“As I said earlier, I’m going to spend the day tomorrow with the Sisters of St. Anthony. I’m going to need a list of all the sisters who stayed at the cabin since they started renting it, and a list of everyone the owner ever rented or loaned the cabin to. We’ll start narrowing the search by contacting every one of them. We’ve run the fingerprints that were taken at the cabin but there were no matches, so at least we know that whoever has your son has no criminal record,” he told Robert. “I’m also going to canvass all of the merchants in the area to find out if they remember if anyone was buying baby equipment and food around the time your son disappeared. It’s a pretty rural area, the town’s small. Most places like that remember strangers. Maybe not that far back, but we’ll see what we can find. It’s a starting place.”
“The accident was in February,” Susanna said. “The cabin isn’t heated. Maybe whoever was staying there bought wood for the fireplace from one of the locals, or maybe propane for the stove.”
“An excellent suggestion.” Parrish turned to her. “See, what did I tell you? You’ve got really good instincts.”
Robert cleared his throat and Trula shot him a dirty look.
“Well, I need to get going.” The agent stood. “Trula, I can’t thank you enough for your hospitality.”
“Well, here.” Trula busied herself at the counter. She handed him a small bag. “Take some of those coconut cookies with you.”
“I’d be polite and refuse them if they weren’t so delicious,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll snack on these later.” He turned to Robert and extended his hand, which Robert took and shook with what he thought would be a bone-crunching grip. Parrish merely smiled and returned the crunch.
“Robert, I’ll be back to you as soon as I have something for you.”
“I hope it’s soon.”
“So do I.” The agent nodded again to Trula as he started for the door.
“I’ll walk out with you, Luke,” Susanna told him. “I should be heading home now. Bye, Trula. Robert, I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Right.” Robert remained standing until Parrish and Susanna left by the back door.
“Isn’t his car out front?” Robert frowned.
“I’m sure he’s just being polite and walking Suse to her car,” Trula pointed out.
“Suse always manages to find it on her own,” he grumbled.
He pretended to sort through that day’s household mail, his eyes straying every few seconds to the backyard, where Susanna and Luke Parrish were in an animated conversation.
After nearly ten minutes, he said, “What do you suppose they’re talking about all this time?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Rob. Why don’t you go on outside and find out?” The smug tone in Trula’s voice was unmistakable.
He shot her another dirty look before going back to the window. Susanna and Parrish were standing close to her car now, still talking. Damn.
All at once, he saw Chloe running down the drive. When she saw Susanna, she came to a quick stop, then skipped over and said something that made Susanna and Parrish laugh. Then the kitten she and Trula had adopted from the local shelter and named Foxy ran into a nearby flower bed, and Chloe’s attention was diverted.
Robert remained fixated at the window, his curiosity just about killing him. The agent was clearly flirting with Susanna, and if Robert wasn’t mistaken, she was flirting back.
“He’s flirting with her,” he told Trula.
“Of course he’s flirting with her. She’s a very lovely woman, and he’s not a blind man.” She added under her breath, “Unlike some others I might mention.”
“What?” Robert looked over his shoulder.
“I said, why wouldn’t he be attracted to her? Suse is very pretty, she’s smart, she’s funny-” She paused. “Was that a harrumph I just heard? Did you harrumph?”
“No.”
Robert stood back from the window as Chloe came running through the back door, the kitten in her arms.
“Trula, I think Foxy is hungry. She was trying to eat a bug.” Chloe set the cat on the floor. “A very big bug. Like a grasshopper, but with long long legs and a funny little head.”
“A praying mantis?” Trula asked.
Chloe shrugged. “I don’t know if it was praying, but it was big.”
“Chloe, did Susanna introduce you to Agent Parrish?” Robert asked.
“Uh-huh.” Her dark head bobbed up and down.
“Did you happen to hear what they were talking about?”
Trula shot him a look of disapproval but she said nothing.
“Uh-huh. The man was asking Susanna where is a good place to have dinner and Susanna told him some places and how to get to them.”
“So she just gave him directions…?”
“Uh-uh. She started to, but he said, why don’t you pick your favorite and join me.”
“What did she say?” Robert leaned against the counter.
“She said, okay, you can follow me and we can-”
“She said okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Chloe sat on the floor attempting to distract the kitten while Trula prepared its dinner.
Robert scowled and looked out the window in time to see Parrish’s car pull to one side of the driveway in order to let Suse’s car pass before falling in line behind her.
“Damn,” Robert whispered as he watched both cars ease down the drive and disappear through the gates.
SIXTEEN
The flight to Nebraska was a tense one, with Sam on the edge of his seat, unable to get through to his brother, and not wanting to explain to his sister-in-law, Kitty, that there was a chance-at least in Sam’s mind-that Tom might be in danger. What if he was wrong? That Tom had been gone for several hours in itself was no cause for concern. Tom was notorious for being chatty. A stop at the gas station to fill up his pickup could last anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, depending on who he ran into. On the way to the airport, Sam had tried Tom’s cell phone several times, and had even tried calling their cousin, Greg, to see if he’d talked to Tom at some point this afternoon. Sam had not managed to get through to anyone, and he was becoming more frustrated by the hour.
Sam glanced across the narrow aisle of the small plane to the seat next to him where Fiona slept. He wanted to wake her, wanted to hear her cool reasoning on why he shouldn’t jump to conclusions. One thing he really liked about her was her ability to reason and to think things out logically. He’d spent years with a woman who seemed to be lacking the common-sense gene and whose nature suffered from an overabundance of the impractical. Carly held the world of whimsy by the tail most of the time, and at first, that had been part of her charm. She was so totally unlike anyone Sam had ever met. She was light to his darkness, fun and games to his studious, solemn nature. He’d been told all his life that he was entirely too serious. When he met Carly, he believed that a woman like her would help him to lighten up, and isn’t that what everyone always insisted he do?
Marriage to Carly had sometimes seemed like a too-long day at the fair, a day filled with too many sweet sodas and too much cotton candy. There’d been many wonderful moments, many good memories, and Sam would never deny that they’d loved each other, but for the last eighteen months before she died, he’d been wondering if the lightness of her being wasn’t perhaps a heavier burden than he’d ever imagined. It had become very difficult, after days of tracking a killer who left mangled children in his wake, to come home to reruns of The Simpsons and entertaining her friends over the elaborate dinners she was fond of preparing. There had been times when he wished only to get into the shower and stay there until he could wash the stain away from his soul, but there would be dinner for eight that night.
He’d tried to explain to her how hard it was for him to switch from one mode to the other, but she insisted that it was better for him to socialize with fun people than to retreat to his study where he’d brood and dwell on whatever case he was handling, that all he really needed was some good times with friends to forget about the nastiness of his job. For Sam, those good times hadn’t been so good, and the friends were mostly hers. He’d never once ended one of those nights without a massive headache. He’d never really fit in with her circle of friends, most of whom lived in the same carefree, fun-filled world wherein Carly dwelled. Sam knew better.