Kate scrubbed a potato vigorously, flushing away bits of peeling under the running tap, and then, abruptly, she shut the water off so hard, the pipe knocked in the wall. “He was never the man you wanted to believe he was, Abby.”
“He was too experienced for me, right? Little sheltered Abby Carter and Big Bad Nick Bennett. Miss Mouse and the Wolf.”
Kate groaned. “Let’s drop it, okay? It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Why? Because you think he’s dead?”
Kate jerked on the water taps and again shut them off. “You have to accept it,” she pleaded. “You’re killing yourself and I can’t stand it.”
“Well, it isn’t about you, is it? For once. This isn’t some college romance, Kate.”
“You think I don’t know that? God, Abby, can you give me no credit?”
Abby didn’t answer. She waited for Kate to finish scouring the potatoes, and taking Kate’s place at the sink, she rinsed the beans and put them in a pan. She added water and seasoning and set them on the stove to cook. Somehow they got through dinner and the rest of the evening. Abby went to bed early and, lying sleepless, thought of going home. It wasn’t as if she was accomplishing anything here other than wearing out her welcome waiting for a return fax that would likely never come. Curled on her side, she pictured herself going through her own back door, and it was a relief when she didn’t feel the customary wash of horrible dread. She could do it, she thought. She could go home. Try and start over. It was the right thing to do, and she felt better for having made the decision.
* * *
The next morning, once she was showered and dressed, Abby scooped her belongings from the chair in Kate’s guest room and stuffed them into her canvas tote. She got clean bed linen from the closet in the hall, stripped the bed and remade it. Kate was already in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a mug of coffee, immersed in reading the morning newspaper. Abby hesitated in the doorway, holding the bundle of sheets. The bowl that held the leftover green beans was out on the counter, along with a loaf of wheat bread and the toaster. All they needed were the eggs to make the sandwiches they’d planned. Abby’s mouth watered. She’d have hers slathered with real mayonnaise, she thought.
Kate looked up. “What are you doing with those sheets?”
Abby carried them into the laundry room. “Want me to fry the eggs?” she asked, retracing her steps into the kitchen.
“I thought you’d have coffee first.”
Abby filled her mug and sat down at the table. “I’m going home. I need to take care of the house, start looking for a job. I think I’ll teach again. Maybe junior high this time. How bad could it be?”
“You’re angry at me.”
“About—?”
“I don’t know. Any number of things, I guess.” Kate spread her fingers, knuckled them over her mouth looking puzzled, anxious, some combination.
“You keep secrets, Kate. You always have.”
Kate’s eyes widened. Abby rarely lost her temper,.
“Ever since college, I’ve never known whether I can trust you. Even before—” Abby broke off unwilling to get into it, how she had always felt the ground between them was wormed with Kate’s secrets. She found Kate’s gaze. “You lied about Baylor. How do I know you aren’t lying now about Nick?”
“You don’t. But I’m not this time, Abby. I wouldn’t—I learned—” Kate looked away, blinking, and in a moment, her cheek was limned in the silvery light of her tears.
Abby bit her lips, angry still and rueful, too, because she knew what it cost Kate to cry, and she’d always hated being the cause. “I’m sorry,” she said, wobbly voiced.
“No, don’t. Don’t say that.” Kate wiped her eyes, sniffed. “What I did was terrible, and I’ve never said how lucky I feel that you forgave me, that you let me back into your life, let us be friends again.”
“You went through so much.” Abby hesitated, remembering how fragile Kate had looked the first time they’d met after Kate had returned to Houston. She’d been horrified to hear the suffering Kate had endured at Baylor’s hands.
“You felt sorry for me.”
“I felt sorry about all of it,” Abby said truthfully.
“Think what I saved you from,” Kate said wryly.
Abby ducked her chin. She had thought about that, and she had been relieved and then felt shame for it, and for all the times she’d wished Kate ill. She said, “I would have been there for you, if I’d known.” Abby had said this before, and it was easier every time she repeated the words. But buried in her mind was a sharp sliver of wonder. Would she have listened if Kate had called her about Baylor’s abuse? Would compassion have warmed itself in the bitter fire of her hostility? Abby wanted to believe she would have been there for her friend, but she had her doubts.
“How could I come to you?” Kate asked. “When Baylor hit me, I was convinced I deserved it. I felt like I was an awful person and not only for taking him from you the way I did.”
“No, Kate. No one deserves that kind of treatment and the truth is you couldn’t have taken him if he hadn’t wanted to go.”
Kate found Abby’s gaze and held it. “I have been so jealous of you, so filled with envy each time you were pregnant, holding your babies. Baylor took that from me.” Kate’s eyes filled again. “I lost my baby, my little girl. I’ll never have children because of him and he—he—” Her voice broke.
Abby bent forward, grasping Kate’s forearms, swiping at her wet cheeks, murmuring, “Kate, Katie, hush now, it’s all right....”
She bowed her head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this now when Nick and Lindsey are—but I’ve wanted to say it for so long. I’ve always felt as though we never talked it through, never worked it out between us.” She looked at Abby. “I don’t think I can ever make it up to you.”
“That’s ridiculous. There’s nothing to make up.” Abby went for a tissue and handed it to Kate.
She blew her nose. “I’m sorry I ever said anything to you about Nick, as if I was an expert with my track record.”
“Look at George. He’s one of the kindest men I know.”
“I got lucky. Don’t ask me how.”
Now in the silence that fell, in the wake of Kate’s honesty and tears, the air seemed to ease, and Abby was swept with gratitude. She felt lighter somehow and less burdened by doubt. She shook her head slightly. “It’s weird that neither of us saw that side of him.”
“When we first married and he acted jealous, I thought it was cute. I had no clue the sort of monster he would turn into.” Kate went to the sink and filled a glass with water, sipping it.
“He could have killed you.”
“You don’t know how close he came,” Kate said.
Instead it was Baylor who had died. Five years ago in prison where he’d been incarcerated for his final assault on Kate that had resulted in the loss of their unborn daughter. He’d had a massive stroke in his cell one week before he was due to be released on parole. Kate had called Abby to tell her. She’d been confused that at his passing she could feel both elation and sadness.
Abby picked up her mug and set it back down. Kate dampened a dishcloth and pressed it to her face.
“Abby?”
She looked up at George framed in the kitchen doorway. His face was a mirror of consternation, and then she saw the paper in his hand, and her heart sank.
“Abby’s gotten a fax,” he said.
“What? How would anyone know to fax her here?” Kate came to the table.
Abby took the fax from George. If he noticed Kate’s disheveled appearance, her red face, her scoured-looking eyes, he gave no sign that Abby saw. He, like Kate, was looking at Abby.
She looked at the fax. It was handwritten, but she had no trouble deciphering it. My wife Sondra, has been missing for nea
rly a year, it read. I don’t recognize the name Nick Bennett. May we talk in person? At the end of the note there was a signature and underneath that, a phone number.
“Who’s Hank Kilmer?” Kate was reading over Abby’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” Abby said.
“Well, if you don’t know him, how did he know to contact you here?” Kate asked.
“Why is he contacting you?” George crossed his arms over his chest.
Abby explained with as little drama as possible about the matchbook and what she’d been led to do about it. She wanted that to be the end of it and said, briskly, “I need to get going. I want to be home by dark.”
“You should have breakfast first,” Kate said.
“You aren’t thinking of meeting this guy?” George came to the point.
Abby said, “You don’t think it’s strange that Nick wrote down the name of a woman who went missing too?”
“Abby!” Kate knelt and grabbed Abby’s hands; she locked Abby’s gaze. “They drowned. They are gone. You have got to accept it.”
Abby looked at George. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, darlin’. Kate’s right. It’s time to move on. I know—”
“No!” Abby stood up, raising her finger at him. “Don’t say it. You don’t know how it feels.” She spun on her heel, left the kitchen and retrieved her tote. She was gone from the ranch within minutes. She did not look back, not once.
* * *
Dennis caught up with her on the highway west of Pipe Creek. She didn’t realize it was Dennis who was behind her, not at first. She saw the flashing lights in her rearview mirror, glanced at the speedometer that registered eighty-five and said, “Shit,” under her breath, easing off the gas pedal. “Shit shit shit.”
She pulled off the road, turned off the ignition and lowered the window. Cold air pushed in around her, blanketed her thighs, pooled around her ankles. She jammed her hands into her jacket pockets, and her fingers closed over the folded edge of Hank Kilmer’s fax.
“Abby?”
She whipped off her sunglasses. “Dennis?”
“What are you doing?”
She tossed her glasses into the passenger seat. “Why is everyone always asking me that?”
He leaned down, folding his arms on the window ledge.
She looked at him. Their faces were so close she could smell the mint flavor of his chewing gum. “I could ask you the same thing. Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction?”
“Kate called. She said something about a fax?”
Abby felt a stab of irritation. What right did Kate have talking about Abby to Dennis? How much had she said? Had she filled him in on every detail of Abby’s private life and her private thoughts and her private pain? Damn her, Abby thought. God damn them all to hell.
“Abby? If you think there’s some connection, I ought to check it out.”
“No. It’s nothing, a mistake.”
“Kate’s worried.”
“She shouldn’t be. I’m fine. I’m going home. I’m going to go back to work, start looking after myself.” Abby straightened up. “It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? For me to accept what’s happened? Move on?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m moving on.”
“Too fast.” Dennis shifted, stiffening his elbows, putting an arm’s length between them.
“Are you going to write me a ticket?”
“No, I’m going to offer you some advice.”
“Slow down, I know.”
“No,” he said. “Let me do my job. Okay? Let the sheriff’s department do what we’re trained to do. If there’s more going on here the way you think, we’ll find it.”
“And if there isn’t?”
He stood up. An eighteen-wheeler roared by, leaving a curtain of dust and the smell of diesel fuel hanging in the air.
“Dennis?”
He met her glance. “Have you found out something I should know?”
Circumstantial. The word rose in Abby’s mind. A cop word, a detective word she’d heard on television. It meant when evidence wasn’t solid, when it couldn’t connect the dots. Hers didn’t. She was dealing in hunches, intuition. Matchbooks and fax numbers. There was the hearsay about a difficult client; there was a tenuous connection to missing settlement money, some fuzzy surveillance footage. There were the phone calls. None of it was proof of anything, and no one, including Dennis, believed the phone calls were even real. And anyway, Abby wasn’t so sure she wanted to know the truth.
Because once it was known, she couldn’t unknow it. She would have to live with it.
“What makes you think they’re not dead, Abby?”
She shook her head. The threat of tears tangled in her throat. If only she could, she would bury her face against his uniform shirt. She imagined it, the starched feel beneath her cheek, the relief of his arms around her. If only she could lean on him just until she could feel her own strength again. If only she could forget a little while.
“I’m going home,” she said, blinking in the clear morning light. “I’m going to try to put my life in order and that’s all.”
Dennis rested his hands on his belt. The butt of his gun jutted from his hip. “You won’t do anything crazy?”
Abby shook her head.
“You’ll call me first?”
She nodded and started the car, then before he could walk out of earshot, she put her head out the window. “The little fawn, how is she?”
He turned. “Missing her mama,” he said and saluted. He’d put on his sunglasses; she couldn’t read his expression. But she knew he was unhappy with her as well as she knew he wouldn’t stop looking for her family. Because it was his job; he wanted the facts as much as she did.
And he wasn’t afraid of the truth.
Chapter 16
Abby had her house key in her hand, ready to unlock the back door, but as she came up the steps she saw that the door was already open, ajar by maybe three inches. She paused, and her first thought was Jake, that he was home. But his car wasn’t in the driveway. She nudged the door, widening the gap. The floor was tracked with grit, not a lot. What would come in on your shoes, Abby thought, if you didn’t wipe your feet. Had to be Jake. She stepped over the threshold and stood in the mudroom, but rather than shouting out his name, she pulled her cell phone from her purse and called him. “Are you home?” she asked when he answered.
“Home?” He echoed in a voice that said she must be nuts. “I’m at school. Why?”
Abby told him, her eye tracking the trail of grit. Maybe she’d dragged it in herself the last time she was here, but when she said that to Jake, he said, “No, Mom, get out of there. Call 911. Somebody’s broken in.”
“Who would—?” Abby was already backing out onto the porch, and although she told Jake she would call the police, she didn’t. She called her neighbor Charlie instead.
“Don’t go back inside,” he told her. “Wait for me. I’ll be right there.”
When he came, he examined the door, running his gaze and then his big-knuckled, work-worn hands over the lock mechanism, the frame. “Doesn’t look as if it was forced.”
“Maybe I forgot to lock it when I left and the wind blew it.” In her state of mind, Abby thought, anything was possible.
“Does anyone else besides you or Jake have a key?”
Abby shook her head. “Not that I remember. Maybe my mother does, but she hasn’t been here.”
“Well, let’s go in and have a look around, or maybe you’d rather wait out here?”
“No,” she said over her growing sense of unease. She was grateful that Charlie seemed so calm, so frankly undisturbed. She remembered a summer day a few years ago when Jake fell out of a tree. He’d bitten through his lower lip, and she hadn’t
been able to stop the bleeding. Charlie had come to help her then, too. He’d scooped Jake up, carried him swiftly to his truck, Abby jostling alongside, holding the towel to Jake’s mouth, and he’d driven them into town to the emergency room with such an economy of motion. He had talked the whole way. Abby hadn’t heard the words, but the quiet rumble of his voice had comforted her just the same. She followed him inside now. Nothing appeared disturbed in the kitchen or in any of the rooms downstairs.
Charlie started up the stairs.
Abby was behind him when the sound of scuffling and then a tiny cry pierced the silence.
Charlie turned to her. “Why don’t you wait here?”
She nodded, watching him go the rest of the way, thinking he should have a weapon, a baseball bat, a gun. She might be able to find a bat somewhere, but she and Nick had never owned a gun. Her heart whisked lightly against her ribs. She had her cell phone still, and she was thinking she would call 911 now when he reappeared holding a furry, squirming bundle of orange fur.
“One of the kittens,” he said. “Her mama had a litter of six in the barn a few weeks back. This one must have found the door open before we did and decided to go exploring.”
Abby laughed in relief. At least that explained the noises they’d heard. “Spooked by a kitten,” she said, making fun of herself. She took the fussing, little bundle into her hands, holding it aloft inches from her face, noting the tawny eyes, the white blaze that led to a pale pink nose. “She’s adorable. Aren’t you adorable?”
Abby walked with Charlie back outside, and handing over the kitten, she thanked him for checking things out. Her gaze lingered on the tiny furry face, and the kitten looked back at Abby, then promptly climbed Charlie’s shirt to his shoulder, where he grasped her. She dug her nails into his flesh, and he grimaced.
“I don’t think the wind blew the door open, Abby. I’d call the police, let them come and have a look around. And I’d have the locks changed, too, if I were you,” he said. “I can do it for you, if you want.”
Abby looked off into the distance, remembering a car she’d seen parked not far from the house when she’d turned onto her street just now, a dark blue sedan. She told Charlie about it. “It was pulled pretty far off the road, near the north end of the pasture by the utility easement. Why would anyone stop there?” Although there were probably any of a half dozen reasons, it struck Abby as odd, now that she thought of it.
Evidence of Life Page 15