“The look on your face, when you came in the bedroom yesterday…”
Emma made her way to the door and into the house.
“I will never forget that look, Em. Or forgive myself for putting it there.”
He hadn’t moved out. Everything was just as she’d left it the day before. Rob’s shot glasses were on the second shelf of the window alcove over the sink. His espresso machine still sat on the counter. And his shoes were underneath the dining-room table—right where he always left them.
Most everything in the townhome—the furniture, the dishes, the mortgage—belonged to her. He’d sold his stuff when he’d moved in because they hadn’t needed two of everything.
“You’re in the same clothes you took with you yesterday.”
She put her purse on the closet shelf. Not far from Rob’s golf clubs. He was that sure of her.
She was that predictable.
“You have clothes at your mother’s house.”
She’d called her mother on her way home, letting Rose know that she’d stayed downtown and had a long rest. She’d assured Rose that she was fine and that she’d call her later. She’d opted out of joining her for dinner and a movie.
Now she wondered if maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea. If she had someplace to be, something she had to do, she could leave without running away.
Chris had had all morning to contact her at his hotel room, but he hadn’t. And he hadn’t returned.
Unlike Rob, she knew when someone was giving her ample time to get out.
“You’ve been out all night.”
Rob’s tone turned accusing as he followed her into the living room, down the hallway and into their shared home office. She had no idea what she was going to do there, but it was a better choice than the bedroom, where she really wanted to be.
Or the shower, where she needed to be.
“Where were you?”
He was standing right behind her. Hounding her. Emma turned and stared him right in the eye. “That is none of your business.”
“You’ve got a hickey on your neck.”
Emma raised a hand to cover the mark. She’d forgotten. Chris had been inside her—for a second time—when she’d admitted that she’d never had a hickey in her life. What had been a hazy recollection crystallized as though a high-powered beam had been pointed at the memory.
“You were with another man!” The astonishment in Rob’s voice riled her. He didn’t have to sound so shocked. Like the idea of another man wanting her was impossible to imagine.
“You’re no better than I am!”
He had that wrong. She’d waited until she was free before she had sex with someone else.
Rob reached out, taking hold of her shoulders, pulling her to him. “I’m sorry, Em. I understand. And I forgive you. I’m actually relieved.” He looked down at her, a sympathetic smile on his lips. “You don’t know how hard it’s been living with someone as perfect as you are. There’s no way I could ever measure up. But now…”
“What do you mean, as perfect as I am?”
“You know!” He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “You live completely on the white side of black and white. You don’t ever mess up. Or do anything unless you know you won’t make a mistake. You have such high standards you make it impossible for a guy to live up to you.”
Emma stepped back forcefully enough to make him let go of her. She’d been crushed that Rob had been unfaithful. He appeared glad that she had been.
“Who was he, Em? Anyone I know?”
More nauseated than ever, Emma walked out of the office. “Get out, Rob. Now. Take your things and get out. The locksmith is on his way.”
“You don’t mean that.” He placed a hand on her arm. Gently. “Please. Let’s talk. We can get through this. I know we can. I know you, Em.”
He did know her. Better than anyone ever had. There was a lot of value in that. A lot of worth.
Chris didn’t know her at all. And didn’t want to.
If she let Rob leave, she’d be alone. Really alone. Did she want that?
“Get out.” The words came from deep within. “The Lock Exchange guy is going to be here soon. Whatever’s still here by the time the locks are changed, you lose.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Yes, actually, I do.” Emma shook inside, scared to death but determined.
She’d done the unimaginable the night before. She’d left a bar with a man she didn’t know. She’d shed her clothes for him, spread her legs for him. And then she’d been left to wake up alone.
Somehow she had to make something good come from that. She had to make the night count. She had to become a changed woman.
“I’m warning you, Em. If you do this, if you really force me out of here, I won’t be back.”
She stood still and tried not to cry.
“I mean it.”
He took a step toward her.
“I know you mean it.” Emma could hardly believe the firmness of her tone. “I am changing the locks and anything that’s left behind, you lose. You’ve had twenty-four hours.”
“Fine, then. But mark my words, you’re going to regret this.”
She faced him one last time, aware of how she must look in yesterday’s clothes with last night’s rumpled hair, smeared makeup and unbrushed teeth. “That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
Emma didn’t take chances.
But apparently the woman she’d unleashed the night before had caught a ride home with her.
CHAPTER NINE
CHRIS TOSSED BACK a few drinks with Jim at his house on Saturday night. The older man had taken a look at his boat and had verified what Chris already knew. He’d shot at least one piston. The Son Catcher wasn’t going anywhere until Chris came up with a thousand bucks and the time to fix her.
And if he kept dipping into his savings, he wasn’t going to have anything left for his retirement.
Not that he had any plans to quit working.
If he couldn’t fish, there wouldn’t be anything left to live for, anyway.
“You don’t come around enough, Chris.” Jim’s wife, Marta, put a plate of fresh crab sandwiches on the table in the enclosed patio and pulled up a stool.
“I don’t want to impose,” Chris said.
“Your folks have been gone almost ten years, and you’ve been here, what, five times since then?”
It sounded so bad when she put it like that.
“I miss our Friday-night dinners.”
Jim had been friends with Chris’s father in high school. When they’d married, their wives had also become close friends. The two couples had shared dinner together every Friday night. And after Chris had been born, the only child among them, he’d become a part of the tradition. One that had continued until his parents’ deaths.
After that, Chris found it easier to be alone.
* * *
EMMA SLEPT ON the couch Saturday night. With the television on.
She wasn’t afraid of burglars. Or of the dark.
She was afraid of herself, that—alone in the queen-size bed, in the room that she’d shared for two years—she’d toss and turn and feel desperate.
She was afraid she’d do something crazy. Like call Rob. He’d be expecting a call. And, in spite of what he said, he’d come back.
She knew him well, too.
Another possibility, a worse one, was that she’d leave the house and go down
to Citadel’s. If Chris made his living there, he’d have to be there more than one night a week. Weekends were the biggest draw.
And if he was booked someplace else, Cody would probably know about that, too.
As badly as Emma wanted to see him again, she knew she shouldn’t. So she didn’t sleep much.
But she caught up on I Love Lucy reruns. And when dawn still took too long to arrive, she put in Pillow Talk, one of her favorite movies from her Doris Day collection. Emma owned every single movie Doris Day had ever made.
She loved them all.
Doris always got her guy. But she never lost sight of who she was in the process. Always remained true to herself.
She was an icon in her day, a woman before her time. The characters Doris depicted were strong women. Women who didn’t need men to complete them, who were successful in their own right and found men to complement them.
Men who were so in love with her characters, that love changed them from playboys into faithful partners for life.
At seven in the morning, as the end credits of Pillow Talk played, Emma reached into the side-table drawer, pulled out a journal—an unused gift from one of her students—and opened it to the first page.
She wrote her name in large black print: EMMA SANDERSON.
And then she started a list.
1. I want to be loved by a man who loves me so much that that love changes him.
She waited for more to come to her, and when nothing presented itself, she closed the journal and put it back in the drawer. Then she went to take a shower and begin the rest of her life.
* * *
AT NINE O’CLOCK Sunday morning, Emma picked up the phone.
Ramsey Miller had given her Cal’s number, after obtaining Cal’s permission to do so. She’d programmed it into the contact list on her cell phone.
She’d let it sit there.
With the push of a button, she made another major life decision.
Her heart was pounding as she waited for Cal to pick up.
“Hello?”
His voice was deep. Distinguished.
“Hello?”
She almost hung up. She had no idea what she was getting into. What kind of Pandora’s box she could be opening. What if the Whittiers tried to sue them?
“Hello?” Cal sounded more perplexed than irritated by the silence on the other end. The young boy she remembered had always been so patient with her and Claire. So willing to listen.
“Cal?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Emma. Emma Sanderson. Detective Ramsey Miller told me that you said it was all right to call and…” I’m a new woman now. Or at least I’m trying to be.
“Emma. I wondered if that was you when I saw the area code and didn’t recognize the number.” There was hesitation in his voice. Not that she could blame him.
“I just… I called to apologize, Cal. I know that nothing I can say will ever make up for what happened to you—and to your father.…”
When she’d been little she’d called Frank “Papa.”
“You have nothing to apologize for, Emma. You were four.”
“Over the years…I’ve thought of you. I could have called, but I didn’t.”
“You wouldn’t have found a number.”
“I might have. And if not, I should have spoken up. Gone to the authorities. Told them that I didn’t think your father did it. I should have been a friend to you, Cal. You were the best friend to me.”
Her throat was dry. Each word was successively more difficult.
“No one was going to believe what you thought, Em. Not without some kind of proof to substantiate your belief. You were a kid. Frank was the only father you’d known. Of course you weren’t going to believe the worst of him.”
“I should have tried harder to convince Mom, instead of always supporting her.”
“I can’t speak to that,” Cal said. “I’ve spent the past twenty-five years hating your mother.”
“I don’t blame you.” What a bizarre conversation. There had been a time she’d never have believed she would ever talk to Cal again. And yet, sitting at the breakfast bar in her kitchen with tears in her eyes, she smiled. Feeling more at home than she’d felt in a very long time.
“I missed you so much. Not just at first, but over the years. I never stopped missing you.”
“I missed you, too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, although it took me a while to admit it.”
“What changed?”
“I’ve mellowed out a bit since I got engaged.”
Emma’s grin grew. “Who’s the lucky woman?”
That started a conversation that lasted more than two hours. He told her about his fiancée, Morgan, and her ten-year-old son, Sammie. He also shared with her how much he enjoyed teaching American Literature and Creative Writing to college students. And then he brought the conversation back to Ramsey Miller. “He needs a DNA sample from Claire,” Cal said. “That’s why he originally went looking for the evidence box.”
“I know.” Emma hadn’t told her mother about the DNA request, the reason for it. She hadn’t told her about the missing evidence, either.
“Did Ramsey explain what was going on?” he asked quietly. “Do you know about Peter Walters?”
A feeling of dread settled in her stomach. “Yeah.”
Detective Ramsey Miller had been on a case, tracking down a missing little girl. He’d followed a lead and found Peter Walters, the fifty-five-year-old kidnapper, and the toddler he’d abducted. Found them before Walters had been able to harm the girl. But, in Ramsey’s words to Emma, she said, “It was clear that it hadn’t been the bastard’s first time at bat.”
“Miller found things hidden beneath the floorboards in Walters’s basement—items belonging to little girls. He’s looking at all cold-case abductions on the East Coast and in the Midwest, testing DNA from the missing children, looking for a match. So far, he’s positively identified four victims,” Cal said softly.
“He told me that he found the stuff in the basement after a confession from Walters regarding what he’d done with one of the victims before and after he’d killed her.”
A confession that, according to the detective, had made him puke.
“He thinks Claire might be the fifth.” Emma’s voice broke on the words. For so long now she’d prayed. On good days, she was able to picture Claire alive and well and happy—unaware that she’d been abducted.
“He’s not sure, Em. From what I’ve gathered, Miller is trying to rule out victims as much as anything. When Claire was taken, DNA testing wasn’t available. Now they can get samples of DNA from a twenty-five-year-old strand of hair. He just needs something of Claire’s, something she touched or wore, to see if he can pull a sample. He wants to either rule Claire out as one of Walters’s victims, or identify her and close her case.”
That scared the hell out of Emma. What would she and Rose do if Claire’s case was closed and their hope was unequivocally destroyed?
How did one go on without hope?
“He’s not working alone on this,” Cal continued. “There’s a Detective Lucy Hayes, from Aurora, Indiana, who’s helping him on the side, without pay. Miller gave me as many details as he could. According to him, he got in touch with Detective Hayes when he tried to check out a box of evidence pertaining to a cold-case abduction in Indiana and found it was already checked out. By her. He told me this only to reaffirm that
he hadn’t just been hounding my father. He wanted me to know that he’s looking closely at every single case. It’s like a quest for him. And apparently with this Hayes woman, too. They want to find Walters’s victims, identify and track down Claire’s abductor, to solve as many of these cases as they can.”
She understood quests. It made her nervous as hell that someone else was exerting as much energy into her sister’s case. Which made no sense. She needed to know what happened to Claire.
“There’s something else, too,” Cal continued softly, on the other end of the line. “Miller also wants to know why the evidence from Claire’s case is missing. Walters couldn’t have taken it. He’s in prison. But did he have an accomplice? Or is there someone else out there involved in Claire’s disappearance who wants to make certain there’s never a chance of getting caught? When Miller called me, it was pretty clear he thought my father or I might have had something to do with the missing evidence.”
The words dug at the hole in Emma’s heart. “Oh, Cal, I’m so sorry. Even after all this time, to be hunted like a suspect…”
She and Rose had a lot to answer for. Too much to answer for.
“There’s no way to make it better,” she said aloud. “If I could change what we did—”
“I’ve made mistakes, too, Em. We all did. We did what we had to do to survive in the only ways we could see fit.”
“You must hate us.”
“I don’t hate you.”
But he’d said he hated her mother. And while she loved Rose fiercely, would protect her fiercely, she couldn’t blame Cal for hating her.
“I need to know who took that evidence, Em. Claire’s DNA could lead us to answers separate and apart from the Walters case. Someone didn’t want her evidence looked at for a reason.”
“I know.” She understood that he was asking her to give Miller what he wanted.
He was asking Emma to face the idea that her baby sister might have died at the hands of a fiend. That she might have suffered horrible atrocities.
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