Читать книгу Dark Moon - Lindsay Longford - Страница 7

Josie never knew how she returned home. She knew only that she was there, the desperate green line of her garden an oasis in the brown of dead and dying grass. She couldn’t remember walking back down the path at all.

But she remembered very, very clearly the sound of the bolt slamming shut against her. Remembered, too, the suffering in Ryder Hayes’s face, the sense of power that came from him and pulled her beyond resistance. Step by step, she tried to analyze what had happened and couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried. She struggled to make sense from an incident that made no sense. She’d been frightened. Oh, yes, Ryder Hayes had definitely frightened her.

But not until that darkness had come from him, a cold, chilling shadow that swept over her like huge, enveloping wings.

And in those moments she’d heard a child’s cry. She’d glimpsed, vaguely, indistinctly, a hazy shape drifting away from her down the long hallway.

Or had she?

Putting her hoe back on the porch, she frowned. She must have been in shock over the incident with the dogs. Or dizzy with hunger. Low blood sugar could account for that enveloping darkness that had claimed her.

Odd, but it had seemed like a claiming. A moment utterly beyond her experience.

Remembering the texture of Ryder Hayes’s arm against her hand, she shivered. The hard muscle of his forearm had flexed, tightened at her touch.

But his skin had been so cold.

She’d had the most surprising urge to rub her hand over his arm, to warm him.

In the closet she’d turned into a bathroom, Josie splashed tepid faucet water against her face as she tried to recall if she’d eaten that day and couldn’t remember eating anything since the bowl of cereal the evening before.

The water spotted the white sink, sending iridescent reflections against the white, the shimmering drops like the flash of colors in the black feathers of the grackles.

Josie stared at her startled eyes in the spotted mirror above the sink and then passed her wet hand over the image in the mirror. Water splintered across her reflection. For a second she’d seen Mellie there, Mellie who lifted herself up to the mirror to see if she was “bootiful” today.

Memories. The unending heat.

Sighing, Josie pressed her palms to her burning eyes. Maybe she was fooling herself. Maybe she wasn’t coping as well as she thought she was. She’d been in the sun all morning and then stormed along the path in the heat of high noon. Heat could make a person do strange things. Imagine things.

Her fingers rested against her closed eyes.

She hadn’t seen the colony of birds on her return. It was as if the curious massing of birds had been a dream.

They had been real, though.

The slow pursuit of the birds had been as real as the feral dogs. But like her conviction that the dogs were watching her with an evil intelligence, her panicked flight from the birds made no sense to her, either.

She wasn’t a woman given to wild imaginings. She’d coped with the reality of blood and bones in the operating room and dealt with prima donna orthopedic surgeons. She was faced with reality every moment of her life. She liked reality.

Or she had until the reality of Mellie’s disappearance and what it meant.

Had she heard a child’s voice, though? Really? Had she actually seen a small form in that chilled, silent hallway?

Yes?

No?

But something had happened.

Cooling her feverish skin, Josie slicked water down her arms. She couldn’t begin doubting her own perceptions. She was a trained observer in the operating room, competent in emergencies. Grounded. As she’d told Hayes, she wasn’t a woman given to hysterical imaginings.

Before he’d strolled out of her life and Mellie’s with a charmingly regretful smile on his face, Bart had always mockingly teased her about her sense of responsibility, but she’d sensed the knife-edge of truth in his teasing, the stab of hostility behind the charm.

“No imagination, no sense of fun, Josie,” he’d said, shrugging. “How can I be tied down to a woman who lives by schedules and lists all the time? I’m a restless kind of guy, Josie,” he’d said, throwing his duffel bag over one very broad, very restless shoulder, “and you’re, well, doll, you’re so predictable. And I like spontaneity, know what I mean, sugarbabe?”

Oh, yes, she knew. But someone had to worry about schedules and bills, and babies needed order, routine, and—

Josie breathed deeply, stopping the bitterness welling inside. No, she wasn’t a woman given to fancies.

She could’ve been mistaken about—

Flipping water at her throat, she paused and considered possibilities. It made more sense to her that thrown off-balance by the power of Ryder’s presence, she probably had seen nothing more than the flutter of a curtain in the shutter-induced twilight of that house, the yowl of a cat becoming a childish cry, the product of her own need.

But with one more child missing, she had to tell Jeb Stoner what she’d seen, no matter how flimsy the evidence. He was the detective investigating the disappearance and deaths of the children. He was the one who’d taken all the information about Mellie. He should know. It was his call.

The police could add Ryder Hayes to their list of suspects. They could search his house. If they found nothing…

She let her face dry in the air, welcoming the illusion of coolness as she scooped out the water from the sink into a can. She would pour the water on her garden tomorrow at daybreak.

Sooner or later, someone would slip up. She would find out what had happened to Mellie.

That was the day she lived for now. That fierce determination to look into the face of the person—

Josie smacked her hand against the sink.

No, she hadn’t seen her daughter in that long, shadowy hallway. She’d given up hope that Mellie was out there, somewhere, desperate and frightened.

Now, all she hoped for was that someday she would know.

The drought would end.

The killings would end.

She would find out what had happened to Mellie.

In the meantime, she put out raisins for the mockingbirds that sang at night and pans of water for the drought-stricken animals that staggered and crawled to her yard.

While she endured the slow passage of heat-heavy days, she planted seeds in her scrap of garden, saving water to dribble on the parched earth that rolled up around the drops of water and coated them with dust.

And, always, she waited.

But a child was missing again.

The shrill ringing of the phone shattered her thoughts.

She went into her kitchen. “Hello?”

Humming silence. “Who is it? Hello? Who’s there?” she repeated, her heart speeding up a little. A click. Static. Josie replaced the mouthpiece of her squatty black rotary phone, the old-fashioned relic of a phone Bart had hated, gently onto the base. A bad connection. A storm somewhere buzzing along the electrical wires.

She always hoped, somehow, though, that the phone would ring and it would be Mellie.

Facing the woods in back of her house, Josie lifted the phone again and dialed the number of the police station. The line was clear.

Five years he’d been gone, and she hadn’t missed him, not after the first year, anyway, and then only because she wanted him there for Mellie, for Mellie to have a father’s hand to cling to as she took her first step. Josie couldn’t help the sliver of resentment over the intrusion of those old memories into her chaotic thoughts today. One more thing that made no sense, she thought as she waited for someone to pick up the receiver at the other end.

Something moved in the woods.

Holding the phone, Josie leaned forward, straining. Only a wisp of cloud passing over the sun.

No one there.

Ryder Hayes. That was why she was remembering Bart. Two very different men, but in those few moments with Ryder, she had been edgily aware of him. Uncomfortable, but caught in the spell of that disturbing, heated awareness, she’d been at a pitch of awareness she’d never experienced.

She bent down to pick up a white dust ball.

The voice rasped in her ear. “Stoner here. Whaddaya want?”

“Josie Conrad here, Detective,” she mocked. “And what I want is to see you. Today, please.”

Listening to the faint drone that translated into words, into meaning, she waited. “I know, but—It’s about my neighbor, Ryder Hayes. Please,” she said, her voice rising and sinking in the late-afternoon quiet. She twined the cord in large loops around her elbow and hand as she listened. “All right. If you can’t, you can’t. Tomorrow afternoon will have to do.” Carefully she placed the dumbbell-shaped receiver back on its hooks.

Tomorrow.

But there was another night to endure.

Just before supper, the phone rang.

Again the click and then staticky squawks.

“Hello?” Josie said irritably, thinking she heard someone say her name. “Hello? I can’t hear you. Can you speak louder, please. We have a bad connection.”

The static grew louder, hurting her ears until she dropped the phone. She’d been getting a lot of interference on her phone line lately.

Maybe she needed a new phone.

When the long summer twilight ended, plunging the earth into dark, she lit the candles and opened a can of tuna, breaking it up into chunks with her fork as she chopped up celery and stirred in yogurt. Sitting down at her empty kitchen table, she made herself eat, but she turned on the television.

Under the intensity of the surge-dimming studio lights, the weatherman wore rolled-up sleeves, a gleam of sweat and an apologetic smile as he slogged manfully through the news that one more hundred-degree day had made it into the record books.

“Sorry, folks, looks like there’s no rain in the forecast for this week. We’ve had reports of brush fires in some outlying areas, so keep an eye open for smoke, hear now?” he admonished as he concluded and turned to the anchor.

“Joel, thanks for that report!” The brunette with the stiffly sprayed hair beamed at him. The tiny line of perspiration along her upper lip caught the light as she spoke. “But at least it will be another record day for the beaches, right?”

Joel nodded as the camera closed in on his sweating face.

“It’s been an interesting weather year, hasn’t it? The January freeze and now this drought?” The anchor’s expression was professionally concerned, her eyes drifting to an offscreen TelePrompTer.

“None of our computer projections suggested this kind of summer, that’s for sure, Janet.” Joel patted his shining face. “And, no, we don’t have an explanation for it. Not yet. Maybe it’s a sign that the world is ending.” His laugh was too hearty. “No, but really, folks, we think it’s probably related to the volcano eruption or to those huge gamma ray explosions reported by the NASA observatory and—”

“Fascinating, Joel! I know our listeners will stay tuned for more background.” The anchorwoman’s chuckle was feeble. Joel had had too much airtime. Her voice dropped to a really, really serious register as she interrupted, “On to local news, Joel. Young Eric Ames is still missing. The search has been expanded to Manatee and Sarasota Counties—”

Josie got up and silenced the perky voice with a flick of her wrist.

Later, she lit the candles lined up along the screened-in porch one by one, a ceremony of remembrance and sorrow, their light a token in all the darkness.

Once, sometime after midnight, an animal shrieked, caught by unseen talons. For an unsettling instant, she had the fancy that she could hear the frantic beating of that distant small heart, feel its fear pumping through her veins.

Standing and pacing on her porch, back and forth, back and forth through the night, she watched the candles and their flickering reflections in the panes of the open windows, until the last candle sputtered out, leaving her alone in darkness.

In the teasing cruelty of the cool that came shortly before dawn, she had the dream again.

Even dreaming, she knew she slept, knew she wandered in some limbo of the soul.

And in her dream she heard the ringing of the phone and knew if she answered it she would hear Mellie’s voice.

“Mommy!” Ahead of her, Mellie danced from one foot to the other. “Hurryhurryhurry! You’ll be too late, Mommy!” Her short, sturdy legs were covered with bits of moss and leaves. Behind her and to her right, a tall shape hovered, its edges blurred and unrecognizable at first. Twisting on her bed, Josie moaned. This time, she recognized the form.

Ryder Hayes, stalking through her dreams, his face turned away from her, only his lean shape betraying him.

“Mommy!” Impatiently, Mellie waved Josie to her. The bangle bracelet, nothing but imitation gold, glittered with her movement. “Now, Mommy. Now!” She stamped one yellow-sneakered foot on the ground and turned to run.

The shape drifted with Mellie, tracking her.

Hayes? Or someone else?

Her blood quickening, Josie twisted in her sleep.

“Mellie, wait!” she called out. From the corner of her eye, Josie saw the shadowy figure stalking beside her now, moving with the easy fluidity with which Ryder Hayes had disappeared into the woods, and she wanted to turn and look, really look, see if its eyes were the haunted dark of Ryder Hayes’s, so that, waking, she would know.

But Mellie was vanishing ahead of her and Josie couldn’t take time to linger. She couldn’t lose sight of her daughter. If she did—“Wait for me, sweetie!” she called. Changing, swelling to an enormous shadow, the form brushed against her, closed her in its darkness as she screamed, “Mellie!”

She knew she screamed. Her throat was raw with the effort. But the words never came out. Strangled in her throat, they woke her every time. “Wait,” she whispered now, the early-morning sunlight a pallid yellow that hinted of the heat to come.

The phone was still ringing.

With a shaking hand, Josie reached for it.

She expected static.

“Mrs. Conrad?” Low, the voice slid over her skin like the tickle of a feather.

She thought he hesitated momentarily over her name. “Yes, Mr. Hayes?”

“You shouldn’t go to the police.”

“What?” she whispered, stricken.

“Don’t go to the police with your story about what you think you saw in my house. You’ll look foolish if you do. Your daughter’s not here. As far as I know, I’ve never seen her.”

Josie couldn’t speak.

“Nor are those dogs my pets. Don’t make a fool of yourself, Mrs. Conrad. Take my advice.”

The click as he hung up sounded like a threat.

Leaning her head on her hands, Josie sat at the edge of her bed.

He’d known she was going to the police.

He’d told her she would make a fool of herself if she did.

She pulled on clean shorts and a long T-shirt that she clipped into a wad on one side. Purple, orange and red, the ring made the shape of an exotic flower when she pulled the fabric through it. A gift, too, from Mellie.

Josie didn’t like feeling threatened by Ryder Hayes.

Would Stoner have called Hayes? Would Stoner have had any reason to warn Ryder Hayes? Complications. Puzzles within a puzzle, but she hadn’t changed her mind about talking with Stoner.

As she poured a glass of milk and snagged the piece of toast that popped up, she heard the heavy thump of the weekend paper landing at her front step. Carrying the milk in one hand, she walked barefoot over the wood floor to the front door. She would read the comics, the sports pages, the editorial.

She couldn’t read the front-page headlines anymore.

Opening the inside front door, she reached for the latch on the screen door.

Even without his implied threat, Ryder Hayes made her uneasy in ways she couldn’t identify.

He had been in her dream, an unsettling darkness moving through the mist toward her. He’d become the haunting shape in her dream. The figure was always there, just out of sight, and each time she had the dream, she was left frustrated, feeling that if she could only once remember to turn and look straight at that shadowy shape, she would know—

She flicked the latch up as she glanced down at her stoop.

Through the glare of sunlight coming through the mesh of the screen, she saw the rattlesnake coiled on top of the thick mat made by the folded-over newspaper.

Stretching toward her and following the movement of her arm behind the screen, its head was flat and triangular. The ropy body was thicker than her arm, its diamond shapes iridescent in the sun. Underneath those gleaming coils, showing in patches, the headline caught and held her gaze. Her eyes fixed on the words and she read them in a blink as the snake’s body thrust forward: ‘Angel Bay Child Remains Missing.’

With both hands, Josie slammed the wooden door. Glass shattered on the floor, and milk splashed up her legs.

The force of the snake’s strike thudded against the screen, his fangs breaking through it, catching on it, scraping the inside door. Trapped high off the ground in the mesh of the screen, his heavy body thrashed against screen and wooden door.

Covering her mouth with a shaking hand, Josie stretched out a leg and dragged a chair to her, bracing it under the doorknob. Shuddering, she snapped the lock and retreated to her kitchen, gagging as the rattlesnake battered at her door, its thrashing smacks shaking the doorframe.

She sank into an aluminum-and-plastic chair at the table. The door shuddered with the heaviness of the snake’s body smashing into it. She couldn’t think what to do.

A plan. She needed a plan. She couldn’t deal with that reptilian body only a cheap wooden door away. She couldn’t cope with it. Not now. Not with her dream waking her with its sense of evil pervading her world, not with Ryder Hayes’s phone call.

No, she couldn’t face that enormous creature thumping with intent against her house.

On the other side of her front door, the snake’s body made a hissing sound as screen and wood slid against one another with the heavy flailing.

Pulling her feet up beneath her, Josie locked her arms around her knees. “Enough, oh, please, enough,” she moaned, rocking back and forth, the clunking sound of aluminum against her floor riding under the agitated whacks of the snake’s body. “I can’t do this. I can’t.” She gagged, dry mouthed, nausea growing with each bump and whack against the door.

But of course she could, and so she stayed curled into herself for long moments, gathering her strength, preparing one more time to do what she had to do. Reaching deep into herself she disciplined herself to ignore the nausea and weakness dissolving her bones.

Finally, unlocking her arms, she stood up and went to get her knee-high boots, thick leather gloves and hoe.

If she’d had a gun, she would have used it.

But she didn’t. She had the sharpened hoe, and, tears streaming down her face, she used it finally, after long minutes of walking from side to side, nerving herself to approach the thrashing snake, not recognizing herself in the woman who, screaming and cursing, slashed and sliced at the reptile until the huge body lay in pieces, separated from the head hooked into the screen.

Tasting bile, Josie got a bucket and scooped up the remains of the snake. She had to use the hoe to knock the head off, ripping the mesh as she gouged at it. Gagging again, she looped the hoe edge under the curved fangs and lifted the head into the bucket. Sliding the metal end of the hoe under the metal handle of the bucket, she carried it to the steel garbage can at the back of her lot. Metal hoe clicked against bucket handle, clicked with each shaking step she took.

She left the bucket beside the garbage can. She’d done as much as she was able to for the moment. She slipped the hoe free, and the bucket tilted, wobbled. Nausea rolled up as she saw the bloodied heap mixed with chunks of newsprint.

She ran. Dropping the hoe, she ran for her garden, but she didn’t make it. Three feet away, she doubled over, retching, the harsh sounds tearing through her until she was spent and empty.

But she stayed upright.

Later she would remember that she wasn’t driven to her knees.

She coped.

Reminding herself of that truth over and over, she summoned the strength to retrieve her abandoned hoe, to hook up the hose to the outside spigot and waste precious water flooding down the concrete stoop and screen door until no trace of the snake’s presence remained except the gaping mesh flaps hanging like pennants from the edge of the screen door.

She felt as if the snake had exuded evil, its poisonous molecules oozing from it to her, lodging in her clothes, her hair. If she could have, she would have stripped naked and bathed outside.

Instead, methodically, systematically, squandering water with a vengeance, she sprayed herself with the hose first and then went inside, cleaned up and changed into a cotton dress. Keeping out the clip that had been Mellie’s present, she first washed it and then threw her shorts and shirt into a garbage bag.

Her hands never stopped shaking.

Bart would have been surprised.

Shuddering, she knotted the bag with one vicious twist and dropped it into the trash. She wasn’t overreacting one little bit, she told herself firmly and marched out her front door.

A tiny clink as the toe of her shoe nudged a small cylinder wedged into the crack between two of the walkway bricks.

The red-pepper capsule.

Stooping, she picked it up. Drops of water glistened against its shiny surface. The force of the water from the hose had forced it into the space where two bricks hadn’t quite met.

It must have been on her stoop. Under her newspaper. With the rattlesnake on top? She recalled distinctly the clattering sound the cylinder had made as it rolled off the edge of Hayes’s porch.

Driving into Angel Bay over the bridge that crossed Angel River, she could see the roof of Ryder Hayes’s house to the north.

At the Hayes property, the river swung in before taking a wide curve out toward the gulf and the bridge from the mainland to the offshore islands.

Devil’s Island was visible from the Hayes property, then Santa Ana and finally Madre Mia, which, over the years, had become Madder Me for Angel Bay natives.

He had come to her house this morning, and she hadn’t heard him.

She’d heard the newspaper delivery boy.

But not Ryder Hayes.

Every self-serve newspaper stand she passed on the way to the police station had black headlines that leapt out at her, and she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. Just before she walked up the steps into the station, she felt a tickle of awareness at the back of her neck, and, frowning she stopped and turned to look behind her.

A shadow vanished behind the corner of the dry cleaners.

An effect of the hazy heat?

Or someone hiding from her? Ryder Hayes?

The deep tolling of the bell from the Baptist church down near the river rang out, the sound long and sonorous, throbbing in the air around her.

She squinted toward the corner and saw nothing except the blaze of sun and the haze of heat rising from the sidewalk.

The door to the police station opened and Jeb Stoner poked his head out.

“Hey, Miz Conrad, come on in out of the heat. I’ve been watching for you.”

“Thanks.” Josie cast one quick look at the empty street behind her and followed the sandy-haired detective inside. She wanted to ask him why he’d been waiting for her, but thinking about that uneasy awareness she’d had, she allowed the moment to pass. Maybe she’d ask him later.

Inside he motioned her to his desk, letting her precede him. Like a rag doll, he flopped into a cracked vinyl swivel chair behind his desk. The chair creaked and groaned under his slight weight. “Can I get you some station-house gunk?”

“No. Thank you.” She folded her hand over the clasp of her purse hanging from its shoulder strap.

He always offered her coffee, and she never accepted. He never suggested a Coke or a glass of water. Josie wasn’t sure whether he didn’t remember or whether it was his way of making an awkward joke. Either way, she had grown tired some months ago of the pro forma offer.

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“Yeah, right.” Everything he said to her came out sounding as if he didn’t believe her. It had been that way from the first.

Conveying the impression that he had all the time in the world, he fanned himself with a sheaf of papers as he waited for her to begin. She’d discovered it was one of his techniques. Most people found it hard to sit in silence. She wasn’t one, but she had business and she wanted to get on with it, not play head games.

“Detective Stoner, something strange happened yesterday.”

He leaned forward and slipped into a cracker drawl. “Miz Conrad, if you only knew, sumpin’ strange happens in this town every day.” He tapped his fingers on his desk. “We haven’t found that boy. Eric.” He looked away from her.

“Yes. I know.”

“I’m sorry. I know you hope we’ll find him alive. We sure as hell want to.” Continuing to avoid her gaze, he sighed.

“Detective—” she paused, not quite sure how to say what she wanted to “—Ryder Hayes is a sort of neighbor of mine.”

“What kind of neighbor is that? A ‘sort of’ one?” The chair creaked and squeaked. “Do you know him?”

“No. I met him yesterday for the first time.” She lifted the flap of her purse and her fingers brushed the edge of the capsaicin cylinder. “Look, I think I heard a child in his house. Crying.” She stared at the floor, at the black pattern of scuff marks against the linoleum, the coffee stains on the side of Stoner’s desk. “I know it sounds unbelievable, but…”

There was a long pause.

“And when would that have been, Miz Conrad?” he asked gently. He picked up a pen, put it down carefully. “Yesterday?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, puzzled.

“You were pis—ticked off with him, weren’t you? About the dogs you thought were his?”

“What?” Josie spoke very carefully, not ready to uncork her temper but well and truly pis—ticked off now. “What are you talking about?”

“Um,” he said, stretching out his short legs and watching her from half-closed eyes. He was a man who sat tall and stood short, a disproportionately long torso giving the illusion that he was taller than his five foot nine. As he pivoted under his desk, his feet brushed against the sides of her shoes. Josie tucked her toes under the rung of the metal folding chair as he pa-dum-dumped in a negligent rhythm on the arms of his chair. “Well, it’s like this, Miz Conrad. Hayes came in earlier today.”

“What?” Josie’s fingers tightened on her purse.

That was why Stoner had been watching for her, to “handle” her with official soothing.

“He said we might expect a call from you. He wanted to touch base with us first.”

“He’s been a busy man, Detective.” The red-pepper spray at her house. The visit to the police. Oh, yes, Hayes had been very busy. She wished she knew what else he’d been doing during the long hours of the night after she left his house. She shut her eyes for a moment, collecting herself. “What did he have to say?”

Stoner’s voice was pleasant. “He thought you might be…upset, is how I think he put it.”

Josie leaned forward and gripped the edge of the scarred desk. Ryder Hayes had been one jump ahead of her. He’d been busily creating a picture of her for the police. A picture she didn’t care one damned bit for. “Listen, ‘upset’ doesn’t begin to describe how I felt about his dogs—”

“They’re not his dogs, Miz Conrad.”

“So he says.” She stood up, angry with Stoner, with Ryder Hayes, with herself. “But the dogs were on my property. For all I know, they might be responsible for what’s happened to the children. They’re dangerous. They went toward his house, and I believe they’re his. And when I went to his house to—” she paused, wondering what word was best to use “—to talk with him about the situation, I think I saw a child crying in the hallway of his house.”

“A child?” Stoner brushed his hand against the edge of an envelope.

Leaning toward him, both hands flat on the desk on either side of her purse, Josie added, “You should consider adding him to your list of people to investigate.” She whirled away, whirled back in anger. “Why did he come here, anyway? What did he give as his reason for making a Sunday-morning visit to the police station? Don’t you think it’s a little peculiar? Just a tiny bit suspicious, Detective?” Josie was so angry she thought her eardrums would burst with the force of her blood pounding in her head.

She wanted to scream at the stolid-looking detective, shake him, make him get up and go immediately to the Hayes house, and yet Stoner sat there rocking and watching her with that bland expression that told her nothing.

“Calm down, Miz Conrad,” he said, rocking forward and leaning his elbows on the desk.

“Calm down?” She wanted to screech at him, pull her hair out by the roots. Instead, she controlled her voice.

He motioned toward the chair. “Yeah. Take it easy and set a spell longer, hear?” Light blond hair grew thickly along the length of his fair, sun-spotted arms.

Like fur, Josie thought irritably. “Why should I? You’re wasting my time, Detective. And telling me nothing. Nothing.”

“Sit down, Miz Conrad.” The casual tone disappeared. Command deepened his easy, light voice into something else. “Please.”

Josie recognized an order. She sat.

Stoner templed his fingers, pad to pad. He avoided her eyes. “I know you think we haven’t done enough to find your daughter.”

Not answering, Josie sat there, tension pounding in her head. He was right. She didn’t believe they’d done everything they could have. If they’d looked harder, spent more hours, searched—She wound her fingers into the braided strap of her purse.

“However,” Stoner said, letting his hands fall to the desk, “we’ve done everything we can. We’ve sent out APBs, we’ve distributed pictures to the restaurants along the highway, we’ve followed up every lead we’ve been given.” His voice was weary. “You know that. You’ve been in here twice a week, checking.”

Josie nodded, her throat spasming against the words threatening to spill forth. She couldn’t afford to alienate Stoner. He was her only link to the search for Mellie. Stoner was willing at least to talk with her. Over the months, the other detectives had passed her along to him, tired of her calls and visits. “Yes,” she managed to say at last. Clearing her throat, she continued, her voice rising with frustration, “But why won’t you follow up on Ryder Hayes? How can you know he’s in the clear unless you’ve searched his house?”

“We searched his house earlier today.”

“What?” Josie sank bonelessly against the chair.

Now Stoner looked at her. She thought it was sympathy that darkened his eyes, but astonished by what he’d said, she couldn’t tell. “This morning. After he came in and volunteered that you might call or swear out a complaint. He invited us out to search his house.”

“But—”

“If he’d had anything to hide, he would have taken care of it before he showed up here, but, Miz Conrad, I swear on my mother’s grave, there’s been no kid at this house. And there aren’t any dogs anywhere around. No sign of dogs on his property. We checked. Nothing that would signal that a pack of dogs had been there at all. No sign of a kid. There’s nothing in that whole blamed house except dust and his magic stuff, a slick kitchen, and one room he sleeps in. We looked. Top to bottom. Everywhere.”

“Everywhere?” she whispered, stunned. “What if you’d looked last night?” She should have insisted that they initiate a search earlier. Why hadn’t she?

Because she’d been disoriented by the strange experience in those last moments with him. So bewildered that she’d felt as if her whole world had flipped crazily upside down.

“If we’d looked last night, we might have found indications that animals had been there, that a kid had been on the premises. We might have found something. But we didn’t go out there last night.” He turned his head from side to side and Josie heard a pop of vertebrae. “Wished to God we had. We didn’t, though. One more dead end.” The thick hair on his wrist sparkled in the sunlight as he reached toward her and she jerked away.

The heavy glass ashtray was too near her elbow. Spraying ashes and matches, it fell to the linoleum floor. “Sorry,” she muttered and made no move to clean up the mess.

Neither did Stoner. “Look, I know you’re distraught—”

“No, Detective, I’m not distraught. I’m angry. You can’t even begin to believe how angry,” Josie said, clipping her words out. She wasn’t about to allow him to label her and dismiss her. She knew how the bureaucratic mind worked. If Stoner could stick a label on her, he would be able to get rid of her more easily. She wanted him to take the memory of her face home with him every night. She wanted him to think about Mellie’s small face in the dark of the night. “I want my daughter found. I don’t know anything about Ryder Hayes. But I saw the dogs. They were going to attack me. Maybe he had nothing to do with them, as he says. I don’t know. But I’m not so distraught—” she made the word into a blasphemy “—that I’m losing my grip on reality. I’m the last person in the world who would do that, believe me.” She spoke fiercely, willing him to understand. “I’m not going off the deep end. I want my daughter back. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. So I want to know what happened to her, that’s all!”

“We’re doing the best we can.” Stoner’s face was obdurate.

“Right,” she said and stood up so abruptly that the chair skidded away. “Fine. Ryder Hayes is as innocent as a newborn babe. He doesn’t have a pack of killer dogs hanging out at his house. Splendid. I’ll sleep much better tonight, Detective. Thanks.” When he grimaced, she knew her irony had been too heavy-handed, but she didn’t give a damn. She only wanted out of the stifling atmosphere created by Stoner and his bureaucratic mentality.

She was glad Stoner didn’t follow her to the door. She might have said something she would have regretted. She was ready to pick a fight, ready to vent the rage and frustration and grief that pooled in her and grew deeper and stronger by the day.

Outside the station, she blinked in the brilliant sunlight. Everything was glazed with white-hot light and Sunday-morning still. In half an hour, the churches would empty and the streets would be filled.

Head down, she walked to the parking lot. She’d lied to Stoner. She was losing her grip. Exhaustion and the constant drain of not knowing about Mellie were taking a bigger toll than she wanted to admit. That, and her refusal to go anywhere, see anyone except the detectives on the case.

She had to organize her life. If she didn’t, she’d never make it through whatever was going to happen. She had to keep strong for Mellie’s sake.

The car was idling next to hers, a low purring that she didn’t even register until she reached into her purse for her car keys, and then she looked over.

The silvery car was backed in so that its driver’s side faced forward. Her car faced the chain links at the edge of the parking lot.

Breaking the glittery silver expanse, a darkened window slid down.

Blinded by the blaze of sunlight in front of her, Josie couldn’t see the face inside the shadowed interior. But she recognized the voice and the lazy grace of his movements as he leaned forward, dipping his head.

“May I have a word with you, Josie Conrad? A moment of your time?” Ryder Hayes said politely, the cool smoothness of his words spreading over her suddenly flushed skin like melting ice cream.