She pulled out her keys, the large ring jangling in the near silence. 12C had finally stopped screaming, which either meant they had passed out or they were on to the lovemaking phase. Cam had no intention of sticking around long enough to find out.
Pushing open the door, she was enveloped in the smell of her home. Part old-apartment-mildew, but that just set off the other, more pleasant aromas. The smell of the pumpkin bread she had made last night in one of her rare cooking fits that mingled with the spiced cookie candles she loved to burn after the kids were in bed. A slight whiff of the strawberry shampoo that everyone in the family used.
One nice thing about them all being girls. They didn’t have to worry about boy soaps or boy toys or boy TV shows. It was convenient to not have to manage fights over the remote control.
The lack of anything masculine in the apartment sometimes felt like a black hole. Some kind of cosmic vacuum that was slowly sucking the soul out of Cam. She didn’t need a man to survive. But it was undeniable that it had been nice to have one around.
Before…
A blinking red light called her attention over to the kitchen counter. The message light on the phone was showing a voicemail. Cam was ninety percent sure she’d checked last night, and she didn’t remember seeing the red light on her way out of the apartment.
Who the hell had called her at 5:30 in the morning?
Picking up the receiver, Cam dialed for the voicemail. The message came through, but wasn’t much. An intake of breath, a cleared throat, then a hang up.
Weird.
Maybe it was a wrong number. That’s what made the most sense. Someone from a different time zone, maybe? But when she checked the caller ID, it was a number from here in San Diego.
Well, if they wanted to talk to her, they’d call back. It wasn’t the first hang-up she’d received in the six years since she’d started the Empty Crib Organization with her best friend and partner, Harper Pembroke. It wouldn’t be the last.
When your child had been abducted, it didn’t take long before you wanted to reach out to someone who’s been through the same thing. That’s how she and Harper had met, after all.
A sound of padding feet caused Cam to spin around. It was Michaela. Mickey, the only towhead of her three. The only one of the gang who looked like her. The rest all favored their dad, dark haired and dark eyed. Especially Ryan…
“Hey, Mouse, what’re you doing up?” she crooned as she scooped up her little girl. The nickname was their private joke. Mickey Mouse. She was small still, but getting bigger by the day. It wouldn’t be too long before she couldn’t snuggle the girls at all. The thought gave her a pang.
“I heard the phone ring,” Mickey said, yawning and rubbing her hand through her rat’s nest hair. Had she gone to bed chewing gum again? Cam tried to smooth the hair down with little success.
“Sorry about that, sweetie. I was just out on the front stairs. Did you get scared?”
“Nope. I didn’t come down until I heard the door open and shut. You okay?” Mickey turned and gave her mother a solemn look. It was a question that never would have occurred to the other two girls. They were wrapped up in their worlds of girlfriends and dresses and dolls. But not Mickey.
Cam gave her a squeeze. “’Course I’m okay, Mouse,” she said. “I’ve got you for a daughter. How could I not be okay?”
Mickey shrugged and gave her a sad smile. “I just know it’s coming up.”
“What, sweetie?” Cam asked, but she knew. It wasn’t something she talked about with the girls much, but they’d seen pictures, of course, and somehow Mickey had picked up on it.
“The day Ryan was taken. When is it?”
“That… is not something that you need to worry about,” she answered, the response sticking in her throat. She looked at her little girl and saw the disappointment and concern written across her forehead in tiny little lines. No seven-year-old girl should have worry lines. Cam cleared her throat. “It’s the day after tomorrow.”
Mickey nodded. “I thought so. Do you want me to stay out here with you?”
Time to make a decision. She could wallow in the pain, share it with her daughter who was way too young to worry about things like that. The temptation to do so was strong.
Or she could be a grownup. Suck it up for the sake of her little ones. The choice wasn’t tough, once she really looked at it.
“Oh, I see what’s going on here,” Cam said with a smirk. “You’re just looking to stay up, aren’t you? Little stinker.” She gave Mickey a squeeze and a tickle, making her squirm and giggle. “Now go on back to bed. You’ve still got a couple of hours before you have to be up.”
Mickey sighed and nodded again, slipping out of Cam’s arms to the floor. After a quick glance at her mother’s face to make sure everything was truly all right, she trotted back down the hall to the master bedroom that she shared with her two sisters.
That was a concession that Cam had made right from the first. There was only one of her. There were three of them. They got the bigger of the rooms.
The door had just barely shut behind Mickey when the phone rang again. Cam swore and darted over to grab the receiver before the entire household woke up. Not that there was much of a chance of that. Jules and Meg slept the sleep of the dead. Or deaf. Not much short of a nuclear apocalypse could wake them. Made school mornings tough.
“Hello?” Cam said in a low voice, not wanting Mickey to get curious and come back out.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, during which Cam glanced at the caller ID. Same number as before.
“Can I help you?” Cam said, a tone of sharpness creeping in. “It’s very early in the morning.”
“I’m… I’m so sorry,” came a timid voice on the other end. A woman’s voice, high pitched and trembling. “Did I wake you?”
“No, I was up. My girls on the other hand…”
“This is a mistake. I apologize,” the voice said. Her embarrassment screamed through the connection. It was clear she was about to disconnect the line.
“Don’t hang up,” Cam urged, suppressing a sigh. Something told her this was well outside of this woman’s comfort zone. Which meant it was probably important. “What can I do for you?”
“Is this Cameron Holdon? From the Empty Crib Organization?”
And there it was. The only good excuse for an early morning call.
“Yes,” she answered. “Yes, I’m Cam.”
The voice on the other end of the line broke down and began sobbing.
* * *
Harper Pembroke sat in her car by the side of the road, waiting for Cam to get there. The house of the woman who had called her partner at the crack of dawn was up in Mira Mesa, about 20 minutes north of San Diego. What was her name? Elizabeth? No, that wasn’t it. Emma. Like that novel Harper was supposed to have read her senior year of high school. Stupid Jane Austen.
Emma Young. And her husband. Some weird name that started with a J. Like Jerome, but not. She shook her head. Names had always been a bit of a problem for her.
Kicking at a soda bottle that had slipped over into her car well, Harper had the thought, as she did almost every day of her life, that she should really get more organized. You know, go through her glove compartment, sift through the papers in the passenger side seat, clean out the fast food bags and wrappers that acted as her car floor mats. Maybe she was just repurposing. That was it. Using the paper bags as a shield for the carpeting in her car.
Yeah, right.
The last time she had seen the bottom of her car was probably back in 2008. Man, that had been a rough year. Sometimes Harper was convinced she could track the good times by the amount of trash in her car. The more trash there was, the happier the times.
There was a honk, and Harper looked out of her window across the street. There was Cam’s beat up Chevy Venture. That thing had to be over ten years old, and it looked twice that. Not that Harper could talk all that much. Her POS Honda wasn’t much younger,
and she’d run into the odd pole here and there. Gave her vehicle character, right?
Cam stepped out of the minivan, a Baby Alive doll falling out and nearly tripping her. Harper held in a snort out of solidarity. Cam might not realize it right at the moment, but Harper had her back. She wasn’t about to laugh at her best friend’s misfortunes. Oh, who was she kidding? Cam was pretty much her only friend.
Besides, Harper could stand to have a doll or two to trip over. She and her ex-monster-of-a-husband had only had the one child, so when Billy had gone missing and eventually turned up dead, that had been the end of the child-related paraphernalia around the house.
And when the killer had turned out to be her spouse, well, that had necessitated a whole ‘nother mess of changes. Hellfire and damnation if that wasn’t the understatement of the century.
There had been a time, back when she was desperately searching for her boy, that she’d thought to herself that she just wanted to know, one way or the other. Turned out, getting closure was a mixed bag. Whether that closure had done anything other than turn her into a cynical bitch was up for debate.
Harper’s eyes blurred a bit as she watched her friend throw the doll back in the car, lock up and cross the street. It was a good question, honestly, and one that Harper couldn’t answer. How would an outsider assess the differences between Cam and her?
Both had been through hell. Both had ended up losing their spouses, Cam’s to the bottle and Harper’s to the big house. But where Harper knew what had happened to her boy, Cam still had no idea.
They didn’t discuss it too much, but Harper knew that Cam was still searching for her lost boy. How could she not? If there were even a squirrel’s fart in a windstorm’s chance that she could see her Billy again, Harper would be all over that like caramel on an apple.
She grinned at her own colorful imagery. Sometimes she thought she should’ve grown up out in the sticks. In the Appalachians somewhere, maybe.
There was a rapping on her window. Cam had made it across the street and was giving her a puzzled look through the glass.
“You fall asleep in there?”
“Hey, you know me,” Harper quipped. “Always up for a little shut-eye.”
Cam smiled, and her entire face lit up. Man, was she pretty. Like, near model kind of pretty. The only thing that would keep her off the runway was that look in her eye. The look that said that Cam saw more than she said. It was the knowledge that there were bad things out there in the world that did more than go bump in the night.
To Harper’s eye, it only made Cam more beautiful, but it wasn’t an easy kind of attractiveness. Nothing vapid about her. It was all about getting down to brass tacks and getting the job done. Not an easy thing to be around that kind of determined competence.
Not even for Harper sometimes.
Grunting as she pushed her car door open and stepped out into the bright California sun, Harper turned her attention to the house that was their destination. A modest home, a bungalow-style that would have been popular back in the 1920s, it had been kept up well enough, Harper supposed, but it looked like it could use an update-and-a-half.
Cam stepped forward and pushed the cracked doorbell with no response. A sigh escaped Harper’s partner as she leaned in to rap her knuckles on the door. Right above where she had knocked, a sign read No solicitors. Nothing like a back-the-hell-off sign to make your visitors feel all nice and welcome.
A woman appeared at the door. She was a young brunette, fairly put-together, but with the feel of someone that was dressing to deemphasize her body. Her very fit, quite attractive body. That was interesting.
It happened every time they met a new client. Harper began looking past the surface appearance, searching for the hidden secrets that every family had. What would make an attractive, fit woman want to play down her sexiness? Insecurity? Sexual abuse from the past? Jealous husband?
As the woman looked at Cam and Harper, sizing them up, she stepped more fully into the light. There were dark circles under her eyes, as well as a look of quiet caution that made Harper sure they had found the right person.
“Mrs. Young?” she asked.
There was a pause. “Oh, no,” the woman responded after a moment. “I’m Rachel. Just a friend of the family.”
Odd. What was she doing answering the door?
There was an awkward stretch, during which Rachel just stared at the two on the doorstep, frowning. The time seemed to stretch out into eternity, and Harper was milliseconds from just turning around and leaving, when a voice called out from inside the house.
“Is that the women from Empty Crib?”
“That’s us,” Harper said, moving to push past this odd gatekeeper of a woman. Her abrupt move seemed to unnerve Rachel, who stepped back with what seemed to Harper to be a touch of reluctance.
They moved into the living room, a cozy affair with hardwood floors and worn but sturdy furniture. There, seated on the couch, were too more women, both dressed in a similar fashion to Rachel. One of them, a dishwater blonde, had red eyes and was holding a tissue.
That had to be Emma.
Just beyond the couch was a fireplace with an old, darkly polished wooden beam for a mantel. Above the beam was a framed picture of Jesus in a white shirt and a red overcoat. And just like that, the fact fell into place. They were religious. Probably evangelicals, if Harper didn’t miss her guess. Conservative, one way or another.
The picture above the fireplace was a much more masculine painting of Christ than Harper had ever seen. Usually he was depicted as kind of scrawny, but not here. This was a guy that you could believe was once a carpenter. That’s what he was supposed to have been, right? Or was that Buddha? Harper always got the big religious figures mixed up.
The woman with the Kleenex looked up, her face brightening ever so slightly. “Ms. Holdon?”
Harper backed up and pointed to her partner. It was the way it always went. Everyone always wanted to talk to Cam. It came from them using her phone number for their organization, but every once in a while it gave Harper a little twinge. Jealousy? Surely not, but it was unpleasant, whatever it was.
There were family photos up on the wall. Emma with four kids, the smallest looking like he was just new born. That must be Joshua, the one who had been taken. And there at Emma’s side, a good-looking man with a neatly trimmed goatee.
“This your husband?” Harper asked.
Emma nodded. “Please, sit down,” she said, indicating the chairs across from the couch. “I don’t have long to talk.”
Harper and Cam exchanged a look. Usually when there was an abduction, there wasn’t really a time limit set on their first meeting.
Emma must have seen the confusion on their faces, as she blushed and looked down at her hands that were resting in her lap. She cleared her throat.
“Jarom… my husband… He doesn’t know that you’re here.”
CHAPTER 2
Well, this was a first.
After her oldest son had been taken and her marriage had gone from bad to worse, Cam had founded the Empty Crib Organization with Harper. A group to help support those who had been through the same experiences that they had.
It had grown from there into something much more… involved. They had become the go-to women to help out with kidnapping investigations. So this wasn’t Cam’s first time dealing with a grieving family, not by any stretch of the imagination.
But she had no idea what to make of this. From the time she and Harper walked into the house, everything about this scenario seemed… off.
The husband didn’t even know that they’d been called? And that was just the beginnings of what was strange.
It wasn’t uncommon for friends to have gathered to comfort the grieving family. Cam saw that all the time. But these two friends of Emma looked like they had set up camp. They almost seemed more at home here than Emma did.
Rachel had gone into the kitchen to start fixing an early lunch, and the other, older woman, had
gone into one of the bedrooms to calm down a crying toddler. She’d introduced herself as Bethany before making her exit.
Another small child streaked past screaming bloody murder, sans pants or underwear. A boy, clearly. Rachel popped out of the kitchen and called out after him.
“Hyrum! Put your clothes on!” She turned to face Cam and Harper. “I’m so sorry. Bethany and I had to bring over our own children to help, but I’m afraid they’re running a bit wild.”
“That’s more than fine,” Cam answered, hoping to set her at ease. “I have triplet girls, so I know how much of a handful they can be when they’re small.”
Rachel flashed her a grateful look. She seemed to be warming up to the two women a bit from that first encounter at the door. Then Rachel turned a much different expression on Harper. Okay. Maybe it was just Cam that she was warming up to.
Cam turned back to face Emma, catching sight of the Jesus up above the fireplace. It was one she had seen before, but she couldn’t place exactly where. A surge of complicated emotions surfaced, but she pushed them down. Not the time or place.
There was a child missing, and the clock was ticking. Most abductions, if they didn’t get solved in the first two days, went south fast. This was the time to find Emma’s baby, not resolve Cam’s issues with her broken faith. Besides, the next topic was going to be tricky enough without adding in distractions.
“I don’t want to be indelicate, but time is an important factor in abductions. The first 48 hours are crucial. So, your husband didn’t want us to come?” Cam asked, her tone gentle.
“Do you think he might have had something to do with it?” chimed in Harper.
Damn her. No matter how many times they talked about it, Cam’s partner just couldn’t seem to grasp the idea of tact when it came to husbands. Not that Cam could really blame her.
Emma’s face was just as horrified as Cam would have expected.
2nd Cycle of the Harbinger Series Collection Page 34