25 Years

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SOME TIME LONG AFTER DARK, Tina woke from a restless and confused sleep to dim light from the kitchen shining through the door of the enclosed porch. Tom Hunter must still be there. The old alarm clock with glow-in-the-dark markings by Jolene’s suitcase showed that it was after two. She’d taken a sleeping pill around ten but had been awake as much or more than she’d slept. And every time she regained consciousness, the feeling of dread and loss was heavy within her. Her first thought now was of the sheriff. In her mind he’d become the only hope of seeing Jolene again.

  Throwing off the covers she sat up, taking a minute to let the dizziness subside. She’d showered earlier, while Tom and Steve organized a formal search to begin as soon as dawn broke, and was still wearing the sweats she’d put on then, wanting to be dressed just in case.

  No one was talking in the other room. Had Tom left? When was he coming back? Was Steve asleep? He’d collected his stuff from the motel in town and was staying at the cabin with her. Had they left the light on for Jolene?

  Had they heard something and not woken her as they’d promised they would?

  Torn between hugging Jolene’s possessions to her chest and avoiding them altogether, Tina walked quietly to the door, just to make sure there wasn’t something going on that she should know about. Then she’d lie back down, make herself sleep.

  They hadn’t called Jolene’s parents yet. There was nothing they could do at this point, and as Jolene’s father had just had open-heart surgery the year before, they didn’t want to worry him unless they had to.

  Only the light over the stove was on, giving the kitchen a lonely glow amid the shadows. The counters, canisters and bread storage bin, the paper towels and the coffeepot were all just vague shapes in the dimness.

  Steve was awake, his short sandy hair mussed. Still dressed in the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt he’d had on that afternoon, he was sitting at the table, forearms resting on the scarred wood, staring down at his thumbs, rubbing them back and forth in a repetitive, mindless motion. Tears were falling slowly down his cheeks.

  Seeing the depth of his pain, Tina found a strange kind of strength—enough to propel her to him and, when he stood, to put her arms around him and hold on. She was trying to give him something she didn’t have, and needing from him something he could never give her, but she held on anyway. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

  “WHERE’S TOM?”

  “Home. Sleeping.”

  Steve knew he should let go of Tina, but he held her for a moment longer.

  “Talk to me, Tina.” It was late—after three in the morning. They needed rest. He stood by the long wooden table in a cabin he’d visited a dozen times or more, searching for answers that weren’t there.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Tina told him, pulling away. She ran a hand through her hair. “I’ve been over yesterday morning a million times. I keep thinking I must be missing some important fact. Some clue. But no matter how many times I replay everything, I don’t see anything.”

  “I need to talk or risk going insane with the scenarios my mind keeps inventing. Where is she right now?” Steve sat down and glanced over at Tina, her sleep-tousled hair, makeup-free skin, the pain shining in her eyes, and felt tears fill his own eyes again. “What’s happening to her?” He said aloud the question that was torturing him.

  How did a man sit calmly at a table while God knows who was doing God knows what to the woman he loved?

  “You can’t think like that,” Tina said, joining him at the table. “I know it’s hard, but we just can’t. She has to be okay. I have no idea where or how, but she has to be okay. Until we know differently, that’s what we believe.”

  There was no factual basis for her statements, but Steve nodded anyway. He needed the hope.

  “So…” Tina said, looking at him and then away.

  “So…” he repeated. There was so much he wanted to ask her. And yet, nothing he could say.

  “She loves you.”

  Steve slid down in his chair, resting his head along its back edge. God, what a mess his life had become. Where had he been? Why hadn’t he seen?

  “Tell me something, Tina.”

  With an elbow on the table, Tina rested her head against the palm of her hand. “What?”

  “Do you think she ran away? That she left of her own accord?”

  He knew what she’d told the sheriff the previous morning. Had it been the truth?

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I saw the box there.”

  “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know the result, because the stick was facing backward in the cup. But she was prepared. Either way.”

  Relief flooded through him. He’d been so afraid she’d run because he’d forced her to face a situation she didn’t feel ready to face. He could be so damned pushy sometimes. He tried to temper his reactions, not get ahead of himself, but sometimes it was too difficult to sit back and wait. Sometimes, because he was driven to move on, he forgot.

  “I know the result.” Tina’s words were like a shotgun blast in the darkened room.

  “I don’t want to know,” Steve said immediately, before she said too much. “Not without Jolene.” They’d tried for a baby together, and they’d deal with the result together, too.

  Tina’s lips curved upward just slightly at his reply. Nothing close to a smile, but he seemed to have pleased her somehow. She sat up.

  “What if you had to choose—Jolene or a child of your own. Which would it be?”

  Steve frowned. What ifs were beyond him at the moment. “I can’t have a child of my own without her.” He stated the obvious.

  “She thinks you can. With someone else.”

  Steve leaned forward until his eyes were level with hers, staring her straight in the face. “Jolene is my life,” he said. “I want us to have a family, yes, but without her, that’s a moot point to me. She is the breath in my life. She’s that vital.”

  Tina blinked, and blinked again. Her lips turned down and her chin stiffened. When tears appeared, she quickly wiped them away.

  “Do you know that every single month, when she has a period, she hates herself for her inability to give you what you so desperately need?” she asked softly, her voice thick. “The weight of the responsibility she feels for disappointing you has become so heavy it’s crushing her. Do you have any idea how much her heart breaks every single month when she sees that she’ll have to hurt you again?”

  He couldn’t believe it. That wasn’t how it had been at all. It wasn’t even close. Steve shook his head.

  Jolene hadn’t disappointed him. Ever. Most of the time he wondered what he’d done to deserve her, to be the lucky man she’d chosen, above all others, to share her innermost thoughts with, her moments of playfulness, her insights, her inadvertent spurts of ridiculous humor, her gorgeous body.

  How could he have put that kind of pressure on her and not even known he was doing it?

  “She’s not hurting me,” he said softly. “Seeing Jolene, talking to her, is what I most look forward to each day.”

  “Then why have you been spending so much time apart from her?”

  Good question. Hard to answer.

  “Seemed easier.” Cheap, Chambers, really cheap.

  Tina’s raised eyebrows compelled him to say more.

  “Sometimes it felt as though she was withdrawing—emotionally.” Words were difficult; Steve wasn’t in the habit of explaining himself. Even to himself—when it came to matters of the heart. If he became aware of them, he worked more, filled up waking hours with distractions that moved him forward.

  “So you withdrew, too?” Tina was frowning at him.

  “I figured the less time we had together, the more that time would mean. To both of us.”

  Or something of the sort. He’d never actually formulated the concept.

  “I want children,” he said, his eyes once again meeting Tina’s. “But I can live without them. I can’t
live without Jolene.”

  Tina’s gaze changed, clouding with fear and he knew what she was thinking. That he might not have a choice about living without Jolene.

  She had to be wrong.

  “REGION FIVE reporting in…nothing…”

  Tina took another step up the hill, and another deep breath, as the radio at Tom Hunter’s belt crackled yet another negative response. The search had been on for more than two hours, and so far there wasn’t even a hint that Jolene had been anywhere in the vicinity.

  She’d paired up with Tom, and the two of them had spent the early hours of the morning scouring the area where Tina had found the shoelace tip the day before.

  “I’m sure she must have left another sign on the trail,” she said again, scared to death that Tom was going to give up on her—on Jolene.

  Tom, who’d started the morning optimistically, sent her a quick glance that could have conveyed anything from pity to impatience.

  Peering up into the mountains, he started off.

  “Where are you going?”

  “It’s a long shot,” he called over his shoulder, “but I’m going to O’Reilly’s place.”

  Tina sped up, slipping in the leaves as she hurried after him. “Who’s O’Reilly? We’ve been roaming these hills all our lives, Tom. There’s no one up there.”

  “Benton O’Reilly grew up on a remote farm about five miles from here.” Tom didn’t even sound winded as his long legs took the hills as easily as if they were city sidewalks. In full uniform he looked out of place in the woods. Or maybe he just made Tina uncomfortable because she’d never, in a million lifetimes, thought she’d be climbing these hills with a cop—searching for Jolene.

  “He went away to college after World War Two but I’m not sure he graduated. He spent five years trying to educate the public about the degradation of the environment. Very few people were ready to listen. Word is, he eventually grew disillusioned and returned home to Colorado in disgust. He bought some land from the state during an auction some forty years ago. It’s up here, on the remotest part of the mountain.”

  Tom glanced back at her as he spoke, as though to see if she was still with him. He needn’t have worried. Until they found Jolene, she was going to match him step for step. Even without any sleep.

  “He lives up here?” she asked. “In what?”

  “He carved a cave of sorts out of the side of the mountain, then built quite a nice cabin by himself, from logs that he sawed manually. He’s been here ever since, logging his land and ignoring a world that’s slowly killing itself. Most of the locals know him by sight, but few have spoken with him.”

  “We’ve never seen or heard of him.”

  “Well, he definitely exists—no mistake about that,” Tom told her, veering off to the right, further and further from the cabin. As kids, she and Jolene had never been permitted to wander this far away—or any distance further than the sound of their fathers’ car horns—and as adults, they’d only revisited their childhood haunts.

  And then it hit her.

  “You think he’s got her?”

  Oh, God. A man who’d been outside society for more than forty years? Tina started to feel nauseous. And cold.

  “No,” Tom said, digging his foot into a sand pile for leverage as they came to a six-foot wall of mountain that was almost straight up. For every step he climbed, he turned and took Tina’s hand, to help her up behind him. “O’Reilly’s a gentle, if disillusioned, guy who just wants to be left alone. Our best hope is that your friend stumbled onto his place and he’s keeping her safe until help arrives, or until he can go for help.”

  He pulled her up to more level ground, then released her hand. Tina wished he’d held on. “You think she’s hurt then?”

  He stopped, shook his head. “I don’t think anything,” he told her, his expression dead serious. “In my job, committing myself to any one way of thinking means closing my mind to other solutions.”

  Tina nodded, stayed half a foot behind him as they started up again. She’d much rather he’d told her that in his job he saw this kind of thing often and that it always turned out just fine. Or even that it sometimes did.

  THE OLD GUY WAS much as she expected after what Tom had said. Soft-spoken, gentle, with stooped shoulders beneath thin, long gray hair and a beard that reached down to his chest.

  “I haven’t seen a woman such as you describe,” he told the sheriff outside the open door of his cabin. After a thorough once-over when O’Reilly had first come outside to the sheriff’s call, the man had not looked at Tina again, but spoke directly to Tom.

  “Were you out yesterday?” Tom asked.

  “Yes, sir.” The man nodded, pointing to a large flatbed wagon on the side of the yard, half-filled with freshly cut logs. “I’m working the south forty this month.”

  The southern forty acres of his land, Tina surmised, based on the earlier conversation with Tom.

  “Did you notice anything amiss?”

  O’Reilly shook his head. The man’s overalls and flannel shirt were clean, though worn almost colorless.

  Though she kept trying to get a good look inside the cabin, Tina could only see the first few feet of wooden floor. There were no windows—being built into the mountain precluded them anywhere but the front—and the place couldn’t be more than one room. A wooden bookshelf stood along the wall she could see and seemed to be overflowing with tome-size books and manuals.

  “No gunshots? Screams? Nothing?”

  The weight inside Tina increased when she heard Tom’s words. Wouldn’t she have heard Jolene’s scream? Had there been one?

  “You mind if I take a look inside?” Tom asked after the other man once again shook his head.

  O’Reilly winced. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I know we agreed I’d check in once a month and never trespass in the cabin, but these are extenuating circumstances, Benton.”

  “You doubting me, Sheriff?”

  “Not at all, just doing my job. Surely you wouldn’t expect me not to?”

  O’Reilly gave Tom a long stare. “I suppose not.” He sounded resigned. Bowing his head, he said, “Come in. But not her.” He didn’t even glance at Tina. “And wipe your shoes.”

  When Tom complied and disappeared inside, Tina stood in the yard, wishing they could just get out of there and continue searching.

  It didn’t take long for the two men to return, Tom standing tall with his steady and sure gait and O’Reilly, several inches shorter, beside him, shuffling like a man who wasn’t confident of much anymore.

  “…what would be your guess?” She caught the tail end of the sheriff’s question.

  “That she’s unhappy with her life as it’s being lived and sought the opportunity for a clean and utterly complete escape.”

  Tom stopped a couple of feet outside the door, and Tina joined him. “Why do it right then?” he asked with narrowed eyes. “Why here? Why not just drive off into the sunset?”

  “You’d trace a car in a second,” O’Reilly said. “But out here? It’s hard to search and nothing to fingerprint. And there’s as much chance of natural danger as anything else.” He nodded once, as though pleased by his explanation.

  Tina didn’t much like O’Reilly.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ABOUT A QUARTER OF A MILE down from O’Reilly’s place, Tina stopped. Dizzy with fatigue and shock, she needed a moment to register the tiny piece of dirty tissue lying on a leaf, off to her left.

  “Tom! Here!” she cried. She wasn’t imagining this. She wasn’t. Reaching for the tissue, Tina laughed, choked back a sob. “She’s been here!”

  “Don’t!” Tom yelled sharply when she would have picked up the blessed little piece of paper. Leaves crunched beneath his feet as he strode to her side, crouching down with his little plastic bag to store the tissue.

  And when he held it up, he frowned. “This isn’t tissue,” he told her. “It’s a piece of web from tent caterpillars. It’s been knocked loo
se. Look.” He pointed above them, to the off-white substance growing in the V between the branches of a huge tree. Though most of it was firmly attached, a corner of it had pulled loose and was moving slightly in the breeze.

  “It’s tissue from her pocket,” Tina insisted, but staring at that little bag, she wasn’t sure. It could be a piece of tree disease. Or, for that matter, a sun-bleached piece of leaf. Or the top layer of skin from a mushroom.

  Tom’s silence scared her. She couldn’t look at him. And then she did. He was staring right back at her, his brown eyes warmer than she’d seen them. Tina recognized that expression. And hated it. She didn’t ever want to see it directed at her again.

  “Don’t pity me.” The words were sharp out of necessity. Sharpness would kill softness before softness could kill her.

  “I can’t tell you what you want to hear.”

  She didn’t like his honesty any better.

  “You think she’s dead, don’t you?” Tina whispered, the words scraping her throat.

  Tom studied the sky for a moment, then gazed somewhere over Tina’s shoulder. He slid his hands in his pockets, shrugged. “I don’t think she’s okay.”

  She took a step back. Meant to take another, but her feet weren’t steady on the rough earth, her knees weren’t strong. Tina had no intention of falling against this man, any man, didn’t even know she had until her head hit his chest.

  His arms came up around her shoulders. She didn’t want them there. It was wrong and dangerous for her to lean against him—against anyone. Dangerous to need anyone. Perilous to her future.

  “Shh, everything’s okay.” She barely heard the words at first. And when she did, they made her cry harder for their delusiveness. He didn’t think everything was okay at all.

  “I lost my husband.” She couldn’t believe she was saying the words. She didn’t speak of Thad to anyone—except Jolene. It was the number-one unwritten rule of her life. “I lost my s-s-son.” She expanded on her error. “I can’t lose Jolene, too. I just can’t.”