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Tyler shifted his weight and checked his cell phone one more time, even though it had not vibrated since he’d arrived at the hospital. He replaced the phone, then took a deep breath to quiet his increasing anxiety, his need to do something.
Finally, he gave in to the gentle urgings of one of the nurses and sat in a hard plastic chair near the bed. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clutched his hat in one hand. He examined the band closely, for no good reason. He just needed somewhere to look that wasn’t Dee—or the smears of Dee’s blood that still streaked his clothes.
How could he have been so blind? Tyler knew that deer leapt out on that stretch of road all the time, yet he’d trundled through, his mind so on Carly that he had become oblivious to everything else.
Lord, I could have killed Dee. Please let me be more alert and aware.
Not that he was normally unaware of Dee. In fact, he’d been increasingly aware of her since she’d arrived in Mercer, with her sharp wit and soft Southern accent. He looked forward to their lunchtime meetings at the café, her questions about Mercer’s residents and history, her thoughts about life in the South.
Tyler rotated his hat in his hands. He enjoyed the way she looked, too, despite the weight she said she wanted to lose. He didn’t get that, the weight loss thing, even though he could stand to lose a few pounds, as well. He liked Dee’s curves, the way her dark hair caressed her shoulders with the soft curls at the tips. She barely came up to his shoulder, so she was maybe five-two, but she seemed just right to him.
What is taking so long? He glanced at his still silent phone again. Never had he so badly wanted to be in two places at once, to see how she was doing here, but also at the scene of her attack. Maybe I should let Maggie take over here. Then he immediately dismissed the thought. Wayne and Fletcher were certainly capable of handling the gathering of any evidence, whereas Maggie had no training with crime victims. He needed to be here when Dee awoke, not Maggie.
He paused. Interesting friends, those two, the New Yorker who had adopted Mercer as her home and the Southerner who had seemed so lost a few months ago. Maggie had been tough on Dee at first; now they were friends. Maggie could be surprisingly hard on the writers at the retreat, even though she was younger than most, maybe thirty-one or so.
Hmm. How old was Dee? Tyler shifted in the hard chair, trying to find any kind of comfortable position, as he attempted to do the math of Dee’s life. He looked again at her face, so oddly relaxed now under the crisscrossing bandages. He knew she’d been married for about ten years, and that her son had been eight when he died three years ago. That would make her, what, early to mid-thirties? She still moved like a younger woman, though…
He stood, pulling his phone out again, as if the ring tone had stopped working for some reason. Still nothing. He glanced at the clock again. Stop getting distracted.
He paced slowly, quietly. There had been too many distractions lately. Focus on the case. What if Dee’s mumblings about the sandals were right? Were the sandals yet one more thing they had overlooked? He knew without a doubt they had searched that stream bank. With a child Carly’s age, the stream always got checked first.
Yet all previous cases of missing children in Mercer had been about runaways, all of whom had returned home quickly. In his ten years on the force, nothing like this had happened. A true kidnapping. And although he’d gained a lot of confidence and experience in the four years since he’d become chief, Mercer did not lend itself to giving him experience in major crimes. Robberies, assaults, an arson or two, the occasional domestic dispute—these were routine. But since the town had separated itself from the county and organized its own law enforcement department apart from the county sheriff’s team, the police had handled only one murder and no other major crime.
Tyler’s mouth twisted grimly, and he dropped back down in the chair. Of course, Mercer’s low crime rate gave him plenty of time to obsess about a missing little girl. The very idea of someone swiping a kid filled Tyler with a stomach-churning revulsion. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would be cruel to a child, and he knew most kids were found within a day or so—or not at all. Whether or not they were found depended a lot on the initial investigation.
The initial investigation. Tyler felt out of his league and terrified of making another misstep. He had made plenty in this case, even with the FBI and the state police helping and his best friend, former NYPD detective Fletcher MacAllister, looking over his shoulder. An Amber alert had not been issued due to the lack of evidence that Carly was in immediate danger; no proof existed that she’d been taken as opposed to running away. He had told Carly’s parents—and the media—too much about their investigation. The lack of evidence had panicked him into asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, leading to a lot of misinformation in the press, and the Bradfords were even more devastated by the publicity. Every day the case had grown colder as early spring rains washed away the last semblance of evidence. There were, in fact, no leads at all, and even now no evidence that she’d been kidnapped. Not even a clean indication of a crime scene.
Yet everyone in Mercer knew that the happy princess had not run away. Tyler ached to prove it. To find her.
He shifted in the chair. Stop whining. Focus on the facts. What few there are.
The Bradfords had no known enemies. Jack and Nancy Bradford were beloved members of the community with no apparent enemies. Even though Jack was a Portsmouth surgeon, he’d been out of medical school only a few years. He’d never been sued and only had one complaint against him registered with the American Medical Association—and the AMA had cleared him in that case. Nancy had given birth to Carly when she and Jack were still in college, barely making ends meet. They were a family made close by hardship, and they adored each other. Almost no one Tyler interviewed had a bad word to say about them.
Carly often played in the woods, but at no set time. The only conclusion anyone could draw was that it had been a random act, a moment of opportunity. A cruel stranger who had happened to see the lovely child skipping along after her dog and decided to…
“Tyler?” The voice came from behind him, and he turned. The young woman who stood there—tall, blond and exceptionally thin—could have been mistaken for a model, except for the white coat and the perpetually exhausted look of an E.R. physician. As police chief of a small town without a hospital, Tyler knew all the E.R. docs in Portsmouth and Manchester. “Hello, Anna,” he said quietly.
Her warm smile was genuine but looked as tired as her eyes. “Hi, Tyler. She one of your Mercer folks?”
“Yes. And a friend.”
Anna nodded. “Then you might want to keep an eye on her for a few days.” She slipped her hands into her jacket pockets and her doctor mode took over. “She took quite a blow across the face. She says it was from a tree branch, and I don’t doubt that. No sign of concussion, though, which is good news. As you can see, we’ve stitched up the cuts and given her something for the pain.”
“Pain.” Tyler took a deep breath. “Will she be coherent if I talked to her about what happened?”
Anna paused, focusing on his eyes, considering the question. After a moment, she glanced at Dee, then shook her head. “She has a lot of meds in her now, but she’s asleep, not unconscious. She should stir soon, but she’ll still be loopy. She didn’t make a whole lot of sense before the meds, but now, you may not be able to tell when it’s Dee talking and when it’s the drugs doing the speaking. She needs to rest for a day or so, but she’ll be okay and far more able to tell you her story tomorrow. The nurse is prepping the release paperwork, so they’ll bring her out in a few minutes. Mostly, she needs quiet.”
Tyler nodded. “Thanks. We appreciate your help.”
Anna paused, then put a hand on his forearm. “If she needs me, page me. I’ll meet you here.”
He wrapped his fingers briefly around hers, then she returned to her work.
When Tyler returned from the treatment area, Maggie stood immediately. “How is she?”
Tyler held up the two plastic bags the hospital had loaned him, one holding a pair of white sandals, the other the contents of Dee’s pockets. “Shook up. Her face is all scratched up, and her left eye is black and swollen shut. Her doctor thought she’d broken her nose, but it’s just badly bruised.”
She looked up at Tyler, then pointed at the bag with the sandals. “What are those?”
He motioned for her to sit, then dropped into a chair next to her. “She kept mumbling about these all the way here. I couldn’t even get her to let go of them. She kept repeating that she’d heard a voice in the woods, demanding that she drop the sandals. She ran, but the voice chased her.” He paused, watching her closely. “She says they’re Carly’s.”
Maggie fell back in the chair as if she’d been punched, and her voice became a tight, hushed whisper. “Carly’s? How could they be Carly’s?”
He shrugged. “She said she found them by the stream.”
Maggie straightened. “That’s impossible. We searched every inch of that stream bank, the entire run of it. The whole town did.”
“I know.”
She shook her head. “And we’ve had other false finds. They can’t be Carly’s.”
“I know.”
“It’s almost too weird to believe.” She paused. “If I didn’t know Dee, I’d think she was…” Her voice trailed off, and she seemed to sag a little.
“Hallucinating?” Tyler asked.
Reluctantly, Maggie nodded.
“Except she didn’t smack herself in the face.”
They fell silent a moment, then Maggie pointed at the other bag. “What’s in that one?”
“The stuff from her pockets.” He turned the bag so they both could see the contents: a cell phone, keys, a pack of mints and a Swiss Army knife. He frowned at them. “She carries a Swiss Army knife?”
“Everywhere she goes. I think it belonged to her husband. Dee isn’t crazy about carrying a purse.” Maggie looked down at the floor a second, then back up at him. Squaring her shoulders, she stood. “What if she’s right? What if these are Carly’s and someone did attack Dee? What then?”
Tyler rose as well, watching her face closely, trying to read her meaning. Was this about Dee? Or the fact that those woods bordered the retreat’s property? Fletcher had once told Tyler that Maggie seemed to adopt all the writers at the colony, taking them under her wing no matter what their age. Encouraging, sympathetic, and patient with the creative egos, Maggie became their sister, mother, or daughter, depending on their needs. He also knew that Dee held a special place in Maggie’s heart. Tyler saw that in her now, the light of deep compassion in her hazel eyes.
He took her hand in his. “Then we’ll protect her. We’ll get her story and investigate. We’ll call the FBI and ask for their help again. We’ll have to revisit a lot of what we’ve done on Carly’s case.”
Maggie breathed deeply, her voice barely above a whisper. “If they are…I mean…would this mean she could still be in the area? Does this mean that Carly is still alive?”
THREE
Somewhere over her head a door slammed violently, and a scream of pure fury echoed throughout the house. Carly Bradford whirled away from the narrow window of the basement room and dropped back down on the bed beneath it. She scooted close to the headboard and drew her knees up close to her chest, waiting, her eyes locked on the overhead vent that allowed in cool air and a lot of noise from upstairs. She followed the booted footsteps as they crossed the ceiling, then thudded down the stairs into the basement and across the short passage outside her door. There was an odd sound of rustling metal that she could never quite figure out, then keys rattled, the lock scraped and the door swung open.
Her captor entered, face red with anger, and Carly knew immediately that the sandals had not been found.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drop them…” She stopped, and Carly’s eyes widened as she took in the bruised face and the streaks of mud on the legs and chest of the sweat suit her captor always wore into the woods. Something had happened.
Carly flinched, a new wave of fear surging through her, and she hugged her legs tighter. “Please don’t hit me again.”
“Someone took them. I tried to stop her—” Her captor waved a hand in dismissal. “Never mind. I want the dress.”
Carly pointed, hand trembling, to a trunk in the corner. “It’s still there.”
Shortly after her captor had locked Carly in this tiny bedroom, new clothes had appeared on the bed, with orders to put the sandals, poncho and dress into the trunk. There they had stayed until last night, when her captor had awakened Carly well after midnight and announced that she needed exercise. Her captor had not bought new shoes for her, so they had retrieved the sandals. They had walked the stream bank into the woods, following only the light of a full moon. Her captor had tried to make her laugh and play, as if all were normal, despite the rope tied securely around Carly’s waist and a hushed threat of what would happen if she screamed. Exhausted, terrified, Carly had tried, finally slipping off the sandals and wading downstream a bit, then back. Only after they had returned home did they realize the sandals were gone.
Her captor snatched the blue sundress out of the box and waved it at the young child. “I’ll get them back. Have to. No matter what it takes. That meddling witch…” The dress snapped like a flag in the wind. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to move.” The door slammed, and the lock clicked back into place.
Tears leaked from Carly’s eyes as the frightened, confused little girl rolled over on the bed. “I want to go home.” The pillow muffled her words and soaked up her tears, but she grew quiet as something her captor had said echoed again in her head.
Someone took them…her…
Someone. A woman. Maybe the rescuer Carly had been praying so feverishly for? Carly looked up at the ceiling. “God? Can she help?”
Is Carly still alive? Maggie’s question haunted Tyler all the way back to Mercer, just as it had clung to almost every waking moment for the past few weeks. He drove back alone in his cruiser, with Maggie insisting that Dee ride in her larger and more comfortable SUV. Anna had been right. When they brought Dee into the waiting area after her discharge, the medications had completely clouded her mind. Incoherent and groggy, Dee had almost fallen out of the wheelchair, and Tyler’s chest tightened as he looked over her injuries and tried not to show his surprise.
Tenderly, he’d lifted her from the chair and snuggled her down into the backseat where Maggie had made a nest of coats and blankets borrowed from the hospital. “Ride easy, Dixie Dee.” He had whispered it so softly no one else could hear, and she’d blinked up at him, then closed her eyes sleepily as he’d tucked a pillow in at her side.
He’d backed away as Maggie took over as nurse, and Tyler returned to his car with the bag holding the sandals. As both cars pulled out of the hospital’s parking lot, he called Fletcher. “Speak to me. Where are you?”
The older detective cleared his throat. “Just leaving the scene. It’s getting too dark to do any more tonight. How’s Dee?”
Tyler related what Anna had told him about the attack and Dee’s condition. “Anything to corroborate her story?”
“Some. Wayne found blood spatter around a tree, and drops leading to the road near where you hit her. He also found blood and bits of skin on one of the limbs. There are at least two sets of footprints, one most likely Dee’s, but we couldn’t tell if there were more than two. The ground is badly torn up. We took a couple of casts, just in case. Wayne gathered some of the blood and skin to send to the lab, but my guess is that it’s all Dee’s.”
“Hear any spooky voices out in the woods?”
Fletcher paused. “You don’t believe her?”
Now it was Tyler’s turn to hesitate. “I don’t know, Fletcher. Her injuries are real, and it does sound as if she had a scuffle with someone. I don’t think she made this up. I just don’t know if she heard what she thinks she heard. It could have been a kid trying to scare her. What’s your take on this?”
Another pause. “The wind in these trees can sound strange to anyone not used to it.”
Tyler grinned. “So says the boy from New York City?”
“Not me,” Fletcher growled. “I grew up in Vermont.”
“Right.” Tyler let him off the hook. “Listen, Maggie is taking Dee to the retreat lodge house. She’ll play nurse, but if you could…”
“Not a problem. And I’ll keep an eye out.”
“I know Dee will remember things differently tomorrow, but there was no way to get a statement out of her today.”
“Assault victims usually do.”
“Is Wayne going to send everything to the lab?”
“Yeah. He said to tell you to go on home. The boys are changing shifts, and he’ll take care of the rest of this. You can do any remaining paperwork in the morning.”
“I’ll drop the sandals off so he can log them in and put them in a proper evidence bag. If, in fact, they are evidence, I don’t want to leave them in the car overnight nor in a plastic bag.”
“You know you’ll have to call Jack and Nancy about this before you do any forensic work on them.”
“I know. Can’t spend the money on forensics unless we know for sure. We’ve already been through this too many times.”
A beat of silence passed before Fletcher spoke again. “You want me there?”
Absolutely! You think I want to do this by myself once again? Look into those faces, offer them some kind of false hope again? “No. Thanks, though. I need to do it.”
“If you change your mind, let me know.”
Tyler hung up, following in silence as the cars turned into the long drive leading to Jackson’s Retreat. He carried Dee from the car into a guest bedroom in the retreat’s lodge house, then stood back awkwardly as Maggie took on the role of Dee’s caregiver. Normally the writers stayed in individual cabins on the property, but this way Dee would be close to Maggie and Fletcher, who would guard her as if she were a queen.
Maggie still bustled about the virtually unconscious Dee as he eased out of the room and returned to his cruiser. The ten-minute drive to the police station felt much longer, with his mind occupied by the innocent eyes of Carly Bradford and the wounded face of Dee Kelley. He gave the sandals to Wayne to log in for evidence, then headed home.
An odd sense of resignation settled around Tyler as he drove to his small house not far from downtown and let go of any idea that the sandals belonged to Carly. They couldn’t. That style had been quite popular for young girls this spring, and they had already received a dozen or more false “sightings” of the shoes. This was just one more. But, of all the people to find another pair of “Carly’s shoes,” did it have to be Dee Kelley, with her wounded mother’s soul? He couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind and heart right now.
Help her, Lord. Tyler’s silent prayer came automatically to him. She’s already been through way too much.
He also hoped that this “attack” was more than Dee’s imagination, that it didn’t mean Dee was about to spiral viciously backward into her old life. She’s come so far since being here, Father. Don’t let her go backward in her healing. She’s going to need Your help.
Everyone in Mercer seemed to know Dee’s heart-crushing story, of how she’d lost her husband and son in a devastating car crash and the three-year depression that followed. He’d heard different versions from a variety of townspeople, including Laurie at the café and a couple of shop owners. As usual, small towns and personal secrets weren’t a good mix. Yet knowing it had led the locals to embrace this newcomer in a way they seldom did. Of course, it helped that they’d discovered Dee to be one of the most gracious people they’d ever met.
He sighed as he turned on to his street, his mind flipping back to the day he’d met her, not long after she’d arrived in Mercer. Tyler and Fletcher had grown close over the past couple of years, and he often ate dinner with the MacAllisters and the writers at the retreat. One day, a few months ago, Dee had joined them. She’d been polite but reserved, and had spent most of the meal watching birds whisk to and fro at the feeders on the back deck of the lodge.
Tyler, on the other hand, spent the time watching her, drawn in even more when Fletcher had recounted her full story to him later that evening. The two of them had retreated to the basement game room of the lodge with hot cups of coffee to discuss cases and long days on the job. Then, when Tyler’s increasingly curious questions about the new writer started to amuse Fletcher, he switched the subject to Dee. Fletcher’s tale captured both Tyler’s imagination…and a bit of his heart.
Fletcher explained that Dee had seldom left her small Southern town before the accident. “She did, however, spend a lot of time on the Internet, which is where she met Aaron.” Aaron Jackson, a best-selling novelist, had started Jackson’s Retreat as his literary legacy, and he’d sung its praises to Dee when they had met during a writers’ conference. An immediate connection had sprung up between them, and they found a lasting friendship in their common beliefs. Aaron and Dee had e-mailed almost every day, sharing stories and problems.
Aaron had also been one of the few out-of-town friends to come to the funeral of her husband and son three years ago, following the car accident that had destroyed Dee’s world. Aaron had even remained several days afterward, holding her and letting her sob and rage at someone other than her parents and God.
Aaron’s murder a year later had been the last straw for Dee’s already fragile mind, and she had descended into a darkness she thought endless. A darkness completely devoid of hope, faith, and love. Devoid of God.
Her mother, however, remembered Aaron’s retreat and found some of the correspondence on Dee’s computer. Her parents, conspiring with Maggie, had put Dee on a plane.
Tyler had scowled at Fletcher. “Why am I just meeting her now?”
Fletcher sipped his coffee. “Because she’s just now emerging from her cabin. She’s not done much except stare at the walls.”
The first month at the retreat had been more darkness, with Dee lying for hours on the bed in her cabin. Maggie, with a new baby on her hip, had gone to the cabin every morning, opened the blinds and windows, turned on the lights and ceiling fan, and booted up Dee’s computer. Maggie had returned in the evening with Fletcher to insist Dee join the group for dinner. Dee had initially refused, and Fletcher and Maggie had stayed with her, eating dinner in her cabin and forcing her to talk to them. They learned the more intimate details of Dee’s life, during those first days, when Dee began to share her words with them, long before she started coming to the lodge for dinner.
Slow therapy, but it worked. Listening to other writers around the large dining table had finally engaged Dee in challenging conversation, and, eventually, had inspired her to sit at the computer, if only to stare at the blank screen. Six weeks later, she started to write. A journal, at first, then essays, two of which she sold to parents’ magazines. Those first paychecks buoyed her in a way she had not expected, letting a tiny glimmer of hope into her mind and heart. Tyler had met her as that glimmer of hope had begun to grow. Yet, the one thing still missing in her life was God. She had not reopened her heart to Him at all.
The bump that edged the entrance to his drive yanked Tyler back to the present, and he now prayed silently that God would make sure Dee held on to that hope. “She needs You more than ever, Lord, even if she doesn’t think she does,” he whispered, as he pulled into the drive at the side of the house and let the car roll to a halt in front of a garage near the back of the property.
