As she walked out onto the wraparound interior balcony and glanced across at Paige’s empty room, Brook took a deep breath, telling herself she had to remain strong. We can get through this. There’s always a way. Wasn’t that the theme of her latest book? If you can release your inner warrior and work towards your true potential, then anything’s possible.
Even getting your kidnapped daughter back.
They’d had the summerhouse built a couple of months after they’d moved in. It was tucked away in the shade of a mature oak tree, beyond the main lawn in the corner of their property, and Brook liked to sit on the rocking chair outside when it was warm enough, watching Paige play and contemplating all that was good in her world. Saturday had been an unseasonably hot day for the beginning of May, and she’d been outside then, reading a book and drinking an iced tea, relishing the time alone for once. Logan had been out coaching tennis to one of his clients, and Paige had been at a friend’s for a sleepover. It was hard to believe that had only been a few days ago. The world had been a completely different place and she hadn’t had the faintest idea of the cataclysmic event coming their way.
Brook checked the framework of the summerhouse, and even the oak tree facing it, to make sure there were no cameras, but there was nothing. Next to the summerhouse, set amongst the shrubs that obscured the brick wall, was the back gate. It led onto a tree-covered hill that ran down to the road on the other side of their property, and was the same height as the wall, at approximately seven feet. The gate was locked and bolted, as it always was. However, that wouldn’t have stopped someone determined climbing over and getting into the house that way. Because of the trees and the space between the houses, they wouldn’t have been seen. The only problem was there was no way they’d have been able to lift Rosa back over it (or Paige, for that matter), so they would have had to leave through the front. The whole thing would have been a very tricky operation, because they were running the risk of being discovered by either Brook or Logan. So either the kidnappers were real risk-takers or they’d known that she and Logan were out and wouldn’t be back.
She frowned to herself and turned to watch as Logan came out the back door, dressed in the clothes he’d had on the previous night, and walked towards her, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, looking more like a condemned man than ever.
Surely he wasn’t that good an actor, she thought. Seeing him now, it was hard for her to believe that he could ever have been involved.
‘Is it safe to talk?’ he asked, stopping in front of her and looking round.
She nodded and stepped forward so that she was close enough to whisper. ‘I’ve checked for cameras. There aren’t any. And I think we need to go to the police.’
Logan shook his head emphatically. ‘No. We can’t risk it. If they find out, we’ll never see Paige again.’
‘We can’t do this on our own. We’ve got a much better chance of finding her with the police helping. They’ve got the resources.’
‘We’ve got to do this on our own. If we get them the money, they’ll release her unharmed.’
‘You see, that’s what I don’t get, Logan. It’s only a quarter of a million they want.’
‘Only? It’s a lot of money, Brook.’
‘But it’s not. This house cost ten times that. And they’d have needed two people to have overpowered Rosa and taken her and Paige like that. That means they’re looking at a hundred and twenty-five thousand each. It’s not enough money for the kind of risk they’re taking and the amount of jail time they’re looking at.’
‘Not all criminals are Einstein, Brook.’
‘Maybe not, but these ones are definitely no fools. So it’s personal. And if it’s personal, they’re going to want to make us suffer. And that means they’re not going to want to give Paige back.’
Logan’s face dropped, as if this had only just occurred to him.
‘Is there anyone you can think of who might hate us so much as to snatch our daughter and injure – maybe even kill – her nanny as well? I know I asked you last night, but I’m asking you again. In fact I’m begging you, for Paige’s sake. Tell me, if there is. We can work through this.’
He met her gaze with an expression that she’d seen him use before, and which was more often than not the prelude for a whopping lie. But still there was the tiniest hint of doubt in his eyes as he said once again that no, he couldn’t think of anyone. ‘No one hates me that much,’ he added hopefully.
‘We need proof that Paige is alive,’ said Brook. ‘Next time they phone, you’re going to have to insist on it. I’m not paying them any money until we know. We have to take back some control in this situation.’
He nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll make sure I ask them.’
‘Don’t ask them,’ she said firmly. ‘Tell them. We need a photograph. One that proves she’s unharmed.’ As she spoke, she wondered what it was that had made a strong, confident woman like her go for a man like Logan: strong on the outside, but weak, needy and narcissistic underneath. It was a question she’d avoided asking herself for years, and she still didn’t know the answer now. Like most people, she was a lot better at psychoanalysing others than she was at analysing herself.
‘They’re not going to like us making demands,’ said Logan. ‘We’ve got to be careful.’
She gave him a withering look. ‘I don’t care. If you want, I’ll take the phone and I’ll be the one to tell them we want proof.’
He shook his head. ‘No. I told you last night. They want to do all the negotiations through me. That means I have to keep the cell.’
Brook frowned. There had to be some reason why they would only talk to Logan, and whatever it was, it made her suspicious. She took a deep breath, knowing she needed to think about this, and started back towards the house.
‘Where are you going?’ he called after her.
‘Where do you think?’ she said over her shoulder. ‘To get the money.’
5
Brook knew it was a total cliché, but she’d never meant to fall in love with a married man.
She and Logan had met, predictably enough, when she’d hired him to give her tennis lessons. She’d spent her formative years in England, after her parents had moved there when she was five, and she’d never learned to play tennis. So when she’d returned to California eight years previously, aged twenty-eight, she’d vowed to take it up. However, since then her game had been flatlining, and Logan had been recommended to her by a girlfriend as a man who could improve it.
From the moment she’d set eyes on him, Brook had felt a strong physical attraction. He might have been close to ten years older than her, but he was a good-looking guy – tall, tanned and well built, with dark, curly hair flecked with only the merest hint of grey and a wide, friendly smile. But Brook knew he was married, so she kept her distance. And to be fair to Logan, so did he. He was friendly and charming, but he was also respectful and avoided physical contact. In fact, he did everything right. She knew that some of his other clients flirted with him, but she didn’t hear any gossip suggesting he was unfaithful.
He was a good coach, too. After three months of twice-weekly sessions her game had improved markedly.
And then one day everything changed. It was a sunny, warm morning in midsummer, and when Logan walked onto the court at the beginning of the lesson, his head was bowed and he looked troubled in a way he never had before. Their interaction had always been very businesslike. Because Brook was so attracted to him, she went out of her way to keep their conversation centred on the lesson itself rather than on personal matters, and she never gave too much away about her own life, or asked too many questions about his. But seeing him like that, she’d asked if he was okay.
‘I’ve had some bad news,’ he answered, ‘and I guess I’m having trouble processing it.’
She’d asked him if it was anything he’d like to share, half-expecting him to say no.
But he’d told her without hesitation. ‘We’ve just found out my w
ife’s got skin cancer. It’s melanoma, and her chances aren’t good.’
Brook had been shocked and sympathetic. She’d told him there was no need to continue the lesson if he’d prefer to be with his wife, but Logan had insisted they carry on. ‘I’d prefer to keep busy,’ he told her. ‘It’s easier that way.’
In hindsight, maybe Brook should have guessed that, by choosing not to be with his wife, it said something less than flattering about Logan’s character. But she hadn’t. Instead she’d read it as stoicism and, ironically, it gave her a new respect for him.
And so over the next few weeks they’d begun to talk about more personal matters. She noticed that Logan’s jaw tightened when he was fighting to contain his emotions, and especially when he gave her updates on his wife’s progress (it wasn’t good, she was going downhill quickly). Looking back, Brook should have noticed that it was odd he never talked about her by name, always preferring to refer to her as ‘my wife’, until Brook finally brought him up on it, and Logan told her that she was called Anna.
But at the time it had never occurred to her that his de-personalizing of Anna suggested that he had deeper, more worrying, personality issues. Instead Brook tried to keep his spirits up by being as optimistic as possible. ‘You can’t let yourself lose hope until the very last breath’ was one of the lines she’d often used in their conversations, and which was lifted straight out of her first book, You Can Be the Hero. She’d really believed it then, too. Now she saw it as the clichéd statement of the obvious it so clearly was, and it made her cringe.
And then one day Logan – big, strong Logan who’d always held it together – had broken down in tears during a lesson. It was late on a cloudy, unseasonably chilly afternoon, and they were alone on the court, with no one to see them. She remembered walking up and putting her arms around him, immediately conscious of his warmth and masculine scent, and she felt an intense, almost animalistic yearning for him that was sudden, unexpected and, most of all, hard to resist.
But resist she did, even as he put his own arms around her and held her close, the strength in his muscles intoxicating to her. The urge she felt to kiss him was close to overpowering. She’d never felt like this about a man, and only when he told her that the doctors had informed them the previous day that Anna’s cancer was terminal – and that she could expect only months, not years, of life – only then did Brook’s lust (because that was in essence what it was) begin to fade, although in her heart she already knew that her resistance was only temporary.
And it was. One evening, a few days later, Logan called her at home. He told her he needed to talk and asked if he could come round. He sounded as if he’d been crying and Brook felt sorry for him. Once again, in hindsight, she should have been suspicious of the fact that he didn’t have other people – close friends – he could talk to, but that was her weakness. Because, in the end, she wanted him to come round, and she justified it in her head by saying that she could give him some good support and advice, knowing that she had nothing to be afraid of with Logan, as he’d always been totally respectful in her presence.
An hour later, he was on her doorstep. He looked tired and down, but he’d dressed well and was wearing aftershave. His eyes were no longer red, if they ever had been.
Brook had known what was going to happen as soon as she let him in, but it hadn’t stopped her. The close hug had come first, accompanied by the talk about how hard Logan was finding everything, how he’d been looking after Anna all day, how he’d just needed to get out; then the staring into each other’s eyes as she told him that he had to be strong, for Anna’s sake; then came the kiss, followed with grim inevitability by the clothes being ripped off.
They hadn’t even made it as far as the bedroom.
Afterwards, both of them had expressed their guilt over what they’d done, but it hadn’t stopped them doing it a second time half an hour later, this time upstairs on Brook’s bed.
Logan had left soon after that, but not before he’d told Brook that, in spite of himself, he had very strong feelings for her. Brook hadn’t replied, but in the end she hadn’t really needed to. Her actions had told him everything he needed to know.
And, of course, when you’ve sinned once, it becomes so much easier to do it again, and very soon, despite Brook’s rather weak protestations, she and Logan had begun a full-blown affair.
The guilt she felt wasn’t easy to handle. It kept her awake at night sometimes. Logan had told her that the guilt was weighing on him, too – and he’d certainly acted like it had been. But that was the whole point with Logan. He was an actor. It had taken her a long time – years rather than months – to realize that he was always playing a part, depending on who he was with. He seemed to have difficulty expressing genuine emotions, and she wondered if, like the businessman client she’d dumped, her husband was incapable of feeling empathy, and if, beneath the surface of his smile, there was nothing there.
Brook had had plenty of chances in those early days to spot the warning signs and terminate their affair. But she couldn’t remember whether she’d not seen them or whether, more likely, she’d chosen to ignore all the negatives. Either way, her failure was why she was in her current situation, driving to the bank in the nearby Carmel Rancho shopping centre to withdraw a quarter of a million dollars in cash, having just phoned Paige’s kindergarten to tell them that her daughter wasn’t feeling very well and wouldn’t be in that day. It had been an almost impossible task to sound cheerful as she’d spoken to Paige’s teacher, Mrs Day, but somehow she’d pulled it off.
‘I love you, baby,’ she whispered aloud in the car as she parked in the lot across from the bank and cut the engine. ‘I’m going to make you safe.’
At that moment, her cellphone rang.
It was Logan and he started talking rapidly. He sounded breathless. ‘They’ve sent me a photo of Paige. I asked for proof of life, like you said …’
Brook felt her heart lurch. ‘Is she okay? They haven’t hurt her, have they?’
‘No, she’s fine. She looks fine, anyways. She’s in a room somewhere. I don’t recognize the place.’
‘Can you send me the photo on WhatsApp?’
‘They told me to delete it straight away and definitely not share it on other phones.’
‘Are you in the house now?’
‘No. I’m in the car.’
‘Then send it to me. They’ll never know. I’ll delete it later.’
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’
‘Please, Logan,’ she said. ‘I’m the one about to get that money. I need to see proof.’
‘Okay,’ he said reluctantly.
‘I’m guessing the kidnappers called you. What did they want?’
‘They wanted to make sure we were getting the money and we hadn’t done anything stupid. They said they were still watching us the whole time.’
Something still didn’t feel right about how the kidnappers were handling this, but in the end Brook was just happy to have it confirmed that Paige was still alive. ‘Was it the same man on the phone as last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘And does he disguise his voice?’
‘He speaks quietly, but he sounds local. Not foreign.’
‘And you don’t recognize it?’
‘No, of course not. Why are you asking me all these questions? I’m trying to give you some good news about Paige.’
Brook took a deep breath and saw her reflection in the rear-view mirror. She’d put on make-up and was wearing a smart suit, wanting to look as businesslike as possible for her visit to the bank, but it was impossible to hide completely her exhaustion and agitation. ‘I know you are,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll send the photo now,’ he said, with a tenderness in his voice that had had been missing too long. ‘She’s going to be okay.’
‘I know she is.’
‘Are you at the bank?’
‘I’m just parking.’
‘Good luck in t
here.’
Brook said goodbye and ended the call, eager to receive the photo of Paige.
She didn’t have to wait long. Less than a minute later her cell bleeped to say she’d received a WhatsApp message. Her whole body tensed as she opened the app and enlarged the photo. For several seconds she was too overcome with emotion to take in what she was seeing. She blinked back tears, slowed her breathing, then examined the picture properly.
Paige was a beautiful child. She had rich, dark hair and golden skin; a round, cherubic face with big brown eyes full of life and innocence; and a cute gap between her front teeth. You couldn’t really see any of that in the photo, though, which was a full-body shot taken from a few feet away. Paige was in an unfamiliar room, with only dark wooden floorboards and a blank wall visible, and she was wearing an equally unfamiliar red-and-white hooded sleepsuit, with the hood bunched up behind her head. She was only half-looking at the camera and her face registered confusion, but not, thank God, fear. At her feet was a small Sylvanian doll’s house with a handful of pieces scattered about it. Other than that, the room appeared empty. There were no clues as to its location or to the identity of the person taking the photo.
But the point was, she was definitely alive. She’d been taken somewhere, put in new clothes and given access to toys. She didn’t look scared. These were all positive signs and, for the first time, Brook experienced an almost elated sense of relief. Maybe they’d even be getting her back as soon as tonight.
But mixed with the relief were nagging questions about the kidnapping. And yet, as Brook got out of the car and retrieved a holdall from the back seat, she pushed such thoughts from her mind.
Paige was alive and, right now, that was all that mattered.
6
Brook had called ahead to the manager of the bank where she’d kept her money for the best part of the last ten years, and he was waiting in the lobby when she walked in.
We Can See You Page 3
