Though Tawny was his baby sister, she gave him a look that reminded him of their mother. “How much sleep did you get?”
Groaning a little, he stood and stretched out the kinks in his back.
“Erik. Are you listening to me?”
His shirt had come partly out of his pants. He tucked it in a little better.
“Did you get any sleep at all?”
Erik made a face at his sister. “Come on, Tawn. Save the lectures, okay? Is there coffee?”
“I just got here. Give me a minute and I’ll make some. Now answer my question.”
He took her by the shoulders and gently moved her out of his path. Then he went to the door, pausing when he got there to explain to her, “I want to get something in my stomach and get the kids fed, too. And then would you take them to church?”
“You know I will.”
“Good. Then I can call Jack and get together with him.”
“For what?”
“To fill out a missing person’s report.”
Tawny just stared at him. “Oh, God,” she said.
Erik knew he had to keep on the move. He headed for the kitchen, pausing along the way to check on each of the kids. They were all still sleeping right then, which was just fine with him. As soon as they woke, they’d want to know if Evie was home yet. He wasn’t looking forward to answering them.
Tawny trailed after him, following him on a circuit of the kid’s rooms and then down the stairs. In the kitchen, she took down the coffee and began spooning grounds into the white paper liner that fit in the top of the coffeemaker. Erik went to the cupboard and brought out a box of pancake mix, then he knelt to find the griddle in the cabinet by the sink.
“What are you doing?”
He sighed and looked up at her. “Making something to eat.”
“I’ll do that. You know you can’t cook.”
“Tawny, I have to keep moving.”
She caught her lower lip between her teeth, her eyes suddenly much too bright. “Oh, Erik…”
He stood. “Don’t. Just don’t.”
She looked away, collecting herself. Then she stepped over to him and shoved the coffee carafe at him. “Here. Finish the coffee. I’ve already measured the grounds.”
He did as his little sister commanded. Once the coffee was brewing, he asked if she would eat, too.
“I’m dieting. Just coffee.”
He set himself a place as Tawny heated the griddle and cracked eggs into the mixing bowl. As he’d feared was going to happen, he was finished with his short series of chores before she had the food ready.
There was nothing to do but sit down and wait. He stood behind his chair, to pull it out—and found himself looking across the breakfast table, to where Evie usually sat.
His gut clenched. And it was the hardest thing he’d ever done to draw air into his lungs.
“How many pancakes?” Tawny had turned. She saw his face. Saw the way he was clutching the back of the damn chair. Her face scrunched up in sympathy.
“Where the hell is she?” He hardly realized he was speaking until the words were already said.
“We’ll find her,” Tawny said, her pretty chin quivering. “She’ll be all right.”
“Seventeen hours. Seventeen hours. Since you left her at the shop.”
Tawny’s eyes were tearing up again. She reached out. Erik did the same. They met midway between the table and the counter, wrapping their arms around each other and holding on tight. Then he took her shoulders and put her at arm’s length. “Six pancakes would be perfect.”
She sniffed and lifted her chin high. “Six it is.”
Just then the phone rang. Erik picked it up before it finished the first ring.
“Erik, it’s Faith.”
“Yeah?”
“Has she come home?”
“No.”
He heard her draw in a breath. When she spoke, the words came fast, as if she wanted to get through what she had to say before he could start asking questions. “Listen, I’ve spoken with Nevada. There were some things Evie didn’t explain to you. She was going to tell you, umm, in her own time. But now, with her disappearing like this, Faith and I really don’t think we can keep quiet any longer.”
Dread sent cold fingers walking up and down his spine. “What things?”
Tawny was looking at him expectantly. He shook his head and waved her away. She watched him a minute longer, then gave up and went back to mixing the pancake batter.
Faith was talking again. Erik listened, hardly daring to breathe, as Faith told him about their father, Gideon, who seemed to have some kind of obsession with his youngest daughter. Faith said Evie had been running from Gideon for years. And that just before Evie and Erik’s marriage, Gideon had called Evie.
Feeling slow and stupid, Erik cut in. “Wait a minute. Go back a little here. Are you saying your father is still alive?”
Faith made a small noise of distress. “Did Evie say he wasn’t?”
Erik tried to remember. “She told me he was ‘gone.’ But she knew how I’d take it. I thought she meant that he was dead.”
“Oh, Erik. Please try to understand. She wanted time with you, time to adjust to married life. She didn’t want you to be worrying—”
“Look. Just tell me what you’re getting at here.”
Faith didn’t speak for a moment. He gave her the time to compose herself. Then she murmured, “All right. What I’m saying is, since Gideon called her, that means he’d found out where she lived. The way things have gone for fifteen years, that was her signal to move on. But she didn’t move on. She stayed put.”
“So?”
“Well, I just mean she broke the pattern, that’s all. She didn’t leave. And both Nevada and I are afraid that that might have set him off somehow. That he, umm, might be responsible for her disappearance yesterday.”
In his mind’s eye, he saw that strange, brief vision from his own dream: Evie, racked by fever, in a dark room on a narrow bed.
He shook his head. He had to get control here. He was really losing it, imagining that he might have dreamed of her where she was now.
“Hold on,” he said. “Let’s get this good and clear. What you’re saying is that you believe your father has—” he had to swallow before he could say the ugly word “—kidnapped her.”
Erik heard Tawny’s startled gasp. He carefully avoided looking her way.
“I don’t know,” Faith said. “I just think it’s likely that he’s got something to do with her vanishing like this.”
“Give me his address and phone number.” Erik signaled Tawny for a pencil and some paper.
“That’s just it,” Faith said, as Tawny rushed over with the pad and a pen. “We don’t know where he lives. We’ve spent our lives trying to put him completely behind us, so the last thing we’ve ever tried to find out is his address. And he’s never stayed in one place for long anyway. He’s a paranoid kind of man, Erik. When we were kids, he’d always get his driver’s licenses under assumed names. He’d establish whole new identities for himself every year or two, just so he could never be found unless he wanted to be found.”
“You have no idea where he lives.” Erik repeated the information in a tone that sounded dead even to his own ears.
“No.”
Erik clutched the phone harder, his anxiety and frustration growing, like a snowball rolling down a steep hill. “Tell me more about him. Why do you want him behind you? Why is he obsessed with Evie?”
Faith launched into a tale Erik could hardly believe, about how Evie had once been a famous psychic called Evangeline, and how her father had promoted his daughter’s clairvoyant talents. Lost people had been found in ways no one could explain. And Gideon Jones had made a lot of money in the process. Then Evie had turned eighteen and her sisters had helped her run away. Ever since then, her father had been following her, tracking her down each new place she moved.
“Evie said Uncle Oggie got a postcard from our f
ather, several months ago,” Faith said at last.
“So Oggie might know where to reach him?”
“It’s possible. Talk to him. I just don’t know.”
* * *
As his pancakes cooled on his plate and his sister tried to get him to explain what in the world was going on, Erik called Jack and asked him to come to his house at ten, when the kids would be at church.
Then Erik called Oggie Jones.
“Been meanin’ to call you myself, son. You just beat me to the punch,” Oggie declared. “Any word from Evie?”
“No. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
The old man was silent for a moment. Then he muttered, “I figured this was comin’. But you know, Evie made me promise never to tell her secrets to a soul.”
“I think it’s a promise you’re going to have to break.”
“When and where?” Oggie’s voice was resigned.
“Ten this morning. At my house.”
“I’ll be there.” The line went dead.
“What is going on?” Tawny demanded, once he’d hung up.
Erik put his elbows on either side of his plate and rested his head in his hands. Tawny marched to his side. “Erik. What did you mean, kidnapped?”
There was nothing else to do but tell her. Briefly, in a low voice, he explained to her what Faith had told him. “We don’t know for sure that Gideon took her,” he added at the end. “It’s just the only explanation that makes any sense. But don’t say anything about it to the kids, all right?”
Tawny let out a little puff of air. “I’m eighteen years old, after all, Erik. I do have some sense.”
He patted her arm. “I know. You’re the greatest. Don’t be mad.”
Oggie arrived a few minutes before Jack. The old man was carrying a large clasp envelope under his arm. As soon as Jack arrived, Erik led both men to his studio, where he knew they wouldn’t be disturbed if they were still at it when the kids came home.
Oggie stumped right over to the couch. He grunted and groaned as he settled down into it, laying the envelope he’d brought with him on the seat cushion next to him. Erik sat on his work stool. Jack declined a chair.
Once Oggie was settled, with his cane propped beside him, he pulled out a cigar. “Moments like these, a man needs a good smoke.”
Jack, standing at his side, made a low noise. “Come on, Dad.”
“It’s all right,” Erik said. He went to the worktable where he kept his supplies and found an empty soup can that he sometimes used for cleaning brushes. He handed it to the old man for an ashtray.
“Thanks, son.”
Erik watched for a moment as Oggie made a big production of biting the end off his cigar and lighting up. Then Erik shook himself. Swiftly he related the information Faith had given him on the phone. Then he asked Oggie, “Do you have any idea where your brother lives—or how we can reach him? Faith says you received a postcard from him in August.”
The smelly smoke from Oggie’s cigar spiraled toward the ceiling. “Sorry. Not a clue. That card he sent was postmarked Las Vegas, but Evie said Giddy most likely only wants us to think that’s where he lives.”
Jack spoke up then. “I’ll want to see that postcard, Dad.”
Oggie patted the envelope beside him. “You’ll get it in just a minute now.”
Jack made a sort of growling noise in his throat. “Dad. What’s going on? What’s with the envelope? Just lay it out straight for once, will you?”
Oggie flicked his ash into the can. “I will, I will.”
“Fine. So do it.”
Oggie chewed the cigar a little. “Just like Faith, I got nothin’ I can prove. But I can guess what’s happened.”
Erik had been sitting on the edge of his work stool, but he couldn’t sit there anymore. He loomed over the old man. “What’s happened?”
Oggie went on chewing his cigar, shifting it from left to right in his mouth. “Get calm. Listen up.”
“I am.”
Oggie looked at him doubtfully. Erik made himself sit on the stool again.
Oggie eyed him for a moment, as if weighing how calm he really was. Then he said it. “Her dad took her.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then Erik said the ugly word once more. “Kidnapped?”
Oggie only nodded.
“What makes you so sure of that?” Jack asked.
Oggie blew more smoke and watched it float away. “All Evie’s wanted for fifteen years is to be free of her dad. See, he made her life a misery. She’s been tryin’ to escape from him since she came of age. And in a way, even though he ain’t in her life anymore, he’s been runnin’ it. He’s had real power over her. Every breath she took, it was in fear of his catchin’ up to her. She’s lived on the edge of things, never settlin’ down, never givin’ her heart.
“But then, when she came here, she decided to stop runnin’. She put down roots, married, made a real life for herself. And I don’t think Giddy can stand that. I get an awful feelin’ he’s gone over the edge about that.”
The men were silent again. Then Jack asked, “What’s in the envelope, Dad?”
Oggie gave the envelope a sideways glance. “It’s clippings and stuff. From newspapers. All about Evie in the old days, when she was known as Evangeline. She saved them over the years and when she got married, she gave them to me, to keep for her, until she got up the nerve to show them to Erik here.”
“What about that postcard that Gideon sent you?”
“I stuck it in there, too.”
Jack looked at Erik, then back at his father. “Well, let’s see them, then.”
Oggie picked up the envelope and held it out to his son, but it was Erik he spoke to. “She said she almost showed you these, the night you proposed to her.”
Erik knew then where he’d seen that envelope before—on the morning after they’d first made love, as she was going out his front door. It had bumped his leg as they lingered over their goodbyes. He’d asked her about it and she’d told him it was only mail she’d collected from the post office on the way over.
It had never occurred to him that it might have been much more. He’d been blinded by his own happiness that morning. He hadn’t even considered that there might be things she should tell him, things he should know.
Jack found the postcard inside the big envelope. He pulled it out by a corner and asked Erik for a small plastic bag to put it in.
An hour or so later, as Erik and Jack were reading the last of the yellowed clippings, Tawny returned with the kids. She promised to answer the phone and get lunch on the table so that Erik could go over to the sheriff’s station and fill out a missing person’s report on his wife.
Once the report was completed, Jack told Erik that with what they had now, he could probably get through an order for a DMV records check on Gideon Jones in California and the neighboring states, to see if they could come up with an address on the man.
“What about fingerprints?” Erik asked.
Jack lifted an eyebrow at him.
“I mean, couldn’t you maybe check for prints on the postcard?”
“I plan to, though the chances of getting a decent print off of a card from a man who stuck it in the mail three months ago have to be almost nil.”
“What about the store? Could you test for prints in there? Maybe match them up with what you get from the postcard?”
“Damn, Erik. You’re really talking long shots now. But I’ll look into it, okay?”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll call you by tomorrow evening, and let you know what we’ve dug up.”
A feeling of hopelessness went through Erik. Soon, it would be twenty-four hours since Evie’s disappearance. And here was Jack saying it would be another day before he had any more news about Gideon, the only real lead that they had.
Jack read Erik’s expression. “Hey. I’m sorry, man.”
Erik looked away. “I know you’re doing what you can.”
If her father had been as mean and tyrannical a figure as Oggie and Faith had described, Erik could see why Evie had wanted to escape the man. He could even see how she might lie to her new husband and say that her father was dead.
But why should she want to hide what she’d been? From what he’d read, she’d done a lot more good than harm. And besides, she’d been little more than a child at the time, manipulated by her father. Not at fault at all. He just didn’t get it.
He went home feeling as if he was no closer than he’d ever been to finding Evie—or to understanding why she’d felt she had to lie to him about her past.
At home, he found no peace. All three of his children were sitting in the living room, waiting for him.
“Dad,” Pete said. “We really want to talk to you.”
Darla, who must have come over and relieved Tawny while he was gone, gave him a sheepish look. “I didn’t put them up to it.”
Erik forced a smile for his mother. “I know you didn’t, Mom.”
“Good. Listen, I’m getting a pot roast started for dinner and—”
“Go on,” he said before she could finish, thinking how damn lucky he was to have his mother and sister to count on. “This is my job and I’ll do it.”
Darla left them. Erik looked at his waiting children and didn’t know how to begin.
“We want to know where Evie is,” Jenny prompted.
Erik started to tell them how he was sure that Evie would be back soon.
Pete wasn’t having any of that. “But where did she go?” the boy demanded. “No one’s talking to us. And I got…things she needs to know about. Mark showed me how to use that bookkeeping program she bought. I been waiting to teach her all about it. But I can’t teach her if she’s not home.”
Erik looked at his son pleadingly. He didn’t have any idea what to say.
“Just tell us,” Pete insisted. “Where is she?”
The Man, The Moon And The Marriage Vow Page 18