Cry Mercy (38 page)

“It probably went right over his head,” Robert tried to assure her.

“I don't know that I'd want to bet on that,” Mallory replied. “Her name is right there on the website.”

Robert excused himself for a moment. “I will be right back. I want you to hold that thought.”

He was back in a minute, his laptop under his arm. He placed it on the table in front of him and opened it to their website. He typed for a moment or two, then smiled broadly.

“There. All fixed.” He turned the laptop around for them to see.

“What's all fixed?” Mallory frowned and craned her neck to look at the screen.

“Here. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Emme Caldwell is now Elle Caldwell,” he told them.

“You're serious. You think that's all it's going to take if someone comes looking for her?” Mallory was starting to get angry.

“No, but who's going to be coming after her?” Trula asked quietly. “It isn't going to be someone who's checking on her credentials as a former California police officer. The only reason anyone will be coming after her is to get to Chloe.”

Her words hung over the room like a low-lying cloud.

“How would we even know if someone was out there?” Susanna wondered aloud. “I mean, if someone
came to Conroy looking for her, how would we know?”

“There might be a way,” Kevin told them. “Let me work on that.”

“So have we decided to give Emme—er, Elle—a pass?” Susanna asked. “Shall we put it to a vote?”

“I say yes,” Trula spoke up immediately.

“I never go against Trula,” Kevin said.

“Me, either.” Robert nodded.

“All right. But if there are repercussions from this …” Mallory looked directly at Robert.

“There won't be. But if there are, we'll find a way to handle them. Suse? What do you think?”

“Emme didn't set out to deceive us because she was trying to get a job she wasn't qualified for,” Susanna said, “or to defraud us in any way. She is what she said she was, right?”

“What, but not who,” Mallory reminded her.

“Still, as Trula said, we have to consider the motive. She was trying to save her child from being kidnapped by a drug lord. Can anyone at this table say they think it would be good for Chloe to be raised by someone like that?”

Her eyes skipped from face to face.

“That's what I thought. So yes, of course, I vote to keep her on.”

“If she stays, there may come a time when we will have to protect her,” Mallory told them quietly.

“If and when that time comes,” Robert told them, “that's exactly what we'll do.”

H
ey, sleepyhead, wake up.”

Emme opened her eyes to see Nick leaning over her. He pushed the hair back from her face and kissed her.

“Trula said I could come see if you were awake, but that I couldn't stay up here. I don't know what she thinks we'd be doing with Chloe running around.” He kissed her again. “On the other hand …”

“Nick,” she pushed against him and tried to sit up. “We need to talk.”

“In a minute.”

“Seriously. We have to talk. It's important.”

“Okay.” He eased back and turned on the lamp on the table next to the bed. “Is something wrong?”

She sat and pulled the pillow up behind her back, and then she began. She told him everything.

When she finished, she sat back against the pillow, her face wet with tears, and waited for him to react. When he didn't, she said, “Nick, do you understand what I'm saying? I've been lying to you since the day we met. Aren't you going to say something?”

“Do I call you Emme, or Ann?”

“Nick, please don't make light—”

“I'm not. Does any of this change who you are? Or what you are to me?” He shook his head. “Not a bit.”

“I'm going to lose my job, Nick.” She held his hands. “They're not going to let me stay after this.”

“Are you sure about that?”

She nodded. “Mallory is loaded for bear, and I don't blame her. I made her look like a fool. She was the one who checked my references, she was the one who hired me.”

“She'll get over it.”

Emme looked at him as if he had two heads. “I don't think this is the sort of thing one gets over. This was their first case. I was their first hire. I've made her look incompetent to Robert and everyone else. She has every right to be pissed at me.”

“She didn't seem that pissed when she was in the kitchen awhile ago. She was asking if you were still sleeping.”

“Probably because she's waiting to fire me.”

“I wasn't getting that vibe, Em.” He played with her fingers. “If the worst does happen, you'll find another job.”

“I'm going to have to think things through a little better. I can't keep uprooting Chloe. She deserves better than that.”

“Look, don't make any rash decisions. If you need a place to stay, there's the farm. You're welcome to stay there for as long as you want. And hey, if worse comes to worst, I can always teach you how to replace chrome, or tune up an engine.”

She tried to smile, but was having a hard time pulling it off.

“You have to stay around at least long enough to help me put together a memorial service for Belinda, but I'm hoping you'll stay longer than that.”

Before she could reply, the door flew open and Chloe blew in.

“Oh, yay! You're awake. Trula said it's time for dinner and we're all going to eat together in the big dining room.” She turned to Nick. “Robert's dining room has a fireplace. And a secret panel. Father Kevin showed me. Wanna see?”

“I do. I always wanted to see what was behind a secret panel.” Nick squeezed Emme's hands and stood. “We'll wait for you downstairs, Em.”

Emme nodded and watched Chloe drag Nick from the room.
The gods must be having a fine laugh at my expense
, she thought.
All my life, I've been searching for what I've found here. Friends, a sense of belonging—and Nick … well, he's the man I always hoped I'd find
. The thought of leaving was almost too painful to bear.

She exhaled and swung her legs over the side of the bed and slipped her feet into her sandals. She needed a few minutes to splash some water on her face and compose herself, and then it would be time to face the music.

She was unprepared for what waited for her downstairs.

Robert had opened several bottles of champagne, and when Emme came into the kitchen, he was proposing a toast to Belinda's memory.

“Ah, you're just in time,” he told her. “We're remembering Belinda. Well, Nick is remembering her, and sharing some of her with the rest of us.”

Trula handed her a flute.

“She was a pretty happy kid,” Nick said. “It's good to think about that right now, to look back on the good times.”

“That's important.” Trula patted him on the arm. “You need to think about the good times. It doesn't make the loss less painful—only time can take away some of the sting—but the good memories will keep her alive for you.”

“I'll drink to that.” Kevin drained his glass. Robert offered a refill, but he declined. “I have a meeting in about an hour at the church,” he said.

“Since when do you have meetings on Saturday nights?” Robert asked.

“Since something came up that I would like to discuss with a member of my parish.” Kevin put his glass on the counter and turned to Trula. “What can I take in to the dining room for you?”

“Everything's already there. We just all need to—”

“Wait a minute,” Emme said. “I feel like the nine-hundred-pound elephant in the room, and all you can think about is eating.”

She looked from one face to the other.

“Do you really think I can sit down to dinner with you all, then turn in my cell phone and leave?”

“You're not leaving, Emme.” Robert put his glass down. “We understand that you did what you did because you felt you had no choice.” He glanced across the room at Chloe. “We all agreed that given those
circumstances, each of us probably would have done the same thing.”

Emme turned to Mallory. “Is that how you feel?”

With some apparent reluctance, Mallory nodded. “I don't like it, but Robert's right. I don't know that I wouldn't have done the same thing. And you are exactly what you said you were. A good investigator. I don't know that I've worked with better.”

“I don't know what to say,” Emme told them. “I was so sure that—”

“Not another word,” Trula said. “Dinner's getting cold. If you want to discuss this any more, you're going to have to do it over pot roast.”

“Trula has spoken.” Robert grabbed a bottle of wine from the counter and began to usher everyone toward the door.

“I'm afraid I can't stick around for the celebratory dinner, Emme.” Susanna swung her bag over her shoulder. “I'm afraid I have another commitment. But I'm delighted that you're on board with us. I think you're a real asset.”

“Thank you, Suse,” Emme said, and hugged her before she left.

“I'll see you all on Monday,” Susanna called to the others before leaving by the back door.

“Where does she go when she takes off like that?” Emme heard Mallory whisper to Trula, who shook her head and whispered back, “Beats the devil out of me.”

•

She'd already missed the entire day, but Susanna had planned ahead. When she wasn't waiting for Emme
to return, she was in meetings talking about Emme or listening to someone else talk about Emme. She was relieved when the vote was taken and everyone—even Mallory—agreed that Emme deserved a place on the staff. The time between meetings was spent on her computer, studying topographic maps and eliminating roads she'd already traveled. There were some she'd driven early on that she thought perhaps she hadn't investigated far enough the first time. Before she crossed them off for good, she needed to be certain. One road in particular had stayed in her memory. It had wound around and around a mountain on a narrow path, but had been navigable. Something she'd noticed on one of the maps she'd downloaded, however, seemed to indicate hairpin turns, the two lanes very tight. She'd drive much of the night to get to her destination, but she didn't really mind. She knew that someday she would find the place where Beth Magellan's car had been hidden all these many months—if not this weekend, then possibly another.

Susanna had asked herself a hundred times how much longer she'd make these trips, how many more weekends she'd spend driving alone on side roads, peering down ravines and checking guard rails for scrapes of brown paint that would match the color of the Jeep that Beth had been driving that day. She hated to admit how obsessed she'd become, but that was the truth of it. There would be no peace for Robert until the Jeep was found, so finding the car was the key for both of them.

In some ways, the trips were a comfort to her. She was doing something for the man she loved, and with luck, someday he'd understand just how much of herself
had gone into these journeys. She wasn't unaware of the risk involved, of course. She knew it was possible that she'd discover what had happened to his wife and he'd still see her as his best friend, nothing more. But she clung to the hope that once the truth was known, once he knew for certain that Beth had left this life, when he looked for love again, maybe someday he'd look to her.

Susanna was smart enough to know that the odds might not be in her favor, but they were the only odds she had. She would look until she found, and then the next act would begin. She didn't know how the play would end, but she would see it through.

N
eedle in a haystack time.

Susanna took the exit from the turnpike Beth Magellan was believed to have taken the morning she disappeared. There'd been an accident eastbound between two exits that had resulted in the first one being closed and all the traffic diverted. Beth may have been one of the first cars to encounter the detour after the road was blocked off, and may have been directed off the turnpike before all of the detour signs had been put in place. That would have left Beth to figure out on her own how to find her way back to the turnpike with some twenty miles between where she got off and where she should have gotten back on.

Over the past two years, Susanna had considered most of the possibilities and traveled most of the roads that would have been the most logical choices, as had the state police and the private investigators Robert had hired. But Susanna figured she had one advantage over all of them: She'd known Beth fairly well for several years, knew how the woman thought.

The scenario that played out in Suse's mind had Beth finding herself in a line of traffic that was not
moving. She'd have been in a hurry to get home. Maybe Ian was fussing in the backseat, maybe she was frustrated at not having her phone with her. She was always talking to someone when she was driving. It was the one thing Robert consistently criticized her for.

What would Beth have done under these circumstances?

Might she have decided not to wait patiently for the police to direct the cars off the turnpike? To Suse's way of thinking, she'd have driven on the shoulder of the road and slipped off the turnpike exit as quickly as she could. With no signs to direct her, perhaps Beth might have done what Suse could see herself doing under the same circumstances: she'd have asked the person in the tollbooth. There was a good chance she'd have been directed to the main road, and hopefully that would take her around the mountain.

The main road off this stretch of highway was a two-lane affair that went through one small town after another, and at first glance might have appeared to be the most logical, took her down the mountain, not up. There were signs that pointed toward this town or that, one state or county road or another, but for a stranger, the signs meant nothing. The last time Susanna had followed this same road, she'd taken the route that led her down the mountain. Today, she'd go in the opposite direction, and see where that would lead.

It wasn't long before she noticed that the road narrowed around those hairpin turns, and that some of the guard rails at several of the turns bore numerous scrapes, battle scars from vehicles that may not have
fared quite so well as she had so far. She had to slam on the brakes several times to take the turns on all four wheels, and on more than one occasion, opposing traffic had caused her to hug the right side of the road a lot closer than was comfortable. On an icy road, drivers could find themselves one misstep from disaster.