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“I wanted to talk to you some more, and then to your brother-in-law.”
She visibly armored up. “To me?” she said, polite but surprised.
“Yeah. You. You know your sister. You know your niece.”
A cautious nod.
“I expected Drew to have a better idea who his daughter’s best friends are.”
Tiny lines puckered that high forehead. “I think that’s because Bree’s two best friends are both gone. The summer hasn’t been a very good one for her.”
“Gone,” Clay echoed. It had to be a reflection of his job that he equated gone with dead.
“Moved. Well, Poppy’s family moved, and to Texas, no less, which means no visits. They’d been friends since preschool. And then Bree’s other best friend, Schuyler, was in a foster home, but Lissa said the courts finally terminated the mother’s parental rights and they’re trying Schuyler in a potential adoptive home. Which unfortunately is in... I forget. Bend or someplace. Close enough for sleepovers, but not to be in the same school, which means they’ll forget each other by October, probably.”
“Sleepovers,” he repeated.
Her hope brightened. “Schuyler would have been on that class list, but the phone number would have been for the foster parents who don’t have her anymore. It could have been impulsive....”
He was already shaking his head, even though he hated to dim the light in her eyes. “I’ll check. You can count on that. But if your sister was going to take Brianna to a friend’s house, why wouldn’t she have stopped at home first to let her pack a bag? Plus, it doesn’t explain why the accident happened where it did.”
Her shoulders sagged. “You’re right.” Then she cried, “Oh, why doesn’t she wake up and tell us what happened?”
She sounded as if she was angry at her sister, which might be natural, or might not.
“Melissa,” he said, pursuing the thought. “The two of you close?”
Jane’s gaze slid from his in what he recognized as evasion. “Yes.” She hesitated. “I mean, we have our moments. Don’t most siblings?”
“Sure,” Clay said easily. “My brother and I beat the crap out of each other every now and again just for the hell of it.”
Jane rolled her eyes. “I can safely say that Lissa and I never get violent. We just, um, have stretches where we don’t talk very often. You know.”
No, he didn’t, but he wanted to. “What about lately? Have you been talking? Would you know if anything was going on with her?”
“Anything?”
“Say, trouble with her husband.”
Some anger fired up on her face. “The husband who is in ICU right now holding her hand and praying for all he’s worth?”
“Two people can fight and still care about each other.”
“But you’re suggesting something a lot worse than fighting.”
Yeah, now that she mentioned it, he was. He couldn’t help thinking of a couple of moments where something had been really off with Drew Wilson. It was a gut feeling more than anything else, but Clay trusted his gut.
“I’m trying to get a complete picture, that’s all. You’d be doing the same if you were in my shoes.”
She slanted a suddenly suspicious look at him. “Why were you at the accident site so early on? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Clay shook his head. “Nothing like that.”
“Then why?”
He moved his shoulders, trying without success to ease the new tension. “I’d come in for a few hours to catch up on reading reports.”
She nodded. She’d been at work on a sunny Saturday, too.
“One of my detectives was taking a report from Drew. He’d given his name, and then I heard him talking about Melissa and Brianna. It clicked that he had to be your brother-in-law and that it was your sister who was missing.” He grimaced. “I was curious.”
Jane studied him, long enough for it to become uncomfortable. Her pupils dilated slightly, as if...he didn’t know. Finally she gave a funny little nod. “Thank you.”
Which meant she knew he’d stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong because he was worried about her. “If it had been the other way around...”
“You’re right.” Now she didn’t want to meet his eyes. “I’d have been curious, too.”
There was a bump in his chest, as if his heart had maybe skipped a beat. Was she implying...? Something else he didn’t know.
Damn. Focus. Do your goddamn job.
“You didn’t really answer my question. Was Melissa speaking to you lately? For some reason you want me to think everything was sweetness and light between her and Drew, but I need to know if it wasn’t.”
She averted her face. He sat through the silence while she struggled with herself. When she finally looked back at him, her expression was guarded.
“No, we haven’t been getting along well lately. Like I said, we have...tensions. There’s three years between us, and after Mom took off I sort of stepped in as a mother figure. Then Lissa was only seventeen when Dad died and she lived with me until she graduated from high school. Especially once she hit about thirteen, she resented me having any authority over her. Her favorite line was, ‘You’re not my mother and you can’t tell me what to do.’” Jane shrugged. No biggie, she was trying to convince him. What had she said? Ancient history.
Too bad he didn’t buy it.
“Rivalry for your dad’s attention?”
Her expression shut down with the finality of a steel door. He didn’t have to hear the lock to know it had slid into place.
“No,” she said, and that was all.
Oh, man, he wanted to pursue the subject, but had an uneasy feeling he was straying into personal territory. Yes, he wanted to know Jane, but right now, the people he needed to know were her sister, her brother-in-law and the missing niece.
“Drew and I are friends.” Jane didn’t sound as if she wanted to tell him, but felt compelled to. “If they were really having problems, he would have told me. Like I said, there was the job thing and the question of whether they’d move if he found a good enough one, but he hadn’t yet, so—” She lifted one shoulder.
“Is he good with the kids?” Clay made his tone casual.
“Drew?” Jane looked genuinely surprised. “Sure. Hey, right now, he’s the one who’s home with them. That’s probably why Lissa took Bree with her. Especially with her two friends having moved away, Bree probably needed some exclusive mom time.”
She didn’t know that Drew had implied Melissa had felt extreme reluctance to take her daughter along. Because she’d been cranky and wanted some peace and quiet? Or because she’d never intended to run the errand that was her ostensible reason for leaving the house?
Or—and this was the big or in Clay’s book—was the whole story fiction? Melissa Wilson’s supposed trip to Rite Aid, the possibility she and her husband had squabbled about whether she was going to take Brianna, the later phone call... It all came from the same man.
Not the phone call; Clay had verified that there was a call lasting just under one minute from Melissa’s phone to Drew’s. But what was said, who’d actually dialed the call, that was all in question as far as Clay was concerned.
His least favorite scenario involved the pedophile who got lucky and happened on a really pretty little girl trying to flag down a passing motorist.
But he had some others that would keep him awake, too, and they involved Drew Wilson.
What if he and his wife had done more than squabble? What if they’d had a nasty fight? If she fled, he might have pursued and been responsible for running her off the road. He could have Brianna stashed somewhere so she couldn’t tell what had really happened. He might figure he could brainwash her, then have her miraculously restored to him.
Or what if he was sexually molesting his eldest daughter, and he really couldn’t afford it if either she or his wife talked?
Jesus. What if he’d killed his daughter and then chased down his wife to shut her mouth? So far, Clay hadn’t found a witness to confirm anything beyond the fact that Drew had dropped his younger daughter off at the neighbor’s without saying anything but that he thought maybe his wife’s car had broken down and he needed to go check on her. His frantic appearance at the police station could be a con job.
And Clay didn’t like being conned.
He was honest enough with himself to admit that he also didn’t like the idea that Jane had a closer relationship with her brother-in-law than she did with her sister.
Once he finished talking to Jane, he was going to have a chat with the nurses in ICU and make sure they kept at least half an eye on Melissa Wilson and her so-devoted husband.
“You said you take the girls alone sometimes. I’ll bet you tried to keep Brianna from feeling too sad this summer.”
“I’ve tried to do something fun with her every week. Sometimes both girls, but Alexis is happier at the day camp than Bree is this year. I know Drew lets her stay home some days even when he takes Alexis.”
A father should want to spend individual time with his kids. Unfortunately, in his job, Clay had seen too many cases where a father liked being alone with one of his kids for a sick reason.
“I’ve mostly been working Tuesday through Saturday,” Jane continued. “So I’ve devoted a lot of Mondays this summer to the girls. Sometimes they spend Sunday at my place. In July I took just Bree over to that really cool water park in McMinnville.”
He decided he had to be direct. “Does she talk to you? Would she tell you if something was weighing on her?”
Jane’s uncomprehending stare slowly altered to one of outraged understanding. “You’re suggesting that...that Drew or Lissa was abusing her?”
“I’m asking if the possibility exists.”
“No!”
He held her gaze with a steady one of his own. “Jane, you’re not that naive. I know this is your family. Nobody ever wants to think a person she loves could do something like that. But it happens. In fact, it’s a hell of a lot more common than most people have any idea.”
She visibly choked on it, but she had been a cop too long to deny what he said was the truth. “No,” she repeated, but more moderately. “I really don’t think so. The girls are both cheerful and affectionate and—” Jane scowled. “If I could imagine it with either of their parents, it wouldn’t be—” She stopped again, unhappy.
“Your sister,” Clay said slowly.
Her mouth tightened. “Actually, I was going to say Drew. He’s a really nice guy. I think Alexis and Bree are more comfortable with him than they are with Lissa. She’s, I don’t know, uptight and—” something else she didn’t want to say “—self-centered, I guess.”
An unpleasant suspicion had entered Clay’s mind as she talked. Clay remembered the way Drew’s face and tone had softened when the subject of Jane came up. Now listen to the warmth in her tone. Was there any chance something was going on there? Even the idea enraged him.
But, truth was, he couldn’t think how a flirtation or even an affair between Jane and Drew could have played into today’s events, unless it had been a catalyst for a monumental fight between husband and wife. And then how did that involve the kid?
No.
He didn’t believe it anyway, he discovered. He thought Jane’s sense of integrity was too unbending to allow her to sleep with her sister’s husband.
But he also found he hated almost as much the possibility that she wanted to. That the two of them looked at each other sometimes with the knowledge between them that they might have been happy together.
And yeah, what grated maybe most of all was the way she’d described Drew. He was a really nice guy—while Clay Renner was scum of the earth.
Like acid in his belly, it ate at him knowing he’d given her damn good reason to believe exactly that.
And...maybe she’d be right to believe it. A self-confident man, Clay had taken a serious hit that day. Since she’d walked away, he’d looked hard at a lot of crap he’d grown up taking for granted. What shook him most was discovering how much contempt for women had been embedded in his father’s “traditional” views of male/female roles.
Yeah, well, too little, too late.
He stood abruptly. “I’m going in to see how your sister is doing. Then I want you to switch places with your brother-in-law so I can talk to him.”
By her narrowed eyes, he could tell she thought he really intended to bully poor, nice Drew, which upped his pissed quotient. But by God, he was too good at his job to let personal feelings influence an investigation.
He nodded at Jane, probably nothing too friendly showing on his face, and left her alone there.
* * *
DREW SAT IN the hard plastic chair beside Lissa’s bed in ICU, listening to the hum and beep of monitors and the squeak of shoes as a nurse walked past. Farther away were voices. Somebody else getting bad news? he wondered with a jab of pain.
Sometimes he tilted his head back and stared at the pattern of Lissa’s heart beating in jagged green lines across a monitor. Mostly he gazed at her face, so ominously still and unlike her. He sat on her good side, so he didn’t have to see the horrible swelling and bruising. Not that he could forget doctors had actually drilled into her skull.
He squeezed the lax, cool hand that lay in his. “Liss,” he murmured, “can you hear me? I really need you to open your eyes. You’re scaring me. I can’t believe you of all people—” He broke off with a harsh breath.
Melissa had been a revelation to him when he’d met her, filled with a vitality that made her stand out from everyone else he’d ever met. Enthralled, he hadn’t been able to resist her. He hadn’t wanted to resist her, even though he’d known he was hurting Jane.
The terrible thing was that sometimes he thought he’d been an idiot, that Lissa was all surface and flash, and he should have been able to see beneath it. He’d begun to wonder if she really loved him at all. Lately—
But he didn’t want to think about the suspicions that nibbled at him like mosquitoes raising welts. If only she’d open her eyes, they could talk. She would convince him that she had nothing to do with whatever had happened to Bree, and these doubts churning in his belly would go away. If only he could have Bree back, have Melissa back, he could forgive almost anything.
He leaned toward her, resting his elbows on his knees. “I need you to talk to me. Please, Liss. Please.”
But her face stayed still and sunken, and on a surge of anguish he tried to imagine never seeing her laugh again, or whirl on him in a fury, or light with some new enthusiasm. What if he had to plod on without her?
But on a clench of dread and fear, he knew: if he could somehow, magically, save either his wife or his daughter, but not both, he would have to choose Bree.
“That’s what you’d want, isn’t it?” he whispered.
She didn’t answer, of course.
CHAPTER FOUR
“AUNTIE JANE?” HUDDLED in a tiny ball beneath the covers, Alexis peered out. “Will you...will you stay till I fall asleep? And maybe even lie down with me?”
Jane’s heart squeezed painfully. “Oh, pumpkin. Of course I will.”
She untied her athletic shoes and dropped them on the floor, then turned off the bedside lamp before lying down atop the covers so that her head shared her five-year-old niece’s pillow and she could kiss her on the nose. The little girl wriggled a few times to fit into the curve of Jane’s body. Then she gave a small sniff.
“Auntie Jane, will you find Bree tomorrow?” The question floated, only a wistful thread.
Jane gave her a squeeze. “You know I’ll try, with all my might. But Sergeant Renner is really the one in charge of finding her. The good thing is, I know he’ll try with all his might, too.”
