Making Her Way Home

So much rage filled Beth, she shook with it. “I can help,” she said loudly. “This is my niece.”

Two other women had just arrived. Everyone looked at her, their expressions startled and pitying. Did they blame her for Sicily’s disappearance? Of course they did, she realized, even if they didn’t know that the detective suspected her of something much worse than carelessness. They were people who were regularly called out to search for missing children. They probably got so they despised the adults who should have been guarding those children. There was nothing kind or sympathetic on those faces. She felt suddenly as if she were standing too close to a fire. The condemnation singed her as surely as the heat would have. She backed away, one step, two, three—and then she came up hard against something solid.

The minute the hands gripped her upper arms, she knew who they belonged to, and wrenched herself away. “Don’t touch me.”

His eyes narrowed. “You walked into me.”

Beth spun away and started walking. After a minute she broke into a run. She’d search on her own. They couldn’t stop her. She had to do something. She thought she might go insane if she didn’t. Yesterday had been torment. She couldn’t do it again, sit there and wait and wait and wait.

“Ms. Greenway! Beth!”

She ran regularly for exercise. Mostly on a treadmill, but not always. She was fast. Her bag bumped against her belly as she tore past the concrete-block restrooms and across the paved road toward the thick woods that lay beyond. His feet slapped the pavement behind her. Something like terror joined the rage that impelled her forward. As his running footsteps neared, she put on a spurt of speed and crashed through shrubbery.

“Goddamn it, stop!” he roared.

Beth risked a look over her shoulder. He was close, so close…. Her shoulder slammed into a tree trunk and she staggered, trying to keep her balance. But she failed and went down hard, even harder than she had last night when she fell off the log.

Pain and humiliation washed over her, making the anger and shame even more volatile. She twisted her body so that she was on her rump and then scrambled backward, away from him, even though her palms burned and both wrists and her shoulder hurt enough to bring tears to her eyes.

Mike Ryan had come to a stop a few feet from her. He was gasping for breath and she was glad, glad, that she’d at least winded him. She’d expected to see anger on his face, but saw something else instead, although she didn’t know what it was.