police departments around the world. He was glad he’d come; knowing what was out there was worthwhile, but most of this was beyond the scope of his relatively small department.

He was to have dinner with Cait and a boyfriend who was apparently serious. Either that, or she was bringing the guy as a sort of screen, because she didn’t want to have to make conversation with her brother for two hours. Because of her work schedule they weren’t meeting until seven-thirty. Yawning as he flipped through channels, Colin realized he’d have to be careful not to nod off. He’d made the drive late last night and gotten up early to have breakfast with a group of other police chiefs and captains from agencies the size of Angel Butte, which had just over a hundred officers.

The news caught his eye. Some damn idiot had driven the wrong way onto I-5 in the middle of the night—blood-alcohol level sky-high. Killed a forty-two-year-old woman driving home from her job at Sea-Tac Airport.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

There was a news flash: “Coming up, join Linda Capshaw for a visit to a shelter for runaway teens.” Then commercials. Colin left the station on, given that he’d been thinking about runaways a hell of a lot the past few weeks. Every major city and many minor ones had similar shelters, but he was interested in seeing what this one offered. Did they keep kids on their radar in any meaningful way? Did they see to it that the teens got dental care, which might mean X-rays?

Duane and the two detectives had gotten nowhere in their attempts to identify the latest bones that had appeared when the tree roots were pulled up. It had turned out that Klamath County also had an unidentified teenage girl, found two years ago; the body had been too decomposed for them to lift fingerprints, and they hadn’t turned up a dental match. Given that the bodies found at Angel Butte and Deschutes County had both turned out to be teenage runaways that had likely passed through Portland, Colin wanted to check with shelters there. Just a couple of days ago, Duane’s team had found a fragment of the upper jaw, with yet another dental filling, which meant that they could identify this kid for sure, and maybe the Crook County one, if they could find dental records. It was a long shot, but worth pursuing.

He had to wait through another report before his patience was rewarded when a perky blonde smiled and said, “Welcome to SafeHold. Yes, there are a number of shelters for teenagers in the Puget Sound area, but word on the street is that SafeHold is the place to go for real help.”

The camera panned a room in which teenage boys lounged on shabby furniture, ignoring the fact that they were being filmed. Then came a talking head, Roberta Charles, who was the director. The brief snippet was mostly the inspiring stuff, about how kids went there for sanctuary. Then, as the camera moved on to showing a group of girls in what appeared to be a modern dance class, followed by boys playing one-on-one basketball in what looked like an old school yard, another woman’s voice said, “SafeHold offers these kids hope in so many forms. Many practical, of course. Some kids go from here to group homes, drug treatment or foster care.” A man wearing a stethoscope was seen talking to a boy whose face was turned from the camera. “They get desperately needed medical care.” An earnest older woman sat at a table with a girl, the two poring over an open textbook as the voice continued. “They’re encouraged to resume schooling and get tutoring to help them succeed. Legal aid is available for those in trouble with the law.” A handcuffed kid was being placed in the back of a patrol car. Then back to the shelter: some girls hammed for the camera in another shabby rec room, a flickering TV in the background. The blonde journalist said, “Dedicated volunteers like Nell Smith, popularly known here as ‘the book lady,’ mean everything to these lost children.” Her back to the camera, a young woman was piling books into a bright red plastic crate. The next moment, she was talking to a girl who looked too damn young to be in a runaway shelter, too slight even to have begun to menstruate. And, sweet Jesus, she was pregnant. Colin should have been past being shockable, but he wasn’t. Linda Capshaw was speaking again, as the camera lingered on a touching moment, the young woman hugging the pregnant girl. There was only a glimpse of their faces, one he’d have missed if he’d yawned at the wrong moment, but he felt as if he’d been jolted by a Taser.

Cursing, he lunged upright and stared at the TV, which had gone back to the studio, where trite bantering led to a weather report. His heart slammed in his chest and his nerve endings buzzed.

Was he was going completely nuts? God knew he’d been thinking about Maddie Dubeau more than was healthy these past weeks. But damn, damn, damn, that woman looked like her. Still thin, cheekbones still high and sharp, chin pointy. He wasn’t sure about the freckles, it had gone so fast, but her eyes were brown, her hair was the same color as when she was a kid.

He let an expletive escape. He couldn’t be mistaken. He couldn’t.

But this woman’s name wasn’t Maddie or anything like it. Nell Smith. He closed his eyes and saw her, smile warming as she wrapped her arms around the girl, eyes momentarily closing and her expression softening into something achingly gentle.

How could this Nell Smith be his Maddie Dubeau? It made no sense; this hadn’t been a case of a parent abducting a child and raising her under a different identity. Maddie had been fifteen, not five. You couldn’t persuade a fifteen-year-old that all her memories of who she’d been were false. And Maddie hadn’t been a runaway. If she was alive, why wouldn’t she have gotten help, called her parents? Found her way home?

The local news had segued into national, making him remember that he had to leave—now—or he’d be late getting together with his sister. Who hadn’t sounded that excited about seeing him.

He didn’t know why he kept trying, and was no longer in the mood. It had been two years since he’d seen her, and that time they’d had lunch. She’d been rushed, claiming she had to get back to work. His brilliant, pretty sister. Maybe he should let Cait go, along with his mother.

But he considered her his only family, and he was a stubborn man. He turned off the television reluctantly, wishing he had a way to replay that short clip. He reminded himself there wasn’t anything he could do about locating Nell Smith tonight, and he’d been looking forward to seeing Cait. One thing at a time, he told himself. He already knew that he wouldn’t be attending day two of the technology symposium tomorrow. He’d be visiting a runaway shelter.

Taking the elevator down to the parking garage below the hotel, Colin thought about coming right out and asking why Cait was so uninterested in having any meaningful relationship with him, her only sibling. But he knew he wouldn’t do it. Her answer might be too honest. Too final.

* * *

NELL CAST AN uneasy glance around the library. Nothing seemed to be out of order. A mother and several children were straggling from the children’s area, all carrying their selections. A couple of teenagers whispered at the end of an aisle of shelves, a group studied at a long table, and a number of adults sat throughout the library reading. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to her.

So why did she keep having the creepy feeling that someone was watching her?

Well, duh. Despite her request not to be filmed, she had appeared on TV. She’d worked last night but had known the spot was being aired and had set her TiVo. Watching it, all she could think was, No, no, no. She’d grabbed the remote and rewound, praying her face hadn’t been visible enough to be recognizable. But there she was. Two patrons had already commented today on how excited they were to see her on KING-5. She kept expecting to find people staring at her.

The definition of paranoia.

She smiled at a mother, then the stair-step array of children as they checked out their books. Perhaps she’d shelve some of the materials she’d just checked in, since things were so quiet.

Once again, she felt that peculiar prickling on the back of her neck, and she swung around quickly. This time, a man was looking at her. He’d been hidden previously by a newspaper held open before him. Now he was closing and folding it, his gaze resting on her.

Because she happened to be in his sight line? Her pulse was jumping despite her determination not to let herself become alarmed about nothing. So what if a guy was looking at her? Maybe he was thinking about asking a question. Maybe he’d seen her on TV. Maybe he would come on to her. That did occasionally happen, although she was good at squelching men.

She sent a vague smile his way and pushed a rolling cart of books out from behind the counter. She could reshelve new books while keeping an eye on the front desk.

He was still watching her. As if his gaze had a weight, she felt it even when her back was turned. Nell couldn’t decide why it bothered her so much. He certainly wasn’t one of the mentally ill homeless people who wandered in here; she’d only peripherally noticed what he wore, but thought he could be a businessman.

Maneuvering the cart, she sneaked another glance. Yes, slacks and a white shirt, open at the neck, but it was after five, which probably meant he was off work and had left his suit jacket and tie in the car. Dark hair cut rather short. Not exactly handsome, his face was still compelling. Hard. And though his posture was relaxed, with his legs stretched out and his ankles crossed, she doubted, although she couldn’t have said why, that he was relaxed at all.

Ignore him.

It wasn’t as if she was alone in the library. If he was still watching her an hour from now when she got off work, she’d have someone walk her to her car, which she’d driven today because it was her night to go to SafeHold.

She shelved in reasonable peace, pausing only a couple of times to talk to patrons and answer questions. A lively discussion with a regular about Alice Hoffman’s latest distracted her enough that she almost forgot the man. At some point, he picked up another section of the newspaper and read it, although he never lifted it high enough to disappear the way he had earlier. He might not be paying any attention to her at all, or he might still be keeping an eye on her. She couldn’t tell.

He hadn’t moved from his chair when her replacement arrived and she slipped away to get her coat and a couple of books she’d plucked off the new-title shelf for herself. But he was nowhere to be seen when she headed for the front doors.

She was almost to her car, keys in hand, wishing it didn’t get dark so early at this time of year, when a man said quietly, “Ms. Smith?”

With a sharp gasp, Nell spun around.

It was him, of course. She couldn’t imagine where he’d come from, how he’d gotten so near without making a sound. The lighting was good in the parking lot, but still cast odd shadows. He loomed over her.

The books fell from her hand, thudding to the pavement, and she backed up until she pressed against the fender of her Ford.

Seeing her fear, he lifted both hands and retreated a step. “Hey! It’s okay. I’m sorry if I frightened you. I won’t hurt you. I meant to catch you inside before you left.”

She didn’t take her eyes off him or bend to pick up the books she’d dropped. “What do you want?”

“I recognized you,” he said simply.

“I don’t know you.” Nell was certain of that.

“No. No, you wouldn’t. I’m a police officer, Ms. Smith. I recognize you from pictures taken before you disappeared.”

She had to swallow before she could get a word out. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His eyes were colorless in this stark, artificial light. Not brown, she thought; something pale gray or blue. They were keen on her face, as if he were drinking in the sight of her. No one had ever looked at her so intensely.

“I saw the news clip last night. I knew you right away.”

She prayed he couldn’t tell that she was trembling all over. Thank God the car was at her back, supporting her. She summoned a cool voice that sounded barely interested. “Just who is it that you think I am?”

“Madeline Dubeau.” He paused. “Madeline Noelle Dubeau. Maddie.”

Maddie. Oh, God, oh, God. She had called herself Mary in Portland. And she’d liked the name Eleanor, when she found it, because Nell sounded right to her. Like somebody she could be.

“My name is Eleanor Smith. I don’t know a Maddie...what did you say the last name is? Dew...?”

“Dubeau.”

Nell shook her head. “I’ve heard we all have twins.”

“I don’t believe it. I’ve searched for you for what seems half my life. I know you.”

Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt. She should say, I’m not this person you want me to be. Please leave me alone. She would say it, but first...she had to know.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why have you been hunting for her?”

He lifted a hand, and she flinched, but he was only reaching to squeeze the back of his own neck. “I was the responding officer when somebody heard your—her—scream. I found the mountain bike, the blood. Your wallet with a driver’s permit. I was new on the job then, and maybe that’s why I let myself care so much.” His hand lowered to his side, slowly, and she thought he was being careful not to alarm her again. “Last night when I saw you on the news—” he cleared his throat as if to give himself a second “—I thought it was a miracle.”

She had to get rid of him. Had to convince him he was wrong.

“I’m not your miracle,” Nell heard herself say so harshly, she didn’t know her own voice. “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but I’m not this Madeline person. You truly are mistaken, Mr....?”

He only looked at her, but she knew, knew, he saw her terror. “I’m Colin McAllister. Captain.”

“I’m not even from this area,” she said.

“Neither am I. Neither is Maddie.” He waited a moment, then asked softly, “Where are you from, Ms. Smith?”

“Where are you from, Captain McAllister?”

“Central Oregon.”

“I’m from the Midwest,” she said. Eleanor Theodora Smith had been born in Eugene, Oregon, but she couldn’t tell him that. He was a cop. If he looked hard enough, he’d find that same Eleanor Theodora Smith was also buried in Eugene, beneath a bronze plaque expressing her parents’ grief.

“I’ve upset you,” he observed. “That wasn’t my intention.”

“What was your intention?” She could combat this fear only with aggression. “Did you imagine that I don’t know who I am and would be thrilled when you told me?”

“No.” He was frowning now. “No. I thought...”

“What?”

“I thought perhaps Smith was a married name. And that Nell is a shortened version of your middle name.”

“It’s not. I’m Eleanor.”

“Or,” he continued, as though she hadn’t spoken, “that you were using a false name to hide.”

She flung her hands up, as though at the ridiculousness of that notion. “I won’t even ask,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Officer...no, Captain. I really need to be going.”

He didn’t move. “Ms. Smith. May I give you a business card? Just in case there’s ever anything you want to tell me?”

She should refuse. Eleanor Smith wouldn’t have any reason to accept, would she? But Nell couldn’t seem to think. And his card would tell her where he came from. Where Maddie Dubeau was from. No, that was silly—she could find articles online, if he were telling the truth. But what if she couldn’t find anything? Couldn’t figure out how the name was spelled? The card would give her a way to reach him, if she dared. If she chose. Nell was appalled to discover how tempted she was to learn about the part of her life she hadn’t wanted to remember.

The keys were biting into her palm, imprinting themselves. She managed a shrug. “I can’t imagine why I’d have any reason to call you, but if it will make you feel better I can take your card.”

“It would make me feel better.” He took one from the pocket of his slacks and held it out without actually moving closer. She was the one who had to take a step, feeling like a small animal hungry enough to creep up and steal a scrap of meat from a mountain lion’s meal, even though he crouched over it. She snatched it from his hand and retreated immediately, poking the card deep into her purse.

“I’d like to hear from you,” he said quietly. “I swear to you that I’ll keep anything you tell me confidential. We can just talk. I won’t tell anyone who you are or where. I swear,” he said again, his voice deep and serious.

Nell scrutinized that hard, unrevealing face for a long moment, trying to see whether he was telling the truth, but how could she ever know? The risk was too great. And he was probably wrong anyway, about who he thought she was. Her shock of recognition might be false. He hadn’t even said how long ago this Maddie had disappeared. She wasn’t going to ask.

She only nodded. After a moment he backed up a couple of steps, his eyes still holding hers, and then he turned and strode away.

With a whimper Nell crouched, scooped up her books and hurried around her car. Even once she was inside with the engine running and the doors locked, she didn’t feel safe. She had to get away from here.

She’d intended to get a deli sandwich somewhere and then go to the shelter. As shaken as she was, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. All she wanted was to go home, to lock herself in the sanctuary of her apartment.

But what if he followed her?

She drove, taking a circuitous route, gradually calming herself as she took one random turn after another and no other car stayed behind her.

Of course, he could have stuck some kind of locator on her car. She’d read about things like that.

If he were really a cop, though, he wouldn’t have to. He’d be able to find her.

Finally she made it back to her own street and the parking slot that she was lucky enough to have beneath the building. She scurried into the elevator, grateful to have it to herself, relieved it didn’t stop at the lobby level. Inside her apartment, she turned the dead bolt and put on the chain, shocked to see that her hand was still shaking.

Then she simply stood there, waiting for the sense of security to wrap around her. It never came.

She wasn’t safe. Somebody had recognized her. If this Captain McAllister were determined enough, he could find a way, legally or not, to get her fingerprints. The life she’d built so carefully could collapse, like a house carried down the crumbling bluff by a mudslide.

A terrible sound escaped her, a shuddering cry.

I have to run. I can’t be here when he comes looking for me again. I can’t.

She sank down, right there inside the door, her back to it, and let her purse and the books fall. Her breathing was loud in the silent apartment.

What if he meant it? What if she could trust him?

What if she couldn’t?

Nell drew her knees up, hugged herself tight and rocked.

The most insistent voice in her head was the one that whispered, Am I Maddie?


CHAPTER THREE

COLIN DIDN’T SLEEP well, and made his morning start early enough to be home in Angel Butte by midafternoon. I-5 south to Salem, then east through the Willamette National Forest to Santiam Pass. Not the easiest or quickest route home, but the most scenic. He didn’t know why he’d bothered, since he wasn’t in the mood for scenery. Every so often, though, he couldn’t help being pulled from his brooding by a glimpse of one or another of the ancient or newer volcanoes, the forests of lush Douglas fir and cedar, the clear waters of the North Santiam River. This pass would have been even more spectacular earlier in the fall. Somewhere he’d read that right here was the highest concentration of snow-capped volcanoes in the lower forty-eight states, and it was easy to believe.

Once he crossed over the pass to the drier eastern side, lodgepole and ponderosa pines replaced the fir and cedar. The six-thousand-foot-plus cone of Black Butte rose on the left, and he was swinging south. Through Bend, and he’d reached the home stretch.

Not once had his cell phone rang, although he’d laid it on the seat next to him and kept glancing at it. Once he even checked to be sure he hadn’t somehow reset it to vibrate without noticing.

It was too soon. He knew it was, but doubt about how he’d handled her and hope were both eating at him. The iPhone had changed from being an irritant to a beacon. He grunted with rueful amusement—there were cops who wouldn’t go to the john without their weapon; he wouldn’t go without his phone.

Even though he was starved when he reached Angel Butte, he still decided to stop by River Park before going home.

The scene wasn’t quite a replay from a few weeks ago. The heavy yellow equipment had been moved. The contractor had been relieved, Colin knew, for permission to go ahead with the job before weather made it impossible. He could see the bulldozer through the trees and hear the roar. Black smoke rose from a burn pile near the river.

Where the bones had been found, four officers were still combing through the heap of dirt. They were all bundled up against the below-freezing temperature. The pile of mixed dirt and brush was in the process of being shifted inch by inch. At least they were getting somewhere, he saw; he hadn’t come down here in over a week.

Jane Vahalik had a paintbrush in her hand and was gently whisking dirt from an object.

He strolled over. “How’s it going?”

She gave him a nasty look. “I’m freezing my ass off, that’s how it’s going.”

Her trainee radiated alarm at the disrespect his FTO was showing their captain. Colin only grinned, then studied the knob of bone Vahalik had unearthed. “Still finding bones, I see.”

“This is the biggest one in days.” She sighed. “Did you have a good trip?”

“In a way,” he said. “Glad to get over the mountains ahead of the storm they say is moving in.”

Sinking back on her heels, she mumbled something highly profane. Colin sympathized. It was early season yet, but if the forecasts were to be believed this crime scene could well disappear under a foot of snow by tomorrow. The ground was already crunchy; if it froze hard enough, the search would be over for who knew how long. Although recovering the bones was important, at this point they were all more interested in finding something, anything, that might have been buried with the kid. Even scraps of clothing could help with identification.

“Brewer come by today?” he asked.

“Yeah, I saw him not half an hour ago.” Vahalik turned her head and then nodded. “Right over there.”

Duane was coming toward them from where the heavy equipment was working. When he stepped over the sagging yellow crime scene tape, his mood looked as piss-poor as his detective’s. Colin walked to meet him.

“You know what?” Duane took off his gloves and shoved them into the pockets of his parka. He must have had a hat on earlier; his graying hair was spiking every which way. “I’d like to dig up the whole goddamn park! You know there are other bodies buried here. There have to be.”

Colin couldn’t argue. He’d also wondered if the red cinder of Angel Butte didn’t cover more bones.

Feeling the cold, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks. Damn, the change in temperature from rainy Seattle to the eastern side of the mountains was dramatic.

“You know we can’t log and tear up this section of woods just because.”

His lieutenant glared at him. “What do you want to bet Maddie’s here, if we just knew where to look?”

Emotion swelled in Colin’s chest until his ribs ached. The force of his desire to tell Duane that she was alive was like a punch. To say that he’d seen her, with his own eyes. Talked to her. Somehow, sad-eyed Maddie had survived whatever happened that night. Done more than survive, had found a way to touch the lives of other kids whose eyes were sad, too.

But he couldn’t. He’d promised her. He’d known, watching her press herself back against her car while fighting abject terror, that the only way he could ever learn her story, ever bring her home, was to walk away and let her make the choice herself. If he’d tried to compel her, she would flee. She would hate him, and he didn’t want Maddie Dubeau to hate him.

And also...seeing how afraid she was, Colin had to ask himself why. Twelve years later, and she was petrified because someone from her past had recognized her? Did she have a good reason? Would he be endangering her if he brought her into the open?

A part of him was thinking he should do just that. His conscience was scraped raw. What if he came face-to-face with her father? It was bad enough not telling Duane. Colin didn’t think he could look Marc Dubeau in the eye, knowing what he did.

No, he thought. He had to keep his promise. He’d leave Maddie’s photo where it hung in his office and hope that someday his cell phone rang and he would hear her voice.

“I’ve always believed she’s alive,” he said abruptly. “Don’t ask me why, but I still do.”

The older man stared hard at him. “You’ve never said that before.”

“Are you going to tell me I’m dreaming?”

Duane gave a short bark of laughter, then rubbed a hand over his face. “No. You’ve got good instincts. You always did. I hope you’re right, Colin. I hope you’re right.”

Colin waved at the scene around them. “Bring me up-to-date.”

* * *

NELL GAVE SERIOUS thought to disappearing again. She went so far as to pack a couple of her suitcases so they were ready for her to grab at a minute’s notice.

A voice of reason tried to quiet her panic. What had been dangerous to her teenage self might not be a threat to the adult she was now. It might even be that she’d spent all these years afraid of the wrong thing. This Captain McAllister said there was blood, a bike lying on its side. Someone had heard a scream. Maybe she’d had a perfectly good life before she was attacked. A family she loved.

But—reasonably or unreasonably—she didn’t think so.

Which still didn’t mean she had any reason to be afraid of the man and woman and boy she distantly remembered, now that she was grown up. It might only be that she’d thought they wouldn’t understand whatever trouble she’d been in. And she had, after all, been a teenager skewed to believe parents wouldn’t understand.

Irrational or not, panic made her stomach jittery. She hardly slept.

The next morning, she went straight to the bank and withdrew a couple thousand dollars.

Just in case. Better safe than sorry.

During the next two days, Nell made tentative, if probably ludicrous, plans. She spent the lunch hour of the first day wandering a cemetery in search of a grave marker for a child who would have been the right age if she’d lived. Whose name she could steal. She stood staring down at one such marker, an infant who had died at three days old, when she thought, Oh, that would be brilliant. Jeez. If she picked someone who’d been born and died here in King County, right where Eleanor Smith would have to disappear, she might as well draw a big red arrow for anyone searching for her. This way.

Walking back to her car across the springy, wet grass, she gusted a sigh. Assuming an identity wasn’t easy these days. The internet and shared databases made both hiding and appearing anew harder than it used to be. Harder, even, than twelve years ago. Plus, she’d have to start all over again, maybe give up her dream of graduate school, and she didn’t know if she had that in her.

What she didn’t do, not right away, was look up Madeline Dubeau on the internet. A part of her knew she didn’t have to, had known the moment he’d said the name that she was Maddie. Whatever was wrong with her wasn’t complete amnesia, the kind that made a man stumble into the emergency room at the hospital and say, “I don’t know who I am.” She did have memories, some clear as if they happened yesterday, tactile and real, while others were misty, barely seen.

She simply knew, had always known, that she didn’t want those memories to clear. The terrified, unthinking creature she’d been had held one certainty: her only hope was not to go back. Not to be who she was.

She wished now she had kept running, not stopped so soon. This policeman wouldn’t have stumbled on her if she lived in Maine or Florida. Back then, though, she hadn’t known where was safest because she didn’t know where she was from. How could she guess, when she had no idea how long she’d been in that car trunk before she became lucid?

She had come to think of her escape that night as her birthing story. The car trunk was her womb. Except a womb was supposed to be a safe place, nestled beneath a mother’s heart. Babies were forced out of the womb when the time came, crying their reluctance, only to be met with welcoming arms. They didn’t flee in terror into the night, grateful for the lash of tree branches, the scrape of bark.

If she had to start over again now, it wouldn’t be quite the same, of course; at least this time she’d retain her history and sense of self. But it would be a rebirth, nonetheless. Too close to what she’d already had to do once. And...impractical. She’d been reacting like a terrified kid, not the adult she was now.

She could call up newspaper clippings and read about Maddie Dubeau. If seeing her own face in them, the faces of her parents or friends, brought back her memories, would that be so bad?

Alone in her apartment, Nell hugged herself with intense anxiety, trying to reason with a bone-deep terror that felt as primal as mankind’s instinctive fear of fire or snakes or the dark.

I like my life. Why would I want to know where I came from?

Because, she admitted. Because she was lonely, and as things stood she didn’t dare let anyone close enough to have the right to expect answers. Because she felt hollow when she was with a group of friends, like her readers’ club, and they shared stories of their childhoods and families until she could see whole tapestries spread out, with rich colors and details so fine they made her heart hurt. Because she would like children of her own, if only she knew why the kind of trust a marriage took was impossible for her.

Because she hated being afraid of something she couldn’t even remember.

The next day, Nell went online and, first, did a search for the policeman who had confronted her in the parking lot. Captain Colin McAllister. It was reassuring when his name popped up immediately with dozens of references. Mostly in central Oregon newspapers, but a few times in the Oregonian, Portland’s daily. She randomly clicked on sites and read about testimonies in court, press conferences, promotions. The article in the Angel Butte Reporter about his promotion to captain of the Investigation and Support Services Division had a photo of him in uniform, gazing gravely at the camera. His eyes were hooded, watchful. They were gray, she decided, peering so closely her nose was almost pressed to the monitor. He wasn’t smiling, and his brows were knit together a little, adding a couple of creases to his forehead. And yes, he definitely had that remote look she was used to seeing in cops who came by SafeHold.

Not sure why she did, Nell printed the picture. Maybe if she kept studying his face she could decide if he was trustworthy.

Finally, pulse racing, she typed Madeline Noelle Dubeau into the search engine and, after a shaky moment, hit Enter. There were bunches of articles, not just in the Angel Butte paper but also in the Oregonian and even the Seattle Times. She chose one in the Portland Oregonian, and was unexpectedly stunned to see her face. She saw the date, and realized how lucky she’d been not to be recognized. She’d been in Portland by then, as naive and, in truth, almost as helpless as a newborn, trying to figure out how to survive while also staying invisible.

Now, she thought in bemusement, I know how old I really am. She’d been close, but was a year older than she’d thought.

The article summed up the history. Her history. It was assumed that fifteen-year-old Maddie had been abducted, leaving behind her mountain bike, her wallet and blood that DNA testing confirmed was hers. Her parents had thought she was upstairs in her bedroom when she had instead been riding her bike through a wooded section of park. The best guess was that she was on her way to a friend’s house in a neighborhood beyond the park. The friend, Emily Henson, hadn’t expected Maddie. Investigators had declined to share any leads police might be pursuing.

Nell read hungrily, article after article. There were her parents. Her father, Marc Dubeau, owned a major resort and had, at the time, sat on the city council. A lean, dark-haired and dark-eyed man, he looked like he might be as French as the name. He was handsome, and she couldn’t see herself in him at all. Her mother was always in the background in photos, either grief or personality making her retreat inside herself so that her face was expressionless, her wide eyes seeing something that wasn’t in front of her. She was blonde and blue-eyed, but aside from coloring Nell looked strikingly like her. The triangular, almost catlike face with a broad sweep of cheekbones and sharp chin, the eyes that were almost too big for the rest of the face. The look came together more elegantly for Helen Dubeau than it did for Nell, whose hair was plain brown and who had somehow acquired freckles across her nose. But they were recognizably mother and daughter, a fact that left her staring and winded.

Yes, these were the people in her fragmentary memories. This was the woman she pictured waiting for her in the hall outside her classroom with other mothers. There were no photos of her brother, who’d been kept out of the public eye, but he was mentioned. Felix was three years younger than she was, a seventh grader that year.

She printed articles, photos, until there was a stack a quarter of an inch thick on her desk. When she was done and closed the browser, she put Captain McAllister’s photo on top, so that it was the one she was looking at.

Exhaustion swept over her. She ached, as if she’d been hauling heavy boxes all day, climbing endless flights of stairs. She barely summoned the energy to stumble to the bathroom and brush her teeth before she tumbled into bed. She fell into sleep as if it were the darkest depths of her forgotten past.

* * *

“WHAT KIND OF fiasco is this?” Bystrom snapped, stabbing the front page article in the Reporter with his finger. The Bend Bulletin lay beside it with a similar headline. “How the hell am I supposed to make us sound like anything but idiots when the mayor asks me about it?”

Colin and his counterpart, Brian Cooper, who headed Patrol Services, exchanged a fleeting, expressionless glance. Colin wished—man, he wished—he could dismiss Angel Butte Police Chief Gary Bystrom as the dumb shit he often sounded, but the SOB was more complex than that. Unfortunately.

He looked like the Hollywood version of a sheriff or police chief, the kind who’d risen through the ranks and now used hard-won wisdom and sometimes bitter experience to lead and inspire his officers. Blond hair had gracefully turned white; he wore a tan as if he’d spent a lifetime out in the field squinting against the sun. What creases and wrinkles his lean face bore made him more handsome. His tall, athletic body was still spare and showed the uniform to advantage. He liked to wear his uniform.

The tan, they all knew, came from the sun reflecting off snow and water. Bystrom was an ardent skier and fly fisherman both. Everyone in the department was grateful that he pursued his hobbies so passionately, because it kept him out of their hair more often than not.

What Bystrom was really good at was politicking. He and the former mayor, Pete Linarelli, had been best friends. Members of the city council strongly supported their police chief. He socialized with most of them, and with most of the important business people in Butte County, too. When Maddie Dubeau disappeared, he had frequently been pictured with her parents, his face reflecting his deep concern, a comforting hand on Helen’s arm.

Colin had checked out his background and knew he’d skated through ten years as a patrol officer, back when Angel Butte was a third the size it was now, a backwater not yet transformed into a tourist town with the resulting increase in crime. He’d served briefly as a community liaison, become an administrative sergeant and then, with stunning speed, lieutenant. He made captain by forty, chief by forty-five. He hadn’t served a day in Criminal Investigations, on the Drug Enforcement Team or the SWAT team.

Temper tantrums were his answer to screwups caused by inadequate manpower, training or weaponry. And yeah, Colin couldn’t argue; this was a big one. Also the kind Colin and Brian both had been expecting, had considered inevitable, given the budget cutbacks.

What happened, so far as Colin understood it, was that a detective on his way home from work had stopped at a Quik-Stop store for some diapers for his eighteen-month-old kid. He’d interrupted a holdup in progress and, though undoubtedly irritated because he’d now have to do paperwork rather than go home, had the perp facedown on the counter within seconds. Unfortunately, a rookie officer answering the original alarm then burst through the door and managed to shoot the detective despite the store clerk’s attempt to explain and the fact that the detective had yelled repeatedly, “I’m police! I’m police!” The wounded detective had to bring down the rookie and take his gun away, a wrestling bout that the robber had taken advantage of to escape.

The good part was that Andy Palmer, the detective, had taken the round in the fleshy part of his left arm and he was right-handed. The excusable part was a kid only five weeks out of the academy getting overexcited. Inexcusable? The fact that officers were spread so damn thin he’d been out on his own way too soon, with backup more than ten minutes away.

The chief didn’t want to hear any of that. He wanted to know what a detective had been doing pulling his gun without having his badge in his other hand. The diapers he’d been clutching were no excuse.

Colin ground his teeth.

And the kid. Where the hell was his field training officer?

Brian Cooper explained that he had ridden around for a month with an FTO, but they’d needed him on patrol.

“You know how after that annexation we’re underfunded and shorthanded....”

Wasted breath. They weren’t allocating their resources adequately. They needed to teach their men to do the job and do it right. What Bystrom was going to tell the press, the council and the mayor was that the kid’s sergeant hadn’t been authorized to send him out on patrol alone. There had been a failure of communication, which he was going to right. Bystrom wanted that sergeant, and maybe the watch commander, slapped hard for embarrassing this department.

Colin suggested that this might be a great opportunity to go to the council for increased funding to plug some of the gaps that had left them so vulnerable. Use this as a lesson in what could go wrong.

Bystrom stared coldly at him and said, “I’m supposed to tell them we can’t do the goddamn job, but they should throw more money at us?”

The two police captains left the chief’s office and walked together in complete silence downstairs and straight out the station’s front door. They still hadn’t spoken a word when they reached the playground and picnic area half a block away, blanketed with eighteen inches of snow on the ground from this pre-Christmas winter blast. Neither of them was wearing a parka. Neither cared.

They paused and stood side by side, gazing toward the river running between puffy white banks. Their breath emerged in clouds.

“That asshole,” Brian said at last.

Colin made a sound that on a better day would have been a laugh. “No news there.”

“We could have lost an officer yesterday, and to friendly fire. Bystrom doesn’t give a goddamn about Palmer.” He let loose with another expletive. “But if Palmer had ended up dead, our fair leader would have looked damn fine telling the world how Angel Butte police officers take care of their own, and how he’d be there for the young wife and two preschool children. After which, hell, he’d have probably hit the slopes. Didn’t I hear the summit lift on Bachelor is open?”

“Yep.”

After another silence, he asked reflectively, “Do you think he has the new mayor in his pocket yet?”

To the consternation of the old guard, Linarelli had lost the election earlier this month to a Democrat who’d served only one term on the city council. Nobody yet knew what to make of Noah Chandler, whom everyone remembered had worn his hair in a ponytail when he moved to Angel Butte ten years ago and opened the town’s first brew pub. Still only thirty-five, he now owned three, the one here in Angel Butte, one in Sisters and a third in Bend. He was an entrepreneur who was going places. The ponytail was long gone; nobody could argue he didn’t have finely honed political instincts. Colin had voted for him and celebrated when he won. He hadn’t yet gone out on a limb and taken the problem that was his boss to the new mayor.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Did you see the press conference they did together? They didn’t look real friendly.”

“No, they didn’t,” Brian agreed thoughtfully.

A phone rang, and they both glanced down at their belts. “Mine,” Colin said, lifting it to see the number. He didn’t recognize it, but the area code was 206. Seattle. He heard the way his voice roughened when he said, “I’ve got to take this,” and turned away.

“Later,” Brian said with a nod, and started back toward the station.

Colin answered the phone. “McAllister.”

A woman said hesitantly, “This is Nell Smith. You gave me your card. I’m, uh...”

Triumph roared through him. “Maddie Dubeau.” He’d expected to wait a lot longer than four days for her to decide, however tentatively, to trust him.

There was a pause. “That’s what you called me.”

He waited.

“You said we could talk.” There was restraint in her voice. Maybe more. Fear, at a guess.

“I meant it. I’ve waited a long time to talk to you,” he told her.

“I don’t understand,” she said, so softly she was nearly whispering.

A group came out of the station and turned his way. They were all under him, a mix of people from Records and his own support staff. He nodded and started toward the parking lot.

“Listen,” he said, “are you somewhere I can call you back in ten minutes? I don’t want to be overheard.”

“Oh! No! I mean, yes, that’s fine. I’m home.”

“Okay. Ten minutes,” he promised, and hit End. He called his administrative assistant and said, “Something has come up. You can reach me at home.”

He made it there in eight minutes and let himself in. He took just long enough to crank up the thermostat and ditch the tie, then pulled her number up on his cell phone and looked at it with wonder that made him feel almost boyish. Maddie Dubeau. Who would believe this?

She answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

“This is Colin McAllister.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Thank you for returning my call.”

He’d have given anything to be able to see her face. “I’m sorry I scared you that night,” he said.

“It wasn’t so much because we were alone in the parking lot.” She took a breath he could hear. “It was just because...”

“I recognized you.”

“Yes. You’re the first person, in all these years.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“The thing is...I don’t remember.” In a rush, she said, “The first thing I knew, I was in a car trunk. I was unconscious some of the time. Finally the car stopped, and I found a latch that folded the backseat down and got out. It was...it was an ARCO station, you know, with a mini-mart, at a freeway exit in the middle of nowhere. I hid for a long time, and eventually managed to get in the back of a U-Haul truck.”

Hearing the stress in her voice, he made sure his was soothing. “You ended up in Seattle?”

“Portland. I stayed there for the first couple of years.”

“Why didn’t you get help? Come home?”

The silence this time was so long he almost broke it. Finally, she said softly, “I didn’t remember my name. I didn’t know where home was.”

“Damn,” he whispered. He sank down on a bar stool in his kitchen. “Maddie...”

“Nell.” She sounded upset, maybe even angry. “I’m Nell.”

“Nell.” He cleared his throat. “When did you remember?”

“I didn’t.” Now her voice was small and tremulous. Oh, yeah, she was all over the emotional map. “I still don’t. Exactly. That’s why you scared me.”

Stunned, he said, “But when I said your name, you knew.”

These pools of silence had such emotional density, he had trouble surfacing to draw a breath. Her distress was nearly unbearable when he couldn’t read her expressions, couldn’t touch her.

“Yes,” she said. “But not until I heard you say it. It was like...something I already knew slipped into place. See, I do have memories. Jumbled ones. When I went online and saw pictures of my parents, I knew their faces.”

“You were scared because I could identify you.”

“I’ve always been scared. I never wanted to remember. I know I was abducted, but...I think I was running, too. I think I knew someone was after me. Maybe even that...whoever it was might kill me.”

A chill crawled up his spine, one that reminded him of that night, when he’d stood in the dark staring at that bike and the blood that had pooled in the red dirt.

“You don’t think your parents could protect you.”

“No. Or else...”

The chill spread, lifting the small hairs on his forearms. “You’re afraid of them, too.”

“Maybe,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

Now he was the one to let the silence grow while he tried to think.

“Why did you call?” he asked at last. “Why are you admitting this to me?”

“I thought maybe I could trust you. It’s been hard, never telling anyone. And not knowing if I’m really crazy.”

“I don’t know a lot about amnesia,” he admitted. “I’ll tell you this. I encourage my officers to listen to their instincts. When we feel unease, or fear, there’s a reason. We notice things our conscious minds don’t acknowledge. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”

Nell was quiet for a minute. When she said, “Thank you for saying that,” she sounded calmer.

“What is it you thought you could trust me to do?”

A hitch of her breath told him her anxiety had kicked up again. “I don’t know! I don’t know what I want!”

“Maybe,” he said, “it’s time you came home.”

Silence again. “Do you know them? My parents?”

“I’ve seen your mother. Never talked to her. Your father I have occasional dealings with. They seem like decent people, Nell. I’m pretty sure not a day goes by that you’re not on their minds.”

She was panting now. “I need to think about it.”

“Okay,” he said, making his voice gentle. “That’s good, Nell. There’s no hurry. I won’t pressure you. I promised.” He couldn’t have even said where he was; he had never been focused so intently on the tiniest whisper of sound coming through a phone receiver. All he could see was her face. Not the one in the photo, but the woman in the parking lot. His chest felt bruised. “Maybe I can call you tomorrow. We can talk. Not about this. Just to get to know each other. If you have to trust me, you should know me.”

The small sound she made might have been a laugh, or a sob. “Yes. Thank you. I’d like that. I work until five....”

“In the evening, then. I’ll call.”

“You’ve been...very kind. Thank you, Captain.”

“Colin.”

“Colin. Goodbye.”

He said goodbye, too, then sat where he was, trying to understand why he felt so much.

Damn it, he had to think like the cop he was. He wasn’t twenty-two anymore with a hero complex.

On the face of it, her story was unlikely. He’d never believed in the kind of amnesia that gave someone an excuse for having walked away from a failed life. Short-term memory loss, sure. After trauma, people often lost the previous day, say, although usually only temporarily.

In her case, if she were telling the truth, she sounded as if she’d wanted to forget. The head injury had helped her along. Given her subconscious justification to ditch memories that were too painful to hang on to.

He didn’t know if that made sense, but it was the best he could do. He was confident she wasn’t a con artist who’d learned that the Dubeaus were well-to-do and thought she’d get something out of them. Nell Smith was Maddie, no question. It wasn’t just her features that made him so sure; it was what was in her eyes. Big and brown and beautiful, those eyes had been hiding so much. They still were.

There in the quiet of his own kitchen, Colin made a harsh sound. The only explanation for his own credulity was that there was simply something about her. There always had been.

And that would have to do until he figured out the rest.


CHAPTER FOUR

“I’M NOT SURE you’d recognize big parts of town even if you hadn’t lost your memory,” Colin said. “Twelve years is a long time.”

Transfixed by the quiet rumble of his voice, Nell clung to her phone. She’d silenced it earlier when she went to her book club, but hated the idea of missing a call from him. She had become so hungry for his calls, she felt pathetic. How embarrassing if he ever knew she had put his photo on her refrigerator door where she could see it when she paced through her small apartment talking to him. This call had started with him wishing her happy birthday—Maddie’s birthday. She was still reeling from knowing when she was really born. The fact that he’d remembered and wanted to call today of all days had brought her close to tears.

“I checked the town out online,” she told him. “To see if anything looked familiar.”

“Did it?”

“Maybe the river. And...and a park.” She had started breathing hard when she looked at those pictures.

“There are only two large parks within city limits.” A new thread in his voice was hard to single out and identify. Compassion? Pity? “Angel Butte and River Park, which combines a couple of picnic areas, a playground, a boat landing for canoes and kayaks, and maybe fifteen acres of old ponderosa forest.”

The always-hovering panic clutched at her throat. “That’s where you found my bike.”

“Yes.”

She didn’t know why her hands were shaking. Whatever happened was a long time ago. Of course she knew it was that park. And didn’t she want answers?

I don’t know. No. Maybe.

She focused on his face in the newspaper photo she could have seen clearly even with her eyes closed. Those watchful, penetrating eyes made her feel safe.

Which didn’t mean she wanted to talk about this anymore.

“You’ve never said where you grew up.” He had promised—hadn’t he?—to let her get to know him so that she could trust him. He’d been keeping that promise, although in their four previous conversations he had mostly told her about his job and some of his frustrations. Otherwise, they’d talked about unimportant things. Their plans for Thanksgiving, the way they celebrated holidays in general, national politics, music, movie and book tastes. It had occurred to her they’d had the kind of conversations that newly dating couples had.

“I grew up right here,” he said simply. “If I didn’t think of Angel Butte as home, I’d have looked for another job a long time ago.”

“But you said your sister is here in Seattle.”

He was silent for a moment, making her wonder if this were more personal than he wanted to get.

He promised, she told herself stubbornly.

“My parents divorced when I was sixteen and Cait was only ten. My mother has moved around some. Cait ended up going to Whitman College, and she’s now in grad school at the UW.”

Nell nodded; she’d finished her B.A. at the University of Washington, which also had one of the nation’s top graduate programs in library and information science. She had been saving, but the idea of not being able to work more than part-time for the two years it would take her to earn her master’s degree made her cautious.

“The divorce was bitter,” he said, before she could ask an innocuous question, like what his sister was studying. “I didn’t see much of them after that.”

He’d closed up, as if he were reluctant to betray emotion.

“Why?” she asked, then flushed with shame. “I’m sorry. That’s really nosy of me. I can tell you don’t want to talk about it, and it really isn’t any of my business.”

“That’s not true, Nell. I want us to be friends. The fact that I know so much about you has got to make you uneasy. I’ve been hoping we can find a better balance.”

Uneasy? What a weak word to describe this complex brew. It bubbled in her chest, sometimes barely simmering, sometimes reaching a furious boil that splattered her painfully and threatened to overflow.

He didn’t wait for her to respond. Instead, he went on.

“I haven’t spoken to my mother in, oh, seven or eight years and not often before that. I hated my father, and she chose to take my sister but not me when she left.”

“You hated your father?” And he had lost his mother, too.

“He abused my mother and beat me. I...tried to protect her, and most of all Cait, but it wasn’t always possible. I was as big as he was by the time I was fourteen or fifteen, and I quit taking it. We fought, sometimes physically. Punched holes in the walls, threw furniture. I suspect that, by the time my mother worked up the nerve to leave him, she associated me with the violence as much as she did Dad.”

“So she saved herself and not you.”

“That’s what she did,” he said flatly. “I forgave her in one way, because she did save Cait, too.”

“I can’t imagine abandoning my own child.”

She could hear him breathing. Somehow she wasn’t surprised when he managed a wry chuckle. “By that age I was hairy, six feet tall, uncommunicative and angry all the time. Probably didn’t bear much resemblance to her little boy.”

“Still.” Nell pictured boys she’d gotten to know at SafeHold. Rebellious, obscene, angry and, yes, violent, but also bewildered—the vulnerable boys still visible beneath the troubled teenagers.

“Still,” Colin echoed, and she heard that same bewilderment in his voice, although she doubted he was aware of it.

“I’m surprised you didn’t run away.”

“Crossed my mind, but I was too proud. I vowed never to back down. If he beat me bloody every day, I wasn’t going to surrender one iota of defiance and hate.” Colin was all man now, sardonic and almost amused at the idiot boy who had set himself up for such brutality. “Kept my vow, too.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“Finally left for college—none too soon—at Portland State University. Started out thinking I was pre-law, but after a few courses in criminal justice, I was sucked in. The couple of times cops came to our house, I saw that Dad was intimidated by them. I guess there’s nothing subtle about my choice.”

Nell found herself smiling. “No.”

“Fortunately, I got over the swaggering ‘I am armed and more powerful than you’ phase quickly. I hadn’t been home in four years. I’m sure I took the job in Angel Butte because I wanted to face down the monster from my childhood, but...”

Nell didn’t say anything, only waited for him to think through how much he wanted to share, or perhaps choose the right words to describe how he had felt.

“While I was gone I’d grown, or he’d shrunk, I was never sure which. No surprise, he was a heavy drinker and was showing the effects by that time. He owned a tavern when I was growing up, but he’d lost it. Angel Butte was changing, brew pubs were already hot and his place was dimly lit, unwelcoming to women, homey only to intolerant sons of bitches like him. Business declined and he had to give up. Ended up bartending for someone else—finally lost that job, too. He was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer four years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Nell said simply.

“Don’t be. I’m sorriest that Cait and I are strangers. She’s the one part of my family I’d have liked to keep.”

Nell had an unsettling thought. “She must have been close in age to me.”

Was she wrong in hearing an undertone to this silence?

“She is,” he agreed at last.

“I wonder if we knew each other. If we were ever in a class together.”

“That...never occurred to me. I suppose you might have been.” He sounded a little disturbed at the idea.

Nell’s pulse quickened. “She might have recognized me, if we’d happened to run into each other.”

“From when you were ten years old? I doubt it.”

“I’d have been safer if I’d moved farther away. I told myself I didn’t know where I was from, but...” She tried to reach for calm, even though this touched on the fear that had always lived inside her: What if someone recognizes me? “I suppose I wasn’t very brave. I was running away but clinging to the familiar at the same time.”

“Most kids who run away get hauled home. The ones who don’t often stay on the streets. They don’t go to college, build a solid life for themselves. If they manage to find that kind of security, they don’t reach out to help kids as lost as they were. Don’t tell me you weren’t brave, Nell.” His voice roughened at the end, making it hard for her to form a rebuttal.

“Don’t make me out to be more than I am,” she said at last. “I did things...”

“Yeah.” Now she heard a tenderness she had no defense against. “I know you must have. Fifteen years old and afraid to turn to any adult? How much choice did you have?”

Did he really understand what she’d been trying to tell him? Nell couldn’t tell, and lost the courage to elaborate. She didn’t even know if it mattered. Maybe it didn’t matter what she had done. Maddie Dubeau was the one he longed to bring home, not Nell Smith. She couldn’t afford to let herself forget that.

“I should go,” she said. “I’m working in the morning.”

“I suppose I should get to bed, too. I’ve probably dumped enough on you for one night anyway.”

“You didn’t dump. I asked.” She hesitated, then closed her eyes. “Thank you. For telling me all that. It helps, knowing your life hasn’t been trouble-free, either. Which means I’m not nearly as good a person as you’re trying to make me out to be. I should wish you had a perfect childhood with a loving family, and you made all that up to convince me we were, I don’t know, fellow travelers.”

He laughed. Really laughed, rich and deep. “I’m not trying to fit you for a halo, Nell.”

“I’m not an angel. Don’t call me that.”

She was as shocked at her sharpness as he must have been.

“I won’t,” he said after a discernible pause. “It didn’t occur to me.” He was soothing her again, much as he had that night he frightened her in the parking lot. Using his voice to convince her he was harmless, that he would never hurt her.

She wondered if his mother had been afraid of him.

Breathing fast again, she said, “I really have to go.”

“Would it help if I came back to Seattle, so we could talk face-to-face?”

Yes. Oh, yes. Please. As her lips formed the words, her eyes stung. She was torn between a desperate desire to see him again and terror that was just as strong. His willingness to let her take their conversations at her own pace had been the reassurance she’d needed. If he had pushed too hard, insisted on trying to delve into her memories, or had shown up unexpectedly, she would have known she couldn’t trust him.

“No,” she made herself say. “I like talking to you, but...”

“All right, Nell. I promised. No pressure. I just find...” He hesitated. “I’d like to see your face, that’s all.”

Her shakiness wasn’t only about panic now. She wanted to see his face, too.

“You’ve been really patient.” He had been. “Given me a huge amount of time. There must be a million things you’d rather be doing.”

“No.” The certainty in his voice was rock-solid. “There is nothing I want more than to help you feel ready to come home.”

Would she ever feel ready?

A sound slipped out that might have been a laugh.

No. Facing her past would be harder than anything she’d done since she escaped from the trunk of the car and shivered her way through that cold night, not knowing who or where she was, only that she didn’t dare go back.

But Nell knew again that if she didn’t reclaim the part of her that was Maddie she would be continuing to live only half a life. Now that she knew she was also Maddie, now that she’d seen pictures of her parents and even the house where she’d grown up, she couldn’t block out the past the way she had.

“I think,” she heard herself say in a voice that shook, “I might come to Angel Butte.”

“Home.”

“I don’t know if it’s home. Nothing I do remember makes me think it is. But maybe...maybe whatever or whoever I was running away from will have shrunk like your dad did. I want to find out there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”

He said some things—how glad he was she had made the decision, how gutsy he thought she was—but most important he renewed his promise not to tell anyone about her, not to warn a soul that she was coming.

One of the things he said shook her a little because he delivered it so thoughtfully. “It might be interesting to see how people react to your reappearance.”

“I have to get time off from work,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

After they’d said good-night and ended the call, Nell discovered she was sitting on the kitchen floor, very close to the corner, her back to the cupboard, her knees drawn up tight.

“Gutsy,” she said aloud, and laughed until she cried.

* * *

TOO ANTSY TO sit behind his desk, Colin killed an hour watching the SWAT team train, went by a house where an ugly domestic scene had occurred the night before and finally simply drove the streets of his town.

He wasn’t fit company right now. Knowing Nell was on her way worked like the most powerful shot of caffeine he’d ever had. His heart kept racing and occasionally thudding out of sequence. It felt like Christmas morning when he was young, before his father’s drinking and temper tainted every family occasion. A couple of times he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror and discovered he was grinning like a fool.

Not something he wanted anyone to catch him doing. If he’d hung around the station, he might have come face-to-face with Duane. Usually Colin prided himself on his ability to hide what he was thinking. He doubted he’d succeed today, especially with a man who knew him well.

Yesterday he’d been okay, even though he’d known Nell was planning to leave after she got off work. He’d made it home before he started envisioning her car like an electronic blip on his mental screen. Leaving heavy downtown Seattle traffic. Hitting Tacoma. An empty stretch, then Olympia. Had she reached Chehalis yet? He wondered if she’d made reservations at a Portland hotel, or had waited to spot one at a freeway exit and gambled on vacancies.

“I know I could make the drive in one day,” she had told him, “but I’d rather it be daylight when I get there.”

He didn’t blame her. Given that she would be arriving on the first of December, she was nervous about driving on snowy roads and would rather cross the Cascades in the morning when she was fresh. Colin had checked weather reports last night and again first thing this morning. It sounded as if Highway 26 had been plowed where it climbed high by Mount Hood. He hoped she’d stop for coffee and even lunch rather than pressing on.

At lunchtime, he finally called his assistant and told her he was taking half a day. As useless as he was, he might as well make his absence official.

Just after one, Nell called.

“I’m on the outskirts.” She sounded tense. “You’re right, I wouldn’t have recognized a thing. There’s a Walmart here.”

“Walmart is everywhere. And yes, we have a half mile stretch filled with chain stores and restaurants, pretty much like every other city in America.”

“Did you make a reservation for me?”

“Why don’t you meet me at my house?” he suggested. “I’m there now.”

Her hesitation was brief. He gave her directions and paced while waiting, one ear cocked for the sound of a car in his driveway.

He had the front door open before she came to a stop. She drove a peanut of a car—a Ford Focus, the one she’d backed right up to in the parking lot at the library.

As if he gave a damn. Part of him couldn’t believe she was here. But the driver’s side door opened, and there she was, just as he remembered her from the library, unmistakably Maddie Dubeau. Her warm brown eyes were wary, but the young Maddie hadn’t looked on the world with much faith, either.

Seeing her this time was different, though. He’d felt a punch that evening at the library because, damn, he’d found Maddie. But getting to know her during their long phone conversations had complicated his thinking. The woman he was looking at now wasn’t Maddie grown up. She was a woman named Nell, who had amazing cheekbones, legs a mile long and a build he thought was a little short-waisted to make up for those legs. He was surprised by her lush mouth, something that either had changed since she was a teenager, or hadn’t shown in those photos because she kept her lips pressed together so tightly.

He was attracted to her. Nonplussed, Colin did his best to shut it down. She’s Maddie Dubeau. This isn’t personal.

It was all he could do not to wince at the inner jeering. Still, the lecture had worked to an extent. Maddie. She was Maddie.

“You made it.” Despite the evidence before his eyes, he still fought a disbelief that mixed with his newly confused feelings.

She made a face at him. “I swear my knuckles were white driving over the pass by Mount Hood.”

“Wasn’t it plowed?”

“Yes, but it was still icy and there were snowbanks to each side so I couldn’t even pull over and let drivers by who wanted to go faster.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You could have flown in.”

“No, I’ll need my car.” She turned to look around her. “This is really nice. I pictured you in town.”

“I wanted privacy.” He only had an acre, but that was enough. His chalet-style house was built on a ridge of exposed lava and shielded by ponderosa pines younger and smaller than those in the park. He’d encouraged native growth, too. One of his jobs growing up had been mowing the lawn. He could live without ever mowing again.

“Come on in,” he said. “Coffee is ready.”

When she stepped inside his house, her eyes widened. “It’s beautiful.”

Outside, he had thought she’d been pretending to be interested. Now she didn’t look as if she were faking it anymore. Nell’s scrutiny made him self-conscious and Colin glanced around. “I haven’t done much decorating.”

“With that fireplace and those windows, it doesn’t need much.”

The river-rock fireplace had sold him on the house, though the vast expanses of glass hadn’t hurt even though he had known they would raise his heating bill substantially. The view from here looked northwest, toward a spine of mountains. It even caught a snippet of Mount Bachelor.

The floors were broad planks of chestnut. Low built-in bookcases formed a long seat beneath one wall of windows. The ceiling-high river rock took up most of another wall, with an ancient slab of wood inset as a mantel. He’d hung a Navajo rug above it instead of a painting.

Nell disappeared to use the bathroom while he poured the coffee in the kitchen that opened to the huge living room. When she reappeared, he saw the stress on her face that she’d been trying to hide.

She added both cream and sugar to her mug, then perched on a stool at the breakfast bar. Colin sipped his own coffee and watched her.

“My parents have a house right on the river.”

“I know. You remember it?”

“Not exactly.” She stirred, gazing into her coffee as if seeking patterns in tea leaves instead. “I looked them up online, then used Google Earth to see the house. I guess I’ve retained enough fragments that the house didn’t surprise me.”

“It’s not far from the park.”

“So it makes sense that I was cutting through on my way to wherever I was going.”

“Yes. Except that it was dark and you hadn’t told your parents you were going anywhere.”

Her eyes, strangely blind-looking, met his. “Are you sure about that?”





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