The Hiding Place (6 page)

N
ick borrowed Tara’s truck so he and Beamer could take Claire to school. When he returned, he found a hearty breakfast of pancakes and sausage waiting for him. Tara had laid out a bright woven place mat and a matching cloth napkin. A ceramic vase held orange and yellow wildflowers. Tara looked a bit wild, too, beautiful but exhausted and windblown. She’d evidently been outside to pick the flowers. She wore no makeup and her hair was tousled as if she’d just gotten out of bed. Nick shifted his legs under the table. The woman got to him in more ways than one.

“This looks great. I didn’t mean to oversleep,” he told her.

“You were able to spend some time with Claire before school, and that’s what mattered. I’m sure you’re jet-lagged. Is the Hide-A-Bed okay?”

Biting back a tease that he’d rather have her bed, he dug into the pile of pancakes. “That foldaway mattress is not half hard enough for what I’m used to. I’m going to have to bring in some dirt and rocks to approximate what I’ve been sleeping on. It’s even weird to be sitting at a table to eat.”

She poured him a glass of orange juice and set it beside his coffee. She seemed to keep her distance, not physically but emotionally. Polite but careful. Kind but distracted. Lack of sleep, or worry he was going to take Claire and Beamer and leave the area, he decided. He hoped she’d didn’t lump him with the kind of guys who took their kids and ran. It did get to him that Claire had just started second grade and liked her teacher and had friends in her class. But she’d learn to settle into a new situation if she had to. Whatever he decided was the reasonable thing to do, Claire would have to go along.

Beamer shifted his position on the floor, tipped his head and perked up one ear, as if interested in their conversation. Tara was washing dishes at the sink, banging things around pretty good. Yeah, she was upset about something.

“Great pancakes. So, how did you get into your line of work?” he asked, spearing a sausage link. He hoped not only to get to know her better, but to discuss something harmless. “Not many P.I.s specialize in tracing kids who are snatched by their dads.”

“Or their mothers’ boyfriends, as the case may be,” she added. “Three reasons, I guess. First of all, I’ve always loved puzzles…finding something hidden in a picture, like in those old
Highlights for Children
magazine years ago. Riddles, cryptograms, Sudoku, you name it. But more importantly, my uncle snatched my nine-year-old cousin, Linc, who was my age and to whom I was pretty close. When we were about fourteen, I suppose Linc really started to question or challenge his dad about their situation. My uncle just dropped Linc back at my aunt’s house, then disappeared again. But Linc was completely changed—out of control, defensive, nasty. He even felt his mother had betrayed him. He ran away when he was seventeen, and my aunt had no way of knowing what happened. We still don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” she said, her voice snagging.

Well, he thought, wrong topic choice again. He stood with his dirty plate and went closer to put it on the counter. “Tough memories. Sorry I stirred them up.”

“No, it’s fine. I—That’s not the only reason I started Finders Keepers. I went on to get my degree in social work from the University of Colorado. Well, you knew that, of course, since Alex and I roomed together. I specialized in family relations and human development.”

Damn, but he noted that tears glazed her eyes again. Was Claire’s guardian this unstable? He hoped he wasn’t making her uncomfortable. From the first he’d felt as instinctively protective of her as he did toward Claire.

“I worked with cases of abuse and neglect,” she went on, going back to washing dishes with a vengeance. She had a dishwasher right there, but maybe she needed something to do with her pent-up energy. “I placed kids in foster care and tried to get families reunified whenever possible, especially kids put back with their biological parents.”

“However draining the work was, you must have felt you were doing good—like you are now with Finders Keepers and with Claire.”

“I saw some pretty bad situations,” she said, nodding, “so I hated the job almost as much as I loved it. I tended to get so involved with my cases that I always took my work home with me. When I stumbled on a couple of cases that involved ex-husbands snatching their own kids and saw how tragic that was for the left-behinds—professional lingo for the mothers of the kids—I started my own specialty firm.”

“Have you ever retrieved snatched kids for their fathers when their mothers took off with them?”

“You know, I haven’t, but I would if the case seemed right. It’s just that word about my services has spread among women, I guess.”

“Did you get a lot of family support for all this?”

“Not really. When I became engaged, my fiancé didn’t think that profession was appropriate for a Lohan wife, so I really had to stand firm with him.”

Beamer jumped to his feet and growled. They both turned to look at the dog as he went to the double sliding glass doors and stood alert. With Beamer, that meant a stiff stance, intense expression and another long, low growl.

“Someone must be coming up the road,” Nick said, and walked toward the sliding doors to the deck. He looked through the glass in one direction, then the other. “I didn’t hear a vehicle and don’t see one either.”

“Elk come into the yard about this time but, as I said, he barks at them, and doesn’t usually growl. There’s been a fox around here lately, too.”

“I don’t see a darn thing, but Beamer’s looking up into the tree line.”

He walked back into the kitchen and leaned over the sink next to Tara to look out and up through the window in front of her toward the thick clumps of pines and aspens above the house. He thought he saw a glint of bright blue in the early slant of sun. A blue jay? Or could Claire’s night fear have been prophetic? Maybe she’d seen a hunter or hiker up there and translated it into a bad dream about Clay. It was hunting season, after all, deer and elk for archery, and wild turkeys and blue grouse for muzzle-loading rifles. Years ago, they’d had trouble with careless hunters too near these isolated houses.

“I’m planning to go over to a friend’s house today and get my truck out of his garage,” Nick told her, “but I think I’ll take Beamer for a walk first. He’s obviously eager to track whatever creature’s up there. Be back in a few minutes. You do keep all the doors locked, don’t you?”

“Always. Just habit from some of the bad scenarios I’ve heard about through my cases, though I know your mom seldom locked the doors.”

“Be back soon,” he repeated, and took Beamer’s thirty-foot lead and working collar off the peg on the wall. Beamer immediately stood at attention. He’d always been eager to work, but then, he’d always been able to sense danger, too.

After Tara locked up behind Nick, she went to her office and called local ob-gyns until she found one who could see her today—thank heavens for a cancellation in just a couple of hours. She called Dr. Holbrook’s office to arrange to pick up her medical records. Then she tried to get herself back on track with her caseload. Despite getting up now and then to look out her window for Nick, she forced herself to concentrate.

She always treated her open cases with respect—even keeping the folders clean, unbent and neat. To her they symbolized the heartaches and hopes of those who were missing their children. As she handled each and added more information, she knew they were trusting her to find them.

One case, which she could now happily put in her inactive file, lay on top of the cabinet she unlocked. Like Nick, her client had served her country despite great hardships at home. When Susan Getz’s National Guard unit had been sent to Iraq, the divorcée had left her three-year-old son, Bryce, for whom she’d been given legal custody, in her mother’s care. Her ex-husband, Dietmar Getz—a U.S. citizen, though he’d been born in Germany—had moved to California and seldom paid child support or even saw little Bryce. But, while Susan was deployed in Iraq, Dietmar returned to Denver and snatched the boy, sending an e-mail that he could take better care of his son than that old woman, the mother of a woman who put war first.

Tara had a copy of that e-mail; the whole case had really upset her. Dietmar knew his wife was in the guard and could be called to active duty when he married her, just as Laird had known she was dedicated to Finders Keepers when he proposed. Tara was proud she’d located Dietmar. Since his passion was extreme biking, she had traced him through rally events for that sport. The result had been great for Susan, who was reunited with her son, and terrible for Dietmar. He’d paid heavy fines, had been incarcerated for a while and lost his job at a bike shop. Susan’s Denver lawyer, through whom Tara had been paid, told Tara that Dietmar was furious with both his ex-wife and Tara, whose name he’d gotten off court papers.

With another sigh, Tara filed the folder in the Inactive/Resolved section of the drawer and hoped the case would remain that way.

She took out the folder of a new case, a fascinating one. The left-behind, Myra Gavin, was convinced her ex had not only abducted their fourteen-year-old son, Ryan—Tara didn’t take cases where the child was eighteen or older—but that her ex had faked his own death. His car had gone over a cliff into a swollen river, and though there was no body found, the police believed the body had washed downstream, just as they believed Ryan, who had been a troubled kid, had run away. Myra wanted Tara to prove a case not of suicide but of pseudocide, as the lawyer who had hired her had called faking one’s own death. And, of course, to locate Ryan so he could come home.

Though Tara took any case where she thought she could help, she liked working for law firms rather than for emotional, distraught individuals directly. Like Claire’s mother, they could get in the way of ultimate success. Lawyers remained calm and controlled, mostly, and she knew she’d get paid. If Laird had not left her a decent financial settlement—as Jen had hinted this morning—Tara could not have afforded to take on some cases where she knew she’d get little or nothing for her efforts.

The other case she needed to review today concerned a biological dad, Jeff Rivers, who had kidnapped his own nine-year-old son from a couple who had adopted the boy over eight years ago. Tara was working hard to locate the man. Usually, she wanted a biological parent to have a child, but in this case, the more she learned about the skip, the more she realized he was a horrible person. So far, she’d had no luck finding him.

But she’d had great successes from other difficult cases, which encouraged her to keep going. Carla Manning, one of her first clients, whom she’d known from her old neighborhood when she was single, had not only gotten her daughter from an abusive husband, but she’d gotten her life back. Carla had returned to college and was now an attorney and child-rights advocate in Seattle. Tara would love to visit her someday, except that’s where Laird had moved, and she couldn’t bring herself to even be near the same area.

Tara sucked in a big breath and got up to look out the window again. No Nick or Beamer in sight. It was as if the forest had swallowed them. She crossed her arms over her stomach, feeling it cramp. It was almost time for her period to begin, but she knew it was more than that. It wasn’t worry about Nick; if there was anyone who could take care of himself, it was him, though she still wasn’t convinced he could take care of Claire. No, this was because of what the doctor had said yesterday. And nerves about seeing another doctor for a second opinion—actually, a third, counting Jennifer’s—so soon.

Tara sat down so hard in her chair it rolled away from her desk. She had felt all uptight like this in the weeks before Clay killed Alex, almost as if she sensed something would go wrong with one of her cases. Did that mean she was sensing something like that now, or was she just getting paranoid because of how tracking Clay had ended up? No, too much was going on in her life right now, that was all.

But her stomachache had triggered a memory. A couple of weeks before her coma, she’d had what she thought was a virus, with nausea and cramping. She wasn’t due for a period then, not until a week later. On the Pill, she’d been so regular. Surely she could not have had morning sickness that week! She bent over her knees, agonized, feeling she’d be sick right now. She wanted to get what the doctor had said out of her head, but it kept coming back to haunt her. It would be hard not to blurt it out to Dr. Bauman today, and demand that he disprove it.

“Listen to yourself!” she scolded aloud and sat up. “You just have a stomachache. You certainly aren’t pregnant now, and you weren’t pregnant then!”

But what if?
What if?

She reached for her cell phone. Though the last thing in the world she wanted to do was contact Laird’s family, she was going to call his mother, Veronica. If she had any chance of getting a straight answer from Laird’s family about whether she could have been pregnant during her coma, it would be from her.

Nick saw a web of paths through the brush and trees above his property. There had been animal trails up here for years. Most were made by mule deer and elk. He saw places on the trees where animals had rubbed off the bark to mark their territories. This was probably a wild-goose—that is, wild deer and elk—chase, but Beamer was tracking something.

As far as Nick was concerned, the alert, self-confident track-and-trail breeds of dogs were one of God’s great gifts to mankind. Most bloodhounds, beagles, German shepherds and Labrador retrievers could smell hundreds of different scents, sometimes from something as tiny as shed skin cells. Whereas people might enter a kitchen and smell vegetable soup cooking, tracker dogs could break that down into meat stock, celery, potatoes, even pepper or herbs. Beamer could sprint up to forty miles an hour. He had a wide range of vision, nearly one hundred eighty degrees, and could see something as small as a mouse from a football field away. He could swivel his ears in two separate directions to pick up diverse, muted sounds at a great distance. All that, and he was eager to give hours of exhausting nose time to search for anyone from lost kids to escaped criminals, just for a bit of praise and a scratch behind his ears.