Where would she and her son stay that evening? Grand Rapids, maybe? Or Kalamazoo? Someplace far from the dusty little towns she assumed Charles had been dragged through all through the fall and into the winter. Someplace where she could get them a penthouse suite and they could order room service and play video games until her little boy fell asleep at the controls and she could pull him onto her lap and never let him go.
Another curve. No car.
Hands trembling, Amy wondered what she’d do if she didn’t find him that night.
How could she possibly take this for another day? Or week. Or month.
An insidious burning crawled through the lining of her stomach, settling just beneath her rib cage. Hands clenched around the steering wheel, shoulders hunched in her parka, she admonished herself to stay focused. On the road. On what mattered. She wasn’t going to allow doubts. Wasn’t going to get discouraged. Charles needed her.
And she needed him, too.
This was the day. The town. She could feel it. She’d never been this close. Never had a lead that lasted longer than the minutes it took to check it out.
Wiping the sweat from her upper lip, she slowed as she approached the town. One motel, a diner, some shops, scattered homes—nothing as formal as a neighborhood—a school that looked a little shabby… Occasional piles of dirty, melting snow.
And a green Grand Am. It turned the corner in front of her.
Thank God.
Giddy with renewed confidence, Amy ignored the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, ignored the grumbling in her stomach, pressed her foot to the floor—and caught the glimpse of taillights as the green car turned again. And then again. It was winding over roads that looked as if they’d been forgotten in the previous century. Cracked, graying pavement. Potholes. No sign of human life on either side.
Kathy Stead—the brunette driving that car had to be Kathy—was traveling away from the county road that led out of town. And turning without hesitation, as though she knew where she was going. But Amy couldn’t remember the nanny ever mentioning the town of Lawrence.
There were no taillights at the next turn. Head snapping from left to right, Amy peered intently. The car had to be up there; she just wasn’t seeing it. Had it turned into a drive? Or a street that she’d missed?
Fighting the nausea that would only slow her down, she drove the stretch of road twice more, slowing at every slight break in the overgrown brush. Cars didn’t simply disappear into thin air.
Five-year-old boys, yes, that happened, but not three-thousand-pound cars.
Still, there was no sign of it.
A huge, wrenching sob filled the Thunderbird. She’d never heard herself make such a sound until the night Johnny died. It didn’t surprise her anymore. Mostly she just gave in to it. Let it twist her ribs painfully, ripping her throat as it exploded out of her. Sometimes she hurt so badly she couldn’t help herself.
All day she’d been chasing this car. Daring, after so many months of emotional torment, to hold on to some minuscule thread of hope. And now the car had been out of her sight for longer than it’d been since she’d first spotted it coming out of the motel drive early that afternoon.
Yesterday she’d been in Flint, showing around a picture of her ex-nanny. The cashier in a gas-station food mart had recognized Kathy, said she’d been in the evening before. She thought Kathy had said she was staying at the motel down the street.
Damning the dusk that was falling in spite of every effort she’d made to outrun it, Amy choked back more tears.
Please. Please don’t let me lose him again, she silently begged.
Back at the intersection where she’d last seen the sedan, Amy turned abruptly and sent gravel flying.
She pictured Charles as he’d been that day at Six Flags, prancing along beside her. His sweet eyes had shone with joy behind those dark frames.
She wasn’t going to fail. She couldn’t.
She retraced her path again. And again.
Nothing.
And then she took every side road, private drive and turnoff that bisected the forsaken stretch of old blacktop.
An hour later found her once more at the main road, staring out into the blackness that was a perfect cover for secrets. Was Charles out there in the darkness? Crying for her?
Was the world making any sense at all to the small son she and Johnny had tried so hard to protect?
“No!” Amy cried aloud, slamming the palm of her hand on her steering wheel. “No! No! No…”
Cotton pants sweaty and wrinkled, her face stiff with tears and a day’s worth of highway grime, Amelia Wainscoat, CEO and principal stockholder of a nationally famous billion-dollar construction firm, wearily slid the big metal key into the lock on the motel room’s discolored door.
She didn’t have to stay in Lawrence. Could have gone on to Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, supplied herself with the comforts and amenities of a five-star hotel, but she hadn’t been able to make herself leave this nondescript town—not while there was still a chance that her son was here.
She’d barely dropped her leather bag on the bed before she was stripping down on her way to a bathroom that would only be passable at best, to stand in a skinny and cracked tub the likes of which, until nine months ago, she’d only seen in movies.
There were no bugs. That was good enough for her.
Careful not to let the suspiciously stained plastic curtain touch her more than she could help, Amy stepped into the tub. The towel provided for her use—a threadbare piece of terry cloth barely big enough to cover her shoulders—was hanging in close proximity. And the complimentary shampoo was a brand she’d at least heard of.
It was her lucky day.
Or so she tried to convince herself until she turned on the shower—and discovered that calling it a shower was far too generous. And no matter how far to the left she twisted the faucet handle, the temperature was tepid at best.
Amy burst into tears. She cried until her head ached. Her hair, cut straight and just to her shoulders, hung wet and limp around her face.
Maybe she was going crazy. What on earth was she, Amelia Wainscoat, only child of the once-prominent, now-deceased William George Wainscoat, doing in a tiny depressed town, standing in a shower with who knew what growing in the drain at her feet? And all because she’d seen a car that had looked like Kathy Stead’s. And a woman driving it who—judging by the glimpses she’d had—could have been her former nanny.
“But what else can I do?” She asked the question aloud, no longer uncomfortable with hearing her own voice. She wasn’t sure when, during the past months, the habit of talking to herself had started.
“You’re losing it, Wainscoat, if you really believed you were going to be holding your baby tonight.” There’d been no sign of a child in that green sedan.
“Why do you do this to yourself?”
Of course, Charles had always slept in the car. He could have been lying down, either in the seat beside Kathy or on the back seat—depending on how much he’d grown, how much space he’d need for legs that weren’t going to be as short and stout as she remembered them.
She hoped he’d been strapped in.
If Kathy wanted Charles badly enough to have kidnapped him, surely she’d be seeing to his safety.
Johnny had warned her about Kathy that day in her office, but even he had been certain that Charles was not in any physical danger. Of course, that had been before last year, before Kathy had become almost insanely possessive.
Amy had to struggle not to lean against the mildewed tile