Evidence of Life

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Abby frowned, nonplussed.

  “The attorney for Helix Belle? The one they arrested for embezzling—”

  “I know who he is,” Abby said. Two years ago, Adam Sandoval had been on the legal team for Helix Belle Pharmaceutical when Nick’s law firm had brought suit against them for distributing pediatric flu vaccine that had been tainted and caused the death of one child and irreparably damaged the hearts of a number of other children.

  “Your husband worked with Sandoval,” the reporter said.

  “They were on opposite sides. Nick defended those children. He’s the one who secured the settlement funds for them. He would have no reason to steal—”

  “Oh, there are plenty of reasons, Mrs. Bennett. A half million of them. Surely you aren’t going to tell me it’s a coincidence that the cash, along with Sandoval and your husband, is missing.”

  “That’s enough, Nadine.”

  Abby looked around and saw Dennis Henderson, and she was grateful for his support when he slipped his hand under her elbow.

  He ordered the reporter off the porch, but she kept pace. “Sheriff, you know who Nick Bennett is. Will you keep looking for him and his daughter under the circumstances?”

  “No comment.” The sheriff ushered Abby through the door.

  The reporter wedged her foot into the gap. “Come on, Dennis, I won’t keep her long.”

  “Back off, Nadine,” he said and managed to close the door.

  “My husband had nothing to do with that money,” Abby said. “He was cleared months ago. I can’t imagine why that reporter is asking about that now.”

  “The San Antonio D.A. is concerned your husband’s disappearance and Adam Sandoval’s could be related.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  The sheriff said, “Maybe.” He set his hat on a nearby table and said, “We had a local boy, Tommy Carr, who got a dose of that bad vaccine. It put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Folks in this part of the state are still pretty riled.”

  “We knew someone, too, who was injured,” Abby said. “That’s how Nick ended up representing the families of the victims, but I still don’t see—”

  “This is a small community. Everybody around here knows Tommy and his parents; they kept a close eye on the case. They celebrated when your husband got Helix to take responsibility. Nick Bennett got to be kind of a household name locally. What happened to Tommy was a tragedy, but it would have been a lot worse if your husband hadn’t gone to bat for those kids. The money they were awarded is the only way their families could afford to care for them properly. Now all that is in jeopardy again.”

  “Not because of Nick. He didn’t take that money. Call his law firm, if you don’t believe me. Call the Houston police detectives who investigated. He hated what Adam—”

  “But they were friends, weren’t they? Outside the courtroom, I mean.”

  “Acquaintances. They knew each other in college. Adam called sometimes when he came to Houston, and he and Nick would go out for a beer. But Nick had no idea Adam was embezzling that money. I remember when he was arrested, Nick said he had financial problems. He and his wife were divorcing. He was going to have to pay a lot of alimony. He was desperate.”

  “Did you know Sandoval’s wife? Did you socialize as couples?”

  “Why are you giving me the third degree? My family’s out there somewhere, they could be injured, they need your help!”

  “There are a lot of folks missing, ma’am, and we need to be certain that we’re using the resources we have to assist those whose need is genuine.”

  “What about my daughter? Do you suspect her, too?” Panic thinned Abby’s voice.

  The sheriff kept her gaze.

  “You know something, don’t you?” Abby’s heart stumbled. “What is it? What have you found out?”

  “Nothing. I’m just trying to figure out what direction they might have gone in.”

  “Abby? What’s going on?” Kate came to Abby’s side.

  “He’s asking me about Helix Belle.”

  “Why?” Kate asked the sheriff.

  “I had a call from the San Antonio DA’s office. Obviously the local media got wind of it, since Nadine was here asking questions.”

  “Nadine Betts?” Kate rolled her eyes. “She’s an idiot.”

  “A call about what? What does any of this have to do with Nick and my daughter?” Abby demanded.

  “Sandoval, or a man resembling him, was caught on some surveillance tape on Tuesday outside a bank in San Antonio. He was with another man matching Nick’s description,” Dennis said.

  “No,” Abby said, shaking her head emphatically. “There’s no way it could be Nick. He was in Houston, working. He was home for dinner that evening.”

  “You were with him at his office?” the sheriff asked.

  “No, but I—”

  “I think the drive between Houston and San Antonio is, what? Three, three and a half hours?”

  “Dennis, you do realize this is ridiculous.” Kate wasn’t asking.

  He rubbed a line between his eyebrows.

  “This is just another ploy,” Abby said. “Another way the Helix Belle legal team is trying to get the spotlight off themselves. It’s what they did before. They tried to implicate Nick.” She spoke strongly over the sound of Lindsey’s voice that vied for her attention: We spent last night in San Antonio, Lindsey had said. Dad says we’re taking the scenic route. But the two things, the possibility that Nick had been in San Antonio on Tuesday and again with Lindsey on Saturday, weren’t related, Abby told herself. They couldn’t be.

  “I’m sorry to have to question you this way,” the sheriff said, “but it’s part of my job to look at all the angles.”

  Kate slipped her arm around Abby’s shoulders. “I’m telling you, I’ve known the Bennetts a long time, Dennis. Nick may not be perfect, but he wouldn’t take money from sick kids and run away with it, trust me.”

  “He wouldn’t run away, period.” Abby pulled free of Kate’s grasp. “Not with my daughter. You can’t stop looking for them. Please—” Her voice broke.

  The sheriff stepped toward her; he kept her gaze and reassured her the search would continue. Abby had the sense that he was moved by her plea, that he meant to touch her. He was close enough that she could feel his warmth and smell the starch rising out of the damp creases of his uniform shirt. It was an odd moment, out of time, but Abby was comforted by it. And then it was over. He stepped back, recovering in an instant the aura of his authority, his natural suspicion. He was paid for that, Abby thought. He was a cop, after all, conducting a cop’s business. Nevertheless she wanted to believe him, to believe it was kindness she saw in the gravity of his expression.

  The sheriff apologized again. “It’s procedure,” he said. “Routine in these cases,” he added.

  “Routine?” Abby said. What about any of this was routine?

  * * *

  It was after midnight when Kate led Abby into her guest room and made her lie down.

  “I won’t sleep,” Abby said.

  “At least close your eyes.” Kate pulled off Abby’s borrowed tennis shoes and lifted her sock-clad feet onto the bed.

  “I should call Mama and Louise.”

  “It’s late. Why don’t you just rest now?”

  Abby looked at Kate. “I don’t care what the sheriff thinks or that reporter. They’re way off base.”

  Kate took Abby’s hand. “But it would be so much more interesting if they weren’t. Nadine especially would love it. The biggest thing she ever gets to report is when someone’s cow gets loose. Now a celebrity is missing.”

  “Nick isn’t a celebrity. Why do you say things about him like that? Why did you say that before, that he wasn’t perfect? Why would you put it that way
?”

  Kate groaned softly. “I knew you were mad.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t believe he robbed the settlement fund, too.”

  “Oh, Abby.” Kate sounded hurt and half annoyed, and she had a right to be, but Abby wouldn’t yield. She rose on one elbow to peer hotly at Kate. “Maybe you know something about where Nick was going. Is that it? Do you?”

  “I wish I did, but he’d never confide in me.”

  Abby fell back, crooking her elbows over her eyes. She felt sick with rage and the effort of steeling her nerves to take the next blow. She wondered if she would survive, if she was strong enough. “What if no one finds them, Katie?”

  “Oh, Abby, don’t. Don’t go there.”

  How could she not go there? Not conjecture? What if Lindsey had been chattering a blue streak or complaining? What if Nick’s attention had been drawn from the road? Abby started to see images and plastered her hands over her eyes, but the curtain in her mind rose in spite of her. She saw Nick, distracted, looking at Lindsey. A wider shot of the car picking up speed, sliding into a black, rain-slickened curve. Now, before Abby’s horrified gaze, her Jeep slammed through a guardrail and flew for what seemed like forever before it plummeted, bounced end over end between canyon walls until finally it struck the bottom, where it sat with Nick and Lindsey dead inside it. By the time the SUV came to rest, it would have taken on the same contouring as the boulders it had fallen among. Boulders the color of iced champagne. The color of limestone baking in the sun. The same color as Abby’s Jeep. It would blend in so beautifully with the rock that no one would ever see it, much less the treasure it contained.

  Abby turned on her side, jerking on the sheet, cramming a corner of it into her mouth, and when the cry broke from her ribs, it wasn’t louder than a whimper.

  * * *

  She woke later in a panic, unable to believe she’d slept, uncertain of where she was, and then the sound of the rain reminded her. It peppered the window in wind-driven gusts. Abby pressed her fingertips to her ears, and still she could hear it; its rattling insistence...the never-ending drops forming rivulets, the rivulets making streams, the streams combining into rivers. Rivers rising over their banks. Endless flooding and drowning and dripping and wet. Water sloshing everywhere. She lay staring at the ceiling. Why was she here safe and warm and dry, while her family was out there shivering and alone in the cold and the dark and—

  But she couldn’t do this, couldn’t lie here with her mind spinning through the endless and terrifying loop of her own thoughts. Flinging aside the bedcovers, she got up. There was light coming from the great room, and she went toward it. A man was there, one of the paramedics she’d met earlier. Abby thought his name was Billy. Billy Clyde Coleman. He was sitting on the floor, eating a bowl of chili Kate had made earlier, and watching television. Abby imagined most everyone else was bedded down in the campers she’d seen parked everywhere or else in the bunkhouse. They’d get what rest they could before resuming the search effort at daybreak. But Billy was like her, Abby thought. He couldn’t sleep. She started to speak, to make him aware of her presence, but then she heard her name, Bennett, and her eyes jerked to the TV screen.

  Catching sight of her, the paramedic raised the remote, saying he would turn it off.

  “No!” Abby said. “Please. She’s talking about my family.”

  “—attorney from Houston along with his daughter are among the missing, and at this point they are presumed drowned.”

  “Oh!” The syllable popped from Abby’s mouth, a near shriek. She clapped her hands there. The commentator went on. Abby’s ears were ringing, but still she heard it. Heard the woman say the search effort for her family and the others had been downgraded. Now, rather than a rescue, what they hoped for was a recovery.

  Of bodies, Abby thought. The commentator meant they hoped to recover the water-bloated remains of her husband and daughter. They would then return them to her for burial. And there was even more to be hoped for, according to the commentator. Closure, the woman said. Recovery of the bodies would give a measure of peace to the families and to the community that had suffered such a devastating loss.

  Abby shook her head, no. She said, “No!” and repeated it, “Nonono.”

  Billy came and led her to the sofa. He settled her there and reminded her that the story was unverified. He tried to reassure her. He gave her one of his soda crackers; he brought her a glass of water. She looked straight at him now, at the smooth curve of his cheeks, his relatively unlined brow, and she thought how young he was, not much older than Jake, and she would always believe that was what kept her from weeping. The idea of Jake being put into this position where he would be called on to comfort some hysterical woman.

  She drank a little of the water, set the glass down and wedged her trembling hands between her knees, resisting an urge to lay her head there, too. “I’m okay,” she told Billy. “You should get some rest,” she added.

  He nodded and sat on the opposite end of the sofa, and he was still there an hour or so later when morning sunlight burst roughshod into the room, making Abby blink. Billy turned to her, looking astonished. “Am I dreaming?” he asked.

  “Do you know who Adam Sandoval is?” she asked.

  “The jerk who stole the money from those kids who got the bad vaccine? Yeah, who doesn’t?”

  “Did you know he was missing? Did they say anything about him when you were watching the news?”

  Billy said no. He said he’d heard Adam jumped bail, that he might be somewhere in the area. Billy said, “If that’s true, I hope he drowned.”

  Abby looked into her lap. She would not go there; she would not examine the connection her mind was trying to make between Adam’s disappearance and Nick’s. There was nothing there. Nothing. Nick wouldn’t endanger Lindsey in that way. He couldn’t.

  “It should get easier now,” Billy said.

  “Easier?”

  “The rescue effort, you know, the work should go faster now that the worst is over.” He reddened. “I meant the rain, that it’s stopped.”

  Abby knew what he meant, and she managed a smile. She wouldn’t tell him what she thought, that the worst wouldn’t be over until her family was found.

  Chapter 3

  It was one of those perfect spring days: a breeze fiddled along under a blue umbrella sky while the sun rose, a butter-yellow balloon above the sodden earth. It was the picture of innocence, a child’s crayon drawing. Not one vestige remained of the horrible rain Abby had driven through to get here, and it disconcerted and infuriated her...this weather that lay on her like a blessing, that wouldn’t hurt a fly, that would take nothing from anyone. She felt mocked by it. She paced the length of Kate’s porch feeling she was the brunt of its joke. An awful noise began to build inside her, and when it pushed into her throat, she bit down hard against it, went back into the house and found Kate in the kitchen. “I have to call Louise,” she said. “I can’t put it off any longer.”

  “I can do it, if you want.” Kate switched on the coffeemaker. She’d dragged out the big one, the forty-cupper that she and George used during roundup or rodeo days when they fed and coffee’d dozens of ranch hands, men who bunked with them, who loved to cowboy. Now a lot of those same men were here in a far different capacity, and Abby was so grateful for their presence. As long as they stayed, there was activity and there was hope.

  She opened the dishwasher and began unloading the clean dishes. “As much as I dread it, I should be the one to tell her that her son and granddaughter are missing.”

  “I’ll sit with you then.”

  “I’m worried she’s alone. I wish I knew a friend to call for her, who could be with her. She’ll be devastated.”

  Kate stowed the glasses Abby handed her in the cabinet. “Won’t her housekeeper be there? Maybe she’ll answer. It might help to sof
ten the news.”

  But it wasn’t Louise’s housekeeper who answered Abby’s call. It was Louise herself.

  “There must be more that can be done,” she said through her tears. “You aren’t thinking clearly, Abby. Of course, you aren’t.” Louise blew her nose, and Abby heard the jangle of her bracelets. “I’m coming there.”

  “No, Louise, you can’t.”

  “What? Of course, I can. For heaven’s sake, I’m Nicholas’s mother. I’m Lindsey’s grandmother.”

  “I know, but the roads are still closed. They’re asking people to stay—”

  “I’ll fly then. It will be quicker in any case. You can pick me up in Austin or San Antonio.”

  “The airports are closed, too, Louise. I’m so sorry.” Abby meant it. She and Louise had never had an easy relationship, but that didn’t seem to matter now. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. I promise.”

  “What is going to happen to me?” Louise asked after an uncertain silence.

  Abby closed her eyes. It was no surprise really that even now Louise would be most concerned for her own welfare. “Consuelo is there, isn’t she? Can she stay with you?”

  “Yes, but I mean if Nick is— If he’s—”

  But Abby wouldn’t allow Louise to say it. “They’ll find them,” she said, and she believed it with all her heart.

  * * *

  Jake didn’t make it to the ranch until late on Wednesday, three days after the rain stopped. By then much of the power in the area had been restored, and most of the primary roads and highways were open. Abby saw him from the porch and went down the steps to meet him, and once he was out of his car, she hugged him to her, fiercely, and he allowed it.

  “Anything?” He stepped out of her embrace, looked anxiously down into her face.

  She shook her head and, reaching up, traced her fingertips across his brow. Although he had her paler coloring, he had Nick’s dark hair, and he was as tall as Nick and as broad-shouldered. In fact, Jake’s resemblance to his dad had never been clearer to her than it was now, and somehow it hurt her even as it pleased and relieved her. She said, “The helicopter’s gone up several times, but there’s no sign of them or the Jeep.”