The Missing

by Shiloh Walker

  But she had to do something. Cleaning like a demon seemed to be the ticket. She opened all the windows, letting the hot summer breeze blow through the house and sweep away the musty, closed-in feel, and then she headed for the garage and all the cleaning supplies.

  It was a sad, sad state when the only thing a woman could do to occupy her mind was clean.

  Three hours later, the house was so clean, Mr. Monk himself would have been satisfied with it. The quirky, obsessive-compulsive fictional detective could have gone through her house with a white glove, and he wouldn’t have found so much as a speck of dust or a hair on the floor.

  Taige, on the other hand, was filthy. But instead of heading for the shower, she changed into her swimming suit and headed out the back door to the stretch of sand and the gentle waters of Mobile Bay. She dove into the water, swimming under the surface until her lungs threatened to burst, and then she surfaced, shoving her wet hair back from her face and treading water.

  A little farther down, she could see a family playing in the sand. Beyond that, a couple of people in the shallows were crabbing. A little girl shrieked, and she turned her head to watch the family. A grin tugged up the corners of her mouth as the father threw the little girl up into the air and then caught her, laughing as the girl screamed, “Again! Again!”

  He tossed her, and she went up with a delighted shriek—

  Please don’t hurt me.

  Taige froze as a girl’s voice whispered through her mind, insubstantial as mist.

  Silence, child.

  The man’s voice didn’t seem real, monstrous and inhuman. How much of that was because of the girl’s fear, Taige didn’t know.

  Taige didn’t even have to see the girl to know who it was. The delicate little black-haired darling had been invading her thoughts and dreams for more than a decade, and Taige knew her voice nearly as well as she knew her own. Come on, honey, tell me who you are, Taige thought helplessly. How can I help you if you won’t talk to me?

  But it didn’t work like that. She didn’t even know if the girl was still alive. For all Taige knew, the girl had been kidnapped and killed before Taige was even born. She could be seeing something that happened years ago—or something that hadn’t even happened yet. She had no idea, and she knew that she wouldn’t get any more than she’d already gotten until the time was right.

  You don’t act—you react. A ghost from her past, Cullen’s voice seemed to echo in her ear as she treaded water and tried not to cry. More than a decade had passed since he’d flung those ugly words at her, words that had cut into her like poisonous claws, and through the pain, she’d known she had to do something. She’d forced herself to go to college, she’d forced herself to learn control, to experiment with her gift and see what she could do. Things that had put her through sheer hell and sometimes, she wondered why she’d even bothered.

  Because even after all of that, there were people, children, that she couldn’t save. People just like Cullen’s mother. People just like her own parents. People like Hannah Brewster.

  She couldn’t save them.

  Useless.

  NICE thing about airports that early—it was quiet. The Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta was hopping with travelers, business and leisure alike. The hour hand hadn’t even edged up on five o’clock in the morning, and all the travelers were tired.

  They sipped on coffee, tried to stay awake while reading the paper, and a few diligently worked on laptops. Cullen was one of them, or at least he was trying. The white screen seemed glaringly bright. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that he hadn’t gotten to sleep until midnight. With a three a.m. wake-up call, it was no wonder he was so damned tired.

  When he realized he had been staring at the same line for the past five minutes, Cullen finally gave up and shut the laptop down. The faint scratch of pencil on paper had him glancing over. The early hour wasn’t affecting all of them. Nice to see.

  “What are you working on, beautiful?”

  Big green eyes looked up at him. Jillian was as beautiful as an angel, Cullen thought. He’d thought so from the first time he’d seen her, nine years ago, when the doctor wrapped her tiny, red little body in a blanket and placed her in his arms. Jilly’s mom had died due to complications from childbirth. She’d held Jillian for half an hour, a miserly thirty minutes, before the nurses took the baby to do a more thorough exam on the newborn. Five minutes after the nurses had taken Jilly, Kim had looked at him and smiled. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  It was the last thing Kim ever said. She drifted off to sleep, and while she was sleeping, she’d started to bleed again. The doctors couldn’t get it to stop, and Cullen had stood there, stunned into silence, as his wife died.

  It had come as a complete and total shock to everybody, including Cullen. How could he lose his wife in childbirth? Women died in childbirth a hundred years ago. Even fifty years ago. But in 1999? He just couldn’t wrap his brain around it, even now.

  Jilly had inherited her mother’s big green eyes, rosebud mouth, and artistic talent. The girl might as well have been born with a pencil and sketch pad in hand. It had been that artistic talent that had landed her in an advanced school when she was only three years old. She had a grasp of light and shadow that many adults lacked, Cullen had been told when he’d met with Arlene Willington.

  Fancy way of saying the girl could draw, Cullen had always figured, but Arlene was right. No matter how she said it, Jilly was gifted. Even aside from her skill with a pencil, the girl was special in ways that Cullen couldn’t even begin to understand, although he wasn’t exactly a stranger to it.

  He studied the faces on the sketch pad she showed him and asked, “Are they friends of yours?” Jilly had drawn three kids who didn’t look familiar to him: a younger girl who was probably only five or six, and then two older ones, about the same age as Jilly. The boy was black, and he had a wide, mischievous smile. Both of the girls were white, one was probably in her early teens. It was the younger one, though, that really caught Cullen’s attention. She looked like a little angel, all big eyes, long hair, and dimples. Although the pencil sketch was in black and white, he imagined the girl’s hair was pale blonde. Jillian’s talent amazed him. How a nine-year-old could draw something like that, so true to life, was just astounding.

  Jilly shook her head. Fat, inky black curls bounced around her heart-shaped face, and she took the sketch pad back. “No. I don’t know who they are.” She reached out, stroked the tip of one finger down one penciled face. The little cherub. “She was the first one.”

  A voice came over the speaker, and a bored airline attendant announced a slight delay. Delay. Hell, wasn’t that great? Bad weather had grounded their flight yesterday, and Cullen had accepted the red-eye for today. He had a signing and some Q and A deal at a library tomorrow, and he’d really wanted the downtime. It was starting to look as though he just wasn’t supposed to have any downtime.

  Distracted, Cullen glanced at Jilly and asked, “The first to what?”

  “The first to disappear.”

  A chill ran down Cullen’s back, and he stopped, looked at the sketch pad, then back up at Jilly’s face. “Disappear from where?”

  Jilly just shrugged. “Around.” She sighed and bent back over the sketchbook, shutting her worried father out. He was used to it. When she was working on something, she worked with a single-minded focus. Normally, it didn’t bother him. Today? Different story. “Where did she disappear from, baby?”

  Jilly muttered something under her breath. She caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and her eyes scrunched down to slits. Recognizing the signs, Cullen reached out and caught a black curl. He tugged sharply and waited for her to look up at him. At first, her eyes were foggy and unfocused. They cleared, and when he knew she was paying attention to him, he said flatly, “Tell me about this girl.”

  The firm, I-am-the-parent-and-you-will-answer-me tone still worked on Jilly, for the most part. She glanced d
own at the sketch pad, but Cullen knew she wasn’t seeing the sketch. She squeezed the charcoal pencil so hard her knuckles went white, and Cullen felt a dark, ugly fear move through him. Not again . . . Cullen thought as he stared down at his daughter.

  Special in ways he couldn’t understand, that was his little girl. It wasn’t until he’d had Jillian and realized just how special she was that he began to understand how terribly wrong it had been for him to blame Taige for not being able to save his mom. She’d been completely blameless, and while he guessed his misplaced fury might have been understandable, it had still been totally wrong.

  This kind of gift was sheer hell, and it still made him sick inside to think about what he’d done to Taige and how much he must have hurt her. He’d undo it all in a second. Often, he wondered if this wasn’t the penance he had to bear for doing it, having a child who shared Taige’s abilities and knowing he was powerless to protect her from the agony it would cause her.

  It had been a year since he’d seen that look in Jillian’s eyes, a hot, muggy summer when the little brother of Jilly’s best friend disappeared. Braden Fleming had disappeared from his backyard, and he’d been missing for three days.

  Cullen hadn’t known anything about Braden’s abduction until late, late that first night. He’d been called to Jillian’s school when his daughter collapsed out on the playground for no obvious reason. Jilly had spent two days in a catatonic stupor that had Cullen so scared he took her to the emergency room. She was admitted to the hospital, and on the second day, she had come out of it, only to look at her father and start crying. The doctors had wanted to admit her for psychiatric tests. Cullen might have agreed, but Jilly looked up at him and whispered, “I know where Braden is.”

  There had been no logical explanation. Jilly hadn’t been home when Braden disappeared. There was no way for her to know that the four-year-old had been grabbed out of his own backyard while he was playing.

  No way she had of knowing Braden’s abductor was the grand-son of the sweet little old lady who lived just behind Cullen and Jilly. But she had known. She’d described a man who sounded vaguely familiar to Cullen. Two hours later, as he continued to rock her and hold her, he had finally figured out who Jilly had been describing.

  They’d found the boy, but to this day, Cullen knew Jilly felt guilty. Braden would spend years—possibly his entire life—in therapy, and there were nights when Cullen could hear the boy screaming in his sleep even from two houses down. Although she never made a sound, Cullen knew Jilly also suffered nightmares, but she wouldn’t tell him about them. He’d tried putting his daughter into therapy as well, but the counselors had made the problem worse. Jilly retreated more and more inside herself, and finally, Cullen had stopped the therapy.

  Gradually, she emerged from the shell she had built around herself. Over the past couple of months, she had slowly started acting a little more like the child she was instead of a miniature grown-up. Jilly had always been a bit—well, different. An old soul, her grandfather called her. But it had been a bit of heaven to see her laughing and playing with other kids, to see her giggle at a magic show or get so excited when he’d told her about their trip. He had a couple of business-related things, the Q and A in Indianapolis, and then a few days in New York City, but before that, they’d spend a few days in Atlanta.

  Seeing Jilly excited over anything was an unexpected blessing. She stopped being scared of her own shadow, and sometimes weeks passed between nightmares instead of days.

  And now this—whatever this was.

  It’s nothing, he told himself. Absolutely nothing. But his gut wouldn’t let him believe that. He scrubbed a hand over his face and looked back at Jillian’s sketch pad. She stared at it solemnly and protectively. Cullen laid a hand on her shoulder and drew her close. Jilly cuddled into him and whispered, “He’s a bad man, Daddy.”

  Gaze narrowed, Cullen studied the people around him. “Who? Is he here?” He didn’t see anybody unusual, just the typical early morning airport crowd: vacationers, business travelers, and a couple either just recently married or involved in one very hot affair. They couldn’t keep their hands, or their tongues, to themselves. “Who’s the man, Jillian?”

  Her voice shook softly. “He’s a monster,” she whispered. She clutched the notebook to her chest, and Cullen realized she was trembling like a leaf.

  Futile anger rushed through him, and he bent down to catch her small body in his arms. He murmured to her gently and stroked her back. She felt too fragile to deal with this burden she’d been handed. This isn’t fair, Cullen thought bitterly and wished he was alone someplace where he could give in to the anger building inside. But, despite his rage, he knew how sensitive Jilly was. If he let even a little of his anger show, it would add to whatever else she carried inside. So instead, he just hugged her close. “It’s going to be okay, Jillian. Promise.”

  And deep inside, he only hoped he wasn’t lying to her.

  SIX weeks later, Cullen had mostly forgotten about the weird episode in the airport. For a day or two, Jillian had been like a little rabbit, jumping at every sound and unable to sleep without Cullen right beside her. But after a few more days passed, she slowly started acting more like herself. And Cullen had forgotten.

  It was hotter than hell and so humid that it felt like a weight was pressing down on his chest every time he went outside. The deadline from hell was looming closer and closer, and he still wasn’t anywhere near to being done with the last book in his contract. If he didn’t hurry the hell up, he wasn’t entirely convinced his editor was going to want to see the proposal he had put together for her.

  Shoving back from the desk, he rubbed his hands over his face and tried to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He’d dreamed about Taige again last night. She’d been hurt. The dreams made little or no sense, unless he looked at them as yet another form of torture. There was no way imaginable he would have chosen to dream seeing her like that, her left eye puffy, swollen and bruised, and her right hand in a soft cast that went halfway up her forearm.

  The dream had disturbed him more than usual, and as a result, when he got up at four that morning, he hadn’t felt like he’d slept at all. Instead of going back to bed, he’d settled down to work, and with the exception of refilling his coffee cup every hour or so and fixing some breakfast for Jilly, he’d been there ever since.

  Movement caught his eye, and he looked up to see Jilly peeking around the corner into his office. There was a smile on her usually somber little face, and as she edged into the room, he saw the phone in her hand. “Mandy called. They want to know if I can go swimming with them.”

  Later, it would haunt him as he recalled how relieved he’d been when the Paxton family had shown up to take Jillian to a local water park. Loaded down with sunscreen, money, dry clothes, and a towel, she’d wrapped her arms around his neck, squeezing tight. “Love you, Daddy . . .”

  Now, as Kelly Paxton sat across from him on a hard bench, sobbing helplessly, Jillian’s words echoed inside his head: Love you, Daddy . . .

  “Mr. Morgan, I realize how terrible a time this is for you, but I need some more information about where you were today . . .”

  Numb, Cullen looked into the agent’s face. His voice was rusty as he repeated, “I’ve already gone over this. A hundred times.”

  “Let’s go over it once more,” Special Agent Holcomb said, his voice polite, professional.

  Frustrated, Cullen turned away, scrubbing his hands over his face. “I’ve been at home. Working. Around two, I talked to my agent. Around three, I stopped to take a piss and get a sandwich. Around three forty-five, my dad called.” His voice cracked, and he had to stop for a minute. “Dad wanted Jilly to come spend the weekend with him,” Cullen said softly. “He hasn’t seen her much this summer. I’ve been so busy . . .”

  Although the agent had heard all of this before, he nodded and continued to jot notes down on his notepad. “And your father lives . . . where?”

  “S
hit.” Cullen blew out a harsh breath and then turned to face the agent. “Look, I get what you’re doing. I know you need to check me out, and you’ll even have to check up on my dad and make sure one of us hasn’t been hurting her.” Even thinking it filled him with an irrational fury, but he knew they had to ask. Cullen had had it, though. His temper was frayed, he was scared to death, and his overactive imagination, such a blessing when it came to his job, was adding to the grief and terror.