* * *
THE FUNERAL WAS SO CROWDED that early September Friday afternoon that more than half the attendees had to stand. Forty-year-old Chris Talbot was one of those standing, holding his place in a back corner of the big old Comfort Cove church with shoulders grown thick from a lifetime of lobstering. Fishing was a dangerous business. The most dangerous in the world if you believed what you saw on television.
To Chris it was a way of life. The only way of life.
It had been that way for Wayne Ainge, too, though Chris had barely known the young man whose funeral he’d given up a day of work to attend. Wayne was only twenty. He’d arrived in Comfort Cove from Alaska that summer. Had signed on with one of Chris’s competitors. And three days ago he’d gotten his foot tangled up in a trapline and was pulled from his boat to the bottom of the ocean. He’d drowned before anyone could get to him.
The accident had not been the boy’s fault. It hadn’t been anything he could prevent. A wind had come up, a wave, just as he’d been hoisting a trap overboard, forcing him into one small step to keep his balance. The one small step had cost him his life.
His wasn’t the first industry death, by a long shot.
But it was Comfort Cove’s first in more than fifty years. The first in Chris’s lifetime.
Wayne’s father spoke. His brother did, too. A man of the cloth—Chris wasn’t a churchgoing man so he wasn’t sure if the man was a priest or pastor or what—read from the Bible and asked them all to pray.
Chris bowed his head out of respect for Wayne’s family, who’d flown in from Alaska to bury their son where he’d said his heart was—the Atlantic Ocean. And then, as people began to file out, he shook hands with his fellow fishermen and their families.
None of them looked one another in the eye.
Every fisherman knew that any one of them could be in that casket up there. It was only by the grace of God that they made it safely home each day.
CHAPTER TWO
“WHAT’S WRONG?” Fifty-six-year-old Rose Sanderson frowned. The expression did nothing to mar her exquisite beauty. Just as all the years of anguish had never done.
As long as Emma didn’t look in her mother’s eyes. There wasn’t a lot of beauty there anymore. Only worry. Angst. Sadness. And pain.
“Sit down, Mom.” Emma pulled out one of the metal-rimmed Naugahyde chairs in her mother’s kitchen—chairs that matched the metal-rimmed Formica-topped table that had been in that same exact place in the same exact house for the past twenty-five years.
Emma had been able to convince her mother to update the rest of the house over the years. But not that table. It was the last place that Rose had seen her baby girl alive—kneeling on one of those chairs at that table eating her breakfast like a “big people.”
Rose wouldn’t change that table, and she would never move—no matter how much the neighborhood changed. Rose couldn’t leave the only place Claire would know to come back to.
As though she would remember; Claire had been two when she was abducted.
Rose’s crystalline blue eyes were wide and worried as Emma sat and folded her hands at the table. “Tell me.”
She had to tell her mother about Detective Miller’s phone calls. Most particularly the last one.
She’d been deliberating for a couple of days about what she was going to say.
Tonight, with Rob’s infidelity a fresh and burning sting, she couldn’t seem to find the usual decorum, the caution, with which she couched everything she told her mother.
She didn’t recognize herself in the woman who was pushing her to do something more. To be something different.
To change what Rose wouldn’t have changed.
“I’ve spent my entire life playing it safe.” They weren’t the words she’d come to say.
Rose’s frown deepened. “What do you mean?”
“I settle,” Emma said. “Or maybe I don’t, I don’t know.” This was her mother. She could only say so much.
Or stray too far from herself…
She was in no state to tell her mother about Ramsey Miller’s phone call—about the horrible mistake she and Rose had made, believing all these years that Frank Whittier, her mother’s fiancé at the time, had abducted Claire.
“I broke up with Rob today.” And that was not a mistake. No matter how badly Rose took the news.
Rose’s eyes held a spark of…something…as she watched Emma, saying nothing. But the woman wasn’t falling apart so Emma continued.
“I came home and found him with another woman in our bed. I gave him until tomorrow morning to get out.”
Rose nodded.
Her mother’s expression wasn’t crumpling. Or, worse, filling with fear. She almost had a hint of a smile on her face. And she was nodding!
Had the whole world gone mad? Or only Emma’s portion of it?
“What? You knew he was seeing someone?”
“Of course not. I’d have told you if I’d known that. I just knew he wasn’t right for you.”
That almost made her angry. As angry as she could ever get with the woman who’d suffered so horribly. And tried so hard to love Emma enough. “You thought Rob was wrong for me?”
“Yes.” Rose squeezed her hand. “But regardless of what I thought, you loved him and you most definitely didn’t deserve to be cheated on. I know it hurts and I’m so sorry about that.”
Shaking her head, Emma ignored the compassion in her mother’s voice. This was no time to open her heart and give in to the weakness there—a desperate need to be loved, in spite of everything.
She was better off if she kept her walls up.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” She concentrated on the facts that perplexed more than they caused pain.
“Because I knew you’d figure it out on your own and that you would be so much stronger for having done so. Acting on my say-so could have crippled you.”
“I’d have married him, Mom.” If Rob hadn’t kept putting off choosing a date. A location. Colors. Anything at all to do with them actually saying “I do,” rather than just “I’m going to.”
Rose shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“But if I had? You’d have let me?”
Rose studied her and then said, “I’m not sure. There was always the chance that I was wrong.”
“You liked him. From the first time we met him at that fingerprinting clinic, you liked how he took a real interest in our quest.”
“He was a big help. And had good ideas. He was a pleasant conversationalist, but that doesn’t mean I thought he’d make you happy. I did like that he kept you here in the area, close by. I liked that he was willing to spend time with us together. That we could do family things.”
A given. Rose had lost one daughter. And ever since that day, until Emma had met Rob, it had always been just the two of them.
“I’m not going to leave you, Mom, you know that,” Emma said. “Not for anything, or anyone.” But for the first time, the words didn’t flow from her heart as easily as they flowed past her throat.
For the first time, she wished, just for a second, that she could be as free as other women her age.
And then, ashamed of herself, she gave her mother a hug.
Emma missed