Stolen Child

by Jane M. Choate

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean to do it. I have no excuse. No excuse at all.”

  “You don’t need an excuse when we both wanted the same thing.”

  “You feel it, too?”

  “Yes, I feel it,” she said.

  Grey had crossed a line. He hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t wanted to. But it didn’t change what had happened. Pursuing a relationship with Rachel was off the table. Not just because Lily was still missing but also because he feared he couldn’t have a relationship with any woman. He had messed up royally in his marriage to Maggie. What made him think he’d do any better with Rachel?

  And then there was Rachel herself to consider. She’d told him about her ex-fiancé who’d dumped her when things got tough. Was she as wary as he was of where their feelings for each other might lead?

  He gazed at her once more, saw the soft color creep into her cheeks. He couldn’t regret touching his lips to hers, couldn’t regret the sweetness that had filled him when her lips had returned the pressure against his own, but he had to pull back.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Rachel didn’t answer immediately. Finally, she said, “You’re in no condition to make any decisions right now. You’re banged up physically, and your emotions are running hot and cold. It’s a wonder you can think at all.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “For now...”

  “For now we find Lily,” Rachel finished for him. “What is it you rangers say? ‘Failure is not an option.’”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For what you’re doing. For staying the course.”

  Rachel was an operative, and he was a client. Nothing else could happen between them. He was right in his decision to pull back.

  Then why did it feel so wrong?

  TWELVE

  Rachel did her best to collect her thoughts.

  Grey’s words left her breathless. Not because she didn’t believe them, but because she did. And because she did, because Grey had grown important to her in only a few days, she had to keep those feelings to herself and focus on what really mattered: finding Lily and bringing her home.

  Honesty forced her to admit that finding Lily wasn’t the only reason she had to keep her heart free from entanglements. She had believed herself to be in love once before and look how that had turned out. The man who had pledged his love to her, had given her a ring and asked her to share her life with him, had left her without so much as a single regret.

  What made her think her judgment was any better this time around? Even more, what made her think that anyone would choose her when her whole life—from the years in foster care where she’d been shuffled from one home to another to her broken engagement—had been one long string of rejections? What made her think someone like Grey would want her?

  After blanking her face from any response to his words, she did her best to flash a confident smile in his direction. Her smile winked out when his expression edged toward despair. She knew that the likelihood of finding Lily was dropping with every second. If the worst happened... No, she refused to go there.

  Surely the God Grey believed in wouldn’t allow that to happen.

  And what about her God? She was once a believer. Did she ever really stop? Or did she only tell herself that because the pain of losing that little girl blocked out every other feeling?

  She longed to turn the voice off with a switch, but it wouldn’t be quieted. Being with Grey over the past few days, watching his faith in action, had sparked her own. But she couldn’t convince herself that the God she’d grown up believing in, loving, was one Who would allow a child to die.

  She recognized the foolishness of her meanderings. Bad things happened all the time. You had only to listen to the news or go online to know of the atrocities men committed against one another. So why had she allowed that one case to get to her as it had?

  Sure, there had been other losses, other failures, but this one had reached inside her and pummeled her heart with merciless intensity. Perhaps it was the fact that the child had been only three, too young to have had her life snuffed out with such cruelty. Perhaps it was the nagging feeling that Rachel could have saved that precious life if only she’d been a little bit smarter, a little bit quicker.

  She had seen the devastating grief in the parents’ eyes and had internalized it. Agents were told to remain uninvolved, warned of the possible consequences if they didn’t, and still she’d fallen victim to it—a rookie mistake.

  Warring feelings sparred within her. Until three years ago, she’d believed with all her being in the Lord and His goodness. Never had she thought that her faith would slip, much less die altogether. Had it been so weak that she had allowed one failed mission to wipe away all of her beliefs? But it wasn’t just a failed mission, a part of her argued. A child had died. What’s more, she’d died on Rachel’s watch.

  How did she—how did anyone—come back from that?

  She didn’t know.

  Being around Grey, witnessing the faith that was so much a part of him, had awakened her own. She resented that. Even knowing it was unfair, she resented him for holding on to that faith despite everything. She wanted to tamp down the fragile shoot of faith that insisted on springing up within her, to return to her unbelieving existence. It was easier not to expect anything; then she couldn’t be hurt.

  “You look like you’re light-years away,” Grey observed.

  “Only three,” she murmured and returned to the present.

  * * *

  They drove to Grey’s house, intent on doing what they’d set out to do yesterday before they were ambushed.

  He wondered what Rachel thought of the home he’d shared for such a short time with Maggie and Lily.

  It wasn’t a palace, like the Gyllenskaag ancestral home, but it was comfortable, the open floor plan warm and inviting. It had suited the three of them while still having enough room for the family to grow.

  Grey took in the damage the bomb had caused, but his mind wasn’t on the patched wall. Not today. Rachel’s suggestion that he look through the house for something that would point them in the right direction was a good one, only he didn’t know what he was searching for.

  They divided up the space, with Grey taking the bedroom and living room while Rachel checked the kitchen and Lily’s nursery. The spare bedroom was empty, with nothing to find there.

  With one arm in a sling, his search was hampered, but he kept at it. He could spot nothing out of the ordinary. Maggie had been a tidy woman who kept everything in its place. Roberta had offered to hire a housekeeper for them, but Maggie had refused, saying she preferred to take care of her home herself.

  She’d kept files on everything—mortgage payments, bank statements and reports of doctor checkups on herself and Lily. He leafed through the papers, not seeing anything out of the ordinary.

  What did he expect to find here? He knew Maggie’s and Lily’s medical histories as well as he knew his own. He opened the file on Maggie. She had had chicken pox at age six, a particularly bad case that had left a small scar near her right temple. A broken arm at age nine when she’d fallen off her bike. Nothing to go on there.

  He got to the last page, scanned it, not expecting any surprises.

  Hold on. Something didn’t fit.

  She’d had a blood test while he’d been overseas. A discrepancy between her blood type and Roberta’s had shown up. No big deal. Clerical errors happened all the time.

  He read further. Maggie had had the test redone. No question this time. Her blood type was O and Roberta’s was AB.

  What was going on?

  He opened the file on Lily. Her blood type matched Maggie’s. If the files were to be believed, there was no way Lily and Maggie could be biologically related to Roberta.

 
; Adoption? There was no other answer.

  Maggie had never mentioned being adopted. It wouldn’t have made a difference, not to him. So why had she kept it a secret from him? And what did it have to do with the kidnapping? Or did it?

  Rachel walked into the room. “Anything?”

  He handed the papers to her. “I’m not sure. What do you make of these?”

  She went through the pages once, then again, her brow crinkling into a frown. “According to this, Roberta Gyllenskaag isn’t Maggie’s biological mother.”

  “Yeah. I got that. What I don’t get is why Maggie didn’t tell me.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know until she saw this, but she ran out of time to tell you.”

  He looked at the report once more, saw the date, then did the calculations of the date of the report and Maggie’s death. “By then, she’d have been too sick to tell me.” His frown mirrored Rachel’s. “Why didn’t Roberta tell Maggie she was adopted? Why leave her to learn it on her own? This had to be devastating to Maggie.” And she’d been alone when she’d made the discovery because he was out of the country. Again.

  “Maybe she didn’t want Maggie to know,” Rachel said.

  “I’m not sure how this plays into the kidnapping. Or if it does.”

  “It’d be a real coincidence that Maggie discovered this, died quickly thereafter from heart failure and then Lily was kidnapped less than a year later. An instructor at Quantico said that there are no coincidences, only things that we haven’t made the connection between yet.”

  “Your instructor was right. When we have the why, maybe we’ll know the who.” How did the blood results relate to Lily’s abduction and the attempts on his life?

  A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. A boy who looked no more than fifteen stood there. “A man paid me twenty bucks to give this to you,” he said and handed a thick envelope to Grey.

  The boy took off before Grey could stop him.

  Grey did the requisite check of the package, a skill he’d learned in the rangers, making certain there was nothing in it that could be dangerous. First, he pressed from the corners and edges to the center, then reversed the process. Finding nothing suspicious, he opened the envelope and stared at the message for a long time. If you want to find your daughter, meet me here. Included was a crudely drawn map with a list of directions.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked.

  He showed the note and map to her.

  “A setup,” was her immediate reaction.

  “Maybe,” Grey said with grudging agreement.

  “We don’t know if it’s legit or if someone will be waiting to ambush you. I’m thinking the latter.”

  “Like I said, maybe. But I have to go.”

  “Correction: we have to go.”

  THIRTEEN

  They made the trip to the first location in less than an hour, then got out of the truck. The note said they’d have to walk the last stretch before reaching a cabin.

  Finding the cabin took some doing. Whoever had drawn the map hadn’t bothered with GPS coordinates and had instead used landmarks like the tree with two trunks and a nurse tree stretched out across the trail.

  “There.” Rachel pointed to the trees identified. “We’re getting close.”

  Minutes later she caught a glimpse of a ramshackle structure that blended into the landscape so well it was nearly invisible. The cabin, more of a shack really, was nestled in a copse of softwood trees and scrubby pine, and it was surrounded by wild bushes, many of which were studded with thorns and vines that snaked over the forest floor, ready to trip the unwary. Swarms of gnats dive-bombed in sneak attacks and then took off.

  With little sunshine reaching the forest floor, the woods smelled of loam and mold.

  As she and Grey drew closer, she could make out the cabin more fully. It resembled a poor man’s hunting cabin, long abandoned. Only its shiny tin roof and gray asphalt shingle siding patched with tar paper provided enough contrast for the construction to stand out in the thickly wooded surroundings. A porch, supported on rusty paint cans, jutted out from the front door.

  A whiff of putrid air told her that the porch had probably been used for cleaning fish years back. They circled the cabin and discovered it had no back door.

  Back at the front entrance, Rachel motioned for them to approach from opposite sides. They crept onto the porch, moved to the door. Weapon in hand, she pushed open the plank door, Grey on her heels.

  The cabin’s sole occupant, a slight man with thinning hair, ignored her and fixed his attention on Grey. “You Nighthorse?”

  Grey kept his weapon trained on the man, as did she. “Yeah. You wanted to see me?”

  “I’m the one that sent you that letter. And—” he gulped “—I’m the man who took your daughter.”

  * * *

  Whatever Grey had expected, this blunt confession wasn’t it. The man didn’t look like a kidnapper, but then what did kidnappers look like? In Grey’s experience with Afghani kidnappings, he’d come across child abductors in all shapes, sizes and ages, even one man who looked like everybody’s genial grandfather with a fluffy white beard and twinkling eyes.

  Grey advanced on the man. “You took Lily? Where is she?”

  The man backed up. “Hold on, there. I took her. I admit it. Wasn’t any big deal as the nanny was in on it. She more or less handed over the little girl to me. Gentle as a lamb she was with that sweet little girl, cried all the while we were making the exchange. I thought she was going to pull out of the deal, but at the last minute she went through with it. She begged me to take good care of ‘my precious one,’ what she called the child.”

  Rachel didn’t lower her weapon. “We’re grateful that Lily was treated well, but you’re not telling us where she is.”

  “Like I said, I took her. I’m not proud of it, but a man does what he has to in order to survive.”

  Grey lunged at him and managed to get in a jab to the man’s jaw. He’d have liked to do a lot more, probably would have if not for Rachel.

  She put herself between the two men. “Lots of people survive just fine without kidnapping children.”

  “Can’t say as I blame you for that,” the man said, rubbing his jaw where Grey’s fist had connected. “And, yes, ma’am, you’re right. I always took the easy way when it came to making money. It didn’t seem to matter much...until now.

  “When I heard what happened to the nanny, I knew things were going south in a hurry. The guy who hired me told me that the nanny was blackmailing him for more money and that’s why she had to go. I didn’t buy it. It was as plain as a june bug on a frog’s nose that the girl’s heart wasn’t in it and that she sure enough wasn’t doing it for the money, no matter how big the payday.”

  Grey yanked the man up by his shirt. “I’ll ask you one more time. Where is my daughter?”

  “That’s what I’m getting to. I started making plans to get out. No way could I hurt a sweet little girl like that, so I stashed her where those that wanted her gone wouldn’t find her.”

  “You said those,” Grey pointed out, latching on to the one word. “You’re saying that more than one person hired you?”

  “I never saw nobody more than the man that paid me, and he wore a mask, but I figured there was someone else, someone calling the shots. Someone maybe he was afraid of.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “Little things. When he was giving me orders, it was like he was talking from a script and had memorized what he was s’pposed to say. He never said more than he had to. I’m not saying he was anybody’s pushover, just that he weren’t working on his own. He liked to pretend that he was making the decisions, but I knew he weren’t.”

  “Any idea of who he was working with?” she asked.

  “No. Like I said, he never said anything about a partner, but I had the impressio
n that he was taking orders, just like I was. To my way of thinking, that makes him no better than me, even if he was wearing classy duds and spoke with one of those uppity accents.”

  “Where. Is. Lily?”

  Grey heard the anguish in his voice and knew he was barely hanging on. Helplessly, he looked to Rachel.

  She gestured for him to let her take over.

  An imperceptible nod on his part told her to go ahead. It was obvious that for all his protestations, the man was enjoying his moment of importance, and, if Grey wasn’t mistaken, wanted something from them. Probably money to get out of the state and set up in a new place.

  “She’s safe. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Once I got wind of what this guy had planned for her, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. There are some lines a man don’t cross, and hurting a little ’un is one of ’em.”

  Grey saw the worried look Rachel darted his way. She was smart enough to have guessed that it was all he could do not to yank the man up by the scruff of his neck and shake him until there was nothing left.

  At the same time, Grey sensed the man was one who liked to tell things in his own time. If they tried to rush him, he might clam up for good. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” The words cost him, but he forced calm into his voice, and his daughter’s kidnapper seemed to relax.

  “This guy found me through the dark web. Asked if I was game for a kidnapping. I said, ‘Sure. Why not?’ Snatch someone, get paid, return the person unharmed. When he told me that the target was a child, I near backed out, but I was broke and the pay was good. Real good.” He ducked his head as though ashamed of the last.

  “My orders said to pick up the package—that’s what he called her—at the park. The nanny was in on it, just like I told you, and would hand her over to me. No muss. No fuss. All I had to do was keep the little girl out of sight for a few days. I took care of her the best I could. Cute little thing, even though she cried most of the time.” Another head duck.