With Child

by Laurie R. King

  “Is there any news about my daughter?”

  “Nothing yet, ma’am. The search team is assembling now; they’ll set out with the dogs again as soon as it gets light. Let’s take you to a hotel, get you something to eat, and we can talk. Do you have any luggage?”

  “It’ll catch up with us later,” Hawkin said absently. “They held the plane for us in L.A.; the bags got left behind.” Kate could see that he badly wanted to seize D’Amico and demand every detail and was keeping himself in only because he knew that loss of control would mean loss of time.

  “I’m Florey D’Amico,” the lieutenant said belatedly, sticking out his hand.

  Kate trailed behind the three of them through the quiet airport and to D’Amico’s unmarked car outside the baggage-claim area. After a brief hesitation, he put Jani in the front seat, but Al was leaning over the seat, waiting for him as soon as he got behind the wheel.

  “What have you got so far?” he asked.

  “Your little girl disappeared from her motel room south of here sometime after nine o’clock Tuesday night. We have yet to find anyone who saw anything, though of course we’re still tracing half a dozen hotel guests who left before we were called. I should make it clear,” he added, peering at Jani to see if she was listening to him, “that we have no evidence of foul play. Nothing to indicate that she did not walk away from her hotel room all by herself.”

  Jani was looking at him, but she might as well not have heard, for all the impact his words had on her expression. Al Hawkin brushed away the reassurances, if that is what they were meant to be.

  “You must have more than that,” he said impatiently.

  D’Amico looked again at Jani, then turned to look at the traffic behind him before pulling out into the roadway. When the terminal was behind him, he said to Hawkin, his voice heavy with warning, “I think we ought to get you settled first, before we go into the details.”

  “Jani should hear it, too.”

  The heavy shoulders in front of Kate shrugged. “If you say so. Okay. As I said, there’s nothing real yet aside from the fact that she wasn’t in her room when Inspector Martinelli here woke up. She hadn’t seen her since they checked in at four-thirty, although the waitress in the coffee shop says that Jules had a hamburger at about six and charged it to the room. The register tag is timed at six-forty-eight, and the waitress says the girl was reading, by herself, and took a long time to eat.

  “So far, two people remember seeing her walking back toward her room a little after quarter to seven. She had the book in her hand. One of them commented that she looked cold and was hurrying, because a wind had come up and it was starting to sprinkle. She wasn’t wearing a coat.

  “We don’t have anyone yet who saw her enter her room, but the house log shows she began watching a pay-per-view movie at eight-thirty-five. The family that stayed in the room next to hers isn’t sure about anything. They knew the room was occupied because they heard movement and television noises from time to time, but they have two kids, and it wasn’t until they got the kids settled at nine that their own room went quiet. They then heard nothing but the TV from Jules’s room until they turned off the lights and went to sleep at about ten-thirty. The wife did hear voices sometime later. She thought before midnight, but she didn’t look at the clock, and she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. Could have been the parking lot or the hallway or the room on the other side.

  “You have anything to add yet, Kate?”

  “Just that I was sleeping so soundly that I probably wouldn’t have heard voices unless they were pretty loud. I had taken a pain pill,” she added. Jani said nothing, but Al looked at her. “My head was bothering me,” she said. “That’s why we stopped so early in the first place. I didn’t think it was safe to drive.”

  “So you abandoned her instead,” Jani said from the front seat, her voice thick with loathing and her jaw clenched.

  “I—” Kate started, but Al reached forward with his right hand and placed it on his wife’s shoulder.

  “Jani, no,” he said. After a minute, he looked at Kate, and she resumed.

  “I didn’t hear anything from Jules’s room. In the morning when I tried to wake her up, at about eight-thirty, I couldn’t get an answer, so I got the key from the desk and we opened her door. She’d been there, had a glass of water, sat on the bed for a while watching the TV. Her room key was there, along with the keys I’d given her to the car and to my room, but some of her stuff was gone: her jacket, the book she was reading, her diary, her pen, and some of her bathroom things. Her toothbrush and hairbrush were missing from the zip bag. Her makeup was still there.”

  “Jules doesn’t wear makeup,” Jani interrupted, her voice dripping scorn. “She borrowed some of mine for the wedding.”

  Kate looked at Hawkin. “Er, she doesn’t exactly wear it, no. But she does experiment with it sometimes,” she told the mother in the front seat.

  “She didn’t before she got to know you.”

  Kate looked helplessly at her partner, who offered her an infinitesimal shrug.

  “That’s all. Except for the boots. Her new boots were missing.”

  “She doesn’t own any boots, and certainly not new ones.” Jani again. “Al, this is ridiculous.” She spoke over her shoulder, still looking only at the windshield. She can’t bear to look at me, thought Kate, who became aware of a tiny spark of wholly inappropriate and utterly inexpressible anger.

  “She does own a pair of boots,” Kate said quietly. “A pair of waterproof Timberland hiking boots she said she’s been wanting for a long time.”

  “Jules wouldn’t want a pair of boots.”

  “I was with her. We bought them on Monday, in Berkeley. In fact, I put them on my credit card,” Kate said baldly. Silence fell in the car, and Kate knew that it was all Jani could do not to insist that Kate be put out of the car, right there on the freeway.

  “Was she wearing them during the day?” D’Amico asked unexpectedly.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, she took them off at eight-thirty.”

  His three passengers gaped at him, astonished at this obscure bit of knowledge.

  “We’re not sure about it, of course, but it looks as if she was lying on the bed, watching her movie, and she must have kicked them off, one after the other, over the side of the bed. We found some chunks of dried mud in the carpeting from a sole with a deep tread,” he explained. “And the guy downstairs was turning on his television when he heard two thuds from overhead, about thirty seconds apart. He said they sounded like shoes dropping.” He shot Hawkin a glance over his shoulder. “You can see that we were interested in the mud and in the noises, but I’d say it’s pretty certain they’re connected. Besides, he heard her moving around a while later. Unfortunately, he went to sleep early.”

  “So that’s it?” Hawkin asked him. “That’s all you have?”

  “So far. They’re still running prints, and as I said, the search parties will be out again in a little while.”

  “They found nothing yesterday?”

  “Not a thing. But the dogs didn’t get here until the afternoon, so they had only a couple of hours.”

  “You haven’t received a note?”

  The brief hesitation before D’Amico answered said a great deal about the chances that she was being held for ransom. “No.” That Al had even asked, his expression said, was a surprise; but then the Al who had asked was not the investigator; it was the father.

  What followed in the ensuing days seemed to Kate like a cross between being inside a tumble dryer and being shot from a cannon. Because she had no standing here in Oregon, she could take on none of the usual roles of questioning or directing or even acting as liaison with the unofficial volunteers. Still less could she talk with the press, which had seized on her familiar name with the glee of a pack of hounds and came howling to life whenever her face crossed their cameras.

  She ended up collating, filing, and answering the telephone, performi
ng her tasks with a grim ferocity, aching to do more and constantly aware of things going on just outside her sight and hearing. She saw Al a few times, Jani twice, looking so pale that her brown skin seemed as translucent as a lamp shade.

  On Friday night, Kate caught at D’Amico’s arm as he went past her. He looked at her as if he had never seen her before.

  “You’ve got to give me something to do,” she said, in what she had intended to be a demand but that came out a plea. “I’m going crazy here.”

  After a minute, he asked, “You have waterproof clothes?”

  “I can get some.”

  He took a pen from his pocket and leaned over the desk, wrote a few words, and handed her the paper.

  “Tomorrow morning, they start at first light. Go past the motel about half a mile. Give that to the man in charge. And get a jacket with a hood. They might not spot you quite so quickly.” He walked away before she could thank him. Kate abandoned her filing and went to buy herself clothes to scramble over hills in. She did not think for a moment that they would find Jules anywhere near the motel, but it was better than sitting inside under the headache-inducing fluorescent lights.

  Kate had already been forced to rent an anonymous small car when word got out among the press that she was driving a Saab convertible—a car that stood out in rainy Portland. She had gritted her teeth over the cost, and she winced when she saw the price tag on the jacket, a parka combining the most modern materials with traditional goose down, but the monetary penance seemed appropriate, and at least she would not collapse because of the cold and wet.

  And cold and wet it was, beating the bush, working on an ever-widening circle out from the motel, covering her assigned segment before staggering back to swallow hot drink and food, not even able to indulge in the luxury of camaraderie with the other exhausted searchers lest she be recognized, then zipping her coat again and going back out into the miserable afternoon. The rain turned into a dispirited sleet before dark. One of the search dogs slid into a frigid stream and was taken away for a rest. A volunteer cracked his head open against a branch; another took his place. Half-frozen mud glued itself to the outside of Kate’s new boots; inside, blisters formed on her feet despite doubled socks. Her knees ached, her hands were raw, one cheekbone was black and blue from an incautiously released branch, and the left sleeve of her expensive parka bore an already-fraying patch of duct tape to keep the feathers from drifting out of the rip it had suffered at some point.

  The next day was Christmas. During their breaks, the searchers ate turkey and pie until they could burst, but they found no sign of Jules.

  On Kate’s third day, the search parties split in two and shifted their centers of operations east and west of either side of the freeway. Kate went with the easterly party, farther up into the foothills. They found articles of clothing by the bushel, skeletons of various animals, and a few fresh animal corpses. One of those last caused a great convulsion of fear and excitement among the searchers, until it was determined to be the flayed remains of a deer, stretched out by scavengers among the dead leaves. The search went on.

  Dogs and helicopters and human eyes traversed the hills in the filthy weather. Searchers faltered and dropped out, some of their places going unfilled now, six days after Jules had disappeared. Gray hopelessness was in all their minds. Everyone knew they were not going to find her, and the knowledge made the physical strain nearly unbearable, until only the habit of determination kept them at it, step by step, one tree, one boulder, one stream at a time.

  After nine days, beneath a low sky dribbling wet snow, the search was called off. Had it been likely that Jules had simply wandered away, the search would have continued, but the chances of this were minuscule. Someone had taken her, and despite the total lack of evidence, people from one side of the country to the other knew who that someone was, if not his actual identity.

  There were news cameras at the center of operations to record the closing down of the hunt, and Kate in her exhaustion failed to dodge them. One minute she was trudging through the mire of the field turned parking lot, exchanging a few clichéd but deeply felt phrases with two fellow searchers, a young brother and sister who had driven three hundred miles from eastern Washington to join the hunt. The next minute, a shout went up, and before she could make her escape, she had the pack on her heels, with shouts of “Inspector Martinelli!” and “How do you feel about the search being called off, Kate?” and “What will you do now?” being hurled at her from these strangers. She pulled her hood back up over her face, put her head down, and pushed her way through the microphones and pocket tape recorders to her ordinary-looking rental car. She had unlocked the door when a gloved hand came into her line of vision, covering the handle.

  “Get your hand off this car,” she said in a low voice, not looking up. The hand drew back quickly, and she had begun to pull the door open against the weight of the people standing against it before her mind registered the question that she had been asked. She looked up into his expensive newscaster’s face, and despite his superior height and her complete dishevelment, what he saw in her eyes made him step back onto his cameraman’s toes. “What was that?” she asked him.

  “I said, Do you know where Jules Cameron is?”

  Two years before, in another lifetime, Kate might have responded, might have given way to incredulity and fury, might even have attacked him. She had been through the wars since then, though, and by now not responding to the media was as automatic as breathing. She tore her gaze from his, shoved the filthy door back against their immaculate coats, and fell into the car. They continued to shout questions at her as she started the engine and put the car into gear; then they fell silent, looks of eager astonishment on their faces when she braked suddenly and rolled down the window. They surged forward, and she waited until they were beside her before she spoke.

  Then clearly, for the benefit of their recording devices, she said, “For the record, no, I do not know where Jules Cameron is.” She hesitated for an instant before adding, “I wish to God I did.”

  Rolling up the window, she drove off, reflecting that at least “Inspector Martinelli said she did not know where the girl is” sounded slightly better than “Inspector Martinelli refused to comment.” Some of them might even relent and include her final phrase. Beyond that thought, her mind refused to look.

  It was difficult driving while wearing slippery oversized boots and bulky ski mittens, so before she reached the freeway, she pulled over to strip off various garments and lace on her lighter shoes. Had she not stopped, she would probably not have noticed the olive green car until it pulled up beside her in front of her motel, but in the mirror she saw it brake for an instant before accelerating past her, and when she saw the driver hide his face by lifting an arm as he went by, she knew that some enterprising reporter had decided to tail her. Too bad I didn’t think of it earlier, she reflected grimly as she pulled off the gloves and bent down to the soggy laces. I could have led them off like the Pied Piper and given the other searchers a chance to get away. As it is, the search teams are in for a round of Kate Martinelli questions. Casting a mental apology over her shoulder, she struggled out of her boots and drove off in her stocking feet, too tired to bother with other shoes.

  With a depressing sense of inevitability, she saw the green car in her mirror, pulling out of a dirt road behind her, keeping well back. It took her half an hour and several illegalities before the reporter’s nerve broke and she lost him, but the effort cost her the last shreds of her energy. When she pulled up in front of the hotel, she was trembling with fatigue and her head was throbbing along the line where the pipe had hit her skull. She retrieved her shoes, abandoning the wet boots and gloves, and dropped the car keys twice—once when she pulled them from the car-door lock, then again when she was digging in her jeans pocket for the key to her room—before she made it to the safety of her room. She let her shoes fall to the floor, fumbled with the bolt and the chain until they were fastened, a
nd walked blindly across the sterile room to the bathroom. She went inside, then came back out to look across the room with dull incredulity at the still figure standing near the window.

  “Lee?”

  Fifteen

  “Hello, Kate,” Lee said in a small voice. “You look…Oh God, Kate. You didn’t find her?”

  Kate didn’t bother to answer, just stood, trying to absorb the sight of the woman standing beside the chipped veneer table, dressed in a flannel shirt, a puffy down vest, khaki trousers, and hiking boots. Her hair was down to her shoulders now, longer than it had been even in university days, and the arm cuffs of her aluminum arm braces had been covered with a solid band of Indian beadwork, a bright, complex pattern that drew Kate’s eyes; they were easier to look at than Lee’s face. Lee said something. Kate blinked, shrugged off her heavy parka, and tossed it in the direction of the bed, where it fell slowly to the floor.

  “Sorry, I have to…” She knew she sounded idiotic, but she could not help it, and so she turned and went back into the bathroom. The toilet flushed, and when she came out again, Lee had not moved.

  “I’m sorry,” Kate repeated. “I don’t seem to be working at top speed. What did you say?”

  “Nothing that can’t keep. You should have a hot bath and something to eat.”

  Kate made an effort to rouse herself.

  “Sounds heavenly.”

  “I’ll start the bath running.” Lee moved then, using the arm braces to steady herself rather than throwing her entire weight on them. Lee was walking, actually walking, not hobbling anymore, moving easily around the end of the bed and past Kate, an arm’s reach from her, then going into the bathroom. Kate heard the water start and sat down on the overly soft mattress. She thought about reaching for the phone and checking in with D’Amico, thought about lifting her foot up and peeling off the sodden, filthy socks, thought about Lee actually walking, and then she turned and lay down on the nylon bedspread. Kate was asleep before Lee came out of the bathroom to ask her about room service.