"He's going to leave me," she said. "I've ruined everything. He can't stay now."

Isaac thought it would be wonderful if Zeke left, but he couldn't stand to see his mother so upset.

"Mama?"

"What?"

It was one of the first times they had been alone, out of Zeke's earshot, since the trip began. Isaac and his mother used to talk all the time, about all sorts of things. Not the same things he discussed with his father. In fact, Isaac did most of the talking, and his mother listened. But she had seemed so interested in everything he had to say-about school and books and what he had done that day. She didn't know all the things his father knew. She was not a person you would go to if you wanted to find out how something scientific worked or learn about a World War II battle. But she had always been someone Isaac could count on.

"Why don't we live with Daddy anymore?"

"It's hard to explain."

But she had said that before, over and over again, and he wasn't going to settle for that answer anymore.

"Do you love him?"

"Not in the way a woman needs to love her husband."

"Why not?"

"Only God can explain that, Isaac. It's not something people can control, who they love, who they don't."

"But you loved him when you married him, right? You loved him once?"

No answer.

"You have to love people to marry them."

"I suppose."

"Mama-do you love me?"

"Of course I do." These words seemed to rush out of her. "More than anything in the world, Isaac."

"But if you stopped loving Daddy, couldn't you stop loving me, too? Are you going to leave me someday?"

His mother began to cry, sobbing harder than the twins ever did, which was not at all what Isaac wanted. He patted her shoulder, trying to comfort her, begging her to stop. The twins, seeing their mother cry, began to weep, too, wailing like animals who had been hurt.

"Pretty soggy in here," Zeke said, sliding into the passenger seat. "Now, dry off and start driving. She won't follow us."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Just drive, Natalie. Take the highway east, all the way back into-" Zeke paused, looked at Isaac. "Just head east, and I'll tell you how to get where we need to go. I want to buy new wheels-and dump these. We'll park this wreck in a shopping center somewhere, take the tags."

"Won't the missing tags just make them notice it sooner?"

"Maybe. But it also means they have to get inside, check the VIN number, which will lead them back to Amos. And that's a dead end these days, you'll pardon the expression."

Isaac glanced over his shoulder, silently rooting for the Mini Cooper. The car started to follow them as they headed up the street, but there was a horrible whap-whap-whap noise, and it stopped abruptly, lurching toward the curb.

"I punctured her tires," Zeke said, laughing. "Let her spend the afternoon in Wheeling. We'll be over the state line before she figures it out."

Isaac watched as the Mini Cooper faded from view. He waved, not sure what else to do, then made a thumbs-up sign, so the driver wouldn't feel too bad. She had done her best, but it was so hard to win with Zeke. It was like Battleship. He was going to have to wait for Zeke to make a mistake. But in Battleship, Isaac remembered, it was the littlest boat that was the hardest to find, and that made it the most powerful.

Chapter Thirty-one

The Roy Rogers at the rest stop wasn't kosher, not that it mattered. Mark Rubin had no appetite after Mary Eleanor's last call, in which she confessed she had lost the family in Wheeling.

"She said everyone looked good," Tess said, not for the first time. She was feeling guilty for being able to enjoy food, much less taste it. But she was famished, and the last Roy Rogers in Baltimore had closed its doors months ago, so this meal was a treat for her. "She saw all the kids, especially Isaac, who kept peering over the backseat and waving at her."

"They looked happy?" Mark traced the lines on the place mat on the tray that held his bottle of water. It was a cartoon showing a family's fun-filled day-capped off with a stop for Roy Rogers fried chicken, of course.

"She didn't say happy. Just healthy, intact. All present and accounted for."

"And the man?"

"I told you." Mark had been asking the same questions again and again. "She described him the same way the McDonald's crew did-tallish, thin but muscular build, dark hair. He was wearing a baseball cap, so she didn't get a good look at his face. Besides, she was staring at the back of his neck most of the time."

Mark didn't look up, just kept tracing the cartoon's family trip, from home to swimming pool to the movies to Roy Rogers and back again.

"Did she say if he was… handsome?"

"Mark-"

"She's with him by choice. He left her and the children in the car for ten minutes and walked away, with mis midwestern librarian parked across the street from mem. All Natalie had to do was drive off, or walk over to the woman and ask for help."

Tess bent over her fries. She had thought that Mark had come to accept the idea that Natalie had left of her own volition and remained away for her own reasons, whatever they might be. Perhaps Tess should not have withheld the information about Natalie's past. But Mark so clearly didn't want to know the worst about his wife. Tess could kill a man, but she still couldn't break bad news to one.

"Mark-we've placed them for the second time in a week. We have a description of the car and the temporary tag numbers. We know they're moving around, probably to escape detection. But they have to light somewhere eventually. Lana's money is only going to tide them over for so long, and she can't have that much socked away, even if she's the best manicurist in the whole Mid-Atlantic region. Plus, they were headed east, closer to us."

"So we should go talk to Lana, demand to know what she knows."

"I'm not a cop. I can't hold a private citizen in a room and interrogate her."

"No, but you can do what you did to the guy at the convenience store."

"Show her my gun and bluff?"

That actually won a halfhearted smile from Mark.

"You could use the same kind of threats. She's a manicurist, right? Threaten to turn her in to the IRS for underreporting her tips if she doesn't talk to you. Or I could run a credit report on her, see if she has any bad debts. A young woman like that tends to get carried away from time to time."

"I don't know, Mark. Her devotion to Natalie seems unshakable. I don't think she's going to fall apart if we find out she was delinquent on a department-store account."

"Then let's go pay her a visit at her place of work. People don't like that. I know I wouldn't be pleased with one of my employees if a private detective and a distraught father came to my shop and started making a lot of noise."

Tess studied Mark Rubin. He was, as always, impeccably dressed, wearing a lightweight gray suit, white shirt, and a silk tie in a conservative pattern of navy and maroon. When they had pulled into the rest stop, he had told Tess he needed to say his evening prayers and walked away from the complex, finding a quiet spot near a copse of trees. He was dignified, a man of what Tess's mother would call good bearing, but his dignity was beginning to fray. She saw the signs of wear in his red-rimmed eyes, in the hair that was at least a week past its normal trim.

"Tomorrow," she said. "I'll go to Lana's salon first thing."

"We will go to the salon first thing in the morning."

"In the morning," Tess agreed. "First thing."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight," she said, her voice gentle, "you should do whatever it takes to get some sleep, whether by prayer or pill."