Or that she was never here at all, but he wasn’t going to say that.
“I don’t think anything yet. I’m leaving the search to the experts and preparing for the possibility we won’t find her here.”
A shudder wracked her. The cold again, or a ghost had walked over her grave.
“Dear God.”
“Sicily’s father. Is there any chance he wanted custody?”
“No. He walked out on Rachel and Sicily and never so much as paid child support. I thought… I don’t know what I thought, but after Rachel died I tried to find him and failed. He might even be dead.”
“What’s his name?” Mike produced the small notebook he always carried in a hip pocket and flipped past the pages of notes he’d made earlier at the Sullivan place.
“Chad Marks. I don’t know his middle name. I…never met him.”
“Were they divorced?”
“I don’t know.” Her three favorite words in the world. This time she sounded uncertain, though. “I’m not sure if Rachel ever bothered. She kept the last name. It’s on her death certificate.”
“Okay. What about your parents?”
“Their names are Laurence and Rowena Greenway. They live in Seattle.” He sensed a reserve so deep he doubted she could swim up through it.
He nodded. “Do you have other siblings? Step or biological?”
“No. There’s no one else.”
“Aunts? Uncles?”
“My father has a brother, but he lives in Dallas. I don’t know him well. I doubt Sicily has ever met him. My mother had a brother, too, but he was killed in a small plane crash when I was a child.”
“Was your sister involved with anyone recently?”
“I think,” she said carefully, “men came and went. My impression from Sicily is that none of them stayed long.”
“How did your sister die?”
“It was…an accident.”
His knees were beginning to protest his squatting position, but he didn’t move. He was looking right into those caramel eyes, watching for every deeper swirl, however subtle. “What kind?”
“They think she fell from the ferry.”
“From the ferry? Wait. I remember that,” he said slowly. It had dominated local news recently. He thought it had been the Kingston-to-Edmonds run. The ferry had arrived and no driver showed up to claim one of the cars, which of course created a godawful tangle in trying to unload in an orderly way. Apparently this happened regularly, but usually the missing driver had fallen asleep on one of the bench seats on the passenger deck. This time, workers scoured the ferry from end to end and the woman never turned up.
“Her body washed ashore, didn’t it?”
“Yes. She had some barbiturates in her system.”
“Did she have a drug problem?”
Her lips compressed before she said, “Since she was a teenager. Alcohol and downers. I understand from Sicily that Rachel mostly managed to hold a job, but I suspect Sicily had been handling many of the practicalities of their life for some time. She admitted she was used to being left alone for two or three days at a time.”
He stared at her in exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”
She blinked. “What does it matter?”
“You don’t think that increases the likelihood that she didn’t hesitate to take off without consulting you?”
“No.” Ms. Greenway bit the word off. “No, I don’t. She’s not like that. I did think about it when I couldn’t find her, because she does do things without asking, but not like this. She’s too sensible. Sicily is everything Rachel wasn’t. She looks ten, but inside she’s more like a thirty-year-old who has been on her own for years. She’s not impulsive. Today I was pleasantly surprised that she was willing to join the other kids. I thought of it as her playing with them, but she doesn’t. I don’t think she knows how to play.”
He digested her burst of speech. Her voice had risen toward the end, a hint of passion or even outrage infusing it. For a minute there, she’d almost seemed like a real person. Some pink showed in her cheeks. He’d have liked her the better for it, if he’d totally believed in it.
“Okay. Do you have a phone with you?”
“Yes.” Her head turned. “In my bag.”
“Does Sicily know the number?”
“Of course she does.”
“She’d call it instead of your landline?”
“I don’t have a landline. This is the only way to reach me outside of work.”
“And you’d have heard it ring.”
“I… Oh, God. Not while I was hunting for her.” She dropped the blanket and scrabbled in her purple tote, retrieving a cell phone. After pushing a button, she exhaled. “Nobody has called.”
“Make sure you keep it close now.”
Her look said, Do you think I’m stupid?
The answer was no. He knew she wasn’t stupid. She was something else, but he didn’t know what. Unfeeling? Nuts enough to have made up this entire story? Cold-blooded enough to have killed the kid she didn’t want dumped on her and come to the beach with the intention of claiming the girl had disappeared? He didn’t want to believe that, but couldn’t be sure. There was something off about this woman.
What he couldn’t understand was why pity wanted to take the place of his suspicion.
Frowning, he rose to his feet, looking down at her. She gazed up at him, still fighting to hold on to her composure, but unless he was imagining things some cracks were appearing. Through them, he could see anguish.
Maybe pity wasn’t so unreasonable. If Beth Greenway wasn’t truly unfeeling, if she wasn’t crazy or cold-blooded, then she was damaged in some other way. She had to be. He’d seen people under stress act in a lot of different ways, but never like this, as though nothing in the world scared her more than showing what she felt.
He grunted, turned around and walked away from her. Who was he kidding? The chances were really good that she had something to do with her niece’s disappearance. Sure she knew how to put up a front. That’s what people with something to hide did.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DAY WAS INTERMINABLE. BETH began to doubt her ability to hold in all the terrible emotions moving inside her, but she had to. Every time she felt herself slipping, she dug her fingernails into her flesh wherever she could reach and concentrated on the pain. When she hurt, she could empty herself. She hadn’t had to do it in a long time.
I will not feel.
But she did. Today, most of all, most horrifyingly, she felt helpless. Being always and entirely in control was as basic to her as breathing. She planned everything. Everything.
Except she hadn’t foreseen the consequences of her sister’s death. She might have if she hadn’t been so certain Rachel hated her.
Rachel had hated her. Of course she had. In the end, though, she hated their parents more. Beth should have realized that.
From the moment Sicily came home with her, Beth had battled panic. There was a reason she’d never shared her life with anyone else. And a child…she knew nothing about children.