She blinked three times in quick succession. “No, Wes, he’s camping out at the state park for the weekend. Actually, I thought you were going with him.”
“I was. I mean, I am. I’m there now. Using the pay phone at the ranger station. No signal up here in the wilderness.” He chuckled softly.
She wasn’t laughing. “I don’t understand. Why isn’t he with you?”
“Oh, you didn’t know? We were supposed to meet at Alley’s, but he called and said for us to go on ahead, that he’d meet up with us later at the park. I just wondered if he had an ETA, ’cause we really thought he’d be here by now.”
“He’s not here,” she said softly, and her eyes shifted to Gabe, sitting at the table. He read the look in them, frowned and got to his feet. “Last I saw of him, he was leaving the hospital and heading out to Alley’s to meet you all. What exactly did Sam say when he called, Wes?”
“Said he needed to give a hand to a friend in trouble. Couldn’t say no to a sweet little old lady.”
“A sweet little old lady?” Again, Carrie met Gabe’s eyes. “Thanks for calling, Wes. If you see him or hear from him, have him call me immediately. Immediately, do you understand?”
“Sure. But, Doc, they found out who the kidnapper was, right? Mean old Mr. Kelly. I always knew he was an SOB. I mean, all that’s over, right?”
“I hope so. Right now, though, I’m not so sure.”
She put the phone down and shifted her gaze to the window, gazing across the driveway at the garage. Then she walked to the door.
Gabe was on her heels. “What’s going on? Where’s Sam?”
“He told the guys he had to help out a little old lady in trouble, and that he’d meet them at the park. That had to be around noon. But he never got there.” She opened the door and stepped out onto the deck. Then she went down the stairs and walked steadily toward the garage. “Something’s wrong. Rose’s car isn’t here,” she said. “Come on. Rose? You think Rose has done something to Sam? I thought you liked her.”
“She paid me in cash. Did I tell you she paid me in cash?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Carrie, the case is over. No one’s out there kidnapping innocent kids anymore. Nate Kelly was a monster, but he’s dead. Your nerves must still be raw from all that’s happened, and… Carrie?”
She pulled free of his hand and crossed the driveway, then went up the stairs to the garage apartment. Taking the key she kept hidden under the shade of the outdoor light, she unlocked the door and went inside.
“I think you’re overreacting,” Gabe said.
“I don’t really care what you think. I’m his mother. I know something’s wrong.”
“You should try calling him on his cell.”
“Wes said he’d tried. No answer.” Stepping inside, she gazed around the place, with the rock in the pit of her stomach growing heavier all the time. She walked into the bedroom, saw some books on the neatly made bed, some kind of scrapbook and…
“What the hell is she doing with this?” she asked, moving closer, flipping open the high school yearbook. “Good God, this is our school!” She turned pages rapidly, stopping at the group photo of her son’s class. Several faces were circled in red ink, and two of them had Xs through the circles. Kyle and Sadie. Sam’s face, though, had been circled, then circled again.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed.
Gabe gasped from behind her, and he quickly flipped open the other book, a scrapbook filled with clippings from tabloid trash sheets and legitimate press sources alike—all about the sixteen-year-old murder and the mystery of the missing baby.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. “I can’t believe this. Who the hell is this woman, anyway?”
Carrie tucked the books under her arm and raced out of the apartment, across the driveway and back into her house. She grabbed her phone and hit the preprogrammed number for the hospital, then waited for someone at the nurses’ station to pick up. By the third ring she was pacing rapidly, adrenaline surging so fast it was making her skin tingle. Finally someone answered, and she cut the woman off before she finished her well-practiced greeting.
“This is Carrie Overton. Has my son been in to see Sadie Gray?”
“Oh, hi, Dr. Overton. Yes, Sam was in today—oh, but you remember that. You were here, too. I think he left around lunchtime. Someone said he was going camping.”
“What about after that?”
“No, Doctor. And Sadie’s actually going home tonight instead of tomorrow, so he probably won’t be back. Is anything wrong?”
Carrie lowered her head and pinched the bridge of her nose hard, squeezing her eyes tightly. “I think there might be.” And then she hung up and dialed Bryan’s home number, while Gabe paced to the windows, looking outside as if expecting to see Sam’s giant red SUV come bouncing into the driveway at any moment. But Carrie had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that he wouldn’t see anything of the sort.
Bryan picked up on the second ring, and she blurted her darkest fears without preamble.
“It wasn’t Nate Kelly, Bryan. He wasn’t the one.”
“Carrie?” he asked. “What are you talking about?” Then, “You sound odd. Are you okay?”
A sob caught in her throat. Gabe came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She forced the words out, words every parent secretly believed they would never have to utter. The last words she had ever imagined she would hear herself say.
“Bryan, Sam is gone. My son is missing.”
And then she sank slowly to the floor, as if saying those words had taken the last ounce of strength she possessed. She felt Gabe pry the phone from her trembling, frozen grip, heard him speaking as if from a great distance, giving Bryan the details. But all she could see was an endless black hole opening up before her and sucking her inside.
“He’s gone,” she whispered. “Oh, God, he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone. My baby’s gone.”
16
Gabe felt more helpless than he had ever felt in his life as he paced and waited for the police to arrive.
It was only ten minutes, maybe less, but it seemed like hours before Bryan Kendall showed up at the door. He had obviously been off duty when he’d taken Carrie’s call, and he hadn’t spent the extra time to put on a uniform. He arrived in street clothes, jeans and a sweater in deference to the chill in the air on a September night in Shadow Falls.
Carrie was shaking, pale, weepy, as she met him at the front door. She offered no greeting, just burst into rapid-fire speech. “I don’t know what to do, Bryan. I don’t know what to do. He was supposed to be camping, but—”
“Easy. Just tell me what happened. Start at the beginning. You said Sam was going camping this weekend.”
She nodded. “Wes said he never showed up. He never showed up, and he didn’t come home, either, and it had to be Rose. It had to be!”
She was on the edge of panic, Gabe thought, and he slid an arm around her shoulders, jumping in to try to clarify. “Sam was supposed to meet his friends at Alley’s around noon. But one of them—Wes something—”
“Wesley Haskins?” Bryan asked.
Gabe looked at Carrie, who nodded jerkily and wiped her nose with a wad of tissues she had crumpled in her hand. “Tell him about Rose. Rose did this!”
“I’m getting to that, Carrie.” Gabe went on. “Wes phoned here looking for Sam. Said he’d had a call from Sam telling them to go ahead to the park, that he’d meet them there later. Sam told him that he had to help a sweet little old lady in trouble.”
“Sweet little old lady, my ass. I’ll kill her if she’s hurt my son!”
Bryan frowned at her, then turned back to Gabe for clarification. “Rose is the woman who’s staying in the garage apartment,” he said. “Her car is gone, and when we went up there, we found a high school yearbook with three faces circled, Kyle’s, Sadie’s and Sam’s. Kyle and Sadie had Xs drawn through them.”
“Shit,” Bryan
muttered. And then he said it again in dawning disbelief.
“There were clippings, too,” Carrie blurted. “Clippings about the missing baby and the reward.”
“Okay, okay.” Bryan put a hand on her shoulder. “Look, the cavalry is here,” he said, nodding toward the window, through which Gabe saw other police cars pulling to a stop. “Let me get them moving. I called Cooper, and he’s on his way back. I’ve already put out an APB on Sam’s car, and, honey, you know that thing is going to be easy to spot. It’s practically one of a kind. What was this Rose driving?”
“An old station wagon,” Carrie said.
“Ford, seventy-four or seventy-five,” Gabe filled in. “I never saw it, but Sam told me about it. Brown, with wood-grain sides.”
“You don’t know the plate number by any chance, do you?”
“No.” Gabe looked at Carrie, but she, too, answered in the negative.
“They were Vermont plates, though,” she said. “I did notice that much.”
“What’s this Rose’s last name?” Bryan asked.
Carrie frowned and lowered her head. “McQueen, or so she told me. And she paid me in cash, said she’d left her checkbook at home or something. God, why wasn’t I suspicious of her then?”
“Because who would be suspicious of a sweet little old lady?” Gabe asked. “It still seems pretty hard to believe, if you ask me.”
Bryan nodded. “I’m still not sure this isn’t more than a misunderstanding. Sam is probably out somewhere and just forgot to call, or—”
As quick as a cobra striking, Carrie had him by the front of his shirt and was right up in his face. “My son is missing, Bryan, and that woman has him. Don’t you dare write this off as an irresponsible teenager’s latest stunt, because that’s not what it is. It wasn’t with Kyle and it’s not with Sam.”
“Hey, hey, c’mon, Carrie, it’s me. You know I’m taking this seriously. I like Sam.”
He held her gaze for one long moment, then looked down at her hand on the front of his shirt.
Swallowing hard, Carrie relaxed her grip and backed off. Bryan headed out the door and down the steps to speak with the cops in the driveway below. She watched as several of them headed over to the garage apartment, no doubt to search it for clues. Gabe saw Bryan Kendall get on his cell phone and knew everything humanly possible would be done to find Sam.
He just hoped to God it would be enough.
Carrie looked at him, her eyes red and wet and all but lifeless. “I should tell him the rest of it,” she said. “That Sam is the missing baby from the tabloids, that I’ve been keeping that secret all this time. That you’re probably his father.”
“And how would that help?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I just… I don’t know what to do.”
“Lean on me, Carrie,” he said. “Let’s put our differences aside—although as far as I’m concerned, we don’t have any, but I know in your mind we do. So put them aside for right now and let’s try our best to help each other through this. We’ll get him back. But we need to be strong, sharp, alert. We have to do all the right things, not make any mistakes now. And we’re more likely to mess up if we give in to panic and fear and grief.”
She met his eyes.
“Just forget everything else except this,” he said softly. “You’re his mother. I’m his father. We both love him, and we’ll both do anything we have to do to get him back. Nothing else matters right now.”
She lifted her chin a little higher, nodded hard. “Okay.”
“Good.”
Footsteps on the front deck made them both turn just as the door opened and Bryan came back inside. “We sent a car out to Alley’s when you first called, and they’ve already called in. There’s a car matching the description of Rose’s station wagon parked along Old Route Six, a mile from the ice-cream place. We’re heading out there now.”
“We’re going, too,” Gabe said. He closed a hand around hers as he asked, “Just a car? No…people?”
“Just a car,” Bryan said. “Come on, you can ride with me.”
“We’ll drive. That way we can take off if we need to,” Gabe said. “You ready, Carrie?”
She nodded, a quick, jerky movement, then turned, looking blankly around the kitchen. “I need my phone. In case he calls. It’s in my bag. Where’s my bag?”
“I’ll get it.” Gabe knew where the bag was. It was on a hook by the door, where it always was. Her confusion told him more than anything how hard this was hitting her. Not that he’d needed any evidence of that. He knew she loved Sam enough to die for him. He’d never doubted that at all.
Rose’s station wagon sat on the side of the road. Nothing was wrong with it—nothing readily apparent, at least. The keys were gone, and she’d left nothing inside it to tell the tale of where she was. Bryan’s police issue SUV was pulled up behind the station wagon. The other police vehicle sat just ahead of it, lights flashing. Gabe had pulled his VW Bus to a stop behind Bryan’s SUV, and they had stayed in the vehicle, listening through the open window to the cops talking. He glanced at Carrie now. She still had that dazed look in her eyes. She hadn’t spoken a word the entire trip.
“Are you okay?”
She shook her head.
He wished to God there was something he could do to erase the fear from her eyes, but there wasn’t. She was in hell, and he wasn’t far behind.
Bryan leaned in the window. “It’s registered to a Maxwell Walters from Burlington. We’re trying to contact him now. Meanwhile, I need a physical description of Rose McQueen.”
He looked at Gabe as he said it, probably thinking he was more capable of a coherent answer than Carrie at that point. Gabe could only shake his head. “I’ve never seen the woman.”
“Carrie?” Bryan prompted.
“Sweet,” she said. “Bright smile. Even white teeth. Snowy-white hair. A couple of inches shorter than me, so…five two, five three. Maybe a hundred and forty or forty-five pounds.”
“That’s really good, Carrie. How old?”
She shrugged. “Mid-to-late-sixties.”
Bryan narrowed his eyes. “It’s less and less likely this is another abduction,” he said. “How’s a little old lady going to dart and then move a sixteen-year-old? An unconscious one, at that. Deadweight.”
“Bryan—” Carrie began, but he kept on talking.
“Sadie hit this person upside the head with an iron eyebolt before she made her escape,” he said. “When did you last see Rose?”
“This morning. I took her some cinnamon buns.”
“Did you see any sign of a head injury?”
“No.” Carrie clearly didn’t like admitting it. “But it could have been hidden by her hair.”
“Maybe she was an accomplice,” Gabe suggested. “I mean, she would almost have to be working with someone else, if she did this. How do we know she wasn’t working with Nate Kelly?”
“We’re not ruling anything out.” But Bryan clearly thought they were reaching. Still, even he couldn’t ignore the existence of that yearbook and all those news clippings.
Carrie stared straight ahead, not meeting Bryan’s eyes, and deliberately not looking too closely at the station wagon. “They’ve searched the entire car? There’s no sign of…”
“No sign of anything, hon,” Bryan said. “Not a struggle, not a body, no blood, no weapons, nothing like that.”
She nodded, then refocused, turning her head to scan the gently rolling meadow along the roadside, and the creek beyond. “We should look out there.”
“Right now we’re looking for Sam’s Expedition. Tire tracks suggest someone in a large truck or SUV pulled over near this car, then left again.”
“You should get fingerprints, run them, see if Rose is wanted for anything else,” Gabe suggested.
Bryan looked irritated. “We’re way ahead of you on that. We have a team out at the apartment gathering evidence, and they’ll be here next. We’ll know pretty much right away, once we get the prints
back to the station, whether there were any matches. We’ll have all that before the night is out.”
“I want my son back before the night is out,” Carrie muttered.
“I know you do, Carrie. I know you do.”
“Kendall!” one of the cops shouted. He was leaning against his vehicle, a radio mike in his hand. “We’ve got a location on the Expedition!”
“Where?” Bryan shouted back.
“The pull-off by the top of the falls.”
“All right.” Bryan turned back toward Gabe, but Gabe was already putting the VW into Reverse. He backed up ten feet, then pulled a U-turn and pressed his foot to the accelerator.
Moments later, a police vehicle came screaming up behind him, lights flashing, and then it passed him as if he were standing still. Bryan, in his SUV, trying to beat him and Carrie to the scene. Which didn’t bode well. Gabe wondered if the cop expected to find something bad, something Carrie would be better off not seeing.
When he looked at Carrie’s stricken face, he knew she was wondering the same thing.
“Try not to expect the worst,” he said. “It’ll only make it more likely to happen.”
She shot him a sideways glance. “Is that part of your we create our own reality philosophy?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“So tell me, Yoda, what did I do to create this? What did Kyle do to create what happened to him? What did Sammy do to get himself kidnapped, huh? Tell me that. You think anyone wanted any of this?”
“I never said you get what you want. I said you get what you expect. What you fear, what you focus on. Shouting ‘I want that’ at something is the same as shouting ‘I don’t want that.’ You’re creating it by your attention to it. Period.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“You think?”
“I know. I didn’t create my son being taken from me. My secret coming out.”
“No, but you feared it. For sixteen years you’ve been worrying about that secret coming out. About losing Sam. You can’t pay that much attention to something and not draw it straight to you.”
Kiss Me, Kill Me Page 24
