A Hero in Her Eyes

He just couldn’t do it to himself again. Coming here was a mistake.

“Never mind, I’ll come back when I have an appointment.” Turning abruptly on his heel, Walker started for the elevator.

“You could make one now.”

Her words reached him just as he was about to press for the elevator.

It was the same low, melodious voice he’d heard coming from the other side of his front door two days ago. The clairvoyant. He hadn’t seen her come out.

Somewhat embarrassed, like a child caught with his hand wedged into the forbidden cookie jar, Walker turned around to discover that Eliza was standing directly behind him.

He hadn’t realized she was so delicate looking. She seemed smaller somehow, more petite. Here, on her home territory, she appeared almost elfin. Or maybe it was just his imagination.

Weren’t elves the ones who were supposed to grant you wishes when you found them in their own lair? Or was he getting that confused with leprechauns? He wasn’t sure. Most of all, he wasn’t sure anymore just what he was doing here.

She’d felt his presence. Sitting in her office, poring over information that ultimately might or might not have to do with Bonnie’s disappearance, she’d suddenly become aware that something had changed. Walker was entering the building.

It would probably spook him if she told him that, she thought with a smile. It had taken her a long time to learn exactly what she could share with someone and what she needed to keep to herself, if she didn’t want them to think of her in the same belittling way her father had.

She’d ventured out of her office, curious to see if she was right, if she actually had sensed his presence, or if concentrating so hard on recovering Bonnie had made her think Walker had come. She’d certainly been hoping that he would. It would make things a great deal less difficult for her to do her job if she had access to Bonnie’s things.

Her job. That was what she’d decided it would be, even as she’d walked away from Walker’s closed front door. Her job. Her mission. To find Bonnie, no matter how long it took. She had to.

Eliza took his hand as if she were drawing out a reluctant child, encouraging him to join the others.

It surprised Walker how delicate her fingers felt against his skin.

It was her job to do that, he reminded himself, to distract him so she could take him where she wanted him to go. Because he’d been a hustler in the practical sense of the word all his life, hustling first for supporters, then for clients, for people to recognize his designs, and then finally for financial backing—he’d come to think of the rest of the world in those same terms. People hustling to convince others that they both needed and wanted the goods or services the other had to offer.

In this case, there was no question that he did. If the services were really legitimate.

That was the doubting Thomas in him, he thought. The practical side that had come by way of his engineer father. The man who had taught him to test twice before he trusted once.

He had yet to really “test” this Eliza Eldridge and her firm.

“You’re in luck—I’m in between cases,” Eliza informed him quietly, still holding his hand in hers.

She’d probably say that whether or not it was the truth. “Right, luck.”

He was still skeptical. Not that she blamed him. He really hadn’t witnessed anything that would make him change his mind. “Don’t underestimate luck, Mr. Banacek. It plays a large role in almost everything.”

His resistance to the whole ludicrous idea of someone being clairvoyant was beginning to strengthen. It was all he could do to keep the sarcasm bubbling within him to a simmer. He wasn’t usually rude, but this had brought out his vulnerability, and he was going to do everything he needed to in order to protect himself.

“So you do what, hand out rabbits’ feet to your clients or tell them to gather up a bouquet of four-leaf clovers, just to be on the safe side?”

She’d been subjected to a great deal worse and had long since learned that fear and ignorance colored the way people spoke. And Walker was afraid. Afraid to believe. Afraid to be disappointed. And afraid of finally, unequivocally, giving up.

If he had given up the way he thought he had, he wouldn’t have come.

“It’s not going to make you feel any better to be antagonistic, Mr. Banacek. I just meant that every decision we make has some effect on the way our individual timelines are formed.” She smiled into his eyes, trying to give him some of her faith. “A lot of good things have happened to people because they were in the right place at the right time.”

“And a lot of bad things have happened to people because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he countered.

There was nothing quite so daunting as when reason joined forces with pessimism, she thought. But she was up to the challenge.

“Still luck,” she replied. “Just this time, bad. Would you like to step into my office?”

He glanced toward the elevator. It would still be here later, he reasoned. He could always leave.

“Sure.” The shrug was careless. “I’m here, why not?”

Eliza smiled. “Why not, indeed?”

He sounded as if he hadn’t made the effort to get behind the wheel of his car and seek out ChildFinders. As if he’d just decided, on a lark, to drop by the offices. But she refrained from pointing that out as she led him down the hall to her office.

The office that she occupied had a view of the ocean, and in the evening, the sunset. Together, they made for a breathtaking scene—whenever she was in the office to witness it. She was comforted to know that the view was there whenever she was in desperate need of tranquillity.

Eliza paused by her door, waiting for Walker to step through.

“Opened or closed?” She indicated the door.

He was busy looking around. It looked like an ordinary office, much smaller than his. There was no incense; there were no candles, no voodoo masks, not even a cluster of books about out-of-body experiences by ghosts who roam the earth. Instead, the only books she had lined up on the single shelf that ran along the sill of her window concerned investigative techniques. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Maybe he was a little of both. “I’m a private person.”

“Closed,” she concluded with a nod, shutting the door behind her.

Rounding her desk, she sat down behind it. She would rather have sat beside him, unencumbered by the desk, but she knew that he preferred the traditional. Besides, she knew she still made him uneasy. Gentling techniques took time.

Folding her hands before her, she smiled at him. “I take it I passed muster.”

“Excuse me?”

Maybe the term was too old-fashioned for him. It’d been one her great-aunt liked to use. “You’re here. That means you had me and or the agency investigated. I’m just assuming that our passing grade was impressive enough to you to bring you here.”

Walker shifted in his chair. More body language for her to read, he upbraided himself. He didn’t like being so easy to read. Moving to the edge of his chair, he locked eyes with her. “Do you do that sort of thing all the time?”

“Do what?” she asked.

“Read a person’s thoughts?”

Even as he asked the question, Walker didn’t know if he actually bought into that on any level. It seemed like a bunch of garbage.

But there was just something about her eyes, about the way she looked at him, into him, that made him think Eliza Eldridge could actually see his thoughts if she was so inclined.

Maybe he was losing his mind, he thought. Given the stress he’d been under—and was still under, if he was honest with himself—it was small wonder. Not every man lost his child and then his wife within a few months of each other.

“I can’t read a person’s thoughts, Mr. Banacek. Like everyone else, I read expressions, and, at times, I sense thoughts or emotions. Perhaps a little better than most people.” The smile she offered him somehow made her statement almost intimate. “But I don’t read minds, cards or the bumps on your head if you have any. That’s strictly carnival stuff. The business the people in this agency and I are in is a very serious one, and I for one can’t think of anything more worthwhile than recovering children wrongfully separated from their families.”

He believed her. As long as he looked into her eyes. Striving to hold on to reason, he looked somewhere else. “Very altruistic.”

Because he was in more pain than he would admit or perhaps even realized, she gave him a great deal of leeway and took no offense at his tone. She knew it was the skeptic in him.

“I’ll settle for noble.” It was time to get down to business. “So, you didn’t come to verbally go ten rounds with me, Mr. Banacek. You came because you weren’t so sure you didn’t believe me anymore.”

The smile came from nowhere. He wasn’t even conscious of it until he saw his reflection in the window behind her. “I thought you said you didn’t read minds.”

“I don’t.” He had a nice smile, she thought, but it didn’t reach his eyes. And wouldn’t, until he found his daughter. “I was doing my impression of Sherlock Holmes for you. I was deducing.”

“But you did have that dream about Bonnie.”

“I did have that dream about Bonnie,” she assured him with quiet intensity.

If he were someone else, listening to himself talk, he would call himself a fool. And yet, here he was, grasping at straws. “And in your dream, she was alive.”

“Very much so.” Reaching, Eliza placed her hand on top of his. “She is alive, I’m sure of it.”

He couldn’t believe he was actually asking questions like this. But he was a man who had come face-to-face with his desperation all over again.

“How often are these dreams—?” He stopped, trying to find the right word that wouldn’t make him look like some talisman-clutching fool. He was angry at himself for being here, for hoping. But he continued to do both.

“Accurate?” she supplied. She took a breath, wondering how to phrase this to his satisfaction. He hadn’t come here wanting to be convinced, he’d come here daring her to convince him. “There’s no easy answer for that.”

Double-talk. He might have known. Disgust filled him. “I thought so.”

“No,” she countered, raising her voice ever so slightly as he rose from his seat, “you didn’t.” He sat down again, his body language telling her that he was ready to walk out in a heartbeat unless she said something to convince him to remain—and said it soon. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come here, when doing so flies in the face of everything you hold logical. And to get back to your question, it isn’t easy to give you a straight answer because my dreams aren’t predictions. They’re things that somehow, on some level, I sense. At times, they’re other people’s pasts—at others, their futures.”

Belatedly he realized he was holding his breath, and released it. This wasn’t true, none of it. Why was he even listening to her?

Because he wanted her to convince him. Somehow, some way, he wanted her to make him believe there was some connection between her and his daughter. A connection that would lead him to Bonnie.

“Which was this?”

“The past. The recent past,” Eliza clarified. “Perhaps even the present.”

He could feel his patience wearing thin. “Can’t you give me a straight answer?”

She didn’t see the anger, she saw the anguish. “This isn’t a science. And even if it were, not even science always gives you a straight answer. Just a hypothesis that might or might not be proven, under the right set of conditions.”

He’d listened long enough. This time, he rose to his feet and remained there. “Look, if this is all going to be just mumbo jumbo, then I’m wasting my time and you’re wasting yours.”

As he began to turn away, she called after him in a strong, steady voice that was far more forceful than the one she’d just used. “Fact, I had the dream. Fact, the girl in the dream was your daughter. Fact, I heard her calling out to you.”

He turned to her. There was a dangerous look in his eyes, like that of a man who’d been asked to endure too much.

“To me? What did she say?”

She could still hear the voice in her head. “‘Daddy, where are you? Come find me. Please!”’

Damn her, she was playing on his emotions, nothing more. He was wrong to have allowed himself to be led by his feelings. He had to get out of here before he lost his temper completely—and before she found a way to sucker him into this.

He was certain she had no difficulty doing that with her marks. She had the look of breeding about her: genteel, but uncommonly attractive. With eyes that could see into a man’s soul. But no matter how she dressed herself up, no matter how lovely her features, she was still nothing more than a con artist. She’d probably gotten her training very young, learning how to use her assets to separate people from their money, and play on their hopes and fears.

But he wasn’t a player. Not anymore.

“All well and good.” He crossed to the door. “And when you have another dream—” he took hold of the doorknob, twisting it “—maybe you can—”

“There’s something else.”

He didn’t bother hiding his contempt. “I rather thought that there would be, but I’m not—”

She sensed this was important to him and said the words very slowly. “She had a bedraggled pink toe shoe with her.”

Walker’s mind went numb. And then anger washed over him. White, hot anger. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

She tried not to take offense. “Nothing about kidnapping, or finding a kidnapped child, is a joke, Mr. Banacek.”

His anger had no direction; she was the only target available. “Stop calling me Mr. Banacek—you make me feel like this is a corporate meeting.”

“All right—Walker, then,” she allowed cautiously, watching his eyes.

He struggled to be reasonable. “How did you know about the toe shoe?”

In all the stories, the police had kept this one fact back, thinking somehow it might be a clue that would allow them to separate the truthful from the frauds who called in, looking for their fifteen minutes of fame.

“I saw it.”

He told himself not to believe. But no one knew about the shoes that had meant so much to Bonnie. “Saw it? Saw it where?”

“It was in the pocket of her overalls. She was wearing a pair of worn overalls that were too large for her. She kept the toe shoe in her pocket to make her feel better, careful to hide it from whomever it was who’d taken her.”

It took effort to keep the wave of emotion in check, to keep it from pounding down on him like a driving rain. Very quietly, he walked back to the chair he’d just vacated and sat down.

Gripping the arms of the chair, he tried to make himself relax, and succeeded only marginally.

“All right, Eliza, you have my attention.”

Chapter 4

There wasn’t much of the dream left to tell. She had given Walker the highlights.

What remained was a haze of feelings—oppressed, frightened feelings emanating from the little girl. It was that, more than anything else, that had sent her searching through the myriad faces on the Internet site.

But that was also something the man sitting on the other side of her desk didn’t need to hear right now. There was no reason to make him acutely aware that his daughter was afraid. It was a silent given; both knew it to be true, without having to exchange the actual words.

Eliza told him what she could, repeating the description of both the farmhouse and the land surrounding it. She gave him as accurate a picture of Bonnie as she could.

And when she was finished, Eliza could read the question in his eyes. He was afraid that Bonnie had forgotten him. It wasn’t uncommon for minds that young to mix reality with fantasy, fact with fiction, until the truth faded away into the misty past. Maybe Bonnie had begun to believe she’d dreamed about having another father, another mother, and had accepted the ones who had her now as her parents.

“She still remembers you,” Eliza told him softly. “Still won’t accept her situation.”

Like an arrow shot straight and true, her words hit his heart dead center. It was as if she’d read his mind. No matter what her claims to perception were, the reality of it startled him. Had she read his mind?

“Her situation,” he echoed. It was a euphemism that could mean anything, encompass anything. He needed everything spelled out so that somehow, some way, he could find a little bit of peace, grasp on to a little bit of hope. “Can you tell what her ‘situation’ is?”

She heard the quiet edge in his voice. The storm was coming.

“I don’t think they’re treating her badly.” At this point, she couldn’t tell him that with any certainty, and she refused to lie.

Walker’s temper erupted again. He was having less and less success keeping it in check. “How can they not be treating her badly? They kidnapped her.”

She wished there were some way to calm him. All she could do was tell him what she knew. “There’re many reasons people kidnap children. It’s not just for ransom, or for child pornography,” she added, reading the unspoken fear that had surfaced in his eyes. “Some children are abducted to fill a void left by either a child who died, or one who was never there to begin with.”

He shook his head. It was as if her words were bouncing off him, refusing to sink in. Emotionally frustrated, with no outlet, he felt himself becoming almost dull-witted. “Meaning?”

“People, women predominately, want a baby so badly, they’ll do anything to get one.” She spoke slowly, measuring out her words. Trying to reach him before he became lost in the place where he’d retreated. “When they can’t get pregnant either because of infertility or lack of opportunity, they become obsessed with having a baby. Some women have been known to go through all the stages of pregnancy, right up through the contractions involved in labor, when they’re not pregnant to begin with.”

He looked at her as if he thought she were making it up. He was a skeptic, through and through, Eliza thought, smiling. She’d encountered more than her share.

“The mind is a very powerful, underused tool. Any scientist will tell you that,” she added as she saw him open his mouth to protest. “Whoever took Bonnie wanted a child so badly, when they saw yours, everything just clicked into place. They had to have her. Desire, means and opportunity all came together for one split second, and they grabbed that second and ran.”

If he was to control his anger, he couldn’t think about that, about someone swooping down and snatching his little girl away.

“Which would explain why the ransom note never came.” He shook his head, remembering. “I was so certain she was taken for the money. I didn’t sleep for three days, waiting for the kidnapper to call. The phone rang off the hook,” Walker added bitterly, “but it was never the kidnapper. Half the time it was some reporter wanting to interview us. As if Bonnie being kidnapped was some kind of diversionary entertainment for the public to watch on the evening news.”

She understood where he was coming from. She’d had a few run-ins with insensitive reporters herself, though she’d found others to be tactful and caring, putting people above stories. “Being on the Fortune 500 list unfortunately makes you a target for all sorts of things. Invasion of your privacy included. It’s only natural that the first thing you think of is that your daughter was taken for the money. You might find this hard to believe, but in a way, it’s a good thing that she wasn’t.”

“A good thing? How could it possibly be ‘a good thing’?” he demanded angrily. “How can having your daughter kidnapped ever be a good thing?”

“Not the kidnapping itself,” she corrected gently. “I meant the fact she wasn’t taken for ransom.” She chose her words carefully, knowing that, his rugged appearance to the contrary, Walker Banacek was in a delicate state. “There are times, too many times, when the child is not returned in exchange for the ransom money. The money’s taken and the child is never seen again.”

He looked at her, stealing himself off from her words, his expression stoic. “Because they’ve been done away with.”

She accepted the euphemism, understanding Walker needed to use it in order to keep the horror at bay. “Because they’ve been done away with,” she echoed. “Whoever took Bonnie from that parking lot wanted to have a child to love. That will keep her safe.”

Usually, she added silently.

That was something else Walker didn’t need to be made aware of: the fact that there were no hard-and-fast rules to this, only generalities that formed patterns.

Eliza couldn’t help wondering how the man in her office would react if he knew she was acting as his protector, keeping things from him she sensed might be too devastating for him to deal with. Probably not well at all, despite the good intentions behind it, she concluded. Walker Banacek didn’t strike her as a man who took kindly to being kept in the dark.

“You said ‘they,”’ Walker began, then hesitated. He couldn’t believe he was asking this. Moreover, he couldn’t believe that he was actually ready to believe whatever her answer might be. But Eliza had somehow known about the toe shoes, and no one but the FBI had been given that piece of information. That did make her claim more credible.

“Did you see how many of them there were? In your dream?” he added, feeling foolish and agitated at the same time.

Eliza continued watching his expression, knowing that the answer she gave wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I didn’t see anyone else.”

He could feel his frustration beginning to build again. “But then, how do you know it’s not just a man or a woman involved?”

“I sensed them, their presence,” she clarified before he could say anything. “They were close by, looking for her.”

“Looking for her?” He didn’t understand. Part of him still felt this woman was just toying with him, seeing how far she could lead him down the garden path before he yelled, “Enough!” “Why? Where was she? Did she run away from them?”

Eliza shook her head. She knew how all this had to sound to him and she wished she could give him more concrete answers, but she wasn’t about to make up anything. One fabrication, one stretch of the truth, and any trust she might be able to build up in him would be irrevocably shattered.

“I’m not sure. Maybe she was just playing in the field and had gotten separated from them.”

It made sense, he supposed. But with the logic came a numbing realization. It felt as if something had died within him.

“Then it was someone else she was calling ‘Daddy,”’ he concluded bitterly.

“No—”

The firm note in her voice surprised him.

“It was you she was calling to.”

He couldn’t tell if Eliza was just saying what she knew he wanted to hear. “How could you tell?”

“I just knew,” she told him simply. “I could feel what she was feeling.”

He couldn’t allow himself to get strung out on false hopes. Though it cost him, Walker tried to approach this as logically as he could. “Couldn’t you have just gotten confused—dreamt about the actual search that went on at the time of her kidnapping?”

The background had been hazy, but not the feelings she’d experienced. “No, these were the people who had kidnapped her. They were looking for her. A man and a woman.”

“A man and a woman,” he repeated. All right, if he was buying into this, he was going to go all the way and pretend she was telling him something that was real. “What did they look like? Can you describe them?”

If it were only that easy. But at times, her gift just frustrated her, teasing her with pieces of a puzzle that refused to take its true shape. “I wish I could, but as I told you, I didn’t actually see them.”

“You didn’t actually ‘see’ her, either,” he said pointedly. The disdain in his voice was aimed more at himself than at her.