Again Lambert shook his head. “I think she was here at least as early as the nineteenth.”
“Why?”
“It rained on the nineteenth. Her clothes were… muddy.”
“Who?” Edward shouted. It was either shout or scream. He looked at the ridge above him. “What kind of animal would do this?”
“I don’t know,” Lambert told him. He studied Edward carefully. “And until I find out, Jennie’s a ward of the court. I’m her guardian. Until we find whoever did this, I’m not letting you take her out of my jurisdiction.”
Edward met Lambert’s appraisal with one of his own. “I won’t try to,” he admitted. “It doesn’t seem I’ve done too good a job of protecting her. I appreciate all the help I can get. I do want to bring some of my people here, make arrangements to stay as long as necessary. I’m not leaving Jennie.”
Lambert nodded his agreement. “I’ve got some ideas of my own now that we know who she is, but do you have any suggestions as to how we find the bastard who did this?”
Edward looked over the valley floor. He wasn’t ready, or able, yet, even to consider that Jennie had been taken from him, that she hadn’t left voluntarily. But even if she had left willingly with someone, she had been betrayed even more brutally than Edward.
“There was no ransom demand.”
Lambert waited quietly while Edward sifted through his memories, realigning them, examining them in the light of what he had learned in the last few hours.
“Two suggestions,” Edward said finally. “We need to find the former security guard at my apartment. He quit without notice and left the day before the wedding. And…maybe you’d better do this. Ask Winthrop’s daughter where she got the painting.”
Edward allowed his bittersweet memory only a moment’s life.
“It was Jennie’s wedding present to me. The last time I saw it, it was in my apartment—and so was Jennie.”
Jennie awoke while the house lay silent and still. Quietly, she made her way to the window seat and pushed open the casement window. Then, drawing her feet up onto the cushion in front of her, she rested her chin on her knees and surrendered to the gentle breeze that drifted through the window as she listened to the predawn sounds of birds searching for their breakfast.
Her world was still dark, and would be until the sun rose to lighten the dense fog of her sightlessness.
And she was alone. Still. Though surrounded by a house full of loving, caring people.
Had she always been alone?
This was the question that had filled too many of her sleepless hours in the months of her life since she had first woken up in Avalon.
She couldn’t have been—not if she trusted her dreams.
But after what had happened to her, who, or what, could she trust?
The man hadn’t returned by the time she had been put to bed like a child or an invalid. She didn’t even know his name.
“It’s better this way,” Reverend Winthrop had insisted softly, patiently, and with a sadness she had not heard before in his voice. “Lucas will explain, if any explanations are necessary.”
Better for whom?
Not for the first time, Jennie wondered how she looked. She knew she was shorter than most people, or at least those she had met in Avalon, whose voices all seemed to come from above her head—even Matilda’s. And small. At least compared to Sheriff Lambert, who had carried her easily on more than one occasion when she was in the early stages of her recovery.
But did she look like a child? Or worse, like someone who couldn’t cope with the slightest obstacle, frustration or tension?
Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know that her every waking hour, and too many of her sleeping ones, were filled with all of those things?
Who was the man?
Was he the tall, stern man of her dreams?
And why hadn’t he returned?
“Foolish question,” she whispered to the caressing breeze. He hadn’t returned because Sheriff Lambert hadn’t let him return—wouldn’t let him until he had completely checked out the man’s story and probably his life from the day he was born. The man in her dreams would not quietly tolerate that kind of inspection, that kind of doubt.
But then, the man in her dreams was just that—a figment of her imagination, created by her subconscious to ease her loneliness, to fill the awful empty hours of the night when her doubts and fears crept around her.
She heard noises through the open window, the sounds of kitchen windows on the floor below being opened and then the robust and off-key singing of Caitlin, the Winthrops’ cook and housekeeper, as she began preparations for breakfast.
Jennie sighed and rolled her head and shoulders, hating the tension that too often plagued her, then relinquished her comfortable place at the window. Matilda would be coming soon to check on her, and because Jennie didn’t want the kindhearted woman to worry about how long her charge had been awake, she eased herself back into bed and pulled the sheet up.
Maybe today he would return, she thought as she turned onto her side and burrowed her cheek into the softness of the down pillows. Maybe today someone would tell her who he was. Maybe today someone would tell her who she was.
Edward paced the comfortable room, impatient for dawn to finish lighting the sky, impatient to make the telephone calls he had promised Lambert he would wait to make. Impatient to see Jennie again. To confront her with his accusations? To comfort her? Or just to hold the woman who was his wife and pretend that the last six months had never happened? To pretend that she loved him, to pretend that he was capable of giving her the love he’d once thought she wanted from him?
Lambert had brought him back to the outskirts of Avalon to this converted private hunting lodge last night too late for anyone with any decent manners to go banging on the vicar’s door. The problem was, Edward wasn’t feeling particularly decent, mannerly or even civilized by that time. What did keep him from rebelling against Lambert’s edicts was the knowledge that Jennie was probably asleep and that she’d need all the rest and strength she could stockpile against the time he finally told her all he knew about her disappearance. If he told her the whole story.
What Edward didn’t understand was why he had also acquiesced in the matter of not contacting his office until the next day. Postponing telling anyone until after he had talked with Jennie, until after he’d had time to absorb at least partially all that he had learned that day, until he’d had time to understand at least partially all the conflicting facts and emotions that had battered him that day, had seemed reasonable, natural even.
But that had been while he and Lambert were seated in front of a still-necessary fire in the huge stone fireplace downstairs, eating the thick roast beef sandwiches the sheriff had, with no apparent effort, convinced the innkeeper to produce long after the dining room had been cleared. Edward had leaned back in a heavy leather chair, poised between exhaustion and jittery nervous energy, and accepted a welcome brandy and not so welcome advice.
He had, reluctantly, accepted the sheriff’s advice, knowing that all hell could have broken loose in his corporate offices in the twenty-four hours since he’d left San Francisco without telling anyone where he was going.
Now, in the gray light of early morning, all that kept him from calling Madeline was his promise to the sheriff, a promise he was eager to be released from but that he would honor.
At