The earnest young man made Sam smile despite the weight on his heart. “That makes two of us. Maybe three, counting Dorrie.”
“I hope you find her soon. Sam, do you want me to pray with you?”
Sam definitely did not. “I know you mean well, Pastor, but—”
“Not a problem. I want to help, not intrude. Would you like me to come with you to the police station?”
Sam’s smile widened a little. “Pastor, I like your pajamas.” They were tropical blue with little white sailboats all over them. “Did someone give them to you?”
“Yes. My mother.” Pastor Lewinski returned Sam’s smile ruefully, accepting the unspoken hint that he’d better go home and go back to bed. He and Sam shook hands.
“I can’t thank you enough.” Sam felt himself choking up just because someone was willing to help him.
“Not a big deal. Please call me if you need me or just want to talk. Anytime, night or day.” He shook Sam’s hand again and let him go.
Walking to his Silverado alone, photos of Dorrie in hand, Sam assumed at first that he was on his way to the police station. Then he thought of what might be a better plan.
Sam White did not like to jump into things. Settling into the driver’s seat, he gave his mind a minute to change. It didn’t. His second thoughts remained the same as his first.
“Okay,” he said aloud as he revved the pickup. “I know who else isn’t sleeping tonight.”
* * *
It might have been more courteous to make the initial contact via telephone, but Sam decided against it. From his experience of the past several hours he could imagine how the Phillipses felt every time the phone rang, and he didn’t want to add to their misery. Anyway, this can of worms, snakes, anacondas, whatever it might turn out to be, required face-to-face. He didn’t know the exact address, but figured that once he reached the neighborhood, it wouldn’t be hard to find. Just look for cop cars.
Again, Sam reminded himself that he was tired and distraught and needed to drive carefully.
Several cautious moments later, steering his truck into Plover Heights, Sam realized truly how badly he was functioning. If he’d been able to think, he’d have remembered that Plover Heights (actually neither higher nor lower than anywhere else in Fulcrum) was one of those gated communities. Now, facing the man at the guardhouse, he felt dumb, inane, desperate just for being there at this uncivilized hour.
Habitual politeness kept his voice level. “I need to visit the Phillips residence.”
The guard’s nonexpression hardened slightly. “They are accepting no visitors.”
“But it’s important. It might have something to do with the disappearance of their daughter.”
The man frankly scowled. “Your name?”
“Sam White.”
So the Phillipses ended up getting a phone call anyway, while Sam waited at the gate.
It took quite a while, and he did not even think to turn off the truck to save gas. It was still idling when a police cruiser appeared out of Plover Heights and pulled up nose to nose with him. A cop got out, the same skinny baby-faced black policewoman he’d spoken with earlier—what was her name? Officer Chappell.
She looked at him through the windshield, nodded, and came around to his window to talk with him. “They sent me to verify your identity,” she explained. “You’d be amazed what news reporters will say trying to get in. Why don’t you park here and come with me.”
He handed over the computer-printout photographs of Dorrie first. Officer Chappell accepted them as if it was only natural that he should be able to procure pictures of his wife. Somehow her attitude seemed surreal.
Everything felt surreal. Sitting in the back of Officer Chappell’s cruiser, Sam felt his sense of reality bowing under the weight of recent events. He knew he wasn’t a criminal, but he felt he had been captured and taken for a ride and he didn’t know where he was going. Trying to remember that this visit was his idea, he asked Officer Chappell, “Do you have that pink book with you?”
“Yes. I mean, it’s at the Phillips residence.”
“You showed it to them?”
“Yes.”
“And?” Sam leaned forward, trying to get a glimpse of the young woman’s face.
No answer. Quietly the cruiser slipped between large homes set on large lots with much landscaping and security lighting.
Sam spelled it out. “What did they say? Do they know of some connection between their daughter and my wife?”
“I can’t divulge that, sir.” The baby-faced policewoman pulled the cruiser to the side of the street, stopped there, and shut down the engine. “Perhaps they’d care to tell you themselves. I don’t know.” She got out of the car.
Sam followed, at first not understanding; why hadn’t they parked in a driveway? Oh. Because there was no room for another car. The Phillips house would be the one with the U-shaped drive packed with Beemers and Mercedes-Benzes and police cruisers.
Sam tried not to contrast this scene too resentfully with his own empty driveway. His missing wife was an adult who might have gone someplace of her own free will, whereas the district attorney’s missing daughter was a minor who had been reported abducted, her vehicle left behind in the mall parking lot. Naturally more attention was being paid to her case.
Lights blazed outdoors and inside, beating back the night. Sam walked as if in daylight under a portico to the front door, automatically observing its bevel glass inserts, its fanlight, noting that the Phillipses’ money had been invested not just in real estate but in elegance. His escort did not knock or ring a doorbell, but simply opened the door and walked in. Sam followed, realizing that he was expected.
Very much so. Every head turned as he followed the young policewoman into a large family room; Sam felt multiple stares upon him. Trying not to stare back, he glimpsed several kinds of uniformed authorities, and some men and women who might be servants, and others who might be family members on standby.
Again, Sam tried not to compare this scene with his own empty living room. If he had called his parents, they would be on their way this minute, rushing from Colorado to be with him. It was his own doing that he had decided not to call them until morning, to let them sleep. Lord willing, Dorrie would come home before—
Hope hurt almost worse than doubt. Sam quashed the thought and made himself focus on the people he had driven over here to talk with. They were not hard to spot: a middle-aged couple sitting close together on a camelback sofa. Sam recognized the man’s face from news photos. And he recognized the pink scrapbook lying open in the woman’s lap.
Sam strode over to them. The man, Don Phillips, stood up and extended his hand, scanning Sam with a quiet, serious look. Giving me the once-over, Sam thought, making his own assessment of the other while they shook hands. He liked this man’s firm grip and steady eyes. The district attorney was making him feel as if they were colleagues in a very serious case. Which, in a way, they were.
“I’m Don Phillips,” the big man introduced himself humbly but unnecessarily, “and this is my wife, Pearl.”
Sam turned to Mrs. Phillips and offered his hand. But instead of shaking it, she reached up from where she sat and clasped his hand in both of hers. Sam saw tears in her eyes.
“This was made with love,” she said, releasing his hand to gesture at the pink scrapbook in her lap. “It was put together with so much love and care. If my daughter is with your wife, she’s in very loving hands. I feel absolutely certain of that.”
It took Sam’s breath away, the way the woman spoke straight to the emotional heart of the matter, brushing aside preliminaries and practicalities. Dorrie did that sometimes, and it always had the same effect on him. He stood speechless.
“Mr. White, won’t you sit down?” Pearl Phillips’s voice, heavily burdened, nevertheless
held steady. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
Sam had never drunk coffee in his life. Having been raised Church of Latter-Day Saints, he still avoided caffeine in any form. But he heard himself saying, “Yes, thank you. I’d like that very much.”
Some woman behind him said, “I’ll get it.”
“Thank you. Mr. White, please make yourself comfortable.”
These people had manners the way he did, the way some people had bad habits. Sam sat in a wingback chair facing Don Phillips, who had resumed his seat close beside his wife. Glancing at the book in Pearl Phillips’s lap, Sam suddenly knew. He just knew.
He knew what shameful secret had happened in Appletree.
But Sam seldom if ever spoke on impulse. Success required caution before courage. Sam asked, “Could I take another look at that?”
Pearl passed him the Juliet book with both hands, as if putting a baby into his arms. Sam opened the scrapbook again to the most recent photo of Juliet Phillips.
Once again it was as if a young Dorrie, younger even than the Dorrie he remembered from college, smiled at him from the flowered pastel page.
This girl was Dorrie’s daughter. Had to be. Sam knew it the way he knew floor under his feet.
Not that he didn’t feel floor, earth, et cetera, quaking a bit, having had no idea Dorrie had ever borne a child. He barely heard a woman’s voice asking him something. Repeating. A question, whether he wanted cream and sugar in his coffee, and never having drunk coffee, he didn’t know the answer. He couldn’t think what to say.
He looked up to find Pearl holding his coffee. He said, “Thank you,” took it carefully by the saucer, lifted the cup to his mouth, and drank. The dark stuff was unpleasantly hot and tasted bitter. Like medicine. Sam couldn’t imagine how anyone enjoyed drinking this stuff, yet he swallowed it down, almost emptying the cup before he set it aside and looked at Don and Pearl Phillips.
Both watching him. But also, he thought, to some extent watching over him. In them Sam sensed both caution and sympathy.
Sam said, “Dorrie never told me she had a baby.”
Pearl said earnestly, “We’re very grateful to her for giving us Juliet. Or not giving us, exactly, because she didn’t know us—”
“And she wasn’t ever supposed to know,” Don Phillips interrupted with some edge. “Mr. and Mrs. Birch were supposed to tell her the baby had been put up for adoption. Period.”
“She was very young,” Pearl murmured. “The mother, I mean. Dorrie.”
“We assumed she’d go off to college the way most kids do, marry some guy from California or someplace, move out of state.” Now Don Phillips spoke softly, as if others in the room—family, servants, police standing by to trace telephone calls—were not supposed to hear. “We never figured she’d end up living right here in Fulcrum.”
Struggling with an increasing sense of unreality, his comprehension lagging, Sam said nothing.
Don Phillips asked him, “Do you know how she found out?”
Sam shook his head.
“Or when? How long ago? Did her behavior change?”
Sam cleared his throat, then said rather hoarsely, “You think she took off with your daughter.”
“The police are checking out that possibility, yes.”
Sam clutched the arms of his chair. He just barely managed to keep from lunging to his feet, or shouting, or otherwise reacting on impulse. Instead he shook his head. “No,” he said almost calmly as he kept shaking his head no, no, no. “No, Dorrie wouldn’t do that.”
“We’re not accusing her.” Pearl Phillips reached toward him. “We have every sympathy for her.”
“Thank you. But you don’t know her. Dorrie is a churchgoing, law-abiding, good . . .” Good woman who had a secret past? Sam fell silent, wondering how well he himself knew his wife.
“Sam, we just want Juliet back,” Pearl Phillips said, her soft voice clotted with emotion. “We won’t care who did what—”
Sam interrupted. “You’re wrong about Dorrie.”
“I’m just going with a gut feeling,” Don Phillips said, leaning toward him, “and my feeling is, you and us, we’re in this together.” The guy was starting to sound like a politician. “You just want your wife back, and we just want our daughter back safe and unharmed—”
“Dorrie would never hurt anyone!” Realizing that he was beginning to yell, Sam stood up. “I’d better leave.”
“No, please.” Don Phillips stood also, with a hand out to stop him. “I understand how you feel, but—”
Someone tapped Sam on the elbow. He turned.
There stood the baby-faced black policewoman. “Word just came in on your wife’s car, sir,” the young officer blurted with unprofessional excitement. “A caller reports the Kia apparently abandoned in a damaged condition. The odd circumstance—”
“Where?” Sam demanded.
“On the sidewalk, sir, not the street, that’s what’s peculiar—”
“Where!” Sam nearly shouted. “Fulcrum?”
“Oh. No, sir. Quite a ways from here, actually. Little town called Appletree.”
SEVEN
Sitting on the backseat of the van, I sucked another cherry candy, feeling ill, while I clutched Juliet’s little blue blinking doodad in one hand to hide it from the man—Him, the one I could scarcely bear to think about—in the driver’s seat. To avoid looking at Him, I studied the side of Juliet’s head. My beautiful daughter. He’d hit her on the cheek. I didn’t see a bruise. If she ever got lupus, she’d bruise easily.
I hoped she’d never get lupus.
I hoped she’d live long enough to never get lupus.
He had hit her. And He planned to do worse than that to her. To both of us.
He and Pandora.
Shifting the van into first gear, He began to turn it around.
Simultaneously, as if we had just sashayed into an automotive square dance, around a corner and onto Main Street slewed another vehicle, this one flashing a blue light a good bit brighter than the one I hid in my hand. I turned to look: A police car was pulling up by my Kia. And just before the van swung into the shadow of the library, I glimpsed the silhouetted form of a woman standing on that corner. An actual human being, far too late.
Where did this madman at the wheel of the van plan to take us?
His U-turn completed, He gunned it toward the street.
But before He got there, the van stalled.
Cursing, He turned the key to start it again.
The starter cranked, but the engine didn’t respond. My heart revved instead, racing with hope for—something, a stay of execution, a spanner in the abductor’s plans, maybe even a rescue—as the van drifted to a stop behind the erstwhile library. In the shadow of the building. Out of sight of the people on the corner.
Three more times, swearing, He tried to get the van started.
No go.
He pounded the steering wheel with His fist. Then He swiveled in His seat to confront me, His face a looming mask of shadows in the night. “You!” His left hand shot toward me. “Bitch, what did you do to my van?”
My entire oversized body somehow relocated out of His reach without my consciously moving. I squeaked, “Nothing!”
“You tell me or I’ll kill you.”
“I didn’t do a thing!” I cried quite sincerely. We were talking about engine trouble, and I hadn’t touched His engine. Certainly, I had meant to, but His alarm system had stopped me. Bless my muddled mind, I had completely forgotten about the wad of Kleenex I’d stuffed up His tailpipe.
He must have accepted my genuine stupidity in this regard, because He slewed away from me, cursing, and slammed out of the van.
A few long strides took Him around the hood. I stayed where I was, not about to go anywhere withou
t Juliet. There wasn’t time to say anything to her, but the instant He opened my door, I decided, I would scream like a steam whistle. If the cop was still at the corner, he couldn’t see the van back here, but with any luck he, or the woman who had been standing by my car, might hear—
As if He had heard me thinking, He opened Juliet’s door instead, and with a lurch in my gut I saw the glint of steel as He pressed that fearsome knife to her neck.
“Not a sound from either of you,” He warned in a low but very convincing voice from the shadows, “or I’ll slice her head off.”
With His left hand He slid my door open. Then He yanked my coat off Juliet, but she kept hold of it with her fingertips as He hauled her out of the van.
Sometime, somehow, He’d released her seat belt. With a remote control in His pocket, maybe. He jostled her into the captive position, her back to Him and His knife poised to slit her throat. She stood there very still with my coat trailing from both hands. From my seat I could see it dragging on the dark ground like a shroud.
I heard Him say, “You, freak face, get out.”
Presumably He was talking to me. Quite slowly I began to bestir my large self to obey. The more time I took, the longer I stretched out the faint possibility of a rescue.
“Move, Goddamn you!”
Obligingly I scooted toward Him, having made a quick but very counterinstinctive decision: I left my purse where it was, on the floor in the shadow of the seat. He seemed not to have noticed it there or realized its significance, but I felt most of my mind clamoring: leave my purse? Leave behind my money, my keys, my pills, my charge cards, my driver’s license, my identity, my selfhood?
That was the point, of course; I didn’t want Him to find out who I was. Yet what if there was something in the purse I needed, or Juliet needed . . .
“Move!” He visibly tightened His grip on Juliet, nudging the razor-edged knife blade closer to her throat. I couldn’t seem to see anything farther away from me than her pale face. That other face—His—half-hidden by her frightened head, was just a pair of wild eyes glaring from shadow.
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