Making Her Way Home

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  “You don’t have any choice.”

  She turned and walked away, toward the sound of voices. She knew he was following, but she couldn’t do anything about that.

  The woman who had been organizing the volunteers yesterday had a clipboard in her hand and seemed to be directing the cluster of people around her. Mike introduced her as Phyllis Chang. She nodded brusquely and went back to what she was doing.

  “I’d like to help,” Beth said, hating how small her voice was.

  Phyllis’s glance went right past her to Mike. She could feel the silent consultation taking place. It made her ashamed and angry. Her stomach churned and her chest felt unbearably tight.

  After a minute, the woman said, “Ms. Greenway, my volunteers are trained. I understand that you want to be involved, but they’re used to working together.” Satisfied that she’d dismissed Beth, she looked around her. “Margie, Chuck, you know where you’re going. Garcia, Fay, I’ve circled in red the area I want you to search.” She handed over a photocopied map with red marker lines.

  So much rage filled Beth, she shook with it. “I can help,” she said loudly. “This is my niece.”

  Two other women had just arrived. Everyone looked at her, their expressions startled and pitying. Did they blame her for Sicily’s disappearance? Of course they did, she realized, even if they didn’t know that the detective suspected her of something much worse than carelessness. They were people who were regularly called out to search for missing children. They probably got so they despised the adults who should have been guarding those children. There was nothing kind or sympathetic on those faces. She felt suddenly as if she were standing too close to a fire. The condemnation singed her as surely as the heat would have. She backed away, one step, two, three—and then she came up hard against something solid.

  The minute the hands gripped her upper arms, she knew who they belonged to, and wrenched herself away. “Don’t touch me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You walked into me.”

  Beth spun away and started walking. After a minute she broke into a run. She’d search on her own. They couldn’t stop her. She had to do something. She thought she might go insane if she didn’t. Yesterday had been torment. She couldn’t do it again, sit there and wait and wait and wait.

  “Ms. Greenway! Beth!”

  She ran regularly for exercise. Mostly on a treadmill, but not always. She was fast. Her bag bumped against her belly as she tore past the concrete-block restrooms and across the paved road toward the thick woods that lay beyond. His feet slapped the pavement behind her. Something like terror joined the rage that impelled her forward. As his running footsteps neared, she put on a spurt of speed and crashed through shrubbery.

  “Goddamn it, stop!” he roared.

  Beth risked a look over her shoulder. He was close, so close…. Her shoulder slammed into a tree trunk and she staggered, trying to keep her balance. But she failed and went down hard, even harder than she had last night when she fell off the log.

  Pain and humiliation washed over her, making the anger and shame even more volatile. She twisted her body so that she was on her rump and then scrambled backward, away from him, even though her palms burned and both wrists and her shoulder hurt enough to bring tears to her eyes.

  Mike Ryan had come to a stop a few feet from her. He was gasping for breath and she was glad, glad, that she’d at least winded him. She’d expected to see anger on his face, but saw something else instead, although she didn’t know what it was.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” He sounded as if he were speaking to an injured wild animal. “Why did you run?”

  Breathing hard, too, she crab-walked a few more feet away from him. He didn’t move, only held up his hands as if to say I won’t touch you. “Are you afraid of me?”

  Yes. The vehemence of her immediate reaction rattled her. Yes! But she shook her head, because she wasn’t, not the way he meant.

  “I know this is hard for you.”

  She shook her head again, inching farther away. He didn’t know. He couldn’t possibly.

  “I do.” He squatted, so he was at her level if a good ten feet distant. “I…lost someone important to me. A child.”

  “And did everyone think it was your fault?” Her voice came out harsh and dry.

  Lines seemed to deepen on his face. “No.”

  “Then you don’t know.”

  He only looked at her. “Is that the worst part for you?”

  Her arms were trembling, supporting her weight. No. No, that wasn’t the worst part. Of course it wasn’t. The worst was the wondering and the fear, followed by the guilt.

  She sat up and bent forward, the pain so awful she didn’t feel the stab in her shoulder or wrists. “No,” she whispered. Behind the curtain of her hair, she said, “I suppose you think I’m crazy.” And maybe she was. She’d become a stranger to herself. She never showed what she was feeling. She’d had to learn to manufacture the responses people expected to see because they didn’t come naturally. And now look at her!

  “No,” he said, in that deep, slow voice that reminded her of the way his hand had moved on her back while she retched. Comforting. “I think you’re scared. I think you haven’t had enough sleep, or enough to eat, and I’ve been pushing you.”

  She swallowed and stared down at her knees. Dark earth and leaves clung to them.

  “We’ll look together. We can be partners.”

  Bitterness gave her the strength to lift her head. “You mean, you can watch me. I won’t be any help at all, because you’ll need to look everywhere I have.”

  “I don’t think you stashed her body out here.” He gestured, taking in the forest around them.

  “Where do you think I put her, then? Managed to push her over the railing of the ferry without anyone seeing? Maybe I pushed my sister, too. Did you ever think of that?” Beth didn’t even know what she was doing or why. Only that she was so angry still. Anger was the cork preventing an even darker emotion from escaping. The terrible fear.

  “Two sets of eyes are better than one.”

  She snorted, knowing when she was being placated. But, really, what were her choices? Go home? She wondered, suddenly, whether she’d have been followed if she had. Maybe he’d wanted her to go so he could find out where she headed.

  “All right,” she said wearily. “I’m sorry. I’m being irrational. I know I am. I’ll go…go sit at one of the picnic tables, if that’s what you want.”

  “No.” He sounded kind now, as he had off and on yesterday. “I want you to help me look. There’s no reason we can’t take a sector.”

  “Shouldn’t you be doing something else?”

  “I’m waiting for phone calls. I can take them anywhere.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “We’ve put out a plea for anyone who was here at the beach yesterday and remembers seeing Sicily to call.”

  “But nobody’s going to call who had anything to do with her disappearance.”

  “Somebody might have seen her get into a car.”

  Beth nodded.

  He rose with that same ease she’d noted yesterday and came toward her, holding out his hand. She scrambled to her feet without taking it. She didn’t like his touch. It was too…something.

  Her shoulder hurt badly, but she didn’t let it show on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll do whatever you want me to.”

  He walked her back to the picnic area where the woman with the clipboard was sending another pair off on their assignment. She watched Beth and Detective Ryan approach, her look both searching and—Beth thought—disgusted. But she didn’t say anything to Beth, only conferred with him and eventually he steered her along the road leading out of the park.

 
It turned out that they’d been allotted a stretch of land just outside the park, thick with alders and vine maples, a few Douglas firs and vast blackberry thickets. They walked slowly, searching the ground for hollows, getting on hands and knees to peer into the blackberries or wriggle under a deadfall. Every thick growth of salal or salmonberry had to be investigated. Where shade had grown deep enough, big clumps of sword ferns could have hidden a lot more than one little girl.

  Within a couple of hours, they were sweaty, dirty and had scratches on their arms and faces. He had to stop a couple of times to answer his phone. Once he turned and looked at her as he was talking, and the weight of his gaze made her skin prickle even though she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  But then she heard him say, “You don’t remember her wearing red?” Pause. “You don’t know who she arrived with?” A few “uh-huhs” later, he said, “Thank you for calling. We may be in touch.”

  When he ended the call, he said, “You’re sure her shorts were red. They couldn’t have been pink?”

  “No!”

  “Did Sicily carry anything down to the beach?”

  She frowned. “Anything?”

  “The cooler? The blanket? You had a tote bag, too, and…what else?”

  She tried to remember. “Nothing. My book was in my bag.” Had Sicily carried anything? “I don’t think so,” Beth said slowly. “She started to reach for the cooler, but I thought it would be too heavy for her. And I already had the blanket draped over my shoulder.”

  “Once you got down there, did she help you spread the blanket?”

  What was the point of these questions? Then she remembered the little bit she’d overheard of his phone conversation. She stiffened. “Those people didn’t realize Sicily was with me.”

  “Assuming we were talking about Sicily at all, and not some other kid.”

  “If it was her, why wouldn’t they remember she wore red shorts?”

  “Do you remember what the other kids were wearing?” he asked, the voice of reason.

  She opened her mouth, then had to close it. Dear God. “No,” she whispered. “I didn’t pay that much attention.”

  “Probably they didn’t, either.”

  “So…were they the family I told you about?”

  “I can’t be sure. They were settled in the vicinity of you, they had four kids with them, they know another girl hung around with their crowd for a little while, and they left shortly before anyone started looking for Sicily.”

  “But…where was she when they left?”

  “They thought she was rejoining her parents a little farther down the beach.”

  “So it wasn’t her at all.”

  He studied her, his blue eyes cool and analytical. “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “You haven’t found anyone…”

  “Who saw her for sure? No.”

  Despair rose in her. “Then why are you even looking?”

  “Sicily Marks is somewhere.” He swept her with one more, hard look. “We’ll find her.”

  * * *

  SWEATY, BLEEDING AND frustrated, Mike took a break to eat the lunch the nearest Grange Hall ladies had brought for the volunteers. While he ate, he kept his distance from Beth Greenway. He wished he could keep his distance from her permanently. She was the most confusing damn woman he’d ever met.

  What had happened today? Ms. Freezer Burn had either begun a major meltdown or she’d faked it. Truthfully, she’d scared the crap out of him when she took off like that. That last sight of her face, bleached pale with her eyes huge and dark with humiliation and pain, was all he could think about as he chased her. Mostly he’d been pissed; she had to know he’d have no choice but to go after her, and that there were more important things he should be doing. And then, man, when he’d seen her terror, when she’d scrabbled away like she thought he was going to rape or beat her… That had gotten to him.

  She’d been subdued ever since. Embarrassed, maybe, or she’d used up her limited emotional content for the day, or she was satisfied that she’d deflected his suspicion into pity? Who the hell knew?

  Fact: he would swear that last night and this morning he had seen real anguish on her face, unlike yesterday when he hadn’t been so sure.

  Fact: not a single person they’d yet found who was at the beach yesterday had seen a skinny, blonde, ten-year-old girl with Beth Greenway. A few men admitted to having noticed the aunt. No one had seen Sicily, unless she was the girl the Bradshaws remembered, albeit they thought vaguely she’d been wearing pink shorts and that she’d headed in the wrong direction when they packed up and left.

  Fact: Sicily Marks’s mother had died, by accident or suicide, barely over a month ago. Dad was a no-show. The grandparents were cold fish. Aunt Beth was either another cold fish or…something else. Pack one box of the kid’s possessions, take it to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, and Sicily’s impact on Beth Greenway’s home would be erased. And that alarmed Mike. Kid gone, stuff gone, problem solved.

  Fact: he didn’t want to believe Beth had anything to do with her niece’s disappearance.

  Fact: he felt wrenching pity and compassion every time he looked at her. When he wasn’t feeling fury that a bunch of strangers cared more about what had happened to Sicily than anyone else seemed to. Except, maybe—and that was a big maybe—her aunt. And, yeah, he felt resentment, too, that Beth Greenway could awaken so many confusing emotions in him.

  Fact: his job demanded that he look hard at everyone closely related to the missing girl. And Beth was closest of all.

  * * *

  SICILY HAD COME UP WITH A PLAN. The man had to open the door eventually, right? Unless he was going to starve her to death, which might work because she was really hungry. Or let her die of thirst, which was possible, too, because she was even thirstier than she was hungry.

  But thinking logically—and Sicily was almost always logical—neither possibility was likely. Why would the guy take the risk someone might see him carrying her in here if he meant to just ignore her until she was dead? He could have hit her over the head and buried her in the woods where no one would ever find her. And he had put a mattress in here, and bedding, and even the bucket, which she had finally had to hurriedly use.

  Anyway, what she thought was that pretty soon he’d open the door and at least shove a bottle of water and maybe some food in. Or else he’d come in here to do something she didn’t want to think about. Something like she’d seen guys do to Mom, except Mom seemed to want to do it, too. But Sicily knew about rape, and that men sometimes abducted little girls because they wanted to do that to them instead of with a grown woman.

  Either way—when she heard the lock make that sliding sound, she’d dash over and flatten herself next to the door. The absolute instant it opened, she’d fling herself out. She’d decided she would go low. That would be a mistake if the man was bent over to push a tray in, but probably he would have food or a bottle of water in his hands. And she was really skinny and she’d catch him by surprise and wriggle past his legs. If he got his hands on her, she’d struggle like anything. She could kick and bite and scream, and all it would take was a loosened grip and she’d run like anything. She could knock furniture in his way. Anything to get to the outer door ahead of him and have the couple seconds she’d need to unlock it and fling it open and run up the few stairs she knew were there and then she’d be outside where she’d have a chance.

  It was the best plan she could come up with.

  Only she couldn’t help herself, she fell asleep. And she didn’t hear the door opening. The first thing she knew, a man was in the room staring at her. She had the creepy feeling he might have been staring for a long time. He had a Burger King bag in his hand and a giant drink from Burger King, too, with a straw already in it. And he said, “You’re probably hungry, kid. So here you g
o.”

  He set both on the floor and backed out while she was sitting up.

  “Wait!” she cried. “I want to know…”

  The door closed, the lock scraped and she was alone again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AT TWO O’CLOCK, MIKE GOT THE call he’d been waiting for all day. In grim silence, he listened to his partner and then asked, “What about Thursday?”

  Sometime during that call, Beth had turned to look at him, caught either by his expression or his tone of voice the few times he spoke. She went completely still, and her eyes dilated.

  To Rulickzkowski, he said, “I need her cell phone records.”

  “I’ll get on it.”

  When Mike snapped his phone shut and hooked it on his belt, she only waited.

  “Tell me about Sicily’s last couple of days.”

  “Last couple…? You mean, before…?”

  “That’s what I mean. Thursday. Friday.”

  Her face changed. “You know she didn’t go to school Friday. How?”

  “You didn’t think I’d find out?”

  “It didn’t occur to me it mattered,” she said stiffly, then corrected herself. “It doesn’t matter. She wasn’t really sick.”

  What a piece of work. “Yeah, then what was she?” He made his voice soft, dangerous.

  “She was upset Thursday. She got a C on a math test.”

  “You told me how smart she is.”

  “Sicily is smart. And she’s always gotten straight As. But I told you how often Rachel moved and Sicily had to change schools. There was no consistency. And all of a sudden she’s in a school district where a really high percentage of the students excel. She’s behind, and for the first time ever she’s surrounded by students who are ahead of her. Friday morning she told me she had a stomachache. I think maybe she did, but that it was because of stress, so I let her stay home, okay?”