In Broad Daylight

“Hello? Hello?” Helpless, she looked up at Dax. “He hung up.”

Very gently, Dax took the receiver out of her hand and replaced it in its cradle. “You did great,” he told her. The woman looked as if she was going to sag to the floor right in front of him. He put his arm around her shoulders, offering her support. She seemed to stiffen against him. “You want to sit down?”

Brenda deliberately shrugged him off. “No. What I want is to find Annie.”

“Yeah, we all do.” Battling to keep frustration at bay, he scrubbed his hand over his face, then looked at her. He’d heard everything she had, but she’d been a microinch closer to the receiver. Maybe that was enough. “Did you hear anything in the background, anything at all?”

She shook her head. “It was like talking to ET’s evil twin. I couldn’t even tell you if it was a man or woman. But ‘he’ kept switching his pronouns, interchanging ‘I’ and ‘we’ several times. That means there’s at least two of them.”

He nodded. It just reinforced his suspicions that the bogus couple who’d asked for a tour of the school were the ones who had taken the little girl. It would have helped if Harwood Academy had surveillance cameras in place, but for a prestigious school, they were appallingly lax in electronic security. A condition he figured the headmaster was going to fix—if he was given a chance. He suspected the kidnapping was going to cost the man some withdrawals.

He looked at Brenda. Unlike the housekeeper, she’d kept her cool throughout the ordeal. He knew it couldn’t have been easy on her. “Quick thinking on your part, using that accent.”

“I thought they might know the Tylers had an English housekeeper.” She realized the admission underscored the fact that she subconsciously agreed with the detective. Someone had gone through a great deal of trouble to plot this all out. Her eyes lit as information worked its way forward through her brain. The kidnapper hadn’t demanded to speak to either parent. “The kidnapper seemed to know that neither of Annie’s parents were home.”

Dax nodded. “They did their homework. This wasn’t a random snatch, this was very well planned.”

The thought chilled her. Had she been observed as well? In the classroom, had someone been watching? For how long? The north side of her classroom was completely exposed with a large bay window that comprised half the wall. She pushed the thought away.

She saw Nathan retrieve his notepad and then place it back into his pocket. “You know,” she told Dax, “you’ve got pretty lousy handwriting. You should do something about that.”

It was nothing he hadn’t heard before. His sister Janelle had said his notes all looked as if they’d been done by a drunken spider whose legs had been dipped in ink. “You managed to read it, didn’t you?”

She laughed shortly. “Only because I’m versed in scribble.”

“Whatever it takes,” he responded. Dax turned his attention to the housekeeper. Seeing him look at her, the woman tried to rally but rising from the sofa seemed to be more than she could manage at the moment. He crouched before her. “Have you noticed any strangers around here lately?”

Martha didn’t have to pause to reflect. “Mrs. Tyler’s having the guest house remodeled.”