CHAPTER 16
Gage stared at his landlady, certain he must have misheard her.
“Moving on? What do you mean?”
Ruth shrugged. “Just what I said. Moving on means moving on. Clearing out. Heading out of Dodge.”
“She’s gone?”
“Guess so, since she left her last month’s rent and told me in the note to keep the security deposit.”
He was frozen suddenly. An ice sculpture carved by some artist’s chainsaw. He couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, was only conscious of the vast, yawning emptiness in his stomach.
Gone. She had left his arms warm and contented and happy—he knew she had, dammit—then returned home to pack up her girls and drive out of his life without leaving a single word about where she was going.
The ice began to melt, leaving red-hot emotion. Betrayal and loss and shock vied for violent control inside him. Why did he feel as if he had just been hit by Lyle Juber’s damn pickup truck all over again? Only, this time his legs weren’t the only thing crushed—every square inch of him felt bruised, shattered.
He was in love with her, he realized. In love with a smart-mouthed little caregiver with a sweet smile and gentle hands. He had spent his whole adult life protecting his heart, but somehow she and her beautiful daughters had sneaked inside and nested there, made a home.
Then ripped it all out by walking away from him.
What the hell was he supposed to do now?
The raging flood of emotions threatened to drag him under. He wanted to crawl somewhere—well, wheel, anyway—and try to cope with his feelings and her betrayal, but before he could move, Lynn opened his front door and trotted down the steps.
“Hello, Ruth,” his mother said cheerfully. “Isn’t it a lovely day? That rain yesterday was just the perfect amount to green everything up and make the garden look fresh and clean.”
“Won’t last,” Ruth muttered. “Heat will dry out the grass.”
“I know. But in the meantime we can enjoy it. We’ll all be remembering glorious summer days just like this in a few months when we’ve been snowed in for weeks.”
Ruth said nothing, and after a moment Lynn continued in the same friendly tone. “I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I have enjoyed your flowers these few weeks I’ve been staying with Gage. At night, I like to sit on the back patio and just inhale all the delicious fragrances. It’s been such fun trying to see if I can identify the different smells. You’re a gardening genius. I’d like to know your secret.”
“Cow manure.”
Lynn laughed, then looked to Gage as if urging him to join in. He stared back stonily, and his mother’s smile slipped away, concern darkening her eyes. “Gage, dear. Is everything all right?”
Nothing was right anymore. Nothing. But he knew he couldn’t express the turmoil boiling through him. Not to his mother and definitely not in front of Ruth.
“Fine. Everything’s fine,” he lied. “Are you ready to go?”
Lynn raised an eyebrow at his clipped tone but only nodded. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Let’s be on our way, then.”
He spent the forty-minute drive into the city trying to conceal the depth of his shock and hurt from his mother’s all-too-perceptive gaze. He had a feeling he wasn’t very successful at it, especially after they entered the parking garage near the gleaming office building that housed the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office.
His mother pulled into a parking stall and shut off the engine, then turned to him, her usually soft features set into definite battle lines. “Okay, I’ve let you get away with it long enough. Are you finally ready to tell me why you’re acting like a bull raised on sour milk?”
The expression took him aback. Lynn was usually so cultured and refined it was sometimes easy to forget she was the daughter of a rough-and-tumble Utah cattle rancher.
He didn’t want to tell her the truth but he couldn’t come up with a convenient lie. “Lisa took off,” he finally said. “Moved out.”
Lynn gaped at him. “When? Why?”
“I guess this morning. That’s what Ruth Jensen was telling me back at the house. As to the why, I couldn’t tell you.”
Her reason for running away had to somehow be connected to the intimacies they had shared the night before. Wouldn’t she have told him she was leaving otherwise? She would have had plenty of opportunities over dinner and afterward.
Had he come on too strong with her? Scared her away, somehow? No, he remembered. Not that he had been an unwilling participant, but she had definitely been the one who initiated their kisses and who had pushed for more.
So she seduced him and then just disappeared. What the hell was going on?
“Where did they go?” Lynn asked helplessly. “I don’t understand. Why would she just pack up and leave without a word?”
“I don’t know. She left a note for Ruth but didn’t tell her where they were heading.”
“You’re an FBI agent. Can’t you do something to find her?”
He swallowed the bitter laugh scouring his throat. “It’s not that easy, Mom. I can’t file a missing persons report on an adult woman simply because she decided to move away.”
“It’s more than that,” Lynn said, with an urgency that took him by surprise. “I know it is. She’s in trouble, Gage. I sensed it several times when I was talking to her. She has problems. I don’t know what they are but somehow her leaving must be connected to whatever has been bothering her. I should have done more to find out what that was, to help her with it. You’ve got to find her!”
“There’s nothing I can do, unless she’s committed a crime.”
Just for a moment he wondered if that could somehow be the reason for her sudden, precipitous flight, if she might be running from justice. No. He couldn’t believe it. The Lisa Connors he knew was too innocent, too artless, to be involved in anything illegal.
“You can’t just let her disappear like this!”
He wanted to ask his mother how he was supposed to find Lisa when he couldn’t seem to unearth a single trace of the sister he had spent the last two decades seeking. But of course he couldn’t. Lisa was gone from his life just as surely as Charlotte.
“I don’t think we have a choice. She’s a grown woman.”
Lynn opened her mouth to argue but he forestalled her by reaching behind his seat for the wheelchair in the back. He pulled it out and set it on the ground, then unfolded it.
“Thanks again for the ride. I can catch a ride home with Davis or Thom Lovell.”
“No. You’ll do no such thing. I told you I’d be back in a few hours and I will.” She still looked dazed, but to his relief she didn’t press him about Lisa. Instead, she hurried out of the SUV and came around to help him transfer into the chair.
Once he was settled, she touched his arm and he was startled to see soft compassion in her eyes. Did she have some inkling of his feelings for Lisa? He sincerely hoped not.
“Gage. Honey, I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t know how to answer her. Besides that, he wasn’t exactly sure he was comfortable being on the receiving end of this kind of empathy from his mother. In the end, he decided he would be best just to ignore it.
“I’ll see you around five,” he muttered and wheeled toward the elevator.
* * *
Gage shifted in his chair, trying to find a more comfortable position behind his desk at the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office. With this blasted brace on his left leg it was definitely a challenge, but he would bite his tongue off before he would complain.
He was keeping mum about a lot of things these days. He refused to complain about missing out on all the action in the field or about having to pore over old case files or even about having to catch up on a month’s worth of Cale’s paperwork.
As much as he despised desk work and being planted in this office instead of out in the field where he belonged, it sure beat hell out of the alternative. He would gladly take a few more months of riding a desk just as long as he didn’t have to spend another minute staring at the four walls of his bedroom in Park City.
He had been back at work a week now, since the day the doctor removed his casts. After the first day back, he decided if he ever broke a limb again, he would just beg the doctors to shoot him and put him out of his misery. He refused to take another day of sick leave.
The FBI was where he belonged. Here he had a purpose, a mission. He wanted nothing more than to slip back into the persona he was comfortable with, the man he had been before the accident—a hard-nosed FBI agent completely dedicated to his career, to closing cases, to finding justice.
A man who never had to deal with distractions like a mother who had suddenly barged into his life and seemed to have no intention of allowing herself to be pried out again or a brother who seemed determined to have a relationship again after twenty years.
Or a beautiful blue-eyed neighbor and her sweet little girls and her problems, who disappeared without a word and left this damn gaping hole in his heart.
He missed Lisa so much he thought he would go crazy with it. He couldn’t go ten minutes without thinking about her, without worrying about her blood sugar levels and whether she was sleeping enough and how she was keeping up with the girls.
He hated it. Part of him even thought he might hate her a little bit for putting him through this. He wanted to forget her, but no matter how much he tried to remind himself that she had made the choice to walk away—that she had turned her back on whatever they might have been just on the verge of discovering together—he couldn’t seem to shake her from his mind or his memories.
Gage turned back to the field notes from one of the cases Davis had worked during his time away. He was trying to see if his partner had missed anything during the interrogation of a suspect in a child prostitution ring when Davis rapped on the open door and peeked his head inside.
“That the Bamburger file?” Davis asked.
Gage nodded. “Nasty piece of work there. I would have had a tough time not breaking the bastard’s neck during the interview.”
“Yeah, I have to admit it was a struggle to keep my hands off him. I had to play nice, though, since Potter was watching.”
As Davis continued standing in the doorway, Gage began to pick up on the tension radiating from him. “Something wrong?” he asked.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Finally Davis walked into the office. “I think you need to see this fax that just came over. It took me a few minutes to put the pieces together but you might be quicker than me.”
He tossed a paper on the desk. Gage picked it up, registering that it was a watch bulletin sent out by the Philadelphia field office at the request of a private investigator.
The picture on the fax was blurred, but showed a solemn woman with long, straight, light-colored hair above the name Alicia Connelly DeBarillas. He narrowed his gaze, trying to place why something about the woman’s features seemed familiar, but came up empty.
“We can play twenty questions here or you can fill me in.”
“Check out the data sheet Philly sent along with it.” Davis handed him another fax. After only a few lines, Gage’s gut contracted as if he’d been slugged.
He gazed back at the picture, his insides suddenly numb. It was still grainy and indistinct, but now he could see the resemblance in the eyes and the bow-shaped mouth. Chop that light hair off, dye it brown and take away ten pounds or so and this Alicia Connelly DeBarillas was a dead ringer for Lisa Connors.
Even without having the picture to compare her to, he would have known it was her, just by reading the data sheet. DeBarillas was an emergency room nurse with diabetes from the Philadelphia area involved in a custody dispute over her daughters, Gabriella and Anna, ages five and three. She had been missing approximately two months, he read, right around the time he gained a new neighbor.
Gage swore long and low, a hot rush of betrayal sweeping through him. This was far worse than thinking she had just run off after their night together. She had played him for a fool. A helpless, invalid fool too stupid and too trusting to ever suspect a sweet-faced woman like her had been lying through her teeth.
What reason did he have to even think for a minute that Lisa Connors was anything but what she appeared to be? A single mother trying to get by on her own. He never would have suspected she was a fugitive, running from a custody battle over her daughters.
With whom? He wondered. The bulletin didn’t say. Maybe her husband hadn’t really been killed by a drunk driver. Maybe that was another tale she had spun. Maybe the guy was somewhere back east searching as diligently for his daughters as Gage’s parents had looked for Charlotte.
He felt sick thinking of it. How much of what she had told him was truth and how much was a lie? What could he believe?
Had the passion between them been real or feigned? Betrayal coated his throat in thick, greasy layers.
Now he understood why she left. While he had been stuck at home recovering from his injuries, she probably figured he hadn’t posed much of a threat to her. But when he had told her he was returning to work, she must have known there was a good chance he would eventually connect the dots between Lisa Connors and this Alicia DeBarillas.
“I think we had better go pay a little visit to your lovely neighbor,” Davis said.
A whole spate of emotions thrashed through him, and he wanted to throw something. The urge to topple this whole damn desk—computer, paperwork and all—was almost overwhelming.
“She’s not there,” he growled. “She packed up her girls and took off a week ago.”
“Any idea where?”
Gage shook his head. “None whatsoever.”
“Well, she’s not facing federal charges, apparently. Pennsylvania only gave us the heads-up as a courtesy so we can be on the lookout for her. I guess that means she’s not our problem.”
Gage shoved away from the desk and grabbed the crutches he was still growing accustomed to. “She’s my problem. I’m going to look for her.”
He wasn’t about to let her get away with kidnapping those little girls and disappearing like the bastard who took his sister.
* * *
Hell was a decaying two-room apartment in North Las Vegas in the middle of a July heat wave.
Though it was after ten o’clock at night, the temperature outside hovered around a hundred degrees and it wasn’t much cooler than that inside Allie’s apartment. A tiny air-conditioning unit rattled and coughed in the window but was about as effective against the heat as a pea shooter against a Sherman tank.
She didn’t know when she’d ever been so miserable.
Allie sagged onto the lumpy couch that came with the apartment. It wasn’t only the heat that bothered her, though, that weighed her down, left her limp and exhausted.
She could have coped with living in an oven, if her life here had any other redeeming qualities. But she hated this apartment with its grimy windows and ugly seventies furniture, she hated working as a maid at the dismal Four-Leaf Clover Hotel and Casino, she hated having to leave her daughters with a woman she barely knew.
More than that, she was scared.
She supposed she could finally admit it here in the solitude of her living room with the girls asleep in the bedroom, their bed an air mattress on the floor where it was a little cooler.
No, she wasn’t scared. She was petrified. Since leaving Park City three weeks ago, her diabetes had flared out of control. She hadn’t had such wildly fluctuating levels since those awful months after Jaime died. Nothing she did seemed to rein it in.
She had adjusted her diet, she had monkeyed with her insulin, she had done everything she could think of to control it, but nothing seemed to be working.
Just that afternoon she had finally gathered her nerve and gone to see a doctor. It cost her nearly two hundred dollars cash for him to warn her in a smug, condescending tone that if she didn’t take better care of herself, she would find herself in the hospital within the week.
What would happen to her girls if she ended up being hospitalized in this strange city where she knew no one? Just thinking about it left her shaky and weak.
Maybe Irena and Joaquin had been right. Maybe all this time she had been fooling herself to insist that she could care for them by herself, given the uncertainties she lived with daily as a diabetic.
At least with their grandparents they wouldn’t have to live this crummy, hand-to-mouth existence, living in this kind of hole-in-the-wall apartment building.
They would be safe, secure, would never want for anything, even if Irena and Joaquin ended up taking off with them to Venezuela and she never saw them again.
She couldn’t bear this. She couldn’t. What was she supposed to do? She gazed out the window at the dismal urban landscape, all strip malls and crumbling apartment complexes and concrete, with hardly anything green in sight except for a few stunted cacti and a palm tree or two.
She should never have left Park City. There they had friends and a backyard to play in and a comfortable bedroom, where cool mountain breezes blew in at night.
But though she might wish with all her heart to be back in that little cottage, she knew it had been impossible to stay. Gage would have found out the truth, and she still would have lost the girls.
Gage. Oh, how she missed him. She pictured him the last time she had seen him, sleepy and naked and gorgeous, and had to press a hand to her heart at the physical ache there.
How could she have come to this? In love with the one man with the power to destroy her world? If only she had met and fallen in love with someone safe, someone she could have confided in. Someone who would understand why she’d made the choices she had.
But she had been destined to love a hard, dedicated FBI agent who would not look with a shred of kindness on a woman who had virtually kidnapped her own children. Not with his own family history.
“Mama?” Gaby whimpered suddenly, poking her head out of the bedroom. “Can I get a drink of water?”
To her horror, Allie suddenly realized silent tears were coursing down her cheeks. How long had she been crying? She wiped at them with a surreptitious hand, hoping Gaby wouldn’t notice.
“I thought you were asleep, honey.”
“I was but I woked up. It’s too hot.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Gaby studied her for a moment, that sweet little face cocked to one side and her big dark eyes concerned. “Mama, why are you crying?”
She didn’t know how to answer. To her shame, she wanted to gather Gaby against her and weep into her hair, but she knew she couldn’t impose the burden of comforting her on a child.
“Do you have an owie?” Gaby asked. “I can kiss it better.”
Only my spirit, honey, she thought. And my heart. My heart has been shattered into a million pieces and I don’t have the first idea how to put it back together.
With fierce effort, she choked back the sob welling in her throat. “No owie. I’m fine. I’m hot and I’m tired, that’s all. Let’s both get a drink of water and then we’ll go to bed.”
Together they walked to the refrigerator where Allie found the pitcher she kept full there. She poured a glass for Gaby, who chugged it as if she’d been stuck in the vast Nevada desert for months.
“Mama, I don’t like this place very much,” Gaby suddenly said, her voice small and forlorn, as if she were confessing a terrible secret. “It always smells funny.”
Allie had to agree. If hopelessness and despair had an aroma, it would probably be the sad scent of the Joshua Tree Apartments.
“It’s just different than you’re used to.”
“I liked our other house. With Gage and Ruth and Jessica and Gage’s nice mommy. Why can’t we go back there?”
How was she supposed to answer that? She knew there were no words a five-year-old would understand so she didn’t even try. “We’ll like it here after we’ve been here a while. Now back to bed or you’ll be too tired to play with Anna tomorrow.”
To her relief, Gaby didn’t argue. With one last hug, she went back into the bedroom. After Allie tucked her in again, she returned to the other room. On that lumpy couch again, she hugged her knees, wishing with all her heart that she could avoid the inevitable. She couldn’t see any way around it, though, and the knowledge pierced through her like a thousand nails.
She had to turn herself in.
It would mean losing the girls to Jaime’s parents and how would she ever survive that? She wouldn’t, she knew. She would shrivel up and die without them.
But she had to. Keeping them in these conditions, with her medical condition so precarious, was cruel and selfish.
She had to think about what would be in their best interest. She finally knew she could no longer avoid the grim realization that the answer to that question wasn’t to live constantly on the run with someone who might end up hospitalized—or worse—at any moment.
Just how did she go about turning herself in? She had no idea but she knew she would have to do it tonight or she feared she would lose her resolve. Should she just phone the nearest police department and say, Hey, come get me?
Here was another chapter she would have added to the imaginary fugitive handbook she’d been writing since leaving Philadelphia—when you realize the game is up, how do you fold your cards and get up from the table?
She could call Gage, she supposed. He would probably be able to alert Las Vegas authorities to pick her up. She shivered, imagining his reaction to that kind of late-night phone call. He would hate her for deceiving him. He would be livid. No, she couldn’t face him.
What about Twila Langston? As much as she respected the woman who had represented her in the custody dispute with the DeBarillas, she doubted her attorney would be able to help her out of her predicament. No one could. But at least Twila might be able to tell her the legal steps she needed to take to turn herself in.
It was past 1:00 a.m. in Philadelphia, but she knew Twila would take her call. Throughout the custody proceedings, they had become friends as well as having a good attorney-client relationship. Twila was probably sick with worry about where she had gone.
With her heart beating an uneven rhythm and her insides quivering, she crossed to the phone. She had no trouble remembering the attorney’s home number and she dialed the digits with shaking fingers.
She paused before hitting the last number. This was it. With this phone call, her life would change irrevocably. She would lose everything she held most dear in the world. Did she have the courage to go through with it?
She had to, for her daughters’ sake. Almost defiantly she started to lift her finger to finish poking in the number just as the sound of the doorbell rang through the small apartment like a funeral knell.