Amanda Bell’s area covered only the double-closet doors, but it included a big map of Brazil with cities and roads highlighted with a black pen. Sandy Kenton’s wall shared space with a four-by-four-foot bulletin board with a map of Iraq. It was marked where, as Gabe put it, “those sites had victims too. We worked hard to disrupt bombs.”

“Those red dots?” she asked, mesmerized by all that he was sharing, and still hesitant to look too closely at her own wall.

“No, the black ones. The red ones show where we didn’t get there in time. Where the bomb went off. This one,” he said, pointing at a dot nearly obscured by men’s first names, “was where I...I lost my friends—and I was in charge.”

She touched his arm, slid her hand down to hold his. He gripped her fingers so hard it hurt, but he didn’t look at her, only at the names.

Finally, she steadied herself to turn away and move closer to the wall dedicated to her. There were newspaper articles about her abduction, all laminated. From somewhere, probably her mom years ago, he’d gotten four photos of her, one alone, two with her sisters, one with the whole family. She stared at her parents, so young. What did her father look like now? And her mother was gone. Gabe had also posted a photo of his father in his sheriff’s uniform. And down by the floorboard a map of the area with Dane Thompson’s house and grounds diagrammed and labeled. She bent down to look at it closely. “So Dane really was your father’s number-one suspect?”

“But he couldn’t make it stick.”

“Dane had an alibi?”

“That he was out of town at the time of the abduction, heading for a meeting in Chillicothe.”

“A meeting?”

Gabe squatted beside her. “Yeah, with a woman, a colleague who still has a vet clinic there. She covered for him with a lie—at least Dad thought so. I have copies here of all the affidavits filed, the investigation files. I go over them, go over everything. It’s kind of like looking for the missing link.”

“But Sandy’s and Amanda’s disappearances are different from...from mine and Jill’s,” she said as they stood.

“Yep. No cornfield escape. But Jill was taken right out of a small tent she was sharing with her brother, near the cornfield that abutted their backyard. Why she didn’t wake up and scream, we never figured out.” He got up, walked across the room and pointed to a picture of a boy. “Mrs. Stillwell said both Jill and her brother were light sleepers.”

“Maybe the kidnapper gagged her right away.”

“Or used chloroform or some drug—jabbed her with a needle, since you’d been given shots of some sort. If we’d gotten you back in this day and age, they’d have run tests to pinpoint exactly what you had in your system instead of just having you treated by the small-town doctor your father insisted on.”

“So the answers are still out there. And that’s why this memory room.”

“My real war room. I just didn’t realize I had the recording with Jill’s voice up so loud.”

“You probably didn’t. I have excellent—sometimes too-good—hearing. Sounds seem to stick with me.”

“Like the harvesting machine sound you mentioned.”

“Do you have the others’—our voices recorded?”

“All but yours. But yours, I remember. I was there not only when you were taken, but also when they got you back. I rode my bike into town when I heard they’d taken you to Dr. Marvin’s office. I blamed myself for what happened to you. I had to see you, so I waited, but your father came out and told me to leave, to stay away from you. But then he saw my mother in the little crowd gathering, and he told her he was sorry for what he’d said to me, that he knew what happened wasn’t my fault. They...hugged each other—hard.”

Tess put her arm around his waist. He put one hard-muscled arm around her shoulders. “As I said a couple of days ago, Gabe, I don’t blame you. And I understand you’re partly so...so into this—”

“Say it. Obsessed.”

“—because you’re trying to finish what your dad started. You drive yourself hard for the victims, for his memory and for yourself too. But if you don’t get some rest, you won’t be any good to anyone.”

He hugged her to him, sideways, hip to hip. When he spoke, his deep voice vibrated through her. “My mother would love you. ‘Are you eating well, Gabe? Be sure you get your sleep and exercise even with all that’s going on.’”

“Then she’s still a good mother. She saw your father work so hard and tried to help him any way she could and now you.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice hard again, but he sounded exhausted instead of intense. “She was a good mother, but he was gone a lot and that was hard—too hard for her sometimes as a wife, I guess. Let’s get some rack time before the sun comes up, okay? And I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell anyone about this room, including Vic Reingold or Deputy Miller.”

“Right. I understand.”

“You know,” Gabe said, turning her to face him, “you do understand.”

His blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. Was he falling apart under the strain? She understood that too. He’d made a memorial here to all his tough times, his failures—including the bulletin board with his battle against bombs.

Maybe she should see if Miss Etta had a book that would help him—though she wouldn’t say who it was for. Something about pressure on the job, stress, handling hardship. She desperately wanted to do anything possible, not only to help him solve the abductions, but to help him stay stable and strong. Strange, but worrying about him actually made her feel a little better about herself.

* * *

The next morning, Tess and Gabe had breakfast together, then she offered to clean up as he rushed out the door to head for his meeting with Vic and Jace. He also intended to have Ann check the stuffed pit bull into evidence. Washing up their dishes by hand, she thought about the difficulties of being married to a sheriff or any law enforcement agent. He might always be rushing out the door. Did Vic Reingold have a wife? If so, he had been gone from her for days. Jace Miller was a newlywed, so how hard was his job on his marriage?

And standing in Gabe’s mom’s kitchen she wondered about those long days alone when Gabe’s father was working on her abduction case and then Jill’s. It was a lonely life, but Gabe had explained at breakfast that his mother had friends, including Marva Green, no less, and Wanda Kurtz too. They’d even worked together sewing those small scarecrows to earn extra cash. Did the wives of law enforcement men ever hear about their cases the way Gabe had shared with her last night?

She went up to make her bed and looked out the window across the cornfield toward her house. There was an AEP electrical truck in the driveway. She’d promised Gabe she wouldn’t leave until he called, but she couldn’t wait to tell him that.

She cleaned up the room, then walked through the downstairs. Despite how tidy things looked, except for the kitchen, things were really dusty. So Gabe kept things neat—or had cleaned up the place once—but didn’t manage the upkeep.

At seven-thirty, Tess got her cell phone out. She wanted to call Char in New Mexico and knew she’d have to phone her before she went out among the Navajos in their distant houses, some of them traditional hogans, which she visited as a social worker. But it was only five-thirty out there and she hesitated to punch in the numbers. Char would console her but question her too. She’d figure out how close she and Gabe were, then lecture her that she was crazy.

Holding her phone, Tess continued to pace in a big circle, through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, around again. Surely, if she could just find the spot she’d been held prisoner, she would recognize it somehow, the house, at least. But the numerous places she’d driven past already, slowing down, staring, had not rung a bell. Even if she’d been kept inside all that time, she’d surely have looked out the windows. She must be able to recognize things outside, a barn, a field, a road—something. Maybe if she drove more of the roads around here, something would strike her as familiar.