A Hero in Her Eyes

The slight contact had created a burst of light within her. Eliza looked at Cade confidently. “Sure thing, but you’ll be too busy.”

“No, I—” The significance of her words hit him. He realized that he’d accidentally brushed against her. From what she’d told him, he knew that Eliza’s insights came at will. Cade looked at her now, his eyes widening. “Really?”

She smiled broadly at him. You’d think this was his first time expecting, instead of a second go-round. “Really.”

He crossed back to her, more eager than she’d ever seen him. “When?”

“This afternoon,” she answered with no hesitation. In her mind, she’d seen the baby, seen one of the assisting nurses recording the time. “3:32.”

“3:32,” he echoed like a man in a trance. He wasn’t skeptical, he really wasn’t, but he would have been less than human if he didn’t ask, “But two minutes ago, you said you didn’t know.”

She knew he wasn’t challenging her. At times, this whole thing left her in awe herself.

“Two minutes ago, I didn’t. Like I’ve told you, I have no control over this. Things come to me. Or they don’t. All I can do is pass on the information when I get it.” Eliza had made her peace with this, though there were times when it still proved frustrating to her. “I’m not much more than a conduit.”

“You’re a lot more than that.” Cade squeezed her hand, grateful for her information and for the fact that worrying about McKayla would be behind him soon. As of yesterday, his wife was officially three weeks overdue. “Thanks. And if you need any help with that—” he nodded at the computer monitor “—I can ask Chad if he has any extra—”

“Thanks, but I don’t think anyone else is going to be able to help, Cade—not yet, at any rate. I’ve only got a vague picture of the little girl in my mind, and right now, I’m the only one who would even recognize her.”

“What we need is a good sketch artist as part of the firm,” Cade commented, leaving. “Well, don’t tire yourself out,” he warned. “I don’t like my operatives dead on their feet, and you’re not going to help that little girl’s case any by turning into a zombie.”

“Zombie, freak. You’re a freak, that’s what you are. Why the hell can’t you be normal, like other little girls?”

The voice echoed in her brain as loudly now as it had any one of the number of times her father had shouted those words at her. They’d come from his own frustration over not being able to understand what was going on with his only child.

He’d been a simple man who understood simple things. His own daughter had seemed like something out of a science-fiction movie to him. He was incapable of bridging the gap that existed between them. After her mother died, that gap had only grown wider.

It had been hard on her father, she told herself now—as she had countless times before in an attempt to smother the hurt his words generated—having a daughter who was different, a daughter with “the gift” as her great-aunt called it.

She’d spent a good portion of her early years wishing the “gift” had been returnable. At the time, she would have given anything to be just like everyone else, just like the “normal” girls her father was forever pointing out to her as a goal to strive for. Being a seer, someone in touch with other people’s pasts and futures, and having those timelines indiscriminately mix with her own present without warning, was more of a curse to her than a gift.

It had certainly been a cross to bear that had made her fearful—until her mother’s aunt, who had endured the same fears, the same trials, had taken her aside to explain the good that could be done with the power she had.

“To ignore it is a sin, Eliza. You have to find a way to use it, to help people. That’s why the good Lord picked you. He knew you could do good with it. Don’t disappoint Him, Eliza. And most of all, don’t disappoint yourself.”

So here she was, with little to no sleep, staring bleary-eyed at an endless series of photographs of children’s faces. Looking for one in particular. Trying to make sense out of her gift and find a reason why she was dreaming of a child she did not know.

It wasn’t the first time, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating, any less challenging.

Behind her, the door to her office closed softly. Eliza blinked, trying to refocus her eyes. Trying to see the girl she’d been missing. The one she was certain was in the computer database somewhere. With a sigh, she reached for the coffee that had grown cold.

About to push away from the computer to take a breather, thinking she might need some distance before she continued the search, something compelled her to look at the next photograph on file.

Eliza’s mouth fell open.

Afraid to blink, to look away, she pressed a key to zoom in. “There you are.”

She had no idea why she was surprised—not when the feeling came, the one that led her to places she would never have thought of going. The feeling that went hand in hand with being clairvoyant. That forced her into people’s faces with bravado when she would much rather have retreated.

Her body at attention, Eliza moved her chair closer to the monitor. “So, hello,” she whispered to the little girl in the photograph. The little girl in her dream. “I’ve been looking for you.”

The moment she’d clicked on the file, seen the small, animated face, a sliver of the dream flashed through her mind’s eye, confirming the identification.

If she concentrated very intently, Eliza could almost swear she heard someone calling for the child. Bonnie.

An eagerness swept over Eliza, erasing her tiredness, erasing everything but the desire to find this child in real life, just the way she had on the Web site.

Quickly she printed out the page with the information. She needed to contact the family.

“Hang on, Bonnie,” she murmured. “We’ll find you.”

He’d discovered that grief, like the possessions scattered within a child’s room, could be boxed up and put out of sight. But unlike the boxes that held his daughter’s clothes and toys, the box that his grief was stored in would periodically appear right before him, without warning, tripping him. Bringing a pain with it that was almost insurmountable.

But he dealt with it.

He had no choice.

He’d made his peace and moved on, not once but twice. Moved on and kept moving. Moving so the box wouldn’t trip him. Moving so that he could pretend he was among the living instead of the walking wounded. Or worse, the walking dead.

And in moving, he went through the motions of living. Those who knew him were taken in by the facade, the performance, and believed Walker Banacek to be a man who had healed from profound wounds that would have felled a lesser person. He had survived his tragedies and found the strength to continue. There was nothing more admirable than that.

It wasn’t even remotely true, but he pretended, for his own sanity, that it was. It was how he got through each day and forced himself to get up each morning. All pretense.

In place of a family life, he dedicated himself to his work. The irony of it never failed to strike him. He dealt with security. Computer security. He’d developed software that kept computers and sensitive information safe—while the security of his family had been breached.

He was the first one in the corporate offices in the morning, the last one to leave at night. Weekends would find him there, as well, working so he wouldn’t have to think, wouldn’t have to feel. He anesthetized himself, and for the most part it worked.

Until he tripped over the box again. Always without warning.

Today had been just that kind of day. He’d tripped over the box, releasing a plethora of memories, of emotions, none of which he was capable of dealing with. Tripped, because today his daughter would have been six years old.

Someone in the office down the hall had been celebrating a birthday. An off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday” was all that was necessary; the thoughts had hooked up to one another instantly, bringing him back to the emotional abyss he’d struggled, time and again, to flee.

Worn from the inside out, Walker made it home, entering the house where lights went on automatically at sundown so that he didn’t have to contend with shadows. So that his mind wouldn’t play tricks on him and make him believe he was seeing an elfin, dancing figure out of the corner of his eye.

Bonnie used to love to dance around the room, pretending to be a ballerina. He’d bought her toe shoes for her fourth birthday, over his wife’s protests. Bonnie had worn them everywhere in place of her shoes. She’d had them on the day she disappeared.

The thought of dinner came and went in a single heartbeat. He wasn’t hungry. He never was anymore. Eating was just something he did to keep going. He vaguely remembered having lunch, and decided that would be sufficient to sustain him until breakfast tomorrow. If he remembered to eat then. A housekeeper came daily, to wipe away the cobwebs and prepare simple meals that were hardly touched. Life went on, in a way.

Walker debated turning on the television set, not because there was anything he wanted to watch, but because the sound of it might interfere with this overwhelming loneliness tripping over the box had triggered.

He didn’t like being alone, but in all this time, he couldn’t make himself allow anyone in to witness the pain he was grappling with.

Riffling through the mail on the counter that the housekeeper had brought in earlier in the day, he heard the doorbell. Ignoring it, he sorted the mail into two piles. Everything that wasn’t a bill went into the pile to be thrown away.

The doorbell rang again. And then again, defying his determination to ignore it. He stopped sorting. Whoever was on the other side of his door obviously refused to accept the obvious—that he wasn’t about to answer.

The ringing continued at one-minute intervals. They weren’t going to go away. There was a time when he would have flown to the door at the first indication of a knock, picked up the phone before the first ring was completed, praying each time that it was someone with news that Bonnie had been found.