Home At Last

All she needed to do was phone and ask him which plane to meet.

She couldn’t stop her fingers from shaking, though, while she punched in her calling-card number. There had to be someone on hand to answer. Her daughter and sons were somewhere out there, and she had no idea where—there had to be an answer.

There was. As soon as she heard the phone being picked up, Kirsten felt a wave of relief crest over the apprehension rising inside her. Then, when Brad’s recorded message began, the fear circled higher.

“Hey, sorry I missed you,” came his cheerful voice. He sounded as carefree and friendly as ever, confirming her long-held belief that Brad Laurence was a terrific person as long as you weren’t married to him. “You know the routine, right? Leave your name, I’ll call your machine, you call mine again, and one of these days we’ll get it together. Okay?” Then a beep.

“Brad,” she choked. “Listen, I need to know where the kids are! Because the airline says they’re not on this flight, and—”

“Hello?” another voice interrupted. “Mrs. Laurence? This is Rena, the cleaning lady. I just heard you on the machine, so I thought I’d pick up.”

“Oh, thank you.” The cleaning lady would be fine as long as she knew where to reach him. “I’m so glad you’re there. Brad is sending the children home this morning, and I need to know what plane they’re on.”

There was a pause. Then Rena cleared her throat.

“Uh, Mrs. Laurence? I think maybe there was a mistake. Because last I heard, they were taking off on vacation.”

On vacation? No.

“They’re coming home today,” Kirsten protested, but already her chest felt tight. As if she needed to brace her entire body against a jolt. Which the cleaning lady delivered.

“Mr. Laurence said yesterday he was keeping the kids. He said you needed a break.”

A break? After two weeks without Lindsay and Adam and Eric? “He said what?”

“Well, that’s what the boys told me. That you were moving? Anyway, he asked me to get the house closed up today.”

Kirsten felt a clutch of panic flaring higher inside her. Brad must have planned this in advance, but why hadn’t he called her if he wanted more time with the children? And how could he have told them she wanted a break from them? “Rena, did he say where they were going?”

“Colorado, maybe? I’m not sure.”

His condo in Telluride. That had to be it. He’d taken the kids there for Christmas six months ago, and they had described a penthouse atop a luxurious resort, which sounded like Brad’s kind of place. “If he calls again,” she asked shakily, “would you have him get hold of me? And tell him to use the new number I gave him, because the forwarding system is messed up. Thanks.”

All she needed to do was phone Telluride, but for some reason it was hard to make her fingers punch in the calling-card number again. There was nothing to worry about, Kirsten assured herself, gazing blindly around the airport’s bustling concourse as she waited to be connected with the resort concierge. But the reassurance was wearing thin…and when she learned that Mr. Laurence hadn’t used his suite since Christmas, she felt a chilling wave of disbelief mingled with stark, raw terror.

Her children were gone.

This wasn’t Brad’s typical carelessness. This was deliberate, and she had no idea how to react. Leave word with everyone he might contact? Alert the police that her ex-husband had failed to return the children? Call the FBI? While he deserved the worst kind of punishment and then some, she hated the idea of Lindsay and the boys seeing Brad arrested for kidnapping…because her children needed to think well of their father.

But he couldn’t keep them. He couldn’t! Not with Adam and Eric starting kindergarten next month, not when Lindsay had already gone two weeks without her bedtime story. Not when he’d never wanted the children for any length of time before.

This didn’t make sense, Kirsten thought again as she headed out to the short-term parking garage where she’d left her car. Brad had never enjoyed the routine of parenthood, the everyday pleasures of being a father. After his parents had died in a plane crash last December, he’d shown a little more enthusiasm than usual for pampering the children—but nothing that indicated he wanted them beyond the usual week around the holidays and two weeks in June or July. Why was he suddenly holding onto them?

And what was she supposed to do about it? Call the police? Her parents? But they had left only yesterday for their thirtieth-anniversary cruise….

She drove home with shivers chilling her body, which under any other circumstances would have been a welcome relief from the heat of a Tucson summer. Yet now she wished the cold numbness would recede faster, wished she could think faster, wished that by the time she reached the new house she could have a plan of action completely formed in her mind.

The logical first step was calling the police, but that proved to be no help at all. “Custody violation by itself isn’t a criminal offense,” an officer explained, “so we can’t do anything right now. If they’re not back in three weeks, call again.”

Three weeks? Three more weeks without Lindsay, without Adam, without Eric? Without the only treasures in her life?

Brad had to be somewhere, she thought, hanging up the phone and pacing the Saltillo-tile floor of her newly furnished kitchen. He might have only been joking with the cleaning lady, might have decided to return the children to Tucson himself—but even if he hadn’t, someone must know where he was. He had friends, surely, people he kept in touch with. Someone had to know where to find the chairman of the Laurence Foundation, even if he rarely set foot in the place.

Who would Brad talk to, anyway? Maybe Steve and Amy in their hometown of Tubac, or John Harris, or Mike and Ellen. Or J.D. Ryder—

No, not J.D. There were plenty of other people she could ask.

She wasn’t calling J.D. Ryder.

But after half an hour of phoning everyone she could think of, only to receive useless reassurances that “Brad must’ve just decided to show the kids an extra good time this summer,” Kirsten found herself frantically scrambling through the battered phone list she’d started during the early days of their marriage. The names, even then, were mostly in his handwriting—Brad had always made friends easily, effortlessly—and seven years later, there were still dozens of people he must have stayed in touch with.

J.D. was listed near the end, but there had to be other names she could try. Brad’s favorite mechanic. His tennis coach. The woman who embroidered his exquisite holiday gifts to patrons of the Laurence Foundation. She tried them all, and learned that none of them had talked to Brad recently. Not since their sympathy calls last winter, when his parents had been killed in the Bahamas and left him the largest hacienda in southern Arizona.

Maybe he’d gone back there, Kirsten realized with a flash of hope. Maybe he’d found himself missing his parents, wanting to show his children the importance of family by visiting his hometown. There weren’t many names left from Tubac…Brad had left for college with blithe promises to keep in touch with all his friends, but within a few years they had dwindled down to a very small collection. Mike and Ellen, who had stayed in Tubac. J.D. Ryder, who had—

You’re not calling J.D.

It would be easy enough to find him, she admitted as she fumbled through her desk for the number of the Laurence estate caretaker. Brad had routinely kept her up to date on their best friend from high school, the third member of “Tubac’s Terrific Trio.” And after rising so rapidly through the ranks of the Phoenix Police Department, it wasn’t likely that J.D. would have vanished into thin air.

The way he’d done eight years ago, when—

You’re not calling J.D. Ryder!

But after an apologetic denial from the caretaker and with every other name in the directory exhausted, she found herself battling a long-buried sense of uneasiness. It would be a simple call, Kirsten told herself desperately. It would be nothing more than the same questions she’d asked three dozen other people. “Have you talked to Brad lately? Did he mention anything about taking the kids on vacation?”

She could do it. She could call him.

All she needed to do was concentrate on finding her children. Ask J.D. a few simple questions. Listen to him with the same focused detachment she’d listened to all those other voices during the past forty minutes, and forget that his voice had ever been more than a simple source of information.

She could do it.

Swallowing a hard, salty knot in the back of her throat, Kirsten reached for the phone.

“Ryder, you just missed a call.”

Jonesy sounded smug about it, J.D. noticed. The guy was probably hoping it would attract notice from upstairs…Ryder’s been out all morning, losing focus ever since he gave notice. Put me in instead.

Well, maybe they would. It was hard to imagine someone as spit-shined as Jonesy taking over the contacts J.D. had spent three years coaxing from the alleys of south Phoenix, but the brass upstairs seldom saw things the way he did. One more reason he’d be glad to get started in Chicago.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the message slip from the junior officer and heading for his desk. The past month of fourteen-hour days had at last reduced the mountain of paperwork to a very short stack, which he hoped his replacement would appreciate. He added this morning’s reports to the pile, checked the vacation-refusal box on the resignation “Freedom Form” someone had finally delivered, then glanced at Jonesy’s message slip and felt a jolt of heat down his spine.

Kirsten Laurence?

It startled him how quickly the sight of her name could still make his skin tighten. Eight years should have put her safely in the realm of old memories, the kind that roused only a vague nostalgia. High-school friends, good old days, Tubac’s Terrific Trio, nothing more than that.

Kirsten…

It was nothing to get excited about, J.D. told himself, initialing his resignation form and dropping it in the battered Out tray. She was probably planning a class reunion, a surprise party for her ex-husband, something like that. Something that required a courtesy call, some message she couldn’t send via Brad…the way she used to send Christmas or birthday greetings whenever he and his old buddy got together for a beer or a Super Bowl game.