by Cara Colter
Peace and quiet … just minutes ago she’d registered how tired she was; now she had the prospect of a night to herself, all she saw was hours of silence, no childish chatter, no hugs, no family. Just spending a night alone.
There was nothing to say. She’d infringed on his rights with his children too much lately. It wasn’t as if—as if she was anything to them. “Good idea, I will call them.”
She made herself smile and wave to the kids as Noah pulled out his phone and called Uncle Joe. “Joe, I’m on my way over to get some dinner, so I’ll get Tim … yes, I know, thanks anyway, but I need to get some dinner anyway—what?” The easy tone turned hard. “What do you mean he’s not there? Where did he go—?” He listened for a minute, his nostrils flared and his eyes dark. “It’s a surprise. I see. How long has he been gone … an hour? What happened to him? Was he upset? Did he say anything? Do you know where my son is, Joe? Do you know where Tim is?”
The panic in his voice would have been out of place for most parents, but not for Noah—never for Noah.
Feeling sick with fear and wretched guilt, Jennifer was already strapped into the front passenger seat by the time Noah flung himself in the truck.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I CAN’T tell you—I promised the lad I’d keep his secret,” Joe was saying for the fourth time. “I’m sure he’s not in any danger. I swear he hasn’t run off, Noah.”
“Promises. Swearing. What is that supposed to mean?” Noah snapped. “You think it counts for anything with me, when it’s just about dark and my son’s missing?” Noah’s voice cracked; he pulled out his phone again.
“Don’t do it!” Again Joe reached out to stop him. “The little lad was that excited, Noah. If you call Sherbrooke on him now, you’ll ruin it all.”
“So you keep saying. Tell me why!” When Joe shook his head, Noah lost it. “Then damn your promises and Tim’s surprise! My eight-year-old son is missing, it’s almost night and you expect me to—”
“To trust your son! Yes, I do!” Joe snapped back. “Give him ten more minutes! That’s all I’m asking.”
“That’s what I did with Belinda,” he snarled at the older man. “I trusted her to come home! After my five-year-old son called me to come home because the babysitter had to go and Rowdy was screaming and he couldn’t get him out of the cot, I came home to find my wife gone—not her things, just her. I gave her ten more minutes, and another ten, and another, hoping she was just shopping, visiting someone I didn’t know—anything but the truth. And then when she was put on the missing persons list, all I could think was, what if I hadn’t given her ten minutes? What if, in those ten minutes I hesitated, she was abducted, raped or murdered, and I could have saved her? If there’s one thing experience has taught me, it’s that it’s better to have my son alive and mad at me. If I can save my son’s life by being safe rather than sorry, I’ll do it even if he hates me!”
Joe’s resistance tumbled down like a house of cards out in the wind; his hand dropped from the phone. Noah flipped it open, finger poised to hit speed dial 1—Police Sergeant Fred Sherbrooke’s home number.
“Noah.”
The touch of Jennifer’s hand on his didn’t feel as Joe’s had—trying to stop him; it trembled slightly. “Noah, I understand—I want him found as much as you do, and it’s my fault this happened. But before we call Fred, why not call his friends’ houses? He’s just a kid, Noah, and he’s been so happy, so settled lately. If he’s just playing, and lost track of time …”
The good sense beneath the guilt in her words stopped him, just as he was about to ignore her and hit the green call button. He heard all she wasn’t saying: he’s only little, he wouldn’t notice the dark coming if he’s having fun with a friend.
“I already called Ethan’s house on the way, but I can call Miss Greenwood and get the numbers of Tim’s other friends …”
He heard what she was saying. Tim was making friends here; a sign of healing, even if he wasn’t ready to admit to that. Here in Hinchliff, the kids either didn’t know or didn’t care about the family’s history. Tim was just a normal kid, one of twenty kids of a single parent.
And he’d thanked God for it.
If he blew it now by overreacting … the story would be around town in hours, and they’d rehash all they knew about Belinda’s disappearance, and their theories on why she’d run. Just like in Sydney—a repetition of the reason Tim had begun running away in the first place. I’m going to find Mummy, then they’ll all stop being nasty!
Everything else Jennifer hadn’t said came whispering into his brain. Tim hadn’t run away now for almost two months; the change of scene, school and friends, and Jennifer’s healing presence, had worked the miracle he’d prayed for when he’d left Sydney and all its memory. One misstep now and he could undo all the progress Tim had made.
But the one thing Jennifer could never understand was the ghost stalking him night and day, the spectre of history repeating—the history that had almost repeated so many times, every time Cilla or Tim disappeared. Oh God, if his precious boy was truly missing, in danger …
“I can’t,” he rasped. Feeling the line in the sand shifting with the wind, as it had done almost every day throughout the past three years, he pressed the button, spoke to Fred briefly and then stood there, feeling guilty and lost and angry.
He started when a pair of gentle arms slid around his waist. “I understand. It’s all right,” she whispered from behind him. She held him close, giving him her caring and strength at the moment he’d never felt so alone with his fears.
Without conscious thought or decision he turned his face. “Thank you,” he whispered back, in a tight, halting rasp. Two words hadn’t taken so long to say since the time he’d heard four fateful words: your wife is missing.
Tonight wasn’t about Belinda; she’d been fading from his thoughts for a long time, but now she wasn’t here with him at all. Usually she seemed to hover over him like some damned ghost ship packed with sackloads of guilt and regret. But at this moment he was just a worried dad, with a beautiful, gentle woman who loved his son and made him feel like a man again. A woman who was looking at him with so much longing in her eyes it turned his fears inside-out; with so much faith, he began to believe.
“Tim will come home to us,” she mouthed without sound. She was with him … and for the first time in years, he didn’t feel so damned alone.
Without conscious thought or decision, he moved across the inch that had been separating them for too long, and brushed his mouth over hers.
Could a first kiss be any more wrong? Wrong time, wrong place, wrong everything. He wasn’t free; his son was missing; his other kids were four feet away, playing with their new toys—and Joe, who’d warned him against taking things further with Jennifer, was watching grimly. Noah could feel the anger simmering in him.
But it was all vague, peripheral, technical; it didn’t matter. What was real was that Jennifer’s breath hitched; he felt her breasts flatten against his shoulder and arm. Her eyes filled with a yearning and arousal so strong, his entire body tightened in reaction.
The current of wanting snapped together. Finally, contact …
One moment in time, that was all; then she pulled back, her face carefully controlled. “Tim!” she called, waving to the left. Noah, lost still in the feeling of being a man, not just a dad, took a few seconds longer to react.
And then it was too late.
The beaming boy proudly riding a slightly lopsided bike—this must have been his project with Joe—vanished in an instant, and the resentful rebel in a child’s body replaced him. The slitted eyes, the mouth turned down. The suspicious boy, the guard dog in human form had returned by necessity.
Tim had seen him kissing Jennifer.
“Hey, mate!” he called, going into automatic damage control. “You’ve got a bike? That’s a real beauty! Where did you get it?”
Tim threw aside his “surprise” as if it didn’t matter. “Let go of her
, Dad,” he yelled. Rowdy and Cilla, startled by the roar, turned to look at their father. “Let go of her, I said!”
“What?” He looked down at his hand, which was clenching Jennifer’s in a stranglehold. It was obvious who’d been doing the touching.
Then he looked at Tim, and an anger to match Tim’s filled his soul. It was time he asserted the authority he’d lost more than three years before. If he kept living in the fear of Tim running away, their family would be ruled by the demands of an unwise, unstable eight-year-old.
When he spoke, it was with quiet authority that never failed to get through to his son. “I’m the grown-up here, Tim—you do as I tell you, not the other way around. What Jennifer and I do, or don’t do, is between us alone. It isn’t any of your business.”
Tim’s control slipped, seeming to shatter on the soft dirt footpath. “You’re married to my mum!” he cried, his voice rising to the pitch of the small, terrified child he truly was.
Noah closed his eyes. The choice was as clear as it was heartbreaking. He either kept knuckling under to Tim’s insecurity in the hope that his son would heal eventually, or he did what he could to give all three of his kids as normal a life as possible.
It was time to move on, whether Tim wanted to, or not.
He released Jennifer’s hand and walked over to his son. When he reached Tim’s side, he held his shoulders despite the boy’s stiffening. “It wasn’t me who left the family, Tim. Mummy went away because she was sad—but if she was coming home, she’d have come a long time ago. And all the yelling at me, and all the running away in the world, isn’t going to bring her back to us. Do you understand, son? It’s just us now.”
“No. No,” Tim screamed, struggling against him, his face white. “She’s coming home, she is. She promised!”
Noah’s heart stalled at the terrible pain his son was in. “She promised to be home in an hour, matey,” he said quietly.
Tim’s little hands clenched into fists. “It’s your fault! We shouldn’t have left home!”
Noah closed his eyes for a moment, praying for inspiration, because his barrel had run dry. “She broke the promise three years ago, mate. She knew where we were all that time, and she never came home.”
“You made her sad! That’s why!”
Grimly he knew exactly who fed Tim that line. “I know Nana and Pa need to believe that—but it’s not true, Tim.” Noah faced his son without flinching. “Mummy was sick. She had something called post-natal depression, and she had it very badly. I didn’t make her sad. I loved her—I’d loved Mummy since I was thirteen. I wanted her to come home. But the sickness got too much for her, the pills didn’t help, and she ran away. But if she comes back to our old house, Nana and Pa live just down the road, right? She’ll go there, and they’ll tell her where we are.”
“No, no!” Tim cried. His poor, thin little body was shaking; he didn’t resist when Noah drew him into his arms, cuddling him close. “She can’t, ‘cause Nana and Pa aren’t there.”
Noah frowned and pulled back. “What do you mean, Nana and Pa aren’t there?”
“Get away!” Tim suddenly screamed, his face flushed with fury. “Get away from my dad!”
Noah turned and saw Jennifer a few feet away, her face filled only with tender sadness. “Tim, just this morning I was your friend. Just because I care about your dad too doesn’t make me the enemy.”
Noah’s throat tightened with the words. She does care about me. He knew it, had known it all along—but hearing the words made it real somehow. Not just wanting, not mere fascination; she cared and he cared.
There was no going back now.
“Your dad was so scared about you, Tim. I hugged him to make him feel better. Can’t I be your dad’s friend, too?”
Tim turned from her, his thin face white and strained. The emotion so jumpy it was frightening. “Dad.” The word was a plea—begging him to make a little boy’s world secure again. To let him hang on to a faded thread of memory, the vow that was all he had left of his mother.
For a moment, Noah hovered on the brink of choice: giving in from pity as he’d done the past three years—or doing what he must to help Tim heal. Then he said quietly, “Tim, what did you mean about Nana and Pa not being home in Sydney?” But he knew exactly what Tim meant, and a grim sense of foreboding filled him. Peter and Jan would only leave home for one reason—the only reason for living they’d had from the day Belinda disappeared.
When Tim shuffled his feet, looking miserably guilty, Noah said it for him. “They’re here, aren’t they, mate? They heard about the lady who looks like Mummy. The one that lives here.”
Tim looked up then, his eyes—eyes so like his mother’s, despite the colouring being his—blazing. “You know about Mummy being here?”
Behind him, he almost felt Jennifer’s body stiffen; but he had no time to reassure her. “Yes, matey, I know about the lady. Are Nana and Pa up here somewhere nearby?”
If they were, they wouldn’t tell Noah. Though they’d known him all his life, and had been so joyful when he and Belinda married, they’d distanced themselves from him from the day the police marked her file Presumed Dead. When he’d accepted it rather than spending all his time and resources on finding her, their love had grown cold. When they called, they asked for Tim, who passed the phone to Cilla and Rowdy.
Suddenly he understood the reason for Tim’s settling down the past few weeks. Peter and Jan had been feeding Tim from their unending well of hope.
“They’re at a caravan park near Ballina,” Tim said, his voice muffled against Noah’s shoulder, shuffling his feet again. “They’re looking for Mummy. They’ve been here a while.”
Noah sighed. “I didn’t tell them, but the police report about that lady was the original reason why we moved here, Tim. They showed me a photo, see. I didn’t tell you all because I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but the police told me there were sightings of a woman who looked a lot like her. I’ve been looking for her ever since we got here.” He hesitated before he added, with painful difficulty, “About a year ago, I hired some special people who look for missing people for a living. They’re looking for Mummy.”
With that, Tim threw his arms around Noah’s neck, burrowing close in a way he only had during nightmares for the past two years. The helmet he hadn’t yet taken off whacked against Noah’s collarbone. “Thank you, Dad,” he whispered. “I was scared …”
Scared you were forgetting Mummy.
The words hovered like a spectre between them, the lie unspoken. For Noah knew now that even had the woman been Belinda, he would have tried to help her, reconciled her with the kids and Peter and Jan—but there was little left inside his own heart but memories. A month ago, he’d hired a second, local detective to find this woman, in a last-ditch effort to remember a marriage gone wrong, to stick to marriage vows long abandoned. The divorce papers he’d had the lawyer draw up last week were in his study now. The guilt and the shame and the relief all at once: ending a CHAPTER of his life that seemed never-ending only three months ago.
But thanks to Jan and Peter’s need to keep Belinda alive at all costs, his son’s suffering just went on and on …
Was this why he’d seen the fear in his daughter’s eyes? Why Cilla had been disappearing until they met Jennifer? What the hell had Peter and Jan been telling his kids?
It seemed today was the day for too many choices. This hour was an epiphany for them both. He could remain quiet, and let the pain come in its time and way, and have his son close again—or he could give Tim maximum anguish now, and let him find healing.
There really was no choice.
“I know Nana and Pa want Mummy to be alive as much as we do, but I heard from the special people last week. Remember the big letter you brought me?” he asked gruffly, hating to shatter his illusions even though he knew it was right. “They found the woman. Her name is Sandra Langtry, and she lives out in the bush with her partner and four kids. Though she looks a lot like her
, she isn’t Mummy—she had kids the same age as you and Cilla.”
Tim’s body went stiff for a few moments; then he gave a tiny cry, lost, soulless, like a dying animal. He broke out of Noah’s hold and bolted for his wobbly bike.
And for once, Noah didn’t even try to call him back.
As he disappeared down the road, a little hand slipped into Noah’s. “We go in the car, Daddy?” Rowdy asked, helpfully. “We find Timmy?”
Noah looked down at his little boy, and a massive lump formed in his throat. Rowdy and Cilla were so completely unaffected by the news that their mother wasn’t alive somewhere nearby. It was as it should be, but it also seemed wrong somehow, like he’d let the family down by not keeping Belinda’s memory alive and strong in them all.
As if healing was the disloyalty Belinda’s parents believed it to be.
It was only now he’d begun to buck the system he’d permitted Jan and Peter to create that he realised the damage he’d done by allowing everyone to think Belinda could come home after she’d been presumed dead. Tim was a child, and needed to accept reality; he needed to begin the healing process at last. He should never spend his time running: not running away as he’d thought, but running around with his grandparents to find his mum, who either couldn’t or didn’t want to come home. And so his parents-in-law were going to find out before the night was over.
No more status quo. It was time, not just to move on, but to heal.
He watched Tim turn the bike left, toward the coast—toward home, and sighed in relief. It seemed he’d been right. Tim’s disappearances had been about trying to find Belinda—or, he thought grimly, to meet his grandparents. “Yes, into the car—but we’re going home, Rowdy. Timmy needs time alone.”
A risk he wouldn’t have thought to take an hour ago now seemed the only option. He couldn’t stop Tim; his dream had been shattered, his faith destroyed. He needed time out before he’d accept his world needed to be reconstructed.