Книга - The Courage Tree

The Courage Tree
Diane Chamberlain


Can a mother ever give up hope?Janine wants her child to live a normal life full of adventure, so she lets her precious daughter go on her first overnight camping trip.When Sophie disappears, Janine is immediately facing a countdown she has no control over. Because Sophie isn’t like every other girl…she suffersfrom a rare disease. Every day her daughter is missing is one day closer to her death.A race against time.A race to save her little girl’s life.Praise for Diane Chamberlain ‘A marvellously gifted author. Every book she writes is a gem’ - Literary Times’Essential reading for Jodi Picoult fans’ -  Daily Mail’So full of unexpected twists you'll find yourself wanting to finish it in one sitting. Fans of Jodi Picoult's style will love how Diane Chamberlain writes.’ - Candis









Praise for

Diane Chamberlain


‘Emotional, complex and laced with suspense, this fascinating story is a brilliant read.’

—Closer

‘An excellent read’

—The Sun

‘This complex tale will stick with you forever.’

—Now

‘A hugely addictive twist in the tale makes this a sizzling sofa read … a deeply compelling and moving new novel.’

—Heat

‘This exquisite novel about love and friendship is written like a thriller … you won't want to put it down.’

—Bella

‘A bittersweet story about regret and hope’

—Publishers Weekly

‘A brilliantly told thriller’

—Woman

‘An engaging and absorbing story that'll have you racing through pages to finish’

—People's Friend

‘This compelling mystery will have you on the edge of your seat.’

—Inside Soap

‘A fabulous thriller with plenty of surprises’

—Star

‘Essential reading for Jodi Picoult fans’

—Daily Mail

‘Chamberlain skilfully … plumbs the nature of crimes of the heart.’

—Publishers Weekly

‘So full of unexpected twists you'll find yourself wanting to finish it in one sitting. Fans of Jodi Picoult's style will love how Diane Chamberlain writes.’

—Candis

‘The plot is intriguing and haunting revelations will have you glued to the very end.’

—Peterborough Evening Telegraph

‘I was drawn in from the first page and simply could not put it down until the last. I think I have found a new favourite author.’

—Daily Echo

‘[A] gripping summer read that's full of twists and turns

—5 stars’

— Woman's Own

‘The compelling story of three friends who are forced to question what it is to be a friend, mother and a sister.’

—Sunday World

‘A gripping novel’

—The Lady (online)

‘Diane Chamberlain is a marvellously gifted author. Every book she writes is a gem.’

—Literary Times

‘A strong tale that deserves a comparison with Jodi Picoult for, as this builds, one does indeed wonder if all will come right in the end.’

—lovereading.co.uk

‘I couldn't put it down.’

—Bookseller




The Courage

Tree

Diane Chamberlain


GETS TO THE HEART OF THE STORY






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




Also by Diane Chamberlain


Her Mother’s Shadow

Kiss River

Keeper of the Light

The Lost Daughter

The Bay at Midnight

Before the Storm

Secrets She Left Behind

The Lies We Told

Breaking the Silence

The Midwife’s Confession

Brass Ring

The Shadow Wife

The Good Father


You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

—George Bernard Shaw




CONTENTS


Praise for Diane Chamberlain (#ufd9ff42a-6783-5119-bab1-953dad51f1a4)

Title Page (#u29ed09b0-d2b1-51a0-922b-47670c6b04f0)

Also by Diane Chamberlain (#uf6ffe3a7-dcd5-513e-88e1-862c670b9112)

Epigraph (#u2b11997b-5a5d-5845-b531-077d60f65503)

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EXTRACT (#litres_trial_promo)

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

End Pages (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE


She would have no music where she was going.

Zoe stood in the center of her living room, with its vaulted ceilings, white carpeting and glassed-wall view of the Pacific Ocean, and stared, transfixed by the huge speaker in the corner of the room. She’d come to terms with the fact that she would lose the beach and the smell of the sea. She knew she could live without television—gladly without television and its bevy of new, young talent—and she could live without newspapers and magazines. But no music? It suddenly seemed like a deal breaker. But then her eyes drifted to the picture of Marti, where it rested on the top of the baby grand piano. Marti had been twenty in that picture, standing next to Max on the beach. She was near Max, but not touching him, and there was no sense of connection between father and daughter, as though each of their pictures had been taken separately and then spliced together. It disturbed Zoe to see that distance between them. If the picture had been of herself and Marti, would they look equally as detached from one another? she wondered. She feared that they would. It was time to change that.

In her boyish way, Marti looked beautiful in the picture. Zoe studied the short cap of blond hair, the compact, small-breasted body, huge blue eyes and long dark lashes that gave away Marti’s identity as a female, and Zoe knew she was making the right decision. In a choice between music and Marti, there was no contest. Everything else in the universe paled in comparison to Zoe’s need to save her daughter.

She turned away from the wall of stereo equipment and began climbing the broad spiral staircase to the second story, her resolve once again intact. It was quite simple, really, leaving forever. She had planned well ahead and now had no need even to pack a suitcase. What could she possibly put in a suitcase that would last her the rest of her life? Besides, someone might realize a suitcase was missing. Unlikely, since she had an entire room on the third story filled with luggage; but still, it was possible, and she couldn’t take that chance.

She walked into Max’s bedroom. She and Max had slept together for the forty years of their marriage, but they’d each had their own bedroom in addition to the master suite they’d shared. Their separate rooms had been for times alone, times of renewal and refreshment, for reading without disturbing one another, for making phone calls late into the night when one of them was working on a project. It was in Max’s room where she knew she would find exactly what she needed.

Opening the door to Max’s walk-in closet, she was startled by the spicy aroma that enveloped her. Max’s aftershave still filled this room, four full months after his death. She had not touched the clothes that hung in neat rows along the walls of the closet since that miserable day in November, and they slowly took on a blurred, surrealistic shape before her eyes. How was it that scent could instantly evoke so much pain? So many memories? But no time for them now. She brushed her hand across her eyes as she pulled the step stool from the corner of the closet toward the shelves in the rear. Climbing onto the stool, she reached toward the back of the top shelf.

Her hand felt the soft-sided rifle case, and she wrapped her fingers around it and drew it down from the shelf. Climbing off the stool, she rested the green case containing Max’s rifle carefully, gingerly, on the carpeted floor of the closet, then returned to her perch on the stool. Reaching onto the shelf once again, she found the box of bullets, then the Beretta pistol and a few loose clips. Never before had she touched these guns, and she hadn’t approved of Max having them. Probably the only thing they’d ever disagreed about.

“Max Garson’s death marks the end of one of the longest running and, by all accounts, most harmonious marriages in Hollywood,” People magazine had written.

For the most part, that had been a highly accurate assessment. And right now, Zoe was glad Max had defied her when it came to the guns. She was doubly glad she had told her friends about the rifle and the pistol and where they were hidden. They would tell the police, and the police would discover the guns were missing. Perfect.

The police would no doubt talk to Bonita, the therapist Zoe had seen for “grief counseling,” as well. Zoe had not needed to employ her acting skills to fake her symptoms of depression.

“Do you think about suicide?” Bonita had asked her on one recent visit, when Zoe had been particularly tearful.

“Yes,” she had nodded truthfully.

“Do you have a plan?” Bonita asked.

The question had shaken Zoe for an instant. How could Bonita possibly know? But then she realized Bonita was asking her if she had considered how she would end her life. Nothing more than that.

“No,” she had answered, knowing full well that if she said she had a plan, Bonita would arrange to have her locked up someplace, and wouldn’t the tabloids have a field day with that. Zoe most certainly did have a plan. Just not the sort of plan to which Bonita was alluding.

She carried the guns into the bedroom and caught sight of herself in the mirror above the dresser. The image horrified her. She looked completely ridiculous. Her long blond hair fell across the rifle case, her deep bangs hung all the way to her eyelashes, and there was something about the lighting in the room that made her skin look sallow, her eyes sunken. She was a large woman. She’d always been tall and full-figured, and back in her James Bond days, she’d been considered voluptuous, but now she was simply big. Amazonian. An aging sex goddess. She had bristled when she’d read those words about herself somewhere, but suddenly, she understood them to be the truth. Who had she been trying to kid, still wearing her hair the way she had when she was twenty-five, coloring the heck out of it to mask the gray? She looked away from the mirror and headed for the stairs. There would be no more two-hundred-dollar trips to the beauty salon in her future, and the thought was rather liberating.

Downstairs, she walked through the kitchen and out into the garage, where she rested the guns on the back seat of her silver Mercedes. Returning to the house, she sat down at the dining room table and gave her attention to what would be her final—and most difficult—task in this home she had cherished for so many years.

Staring down at the sheet of cream-colored parchment on the table in front of her, she picked up the Pelikan fountain pen Marti had given her several Christmases ago, on a day when the world had still seemed benevolent and the future still held promise. She rested the nib of the pen on the paper.

I see no choice but to end my life, on this, the eve of my sixtieth birthday, she wrote. Leaning away from the paper, cocking her head to the side, she noted that her penmanship looked like that of an old woman. Her hand quivered above the page.

“Pathetic old cow,” she muttered to herself, then continued writing.

My life is not worth much anymore. My beloved husband is dead; my daughter has been wrongly, cruelly imprisoned for the murder of Tara Ashton; the tabloids persist in noting each new wrinkle on my face, and I’m losing my singing voice. Although my acting skills are at their peak, they go unrecognized these days. Parts that once would have come to me are now given to actresses much younger than myself.

Zoe stopped writing for a moment and looked out the window toward the ocean. That last sentence made her sound small and bitter. She could leave it out, but then she would have to start the letter all over again. And what did she care what anyone thought of her at this point? She laughed at the bruised ego, the irritating narcissism that had dogged her these past few years and that seemed intent on following her to her counterfeit grave.

What do I have left to live for? she began writing again. I hope to take my life somewhere where I won’t be found. I don’t want to be seen in that condition. Marti, I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry I failed you. I tried every possible avenue I could to help you prove your innocence, but the system has failed both of us. The tears were quick to come this time. One fell on the paper, and she blotted it from the word innocence with the side of her hand.

She had failed Marti—in far too many ways—choosing the demands of her career over the needs of her daughter at every turn, placing Marti’s day-to-day care in the hands of nannies, sending her off to boarding school to let someone else deal with her moods and her mischief.

Suspicion would never have fallen on you had you not been my daughter, she wrote. Zoe’s daughter. I love you, dearest. Zoe’s breath caught in her throat, and she stared out the window at the sea for a long moment before continuing. Be strong, she wrote. All my love, Mother.

Moving the sheet of paper to the center of the table, she stood up, blotting her damp palms on her khaki-covered thighs. Her knees barely held her upright as she walked toward the garage, and her entire body trembled now, from the gravity of the lies she had just committed to writing, and from the fear of the journey she was about to make.




CHAPTER ONE


The guest cottage seemed stuffy, its four small rooms over-flowing with sunlight. At two-thirty, Janine turned off the air-conditioning and opened all the windows, starting in her bedroom and Sophie’s room, then the kitchen and finally the living room. Although it became instantly warmer in the cottage, the air was arid, a remarkable phenomenon for June in northern Virginia, and the faint breeze carried the scent of magnolia and lavender into the rooms.

Janine sat sideways on the sofa in the living room, her back against the overstuffed arm, bare feet up on the cushions, gazing out the window at Ayr Creek’s gardens. In fifteen minutes she could leave, she told herself. That would make her early, but there was no way she could wait here any longer.

The view of the gardens was spectacular from this window. Bands of red and violet, yellow and pink dipped and swirled over more than two acres of rolling landscape before losing themselves in the deep woods between the cottage and the mansion. The nineteenth century, yellow frame, black-shuttered mansion could barely be seen at this time of year due to the lush growth on the trees, allowing Janine to imagine that she was master of her own life and not living on her parents’ property. Not that Ayr Creek truly belonged to her parents, who were little more than caretakers. The house was owned by the Ayr Creek Foundation, which was operated by the descendants of the estate’s original owner, Angus Campbell. The Foundation had deeded enough money to the county to keep the garden and a few of the mansion’s rooms open to the public on weekends. And through some quiet arrangement, Janine’s mother, Donna Campbell Snyder, had been given the right to live in the mansion until her death, although she did not otherwise have a cent of her family’s fortune. This, Janine had always thought, was the source of her mother’s bitterness.

Nevertheless, Donna and Frank Snyder adored the Ayr Creek estate. Retired history teachers, they relished the task of over-seeing the upkeep of the house and gardens. And they willingly allowed Janine and her daughter, Sophie, to live rent-free in the “guest cottage,” a euphemism designed to masquerade the true history of the diminutive structure: it had once been home to Ayr Creek’s slaves.

There was a tear in the window screen. Just a small one, and if Janine closed one eye and leaned nearer to the screen, she could see one perfect, blue-blossomed hydrangea captured in the opening. If she leaned a little farther to the left, she could see the roses Lucas had planted near the wishing well. She should get up and repair the hole instead of playing games with it, she thought briefly, but shifted positions on the sofa and returned her attention to the gardens instead.

This restlessness, this stuffy, claustrophobic feeling, had been with her all weekend and she knew it was of her own creation. She had not drawn a full breath of air since Friday evening, when she’d watched her daughter ride away in the van with the rest of her Brownie troop. Sophie had grinned and giggled with her friends, looking for all the world like a perfectly healthy eight-year-old girl—except, perhaps, for the pallor and the delicate, willowy, white arms and legs. Janine had waved after the van until she could no longer make out Sophie’s red hair against the tinted window. Then she offered a quick smile to the two other mothers in the parking lot of Meadowlark Gardens and got into her car quickly, hoping that the worry hadn’t shown in her face. There hadn’t been a day in the last five years that she had not worried.

She’d planned to use this weekend alone to clean the cottage from top to bottom, but she’d gotten little done. She’d spent time on Saturday with her mother in the mansion, helping her research historically accurate wallpaper patterns on the Internet for one of the mansion’s bedrooms, and listening to her complain yet again about Lucas, the horticulturist in charge of the gardens. Janine knew, though, that she and her mother were both preoccupied with thoughts of Sophie. Was she all right? Eight years old seemed far too young to be spending the weekend at a Girl Scout camp nearly two hours away, even to Janine, and she knew her mother was furious with her for allowing Sophie to go. Sitting in the office, which was part of the mansion’s twentieth-century addition, Janine had tried to concentrate on the computer monitor while her mother leaned over her shoulder.

“It’s hot out and she’ll drink too much water,” her mother said. “She’ll forget to take her pills. She’ll eat the wrong things. You know how kids are.”

“She’ll be fine, Mom,” Janine had said through gritted teeth, although she couldn’t help but share her mother’s concerns. If Sophie came back from this trip sicker than when she went, the criticism from her parents would never end. Joe would be furious, as well. He had called last night, wanting to know if he could come over to see Sophie after she got home tonight, and Janine knew he was feeling what she did: the deep love and concern for the child they both treasured. Like Janine’s mother, Joe had expressed strong disapproval over Sophie’s going on this trip. One of many things Joe was angry with her about. Joe’s anger was hard for Janine to ignore, because she knew it came from a place of caring, not only about Sophie, but about herself, as well. Even in the ugliest moments of their separation and divorce, she’d been aware that Joe still loved her.

At two-forty-five, Janine left the cottage and got into her car. She drove down the long gravel driveway, banked on both sides by boxwood as old as the estate itself, and looked toward the mansion as she passed it. Her parents would be inside, waiting anxiously for her to bring their granddaughter home. She hoped she’d have some time alone with Sophie before she had to share her with them and Joe.

Meadowlark Gardens was less than half a mile from the Ayr Creek estate, and the parking lot of the public gardens was as full as she’d ever seen it. As Janine turned into the lot from Beulah Road, people dressed in wedding regalia spilled out of one of the brick buildings, probably getting ready to pose for pictures. In the distance, Janine could see another wedding taking place in the gazebo by the pond. A beautiful day for a wedding, she thought, as she drove toward the southeastern corner of the lot, where she was to meet the returning Brownie troop, but her mind quickly slipped back to her daughter. Suddenly, all she could think about was scooping Sophie into her arms. She pressed her foot harder on the gas pedal, cruising far too fast through the lot, and parked her car near the corner.

Although Janine was early, one other mother was already there, leaning against a station wagon, reading a paperback. Janine knew the woman, whose name was Suzanne, vaguely. She was pretty, a bit older than most mothers of children Sophie’s age, and it was hard to tell if her chin-length hair was a pale blond or actually gray. Janine smiled as she walked toward her.

“They certainly had great weather, didn’t they?” Suzanne asked, shading her eyes from the sun.

“They did.” Janine joined her in leaning against the car. “I’m glad it wasn’t too humid.”

Suzanne tossed her paperback through the open window of her car. “Oh, that wouldn’t have bothered them,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Kids don’t care whether it’s humid or not.”

Sophie would have cared, Janine thought, but she kept the words to herself. She tried unsuccessfully to remember what Suzanne’s daughter looked like. In truth, she’d paid little attention to the other girls in Sophie’s troop. It was so rare that Sophie could take part in any of their activities that Janine had had no opportunity to get to know any of them or their mothers. She looked at Suzanne. “Has your daughter…” she began. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember her name.”

“Emily.”

“Has Emily been on one of these camp-outs before?” Janine asked.

“Yes, she has,” Suzanne said. “But none this far away. And I know this is a real first for Sophie, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She felt somehow touched that Suzanne knew Sophie’s name. But, then, the other mothers probably talked about her.

“It’s wonderful she could go,” Suzanne said. “I guess she’s feeling better, huh?”

“Much better,” Janine admitted. So much better it was scary.

“I heard she’s receiving some sort of experimental treatment.”

“Yes.” Janine nodded, then hesitated a moment before adding, “She’s in a study of an alternative medicine. She’s only been in the study a couple of months, but she’s had some dramatic improvement. I’m just praying it will last.” It was hard for Janine to give words to Sophie’s improvement, to actually hear herself say those words out loud. She lived in terror that it might not last. Since being in the study, Sophie had not only remained out of the hospital, but had finally learned to ride a bike, had eaten almost anything she wanted, and had even attended the last of week of school. For most of the year, she’d been tutored at home or in the hospital, and last year had been equally as bad. Most indicative of Sophie’s improvement, though, was the fact that she no longer needed to spend every night attached to her dialysis machine. For the last couple of weeks, she’d required treatments only two nights a week. That had given her the freedom to do something she’d never before been able to do: spend the night away from home with her friends.

Sophie’s astonishing improvement seemed miraculous, although Dr. Schaefer, the researcher behind the study, had warned Janine that her daughter still had a long road ahead of her. She would need to receive twice-weekly intravenous infusions of Herbalina, the name he had given his herbal remedy to make it more appealing to the pediatric population of the study, for at least another year. Despite the ground Sophie had gained, her own nephrologist, the doctor she’d been seeing for the past three years, scoffed at the study, as did every other specialist with whom Janine had spoken. They’d pleaded with Janine to enroll Sophie in a different, more conventional study of yet another experimental drug, but Sophie had already participated in several of those studies, and Janine could no longer bear to see her daughter suffer the side effects of the toxic drugs they gave her. With Herbalina, Sophie had only gotten better. No rashes. No cramps. No bloating. No sleepiness.

The positive results were merely a temporary reduction in symptoms, Sophie’s regular doctor and his colleagues had argued. Beneath the surface, the disease still raged. They claimed Schaefer offered false hope to the hopeless, but stopped just short of calling the small, wiry, soft-spoken doctor a charlatan. Janine could easily see the situation from their perspective. After all, the medical profession had been grappling with Sophie’s form of kidney disease for decades, searching for a way to turn the tide of its destruction. Then along comes some alternative medicine doctor, with his combination of tree bark and herbs, and he thinks he can do what no one else has been able to do: cure the incurable. Sophie’s regular doctor said Schaefer’s treatment was nothing more than a Band-Aid, and it terrified Janine that he might be right. She was just getting her daughter back. She could not bear to lose her again.

“Where are the other parents?” Janine looked behind her toward the parking lot entrance. It was nearly three.

“Oh, I think it’s just you and me. I’m going to drive a couple of the girls home. Gloria and Alison will take the rest, but we figured you’d probably be anxious to be with Sophie, so we didn’t think to ask if you wanted one of us to give her a ride.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I can’t wait to see how she made out.”

“She looked so excited when she got into the van Friday evening,” Suzanne said.

“She was.” Janine was glad she was wearing sunglasses, because her eyes suddenly burned with tears. Her baby girl. How rare it was to have seen such unfettered joy in Sophie’s face rather than the usual lines of pain and fear. The sort of fear no child should have to endure.

“She’s so cute,” Suzanne said. “Where’d she get that red hair?”

“It’s a combination of mine and her dad’s, I guess,” she said, touching her hand to her own strawberry-blond hair. Joe’s hair was dark, his eyes blue, like Sophie’s.

“It’s her kidneys that are the problem, right?” Suzanne probed.

“Yes.” Janine didn’t mind the questions. The only time she was bothered by them was when they were asked in front of her daughter, as though Sophie were deaf and blind as well as very, very ill.

“Would a transplant help?”

“She already has one of mine.” Janine smiled ruefully. “Her body rejected it.” Joe had offered one of his, as well, but he was not a good match. And now, Sophie was beyond being helped by a transplant.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Suzanne said kindly. “She seems to handle everything very well, though. I was so surprised when I met her, because she’s so tiny. I thought she was about six. But then this eight-year-old voice comes out of her, with a ten-year-old vocabulary. It’s such a surprise.”

Janine smiled. “Kids with kidney disease tend to be small.”

“What a lot you must have been through with her,” Suzanne said. “And to think of how much I worry when Emily has the sniffles. I really admire you.”

Janine didn’t feel admirable. She was coping the only way a desperate mother could—searching for solutions, doing all she could to make Sophie’s time on earth as happy and carefree as possible…and crying only when she was alone at night.

“Emily told me you’re a helicopter pilot,” Suzanne said.

“Oh.” Janine was surprised. “I was, a long time ago. Before Sophie got sick.” She had learned to fly a helicopter in the army and had flown for an aircraft leasing company after getting out of the reserves. Was Sophie telling people she still flew? Maybe it embarrassed her that Janine had turned from an adventurous pilot into a stay-at-home mom. But with a chronically ill child, she could imagine no other course of action.

“Emily has a secret hope that, when the girls in the troop get a little older, you might give them flying lessons.”

She had thought of that herself, in those rare, optimistic moments when she could picture Sophie reaching her teenage years. “Maybe one day,” she said. “That would be fun.” She turned to look at the parking lot entrance again.

“You must worry about Sophie when she’s away,” Suzanne said suddenly, and Janine knew that the worry was evident in her eyes, or maybe in the way she was knotting and unknotting her hands.

“Well,” she said, “this is new to me. Sophie’s never been away from home without me or her father by her side.” She’d also never been so far from emergency care, which was why Joe had said the trip was out of the question. But Sophie had begged to go. There was so little she ever asked for, and so little Janine could do for her. She said yes, after getting permission from Dr. Schaefer, who even called Joe to assure him that Sophie would be fine, as long as she watched her fluid intake and was home for dialysis on Sunday night and back at Schaefer’s office for Herbalina on Monday. Joe, who lost his temper too easily and too often, had hung up on him.

Like Sophie’s regular doctors, Joe thought Schaefer’s study was a sham, and he had argued with Janine about making Sophie into a guinea pig. Although Janine and Joe had been divorced since Sophie was five, they usually were in agreement on how to handle their daughter’s treatment. This study had driven a wedge between them and was unraveling the already frayed edges of Janine’s relationship with her parents, as well. They hadn’t wanted Sophie to take part in such an unconventional treatment, either. It wasn’t like Janine to stand up to any disapproval from Joe or her parents, at least not in recent years. But Sophie was terminally ill. Even dialysis was failing her, and she’d been given mere months to live. There was little to lose.

“I don’t think you need to worry,” Suzanne said. “Gloria seems like a very caring and responsible leader.”

“I wonder about Alison, though,” Janine said. Alison was the younger of the two troop leaders. Only twenty-five and single, Alison had no children of her own. She’d been a volunteer leader in Sophie’s troop for the past two years, and all the girls loved her. She was fun-loving, comical and had a spirit of adventure that the girls adored and the parents feared. Alison had made a few errors in judgment over the past couple of years. Very minor. Nothing life-threatening. But then, she hadn’t had a child as frail and needy as Sophie under her care before.

“Oh, I think Alison’s super,” Suzanne said. “How many young women do you know who are childless themselves but still volunteer to work with kids? And the girls love her. She’s a good role model for them.”

Janine felt mildly chastened and wished she had thought before she’d spoken.

She was about to apologize, when she spotted a white van pulling into the parking lot.

“Is that them?” she asked.

“Looks like it,” Suzanne said.

The van was heading toward them, and Janine waved.

Stepping away from Suzanne’s station wagon, she wished she could make out the faces behind the van’s tinted windows. Patience, she told herself. If she charged the van, or God forbid, started crying when she saw Sophie, she would only embarrass her.

The van came to a stop next to the station wagon, and Gloria stepped out of the driver’s side, giving them a quick wave as she walked around the front of the car to slide open the side door. Five grimy, tired little Brownies began tumbling out. Suzanne stepped forward to give her daughter, Emily, a hug, and Janine looked past them, watching for a sixth girl to emerge. She walked toward the van, trying to see through the dark windows, but there appeared to be no movement inside.

“Janine,” Gloria said. “How come you’re still here?”

“I’m waiting for Sophie,” Janine said, confused. “Isn’t she with you?”

“Didn’t Alison get here yet?” Gloria asked.

Janine frowned. Alison? Gloria had let Sophie ride with Alison?

“No.” She tried to keep her voice calm. “I’ve been here since ten of. I haven’t seen her.”

“That’s strange,” Gloria said, reaching into the van to pull out one of the girls’ knapsacks. “Sophie and Holly wanted to ride with Alison,” she said, “and they had a good ten-minutes’ head start on us.”

Suzanne must have caught Janine’s look of panic. “Maybe Alison drove Sophie straight home?” she suggested.

“She knew she was supposed to come here first,” Gloria said, reaching for another knapsack.

“But maybe Sophie or Holly persuaded her to take them straight home,” Suzanne said.

Gloria shook her head. “She knew Janine would be waiting here for Sophie.”

Janine turned her head between the women as if following a Ping-Pong game. “I’ll call home,” she said, heading for her car. “I’ll see if they showed up there.”

Her hands shook as she opened her car door and reached inside for her cell phone. She dialed the number for the mansion, and her mother answered.

“I’m at Meadowlark Gardens, Mom, waiting for Sophie to get back, and I just wanted to check to see if her troop leader might have dropped her off there.”

“I haven’t seen her,” her mother said. “Could she be in the cottage?”

“Possibly.” Although if Sophie had been dropped off at the cottage and found that Janine wasn’t there, she probably would have walked up the driveway to the mansion. “Could you check, please?”

Janine heard some movement of the phone. “Frank?” her mother called, her voice obviously directed away from the receiver. Janine pictured her father sitting in the leather recliner in the Ayr Creek library, his favorite perch, either reading or working on his laptop. “Go over to the cottage and see if Sophie’s inside. She might have been dropped off there.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Janine said, once her mother was back on the phone.

“Why would they bring her home if they were supposed to meet you at Meadowlark Gardens?”

Janine tensed. Here we go, she thought. “There might have been a misunderstanding,” she said.

“Well, if they could get something as simple as that wrong, what else could they get wrong?”

“Mom, please.”

“She’s only eight years old, and a very fragile little girl,” her mother said. “I wouldn’t have sent you off to camp when you were eight, and you were healthy as a horse.”

It was true that her parents had never sent her to camp. She’d had to create her own adventures, and create them she did.

“I think this was a terrific experience for Sophie,” Janine said, although she’d argued about this with her mother and father and Joe so much over the past few weeks that she knew anything she said now was pointless.

Janine heard her father’s voice in the background, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“She’s not there,” her mother said into the phone.

“All right. Please call me on my cell phone if she shows up there instead of here, okay?”

“How late is she?”

“Not really late at all, Mom. I was just checking in case they took her home. I’ve got to go now.” She hung up and walked back to the van, where Gloria and Suzanne were talking. Emily leaned tiredly against her mother, and Janine felt a pang of envy witnessing the simple, uncomplicated warmth between them. She wanted Sophie here with her, now.

Gloria and Suzanne were looking toward the entrance to the parking lot. Janine followed their gaze, but there were few cars pulling into the lot this late in the day.

“What color is Alison’s car?” she asked.

“Blue Honda,” Gloria said. “Sophie’s not at home?”

Janine shook her head.

“They probably took a bathroom break,” Suzanne suggested.

“We had to take three of them,” Emily groaned. “Tiffany had to pee twice.”

“Shh,” said her mother.

Janine turned to look toward the far corner of the parking lot, searching for a blue Honda. Maybe Alison had her southeast and northeast confused, but this was the same spot from which the troop had taken off. Besides, she surely would have noticed the van by now.

“I’m sure they’ll be here any minute.” Gloria touched her arm. “They probably got stuck in a traffic jam.”

“You would have gotten stuck in it, too, then,” Janine said. “Does Alison have a cell phone with her?” Her voice sounded remarkably calm despite the fact that she was furious with Gloria for allowing Sophie to ride with the young troop leader.

“Yes, she does.” Gloria sounded relieved at that realization. “I have her number in the van. Hold on.” She walked quickly toward her van, stopping only a second to talk to her daughter.

“Sophie’s just fine,” Suzanne said in a reassuring voice.

Janine tried to nod, but her neck felt as if it were made of wood.

“She had a really good time, Mrs. Donohue,” Emily said, somehow picking up her mother’s cue that Janine was in desperate need of reassurance.

“What sorts of things did you do?” Janine tried to smile at Emily, one eye on the van where Gloria was making the call.

“We rode horses,” Emily said. “That was my favorite part.”

“Really?” Janine asked. “Did Sophie ride a horse?”

“Yup.” Emily told her some of the other things they’d done, but Janine was stuck on the image of her daughter astride a horse for the first time in her life.

Gloria moved the phone from her ear and started walking toward them.

“Did you reach her?” Janine asked.

“No answer,” Gloria said. “She probably has it turned off.”

Brilliant, Janine thought.

The other girls were getting grumpy. They slumped wearily against the van, begging to leave. Their cheeks were pink from the sun, their arms blotchy with mosquito bites.

“Be patient,” Gloria said to them. “As soon as Alison gets here, we can divide up and start for home.”

Gloria and Suzanne chatted calmly as they waited, but Janine could not follow, much less participate in, their conversation. Minutes passed, and her hand became slick with perspiration around the phone locked in her fist, while the world in the parking lot took on a dreamlike quality. Janine was only vaguely aware of the movement of the cars and the people and the tired Brownies, who now sprawled on the stretch of grass between the parking lot and Beulah Road. She glanced repeatedly at her watch as the minute hand made its steady fall toward three-thirty, and her mind raced with explanations for Alison’s tardiness. Maybe Sophie had gotten ill and they’d needed to stop. Or maybe they were simply caught in a traffic jam that Gloria had somehow circumvented. Or maybe Alison had decided to take them on some new, unplanned adventure. Janine wanted to ask Gloria what she had been thinking, putting Sophie in Alison’s car for the ride home. Did Alison have with her the three pages of instructions Janine had written outlining Sophie’s special needs? Did these women understand how sick Sophie was? She suddenly wondered if Joe had been right in not wanting Sophie go on this camping trip. Maybe it had been a foolish decision, after all. Thanks to Dr. Schaefer’s treatment, Sophie looked quite well right now. It would have been easy for the troop leaders to have forgotten how seriously ill she was.

Gloria tried several more times to reach Alison’s cell phone, without success, and at four o’clock, Janine could take it no longer.

“What’s Alison’s home phone number?” she asked Gloria. Her voice sounded curt, but she felt herself soften as she saw the look of concern in Gloria’s face.

Gloria knew the number by heart, and Janine dialed it on her own phone.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice answered.

Janine gripped the phone. “Alison?” she asked.

“No, this is Charlotte. Alison’s not here.”

“Are you her…housemate?”

“Yes.”

“I’m waiting for her at Meadowlark Gardens,” Janine said. “She’s supposed to be bringing my daughter and another girl back from West Virginia. Have you heard from her?”

“No,” Charlotte said. “I was wondering where she was, actually. She should have been home an hour ago. We’re supposed to go to Polyester’s tonight.”

Janine had no idea what Polyester’s was, nor did she care. “Look, if you hear from her, tell her to call this number immediately.” Janine gave the woman her number.

“You could call her, if you want,” Charlotte said. “I can give you the number for her cell.”

“We’ve tried calling her. She must be out of range.”

“I doubt that. She has the same phone plan I do. We’re never out of range.”

“Well, I guess she has it turned off, then.”

Charlotte laughed. “She never turns her phone off. She’s terrified of missing a call.”

Janine said goodbye, then hung up her phone. She looked toward the entrance of the parking lot, where a short line of cars was waiting to exit, and none were waiting to come in.

For whatever reason, Alison had turned her phone off now.




CHAPTER TWO


They waited until nearly four-thirty before calling Holly’s parents, and by that time the muscles in Janine’s face ached from trying not to cry. She wondered how another mother might react in a situation like this. The mother of a healthy child would take tardiness in stride. She wanted to behave like the typical mom of a typical child, but she’d had so little practice with that.

Gloria stood next to Janine as she placed the call to Holly’s parents, but it was apparent from her end of the conversation that they were not home.

“Are you Holly’s sister?” Gloria asked into the phone. “Will you have them give me a call as soon as they get home? It’s important…no, now don’t worry them. I’m sure everything’s fine.” Her voice was tight but upbeat. “Holly’s just a little late getting back from camp, and I wanted to let them know, that’s all.” She gave the girl her number, then hung up the phone and smiled at Janine.

“They have seven children,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

They could lose one and still have six left, Janine thought, although she knew such thinking was both irrational and callous.

“Holly falls smack in the middle,” Gloria continued.

Suzanne glanced over at Emily, lying on the lawn with the four other girls. “Em’s the middle child, too,” she said. “Though she doesn’t have that middle kid syndrome. Not yet, at least.”

“Jason has it, that’s for sure,” Gloria said, referring to her son. “Of course he’s stuck in the middle between two girls, so it’s not just the middle child syndrome he’s coping with.”

Janine had nothing to add to this conversation. How could Gloria and Suzanne stand there chatting about birth order when Sophie and Holly were over an hour and a half late? She stepped away from the two women and dialed Alison’s cell phone number again. Still no answer. She thought of what Alison’s housemate, Charlotte, had said about Alison never turning off her cell phone out of fear of missing a call. Had she had the phone glued to her ear on this trip? Might she have been concentrating on a conversation rather than on her driving and smashed into a tree? But then, wouldn’t Gloria have seen the accident, since she had been behind her? Maybe Alison had taken a different route. Then Gloria wouldn’t have been able to see the accident, and…

“Why don’t I take the girls home?” Suzanne interrupted her ruminating with a question to Gloria. “I’ve got the station wagon. I can fit them all in. Randi, too,” she said, referring to Gloria’s daughter.

Gloria looked at her watch, then nodded. “That would be great,” she said. “No sense in all of us waiting here.”

Suzanne gave Janine a quick, one-armed hug. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” she said. “This is just one of those crazy misunderstandings. You’ll see.”

“I hope so.” Janine tried to smile.

She leaned against the van, watching Gloria and Suzanne help the girls load their gear into the station wagon. She supposed she should help, but felt unable to move from the side of the van, dazed by the sight of all those healthy brown arms and legs, as the girls climbed into the station wagon with their sleeping bags and knapsacks. From the other end of the parking lot came a cacophony of whistles and applause, and she turned to see a car drive out of the lot onto Beulah Road, streamers sailing in the air from the rear bumper. Her mind was so heavy with worry that it took her a moment to realize it was a bride and groom making their getaway.

Gloria came to stand next to her as they watched the station wagon pull out of the parking lot. She looked at her watch again.

“I think we should call the police,” she said. “We should make sure there haven’t been any accidents.”

“Yes,” Janine agreed. She thought they should have called the police an hour ago.

Again, she listened to Gloria make a call in that tight, even voice, describing the problem in terms Janine deemed far too mild. She wanted to grab the phone from Gloria’s hand to tell the dispatcher her view of the situation, but she kept her hands knotted firmly around her own phone.

“They’re sending someone over here to talk with us,” Gloria told her as she clicked off her phone. “Though I hope by the time they get here, we won’t need them.” She looked toward Beulah Road as if hoping to see the blue Honda.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Janine said. “The one time I let her go someplace alone, and now she’s…Who knows where she is?”

Gloria put a gentle arm around Janine’s shoulders. “I’m sure she’s fine,” she said. “And Sophie had the best time, Janine. I was so glad she was finally able to do something fun with the rest of the girls. I just can’t get over how well she seems.”

“I know,” Janine said. “But she still needs to be careful. To watch her fluid intake and her—”

“And her diet,” Gloria finished the sentence for her. “We were careful with her, Janine. We were vigilant. Although she knows what she’s supposed to do to take care of herself. She’s very sophisticated about her condition.”

“Yes, she is,” Janine admitted. “But it’s gotten more complicated because of the study she’s in. Her fluid needs are always changing.”

“She told me about Herbalina.”

“What did she say about it?” Janine asked, curious.

“That she hated getting it at first. The needle was painful and all. But she knows it’s made her feel so much better. And it’s given her more freedom at night from being hooked up to that machine.”

“It has.” She remembered how Sophie had cried the first time that fat needle had pierced her vein. The last couple of weeks or so, though, she’d been so brave, sticking her arm out for Dr. Schaefer’s attack. Janine owed that change to Lucas and his courage tree.

“Is it a cure?” Gloria asked. “Or just a treatment.”

Janine sighed. “Depends on who you ask,” she said. “The doctor in charge of the study believes it can ultimately cure her. But Sophie’s regular doctor thinks it just buys a little time, and not much of it at that.” She looked away from Gloria, toward the road, tears burning her eyes again.

Gloria squeezed her shoulders. “Even if that’s the case, at least she’s able to enjoy herself right now.”

“Exactly my thought,” Janine said. Although she knew she was lying. Deep inside, she could not settle for mere temporary relief for Sophie. She wanted Sophie to have the chance at a normal life, the same chance Gloria’s daughter had.

“She’s such a sensitive little girl,” Gloria commented. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds,” she added quickly. “It’s not like she’s overly sensitive to what people say to her, or anything like that. But she’s very sensitive to the needs of the other girls. Brianna was homesick that first night, and Sophie told her jokes to take her mind off it.”

“That’s my girl.” Janine smiled. Sophie would always talk about the other kids in the hospital with sympathy. She felt sorry for them for being sick, as though she didn’t recognize that she was one of them herself.

“She said she was worried about you,” Gloria said.

“About me?”

“That you’d be lonely without her over the weekend.”

Janine shook her head, pressing a fist to her mouth. “I don’t want her to worry about me,” she said. Yet she knew that Sophie always did. More than once, Janine had stood in a hospital corridor, peeking unnoticed into Sophie’s room. Sophie’s pale, freckled face would be contorted with pain and misery, but her features would shift instantly into a devil-may-care smile once she realized her mother could see her. What about right now? she wondered. Wherever Sophie was, she had to know that Janine was worried about her. And that would upset her. Sophie had always taken on too much responsibility for the feelings of others.

A police car pulled into the parking lot, turning toward the southeast corner, slowing as it neared them. The car came to a stop next to Gloria’s van, and Janine felt her hope pour into the young officer who stepped out from behind the wheel. He looked little more than a child himself, though, as he walked toward them. She could see the sunburn on his nose and the gawky way he carried himself, as if he’d suddenly found himself in his father’s police uniform and didn’t know quite how to wear it.

“Are you the two ladies with the late Girl Scouts?”

“That’s right,” Gloria replied, but Janine was struck by the insensitivity of his words. The late Girl Scouts. She supposed it was her own sensitivity that was putting her on edge.

“They were due here at three.” Gloria told him about the trip back from the camp and gave him the names of Alison and the two girls. He wrote the information down slowly, in neat block letters, on a small notepad.

“Are you sure she took the same route as you?” he asked Gloria. He pronounced the word rowt.

“I assumed so. I mean, we followed each other going up there. I imagine she would have taken the same route back.”

“But you don’t know that for sure.”

“No.”

“Did you notice anything unusual when you were driving back? Any construction or anything going on along the side of the road—maybe a crafts fair or something—that they might have stopped for?”

“No. But I wasn’t really looking, either.”

The young man studied the words on his notepad as though he wasn’t sure what to make of them. “Okay, first of all, let’s get everyone down here. The troop leader’s roommate, your husband.” He nodded toward Janine, and she thought of correcting him, but there was little point in doing so just then. “The other girl’s parents,” he continued. “And I’m going to call in my supervisor. He has a phone and can check with the dispatchers along the route to see if any accidents have been reported. Unfortunately, only a small part of the route is in Fairfax County, so we’ll have to coordinate with the other police barracks between here and the camp. Of course, we’ve got a recent change of shift, so whatever dispatchers are on duty now might not know about any accidents that occurred on the other shifts.” He tapped the end of his pen against his chin as he stared at the notepad, and Janine grew impatient.

“Wouldn’t they have a record of any accidents, though?” she asked.

“Oh, sure, of course. I was just thinking out loud. Shouldn’t do that.” He grinned at her, and she looked away from him. He was too young to have any children of his own, she thought. He had no idea what this felt like. She watched him stride over to his car just as Gloria’s phone rang.

Gloria quickly brought her phone to her ear, but the caller was only Holly’s mother, and Janine wanted to scream out loud with her disappointment.

“Right,” Gloria said into the phone. “She’s riding in the car with Alison and one other Brownie, Sophie Donohue, and they haven’t shown up here yet. I’m sure everything’s okay, but we’ve contacted the police just in case…yes, you should come over. The police want everyone to be here.”

Somehow, knowing that the police wanted everyone together at Meadowlark Gardens made the gravity of the situation even more real.

“I’ll call my ex-husband,” Janine said, dialing his number on her own phone.

There was no answer on Joe’s end, just his taped message about being unable to come to the phone right then.

Yet another cell phone turned off, she thought. But at least with Joe, she could be reasonably sure where to find him…and who would be there with him.




CHAPTER THREE


Joe had never seen Paula quite so vicious on the tennis court. He dove to return her serve, missing the ball and nearly tripping over his own feet in the process.

Paula must finally be pulling out of her period of mourning, he thought, as he sent the ball back over the net to her. Six weeks ago, he’d accompanied her to Florida for her mother’s funeral, staying with her in her childhood home, trying to comfort her when she seemed inconsolable. Her mother had been her last living relative, and Paula’s pain over her death had been fierce and was only now beginning to lift. It was a particular sort of pain Joe knew and understood all too well.

Or maybe Paula just seemed more aggressive today because his heart was not on this tennis court in Reston, but rather at Ayr Creek, where Sophie would be babbling excitedly to Janine about her weekend at camp. He wanted to hear all about it. Despite the fact that he had strongly objected to her going, he hoped she’d had a wonderful, healthy time. He had no desire to have his grave misgivings about the trip proven correct.

Paula let out a whoop as she sent the final ball over the net, far out of his reach. He didn’t even bother attempting to return it. Instead, he bent over, his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath from the wild ride she’d just taken him on.

“Congratulations,” he called across the net. This was the first time she had beaten him so decisively. He straightened up, walked toward the net, and shook her hand.

“A hollow victory,” Paula said, pulling the clasp out of her dark hair and letting it fall across her shoulders. She tossed it back from her face with a shake of her head.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, as they walked on opposite sides of the net toward the benches.

“Because you weren’t paying a bit of attention to the game.”

“Well, my focus might have been a little off, but you won fair and square.”

Paula sat down on the bench and mopped her face with a towel. “You’re still worried about Sophie, huh?”

“Not worried, really.” He slipped his racquet into its case. “If anything had gone wrong at the camp, we would have heard. I’m just really curious to see how she made out. This is the first time she’s ever done anything like this.”

“The first time she’s been able to,” Paula reminded him, and he knew where she was headed with her train of thought.

“Right,” he said. He sat down and took a long drink from his water bottle.

“But you still can’t admit that it’s that herbal treatment that’s made the difference, can you?”

“Oh, I’m willing to concede that it might be,” he said. “But everyone says—everyone except the doctor in charge of the study—”

“Schaefer,” she said. “And I know what you’re going to say. That everyone else thinks her improvement is just a temporary effect of the herbs.”

He guessed he was beginning to sound like a broken record. “Right. So who would you believe?” he asked. “Sophie’s type of kidney disease has been around a long time, with bona fide researchers looking at it from every angle. Should I believe them, or some alternative doctor who appeared out of nowhere with his bag of weeds?”

“But she’s doing so much better,” Paula argued.

“I’ll admit that those IVs she gets have made her feel better. That doesn’t mean she is better.”

“Are you going over to Ayr Creek to see her tonight?”

“Uh-huh. Want to come?”

Paula nodded. “If that’s okay with you,” she said. “Unless you want to spend the time alone with her and Janine.”

He appreciated her consideration, but he also knew how much she cared about Sophie.

“No, I’d like you to—”

They both turned toward the small parking lot at the sound of a car door slamming shut. The tennis court was surrounded by trees, and Joe stood up to try to peer through the branches. A woman was running from the parking lot toward the tennis court.

He frowned. “That looks like Janine,” he said.

“Joe!” the woman shouted as she pulled open the chain-link door of the court, and he could see her clearly then—clearly enough to see the fear in her face.

He froze where he was standing. Sophie. Something was very wrong. Paula stood up next to him, clutching his arm as Janine ran toward them.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, finding his voice as he took a step toward her. “Is Sophie all right?”

Janine glanced at Paula, then back at Joe again. “She’s late returning from camp.” Janine was winded. “She’s riding with another girl and one of the leaders. I’ve been waiting at Meadowlark Gardens for her, but she hasn’t shown up yet.”

“What time was she supposed to get back?” he asked.

“Three.”

Joe looked at his watch. It was six-thirty. “She’s three and a half hours late?”

“Yes.”

“We need to call the police and—”

“They already know,” Janine said. Tendrils of her strawberry-blond hair were matted to her damp forehead. “They want everyone to come to Meadowlark Gardens to try to sort out what might have happened.”

“Damn it!” Joe punched the fence with the side of his fist, and he saw Janine flinch. “I knew she shouldn’t have gone on this trip!”

Paula rested her hand on his arm. “Not now, Joe,” she said softly. “We’ll follow you,” she said to Janine. “Where in the parking lot should we meet?”

“In the front, close to Beulah Road,” Janine said. She turned away from them and headed back to the gate at a run. “You’ll see the leader’s white van.”

Scooping their equipment into their arms, Joe and Paula ran down the court after her.

“Maybe she’ll have arrived by the time we get there,” Paula said as they got into Joe’s car. Paula was always like that—rational and optimistic. She’d been Joe’s co-worker at the accounting firm for the past four years. Co-worker and closest friend. Sometimes he didn’t know what he’d do without her to keep him sane. Right now, though, even Paula could not quiet his anger.

He pounded the steering wheel with both hands. “I should have taken Janine to court over this idiotic study,” he muttered. “I never should have allowed my daughter to be a guinea pig.”

“The study really doesn’t have anything to do with Sophie returning late from—”

“It has everything to do with it,” he snapped. “If she hadn’t been feeling better, she never would have gone.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Joey.” Paula’s voice was calm. “Don’t you think it’s even a little bit terrific that she’s feeling so much better?”

“The disease is still there, Paula,” he said. “It’s still raging. Still killing her.”

Those words shut her up as she fell silent next to him. This had been the major area of disagreement between them in recent weeks, and he knew she was tired of the argument.

Sophie’d had an entire cadre of nationally renowned physicians treating her over the last three years. When Janine had told him that she planned to enroll Sophie in the alternative medicine study, Joe had asked those doctors to dissuade her. One of them told Joe, far too bluntly, that Sophie was going to die, anyway, so it mattered little what sort of treatment she received now. The other doctors, however, spent hours talking with Janine, on the phone and in person, but she wouldn’t budge on her plan to subject Sophie to Schaefer’s snake oil.

Joe had even gone to see Schaefer himself, determined to try to understand exactly how he thought his Herbalina could help. Schaefer was a nerdy little man, unable to make eye contact, and seeing him had done nothing to ease Joe’s discomfort about the study. Even Schaefer’s voice was weak and hesitant. But he told Joe he was “almost certain” that he was onto something that would help children like Sophie. That was his reply to each one of Joe’s questions. Johnny One-note.

In early April, Sophie’s primary nephrologist contacted Janine to tell her about a new study at Johns Hopkins, one using a more conventional approach to treat Sophie’s illness. Joe had pleaded with Janine to allow Sophie that chance, but she seemed positively driven in this. She refused to let Sophie suffer any longer if she could find a way to give her some relief, she’d said, and she’d found support for her intentions from an unlikely source.

“It’s the gardener’s fault,” he muttered, as he turned the car onto Route 7.

“What?” Paula asked.

“The gardener at Ayr Creek. You know, Lucas Trowell. The guy Janine’s parents think is a pedophile?” He could picture the thin, bespectacled gardener pruning the azaleas or mulching the trees at Ayr Creek. The few times Joe had seen him there, Lucas had looked up from his task to stare at him. Not glance at him, but literally stare, as though Joe were a member of a species the gardener had never seen before. There was definitely something odd about that man.

“How on earth is this his fault?” Paula asked.

“He told her the study sounded like a great idea. He told Janine it made sense to him. He’s a gardener, for Pete’s sake. And probably certifiable, too. He lives in a damned tree house. I can’t believe she would listen to him instead of to Sophie’s doctors.”

He and Janine’s parents had joined forces to try to dissuade Janine from putting Sophie in the study, and again from sending her away this weekend, but they had failed on both counts. Janine seemed to be under the spell of a lunatic doctor and a persuasive gardener.

“I can relate to how Janine must feel, though,” Paula said, in her most careful, not-wanting-to-upset-him voice. “She’s concerned about quality of life for Sophie right now. The way I was about my mom before she died.”

“Well, I think she’s lost her mind.” He honked his horn at a driver who pulled in front of him, cutting him off from Janine. “She never had most of her mind to begin with.”

“Look, Joey.” Paula adjusted the chest strap of her seat belt so that she could turn to face him. “You’re angry and upset, and it makes sense that you’re trying to find someone to blame, but the truth is, if Sophie is late getting back from camp, it isn’t the fault of the study, or Schaefer, or the pedophile gardener, or Janine, or—”

“It is Janine’s fault,” Joe interrupted as he passed the car ahead of him, pulling up behind Janine again. “Sophie should never have gone on this trip. She’s never been away from us. Even during all her hospital stays, she’s had one of us with her. Janine completely disregarded my wishes. I don’t get it, either. For the past few years, we’ve agreed on how to handle things with Sophie. And now…”

“You mean, she’s gone along with everything you wanted to do.”

He glanced at her. “What are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m saying that Janine hasn’t dared to think for herself since Sophie got sick, when you and her parents pinned the blame on her.”

“I never overtly blamed her for it,” he said, although he knew the argument was weak and that Paula could see through him. “Even though I do think there’s a good chance that Sophie’s problem was the result of Janine’s stint as GI Jane.”

“Oh, Joe, there’s no record of other Desert Storm soldiers producing kids with kidney disease. Just because Janine—”

“Let’s not talk about this, okay?”

“You always say that when you’re about to lose an argument, you know that?”

He barely heard her. They were parked at a too long stoplight on Route 7, and he could see the back of Janine’s head in the car in front of him. She was brushing the hair from her face…or maybe wiping tears from her eyes, and he softened. If he was in her car right now, he would touch her. Hold her hand, perhaps. It had been a long time since they’d had any physical contact. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want it.

“How can I be so angry with her and want to jump her bones at the same time?” Joe asked.

Paula was quiet for a moment. “You’re still in love with her,” she stated.

He kept his eyes on the road. How did Paula know that? He’d never told her. Except for this last comment, which he knew to be inappropriate in both content and timing, he’d said nothing positive about Janine in months. How did women always manage to know what you were thinking?

“What makes you say that?” He turned off Route 7 onto Beulah Road, following closely on Janine’s bumper.

“Jumping her bones is just guy talk for the fact that you love her.”

“I can’t love her. I’m too angry with her.”

“Love and anger can exist at the same time,” Paula said. “I should know.” Paula had been divorced for five years from a man who had swindled her out of her savings. Only recently had she stopped talking about him with longing.

“I don’t know how I feel about her anymore,” he said. “I just think…we used to be a team. We used to be in sync—at least when it came to Sophie.”

He knew it was his fault that their marriage ended. He’d been stupid and angry, and if he could make it up to Janine somehow, he would. He wanted her back. The three of them were meant to be a family.

“Look, Joe,” Paula interrupted his thoughts. “Janine needs support right now. You guys need each other. So put the anger aside and just be a dad for now. Okay?”

She was right, and he nodded. “I’ll try,” he said.

The parking lot at Meadowlark Gardens was nearly empty, except for the bustle of activity in the corner nearest the road. Joe followed Janine’s car across the lot and parked between the white van and a police car. Scanning the small group of people, he tried to find a skinny, little red-haired girl among them, hoping Sophie had arrived safely during Janine’s trip to Reston.

But Sophie was not there, and Joe and Paula got out of the car and followed Janine into the circle of people.

“Any news?” Janine asked a tall woman, who shook her head, then looked at Joe.

“You’re Sophie’s dad?” The woman reached her hand toward him and he shook it quickly, as if he didn’t want to touch her for too long. He was angry with her, too. Angry with anyone even remotely responsible for putting Sophie in harm’s way.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m Gloria Moss. Sophie’s troop leader.”

“What’s going on?” He heard the impatient, officious tone to his voice and felt Paula’s steadying hand on his arm once again.

“Sergeant Loomis just arrived,” Gloria said, pointing in the direction of a large black man in uniform. He was talking with a young male officer, who used his hands as he spoke, cutting the air with them, while the big man listened.

Gloria introduced Joe, Paula and Janine to Holly’s parents, Rebecca and Steve Kraft, who had apparently arrived only minutes earlier in a large, midnight-blue Suburban. Everyone had questions for one another, but no one had the answers, and they stood waiting uncertainly by the white van, while the sergeant spoke to someone on the phone. Joe wanted to walk over to him and tell him to hurry up and do something, but he knew that was not going to help.

A Honda sped into the parking lot, giving all of them a hope-filled start until they realized that the car was silver. It came to a stop near the fence, and a young woman jumped out.

“I’m Charlotte,” she called as she ran toward them. “Alison’s roommate. Did anyone hear from her yet?

“No,” Janine said. “You haven’t heard anything, either?”

Charlotte shook her head. She looked about twenty years old, with shoulder-length blond hair and tiny glasses perched atop her button nose. Within seconds, Joe knew she was the sort of young woman who could make any event into a disaster.

“This is terrible,” she said repeatedly. “Alison would never be this late without a good reason. We’re supposed to go out tonight.”

“Well, the police are working on it,” Gloria said, although she looked uncertain as she glanced in the direction of the sergeant and young officer. Gloria wore her tension and worry in her face. She couldn’t have been more than his and Janine’s age, thirty-five, Joe thought, yet her forehead was creased with deep horizontal lines and her mouth was tight, her lips narrow.

Janine, on the other hand, carried her worry as she always did, with a calm resolve that made her face impassive and hard to read. How often he’d seen that face across Sophie’s hospital bed or while waiting for news from one doctor or another. She would fall apart later, he knew, when she was alone. But for now, there was little outward sign of the anguish he knew she was feeling.

Holly’s parents were another matter altogether. Steve and Rebecca Kraft wore wide, optimistic smiles, as though they dealt with this sort of thing all the time and refused to let it get them down. They were an older couple, somewhere in their mid-forties, he guessed, with the look of well-aged hippies. Steve wore his graying hair in a pony tail; Rebecca’s mousy-brown hair fell to her shoulders from a center part. Two of their seven children were with them—one a young boy, barely a toddler, the other a sour-looking six-year-old named Treat. “Everything will work out all right,” Rebecca said to Joe and Janine as she bounced the toddler in her arms. “It always does. We’ve been through this sort of thing so many times, we’re used to it.”

Their optimism was catching. Or at least Joe tried to catch it as he listened to them tell tales about their older children’s misadventures. He felt like the young, green father next to Steve’s and Rebecca’s soothing voices of experience.

Finally, Sergeant Loomis approached them, gathering them together with a sweep of his big arms. Joe stood between Janine and Paula in front of the white van, listening to Loomis’s deep, booming voice.

“The police agencies between here and the Scout camp have been alerted to notify us of any accidents along that route,” he said. “So far, there are no reports of any accidents involving a car like Ms. Dunn’s. Of course, it’s possible that they are simply lost.”

“She has the best sense of direction,” Charlotte offered. “Whenever we’re in Georgetown or D.C., she’s the one who can find her way around when the rest of us are totally lost. Except she also likes to take shortcuts, and sometimes they turn out to be more like longcuts.”

“They’re four hours late,” Joe said. The words gave reality to the facts, and he licked his dry lips. “That’s pretty damned lost if that’s what happened.”

“Now, it’s possible they just stopped to rest or to eat somewhere,” Sergeant Loomis suggested. “Maybe they got sidetracked by an event or an attraction of some sort and didn’t realize everyone would be worried by their late arrival.”

“Alison would’ve called me if she was going to be late,” Charlotte said. She was literally wringing her hands, and Joe couldn’t take his eyes off the way her knuckles whitened, then pinked up again, each time she passed one hand over the other. “Something is very, very wrong.”

“I’m guessing it’s one of those two options,” Sergeant Loomis seemed deaf to Charlotte’s remarks. “But we do need to entertain other possibilities.”

“Weren’t some hikers murdered in that area recently?” Charlotte asked, and everyone turned to look at her in a horrified silence.

“Let’s not expect the worst, okay?” Loomis said, in a firm, kind voice.

“Is she right, though?” Gloria asked. “Was someone recently murdered near the camp?”

“Not recently, and not really near the camp,” Loomis said. “It was last fall on the Appalachian Trail. A couple of women were found. And it’s not worth thinking about.”

At least not yet. Joe could hear the unspoken phrase at the end of the sergeant’s sentence.

“Is there a chance Alison Dunn might have taken off with the two girls?” Loomis looked from Gloria to Charlotte and back again. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, but we need to look at every possibility.”

“That’s crazy,” Charlotte actually laughed. “Why would she? Alison would never do anything like that.”

“Was she acting at all out of the ordinary as she was getting ready to give the two girls a ride?” Loomis asked Gloria.

Gloria shook her head. “No, and that just wouldn’t make sense, Officer. Alison’s very responsible. I know she has the reputation of being a little bit…ditzy…but that’s just her fun-loving side. She would never do what you’re suggesting.”

Joe could hear Janine breathing next to him. Long, ragged-sounding breaths, and every few seconds or so, her gaze would leave the sergeant and turn in the direction of the parking lot entrance. He didn’t blame her. He, too, expected Alison and his daughter to arrive any moment and put an end to this silly exercise in worry. The light was just beginning to fade, edging toward dusk. Soon it would be dark.

“You know,” Rebecca said slowly, and Joe noticed for the first time that she had a slight drawl to her speech. She was leaning against the van, her toddler in her arms and a look of amusement on her face. “That Alison is quite a character,” she said. “I wouldn’t put it past her just to decide Holly and Sophie didn’t have enough fun at camp and take them off to some amusement park or something. What amusement parks are there between here and there?” She looked at her husband. “Where’s that Water World place?”

“She wouldn’t do that,” Gloria insisted before Steve could respond. “Even if she wanted to, she’d know better than that.”

“That’s right,” Charlotte added. “I mean, Alison can be crazy and everything, but she knew we were going out tonight, and she would have come straight home. Plus, it doesn’t make any sense at all that we can’t get her on her phone. That’s what’s really freaking me out. No matter where she is, she has that phone on.”

“Well, batteries run out and phones break,” Sergeant Loomis said calmly. Charlotte was annoying him, Joe thought, but to the man’s credit, he was doing his best not to let it show.

“Could they have been kidnapped?” Janine spoke up, and only then did Joe realize how quiet she had become during this whole discussion. “I mean, by someone other than Alison?

“If they’re not back in a few hours, and if we have no reports of an accident, that’s something we’ll need to consider,” Loomis said. “Whether it be by Alison Dunn or someone else.”

“Please consider it now,” Janine said, a tremor in her voice. “Just in case that’s what happened. We can’t waste any time.”

“Right now,” the sergeant said, “I want to talk with each of you individually.” He pointed to Janine. “You first, Mrs. Donohue.”

“Are we suspects?” Steve asked, and only then did that thought occur to Joe. The parents were the first to fall under suspicion when a child disappeared. And too much of the time, they were guilty. He suddenly saw Steve and Rebecca Kraft with new eyes. They were a little too cheerful about this whole thing. A little too cavalier.

“I just want to see what information each of you has,” Loomis said. “Separately, you might remember something…be able to think of something that’s evading you now. And I’ll need to get more identifying information from you on the missing girls.”

Janine looked flustered. “Could you start with someone else?” she asked. “I need to call my parents first. I spoke to them earlier. They must really be worried by now.”

Joe touched her arm. “I’ll call them,” he said. She would hate dealing with Donna and Frank about this, and he didn’t blame her.

“Thanks.” Janine nodded, looking away from him. She was having trouble meeting his eyes tonight, he thought. She knew he blamed her for this, no matter how kindly he acted toward her now.

He watched her walk over to one of the police cars with Sergeant Loomis, then turned to Paula. “Be right back,” he said.

In the front seat of his car, he dialed the number for the Ayr Creek mansion on his cell phone, hoping Frank would answer. Neither of Janine’s parents would handle this news well, but Frank would be the calmer of the two.

“Hello?” It was Donna’s voice on the line.

“It’s Joe, Mom,” he said. He could see Janine sitting in the police car, the doors open to catch the faint breeze.

“Joe! I just tried to call you,” Donna said. “Do you know where Sophie and Janine are? Janine called hours ago to see if Sophie got dropped off here, but she hadn’t, and then I figured maybe they stopped at your house. Although I thought you were coming over—”

“Hold on, Mom,” he interrupted, then hesitated, not sure how to tell her. “I’m with Janine at the parking lot where Sophie and her Brownie troop were due to arrive. Some of the girls are back, but the car Sophie was riding in hasn’t shown up yet.”

Donna didn’t speak for a moment. “I thought they were supposed to arrive at three. That’s what Janine said.”

“Yes.”

“And they haven’t gotten there yet? It’s nearly seven-thirty!”

“I know, Mom.” He’d never stopped calling Donna “Mom.” When he and Janine split up, he’d tried to go back to addressing his ex-in-laws as Donna and Frank, but they had pleaded with him to continue calling them Mom and Dad. He’d been relieved. They were the only parents he had.

“We’ve contacted the police,” he informed her. “They’re looking for the car. They think maybe it had a breakdown or something.” It was a lie, but what else could he say?

“I told Janine not to send her.” Donna was already in tears, and Joe could hear Frank’s deep voice in the background asking her what was wrong. “Sophie hasn’t ever been away for an afternoon, much less at a camp a thousand miles away.”

“It wasn’t that far,” Joe said, although he certainly shared her concern. “I can hear Frank there,” he said. “Can you put him on?”

There was some fumbling with the phone, then Frank’s voice came on the line.

“What’s going on?” he asked, and Joe repeated what he’d told Donna.

“Janine isn’t a clear thinker these days,” Frank said. “She’s gone back to that crazy girl she used to be, all of a sudden. After this, I want you to go to court and get more say over what happens to Sophie, all right? Get veto power.”

Joe was already thinking of taking that step. “Well, for right now, we just need to get through this situation,” he said.

“Do you think this has to do with the gardener?” Donna had gotten on the extension.

Joe was confused, but only for a moment. “Lucas Trowell?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe he knew Sophie was due back, and he kidnapped her and the other girl, or—”

“No, Mom, I don’t think he’d go to those lengths.”

“You don’t really know him,” Donna asserted. “You don’t see how he’s always looking at the cottage, watching for Sophie to come out. He hardly does any work, just bosses the fellas under him around. He tries to get close to Janine to get her to trust him, and—”

“I know you don’t like him, Mom, but let’s not get into this now, okay?” Joe was no fan of Lucas’s, either, but it seemed unlikely that he’d had anything to do with Sophie’s disappearance.

“I’m always afraid that Janine will turn her back one day,” Donna continued, “just for a second, and Lucas Trowell will make off with Sophie. You hear about that happening all the time. It’s always the gardener or the handyman or someone who works nearby.”

It seemed far-fetched, but maybe Donna had a point. “I’ll ask one of the cops to take a drive by Lucas’s house just to make sure he’s there and that there’s nothing fishy going on, okay?” he offered.

He saw Janine step out of the police car. Although it was not yet dark out, the parking lot lights came on, and Janine stood uncertainly in the glow of one of them for a moment before walking toward the white van. There was a fragility about her that Joe had never noticed before. Not even during all those days and nights in the hospital, standing at Sophie’s bedside, wondering if she would live or die. A moment later, Sergeant Loomis got out of the car himself and waved to Joe.

“I’ve got to go,” he said to Donna.

“Should we come over there?” Donna asked.

“No, you sit tight. We’ll call the second we know anything.”

He passed Janine as he walked toward the police car.

“You okay?” he asked her.

She nodded, unsmiling, and he knew she was anything but okay.

“Too hot in there,” Loomis said, as Joe approached the police car. He wiped his damp forehead with a handkerchief. “Let’s stand out here and talk.”

Joe leaned against the closed door of the car, while Loomis asked him the predictable questions. Where had Joe been that day? What was his relationship with Sophie like? With Janine?

“Your ex-wife says you strongly disapprove of the medical treatment your daughter is receiving.”

“Yes, I do,” Joe said. “But I haven’t kidnapped her and taken her to the Mayo Clinic, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“And you didn’t want her to go to this camp, either,” Loomis continued. “How badly do you want to prove your ex-wife wrong about her decision to send your daughter there?”

Joe’s temper was rising, and he wondered if that was Loomis’s intent. “I would never use my daughter that way,” he said, working to keep his voice calm.

Loomis asked him a few more questions, about where he worked, about his relationship with Paula. Finally, he sighed and looked toward the clot of people a dozen yards or so away from where he was standing with Joe.

“Do you have any gut feeling about this?” he asked, once he’d seem to run out of questions. “Any instinctive sense of what’s going on here?”

Joe thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I just spoke with my in-laws. Sophie’s grandparents. They have some concerns about their gardener. Sophie and Janine live on their property, so the gardener knows them. My in-laws think he’s a little too interested in Sophie, and they’re worried he might have something to do with this. I told them I’d pass that along to you, in case you wanted to swing by his house and just make sure he’s there…and that Sophie isn’t.”

“What do you think?”

“I think the guy’s maybe a bit more interested in little girls than he should be, but I frankly doubt he has anything to do with this.”

“Do you know his address?”

“It’s on Canter Trail. Over near Wolf Trap. I’m not sure of the number, though. It’s a small ranch sort of house. A rambler. Brick. But he actually lives in the wooded lot behind the house, up in a tree house, and—”

“Are you talking about that Trowell fellow?” Loomis looked interested.

“You know him?” Joe felt a flash of fear. Why would the police know Lucas? Could he really be the pedophile Donna and Frank feared him to be?

“No, not personally,” Loomis said. “I just know that he lives there. Everyone knows about the guy in the tree house.”

“Can you check to see if he has a record?” Joe asked. “His first name is Lucas.”

“Will do. And I’ll have someone swing by there.”

“Thanks.”



It was dark by the time Sergeant Loomis had finished his questioning of everyone in the group. He stood beneath one of the parking lot lights and drew them all together again with a wave of his arms.

“All right,” he said. “That’s it for tonight. You—”

“That’s it?” Joe asked. “What are you going to do? Who’s out looking for them?”

“Look, Mr. Donohue,” Loomis said. “We’re not miracle workers. We’ve got a situation here of some travelers not reaching their destination. They’ve covered about a hundred miles, through several counties, in a blue Honda Accord, not exactly the rarest car on the road, and we don’t have a clue if they might have taken off in another direction altogether or if they stopped at a rest stop and took naps on a picnic table or if they were kidnapped by someone or decided to stop to eat, or who knows? So there’s not much for us to go on right now. We’ll do all we can. We’ll have the patrol cars along the route keep a lookout for them. Not much else we can do tonight.”

“What about talking to people in shops or restaurants along the way?” Paula asked.

“Most departments don’t have the manpower to do that, ma’am. At least not at this point in the investigation. So for now, you should all go home and stick close to your phones tonight.”

Go home? Joe could not imagine being able to go home. He looked at Janine and knew she was thinking the same thing.

He moved next to her. “Let’s drive up to the camp,” he said. “Follow the route they would have taken.”

“We’ve already got that covered.” Loomis had heard him. “There’s no need for you to—”

“I want to,” Janine insisted.

“And we’re staying right here,” Rebecca said. “In case they’ve just been delayed somehow and are on their way back.”

The police officer sighed. “Most of you have cell phones. I’ve got all your numbers. Let’s make sure you’ve all got each other’s.”

Holly’s parents had no cell phone, but Paula said she would stay with them so that they could use hers. Joe was grateful to Paula for not suggesting she join Janine and himself on their drive. She knew he’d want this time alone with Janine.

They exchanged phone numbers with everyone, and he and Janine got into his car. Once they were on the road, Janine began to cry. She wept softly, her face toward the window, and he pulled the car to the side of Beulah Road and turned off the ignition.

“It’ll be all right,” he said, his hand on her shoulder.

She turned to him. The light from the street lamp lit her hazel eyes and settled in one tear that slipped down her cheek. “I’m sorry, Joe,” she said. “I’m so sorry I sent her.”

He bit his tongue against an angry retort. “You couldn’t have known this would happen,” he managed to say instead. He reached over and pulled her into his arms, felt her melt there in the comfort of his touch, and he knew without a doubt that he wanted her to be his wife again.




CHAPTER FOUR


Lucas turned his head from his computer and listened. Far below the tree house, something was moving. It was not unusual to hear sounds at night on this deeply wooded lot. There was the steady June buzz of cicadas and crickets, and the leaf rustling of raccoons and possums and an occasional deer. But this was the unmistakable heavy crunching footsteps of a man. Lucas held very still, listening.

“Mr. Trowell?” A male voice called to him from somewhere below.

Lucas quickly logged off the Internet. He left his small study, reaching in his pocket for the key to the room, and he carefully locked the door and pocketed the key before walking through the living room to the front door. Opening the door, he stepped onto the deck and leaned over the railing, slipping into the blinding glare from a flashlight.

“Yes?” he called, lifting his hand to block the glare.

The flashlight was instantly turned off. “Sorry,” the man said. He was now illuminated by the deck light, which fell in a soft glow over the trees and cast shadows through the woods. The light bounced off the badge on the man’s uniform, sending an icicle of fear up Lucas’s spine.

Damn.

“Are you Lucas Trowell?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Lucas said, wondering if the county would send a policeman on a Sunday evening to tell him his house was out of code in yet another way. The county was never quite sure what to do about his tree house.

“Can I come up there for a minute?” the officer asked.

“Sure.” Lucas leaned over the railing again to point to the broad trunk of the oak tree beneath his house. “Can you see the steps? They’re around the back of the oak.”

“Right. I see them.”

Lucas listened as the man climbed the stairs, cringing at the squeaking sound a couple of them made. They were not rotted or anything like that, but he knew he should fix them, anyway. He had so little time these days to get work done on the house, though.

He didn’t like the anxiety he felt as the policeman neared the top of the stairs. Did everyone feel a pang of guilt when a cop wanted to see them? Did everyone’s mind race, searching for the reason for the visit? Or did that happen only to a person with something to hide?

The policeman joined Lucas on the deck. He was a young guy—very young—blond and blue-eyed, and he was grinning. Lucas’s anxiety dropped a notch.

“Totally cool,” the cop said. “I’ve always wanted to see this place. Everyone talks about it, but I don’t know anyone who’s seen it up close.”

“What can I do for you?” Lucas asked.

“Do you actually live up here?” The cop was not ready to get down to business, and Lucas wondered if his banter was intentional. Was he trying to throw him off guard? “Or do you just come up to get away from the house every once in while?” He looked toward the small, nondescript brick rambler, dark at the edge of the woods.

“I live up here as much as is reasonable,” Lucas said. “I store things in the house, and I cook in the house. I don’t like to keep food up here. I think I’d have a bug problem. The trees go through the house, and I have a steady stream of ants and spiders as it is. We’re living harmoniously at the moment, but I wouldn’t want to encourage any more of them to visit.”

“Any chance I can see inside?” the officer asked.

“In a minute,” Lucas said. He’d had enough of the game playing. “First, though, tell me why you’re here.”

“Yes. Sure.” The young man looked embarrassed, and Lucas relaxed to see that the cop’s interest had, in all likelihood, been genuine and not some ruse to get him to open up. He’d been seduced by the trees. It was usually that way. People lost themselves up here. They forgot about everything else in the world, at least for a moment. “I’m Officer Russo,” he said. “You work over at the Ayr Creek estate, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, the little girl who lives there…”

“Sophie.” He felt his heartbeat quicken, but carefully kept his face impassive.

“Sophie. Right. She was away at a camp this weekend and she was due back at Meadowlark Gardens at three, but she and one of the other girls and their leader never showed up. So I’m talking to people who know her to see if they might have any information.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Are you saying the rest of the girls are back?”

“Right. They showed up on time, but they were riding in a separate vehicle.”

“Maybe Sophie’s ride got a late start?” Lucas offered.

“No. The other leader saw them take off ahead of her.”

He felt a sort of panic rise up in his chest. “Could they have been in an accident or—”

“We’re checking on all of that,” Russo said. “So far, they’ve just fallen off the map.”

“Well, I was aware that Sophie was going away for the weekend,” Lucas said. “I don’t know any more than that. I’m not even sure where she went.” That was a lie—and probably an unnecessary one—but he felt the need to play dumb to this cop when it came to Sophie.

“Have you been here all day?” Russo asked.

“Most of it,” he said.

“And when you weren’t here, where were you?”

“What are you getting at?” Lucas asked.

“Just routine questions,” Russo assured him.

“I took a drive to Great Falls to see a friend around one or so. I was back here by three-thirty.”

“Could your friend verify that information for me?”

Lucas sighed. He should have lied. “Do you think I have something to do with this?” he asked. “With Sophie being late?”

“We’re just checking out everyone who has any relationship to Ayr Creek,” Russo said easily.

Everyone with a relationship to Ayr Creek, Lucas wondered, or just the gardener Frank and Donna Snyder distrusted around their granddaughter?

“My friend could verify it, but I’d rather not put him in that position,” he said. That would make things very messy.

“All right, I think we can hold off on that for the moment,” Russo said. “Now can I have that tour?” He looked up at the second tier of the house. “How many trees is this thing resting on?” he asked.

“It’s built between four, actually,” Lucas said. “This one’s a white oak.” He pointed to the tree supporting the deck. “That second level is built on a shag bark hickory, and, it’s hard to see from here, but there’s another oak and a tulip poplar doing the rest of the work.”

Russo stomped his foot on the deck. “Feels sturdy enough,” he observed.

“Oh, sure,” Lucas said, as he opened the front door and led the officer inside. “On a really windy day, though, the whole contraption sways in the wind, and I start to wonder if I’m out of my mind to live up here. Other than that, it’s pretty secure.”

“Holy…” Russo exclaimed, as they walked into the living room.

It was the usual reaction Lucas got when he brought someone inside. The trunk of the hickory cut through the room. The floor was tongue-and-groove fir, the walls, shiplap paneling. Huge windows and healthy houseplants were everywhere. A sofa was built in along one side of the room, and three captain’s chairs provided the rest of the seating.

“This is something else,” Russo said. “I wish my wife would let me do something like this in our backyard. We have the trees for it, I think.”

Lucas switched on the light for the back deck, so that Russo could see the treetops through the windows.

“Unreal,” Russo said. “And you even have electricity. What do you do in the winter?”

Lucas pointed to the baseboard heaters. “I have heat,” he said, “and everything’s insulated.”

“Man, oh man.” Russo shook his head. “So, show me the rest. Where’s the bedroom?”

“Up here.” Lucas pointed to the covered stairway leading to the second tier. He climbed up ahead of Russo and opened the door to the bedroom.

Russo walked past him into the room. He glanced at the double platform bed and the dresser. An air-conditioning unit, unattractive but necessary, was in the bedroom window. “It must be great to sleep up here,” he said, opening the small closet at one end of the room and peering inside, and Lucas knew this was not merely a tour to satisfy Russo’s curiosity about his house.

“Ready to go down again?” Lucas was getting impatient.

“Sure.” Russo pointed to the blue splint on Lucas’s left wrist. “You must have carpal tunnel syndrome, huh?”

“That’s right.” Lucas said. He’d blamed the splint on carpal tunnel so often that it was beginning to feel like the truth.

“My wife has that,” Russo said, as Lucas led him down the stairs and into the living room again. “She got it from her computer job.”

Lucas tried to usher Russo toward the front door again, but the officer had noticed the locked door at the rear of the living room.

“What’s in there?” he asked.

“My study,” Lucas said.

“I’d like to see it.”

“It just has my computer and printer and some books,” Lucas said, walking toward the door. He reached in his pocket for the key. “I keep it locked in case any kids decide to come up here. I don’t want them to make off with my equipment.”

His heart thudded in his throat as he tried to remember how he’d left the study. Was there anything in clear view that might tweak the cop’s suspicions? He couldn’t remember. Thank God he’d thought to log off the Internet.

He opened the door about ten inches, enough so that Russo could see inside without actually stepping into the room.

“Nice,” Russo said, peering in, nodding. “Hey, I like that screen saver.”

Lucas followed his gaze to the baobab tree on the screen of his monitor. “Thanks,” he said.

Russo drew back from the door, showing no interest in the narrow closet with the louvered doors, and Lucas felt the muscles in his neck release. He was home free now—at least as far as the tree house tour went.

But Sophie was missing. He wanted to ask if they had any clues as to what might have happened to her, but he didn’t dare appear too interested. “Sophie’s mother must be very upset,” he said, hoping that would prompt Russo to tell him where Janine was.

“Yes. Everyone’s pretty shaken up.”

“Maybe they just got lost coming back,” Lucas suggested.

“Not five and a half hours worth of getting lost,” Russo said. “Highly unlikely.”

“I know she’s been sick. Could that have something to do with it?”

“We don’t know,” the officer admitted.

“Well, I sure hope she’s okay.” Lucas worked at the indifference in his voice as he walked Russo out the front door and onto the deck again. “Good luck trying to find her.”

“Right,” Russo said. “I have your phone number. I’ll be in touch if we need to talk with that friend of yours.”

Lucas listened as the officer descended the stairs and watched as he disappeared into the darkening woods. Then he looked through the treetops toward Ayr Creek, a couple of miles from his house. What was going on over there right now? Was Janine there, waiting and upset? Was Joe with her?

Sophie didn’t like the dark. He recalled the evening she’d been up here in the tree house, playing a game with him and Janine in the living room, when the power went out. It had gone out all over the neighborhood, and the still darkness was a glorious wonder up here in the trees. But Sophie had been panic-stricken, clinging to Janine until he’d lit several candles, enough to let them see one another’s faces. Wherever Sophie was now, he hoped she had light, and for the first time the seriousness of the situation sunk in. Sophie had been due to arrive at three. It was now nearly nine. There could be no simple reason for that much of a delay.

He looked toward Ayr Creek again, wondering if he could come up with some excuse to go over there. Not much need for a gardener in the dark, though, and they would know. They’d know it was his interest in Sophie that brought him there.

And they would be entirely right.




CHAPTER FIVE


Janine’s eyes burned from trying to pierce the darkness. For hours, she and Joe had been driving along the route Alison and the girls should have followed from the camp. Joe was at the wheel, and he drove as slowly as safety would allow, while they searched the side of the road for a disabled car hidden by the darkness. They stopped at every restaurant and gas station that was still open at that hour, asking if anyone had seen the missing Scouts. Several sheriff’s cars had passed them along the way, reassuring them that they were not alone in their search. Still, their cell phones didn’t ring. They’d kept in touch with everyone who had remained behind at the parking lot, hoping for good news, but nothing had changed. Nothing except the fear which grew inside all of them as the minutes ticked by.

When they’d reached the camp, they’d spent some time talking with the sheriff who was questioning the supervisor and counselors there, then started to retrace their route back to Virginia. Joe suggested they get a hotel room—actually, he wisely suggested they get two—but Janine couldn’t lock herself, safe and secure, into a hotel room when she had no idea where Sophie was.

Leaning her head against the window of Joe’s car, Janine closed her eyes. Instantly, a familiar, unwanted image slipped into her mind, as it often did when she was in a moving vehicle and slightly disoriented. She was suddenly flying her helicopter through the smoke above the Saudi Arabian desert. The smell was acrid, filled with the chemicals that she, in her darkest moments, feared had altered something inside her and caused her to produce a child whose kidneys did not work correctly.

If it had been Lucas with her in the car, rather than Joe, she would have told him about those memories, but she had no energy to recount them to her ex-husband. He would have no sympathy for her, anyway.

“Tell me more about this Alison,” Joe said grimly, bringing her back to the present.

Janine opened her eyes to see that they were driving slowly past a restaurant, while Joe tried to determine if it was still open. It was not, and he sped up again.

“Is there a real chance that Alison might have taken off with them?” he asked.

“She’s a free spirit,” she said, only half aware that those were the same words Joe had often used to describe her in their early years together. “She’s made a few mistakes working with the girls, but I just can’t believe she’d do anything that extreme.”

“What do you mean, a few mistakes?”

“Oh, she talked to them about the birds and the bees without getting parental permission, that sort of thing.”

“Well.” Joe let out a sigh. “Let’s face it, Jan. They never got back from this trip, and I know it’s dark, but we’ve scoured this route, and her car is not anywhere along it. Wouldn’t you agree?”

She nodded.

“That has to mean that she and the car and the girls are somewhere we’re not looking. Somewhere they’re not supposed to be.”

The thought was strangely reassuring. “Maybe Holly’s mother…Rebecca…was right and Alison decided it would be fun for them to go to an amusement park or something, and she’ll bring them back tomorrow. She can probably get by without the dialysis tonight, but she has to be back tomorrow to get her—” She stopped herself, but Joe knew what she was about to say.

“To get that damned herbal crap,” he said.

Janine turned her face to the window again. “It’s made her feel so much better,” she said weakly. Tears burned her eyes. “I just wanted to see a real smile on her face again.”

“At what cost, Jan?” Joe glanced at her. “Maybe she’ll get a few weeks or a couple of months of feeling good before the disease catches up with her again and kills her.”

“Shh!” She didn’t want to hear him say those words.

“What are you shushing me for?” he asked. “It isn’t news that she’s going to die. The only real remaining chance she had was the legitimate study at Hopkins, but you were determined to do this no matter what I wanted.” He braked the car abruptly. The driver behind them honked, swerving sharply to avoid hitting them, and with a yelp, Janine grabbed the dashboard.

She saw what had caught his attention—a car parked on the side of the road. Her heart still pounded from the near accident as she opened her car window to get a better look. The parked car was huge and looked deserted, a white paper stuck to its antenna.

“It’s a…I don’t know, some big car,” Janine said. “Not a Honda, anyway.”

“Sorry.” Joe apologized for his erratic driving. He reached across the gear shift to touch her hand, a surprising gesture. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said. She would have braked with equal force had she been the one driving.

Joe sighed again. “So,” he said. “Back to Sophie. Here’s what I don’t get. You and I have always talked to each other about how to deal with her, whether we were communicating about her medical care or her behavior or anything. Isn’t that right?”

She nodded. Joe sounded genuinely perplexed, and she felt guilty. She had always consulted with him in the past and taken his feelings to heart. Decisions about Sophie had, in every instance, been mutually made.

“I loved that about us,” Joe continued. “I was proud of us. We might have been divorced, but we were still a team when it came to her. Then you go off and do something half-assed like enrolling her in that study. Something that goes completely against what I want.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I thought it was the right thing. I still think it was the right—”

“What possessed you?” He looked at her. “You’re usually smarter than that. Whatever made you think Schaefer’s herbs could fix what no one else has ever been able to fix?”

“I didn’t go into it blindly,” she said. She heard the weakness in her voice. She always felt weak around Joe, as though being near him sucked the strength and self-esteem right out of her. “Lucas Trowell knows a lot about herbs and he researched the ingredients in Herbalina for me. He really felt it might have a chance of—”

“You know, Jan.” Joe shook his head. The muscles in his cheeks contracted, and she knew he was trying to control his anger. “Lucas Trowell is a gardener. He’s not a doctor.”

“He knows a lot about herbs, though,” she said.

“How do you know that? Because he told you so? I think he’d tell you anything to get close to Sophie.”

There it was again. That Lucas-Trowellis-a-pedophile paranoia.

“That’s crazy, Joe,” she said. “He’s been very kind to Sophie. She adores him.”

Big mistake. Joe nearly lost control of the car, sending it over the line into the middle lane, and again, a driver honked his horn at them. “You keep him away from her, Janine,” Joe shouted as he steered the car back into the slow lane. “I mean it! I am damn serious. I don’t want that guy anywhere near her.”

She hated it when he yelled. Joe had never laid a hand on her, but he didn’t need to. He was big and muscular, and his anger could be so powerful that it alone was enough to frighten her into submission. She lowered herself farther into the seat and shut her eyes.

“What does it matter to him if the treatment works or not?” Joe continued his argument. “Sophie’s not his daughter. She’s nothing to him. Your judgment is all screwed up.”

Eyes still shut, Janine pressed her temple to the window. She was not wrong about Lucas, although she’d twisted the facts of Sophie’s enrollment in the study a bit. It was actually through Lucas that she’d learned of the study; she probably never would have known about it had he not told her.

Lucas had heard a short ad on the radio about a researcher who was looking for pediatric subjects to be in a study of an alternative treatment for pediatric kidney disease. Janine had called about the study and learned it involved an herbal remedy, delivered intravenously. When she told her parents and Joe that she wanted Sophie to participate in the study, they refused to even discuss the matter with her. Instead, they wanted Sophie to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of one more horrid, toxic medication—that if it didn’t kill her—might help her.

The herbal approach had no such side effects, Dr. Schaefer had told her. As a matter of fact, Sophie would feel much better very quickly. Even so, Janine did not enroll her right away. Schaefer was a bit strange, a mousy man of few words who seemed remarkably unsure of himself to be leading a study of any kind, but she checked into his background and learned he had conducted some research of minor importance in the past, in which his hypotheses had been proven correct. She assumed he was one of those cerebral types who was brilliant despite a nerdish exterior.

Lucas researched the herbs for her, telling her he thought Schaefer might actually be on to something. She’d sat with him in his tree house, studying the computer screen as he pulled up information about each herb from the Internet and translated the scientific descriptions of them into language she could easily understand. Lucas was the only person with whom she could speak rationally about the study, who didn’t scoff at the idea or belittle her for considering it. Her parents and Joe simply wouldn’t discuss Schaefer’s approach as an option.

Still, it wasn’t until Sophie suffered another crisis, one her doctors felt certain spelled the end of her short life, that Janine did something she hadn’t done in many years: she rebelled against Joe and her parents, that mighty, controlling three-some, and enrolled Sophie in the study behind their backs. Their fury had been quick to flare, and Janine would have backed down had it not been for Lucas. He’d lifted her guilt and rebuilt her back-bone. But look where that backbone had gotten her now. Look where it had gotten Sophie.

Long, long ago, Joe had appreciated Janine’s independence and daring. They’d known each other since their first year of junior high school, and back then, Joe had often expressed an admiration of her tomboyishness, her competitiveness and her spirit. Something shifted in their relationship during their junior year of high school, though, when Joe became attracted to her as something more than just the girl who could win any race and would accept any dare. They began to date, very quickly becoming a steady item in the halls of their high school. He grew less tolerant of her rebellious side, as he began to long for her to be more like the calm, faithful, feminine young women who dated his closest friends. One bonus of that wild streak, though, was Janine’s uninhibited sexuality. She’d wanted to lose her virginity, and Joe had been more than pleased to oblige—after first making certain she was on the pill.

She had been on the Pill, but as in most areas of her life, she was not terribly careful about taking it. Still, it wasn’t until the spring of their senior year that she became pregnant.

Her parents blamed her, not Joe, for the pregnancy, and they were quick to encourage Janine to marry him. The wedding took place the day after their graduation, in the garden at Ayr Creek, and Janine, a bit overwhelmed by all that was happening, allowed her parents to plan the event. The wedding was traditional in every detail, except, perhaps, for the bloated stomach of the bride, which pressed firmly against the fabric of her wedding gown.

Her parents adored Joe. He was the son they’d never had, and for Joe, the Snyders filled the lonely, empty space only an orphan could know. His mother had abused drugs and alcohol, deserting Joe and his father when Joe was only a year old. His father abandoned him in his own way, by dying in a plane crash when Joe was ten. Joe was then raised by his elderly aunt and uncle. Janine couldn’t blame him for being thrilled by her welcoming parents, even if she had never found them welcoming herself.

Her parents, who taught history in two different high schools at the time of the wedding, helped them out financially so that Joe and Janine were able to rent a small apartment in Chantilly. Janine’s mother bought them things they would need for the baby, and her father built them a crib from a kit. But all during that pregnancy, Janine had a sense of unreality. Her body grew rounder, yet she couldn’t quite grasp the fact that, in a few months, she would be a mother. She was barely eighteen, and not ready, not willing, to settle down.

She was good, at least as good as she could be. She didn’t swallow an ounce of alcohol once she learned she was pregnant, and she stopped smoking. But the physical risks she loved—climbing the cliffs at Great Falls, kayaking in the white water of the Potomac, canoeing the Shenandoah River—she did not give up. She wanted to learn how to fly, she told Joe. Maybe she would even be a stunt pilot or a wing walker. Joe told her to “grow up.” They had no money for her to take flying lessons, he said. He was working at a grocery store, trying to keep food on their table, and Janine thought he’d become remarkably stodgy overnight. It would be years before she understood that Joe’s quiet commitment to his job was a sign of his maturity, and that her wild streak was the hallmark of a self-indulgent, self-centered girl who had no business being married, much less a mother.

It was during one of her canoe trips that her baby decided to be born. Joe was not with her; he was working and would have been upset if he’d known she had gone off with her friends for a day on the Shenandoah. It was a weekend, and she didn’t see why she should have to stay home just because Joe had to work. Yet she knew better than to ask him if he minded. She simply went. She never would have gone if she’d known the baby would come six weeks early.

She was with three of her friends from high school: her best friend, Ellie, and two male friends who were simply that—friends. They were in two canoes, deep in the forest, battling a patch of white water, when the pains started. Quickly, Janine was bleeding, her terror mounting with each stab of pain.

They paddled to the riverbank, and Ellie stayed with her on a bed of leaves and moss, while the guys went for help. Ellie had no idea what to do, of course, and looking back on the event later, Janine barely remembered her friend’s presence. Instead, she remembered feeling completely alone, the trees a canopy of gold above her as she gasped from the pain and shivered in the October chill.

By the time the paramedics found her, she had delivered a stillborn baby boy, which Ellie had wrapped in her windbreaker.

The paramedics lifted Janine onto a stretcher and covered her with blankets.

“What the hell are you doing out here when you’re nearly eight months pregnant?” one of them asked her, as he rested a blanket on top of her.

She couldn’t answer, but she knew she deserved the hostile tone of the question. Once in the ambulance, she stared at the unmoving bundle where it rested in a clear plastic bassinet, and it was as if she were acknowledging for the first time that there had truly been a life inside her that she had taken for granted. A life she had, in effect, abused and neglected. She didn’t cry, at least not aloud, but tears washed over her cheek onto the stretcher.

Joe had been furious. He didn’t talk to her for weeks, and she’d felt alone and completely deserving of the isolation. She would mourn for that baby for the rest of her life. That had been her first true taste of guilt—a bitter, vile taste that was unfamiliar in her mouth. But it was not to be her last.

“Are you awake?”

She heard Joe’s voice in the darkness and drew herself back to the present.

“Yes.” She sat up straight, brushing tears from her cheeks. They were still in the car, somewhere on Beulah Road, and she saw the lights of the Meadowlark Gardens parking lot ahead of them. Leaning forward, she tried to make out the vehicles in the far corner of the lot.

“Looks like Gloria’s van,” Joe said. “And Rebecca and Steve’s Suburban. Your car. That’s it.”

They pulled into the lot, vast and dark in its emptiness, and drove to the corner. The four of them—Paula, Gloria, Rebecca and Steve—were sitting on small beach chairs set on the macadam. The Krafts’ two sons were no longer with them, and Charlotte had apparently gone home. Crushed bags and empty cups from Taco Bell littered the ground near the chairs.

Everyone stood up as Joe parked the car next to the Suburban.

“Any news?” Janine asked, as she got out of the car.

“Nothing,” Gloria said. “How about on your end? Did you see anything?”

“No clues,” Joe said. “But it was so dark up there, and the people working at the gas stations and restaurants are not the same people who were there this afternoon. So it was a little frustrating.”

“Plus, a lot of the shops and restaurants are closed,” Janine added.

“The police told us to go home and stay close to the phone,” Gloria said. “But we didn’t want to leave until you two got back.”

“Your parents called us a million times,” Rebecca said to Janine. “They’re so worried. You might want to give them a call.”

Rebecca and Steve no longer wore their wide, optimistic smiles. They looked a little ragged around the edges now, with dark shadows around their eyes, and Janine wanted to pull Rebecca into a hug. But there was still some distance in Rebecca, as if she were intentionally holding herself apart from the scene, and Janine did not feel that they were sharing the same frightening experience at all.

Joe touched Janine’s arm. “I’ll take Paula home, then meet you over at Ayr Creek, okay?” he asked.

She nodded, uncertain if it would help or hurt to have Joe there when she spoke to her parents.

She walked toward her car. It seemed like weeks had passed since she’d driven into the lot, full of excitement at seeing her daughter. Inside the car, she felt the emptiness in the back seat where Sophie should have been, and she kept turning to glance behind her, as though Sophie might pop up, yelling “Surprise!” and telling her this had been some silly kind of trick, some crazy scheme of Alison’s. But Sophie was not in the car, and as Janine drove through the dark, winding back roads on the outskirts of Vienna, she said a prayer that, wherever Sophie was, she would be alive and healthy and, somehow, unafraid.




CHAPTER SIX


Janine didn’t drive directly home. She pulled out of the parking lot at Meadowlark Gardens and onto Beulah Road, glancing in her rearview mirror as if she still expected the blue Honda to turn into the lot any moment, then drove as quickly as she could toward Lucas’s property. He lived at the end of a cul-de-sac on an acre of mostly wooded land bordering Wolf Trap National Park. She parked in the driveway near the small, rambler and walked along the darkened, familiar path through the woods to reach the tree house. She was relieved to see that the lights were on in his living room; she would hate to wake him.

Gripping the banister, she climbed the stairs that circled the oak tree. He must have heard her, because he was waiting for her on the deck by the time she reached it. Wordlessly, he pulled her into his arms. She breathed in the soap-and-earth scent of him, feeling enclosed, but not truly comforted; sheltered, but not safe. Nowhere would she feel safe right now.

“You must know Sophie’s missing,” she whispered.

“Yes.” His breath was warm on her neck.

“How?”

“Cop came to ask me some questions.”

She pressed her hands against his back. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. Is there any news?”

She pulled away from him, running her hands through her hair. “Nothing,” she said. “Joe and I drove all the way up to the camp and back again, trying to cover the route she would have followed back to Vienna. There was no sign of Alison’s—the troop leader’s—car anywhere. And we must have talked to every gas station attendant and waitress between here and there. They’ve just disappeared.”

“Come in,” he said. He guided her into his small living room, an arm around her shoulders. “Have you eaten anything?”

“I can’t.”

“Iced tea? Soda?”

She shook her head. The thought of trying to get anything down her throat nearly made her gag.

Lowering herself onto the built-in sofa in his living room, she suddenly began to cry. “I feel so helpless,” she said, accepting the handkerchief he handed her and blotting it to her eyes.

He pulled one of the captain’s chairs in front of her and sat down, taking her right hand in both of his. “Tell me everything,” he said. “What do the cops think?”

She ran her fingers over the blue splint on his wrist as she wearily answered his questions, and Lucas suggested the same possible explanations for the disappearance of the girls that she had gone over with Joe and the police and Gloria. They were lost. They’d fallen asleep somewhere and forgotten the time. They’d taken a recreational detour. The explanations sounded weaker now, in the middle of the night, and for the first time, Janine allowed the worst to enter her mind.

“What if she’s dead?” she asked Lucas. “Children disappear all the time. They’re always found dead somewhere.”

“Children don’t disappear all the time, and they are rarely found dead,” he said softly. “They’re simply the ones you hear about. It doesn’t do any good to start thinking that way, Jan.”

“She’s supposed to have dialysis tonight,” she said, “and she needs her Herbalina IV tomorrow.”

Lucas nodded. “I know. I was thinking about that. Have you ever asked her doctor what would happen if she missed an IV?”

She shook her head. “I would never allow that to happen.”

“You should call him right now.”

“Schaefer? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Yes, but I think the police should have a very clear picture of her illness. Did you tell them?”

“Yes. But not in great detail. Not anything about what would happen if she misses that IV.”

“They should know, Jan, don’t you think?” Lucas asked. “They can get the information to the media, and the media can get it out on the airwaves. They need to know how urgent this is. If—and this is only an if—Sophie’s been kidnapped, by the Scout leader or someone else, and the kidnapper hears that Sophie needs treatment right away…well, maybe he or she has a soft spot in his heart and would drop her off at a hospital or something.”

She nodded. He was right, and making the call would give her something to do to ease the helplessness. “His number’s stored in my cell, but can I use your phone?” she asked. “I don’t want to tie mine up.”

He handed her his phone and she dialed the number. It was after one in the morning, and the woman at Schaefer’s answering service sounded annoyed at being disturbed.

“I need to speak with Dr. Schaefer,” Janine said. “It’s an emergency.”

“If this is an emergency, you should hang up and call 911,” the woman said.

“No. Not that sort of emergency. Please…just get in touch with him and ask him to call Janine Donohue right away. Only not at my usual number.” She gave the woman Lucas’s number, then hung up the phone. Her hand was shaking.

The doctor called within five minutes. He sounded wide-awake, although his usually faint New England accent was more pronounced than she’d ever heard it before.

“Is Sophie all right?” he asked, and Janine was grateful for the genuine concern in his voice.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She went to a Girl Scout camp this weekend and she hasn’t come home. She and another girl and their leader are all…missing. They were due back at three. The police are involved, but there’s no trace of them. And I’m worried she won’t be found in time to get her IV tomorrow. Will she…will she be all right without it?”

There was a long silence on Schaefer’s end of the phone line.

“Dr. Schaefer?” she prodded, wondering if he had fallen asleep.

Finally he spoke. “This sounds very serious,” he said.

“Yes, it is, but right now I’m just worried about her physical condition. What will happen if she’s not back in time for her appointment tomorrow? And she’s supposed to have dialysis tonight.”

He hesitated again. She would have chalked it up to sleepiness on his part had it not been for the fact that this slow reaction time was his usual style. “As soon as she arrives tomorrow, bring her in,” he said. “Don’t worry about the appointment time.”

“What if she doesn’t arrive, though? I mean, tomorrow. What happens if she misses tomorrow’s IV altogether? And what if she misses Thursday’s, too?” She looked at Lucas, who was leaning toward her, his arms on his knees.

“The obvious,” Schaefer said.

“What do you mean, ‘the obvious’?” she asked.

Lucas scowled, apparently annoyed with the doctor as he listened to Janine’s frustrated side of the conversation. He reached for the phone, asking her permission with his eyes. She nodded, relinquishing the phone to him gladly.

“Dr. Schaefer?” he said. “This is Lucas Trowell. I’m a friend of Janine’s. Maybe you could tell me precisely what you think will happen if Sophie misses her IV and her dialysis. And if you could also give me the details of her illness, we can give them to the police.”

He reached behind him to grab an envelope from the coffee table, then motioned to Janine for a pen. She found one in her purse and handed it to him, watching as he began to take notes, the phone nestled between his shoulder and his ear.

Apparently Schaefer had found his voice, and Lucas filled the entire back of the envelope with his small, neat script. When he hung up the phone, he gave Janine a sympathetic smile.

“Thanks,” she said. “He was driving me crazy. What did he say?”

“It’s what you would expect. Without the dialysis, she’ll have a buildup of fluid and toxins, but that will happen much more slowly than if she’d never had the Herbalina. And she’ll get gradually worse with each Herbalina IV she misses, until she’s back where she started.”

“How many can she miss before that happens? And will it work again for her if she starts it up again after missing it for a while?”

“He didn’t seem to know how long it would take to be out of her system, but he does think it will work just as well as it did before, if she needs to start it all over again. He gave me some general information about her condition you can pass on to the police so they can get the word out, although I really think you know at least as much about it as he does.” He often told her how much he admired her tireless research into Sophie’s condition and the few treatment options that were available.

“Would you mind calling the police?” she asked. “You can read your own notes better than I can. Besides, I seem to be screwing things up tonight.” She picked up his phone again and dialed the number Sergeant Loomis had given her.

“I’ll do it,” he said, taking the phone from her hand, “but only if you promise to cool it with the self-deprecating comments, all right?”

She nodded. “Okay.”

She listened while he spoke with the sergeant, explaining who he was and why he, rather than Janine, was calling. It reassured her that Loomis was still working on the case, even though it was the middle of the night. He hadn’t sloughed it off onto someone else’s shoulders.

Lucas was so calm. A rock. As he spoke to the officer, he reached for her hand again and held it on her knee. He could talk to anyone, she thought: the gardeners he supervised, a medical specialist, a cop. An eight-year-old girl. She remembered how he’d ceremoniously presented Sophie with a small, black penknife before she left on this trip, her first camping adventure.

Janine’s love for Lucas brought easy tears to her eyes as she watched him on the phone. His body was lean, yet tight—an odd mix of physical laborer and computer geek. His brown hair was frosted by the sun and beginning to thin at the temples, and he wore wirerimmed glasses. His gray eyes looked cloudy now, inside at night, but in the daylight, they were translucent. Sometimes she thought she could see straight through them to his soul.

“I assume they don’t know anything new?” she asked, once he had hung up the phone.

“Nothing. But he was grateful for the information and said they’d send out a press release right away.”

“Thanks for calling.” She looked at her watch and shuddered. “I have to go to Ayr Creek and see my parents. Joe should be there by now, and I’m sure they’re furious I haven’t gotten over there yet.”

“Don’t let them blame you for this, Janine,” Lucas said, standing up. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Haven’t I?” she asked. “Then why do I feel like I have? Why do I feel as though every time I make a decision that flies in the face of what they think I should do, something terrible happens? I canoe while I’m pregnant, I kill my baby. I join the army, I kill my daughter. I—”

“You haven’t killed anyone.” He ran his hands down her arms, drawing her into an embrace.

“I enrolled her in a study no one wanted her to be in except me,” she said into his shoulder, “and she felt so well that I let her go to camp, even though everyone told me I shouldn’t. But I did, and now she’s probably lying in a ditch somewhere, dead and—”

“Stop it!” His voice was so loud and so uncharacteristically harsh that she did stop. He held her shoulders. “I don’t want to hear this, Jan,” he said. “It’s irrational. You love Sophie as much as any mother could love a child, and you’ve let your parents—and Joe—do a number on your head all these years. She’s not dead. Don’t start thinking that way, all right?”

She pressed her forehead to his. “I’ll try,” she said, her gaze on the floor. On the Berber carpet, his feet were bare, hers in sandals. She felt his hand circle the back of her neck.

“Good.” He kissed her forehead. “I love you, Jan,” he said. “And all I want is for you to start loving yourself.”




CHAPTER SEVEN


Darkness gave the Ayr Creek estate an otherworldly feel, and on this night, with the half-moon masked by the trees, Janine felt as though she were slipping into a dream as she drove up the long driveway. The broad, meandering gardens slept, and beyond the boxwood, the willow trees drooped low to the ground in their lacy, moon-speckled shrouds. The forest surrounding the house and gardens on three sides was so thick and deep, that the moonlight could not penetrate it. Only where the trees parted to make room for her little cottage at the rear of the property would the light truly fall, the play of moonglow and shadow making the building look as though it had been lifted straight out of a spooky fairy tale.

Friends often asked her if she was afraid out here at night, hidden away in the woods in a cottage which, according to historians with the most vibrant imaginations, was still haunted by the spirits of those slaves who once lived within its walls. Janine rarely thought of Ayr Creek as foreboding, but tonight the estate, the entire world, seemed malevolent.

In the daylight, the gardens of the Ayr Creek estate held none of their nighttime mystery. They were meticulously cared for, and several acres of the plants, trees and flowers were dedicated to reflecting historical accuracy. That was the reason Lucas had been hired to oversee the grounds and the gardeners at Ayr Creek. He had excellent references, having worked at historic Monticello, making sure that nothing was planted that would not have grown in the time of Thomas Jefferson. He never would have been hired at Ayr Creek if Janine’s parents had had their way, however, the decision had not been up to them.

Her father had been the one to take Lucas on his initial tour of the grounds. He’d reported that the gardener had seemed disinterested and distracted until Frank mentioned that Janine and her little girl, Sophie, lived in the cottage on the property. Lucas had brightened at that fact. He’d asked questions about Sophie, raising Frank’s suspicions about his intent. Frank had reported his concerns to the Ayr Creek Foundation, but the Foundation was thrilled by the opportunity to have a former Monticello gardener work at Ayr Creek, and they were the ones to make the final decision. Frank and Donna’s concerns were disregarded. They had warned Janine to keep an eye on Sophie when Lucas was around and never to leave her alone with him. In the beginning, Janine had heeded their warning. Now she knew they had misinterpreted any interest Lucas might have shown in her daughter.

As she neared the rear of the mansion, she saw that Joe’s car was parked in front of the freestanding, three-car garage, which had at one time served as the stable for the estate. She pulled her car next to his, her mouth set in a grim line. She was about to face the formidable Anti-Jan Triad. That’s what Lucas called her parents and Joe. He’d tell her to put on her suit of armor. But tonight she had no armor, and despite Lucas’s words of encouragement, she felt as though she didn’t deserve to possess any.

Bracing herself, Janine walked in the unlocked side door of the mansion, passed through the mudroom and into the kitchen.

All three of them were there. Her mother sat at the mahogany table, while Joe and her father leaned against the counters, and they all turned to look at her when she walked in.

“Janine!” Her mother jumped to her feet. “Where on earth have you been? We don’t need you disappearing, too. Joe said you should have been here by now.” Her face was red from crying, and her blond hair, which she usually wore tied back, hung loose around her face. She was a worrier under the best of circumstances, but tonight, the lines in her tanned face looked as if they’d been carved there with a cleaver.

Janine set her purse down on the table. “I stayed a little while at the parking lot,” she lied, glancing at Joe. He looked tired. His dark hair was askew, and he rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“Any news?” Her father walked toward her and gave her shoulder the slightest of squeezes, his awkward way of comforting her, or, she supposed, the kindest gesture he could manage while being furious at her. And he was furious. All three of them were. That she knew for certain. The air of the kitchen was filled with blame.

“Nothing,” she said, taking a seat at the table. She looked again at Joe. “You haven’t heard anything, either?”

He shook his head.

“Joe said the woman Sophie was riding with was very young and irresponsible,” her mother said. “Why you would ever let her go away with someone like that, I just don’t know.”

“She’s not irresponsible, Mom,” she said, annoyed with Joe. “Just young. Plus there was another leader with them.” If only Gloria had been the one to drive her home.

“Why did you send her to camp?” her mother asked. “Didn’t I tell you she’s just too young? Even a healthy eight-year-old has no business going two hours away for an overnight in the woods.”

“Mom,” Joe said. “What’s done is done. It’s not going to help to go over that argument again.”

Janine was surprised and gratified by his sudden support.

“I just…” Her mother shook her head. “I’m just appalled, that’s all.” She sat down at the table again, facing away from Janine as though she couldn’t bear to look at her. “Has anybody thought that maybe Lucas Trowell has something to do with this?” she asked the men, who leaned against the counter on opposite sides of the refrigerator, like bookends. “You know how he’s always got his eye on Sophie. They should go see if he’s up in his tree house or if he’s somehow gotten hold of Sophie and the other little girl.” She turned to Janine. “Did you mention to him that she was going to Girl Scout camp this weekend?” she asked. “I hate how you’re always talking to him.”

“Lucas had nothing to do with this,” Janine said.

“How can you know that?” her mother asked. “He’s just the sort you’d suspect of something like this. You know how you always hear about those men after the fact. They were quiet. A little odd. Kept to themselves. That fits Lucas to a tee. The only time you see a glimmer in his eye is when you mention Sophie to him.”

Janine didn’t bother to respond. She had seen a glimmer in Lucas’s eyes any number of times.

“I asked the police to go by the tree house and make sure Lucas was there,” Joe said.

So, it had been Joe who’d instigated the visit from the police. He certainly knew how to win her parents’ favor.

Joe took his cell phone from his back pocket. “I’ll give them a call to make sure they did,” he said.

“The police already interviewed him,” she said, surprising herself with the admission, and the three of them turned to look at her.

“How do you know?” Joe said.

She drew in a long breath and folded her hands on the table in front of her. “Because I was just there,” she said. “At his tree house. The police were there hours ago.”

“You went to his house alone?” her mother asked. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Why did you go there, hon?” her father asked. “Did you think you’d find Sophie there?”

“No, Dad, I never suspected Lucas. I just stopped by to tell him what happened.”

“Why?” Her mother’s blue eyes were wild with disbelief. “What possible business is it of his?”

“It was foolish to go there alone, Janine,” her father said. “What if—”

“Please stop!” Janine rose to her feet, sending her chair thumping against the wall. “Please stop all this crazy paranoid talk about Lucas.”

They stared at her.

“He had nothing to do with this whole mess,” she said. “He cares about Sophie.”

“He has you fooled,” her mother said. “Don’t you see—”

“No, I don’t see any such thing.” Janine walked around the table toward the door. She considered escape, but turned instead and leaned against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest. “I may have made some mistakes in my life,” she said, “but my judgment is not so screwed up that I couldn’t tell if Lucas was the type to hurt Sophie. I would never put Sophie in danger.”

Her mother let out a cynical laugh. “Do you hear yourself, Janine?” she asked. “You have put Sophie in danger. Repeatedly. What do you call this weekend away? What do you call putting Sophie in a harebrained study to use herbs to cure—” she used her hands to put quotes around the word cure “—end stage kidney disease? You’ve gone out of your way to put Sophie in danger.”

“Mom,” Joe said. “Maybe that’s going too far.”

Maybe? Janine’s eyes burned from the assault.

“It’s insane that you stopped doing her nightly dialysis.” Her mother wasn’t quite finished.

“She doesn’t need it every night anymore,” Janine said.

“Your mother might be exaggerating a bit,” her father said, in his even, controlled voice, “but we do need to talk about this. About what’s been going on the past few months.”

“What do you mean?” She tightened her arms across her chest. How much did they know?

“We’ve been talking with Joe about what to do when Sophie gets back,” her father continued. He was tall and gangly and always looked like a little kid whose body had grown too quickly for him to handle with grace. “We really think Joe should have custody of her,” he said. “I mean, you could still have her live with you much of the time, the way you do now, but when it comes to making the medical decisions and…decisions like this one, about the Scout camp and all, we think Joe should be the one to make them.” Her father’s calm disappointment in her cut even deeper than her mother’s shrill accusations.

Joe moved next to her, touching her hand where it gripped her elbow.

“Let’s not talk about it now,” he said to her parents. “Don’t even think about it tonight, Janine. Right now, let’s just focus on getting Sophie back.”

He was the voice of reason, and his kindness seemed genuine, but she knew better than to trust him. Behind her back, he was conspiring with her parents. She took a step away from him to pick up her purse from the table. “I’m going to the cottage,” she said, heading for the door.

“What?” her mother said. “We need to stay right here until we hear some news.”

“I can be reached just as easily in the cottage,” she said.

Joe rested his hand on her shoulder. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

She shook her head without looking at him, then walked through the mudroom and out to the driveway.

Walking through the darkness toward her cottage, she bristled from the encounter with her family, and she was glad Joe hadn’t tried to follow her. Having Joe with her was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t need to hear any more about his plans to assume custody of Sophie. She didn’t need any more blame. It had been this way her entire adult life: her parents and Joe against her. Over the years, their disapproval of her had crystallized into something hard and unmovable. Even now, when they should be pulling together with her, fighting on the same side of this war, she felt like their enemy.

Once in the cottage, though, she would call Lucas. That’s where she would find her advocate. That’s where she would find her strength.




CHAPTER EIGHT


Zoe held a match to the kindling at the bottom of the fire and watched as the wood began to flame. She was getting good at this. Very good, actually. For someone who had never built a fire in her life—in spite of having had four fireplaces in her Malibu house and six on Max’s dream ranch in Montana—she could now call herself an expert.

Resting near her on the ground was a pot filled with water, uncooked rice and chunks of the rabbit she’d killed that morning. She moved the pot to the small grill she’d laid over the fire pit and sat down on one of the flat rocks to wait for the water to boil.

She could not yet claim to be comfortable with the whole meat preparation process, but she was getting there. As of today, she had killed six animals: two rabbits, three squirrels and, amazingly, a porcupine. She had shot at many more, and she felt worse about those she’d merely terrorized with her bullets than those she had killed with one clean, quick shot. Still, this slaughtering and eating did not come easily to someone who had been a vegetarian for a dozen years. She’d been such a champion of animal rights that she’d refused to wear leather shoes, and she’d even been arrested for protesting in front of stores that sold fur. Ah, yes, if only PETA could see her now, she thought, boiling a rabbit she had killed, skinned and gutted herself.

She’d left the lid to the pot inside—the tiny, rundown cabin she had quickly come to think of as her home, so she got to her feet and walked inside. When she returned to the small clearing carrying the lid, she spotted a large dog standing a couple of yards from the fire, and she froze. It was the dirty yellow dog this time, as opposed to the huge black bear of a dog who had visited her a few days earlier. Both of them had temperaments as nasty as their matted and unkempt coats. When she’d first seen the dogs, she’d feared they belonged to someone living nearby and that she was not alone in these West Virginia woods. But their hungry, neglected appearance made her think they were probably wild.

The yellow dog looked in her direction, silently baring his teeth.

“Scram!” she shouted at him. “Get lost!” She banged the lid against the flat rock, and that seemed to work. The dog turned around and trotted off into the woods.

It was her fault the dogs hung around the shanty. She’d made a tactical error with them in her early days out here. She had killed her first animal, another rabbit, and she’d had to force herself to go through the motions of preparing it to eat. Following the instructions in one of the wilderness survival books she’d brought with her, she told herself she had no choice: she would need protein to be able to live out here. Despite the fact that she’d fashioned an impressive spit above the fire and that the aroma of the cooked rabbit had actually made her mouth water, she had not been able to make herself chew and swallow the meat. Instead, she’d tossed it into the woods. That night, she’d lain awake, weeping quietly over the life she’d taken for no good reason, and listened to animals—wild dogs, she knew now—fighting over the carcass in the darkness.

The next time, though, she was hungrier and more determined. Marti was a meat eater, and Zoe knew she would have to be able to kill and cook meat to feed her. On that day, she killed and ate her first squirrel. She’d also caught a small, dark-scaled fish in a net she’d brought with her, and she’d managed to get that down despite the fact that it bore no resemblance to any other fish she’d ever eaten and could have been poisonous for all she knew.

The water was boiling, and she leaned forward to stir the stew before covering it with the lid. The fire pit was in the exact center of the small clearing, just a few yards in front of her shanty. That was what she called the dilapidated cabin, finding shanty a far prettier word than hovel or shack, which would have been a more accurate description of the building. Her little shanty was hidden so deeply in the forest that Zoe was certain no one would find it unless they actually knew it was there.

She herself had found the structure through a painstaking search of these wooded West Virginia mountains back in early April, when she and Marti first agreed on their plan. She’d actually discovered several abandoned cabins, but this one had appealed to her most, both practically and aesthetically. On the practical side, it was far from the nearest road, a good five miles, and even that road was barely paved and rarely traveled. The nearest main road was a couple of miles beyond that one. This cabin was as far from civilization as Zoe had ever been, and she was frankly thrilled by the distance between her and the rest of the world. That world thought she was dead. It held nothing for her any longer.

Her shanty would never appear in Better Homes and Gardens, but it was still more appealing than some of the other shacks she’d seen. Some of them were little more than decrepit piles of rotting wood, while this one had a little character. It was a log cabin and looked as old as the mountains themselves. The logs were separated by a mortar that had once been white, but was now green with moss on two adjacent sides of the house, dirty and crumbling on the others. The roof was rotting, and she’d initially covered the decaying wood and scraps of tin with the tarp she’d brought along with her. But then she realized that, if anyone should find his way to her little clearing, the bright-blue tarp would give away the fact that someone was living in the shanty, so she took it down. Now, when it rained, she put a couple of buckets beneath the worst spots in the roof and let it go at that.

Inside the front door of the shanty was, what she called for want of a better term, the living room, which ran the width of the building. Behind that, an identical room served as a bedroom. And that was it. A two-room log cabin, both rooms together nearly equaling the size of her Malibu bathroom.

But the shanty had what she was coming to think of as amenities. Remarkably clear water ran from a rusty old pump in the overgrown yard. A wood-burning stove in surprisingly good shape sat on the floor in the main room, its chimney pipe winding its way through a leaking hole in her roof. The pipe was round, the hole square, and that about summed up the care that had been taken by whomever constructed this place. She’d used the stove only once to cook on, but it heated the entire shanty, and she knew she would have to do her cooking outside until the cooler months. At least she and Marti would not freeze here in the winter.

There was a sofa in the living room, and once she’d gotten over the revolting, disintegrating fabric and protruding tufts of stuffing, she was grateful for a place to sit. She’d brought a dozen or so sheets with her, and she threw a cream-colored one over the sofa and thought that it looked like it came straight out of some campy catalogue—as long as no one noticed the splintery wooden floor beneath it and the lack of glass in the window behind it.

Not far from the house, but hidden behind a shield of brambles and vines, was an outhouse. It tilted to one side, giving her vertigo when she sat inside it. The outhouse had smelled nearly as fresh as the forest when she’d first arrived, a testimony to how long it had been since anyone had called this place home.

When she’d first stepped inside the cabin, the floor had been covered with debris—branches and twigs and rotting leaves that had fallen or blown through the gaping holes in the roof. Mice skittered away from her broom, and she remembered reading something about mice droppings causing that flesh-eating virus, so she’d covered her nose and mouth with a kerchief, unsure if that would help. Unsure if it really mattered. She just needed to live long enough to save her daughter. After that, death could come anytime, and she truly wouldn’t mind.

Once she’d emptied the back room of its tree branches and leaves, she discovered four sleeping palettes on the floor, one in each corner. She’d brought two air mattresses with her, which she inflated on the palettes against the far wall. Then she tore one of the king-size sheets and made the palettes and mattresses up as best she could. She’d stepped back to look at them and was amazed at how much the simple sight of those two low beds, dressed in Egyptian cotton, pleased her. She was glad she’d thought to bring these lavender sheets; they were the only ones that did not remind her of Max, since he’d always hated the color and she had used them only on the guest beds. She hadn’t wanted to bring any tangible traces of her grief with her. Living here would be hard enough without adding mourning to her list of things to do. Once she’d left Malibu, once she’d pulled the car out of the driveway and headed for the mountains, she knew she was leaving Max behind forever. She was leaving everything behind—except her duty as a mother.

She’d been in the shanty for over a month now, but she’d been planning this trip, this new life, for weeks prior to her “suicide.” She’d been planning it ever since Marti had written her, telling her she was being transferred to the prison at Chowchilla. It had been unbearable to picture Marti in prison anywhere, but Chowchilla, with its reputation for abusive guards, toughened prisoners and intolerable living conditions, was out of the question. Zoe had lain awake all that night, Marti’s letter in her hand, a bizarre plot taking shape in her mind.

She’d gotten out of bed to walk downstairs to the study, a room she’d been avoiding ever since Max’s death. Sure enough, the Persian rug and the burgundy walls lined with books and awards still held his scent, that musky scent of cigars, as though he’d just left the room for a moment. Standing stock-still in the doorway of the room, she’d had to shut her eyes and remind herself that he was dead. This was the room where she’d found him, crumpled on the floor near the hearth, the way a blanket would crumple if you dropped it, limp and folded in on itself. She’d known instantly that he was dead, and yet she’d screamed his name over and over as if he could hear her. It had been his third and final heart attack. The cigars were to blame, she’d thought. Or maybe the pace he’d insisted on holding himself to. He’d been seventy years old and still producing a movie a year, still insisting on having his hand in every aspect of it, from the casting to the final cut. She did not, however, blame herself, except for not checking on him sooner when he hadn’t come up to bed that evening. She had been a good wife to him, and he had been the finest of husbands. A forty-year-old marriage in Hollywood was something to point to with pride. Yet, she’d hoped to see fifty years with him, and maybe more.

She could not be the single woman again, not at sixty. Not with the paparazzi following her every move, noting each new wrinkle, each gray root marking the birth of every dark-blond hair on her head. She’d been known for that long, thick, shimmery blond hair since she was a little girl, and she had not been able to let go of it. She’d had three surgeries on her face already, and she was sick of the doctors and the recovery time and the fact that she no longer looked like herself. And now the wrinkles were starting again and the tabloids were taunting her. They criticized the extra pounds she’d put on. Last year, one of them had described her as a mountain. A mountain! Only Max had still seemed to think she was beautiful and desirable and valuable, and when he died, there was no one to tell her the tabloids were simply wrong and mean-spirited. She’d been an actress and a singer since she was three years old, well-known enough to go by her first name alone, like Cher and Madonna and Ann-Margret. Only those women were aging far better than she was. Escape began to sound marvelous. She would not have to endure growing old in the unforgiving spotlight.





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