Making Her Way Home

Good. Great.

“Grandparents?”

“She has them,” Ms. Greenway said tersely.

“Do they know her any better than you do?”

“I…don’t think so.”

She didn’t think so. If she didn’t know what kind of relationship her own parents had with her sister and niece, that meant she had no relationship to speak of with them, either. That poor kid’s family was a mess.

He kept asking questions. Had she and Sicily quarreled today? No. Yesterday? No. Recently? No. In the month since her mother died, had the girl tried to run away or otherwise alarmed Ms. Greenway? No, nothing like that. Does she carry a cell phone?

She gave him a startled look. “She’s ten years old! Of course not.”

He’d have pursued the subject, except that even kids who did have a phone might not carry it to the beach.

Had Ms. Greenway noticed anyone else close by today? Seeming to pay attention to them? Maybe watching Sicily or pausing to talk to her?

No. Ms. Greenway was reading and only glancing up occasionally before she nodded off.

She was one hundred percent no help. The whole time he questioned her, she held on to that astonishing poise. Literally, since she never once uncrossed her arms. He kind of wished she would, since the tightness of her grip pushed her breasts up and created a distractingly deep cleavage above the white tank top that also revealed a fragile collarbone and long, slim arms. At least her legs weren’t equally bared; she wore khaki pants that ended midcalf and the kind of sandals sturdy enough to be running shoes except somebody had decided to add cutouts for extra ventilation.

He let the silence spin out, thinking maybe that would shake her. As if to punctuate it, a seagull swooped low overhead and let out a strident cry. She jumped and gave a wild look around. Mike waited, but that was it.

Finally, he conceded defeat. “Ms. Greenway, is there anyone at all Sicily might go to or call if she got scared or separated from you?”

For the first time, he saw despair in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she whispered, and he knew she was ashamed to have to admit it.

Or, like that landscaper John Sullivan, she was playing him.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said abruptly. “I need to speak to some other people.”

By this time, nearly two dozen members of the search-and-rescue organization had arrived and were spread out, combing the park for one little girl in red shorts. He spoke to a couple of the people in charge, then phoned another detective with whom he often worked. Eddie Ruliczkowski answered on the third ring and listened in silence to Mike’s request.

“Yeah, hold on and I’ll do a quick internet search.” With his big, beefy fingers, Eddie had a heavy hand on a keyboard. The keys clattered and he grunted a couple of times before finally saying, “I’m finding an Elizabeth Greenway who owns some kind of event planning company.”

“Event planning? You mean, like weddings?”

“No. Uh, looks like mostly auctions, big corporate shindigs, product launches, sports tournaments.” He was clearly reading off a list. “Team building,” he said with a snort. “Holiday parties.”

“Huh. Anything personal about her?”

“Nothing. All I’m seeing are mentions of her in her professional capacity. She’s a member of Rotary, some women-in-business group… Give me a minute.”

Mike did. Aside from the basic stat that Ms. Greenway was thirty-two years old—only two years younger than Mike—Eddie came up with zip. Elizabeth Greenway had no record of trouble with the law, not so much as a parking ticket.

“Okay,” Mike finally said. “If you have time, keep digging. This whole thing stinks.”

Under any other circumstance, Eddie would have grumbled about having plenty of his own stuff to do. But he’d been around when Nate died. He knew what Mike had gone through and how sensitive he’d be to any case with a child in peril.

Mike looked at his watch—he’d been at the park for an hour. Sicily Marks had now been missing for two hours. The odds that she’d been abducted were increasing by the minute, unless something else odd was going on.

Back to talk to Ms. Greenway, he decided grimly. It might not have been the father’s decision not to be involved in his daughter’s life. It was interesting, if true, that Ms. Greenway had acquired custody only a month ago. Somebody might not have been pleased, whether it was the child’s father or the grandparents. Or were there other family members? He cursed himself for not asking and retraced his steps to the beach.

She stood exactly where he’d left her. He felt a pang of something strange when he saw her planted there, stiffer and less graceful than any of the madrona trees on the bluff above her. He wondered if she’d moved a muscle beyond those required to breathe.

When he reached her, he saw something else. There were goose bumps on her arms and she was quivering. No, shivering. In alarm, he laid one of his hands over hers, clasped the other on her upper arm, and found it icy. She jumped and swung to face him. “What…?”

“You’re freezing,” he said brusquely. This time he wrapped his hands around both her upper arms and began rubbing. “Why didn’t you say something?”

She looked at him with unshaken poise and said, “I’m perfectly…” Fine. That’s what she meant to say, but it didn’t come out because her teeth chattered.

“You’re not.” She was in shock and either hadn’t recognized it or refused to acknowledge her own vulnerability. He urged her backward and said, “Sit.”

“No! I…”

He all but picked her up and sat her butt down on the blanket, which he then gathered up and wrapped around her. Her teeth chattered again and she seemed to shrink. After a moment, she clutched the edges of the blanket and tucked in her chin, turtlelike. Squatting on his haunches next to her, all he could see was her hair, which had swung forward to veil her face.

“Better?” He was trying for gentle, but his voice came out gruff.

Her head bobbed, and after a minute she said, “Thank you.”

“I’m afraid I have more questions.”

She didn’t so much as sigh. She was the toughest read of anyone he’d ever met. After a moment she lifted her head. “You think somebody took her,” she said steadily.

Or that she was never here at all, but he wasn’t going to say that.

“I don’t think anything yet. I’m leaving the search to the experts and preparing for the possibility we won’t find her here.”

A shudder wracked her. The cold again, or a ghost had walked over her grave.

“Dear God.”

“Sicily’s father. Is there any chance he wanted custody?”

“No. He walked out on Rachel and Sicily and never so much as paid child support. I thought… I don’t know what I thought, but after Rachel died I tried to find him and failed. He might even be dead.”

“What’s his name?” Mike produced the small notebook he always carried in a hip pocket and flipped past the pages of notes he’d made earlier at the Sullivan place.

“Chad Marks. I don’t know his middle name. I…never met him.”

“Were they divorced?”

“I don’t know.” Her three favorite words in the world. This time she sounded uncertain, though. “I’m not sure if Rachel ever bothered. She kept the last name. It’s on her death certificate.”

“Okay. What about your parents?”

“Their names are Laurence and Rowena Greenway. They live in Seattle.” He sensed a reserve so deep he doubted she could swim up through it.

He nodded. “Do you have other siblings? Step or biological?”

“No. There’s no one else.”

“Aunts? Uncles?”

“My father has a brother, but he lives in Dallas. I don’t know him well. I doubt Sicily has ever met him. My mother had a brother, too, but he was killed in a small plane crash when I was a child.”

“Was your sister involved with anyone recently?”

“I think,” she said carefully, “men came and went. My impression from Sicily is that none of them stayed long.”

“How did your sister die?”

“It was…an accident.”

His knees were beginning to protest his squatting position, but he didn’t move. He was looking right into those caramel eyes, watching for every deeper swirl, however subtle. “What kind?”

“They think she fell from the ferry.”

“From the ferry? Wait. I remember that,” he said slowly. It had dominated local news recently. He thought it had been the Kingston-to-Edmonds run. The ferry had arrived and no driver showed up to claim one of the cars, which of course created a godawful tangle in trying to unload in an orderly way. Apparently this happened regularly, but usually the missing driver had fallen asleep on one of the bench seats on the passenger deck. This time, workers scoured the ferry from end to end and the woman never turned up.

“Her body washed ashore, didn’t it?”

“Yes. She had some barbiturates in her system.”

“Did she have a drug problem?”

Her lips compressed before she said, “Since she was a teenager. Alcohol and downers. I understand from Sicily that Rachel mostly managed to hold a job, but I suspect Sicily had been handling many of the practicalities of their life for some time. She admitted she was used to being left alone for two or three days at a time.”

He stared at her in exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”

She blinked. “What does it matter?”

“You don’t think that increases the likelihood that she didn’t hesitate to take off without consulting you?”

“No.” Ms. Greenway bit the word off. “No, I don’t. She’s not like that. I did think about it when I couldn’t find her, because she does do things without asking, but not like this. She’s too sensible. Sicily is everything Rachel wasn’t. She looks ten, but inside she’s more like a thirty-year-old who has been on her own for years. She’s not impulsive. Today I was pleasantly surprised that she was willing to join the other kids. I thought of it as her playing with them, but she doesn’t. I don’t think she knows how to play.”

He digested her burst of speech. Her voice had risen toward the end, a hint of passion or even outrage infusing it. For a minute there, she’d almost seemed like a real person. Some pink showed in her cheeks. He’d have liked her the better for it, if he’d totally believed in it.

“Okay. Do you have a phone with you?”

“Yes.” Her head turned. “In my bag.”

“Does Sicily know the number?”

“Of course she does.”

“She’d call it instead of your landline?”

“I don’t have a landline. This is the only way to reach me outside of work.”

“And you’d have heard it ring.”

“I… Oh, God. Not while I was hunting for her.” She dropped the blanket and scrabbled in her purple tote, retrieving a cell phone. After pushing a button, she exhaled. “Nobody has called.”

“Make sure you keep it close now.”

Her look said, Do you think I’m stupid?

The answer was no. He knew she wasn’t stupid. She was something else, but he didn’t know what. Unfeeling? Nuts enough to have made up this entire story? Cold-blooded enough to have killed the kid she didn’t want dumped on her and come to the beach with the intention of claiming the girl had disappeared? He didn’t want to believe that, but couldn’t be sure. There was something off about this woman.

What he couldn’t understand was why pity wanted to take the place of his suspicion.

Frowning, he rose to his feet, looking down at her. She gazed up at him, still fighting to hold on to her composure, but unless he was imagining things some cracks were appearing. Through them, he could see anguish.

Maybe pity wasn’t so unreasonable. If Beth Greenway wasn’t truly unfeeling, if she wasn’t crazy or cold-blooded, then she was damaged in some other way. She had to be. He’d seen people under stress act in a lot of different ways, but never like this, as though nothing in the world scared her more than showing what she felt.

He grunted, turned around and walked away from her. Who was he kidding? The chances were really good that she had something to do with her niece’s disappearance. Sure she knew how to put up a front. That’s what people with something to hide did.

CHAPTER TWO

THE DAY WAS INTERMINABLE. BETH began to doubt her ability to hold in all the terrible emotions moving inside her, but she had to. Every time she felt herself slipping, she dug her fingernails into her flesh wherever she could reach and concentrated on the pain. When she hurt, she could empty herself. She hadn’t had to do it in a long time.

I will not feel.

But she did. Today, most of all, most horrifyingly, she felt helpless. Being always and entirely in control was as basic to her as breathing. She planned everything. Everything.

Except she hadn’t foreseen the consequences of her sister’s death. She might have if she hadn’t been so certain Rachel hated her.

Rachel had hated her. Of course she had. In the end, though, she hated their parents more. Beth should have realized that.

From the moment Sicily came home with her, Beth had battled panic. There was a reason she’d never shared her life with anyone else. And a child…she knew nothing about children. She couldn’t even bear messes at home. She knew she was obsessive, but that’s how she survived. How was she supposed to juggle another person’s needs with her already full schedule and her need for order?

The irony was that in the past week she had begun to relax. Her niece was quiet, organized and trying very hard to fit in. Too hard. Beth could see that, and it made her feel guilty because a kid should be confident she could belong without changing herself. But she could also tell that Sicily was skilled at going unnoticed, which meant she’d worked at it. That caused Beth to feel a rare flash of fury—what kind of men did Rachel keep around, that her daughter had to learn to be invisible? Or had Rachel herself been abusive?

But that, of course, led to more guilt, because Beth could have tried harder to have a relationship with Sicily—Rachel might have given in—and she hadn’t.

Still, even with all the turmoil, they were working out a routine and she was finding her ten-year-old niece unexpectedly easy to live with.

Now this.

Swept by a maelstrom of terror and guilt and that overwhelming sense of herself as small and useless and unable to do anything at all to impact the outcome, she drove her fingernails into the inner flesh of her upper arms.

I will not feel.

It didn’t help at all.

Her initial gratitude to that cop—Detective Mike Ryan—slowly changed to resentment and eventually anger and something even more bitter over the course of the afternoon. It was like food left out, spoiling until it would have sickened anyone who took a bite. She kept thinking there wasn’t a single thing left he could ask her, that he’d go away and leave her alone, but he never went for long. The crunch of footsteps on the pebbles would herald his return. Sometimes she refused to look up until he was right in front of her. Other times she couldn’t help but turn her head to watch him stride toward her. It was hope, she tried to tell herself, that made her look at him. He was going to say they’d found Sicily—she’d taken one of the nature trails and sprained her ankle, or gotten lost exploring in the woods, or… Beth couldn’t think of any other explanations that were innocent, that meant Sicily would be returned to her now, today, safe and sound.

Those small, irresistible spurts of hope might have been part of why she couldn’t help but look at the detective, but they were only part. He stirred something in her. Something dangerous.

It wasn’t that he was a gorgeous man. He had a rough-cut face and hair not quite light-colored enough to be called blond. No talent scout would have grabbed him to be a GQ model. He did have nice broad shoulders and an athletic build and the walk of a man able to get where he wanted to go with speed and no deviation from the path. With that body, he probably would have worn beautifully cut suits well—if he didn’t shed the suit coat, roll up the shirtsleeves, tug loose the tie, scuff the shoes and get the whole ensemble wrinkled.

When he’d hunkered down next to her, Beth had found herself staring at the powerful muscles in his thighs outlined by the fabric of his slacks. He likely ran, or something like that, to keep in shape. People in law enforcement were supposed to stay fit, weren’t they? She doubted he did anything like lift weights to increase muscle definition—his haircut looked barbershop instead of salon and his slacks and rumpled shirt did not resemble the ones worn by the businessmen she often dealt with through work. If Detective Ryan cared about his appearance, it didn’t show.

What he was, was pure male. Dominant male. No question he was in charge from the moment he strode onto the beach. Beth wondered if his superiors ever tried to give him orders.

His eyes were the one part of him she’d call beautiful. They were that rare crystalline blue, untouched by hints of gray or green. It had to be the color that made his every look feel like a scalpel cut. He turned those eyes on her, and she was terrified that he was seeing all the way inside her to the little girl huddled behind the suitcases in the under-the-staircase closet.

She wanted him to go away and never look at her again. After he found Sicily.

She also wanted to stare at him and drink in whatever quality it was that made him seem so strong.

The sun sank behind Whidbey Island. Beth watched it go down as the shadow of dusk crossed the Sound and finally reached her beach. One moment, she could see everything clearly—rocks and dried gray driftwood logs, the peeling red bark of madronas, the weave of the blanket she clutched in tighter and tighter hands. And then, from one blink to the next, the clarity became muffled. Her surroundings were purplish and dim.

She recognized the particular crunch of Detective Ryan’s footsteps.

He crouched beside her, so close she had to look at his face.

“We’re calling off the search for the night.”

“No!” Her voice came out thin and high.

“We’ll resume it tomorrow, although…” His voice was a deep rumble, “I’ll be frank, Ms. Greenway. We’ve covered the park pretty thoroughly. I don’t believe your niece is here.”

“Then where…?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.”

She hated hearing her own words cast back at her. She couldn’t tell on that impassive face whether he’d chosen them deliberately as a slam at her.

He’d kept her updated as the afternoon had waned. Small boats had trawled offshore. They couldn’t be sure Sicily hadn’t gone in the water, but the beach had been crowded enough today he thought someone would have noticed.

Not a single trace of Sicily’s presence had been found. Beth kept telling him that Sicily hadn’t carried anything to drop. She’d worn exactly three items of clothing: panties, red twill shorts and a plain white crew-neck T-shirt. On her feet were a pair of thick-soled flip-flops that Beth had bought her when she first came to stay and it became obvious how inadequate her wardrobe was.

That was it. No towel, no iPod—really? Did people buy cell phones and iPods for ten-year-olds? No sweatshirt tied around her waist, no jewelry of any kind, no cheap camera. Nothing.

They wanted a photo of her, but Beth didn’t have one in her wallet. Rachel had never sent her not-so-beloved sister school photos, even assuming Rachel had wanted or paid for them in the first place. She’d been touched when Sicily offered her a couple of pictures not that long ago.

“I have pictures at home,” she told Detective Ryan rather desperately, “but they aren’t recent ones.” Even she knew they wouldn’t be useful, given how quickly children changed.

“Would her grandparents have something better?”

“I don’t know,” she’d had to say, and hid her wince at the brief expression of disbelief—or was it contempt?—that flashed on the detective’s face before he hid it.

During one of the many stretches where she had nothing to do but wait, she’d tried to think of some other way to say I don’t know.

I’m not aware. Pretentious.

You’d have to ask someone else. He would want to know who, a question to which, of course, she’d have no answer. Or she’d have to say, again, I don’t know.

Not a clue. Inappropriately flippant.

So were her thoughts. But she couldn’t control them, however hard she tried.

“You need to go home,” he told her, with some gentleness this time.

“No,” she said again. “No, I can’t!”

Fingernails. This time she knew she’d drawn blood. I don’t feel. I don’t.

“I’ll drive you,” he said, but already she was shaking her head.

“No, I can drive myself. There’s no need.”

“Then I’ll follow you.”

Staring at his face, she realized he wasn’t offering her an option. He intended to see her home. The grim set of his mouth told her more. He’d want to come in. No, not want; he would come in. He still wasn’t done with her.

And that was when she let herself know what she’d blocked out all day: he doubted everything she’d said. He thought she might have something to do with Sicily’s disappearance.

Nausea rose so swiftly she couldn’t do anything but clap her hand to her mouth and swivel sideways. She retched onto the beach, nothing but bile so acidic it burned her throat and mouth. She couldn’t seem to stop heaving, as though her body was determined to make her give up everything she had.

Not until she finally sagged, spent, did she realize the detective had laid a big hand on her back and was rubbing it in soothing circles. He was murmuring something; she couldn’t make out words. It was more like a croon.

She had a sudden flash of remembering Maria, the housekeeper who’d left—or been fired—when Beth was five or six. A plump bosom, consoling arms, the songs she sang, all in Spanish. In Beth’s life, no one but Maria had ever given her comfort—and that had been so long ago, Beth had almost forgotten what it felt like.

It was the strangest feeling. She marveled at why he would worry about her distress despite the fact that he clearly suspected her of something horrible. It didn’t make sense.

Beth took long, slow breaths: in through her nose, out through her mouth. Her stomach, entirely empty, gradually became quiescent. She focused enough to realize the detective was holding out a can of soda. He must have taken it from her small cooler, unopened since she and Sicily had arrived. Beth seized it gratefully and after rinsing her mouth, took a long drink.

“Ready?” he asked, rising to his feet.

No, she wasn’t ready to leave without Sicily. To drive home to her empty house. The thought sent a shudder through her, but she nodded and let go of the blanket, stuffed her book into her bag and got up. To her surprise, Detective Ryan grabbed the blanket, shook it out and folded it with quick, effective movements. He picked up her small cooler, too, obviously prepared to carry it.

They walked in silence the short length of beach and up the trail. She was suddenly aware that they were virtually alone. The searchers had already been called off. She stopped at the top for one last look at the beach. The tide had long since come in and was turning to go out again. The light was so murky, she could barely make out the spot where she’d spread her blanket, or see the heaps of driftwood as anything but angular shadows. Again, she shuddered.

The parking lot had emptied, too. Toward the campground she could see flickers of firelight.

“You looked there?” she asked.

“Yes. And talked to all the campers. We asked permission to look in their tents and trailers. Everyone let us without argument.”

She nodded dully and unlocked her car. “You don’t have to follow me.”

“Yes, I do.”

Without a word she got in, started the engine and after letting it warm up for barely a minute, backed out of the slot and drove away. He’d catch up to her, she had no doubt. He knew where she lived anyway.