Читать книгу Making Her Way Home - Janice Johnson Kay - Страница 9
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
EVEN AS SHE AWAKENED SLOWLY, Beth Greenway felt the first pang of unease. The sun was warm on her face, which was strange since she never slept in the daytime. Whatever she was lying on wasn’t very comfortable. Instead of immediately opening her eyes, she listened to distant voices—conversations, shrieks of delight, laughs.
Pebbles. That’s what she seemed to be lying on. Puzzlement sharpened her brain and she opened her eyes to the sight of the sun and a glimpse of twisted gray driftwood.
She was at the beach. She and her niece, Sicily, had brought a picnic. Sicily had found some other kids to play with, and Beth read a paperback thriller until her eyes got so heavy she’d laid back and closed them.
That’s why she felt uneasy—she hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Sitting up, Beth quickly scanned the beach, searching for the ten-year-old. Sicily surely had the sense not to go far. The tide was on its way in, but there was still a wet, slick expanse of beach tide pools. A cluster of children crouched, gazing into one, but none of them had Sicily’s bright blond hair.
The parents of the kids she’d been playing with had laid out their blanket over there…but the blanket and parents were gone.
Now she was on her feet, her head turning. Where on earth had Sicily gone? Beth snatched a glance at her watch and was reassured to see that she hadn’t been asleep for more than half an hour. Inexcusable if her niece had been younger, but Sicily was, thank goodness, astonishingly self-sufficient. She’d had to be, with such an undependable mother.
Beth walked first north, then south on the beach, scanning each group, scrutinizing the beachgoers reading or strolling above the waterline. Her heart had begun to hammer. Was Sicily trying to scare her? Beth couldn’t imagine. No, it was more logical to think it hadn’t occurred to her niece that she needed to keep any adult in her life informed about her plans. It was new to her to have someone trying to establish rules.
She might have walked up the trail to the wooded land above. Hadn’t they seen a sign for a nature trail? That made sense, Beth thought on a surge of what she wanted to be relief.
But she hesitated. If Sicily came back and found her gone…
Beth spotted a group of older teenagers listening to music and talking near where she’d been snoozing. She jogged up to them.
“Excuse me.” Her breath came in choppy pants. “I can’t find my ten-year-old niece. She’s blonde, wearing red shorts and a white T-shirt. Have you seen her?” In unison, all five shook their heads. “Will you be here for a few minutes?” she begged. “That’s my blanket right there. I’m going to check the nature trail to see if she went up there. If she comes looking for me, will you tell her I’ll be back soon?”
“Sure,” one of the girls said. “Do you need help looking for her?”
Surprised by the offer, she said, “As long as one of you stays here, I’d be really grateful if any of you are willing to look. Sicily is about this tall….” She held up her hand. “Skinny, long-legged. She was playing with some other kids and I guess I fell asleep.”
Two of the girls stood up. “We’ll look,” the first one said. “There are lots of places to hide along here.”
“Thank you.” Beth began running, her searching gaze moving nonstop. She’d see Sicily any minute; she’d probably gone too far down the beach, or up the trail, or…maybe she’d needed to use the restroom the state park provided.
Beth went there first, pushing open the heavy door on the women’s side. “Sicily?” she called. “Are you here?”
Nobody was in the restroom. Beth raced to her car; her niece wasn’t waiting at it.
Back to the nature trail, which according to the sign was half a mile long. Half a mile didn’t take Beth long to cover if she jogged the entire loop. She asked the few people she passed if they’d seen a ten year old girl in red shorts, but no one had.
Oh, God, she thought, please let her be there when I get back. As she rushed back down the trail to the beach, Beth comforted herself by rehearsing how she’d scold Sicily. The moment she stepped onto the pebbly beach, she saw her blanket and the group of teenagers. There was no child with them.
She felt the first wash of real fear.
* * *
MIKE RYAN FROWNED AS HE DROVE, thinking about the interview he’d just conducted. The home owners had suffered a major loss. Mike had taken the case from the first responder, a patrol officer. Nobody in the detective’s division would have gotten involved if this had been a garden variety break-in, with maybe a plasma TV, a laptop, a digital camera stolen. This one was bigger than that. A window into the family room at the back of the house had been broken and, yeah, TV, DVD player, Nintendo, camera and two iPods were reported stolen. More significantly, a locked metal outbuilding had been stripped of some heavy equipment the husband used in a landscaping business. The Komatsu dozer alone was insured for $37,000, never mind the attachments. There’d also been a commercial quality aerator, stump grinder, a couple of tillers, chain saws and more. Two flatbed trailers parked outside the building were gone, too. The loss added up to $200,000 easy.
Detectives in this rural Washington State county handled a mix of cases, from fraud and theft to rape, assault and murder. Mike had a dozen active cases already, and at least another dozen not-so-active ones that stayed in the back of his mind in hopes a break came.
He’d have to go back later in the day when neighbors were home to find out if anyone had seen or heard anything. Supposedly the home owners had been away for a weeklong visit to see their daughter in Ocean Shores. The house, a 3,500-square-foot faux Tudor with a three-car garage as well as the 2,000-square-foot metal outbuilding, sat on a five-acre wooded parcel. The buildings were visible neither from the road nor the neighbors’ houses, which were also situated on five-acre parcels. It would be pure luck to find someone who happened to see either of the flatbed trailers being hauled away.
Mike was pretty damn sure he was being played, and he didn’t like it. Right now, he was heading back into the station, where he would begin delving into the finances of J. N. Sullivan Landscaping Services. He had a suspicion he was going to find the business was in trouble. So much trouble, a nice insurance payoff would be an easy way for Mr. John Sullivan to take his retirement. Especially since he’d likely sold all that heavy equipment, and would thereby double his return once the insurance company paid out.
The radio crackled on and off as Mike drove, all routine inquiries and requests. “Possible missing child at Henrik Beach County Park.” He was caught by the note of urgency in the dispatcher’s voice. “Ten years old, last seen an hour or more ago. Park ranger search failed to turn up the child. Any nearby units please respond.”
Oh, hell. If there was one thing that rubbed Mike raw, it was people who didn’t keep a sharp eye on their kids in potentially dangerous situations. A park that combined a mile of Puget Sound waterfront, crumbling bluffs, a forest and a whole lot of strangers met that criteria. And by happenstance he was less than a mile from the park. In a county as sprawling as this one, it might take fifteen minutes to half an hour for a patrol response. He reached for his radio to gave his location and ETA.
Not ten minutes later, he was getting the story from the park ranger, a short, wiry woman in her forties with weathered skin.
“Maybe we brought you in too quick, but I’d rather that than make the mistake of wasting time.”
“That’s our preference,” he agreed. “Sounds like you’ve done the basic search.”
She nodded. “We need help.”
“All right. I’m going to put in a preliminary call to search-and-rescue, then let me talk to the aunt.”
He knew the local head of the volunteer group and, when Vic Levine said he could have the first few searchers there within fifteen minutes, Mike hesitated. Standing by his car in the parking lot, his gaze moved slowly over the density of the old growth forest past the picnic ground. As county parks went, this was a big one, including a campground, as well as the picnic area, several trails and the beach. He didn’t like to think about how many people were in the park at this moment, never mind the ones that had come and gone as the sun moved overhead and the girl’s aunt failed to notice she was missing.
“Make the calls,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Good enough.”
The ranger, who had introduced herself as Lynne Kerney, was waiting to lead Mike down to the beach. He followed, taking in the scrubby coastal foliage clinging to the bluff, the tumbles of driftwood, the tide that must be starting to come in. There were people all over the beach, most of them wandering or scrambling over the gray logs.
Ranger Kerney turned toward him. “Most every adult here is looking for Sicily.”
There was one woman who wasn’t searching. She stood beside a blanket maybe a hundred yards from where the trail they were on let out onto the gravelly beach. As he watched, she turned slowly in a circle, her arms wrapped herself as if she were cold. Or containing fear? But from this distance he didn’t see any on her face.
He wasn’t surprised when Lynne Kerney led him straight toward the woman. Anger began to burn inside him as the coals in his gut ignited. Her niece was missing and all she could do was stand there looking a little agitated, as if this were on the scale of discovering she had a run in her pantyhose or a button was off the blouse she’d intended to wear that day.
She was facing them long before they reached her. Her eyes fastened first on the ranger, then him, flickering from his face to the badge and gun he wore on his belt.
“You haven’t found her?” She even sounded cool. No, that wasn’t fair—she was worried, all right, but hadn’t lost her composure. Mike couldn’t imagine not being utterly terrified by this time.
“I’m afraid not,” the ranger said. “Ms. Greenway, this is Detective Ryan with the county sheriff’s department. He’s called in search-and-rescue.”
“The first volunteers should be here in ten minutes or so,” he said. “It’s great so many people are already helping, but these folks are trained to search systematically. If your niece is in the park, we’ll find her.”
She swallowed, he did see that. A reaction of some sort. “If only I hadn’t fallen asleep,” she said softly.
If only were two of the ugliest words in the English language, especially when spoken by an adult who’d been negligent where a child was concerned. His slow burn was gathering force, ready to jump the fire line.
Not yet, he cautioned himself. People didn’t all react the same to fear or grief or any other strong emotion. He knew that. This woman might be holding herself together by the thinnest of threads. If he severed it and she got hysterical, he might not get answers.
“Your name?” he asked.
“What? Oh. Beth Greenway. Elizabeth.”
“And is your niece also a Greenway?”
“No. Her name is Sicily Marks.”
He processed that. “Sicily. Like the Italian island?”
“Yes.” She sounded impatient and he couldn’t blame her.
Somebody shouted down the beach and they all turned to look. A question was yelled down the line. Did Sicily have a blue-and-white-striped towel?
Beth shook her head. “We only brought one towel. It’s right here.”
Mike glanced down at the towel, folded neatly and apparently unused. It was a sea foam-green and more of a bath sheet than a beach towel.
But this woman wasn’t Sicily’s mother. No surprise that she had to improvise for an outing.
The ranger hurried away to talk to the people excited by the abandoned towel. Mike looked at Ms. Greenway.
“All right,” he said quietly. “Tell me what happened.”
He knew the basics of what she had to say and didn’t listen so much to the words as to her intonation, the way she paused over certain words and hurried over others. He hoped to see emotions and failed. She’d battened down the hatches with a ruthless hand. The only giveaway at all was the way she clutched herself, seemingly unaware that she was doing so.
“So then I talked to these teenagers.” She turned her head, looking for them. “They’re still here, helping search. They said they’d watch for her while I…”
As she spoke, he had the uncomfortable realization that anger wasn’t the only reason his belly was churning.
He was attracted to her. Extremely, inappropriately attracted.
Beth Greenway wasn’t a beautiful woman, exactly. She should have been too thin for his tastes, for one thing. The bones were startlingly prominent in her face, like a runway model. That was it exactly, he decided; her face was all cheekbones, eyes and lips. Those lips might be pouty and sultry in other circumstances, but were being held tightly together between sentences, as if she were thinning them deliberately.
Her hair was brown, but that was an inadequate description for a rich, deep color that was really made up of dozens of shades. Chin-length, it was straight and thick and expertly cut to curve behind her ears. Her eyes were brown, too, but lighter than her hair. Caramel, maybe, flecked with gold.
Fortunately, he was good at compartmentalizing. In the couple of minutes that passed while she talked, he’d assessed her appearance, decided his reaction to it was one hell of a stupid thing he could ignore and begun to question whether a single word coming out of her mouth was the truth.
“Will any of these folks looking for your niece be able to recognize her?” he asked.
She stared at him. Her eyes dilated at the instant she understood what he was really asking. Did any of these people ever actually see your niece?
“I…I don’t know.” It was the first time she’d faltered. She rotated 360 degrees, her eyes so wide and fixed he wondered if she would even recognize a familiar face. “There was a family sitting near us. They had four kids.” Her forehead creased briefly. “Or maybe a couple of the kids were friends. I don’t know. But they were all close enough to Sicily’s age, they latched right onto her. They were looking at tide pools when I—” her pause was infinitesimal “—fell asleep.”
Rage came close to choking him. Instead of sleeping, Ellen had been busy chatting with her friend; that had been her excuse. She thought Nate was napping. Well, yes, the sliding door was open but she could have sworn the screen door was closed and latched. “It was only for a few minutes,” she’d whispered. Then screamed, “That’s all! A few minutes!”
A few minutes was all it took.
Beth Greenway had brought her ten-year-old niece to a crowded public beach and then settled down for a nap, contentedly believing the kid was completely safe because she was playing with some other children.
“Did you talk to the parents?” he asked.
She shook her head. “We smiled.”
“You smiled.”
“My niece was studying crabs in a tide pool with their children. There was no need for me to interview the parents for suitability.”
Her voice and expression were marble cool. He kept waiting for her to shiver or something, but it wasn’t happening.
“But these people are gone.”
“Yes.”
He could see the first people from search-and-rescue arriving in the parking lot. He excused himself from Beth Greenway and went to talk to them about where to start. Nobody suggested that the beach had been adequately searched; these men and women knew as well as he did how easy it would be for an adult who’d raped and murdered a child to pretend to examine the spot where the body had been stowed. No one wanted to believe yet that this was anything other than a case in which a kid had thoughtlessly wandered away. Maybe she had gone for a hike with someone, maybe gotten lost, maybe gone to sulk and hide from the aunt if the two of them were fighting.
“I need to ask the aunt some more questions,” he said, and they proceeded to organize themselves.
When he returned, Beth had her back to him. Purposely, or was she truly engrossed in what the cluster of people way down the beach was doing? He looked to see if there was a flurry of activity, but there wasn’t.
“Ms. Greenway.”
Maybe she was hiding tears. But when she turned, her eyes were dry and curiously blank.
“Does your niece have a habit of wandering or hiding?”
“I don’t know.”
“What can you tell you me about her?” His voice had sharpened.
She blinked a couple of times. “Well…she’s a good student.”
“There’s not much to read down here.”
Her sharp chin was one of the features that kept her from true beauty. She lifted it now. “Was that meant to be sarcastic?”
“I apologize,” he said expressionlessly. “Tell me whatever occurs to you.”
“I think she does like science. That’s why I checked out the nature trail right away.”
“Can she swim?”
Both of them cast involuntary looks toward the choppy blue water of the Sound. Until now he’d been too preoccupied to notice the salty sea air and the faint scent of rot that was usual during a low tide.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Nobody swims here anyway, so the subject didn’t come up. She didn’t wear a bathing suit.”
“Ms. Greenway—” civility was becoming harder to maintain “—perhaps we should call Sicily’s parents.”
Those beautiful eyes met his. “She doesn’t have any. I have custody.”
Every instinct he had went on red alert. Did this kid even exist? This whole thing could be a hoax, an attention-grabber. Worse possibilities jumped to mind and if Sicily Marks didn’t materialize pretty damn quickly, he was going to have to take those possibilities seriously.
“Her mother died a month ago.” Ms. Greenway sounded stiff. “Sicily came to live with me then. We’re still feeling our way.”
He shoved his fingers through his hair and resisted the urge to give it a yank. Could this whole situation get any more unsettling?
“I take it you hadn’t spent much time with your niece.”
Was it possible the arms wrapping her had tightened? “My sister and I were estranged. I sent Sicily birthday cards and the like, but she tells me that Rachel—her mother—never gave them to her.”
Mike digested the fact that this family was—or at least had been—majorly screwed up. Which meant the kid likely was, too. “Her father?” he asked.
“Hasn’t been in the picture since Sicily was a toddler. She doesn’t remember him.”
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.
