by Gayle Wilson
“You want to call him?” Dean asked. “Or you want me to?”
“It might be better coming from you. I’m definitely not his favorite person right now. He might refuse to come in, just because I asked. You staying at the office a while?”
“Yeah. You get some sleep.”
“Special Agent Franklin was out at the McCoys’.”
“Anything new?”
“They’re convinced she’s dead. They’re going back to Jackson tomorrow. That’s not for public consumption, by the way.”
“Can’t say I blame them. You gonna tell the Nolans?”
“Eventually.” Just not tonight.
“Want me to do it?”
“Thanks, but that kind of thing is really my job.”
Another pause. She wondered if Dean was thinking what she was. That, as Jake Underwood had reminded her, finding Raine had also been her job. One she had failed at miserably.
“See you tomorrow, then.”
“Don’t stay too late,” she urged. “We’re all running on fumes. And I don’t think anything else will happen tonight. At least nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.”
Unless that next set of bones does belong to a child.
She closed her cell and climbed out of the patrol car. Every part of her body ached. Too little sleep. Too little food. Too few results.
She turned her key in the lock and welcomed the artificially cooled air that rushed out to greet her. The house was dark, but in its welcome familiarity, she didn’t bother to turn on the lights.
She headed toward the back instead, removing her utility belt to drape over the back of the couch. She walked down the hall to the bathroom, unbuttoning her shirt as she did. She pulled it out of her pants and then off over her head before she put the stopper in the tub and turned on the hot water. She let it run as she removed the rest of her clothing.
She wasn’t sure she could keep her eyes open long enough to soak out the bone-deep fatigue, but she was going to try. And she needed to eat something before she lay down. Bath, food, bed.
Wearing only her panties and bra, she walked across the hall to her bedroom—cool, dark and too inviting—to get a clean nightgown. Resisting temptation, she didn’t even look in the direction of the bed as she retrieved the gown from her drawer and started back toward the hall.
Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on nagged at her, however, causing her to stop at the doorway and then turn to survey the room. Her bed was unmade, as it had been during the past few hectic days.
It didn’t seem to be in quite the same condition she’d left it in this morning. The covers were too neatly turned back on the far side, with both pillows positioned against the head-board. Since she cradled one of those as she slept, it usually ended up aligned vertically along the center of the wide mattress in the morning. She would have sworn it had been there today.
She took a step forward, trying to remember if she had straightened the bed when she’d crawled out of it. Was it possible she was so sleep deprived she had no memory of doing that?
Another step carried her near enough to realize something lay partially concealed by the arrangement of the bedding. A bulge that began in the center of one of those precisely placed pillows.
Hands trembling, she reached out and flicked on the bedside lamp. Even with the object in the bed illuminated, it took a second for her brain to process what she was seeing.
Not a child, which had been her first terrifying thought. And nothing that had ever been animate, despite the deliberate attempt to make it appear lifelike.
It was a doll. A baby doll—almost life-size—its rounded plastic head centered on her pillow.
Having made that identification, Eden still didn’t move, her hand frozen on the switch of the lamp as she came to a series of undeniable conclusions. While she’d been at work, someone had placed a doll in her bed and covered it as you would tuck in a child for the night.
Her heart began to pound. She gagged, thankful that her stomach was empty. She put a shaking hand over her mouth, unable to prevent the tears that flooded her eyes.
Her instinct was to flee. Get her clothes and just get out. Except this was her home. Her sanctuary. The thought that someone had invaded it to do this vileness…
Forcing herself to move, she took the three steps that would carry her to the closet and ripped her robe off its hanger. As she struggled into the garment, she ran toward the kitchen and the back door.
It was locked, the dead bolt shot, just as it had been when she’d checked it last night. She turned to retrace her steps to secure the front door, trying each of the windows as she passed by them.
Two lifted when she pushed against their sashes, but they were the ones she occasionally raised to air out the house. She couldn’t swear they’d been locked after the last time she’d done that.
She could find nothing else suspicious. Nothing had been disturbed. There was nothing missing and nothing out of place.
Only the doll, carefully placed in her bed. And positioned exactly as the other one had been.
Knowing the bath she’d anticipated would no longer be in the least relaxing, she walked back to turn off the water. She stood a moment, watching the steam rise off its surface, trying to think what she should do. Before she had decided whether to call Dean and get someone out here to do the kind of examination of the premises they’d do for any other break-in, the doorbell rang.
Although it wasn’t late, it was after dark. People usually wouldn’t come to the door without calling first, unless…
Unless it was an emergency. Or bad news.
She took a deep breath, trying to prepare for something she’d been dreading since the morning Raine disappeared. And realized she would never be prepared for what she feared she was about to hear.
She pulled the front on her robe together as she walked to the living room. Her utility belt was still lying over the back of the couch. Given that she had no way of knowing who was waiting on her stoop, she slipped her weapon out of it, concealing the Glock in the folds of her robe.
“Who is it?” she asked, as she turned on the porch light.
“Jake Underwood.”
The last person she might have expected to show up at her front door unannounced. Considering how angry he’d been this afternoon, she couldn’t think of a reason why he might have come.
All the doubts she’d originally had about his motives the morning he’d showed up in the office with his flashback story flooded her head. Those had long since been pushed aside by the trust that had grown between them. What if she’d been wrong? What if he’d been the person who’d broken into her house?
Except that made no sense. How could Jake have known anything about the doll?
“What do you want?”
“To apologize.”
Which was even more unexpected than his showing up here without warning. As she was trying to decide whether or not to believe him, he spoke again.
“I can do that from out here, if you want.”
Did she really believe he intended to do her harm? And if not, why would she hesitate to let him in?
After all, she’d gone out to his place to apologize. Why wouldn’t he think it was okay for him to do the same?
She undid the chain, turned the locks and opened the door. The swelling on his face looked even worse under the glare of the porch’s yellow bug-repellant light. And for the first time since she’d known him, he looked uncertain.
“Come in.” She stepped back, giving him room to enter.
Although he’d been dressed in his usual faded jeans and T-shirt this afternoon, tonight he wore a navy polo and khaki trousers. The transformation those effected surprised her, making him seem almost a stranger.
An officer and a gentleman. The familiar phrase reverberated, making her realize that Major Jacob Underwood was undoubtedly more sophisticated than she’d given him credit for.
“I can make coffee.” She wasn’t sure where t
hat offer had come from. Maybe from the sense of absolute aloneness she had felt watching the steam rise off her cooling bathwater.
“I don’t know what kind of reception an uninvited guest is supposed to receive down here,” he said, “but whatever it is, don’t feel under any obligation to provide it. I shouldn’t have said what I did to you this afternoon. No one could have done more than you have with this. And it isn’t really even your job. That’s what the FBI is here for. If, with all their resources, they can’t find Raine Nolan, no one expects you to do it.”
“No one but me,” Eden said. “And you were right before. It is my job. This is my town and my people, and I’m responsible for what happens to them. I feel that very strongly.”
“I know. I said what I did because I was angry, not because I think you haven’t been doing all you can.”
“I appreciate that. Look, if you don’t want coffee, how about tea? You can have it hot or iced.” He had begun to shake his head, but she plowed on, unready to face her dilemma again. “Since I haven’t eaten today, I was about to make myself a sandwich. I hate to eat alone.”
He would think she was coming on to him. At this point she didn’t particularly care if he did. As long as he stayed.
She needed someone to talk to. Someone intelligent and rational, and less emotionally involved in this than she was.
Like the guy who claims to have visions of missing children?
She pushed that unwanted thought out of her head, waiting for him to turn her down. He surprised her instead.
“Okay. And I drink my tea iced.”
“Fair enough.” She started toward the kitchen and realized she was still holding the Glock. As she passed the couch, she pushed the weapon back into its holster.
“You always answer the door armed?”
“I’ve never felt the need to before tonight. Someone broke into my house today. I discovered that fact as I was undressing to take my bath. Right before you rang the bell.”
His pupils widened into the surrounding ring of gray. And then he asked the pertinent question. “You’re sure they’re not still here?”
She nodded. “I checked.”
“You think it was somebody from this morning?”
He meant one of the men who had attacked him, she realized, something that had never crossed her mind. Would one of them be so angry she’d interrupted their fun that he’d decided to play a prank on her? Except…
“I wouldn’t think so.”
His face changed, concern replaced by confusion. “Then…? You have any idea what they were after? Was anything taken?”
She shook her head. “That’s what I need to talk about. To try to figure out what this was all about.”
“What you need to do is get some of your people out here to dust for prints. They also need to check for footprints outside. Look for forced entry. You know what you need to be doing.”
“There won’t be any prints. Just like there weren’t any on Lincoln Greene’s truck.”
“You think this is the same guy who came out to my place and took a shot at you?”
She nodded. “I’m sure of it. Look, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need something to keep me awake and lucid. We can talk while we eat.” She gestured toward the door to the kitchen.
His gaze followed, at least briefly, before it came back to her face. “How’d you know someone had been here?”
She didn’t want to go back into the bedroom. The feeling was visceral. Gut level. Patently ridiculous. And exactly the same as when she’d seen the gingham quilt.
“I’ll show you.”
As he followed her down the darkened hallway, she was conscious for the first time of how little she was wearing underneath her robe. And very conscious of how thin was the fabric from which it was made.
She stopped at the door of the bedroom, steeling herself to enter. Instead, Jake brushed by her and, guided by the lamp she hadn’t turned off, walked straight to the side of the bed where the doll lay.
He studied it for a moment, before he turned back to her. “You think somebody’s taunting you? Because we haven’t found her yet?”
We. We haven’t found her yet.
Was he sensitive enough to know how accusatory “you” would have felt in that sentence? Or did he, too, feel this crushing sense of responsibility?
“Actually…I don’t think that’s supposed to represent Raine.”
“Then…” He shook his head again. “I don’t understand. What the hell’s going on?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. To explain what I think this is. This and the quilt.”
“The quilt? The one in the truck.”
She nodded. “I don’t think either of them has anything to do with Raine.” She stopped, because she couldn’t say that with any certitude. “At least… It’s complicated. That’s why I’d like to talk it all out with somebody who…somebody who can view it with some kind of detachment. Who can think rationally about what’s happening.”
“And you believe I’m that person.”
The confusion in his voice had been replaced by some emotion she couldn’t identify.
“Yes.”
As she’d stood in the bathroom, she had considered the very limited list of people she might trust with this. Dean should have been at the top, but she knew how he would react. Just as he’d reacted to Jake’s story.
Next had been Doc Murphy, who was not only the county coroner, but had been her father’s doctor, as well. And for that reason alone she had rejected him.
She had even briefly considered the minister at the church she attended, but in her opinion, this wasn’t going to be the kind of situation one turned to the clergy to solve.
Now, instead of trusting any of them, she was about to reveal more about herself than she had ever told those other people to a man who had more right than anyone else to refuse her plea for help. The one man who would be fully justified in telling her to leave him the hell alone.
And that he hadn’t done that—at least not yet—made her know she’d made the right decision.
Chapter Eleven
Eden had poured the iced tea she’d promised, but she seemed to have forgotten that she needed to eat. They were sitting now at the scarred wooden table in her small kitchen.
Jake watched as she ran her finger around the rim of her untouched cup of coffee while she talked. The motion was unthinking, unconscious, as the past slowly unfolded in her mind’s eye. Even the cadence of her speech seemed to have slipped into a more childish rhythm.
“I was two years older than Christie. That meant I was supposed to look after her. I can hear my mother’s voice saying that to this day. ‘Look after your sister, Edie. Make sure nothing happens to her.’
“We’d been swimming that day. Mama had taken us by herself because Daddy had to work. We went to the community pool, like always. There must have been two hundred people there. It was a Saturday, so it was mostly families. Lots of kids. I had trouble keeping an eye on Christie. She kept running into the women’s locker room, she said to go to the bathroom. She’d do that everywhere she went. Daddy said she was taking a survey of all the bathrooms in the state.” Her lips tilted at the memory, and then the smile faded as she went on with her story.
“Mama would send me into the locker room to get her because she’d be gone so long. Once when I went in, she wasn’t there. I searched everywhere, all over the building, but when I went to tell Mama I couldn’t find her, Christie was in the pool. I didn’t say anything to Mama, afraid I’d get her in trouble, but then I wondered, after it happened—”
She stopped, lifting her eyes to his. “Sorry. I know…” She shook her head. “It’s been so long. And I’ve never talked about this. I’ve tried not to think about it.”
“Just take your time,” Jake said soothingly.
This wasn’t something he wanted to hear, and he didn’t understand how some incident from her childhood had anything to do with som
eone breaking into her house or with Raine Nolan. Since she seemed to feel it was somehow connected, he was at least willing to listen and then draw his own conclusions.
Eden took a breath, her finger again beginning that slow circle around her cup. “We were tired. Playing in the water does that to you. And the heat. After supper, Mama sent us up to bed. I don’t think either of us made a fuss, but it must have been early. Not even dark yet. That didn’t keep me from falling asleep, almost as soon as my head touched the pillow. I don’t know about Christie, but she didn’t usually get out of bed. Of course, she had been so bad at the pool…” The sentence trailed as she appeared to consider whether or not her sister might have continued her misbehavior that night.
“When I woke up the next morning, the sun was so bright coming in through the curtains, my first thought was that someone should have called me because it was so late. I lay there and listened a long time, but I couldn’t hear Mama down in the kitchen. The house was too quiet, like everyone had gotten up and gone someplace and left me asleep.
“But it was Sunday. And Mama wouldn’t dream of not going to church. When I looked over at Christie’s bed, I knew she wasn’t there. I could always see the lump she made under the sheet, but it wasn’t there that morning. I thought maybe she’d gone down to wake up Mama and Daddy. I thought…” She shook her head again. “Nothing bad. Nothing bad had ever happened in my whole life. Not before that morning. And I had no reason to expect that anything ever would.”
She looked up again, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Even after all this time, I can remember what I felt when I walked over to the bed and saw Christie’s baby doll tucked under the sheet. I thought she was playing a trick on me. Like she had at the pool the day before. I thought she was hiding somewhere. Trying to scare me. Or that she was down in the kitchen, eating the leftover brownies Mama had made for our picnic the day before. The thought that she could really be gone—that someone had come into our house and taken her—never crossed my mind. Things like that didn’t happen. Not to my family. Or my sister.”