In Jenny’s room, he found his older daughter clutching the princess from the snow globe. Jenny had received the princess when Becca got her precious Chippy.
Erik made no remarks to either child about the toys. He knew why they were holding them so tightly. He secretly wished he had some small talisman from Evie to clutch close to his own heart, until she returned to him.
Darla called right after he got the kids to bed.
“Is she home yet?”
“No.”
“I’ll be right over,” Darla said.
Erik didn’t argue. He wanted to go back over to Wishbook and look around some more.
When he got to the store again, he turned on some lights and went upstairs. He let himself into the apartment and walked through each room, calling her name, expecting no answer, really. And getting none.
He tried the storeroom next and found it full of things Evie wasn’t using downstairs right then, but no sign at all of Evie herself.
Once back downstairs, he went to the old rocker in the corner near the children’s books. He sat, leaned his head back on the back rail and wondered for the thousandth time where his wife was—and if she was all right.
He rocked for a moment, the slight creaking sound of the runners on the wood floor vaguely comforting. And then he stopped rocking.
There was no sense in stalling anymore. He knew what he had to do next.
He rose and went to the register counter. He got out the phone book and looked up Jack Roper’s number. Jack Roper was Oggie Jones’s oldest son, a son Oggie hadn’t even known existed until a couple of years ago. Being Oggie’s kin made Jack family; he was Evie’s cousin and half brother to Amy’s husband, Brendan.
Jack was also a deputy over at the sheriff’s station.
Jack told Erik to sit tight, he’d meet him right there, at the store.
Jack arrived fifteen minutes after Erik had hung up the phone. He asked a lot of questions. Erik told him everything he knew and explained how he’d called everyone he could think of in town, looking for someone who might know where Evie had gone.
“Erik, was anything bothering her recently?” Jack wanted to know.
“Like what?”
“Did the two of you have some kind of an argument in the past few days?”
“No.”
“Is there something going on between you that might have made her want to get away for a while?”
Erik’s first reaction to that question was anger. He quelled it. Jack was just trying to find out what was really going on here. “No. I don’t think so. She seemed happy today. She’s always gotten along great with the girls, but she’d finally found something to get through to Pete.”
“What?”
“She bought a computer. She and Pete and Pete’s friends drove down to Sacramento today to get it. And Pete was all excited about it. I could hardly pry him away from it to get him to bed tonight.”
“So there were no problems, between the two of you?”
“Hell, Jack. Sure, we have problems.”
“Like what?”
“We…we argue about money sometimes. And I think she pushes herself too hard. Sometimes I get on her about that. She’s had a cold she can’t shake for two weeks now, and I think it’s mostly because she just won’t slow down.”
“But is there anything that might make her run off out of nowhere?”
Erik answered with conviction. “No. As far as I know, there’s nothing like that, I swear it.”
“Okay, then,” Jack said. He thought for a moment. “She has a couple of sisters, right? They came to your wedding. Nevada and—?”
“Faith.” Erik supplied the other name.
“Have you called them about this?”
“Not yet.” Erik rubbed his eyes. “I keep thinking she’s going to turn up any minute.”
“I understand.” Jack’s voice was gentle. “And she probably will. But it’s almost ten now. Eight hours since Tawny left her here for the day. I think it’s time you contacted the sisters. Tell them that she’s been gone for several hours and ask if they’ve heard from her, or if they know anything about where she might be.”
“All right.”
“And what about her mother and father?”
“They’re both gone.”
“Deceased?”
“Yeah. She never talks about them much.”
Jack nodded. His dark eyes, which were such a strange contrast to his white-blond hair, looked sad. “Sometimes there’s not much to say. About the past.”
Erik gave no response to that. He didn’t agree. He’d told Evie everything of his past and he’d wanted to know everything of hers. But she had secrets she insisted on keeping.
Could it be that her disappearance now had something to do with those secrets?
Jack said, “Look. Go on back home. Call Evie’s sisters. If you learn anything that sheds any light on this, give me a call at my place. Otherwise, call me in the morning.”
“And then?”
“We’ll go over to the station and fill out a missing persons report, get her description out to all the law enforcement agencies.”
“And that’s all?”
Jack sighed. “Erik. There are no signs of a struggle here. Her purse is gone, there’s money in the till and you say the store was closed when you discovered she was missing.”
“But all the lights were on. The back door was open.”
“I know. I hear you. But it still appears as if she walked out of here of her own accord.”
“But she left her van. Why would she leave her van?”
“Look. I think you’re right. Something’s fishy. But to mount any kind of a major search for her, I’m going to have to justify it to a lot of people who don’t know her. And they’re going to tell me that she’s a grown woman who closed up her store and left without telling her husband where she was going. They’re going to veto any requests I make about spending taxpayers’ dollars looking for her until we have more to go on than we do now.”
Erik opened his mouth to keep arguing—and then shut it. What could he say? Jack’s reasoning was sound.
So he went back to the house and sent Darla home. Then he called Faith and Nevada.
His conversations with Evie’s sisters left him feeling worse than ever. Each sounded worried and acted closemouthed. And when he tried to push them as to what they were hiding from him, each of them insisted she didn’t know what he was talking about, then asked that he call as soon as he had any news.
He hung up from both of those conversations feeling misled and unsatisfied. By then, it was nearing eleven. He went upstairs, thinking he might try to get some sleep.
But one glance into the room he usually shared with his wife was enough to put an end to that idea. He’d never fall asleep in their bed tonight without her beside him.
So he went to his studio. There, the portrait he’d painted of her hung on the wall opposite his drawing table. He found himself staring at it, looking into those brandycolored eyes, a hundred questions chasing themselves around in his head.
Where are you?
Are you all right?
Sweet God, why don’t you call?
He remembered what Jack had said, how there was no way they could mount a search for her unless they had some evidence of foul play.
And he remembered the way both Nevada and Faith had seemed to be hiding something.
From the painting, Evie looked down at him, smiling that beautiful, mysterious smile of hers.
He couldn’t look at it for one minute more. Though he knew it was childish of him, he marched right up to it, took it down and set it on the floor facing the wall.
Then he went to his worktable and picked up a pallet and a brush. He approached a painting he’d been working on the night before, of a high mountain meadow in summer. The painting was nearly done. When it was, he would take it to Sam Fletcher’s store in hopes of a sale. For a few minutes he dabbed at the thing halfheartedly with
the brush, trying to finish it up.
But his heart wasn’t in it. His mind kept returning to thoughts of Evie.
He couldn’t help thinking of the nightmares she’d been having the past couple of weeks, the ones she always insisted she couldn’t remember. Every time she’d had one, she’d sworn they meant nothing at all.
He hadn’t believed her. But he hadn’t pushed her to reveal more than she was willing to. As each moment ticked by now, he felt more and more certain he should have pushed her.
Erik set the pallet and brush aside. He dropped to the couch and stared at the painting, not really seeing it.
The questions kept playing themselves, in a loop, through his head.
Where are you?
Are you all right?
Sweet God, why don’t you call?
Eventually, with a despairing sigh, he stretched out as best he could on the too-small couch. He stared blindly at the painting and waited for sleep, not really expecting it to come, thinking of all the questions never asked—all the answers never offered…
Chapter Fourteen
Erik woke in a meadow, a high mountain meadow, and found he’d been napping on a bed of bright wildflowers. All around, majestic and grand, rocky peaks reached toward the sky, still capped with the last of winter’s white. The sky itself was the pure, sweet blue of Becca’s eyes.
It took him an extra moment to realize that the meadow was one he’d created in his own mind, the meadow in the painting he hadn’t quite finished yet.
So strange, that he should fall asleep and wake here, in this beautiful place he’d made up himself.
A little too strange, really.
Erik shrugged and got to his feet. Best not to examine any of this too closely, he decided.
So he breathed deeply of the fresh, clear air and basked in the feel of the sun shining down, warm and good, on his upturned face.
“Erik?”
Erik’s heart bounced into his throat when he heard her voice. He spun around.
She was there, poised on the edge of the meadow, silhouetted against the rugged peaks and the blue, blue sky.
“Erik?” This time the word had a plaintive sound.
Still, he didn’t answer her. He stared at her, feeling hurt and angry. Deserted. Betrayed. She’d sworn never to leave him. And yet, where was she now?
She seemed to know his thoughts. At least, she answered them. “Please. Try to understand. I didn’t want to leave you. I swear to you. I had no choice.” Hesitantly she approached, her hands outstretched. “Erik, please…”
He looked her up and down. He knew what he wanted. He made his demand. “I’ll have those secrets now. All of them.”
She dropped her hands. “You sound…so strange.”
“I’m angry. And afraid. I don’t know where you are. And besides…”
“What?”
“This is only a dream.”
He felt cruel somehow, saying the truth right out loud like that. And more so, when she backed up a step.
“Don’t say that. Let’s pretend, please? Let’s pretend that it’s real.”
He shook his head, not feeling he could allow that lie. “But it isn’t real, Evangeline.”
She fell back a second step. “How did you know that name?”
Then he felt more sad than angry. “I always knew. Since that day in your shop, when I touched you. And everything changed. You remember that day.”
“Oh, yes. I do. I’ll never forget it.”
“Good.” Impatience rose in him. “The secrets, then.”
Even here, in this dream place, she hesitated to tell him. “What good will it do, to tell you now?”
He shook his head, aware by some means he couldn’t explain that somewhere, in a windowless locked room, a fevered woman slept fitfully, racked by chills. “This might be the only chance you’ll get to tell me the truth.”
She knew what he meant. “Yes,” she said, then added, “but will it do any good? Will you remember? Will it be real to you?”
“Probably not. But do it anyway.”
“It does feel as if it will matter. And there’s that old cliché, isn’t there? About confession being good for the soul. Do you think it counts, even in dreams?”
He asked, “Are you stalling?”
She looked down at the wild grasses that grew at their feet. “Yes. I guess I am.”
“Stop it, then. Tell me.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
She looked up and smiled, a beautiful, shy smile. Then she asked, with great formality, “Won’t you sit in the flowers with me?”
He thought about that. There seemed no harm in it. “Yes. All right.”
She reached out her hand.
His remained at his side. He looked down at it, wondering why he couldn’t extend it to her. Then it came to him. Dreams were so tricky. They had their own rules.
He told her, “Here, we can’t touch.”
The longing in her eyes cut him like the sharpest of knives. “I see.” She dropped her arm. “This way, then.”
She led him to where the flowers grew thickest, then she sat. He followed suit. They looked at each other.
The silence grew painful. At last, she confessed, “I don’t know…how to begin.”
He considered for a moment. “Start when you were little, after your mother died.”
“All right. If that’s what you want.”
He leaned back, half reclining on an elbow among the fragile flowers, and stretched his legs in their worn jeans out toward her.
She sighed as she watched him. “Oh, Erik. It’s so hard to believe this is only a dream. You seem so big and solid and real.” In her eyes, desire moved.
He responded to it, as he always had. He wanted nothing so much as to grab her and hold her, to cover her sweet mouth with his own. He tried to keep to the point. “You’re stalling again.”
“No. Listen. I want you to know.”
“What?”
“Whatever happens, to have known your love has made all the difference to me. To have met you at last. It’s made every lonely year worth living through…”
“Talk,” he said, more gruffly than he should have.
“Yes. Of course. I will.”
Yet still, she didn’t speak for a moment. He sensed he shouldn’t push her again right then, so he made himself wait until she could bring herself to begin the old story. As the seconds spun out, he found it unbearably painful, that he couldn’t reach out and touch her. He had to do something. So he picked a yellow buttercup and rolled the stem between his thumb and forefinger.
At last, she spoke. “After our mother died, we—Nevada and Faith and I—lived with our father, Gideon. It was a rough life.”
He chose a purple lupin. “You told me that.” He felt her watching him as he picked more flowers, bleeding hearts and columbines and Queen Anne’s lace, adding each one to the wild bouquet in his hand.
It came to him that she’d fallen silent again. He glanced up from the flowers. “Keep going.”
“Yes. All right.” She took in a breath and went on. “Gideon never seemed to make a go of anything. He worked odd jobs, when he could get them. And he gambled away most of his paychecks at cards. Sometimes he’d come up with wild money-making schemes. But none of them ever amounted to anything. We slept in his car a lot of the time, and we’d clean up at public rest rooms, and eat whatever he could scrape together for us. It seemed we were always hungry. And always moving west.”
“From where you’d lived with your mother?”
“Yes. We started out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where my mother’s house was. And by the time I was ten, we were in Los Angeles.”
“Five years of wandering.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“Then…things changed.”
“Why?”
“Because of me.”
“Explain.”
“Because I…had an accident. In a publi
c pool.”
“What kind of accident?”
“A fatal one.”
He looked up from the flowers then and right into her huge, soft eyes. He couldn’t quite take in what she’d said. It had made no sense, even in this strange dream world. “Fatal means you died.”
She closed her eyes then, and breathed deeply.
He saw again a cold, dank room. And he saw Evie, a prisoner there, shivering on a narrow bed.
She seemed to see what he saw. She whispered, her eyes still shut, “Tell me that this is real. You and me. Here in this meadow I’ve never seen in my life except in that picture of yours.”
But he couldn’t tell her that. That would have been a lie. He remembered the swimming pool. He wanted to get to the truth about that. “Evie. Go back. What did you say? You said afatal accident.”
With some effort, she opened her eyes and looked at him. “I’m saying I died. And came back to life. And when I came back, I was…different than before.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Erik? Erik, wake up.” Someone shook him gently.
With a groan, Erik opened his eyes. Tawny was bending over him. “Erik?”
“Huh?” Every joint aching, he pulled himself upright on the couch. “Uh, what time is it?” He raised his wrist and looked at his watch.
Tawny confirmed what the watch told him. “Almost seven. Mom sent me over to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the painting of the mountain meadow. Strange. He must have been looking at it, when he dropped off to sleep. “I had…the weirdest dream.”
Tawny had more important things than dreams on her mind. “I take it you haven’t heard anything…from Evie?”
He combed through his hair with his fingers. “No.”
Tawny watched him, shaking her head. “Erik, why didn’t you go to bed?”
Because I couldn’t take being in our bed without her, he thought. He said, “I wanted to be ready. In case she called or something.”
The Man, The Moon And The Marriage Vow Page 17