The Sheriff's Secretary

LUCAS LOOKED AT HER in surprise. Her ex-husband? “I thought you were a widow, that Billy’s father was dead.”

Her blue eyes refused to meet his as she stared at her hands in her lap. “That’s because I wanted everyone to believe I was a widow. Because I wanted to forget Frank Landers and my marriage to him.”

“You need to unforget now,” he said with an edge of impatience.

She reached up and twisted a strand of her hair between two fingers. “Frank and I were married for five years. We’ve been divorced for two. We lived in Shreveport.” She dropped her hand to her lap and rubbed her left wrist like an arthritis sufferer feeling a weather front moving in.

“If you’ve been divorced for two years, why would your ex-husband decide to grab Billy now?” Lucas asked.

She looked at Lucas. Her cool blue eyes betrayed nothing of what might be going on inside her head. “I don’t know. It’s possible it took him all this time to locate us.”

“He didn’t know where you and Billy were going when you left Shreveport?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know where we were going when we left Shreveport, and I haven’t been in touch with Frank since before my divorce.”

He was less interested in what she was saying and more intrigued by what she wasn’t telling him. “You don’t have a custody arrangement with him?” he asked.

“I have full custody.”

He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. The woman definitely had secrets, but he didn’t have time to be curious about her past.

All he cared about was finding Jenny and Billy, and if she thought this Frank Landers might be responsible, then he needed to call the Shreveport police and see if they could locate the man.

“You have an address for him?” he asked.

“I imagine he still lives in our old house.” She told him the address and he wrote it down.

“I’ll contact the Shreveport police and see if they can hunt him down.” Lucas looked at his watch. Almost midnight. Hopefully the authorities in Shreveport could go to Frank’s home and find out if he was there. It was a five-hour drive from Conja Creek to Shreveport. Even if Frank was home, he could have taken Billy and Jenny and gotten back by now.

He tried not to think about where Jenny might be. If Frank Landers had come to get his kid, then what had he done with Jenny?

Mariah stood, her entire body taut with tension and her eyes haunted. “If he’s taken Billy it isn’t because he wants his son. It’s because he wants to hurt me.”

He’d always looked at Mariah as nothing more than a barrier he needed to get through to see the mayor, a respectable widow who might be a good influence on his flighty, dramatic sister. Now he saw her as neither of those things, but rather as a woman who had apparently suffered some sort of heartache in her past. Lucas knew all about heartache.

“Within an hour we should know if Frank is in Shreveport. In the meantime, why don’t you make a fresh pot of coffee? My deputies should be checking in anytime and they’d probably appreciate the caffeine since it’s getting so late.”

He knew the moment those last words left his mouth that they were the wrong thing to say. She lifted her wrist to check her watch, and her features seemed to crumble into themselves as a sheen of tears filled her eyes.

“Billy has never been away from me this long,” she said, but before he could reply she left the living room and disappeared into the kitchen.

The next couple of hours passed in agonizingly slow increments. Lucas called the state police, and an Amber Alert went out. He also spoke to the FBI, who indicated they would have a field agent there the next morning. The deputies checked in with the news that nobody had seen anything suspicious at the home during the day.

“I’m not surprised,” Mariah said. “All my neighbors work except Sarah Gidrow across the street, and she spends most of her days watching soap operas in the family room in the back of the house.”

They couldn’t be sure Mariah’s house was a crime scene, which was problematic. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing to indicate that anything untold had happened there. It was possible the crime scene was the front yard, or the park, or a sidewalk a block away.

Jenny’s e-mail had yielded nothing to raise an eyebrow, and Deputy Maylor had reported that there was no sign of forced entry or tampering at any of the windows or doors, leaving Lucas to suspect that if the crime had happened here, Jenny had opened the door to whomever had taken them.

If they’d really been taken.

It was that particular thought that haunted him as the night hours passed. Were Jenny and Billy really in danger from a kidnapper, or had Jenny orchestrated this whole drama? What better way to get the attention of Phillip Ribideaux, the young man who had recently broken her heart?

Although this was certainly beyond the pale of any stunt Jenny had pulled in the past, he had to admit that it was something he thought she might be capable of doing.

It was in her genes. He had plenty of memories of his mother pulling crazy stunts in an effort to hang on to whatever man happened to be in her life at the time.

He shoved away those thoughts, not wanting to remember the woman who had possessed the maternal instincts of a rock. She’d died when Jenny was twelve and Lucas was twenty-two, and for the past thirteen years Lucas had spent his time raising Jenny and trying to make sure she didn’t turn out like Elizabeth, their mother.

Despite the late hour, he began calling Jenny’s friends to find out if anyone had spoken to her that day or knew where she might have gone.

Mariah sat on the edge of the sofa and listened to him making those calls. With each minute that passed, the tension that rolled off her increased and her eyes gazed at him with the silent demand that he do something, anything, to bring her baby boy back home.

By three he had nobody else to call, nothing else to do but wait until morning or for another phone call to come in.

“You still aren’t sure that they’ve been taken by somebody, are you?” she asked when he hung up the phone after talking to one of Jenny’s girlfriends. There was a touch of censure in Mariah’s eyes.

“I have to look at all possibilities,” he replied non-committally.

“It must be terrible, to always look for the worst in the people around you.”

He eyed her in surprise. There was an edge in her voice that made him wonder if she was trying to pick a fight. He stared at her assessingly.

Even though exhaustion showed in the shadows beneath her eyes and her forehead was lined with worry, somehow she looked lovely. He’d never really noticed before how pretty she was. But she also looked achingly fragile, as if the mighty control she’d exhibited over the past hours might snap at any moment.

“I’m just doing my job,” he said, refusing to be drawn into an argument with the mother of a missing eight-year-old. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” he suggested. “We’ve done everything we can do for now.”

She sighed and swept a hand through her cascade of chestnut curls. “So, we just wait.” Her voice was flat, without inflection. It wasn’t a question, but rather a statement.

Lucas didn’t reply. He knew there was nothing he could say that would make things better for her. There was no way he could tell her that, no matter what happened, he didn’t see a happy ending.

If Jenny were responsible for this, then he would have to do his duty and arrest her for kidnapping. If Frank Landers had taken Billy, then what had he done with Jenny? The answers that sprang to his mind chilled his blood. And if somebody had taken Jenny for ransom, then Billy was expendable.

No matter what, Lucas had the terrible feeling that a tragedy lay ahead and there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening.

THE FIRST THING Jenny became aware of was a headache the likes of which she’d never had before. She winced and reached up to grab the back of her pounding head. Slowly, other sensations and impressions began to seep through her mind.

The smell of rotting fish and dampness coupled with the faint sound of water lapping against wood. The sound of insects buzzing and clicking. She opened her eyes and was terrified when she saw nothing but blackness.

Where am I? The question screamed through her head, making it pound with more nauseating intensity. Panic surged inside her as she sat up, fighting back a scream of sheer terror.

Before she could release the scream, a faint whimper sounded from someplace beside her. And with that whimper, memory returned.

She and Billy had been sitting on the sofa watching cartoons. Billy had gotten up to the bathroom…and somebody had come into the house.

One minute she’d been laughing at the antics of the Road Runner, and the next her mouth and nose had been covered with something that must have rendered her almost immediately unconscious.

“Billy?” She tentatively moved a hand and encountered his warm little body next to her.