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“Good Lord. I didn’t know … I mean. You have a son?” he said again, totally confounded by the revelation. The obvious thought leaped into his mind, and he felt his stomach clench. “I didn’t know you’d gotten married.”
She continued to meet his gaze. “I’m not married. He’s four years old, Matt. He’s your son, too.”
The shock and confusion was like a body blow, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. Shaking his head, he tried to clear his brain. He couldn’t be hearing her correctly—could he? “I don’t think I’m getting all of this quite right.”
In a high, strained voice, she said, “I know I’ve shocked you. I didn’t know how else to say it. Five years ago, I left you because you told me you didn’t want to get married. And you didn’t want children. Then I found out I was pregnant, and I wasn’t going to come back and beg you to marry me. So I just….” She let go of the mug and flapped one arm. “I just went it alone.”
He tried to imagine what she’d been through, what she was going through now.
“You’re saying he’s been kidnapped?” Matt said, his own voice turning rough. This was like a nightmare. An old nightmare coming back. Only she didn’t know it yet.
“Yes.”
He asked the next obvious question. “And the police and the FBI are looking for him?”
The scared, determined look on her face tore at his heart. “No! I can’t go to them.”
“You have to!”
“I can’t!” she shouted, then lowered her voice. “Somebody picked him up at day care two days ago. A man, apparently. He made the teacher think he had my permission. But he left a note for me with her. It said that if I contacted the police or the FBI, they’d kill Trevor.”
The revelation tipped her over the edge. It looked as if she’d been holding herself together with strapping tape. Suddenly, all pretense of composure evaporated. She began to cry in great gulping gasps, her shoulders shaking as the sobs racked her body.
Matt shot out of his chair, came around the table and hauled her up. When he wrapped his arms around her, she leaned into him. As he folded her close, he knew he needed to hold on to her as much as she needed to cling to him.
While he rocked her gently in his arms, he tried to process everything she’d just told him. It was too much to take in all at once, but he had to because the past was rushing back to body-slam him.
Shelley gulped, and he could feel her trying to pull herself together.
Now he was the one who was hanging on to composure by a thread.
“You have no idea who took him?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered.
“And you have no idea what they want?”
“No.”
“They didn’t ask for money?”
“I’m telling you everything I know.”
He stroked her back. “Okay. I believe you.” Sucking in a breath, he let it out in a rush, knowing he was going to make this worse for her. For both of them.
“A long time ago, I was kidnapped,” he said.
Her head jerked up, and she stared at him through brimming eyes. “What?”
He had turned the tables on her. Now she had to process what she was hearing. “You were kidnapped?” “Yes.”
“You never told me about it!”
“It’s not something I was prepared to talk about—with anyone.” But now that he’d opened the subject, he knew she had a thousand questions, and he would do his best to answer them. He’d told her she’d feel better when she explained why she’d come. Strangely, he was discovering the truth of his own words. Despite the circumstances, it was a relief to stop lying. Well, lying by omission.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve.” Before she could ask another question, he pressed ahead. “A couple of friends and I had gotten off the school bus. A white van stopped and somebody pulled me inside.”
“Who?”
“I don’t remember!”
“But you got away!” she whispered, and he knew she was grasping onto that fact. He was here. Somehow he’d escaped from his captors.
“I came back three months later. I don’t have any memories of what happened to me while I was gone. The next thing I remember is wandering along the stream on the ranch.”
“You were safe!”
“Yeah. But I made the decision never to have children. Never to put a child of my own in danger. Now I know I was right.”
“Matt, what are you saying?” she gasped, obviously trying to put it all together.
“Shelley, it can’t be a coincidence that I was kidnapped, and then Trevor. It’s got to be related.”
When she stared at him, stunned, he said, “I understand your confusion. Let’s sit down where we’ll be comfortable.”
He led her down the hall to the den where they’d sat on so many evenings long ago. After seating her on the sofa, he crossed to the fireplace and removed the screen. Kneeling down, he struck a long match and lit the kindling under the dry logs in the grate, watching them flame up.
When she turned, he saw Shelley huddled on the cushions, staring at the fire as though the flames held the answer to their problems.
“I tried,” he said. “I tried to keep it from happening again.”
She nodded, and he knew he had to tell her the rest of it.
Still standing with his back to the fire, he said, “I may not remember what happened to me, but I know it changed me.”
Lifting her gaze, she asked, “How?”
He swallowed, because as bad as the first part of his revelation had been, he was just getting to the worst part.
BIG BOYS don’t cry. Trevor Young knew that, but it was hard to keep tears from leaking down his cheeks.
He was cold and hungry, and he wanted to go home. He wanted his mommy.
With a trembling hand, he swiped the tears away.
“Mommy,” he whispered so that the man named Blue wouldn’t hear him. “Mommy, please come get me out of here.” He didn’t think that she could hear him. But he couldn’t stop himself from talking to her because it made him feel a little better.
He was in a cabin in the middle of a field—with trees all around the edges, except where the road cut through. He could look out the window, but he couldn’t see any other houses. Maybe there were some behind the trees. Or maybe not.
He wanted to get away. But the window was locked. And so was the door. And sometimes Blue put a handcuff on Trevor like the police did on TV when they were taking the bad guys to the police station. The cuff was attached to a chain. And the chain was attached to the bed frame. So he couldn’t move very far.
Only it was all backward now. The bad guy had the handcuffs. Not the police.
He lay curled on the bed, hugging his knees. When he heard the doorknob turn, he burrowed under the covers, wishing he could hide.
Footsteps crossed the wooden floor, and he knew Blue was looking down at him. If he pretended to be sleeping, would the man go away?
Instead, he pulled down the blanket, and Trevor couldn’t stop himself from whimpering. “Please, let me go back to my mommy.”
“Don’t give me a hard time, kid.”
“Why are you so mean?”
“It’s my job.”
“What kind of job is that?” “Stop asking questions.”
The hard look in the man’s eyes made Trevor clamp his lips together.
Blue pulled his hand from behind his back, and Trevor saw that he was holding a hypodermic needle.
Trevor cringed away. The man had already given him some shots that hurt a lot. In his back. “Please, please don’t do that to me again.”
“Shut up. The sooner we do this, the sooner it will be over.” As the man grabbed his arm, Trevor started to cry.
SHELLEY STARED at the harsh lines of Matt’s face. The way he said that being kidnapped had changed him scared her.
“You have to tell me what you mean.”
He looked as though he didn’t want to speak.
“You’re the one who brought it up!” she threw at him.
“Yeah. Because of the reason you came here.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then said, “Shelley, I’ve never told this to anyone. Well, I mean, my mom figured it out. But I never admitted anything—even to her. Especially to her.”
She kept her gaze steady. “I’m still not following you.”
“When I was kidnapped, I was just an ordinary kid. When I came back, I was different.”
She wanted to scream at him. Whatever he was planning to say, he was dancing around it. “Spell it out,”
“Okay. I can make people do things.”
“That’s your terrible secret?” she shot back. “Well, what’s the big deal? I can make people do things, too. I can make Trevor go to bed at bedtime. I can make his nursery school teacher be more sensitive to his needs.” She bit her lip. “Well, I could do those things—before he disappeared. So what exactly do you mean?”
He thrust his hands into his pockets. “I mean that I can suggest a course of action—and the person will follow it. I don’t mean I say or do anything. I just think about it—and they do it.”
“That’s … nonsense.”
His stance turned aggressive. “Oh, yeah? So you think it was all your idea to leave me?” “Of course it was!”
“Not true. I put the idea in your mind—and you did it.” “How?”
“I don’t exactly know. I came back from those three missing months with the power to influence people.”
She stared at him, trying to take that in, and trying to figure out what it meant to him. She’d driven here through a raging storm because she needed his help. Now it seemed as though he’d come unhinged. From the news that he had a son and that Trevor was missing? Or had it started earlier—when he’d walled himself off from the world?
As she regarded him, she started putting a bunch of things together, a bunch of things that added up to very odd behavior. He’d given up raising horses. He had an alarm system to warn him if someone was sneaking up on him. He was holed up here in this house like a hermit. He had a bunch of guns, not just normal rancher’s hardware. And she was locked in here with him.
Suddenly, she was wondering what Matt Whitlock might do if he thought he was cornered.
When he started toward her, she cringed—giving away her fears.
He stopped short, staring at her. “You’re afraid of me,” he said in a flat voice. “No.”
He shook his head. “It’s written all over your face, but I don’t blame you.”
“You say you have this talent—and you never told anyone about it,” she challenged.
“That’s right.” He sighed.
“Why not?”
His expression turned glacial. “For starters, my mother tried to beat it out of me. I’ve told you what she was like. Strict. Absolutely certain of what was right and what was wrong. She used to talk about the neighbors. The people in town. She’d make judgments about them—and nobody ever came up to her standards. She even drove an extra fifty miles to a dry goods store because she didn’t like Mr. Mason, the guy who owned the mercantile in Yuma.” He took a breath.
“When she realized what I could do, she was sure it was the work of the devil. None of that made for an idyllic childhood.”
Her heart squeezed, and she tried to imagine what it must have been like for him—if he was telling the truth.
He sighed. “I see you’re having a little trouble with the concept. Do you want me to prove it?”
“How?”
“We’ll call Ed Janey over from the bunkhouse, and I’ll get him to do something.”
“Maybe it will be something he was going to do anyway.”
He laughed. “I mean, you can choose what you want him to do.”
“Like what?” “Anything.”
She thought for a minute, trying to come up with something Matt wouldn’t think of. Something that wasn’t obvious. “You used to keep cans of vegetable beef soup in the pantry. Do you still?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him to get a can from the shelf—and take it home,” she tossed out, sure that would be the end of the experiment.
