by Brenda Novak
Jenna gave her the number, then the phone clicked and Dennis’s mother was gone.
“Any luck?”
Jenna glanced up to see Adam leaning against the doorjamb, looking as tired and worried as she felt. The sight puzzled her in a vague way, but she was too preoccupied to examine it. “I was talking to Meredith, Dennis’s mom.”
“I remember Meredith.”
“I’m not sure, but I think she’ll call me if she hears anything.”
“And his brothers?”
“I’ve only talked to his cousin, who hasn’t heard from him. His brothers are next on the list.”
Turning back to the faded writing in her address book, Jenna found Gary’s number, the brother who’d lived just across town from them for most of their marriage, and dialed. Three beeps and a recording played in her ear.
“The number you have dialed is no longer in service….”
She frowned at Adam and hung up, wondering if Gary and his family had moved, then tried his work number.
“Henley’s Autobody.”
“Is Gary there?”
“Just a minute.”
Jenna tapped her foot as Adam crossed the room to sit on the corner of the desk. Finally Gary came on the line.
“Gary? This is Jenna, Dennis’s ex-wife.”
“Shit. What’s he done now?”
Jenna had occasionally called Gary, when things with Dennis had gotten really bad. But she’d soon realized there wasn’t anything he could do to help her, not really. By the time he arrived, Dennis had usually stormed out. The one time he hadn’t, Dennis had broken Gary’s nose, along with a window and two doors. Jenna had never called Dennis’s brother for help again. He had a wife and three kids of his own. It wasn’t fair to involve him.
“He’s taken Ryan from school,” she said simply.
“God, he’s a mess. Will he ever quit?”
“I don’t know. I’m terrified, Gary. I’m afraid he’ll hurt Ryan.”
“Where are you living now, Jenna?”
“I’m back in Mendocino. Dennis followed me down here, making all kinds of threats. He went to jail for a week for violating his restraining order. As soon as he got out, he took Ryan.”
“When?”
“This morning, before school started. Do you ever hear from him?”
“Not often. Every once in a while he comes by here asking for twenty bucks, but the last time I wouldn’t give him any money. I tried to get him back into AA, even got him a job here with me. And what does he do? He takes his first paycheck and goes on a drunken binge and gets fired for not showing up at work.”
The story didn’t surprise Jenna. She’d heard it many times before. “Will you call me if you hear from him? For Ryan’s sake?”
“Sure.”
Jenna gave him her number and hung up as Adam rounded the desk and started to knead her tense shoulders.
Dennis had one other brother, Russ, but he’d always taken Dennis’s side, and Jenna had much less confidence he’d help her, even if he could. She dialed him next, anyway, and an answering machine picked up. She left the Victoriana’s number and the number of Adam’s car phone, then called Dennis’s sisters, both of whom treated her distantly but promised to call if they heard anything.
“Do you think any of them will really contact us?” Adam asked when she slumped in the chair.
“I think Gary would. The others? Who knows? Dennis is a convincing liar when he wants to be. If he told them he’d gone clean and I was being vindictive in not letting him see Ryan, he could probably sway their sympathy.”
Adam’s strong hands continued to smooth the knots out of Jenna’s shoulders and neck. But her head still throbbed with the pressure of tears, both shed and unshed.
“Well, I finally got hold of Todd,” he said after a moment, and Jenna could tell he was trying to infuse some positive energy into his voice. “He said Dennis has no address down here. My guess is that he’s on his way back to Oregon, trying to put some distance between us and him. He’s got to get back to familiar ground where he might be able to lay hands on some money. If he couldn’t post bail, he doesn’t have much.”
Jenna winced. “Which means he might not have what it takes to feed Ryan or get them a place to sleep at night.”
“You can’t think of that, Jen. Only of finding them. I’m going to head up to Oregon and see what I can dig up, ask a few questions along the way. Give me the numbers of his family, and I’ll contact each of them again once I get there. You call me if you hear anything on this end, okay?”
The telephone rang and Jenna snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Jenna? This is Todd. I think I’ve found something.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JENNA STARTED to shake so badly she could hardly keep her grasp on the phone. She felt Adam’s arms go around her, felt him give her a kiss on the top of her head, and his warmth and calm helped to bolster her. “What is it?”
“Since I talked to Adam, I’ve been checking with different police departments between here and the address you gave me as Dennis’s last known residence. Just across the Oregon border, in Medford, an elderly woman reported seeing a man drag a little boy away from a pay phone outside a drugstore. She said the boy seemed frightened, reluctant. She insisted the man had to be some kind of sexual predator, but the uniforms up there didn’t take the incident too seriously because she calls in so often. Most of what she reports turns out to be nothing. But in this case the description of the man’s car matches the one Dennis was driving.”
Jenna’s heart beat faster with hope. “Medford is on the way to Portland.”
“Yep, right off Interstate 5. I think we’ve got a start. At least we know what direction he’s taking. I just wanted you to know we’re doing something about this, Jenna. We’ll get your son back.”
“Thanks, Todd. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.” After stoically withstanding the coolness of Dennis’s family, Jenna felt the kindness of Todd’s voice slip beneath her resistance like smoke beneath a door. Tears started streaming down her cheeks again, tears she couldn’t hold back. She hung up quickly so Todd wouldn’t hear the wobble in her voice, but there was no hiding what she felt from Adam.
“So he is on his way to Oregon,” Adam said. Pulling her up and against his chest, he stroked her back while she cried. “I’m going after them.”
Jenna straightened, collecting her thoughts. “I’m going with you.”
“But what if we’re wrong and the sighting’s a fluke? Don’t you want to be here in case—”
“No. I know Dennis. He’s running back home. His family acts like they don’t care about him, because they’re so disappointed in him, but his brothers have tried to help him a dozen times. He’ll use Ryan as an excuse to get some money out of one of them, probably Russ, and claim he’s going sober and getting a job.”
“All right. Gram and Pop will be here. They can call us the minute they hear anything.”
As if Adam’s words had conjured up his grandmother, Mrs. Durham knocked softly on the open door to announce her presence. “What have you learned?” she asked, hobbling into the room.
Adam helped her to a seat, evidently sensing, as Jenna did, that the crisis had stolen her energy for the day. He told her what Todd had found out and what Jenna suspected, then asked, “Are you holding up okay, Gram?”
“Fine,” she said, but her eyes filled with tears. She self-consciously wiped them away with fingers slightly bent from arthritis, but it was then that Jenna understood how much the Durhams cared for Ryan. Over the previous months he’d become their grandson in every way that mattered, and at that moment they became Gram and Pop to her, too.
Pop came in and stood behind his wife. Somehow that unity, that common bond of love for her son, helped calm Jenna’s frantic heart. They were all searching for Ryan, praying for his safety, drawing close in their worry and fear. Dennis’s parents might be uninterested in Ryan, and her parents were gone, but in the Durhams, he
r son had the very best grandparents in the world. Together they would get him back.
But did that together include Adam? Jenna eyed him and tried, once again, to keep some emotional distance between them.
Don’t depend on him, no matter how tempting his strength. He won’t be here forever. He won’t last.
She decided to think about Adam later, except that later didn’t exist. While Ryan was gone and possibly in danger, there was only now, which made it so damn easy to lean on him when he put his arm around her.
ADAM TURNED the radio down when he noticed that Jenna had nodded off. They’d had little rest with which to confront the emergency that had greeted them this morning, and the motion of the car had eventually put Jenna to sleep. They’d have to stop at each town they came to once they crossed the Oregon border, to ask after Dennis and Ryan, but he wanted to give Jenna as much time as possible to get her strength back before he had to wake her.
A gentle rain fell and beaded on the windshield as Adam drove. He automatically flipped on the wipers, and their rhythmic slap, combined with the steady hum of his tires, began to ease the tension that cramped the muscles of his back. Memories of Jenna’s son—Ryan’s gap-toothed smile the day they’d ridden bikes together, the feel of the boy’s skinny arms locking around his neck the night of his bad dream, Ryan’s trusting young chatter when they’d gone out for burgers—threatened to bring the worry back with a vengeance, but he refused to give it audience. Telling himself they’d find Ryan soon, he forced the fear of what might happen if they didn’t to the back of his mind. Then he turned his thoughts to Mike, and Bernstein and Lowe, and the decision he’d made on the phone that morning—and waited for the devastation to hit.
Surprisingly enough, what he felt fell far short of devastation. He wasn’t even sure it was regret. Concern for his clients seemed to be chief among his emotions. He’d called the office to tell the secretaries to reschedule all his appointments and appearances, and to send someone else to those that couldn’t be postponed, but he needed to follow up and make sure every client was given to a competent colleague.
And then what? Did he go out on his own? He’d given Bernstein and Lowe more than a decade of his life. Why didn’t he feel—
“What are you thinking?”
Adam glanced over to see Jenna watching him. “You didn’t sleep long.”
She rested her head in her palm and propped her arm on the door, but didn’t look away. “You didn’t answer my question. What’s going on inside that head of yours?”
“Nothing in particular,” he lied. “Why?”
“You had an odd smile on your face.”
Adam supposed his expression probably was odd. Who would have thought he could cut himself loose from Bernstein and Lowe so easily and feel…what? Free? Free from Mike’s demands and expectations, and the grueling all-consuming pace he’d set for himself?
Briefly he considered telling Jenna what had happened, then decided against it. He didn’t want her to feel responsible for his decision. And he sure as hell didn’t want to frighten her by making her think their relationship was more serious at this moment than she felt it should be. He needed to lull her along, become part of the fabric of her life again, slowly convince her that he belonged there.
Her gaze didn’t waver. “So you’re not going to tell me?”
“Are you sure you want to know?” He gave her a wicked grin and raised his brows. “I was thinking about last night.”
A reddish stain darkened her cheeks, and she glanced out at the passing greenery. “Men,” she groaned, then turned back to him, and he could tell by the pensiveness in her eyes that she had something to say.
“What’s that look about?” he asked.
She scowled. “It certainly has nothing to do with sex. Being female, I can think of other things.”
“Not last night, you couldn’t.” He laughed, unable to resist the opportunity to remind Jenna that she was the one who’d traipsed through the hall to reach him.
Suddenly she laughed, too, and it did Adam’s heart good to see her smile again. “You should be used to that,” she said. “Don’t you drive all the women crazy?”
Her voice was almost flippant, but Adam sensed there was something deeper underlying her words. “Are you asking me if you’re only one in a crowd, Jen?”
“No.” She fiddled with the jeans she’d put on, along with a sweater, before they’d left the Victoriana, and Adam reached out to stop her before she could put her fingers in her mouth to bite her nails—nails that had already sustained considerable damage since they’d learned of Ryan’s disappearance. “I mean, yes,” she admitted with a frustrated sigh.
He gave her a sideways glance. “Jenna, I told you while I was making love to you that you mean something to me. My feelings haven’t changed with the rising of the sun.” He’d told her that he’d never been able to forget her, that he never could, but he hadn’t said he loved her. The words had nearly escaped him a dozen times. He knew he loved her, had always loved her, but each time he’d been tempted to make the declaration, he’d choked it back, determined to wait until she gave him some indication that she might return his feelings. Or at least that she wouldn’t throw the words back in his face.
She didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, she surprised him by saying, “What are you doing here, Adam? This is my problem, my nightmare. You should be in San Francisco, at work. I heard you on the phone earlier, telling whoever it was that they had to cancel all your appointments and…and everything. You don’t have to do this.”
“You’re right. I don’t have to be here,” he said. “That should tell you something.”
“What? What does it tell me, Adam?”
“You’ll figure it out when you listen with this—” he pressed a hand to the soft swell above her heart “—and not this.” Pulling gently on her ear, he grinned, knowing the real question was whether or not she’d let herself trust what her heart was telling her.
“WHERE DID YOU GET this?” Stunned, Jenna stood behind Adam in a dingy service station only fifty miles from the Oregon border and gazed down at a flyer with her son’s picture. Across the top in big block letters it said MISSING.
Adam tacked one up on the wall. “What did you think I was doing while you were at the police station? Enjoying a leisurely lunch?”
Jenna barely heard him. The fact that he’d made up hundreds of flyers wasn’t so surprising; the fact that he was offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of her son was. “How could you do this?”
He shrugged. “It was easy. I typed the body of it on my laptop, used the copier at the Victoriana to add Ryan’s picture, and there you are.”
“You know what I mean. I don’t have this kind of money.”
“Which is why I’m the one who’s offering the reward.” He stepped back to study Ryan’s picture. He’d placed it right in the middle of the wall, surrounded by photographs of other lost or stolen children, and it was the sheer number of those small faces that frightened Jenna. How many of them were ever found?
“But…” She didn’t know what to say. How could she thank him for such a grand gesture? Money motivated people, and only the promise of a large reward separated her kid’s picture from all the others. Surely they’d get Ryan back now.
As her gratitude overwhelmed her, she felt tears prick behind her eyes, and she didn’t bother to fight them. Nothing, least of all her pride, mattered more to her than getting Ryan back.
“Come on, don’t cry,” he said, lifting her hair off her neck and kissing the groove beneath her ear. “You can work it off as my love slave.”
His joke relieved the intensity of the moment, and she laughed in spite of her jumbled emotions. “How much did I earn for last night?”
He whistled. “If I had to put a monetary value on last night, I’d say I owe you money.”
“God, you know how to break a woman down.” Jenna’s worry for her son had twisted her stomach
and her heart into such a painful knot that she wondered how other parents lived through the ordeal. But laughter helped ease some of the rawness of her feelings. She doubled her hand into a fist and gave Adam a playful punch, and he used the gesture to pull her into his arms.
Sobering once he got her there, he gazed down into her eyes. “You’re putting up a good resistance,” he said before his mouth quirked into another smile. “Have you ever seen Fatal Attraction?”
“No.”
“Some people can be pretty tough to get rid of.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That I’m not going anywhere.”
Jenna stared at him, wishing she could believe him, but experience had taught her too memorable a lesson. He’d stay until the novelty wore off or he met someone new in San Francisco. As long as he worked and lived there, it would be all too easy for him to walk away.
Shifting, she looked beyond him to the flyer, hoping she sounded calm and detached as she said, “The reward is really something, Adam, way above and beyond the call of duty. Ryan isn’t even your son.”
“How do you know he won’t be?” he asked, his voice soft but finally serious.
Jenna felt light-headed as his words sank in. “Because you know that would take a serious commitment, my attorney friend.”
He smiled. “I guess it would. But you know what? Losing you again is the only thing that really scares me.”
Until you have me back and the challenge is gone. Jenna kept her gaze on her son’s picture and tried to edge away from the emotional precipice that yawned before her. “I guess you’re putting your money where your mouth is, huh?”
DENNIS SAT ON THE HOOD of his car holding a sign he’d made from the flap of a cardboard box. It read, “Trying to get home. Please help,” but the patrons of the rest area mostly ignored him. They shuffled into and out of the cement washrooms, got a drink from the pebbled fountain and hurried on their way. The few he’d approached had shaken their heads and circled wide if they had to pass him again. And now that it was dark and getting late, Dennis doubted his luck would improve. Ryan had fallen asleep in the back of the car. Without him, strangers had no trust and even less sympathy.