by Jean Barrett
“He was nearly two years old when he disappeared.”
“Wait a minute, the kid in this photo—” He leaned forward to gaze at the picture on the coffee table. Red-gold hair and eyes that were lavender blue. A handsome child, but no two-year-old. “This boy must be five years old, four at the least.”
“Nathanial vanished almost three years ago. And don’t tell me he isn’t alive, because the photograph proves that he is.”
“Three years is a long time when you’re that age. Kids can change so much that—”
“Don’t say it, because I don’t want to hear that either. It is Nathanial in that photo. I know it is.”
“And I was carrying his picture, and that’s supposed to mean something. Assuming you’re right, and this is your son.”
“It does mean something. It has to. There was a reason why you had the photo and my business card, why you came to me like that.”
“Maybe, but what do you expect me to do about it?”
“Help me to learn that reason.”
“Look, I’m sorry your kid is missing, but how am I supposed to help you when I can’t help myself?”
“If we could unlock your memory, then we’d be helping each other.”
She continued to gaze at him with that anxious, hopeful expression in her blue eyes. It was a look that twisted his gut. He couldn’t take it anymore. Surging to his feet, he crossed the room and stood looking out at the river with his back to her, hands shoved into his pants pockets.
Shane. He regretted the name now. It conjured up too strong an image of the movie hero he had borrowed it from. Did she have some sudden, misguided notion that he was going to turn out like that hero? A drifter riding in out of nowhere to save the day?
Hell, he was no hero. He was nothing more than a poor, frustrated lout who couldn’t recover his own memory, never mind a kid who had vanished three years ago.
But there was something he couldn’t ignore. Not after Eden’s emphatic reminder. The photograph had been in his possession, supporting her conviction that his path must have crossed in some inexplicable manner with the boy she was convinced was her son.
Someone he had to reach.
Last night’s urgency that had driven him to Eden’s door came back to him. But what if it hadn’t been Eden he’d needed to reach? What if it was the child? Her child? Too fantastic.
Still, he couldn’t deny her argument. He wanted his memory, she wanted her son. Find the one, and it was possible they would find the other.
He looked over his shoulder. She continued to stand between the TV and the sofa, hands clasped in front of her as she waited for his decision.
“I’m not saying yet that it’s worth a shot. I’m just saying maybe it is. One thing, though,” he went on solemnly. “What if it turns out I had something to do with snatching your kid? That I’m the bad guy in this scenario?”
It was a possibility that already haunted him, but he didn’t tell her that. She had to take him as he was, without the assurances he was incapable of giving her. She understood that.
“I have no choice but to take that chance. Look, my proposal isn’t as hopeless as it sounds. I am a private investigator, remember.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Meaning, I suppose, that you don’t think I can be a very good one, or I would have found Nathanial long ago. Believe me, I tried in every way. But there was nothing to go on. Absolutely nothing. Until now.”
Shane looked again at the river. “Is there a path along the riverbank?”
“Yes.”
“Then suppose you and I walk it, because I’m going to need some more convincing.”
He was restless, wanting to get out of the houseboat. And by the look of the area, there wasn’t much risk of them encountering anyone. He figured Eden would immediately agree to his suggestion, but when she didn’t answer him, he turned away from the window to learn the reason for her hesitation.
He found her eyeing the pistol that was still stuck in his belt. So she still didn’t trust him, was worried by what might happen to her if she went out there in that wilderness with him while he was armed. He guessed he couldn’t blame her. He’d been pretty hard on her.
“The gun isn’t loaded,” he said, taking the weapon out of his belt and placing it on the bar. “I removed the clip after you went into the rest room.”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess I should have known you wouldn’t let me get that close to the gun if there was the chance I could have used it.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want anyone getting shot, and as long as you believed it was still loaded…”
“I’d do what you wanted,” she finished.
He could see by the look on her face she was aggravated he’d been so confidently able to control her with an unloaded gun.
THE PATH, spongy in places from the previous night’s rain, was bordered so thickly by tangled growth it reminded Shane of a jungle, making him wonder if he’d ever had any experience with a tropical rain forest. Still, the path was wide enough to permit them to stroll side by side along its length.
They weren’t out of sight of the houseboat, when Eden, eager to win his cooperation, asked him, “What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with Nathanial’s father. Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. I never knew him. Never even met him, in fact.”
Shane broke step to gaze at her in confusion.
“I know,” she said. “That doesn’t make sense. Maybe I’d better explain everything from the beginning.”
He nodded, prepared to listen to her as they moved on through a grove of tall slash pines.
“Charleston wasn’t always home to me, Shane. I grew up in Chicago. My mother and father are still there operating the home office of the Hawke Detective Agency.”
“There are branches?”
“Six of them in different parts of the country, including mine and the original one in Chicago. The other four are staffed by my brothers and sister.”
“Your whole family are private investigators?”
“In the blood, I guess, which makes what I did understandable, if not very smart.”
“And that was?”
“I went and fell for another P.I. who was in Chicago on a case. I thought what we had was real. Real enough, anyway, that I followed him back to Charleston. We were going to run an agency together, raise a family.”
“And the dream went sour,” Shane guessed.
“I won’t go into the details. Let’s just say I learned in time that he liked women. Lots of women. In the end, he moved on, and I stayed. I no longer loved him, but I did love Charleston by then.” She interrupted her story to apologize to him. “My whole history isn’t what you wanted to hear, is it? But I just thought if you were going to understand what happened…”
“If I get bored, I’ll let you know. Go on.”
“I made a life for myself in Charleston. Opened the agency, bought the houseboat, made friends.”
“Everything but that family to raise, huh?”
“And I wanted that. My brothers and sister were all having babies, everyone around me seemed to be having babies, and…well, I wasn’t.”
Turning his head to gaze at her, Shane thought he could understand her need. It wasn’t easy to define, but there was a nurturing quality about Eden Hawke. He had experienced it last night when she had cared for him so solicitously. She had a woman’s body, too. The kind of lush body that, among other things, made a man think about her in terms of bearing his children.
Hell, where had that come from?
He must have had a strange look on his face, because she was looking at him in puzzlement. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing. You were saying?”
“That I wanted to be a mother. But without the complications of marriage and a husband.”
“An issue of trust,” he said perceptively, wondering how he had learn
ed to be so observant. “Or weren’t you saying in so many words that, after the boyfriend, you were disillusioned in that area?”
“I suppose so,” she admitted. “Oh, I knew what all the arguments were against single parenthood, but I felt I had a lot to offer a child. Believe me, I did agonize over the subject. Examined it from every angle, even considered adoption. But I wanted a child of my own, which is why in the end I decided on a donor.”
“A sperm bank?”
“At a fertility clinic in Charleston, yes.”
“And the outcome was Nathanial.”
“He was the love of my life, until—”
Her voice cracked. He stopped on the path beside her to give her a chance to collect herself, wondering if she would be able to go on. He knew she had to be suffering her loss all over again.
They had paused where honeysuckle vines sprawled over a little spit of land that extended into the river. In the summer the air here would be fragrant with honeysuckle blossoms. But in this season there were only the odors of the river and the moist earth, a pungent blend of moss, decaying vegetation and the swampy smell of the reeds that grew in the shallows.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“Yes, I do,” she insisted, resuming her story as they continued along the path. “There was a playground in the park across the street from the day-care center Nathanial attended. The little ones loved it when they were taken there almost every afternoon.”
“And on one of those afternoons?”
“It was like lightning. One minute Nathanial was there in that playground with all the other kids in his group, and in the next he was gone.”
“And no one saw anything?”
Eden shook her head. “The day-care staff was always very careful, but they’d been distracted by a little girl’s nosebleed. When that was under control, they realized Nathanial was missing. If he’d wandered off, none of the kids had noticed it. They’d all been gathered around the nosebleed.”
She didn’t need to tell him of the frantic hours that must have followed, hours that had lengthened into days, then weeks. He could imagine it all. The search, the questioning of every possible witness, the failure to produce any results. And a mother’s ceaseless torment.
“It was bad,” she said, as though sensing the direction of his thoughts. “You hear all the stories about a parent’s worst nightmare, and they’re true. But what no one ever tells you about is the terrible anger you experience. Anger with the media who write things about child predators and how the victims rarely survive, anger with the police when they tell you there’s nothing more they can do, and, worst of all, anger with yourself because you failed to protect your child. Especially in my case. I was a P.I., and no matter what efforts I made—and believe me, I made them all—I couldn’t find my own son.”
“What about your family? All the other Hawke P.I.’s?”
“They went to the wall for me, every one of them. Were even able to get several promising leads that the police hadn’t discovered. There was one in particular, a woman who was sighted in Seattle with a little boy matching Nathanial’s description. But the trail went cold. They were all of them dead ends.”
“Anything with Nathanial’s biological father?”
Eden shook her head. “Records at sperm banks are absolutely confidential. All the pertinent data of the donors, their characters, histories of health, that kind of thing, are made available to the mothers, but the actual identities are withheld.”
“But under the circumstances…”
“Exactly. Mine was a special case, so the court was able to subpoena the record. They wouldn’t release his name to me, but they did tell me he’d died in a boating accident without ever being aware of Nathanial’s existence. He was a young artist, the only surviving member of his family, so he’d left no one behind.”
“In other words, another dead end.”
She nodded.
They stopped again, this time under the canopy of an ancient live oak festooned with long scarves of Spanish moss. There was an impassive expression on Eden’s face as she watched a snowy egret skim over the surface of the river, but Shane knew that behind that expression were emotions that seethed.
Lost in those emotions as she was, he didn’t think she was aware of him. But when he shifted his weight from one leg to another, she glanced down at his right leg. The one that was responsible for his slight limp.
“If it’s bothering you,” she said in concern, “and you’d like to turn back—”
“Forget the leg,” he said, an edge of annoyance in his voice. “It isn’t bothering me, and, no, I don’t know how I ended up with the scars or the limp.”
She was silent again, one of her hands fingering a strand of Spanish moss that trailed down near her shoulder. After a moment she gave voice to those intense emotions roiling inside her.
“I suppose every mother in my situation refuses to believe her child is dead, and I was no exception. I never gave up hope. Never. But it wasn’t easy. You have this aching void after they disappear. This awful emptiness that won’t go away. So you try to fill it by wondering where they are and what they’re doing at that moment. And if they’re safe and happy. Yes, as awful as it is, you want them to be happy, even if they aren’t with you.”
She was tugging now at the Spanish moss, an unconscious action that expressed her deep anguish. Shane didn’t want to listen to her. It tore his guts out listening to her.
“Never a day went by that I didn’t think of him,” she confessed. “I’d think how I was missing out on all the changes that kids go through at that age. The ways their minds and bodies grow. If he had any memory of me. Somehow that was the worst. Because it was likely that at two years of age he would soon forget all about me. And if that was true—”
She dragged so hard at the strand of moss that it came away from the tree. She looked at it in her hand and then up at him.
“Sorry to go all emotional on you like this,” she apologized, her voice quavering as she turned to him. “It isn’t easy for me to talk about Nathanial.”
Oh, hell, there were tears in her eyes now. He didn’t know how he was supposed to deal with that. But somehow he did. Somehow he found himself reaching out to her, his arms wrapping around her.
She didn’t oppose his action. In fact, she surrendered to it with a sigh of gratitude, dropping the moss and allowing herself to be drawn snugly against his length. He knew she no longer considered him an aggressor to fear and mistrust. Not in this moment, anyway, when he offered the comfort she so badly needed. When it didn’t matter that he was still a stranger who might in some way be connected with the disappearance of her son.
An act of compassion. That was what it was supposed to be, and at first that’s all it was. Shane held her and murmured some awkward nonsense intended to soothe, his hands gently stroking her back.
He didn’t know when it changed. Maybe when he became aware of how perfectly she fit against his chest, how right it felt for her to be there. So right that he wondered fleetingly what it would be like to be her husband for real. Suddenly he was conscious of her softness, her tantalizing warmth and womanly scent. And of his longing to taste her.
Eden must have sensed that change herself. Her head lifted from where it had been nestled under his chin. The pure blue eyes that searched his face were wide and moist, her mouth parted. An invitation? Shane wanted to think so. Wanted to join his mouth with hers, sink his tongue into that sweetness.
Another part of him yearned to be buried inside a more tender area. He ached with that raw need. The swollen evidence of it was something she couldn’t mistake. An insanity, the whole thing, and she knew it even if he didn’t.
“We can’t do this,” she implored.
She was right. Things were complicated enough as it was. They’d only be worse if a surrender to lust got added to the mix. But it wasn’t easy to let her go, to withstand the urge to let his hands slide along the sides of her enticing
breasts as she stepped away from him.
“Now what?” he asked her.
“I was hoping you could tell me. That, having heard my story, maybe you—”
“Could tell you mine? I wish I could return the favor, but nothing you’ve said triggers a recollection, if that’s what you were hoping for.”
“Then you haven’t remembered anything yet? Anything at all?”
“Nothing,” he said flatly.
“Well, look—”
She paused to swipe the backs of her hands across both of her eyes, ridding herself of any remaining tears. In the process she shed the vulnerable mother and became again the professional P.I., all earnest business.
“I think it’s time,” she continued, “that we had help with this. We need to consult a therapist, someone trained in dealing with amnesia. That means going back to Charleston.”
Shane didn’t hesitate. “No, and don’t suggest it again.”
Though he might not understand his refusal, he instinctively knew he couldn’t risk either Charleston or a professional therapist. There was danger in that kind of exposure. But dangerous for who? Himself? Or someone he was shielding?
Eden apparently understood the wisdom in not arguing with him about the idea. She regarded him in a long, speculative silence. Shane had the sudden, uneasy feeling of being a specimen under a lab microscope.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“What?”
“Whatever you’re thinking.”
“It was just something I was remembering. About this woman who lives in the village down the road. Her name is Atlanta Johnson.”
“And?”
“She’s a hypnotist.”
Shane understood immediately what she was about to suggest. “Uh-uh, forget it. No way am I going to be a subject for some local witch doctor.”
“She doesn’t practice that kind of thing. She’s a professional and a very effective one. I’ve seen her in action, Shane, and her sessions have helped people. She even cured someone I know of a smoking habit.”
“Yeah? She ever cure anyone of amnesia?”
