A Hero in Her Eyes

by Marie Ferrarella

  “No need.” There was going to be some bruising there tomorrow, she thought wryly. “You’ve been through a great deal. I wouldn’t be telling you I could help if I felt I couldn’t.”

  He merely nodded. Maybe it was better if he left her alone to do this. It was clearly taking too much out of him. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

  Without waiting for her response, he withdrew and closed the attic door behind him.

  Chapter 6

  “I’d like to see her room now, please.”

  Coming from behind him, the soft voice startled Walker. He saw her reflection in the window he was looking through and realized Eliza must have entered the living room without making a sound.

  Maybe she was an apparition herself, he thought. Someone he’d dreamed up in his unconscious desperation to find Bonnie.

  But he didn’t dream, he reminded himself. Not anymore. Now he just fell into a dark, empty sleep, waking up just in time to get ready to go to work. His life had become all about work now, with little time for anything else. As he saw it, there was no point to anything else, and his recently acquired philosophy concerned his sister and the few people who had the tenacity to hang on and remain his friends.

  “Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  He’d been looking at the breeze move the swing hanging from the tree, the swing he’d put up when Bonnie had begged him to. He’d done it, but only after she’d promised that he had to be the one who pushed her. It had been his way of protecting the little girl.

  As the swing moved now, he could almost see Bonnie on it, laughing, begging him to push her “higher, Daddy, higher!”

  Turning away from the window, he looked at Eliza. “What did you just say?”

  She’d interrupted something, she thought. “That I’d like to see Bonnie’s room, and if you have any videos of her, I’d like to see those, too. Anything of that nature would be helpful.”

  “What does all this have to do with her kidnapping? She was kidnapped, she wasn’t a runaway.”

  She saw impatience creasing his brow. How many times had he smiled in the last two years? she wondered. Probably not very often. “I’m trying to get a feeling for the kind of person she was.”

  The kind of person she was. He didn’t think of Bonnie in those terms. As a “person.” She was a little girl and his daughter. Sunshine in pink toe shoes and pink overalls. Energy, laughter, but not a person. It was a word he associated with someone who was beyond the age of twelve. “How does that help find her?”

  Eliza had the sudden, strong urge to smooth out the crease between his eyes. To touch his soul and make it better.

  Giving yourself too much credit, Lizzie, she mused. “It helps me make a connection.”

  He was still trying very hard to find his way through this new maze he found himself in, using the only tool he had: logic. “A connection between facts?”

  She shook her head. “A connection to Bonnie.”

  Like someone from a psychic hot line, he thought in disgust, annoyed with Eliza, and with himself for actually holding on to the hope that this was real.

  He waved an impatient hand at her. “I’m sorry, this is just too weird for me.”

  She wasn’t put off. “It is for a lot of people.” Eliza followed him as he walked out of the room. “Think of me as an overzealous FBI profiler, if it helps any.” That struck a cord. He stopped walking and looked at her.

  Her eyes met his. “I need to find Bonnie as much as you do.”

  He sincerely doubted that. But something inside Walker wanted to give her the opportunity to convince him. “Why?”

  The answer was simple. “Because she asked me to. In my dream, she was calling out to you, but the message came to me. I’m not going to be able to sleep until I find her.”

  She sounded sincere enough about it, he thought. And if he looked into her eyes, he found himself believing. Believing in all sorts of things. In small, petite women who made outlandish promises no one in their right mind would buy into. The power of dreams and visions and things that couldn’t be explained by anyone employing a rational thought process.

  Desperation, he concluded, had pushed him to the edge of the ledge. “All right, this way.”

  Walker brought her to a sun-drenched room; on a wall were tiny ballerinas all in a row, executing the five basic ballet positions, their small hands resting delicately on a ballet bar on the wall. The pattern was repeated on the opposite wall.

  When she drew closer, Eliza realized that the walls weren’t covered with wallpaper, but murals. Someone had spent countless hours doing this. A woman with blond hair and paint smudged on her face flittered through her mind’s eye. “Someone was very talented.”

  Yes, she had been, he thought, blocking out the sadness. “My wife,” Walker muttered in reply. The half shrug was almost self-conscious. “When I met her, she told me she liked to paint. I thought she meant rooms.” The very slightest hint of a smile came, self-depreciating at its birth. “I guess, in a way I was right.”

  Up close, Eliza inspected the detail. As she did so, she perceived the image of a little girl giving instructions, clapping her hands. Bonnie. “This is beautiful.”

  He didn’t like talking about anything that had to do with Rachel. It hurt too much for too many reasons.

  “Bonnie liked it.” It was an understatement. Bonnie had been thrilled by Rachel’s efforts. If he tried, he could still hear the girl’s squeals of pleasure.

  When he’d packed up everything else, he’d been tempted to have someone come in and paint over the walls. But he couldn’t make himself do it. He knew if he did, it would be as if the final link to his past were blotted out with the last stroke of the brush. That stroke would take away not only his daughter, but his wife, as well. Maybe it was cowardly of him, but he wasn’t prepared for that yet.

  “Yes,” Eliza murmured, moving around the room slowly. “She did. She liked the room very much.”

  He’d left the bed, she noticed. Clearly a young girl’s bed, with a billowy canopy. It had a white eyelet comforter with matching dust ruffle and pillows. Bonnie had been a female down to her tiny toes. If Walker were as callous as he believed himself to be, this would have been placed into storage, as well.

  No matter where she turned, Eliza kept butting up against things that spoke of Walker in one form or another. Now, standing in his daughter’s room, she was getting a definite feeling. Not of the missing girl, but of him.

  “You were happy here,” she said, turning to face him.

  He took it to mean that she thought he was happy in the house itself. His answer was preceded with another careless shrug. “Yeah, maybe.”

  There was no need to tell Eliza that he and Rachel had begun to drift apart. Drift apart so much that his wife had sought solace in someone else’s arms. Rachel had felt so guilty about it, she’d confessed her affair to him, swearing that she would never see the other man again. And that had caused a rift that had never healed. These were things Eliza didn’t need to know. They had nothing to do with Bonnie’s abduction.

  He sought to divert her from any more questions by asking sarcastically, “Is that the house speaking to you now?”

  She stopped running her hand along the comforter and looked at him over her shoulder. “Were you always this cynical?”

  No, once he’d been a great deal happier, a great deal more open. That, too, was something he didn’t want to let her know about, as if in talking about it, he would lose that last little strain forever.

  So instead, he looked at her defiantly. “You tell me.”

  Turning around to face him, Eliza looked intently at him for what felt like a long moment. Walker could feel her eyes delving into him, not invasively like a surgeon’s scalpel, but gently, like the first spring breeze when it softly whispers between the leaves of a tree.

  “No,” she decided, “you weren’t. You came here to live with a great deal of hope, and then something happened.”

&n
bsp; This had been his first house. He and Rachel had bought it as newlyweds with the intention of eventually moving on; but somehow, they never did.

  Walker held his breath, half expecting Eliza to say something about Rachel’s affair. He didn’t want to hear the words, didn’t want to share with anyone the knowledge, the shame that his wife had betrayed him—and that he had driven her to it.

  There was something in his eyes, something she couldn’t read, a barrier she couldn’t surmount. He had a right to his privacy.

  Mentally, Eliza drew back, feeling just the slightest bit shaken. Not because of any secrets that were held in abeyance, but because of the man himself. It was as if his very being was reaching silently out to her. Not bonding, but touching.

  She was letting her work get to her. A smile curved her mouth. It was the kind of work she was forced to bring home with her, no matter what. It wouldn’t remain “at the office” the way other people’s work did, because everywhere she went, she was her own “office.”

  Knowing Walker didn’t want her to press the issue, Eliza turned away from him and slowly began to move about the room again, touching a curtain, laying her hand on a windowsill, brushing by a window seat cushion. Nothing but a sense of contentment came to her in this room. Bonnie had been happy here. If there was some sort of discord between Bonnie’s parents, such as Eliza had sensed from Walker, it never ventured into this room. An invisible barrier kept it out.

  Or perhaps a conscious effort by both parents that their daughter was never to be tainted by the sadness that had found them.

  Eliza also got a vivid sense of something else. “She was a strong-willed child.”

  Each time she told him something he knew, he encountered a wave of surprise. “Yes, she was. How did you— I should stop asking that, shouldn’t I?”

  He was trying to be friendly. It wasn’t easy for him. She appreciated the attempt. “You can keep asking if you like, but I really don’t have any better answers to give you than the one I already have. It’s a feeling I get, being here.” It also reflected common knowledge. She turned once in a complete circle, as if absorbing the very air. “It’s a bright sunny room for a bright, sunny child. Only children are usually pretty strong-willed because they’re accustomed to being the center of their parents’ universe.”

  He’d tried. Quality time was such a pitiful term for what he’d wanted to give his daughter. She’d represented the very best part of him, and he had wanted to give her all of himself. But he’d also wanted to give her things, never let her lack for anything—and that took money. Most of all, he’d wanted to give her the peace of security.

  “Even if one of the parents is always busy?” he heard himself asking ruefully.

  “Even then.” Intuition rather than her gift told her things about this man before her. “When you were home, you gave your daughter all your attention, which is what mattered.”

  “Is it?” He wasn’t so sure of that.

  But if he had doubts—as she saw in his eyes—she had none. With all her heart, she would have wanted to be in Bonnie’s place, to have a tenth of the love, the understanding that child had had. Eliza’s father had been closed off to her even before her mother died, and much more so after.

  “It was to Bonnie,” she told him. “That’s why she’s calling out to you to come rescue her now.”

  How did he put this without sounding like some mindless automaton to be led around by the nose? “Look, if I believe you—is she in any danger? Is that why you’re getting these visions?”

  “Dreams,” Eliza corrected.

  “Whatever.” His impatience with himself and the situation intensified when he saw the slight hesitation on her face. “I have to know the truth—whatever you think it is. I don’t want you holding back.”

  Walker stood back in wonder. Was this really him putting his faith into a soothsayer, a beautiful charlatan—for all he knew—? He’d really reached the end of his rope, hadn’t he? he mocked.

  She told him as much as she was able, as diplomatically as she could. “I don’t know if there’s any new danger, but there is this sense of urgency. As if something might change soon if we don’t find her.”

  “Change how?” He bit back an oath, knowing that losing his temper would serve no purpose.

  “I don’t know.” She saw his thoughts in his eyes as plainly as if he’d said them out loud. “Walker—” she spoke to him as if they’d known each other a long time rather than what amounted to a few hours “—these answers I’m giving you are as frustrating for me as they are for you. I don’t get clear pictures of things, I get pieces I have to arrange into a whole. I wish it were some other way, but it isn’t. I just have to be patient until I can get somewhere.”

  Patient. Patience was the one commodity he didn’t have. It had been lost to him two years ago. “So what do we do now? Where do we go from here? Is watching the videos actually going to be of some help to you?”

  There were times when a glimmer of something she saw, something the victim saw as well, hooked up and sparked a vision, a clue. But she wouldn’t know that until she watched the tapes.

  “They can’t hurt.”

  Yes, he thought, they can. He hadn’t looked at any of the videos since the night after the kidnapping, when he’d discovered that viewing a tape of his daughter, laughing and dancing, always dancing, was just too painful to endure. Rachel had walked in on him as he’d sat in the darkened living room, watching the little blond girl giving him his own private dance recital on the front lawn. Bonnie had moved with surprisingly adult-like grace for a child her age. He remembered hearing Rachel start to cry. The sound had echoed the one locked in his heart. He’d put the tapes away after that.

  Eliza understood what he left unsaid. “You don’t have to watch with me,” she told him gently. “But I need to see them.”

  Somehow, allowing Eliza to view them without him was tantamount to abandoning his child. He couldn’t do that, no matter what seeing them would cost him.

  “I’ll watch them with you.”

  There was no arguing with his stoic voice.

  The picture faded and a blue screen took its place.

  That was the last of them, Eliza thought. There had been a total of fourteen tapes in all, tapes involving Christmases and birthdays and “just because,” and she’d sat through all of them, watching intently. She could see why someone would be drawn to Bonnie. The little girl lit up the screen even when she had just a corner of it. Everything about her drew attention like a high-powered magnet.

  Walker rose from the seat he’d taken beside her, crossed to the VCR. He pressed the rewind button just as he had the other thirteen times. He was surprised to find that he was dry-eyed. He hadn’t expected to be.

  But there was this lump in his throat that made speaking difficult. “That’s the last one.”

  Eliza shifted, trying to ease the tension from her body. She’d been keenly alert throughout the entire viewing, waiting for that one moment when something struck her, came to her. But it hadn’t. She tried to contain her disappointment, confident in the belief that if one thing did not work, something else would.

  “She’s a beautiful little girl.”

  “Yes,” Walker agreed, his back to her, “she was.”

  He was letting despair get to him again, she thought. “Is,” Eliza corrected, standing up. Coming up behind him, she placed her hand on his shoulder. “Bonnie’s alive, Walker. There’s no reason to refer to her in the past tense.”

  He could feel it, actually feel the despair coming for him like a black, insidious goo. Just as it had the last time, before he’d found a way to put the barricades up. Before he’d found a way to preserve what was left of his sanity.

  Angry at being put through all this again, he looked at Eliza sharply. “Damn it, why did you have to come here? Why couldn’t you just have rolled over in your bed, gone back to sleep and left me alone?”

  “Because I’m going to find her.”

>   How could she be so sure? How the hell could this wisp of a woman be so sure of succeeding where the police and the FBI had failed?

  “And if you don’t?”

  She couldn’t believe that the strong vibrations she’d gotten, the clarity and persistent repetition of the dreams, would be for naught.

  There was a reason for everything, she’d come to firmly believe, and she’d had these dreams for only one reason. To find the girl who was calling out in them.

  “That’s not an option,” Eliza informed him quietly but firmly. “I will.” She covered his clenched hand with her own. “We will.”

  He felt it then, felt not just her conviction, but the serenity in which she offered it. Her serenity. For just a shred of a second, her peace spoke to him. Filled him. Made him one with her. He felt all her hope and her certainty.

  He had to be going crazy.

  It would certainly account for what he did next. He had no other plausible explanation as to what possessed him to do it.

  Maybe he could have used the excuse that he wasn’t in his right mind, but that would have presupposed that he was in his mind at all. And he wasn’t. He’d taken complete leave of his senses.

  If not, why else, riding on the cusp of a flare of intense emotion, was he suddenly framing Eliza’s face with his hands? Why else was he tilting that same face up and kissing her mouth? Hard, as if doing so would give him enough strength to continue, to fill his veins with that strength and give him the energy to follow this quest again, this time to a happy conclusion.

  Even under oath he would have had to plead ignorance as to how any of it transpired. But there he was, holding Eliza, lowering his mouth to hers and kissing her. Kissing a woman he didn’t know. This, after not having kissed the woman he did know during the last months they’d had left together.

  There had been no intimate touching, no kissing, no exchange of endearments or gentler emotions of any sort between him and Rachel for several months before Bonnie’s abduction—not since he’d learned of the affair. And there had not been any afterward. The kidnapping had only intensified what had already existed. They’d each gone to their separate corners to grieve, and he had cut Rachel off completely.