Making Her Way Home. Janice Johnson Kay

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СКАЧАТЬ Uh, looks like mostly auctions, big corporate shindigs, product launches, sports tournaments.” He was clearly reading off a list. “Team building,” he said with a snort. “Holiday parties.”

      “Huh. Anything personal about her?”

      “Nothing. All I’m seeing are mentions of her in her professional capacity. She’s a member of Rotary, some women-in-business group… Give me a minute.”

      Mike did. Aside from the basic stat that Ms. Greenway was thirty-two years old—only two years younger than Mike—Eddie came up with zip. Elizabeth Greenway had no record of trouble with the law, not so much as a parking ticket.

      “Okay,” Mike finally said. “If you have time, keep digging. This whole thing stinks.”

      Under any other circumstance, Eddie would have grumbled about having plenty of his own stuff to do. But he’d been around when Nate died. He knew what Mike had gone through and how sensitive he’d be to any case with a child in peril.

      Mike looked at his watch—he’d been at the park for an hour. Sicily Marks had now been missing for two hours. The odds that she’d been abducted were increasing by the minute, unless something else odd was going on.

      Back to talk to Ms. Greenway, he decided grimly. It might not have been the father’s decision not to be involved in his daughter’s life. It was interesting, if true, that Ms. Greenway had acquired custody only a month ago. Somebody might not have been pleased, whether it was the child’s father or the grandparents. Or were there other family members? He cursed himself for not asking and retraced his steps to the beach.

      She stood exactly where he’d left her. He felt a pang of something strange when he saw her planted there, stiffer and less graceful than any of the madrona trees on the bluff above her. He wondered if she’d moved a muscle beyond those required to breathe.

      When he reached her, he saw something else. There were goose bumps on her arms and she was quivering. No, shivering. In alarm, he laid one of his hands over hers, clasped the other on her upper arm, and found it icy. She jumped and swung to face him. “What…?”

      “You’re freezing,” he said brusquely. This time he wrapped his hands around both her upper arms and began rubbing. “Why didn’t you say something?”

      She looked at him with unshaken poise and said, “I’m perfectly…” Fine. That’s what she meant to say, but it didn’t come out because her teeth chattered.

      “You’re not.” She was in shock and either hadn’t recognized it or refused to acknowledge her own vulnerability. He urged her backward and said, “Sit.”

      “No! I…”

      He all but picked her up and sat her butt down on the blanket, which he then gathered up and wrapped around her. Her teeth chattered again and she seemed to shrink. After a moment, she clutched the edges of the blanket and tucked in her chin, turtlelike. Squatting on his haunches next to her, all he could see was her hair, which had swung forward to veil her face.

      “Better?” He was trying for gentle, but his voice came out gruff.

      Her head bobbed, and after a minute she said, “Thank you.”

      “I’m afraid I have more questions.”

      She didn’t so much as sigh. She was the toughest read of anyone he’d ever met. After a moment she lifted her head. “You think somebody took her,” she said steadily.

      Or that she was never here at all, but he wasn’t going to say that.

      “I don’t think anything yet. I’m leaving the search to the experts and preparing for the possibility we won’t find her here.”

      A shudder wracked her. The cold again, or a ghost had walked over her grave.

      “Dear God.”

      “Sicily’s father. Is there any chance he wanted custody?”

      “No. He walked out on Rachel and Sicily and never so much as paid child support. I thought… I don’t know what I thought, but after Rachel died I tried to find him and failed. He might even be dead.”

      “What’s his name?” Mike produced the small notebook he always carried in a hip pocket and flipped past the pages of notes he’d made earlier at the Sullivan place.

      “Chad Marks. I don’t know his middle name. I…never met him.”

      “Were they divorced?”

      “I don’t know.” Her three favorite words in the world. This time she sounded uncertain, though. “I’m not sure if Rachel ever bothered. She kept the last name. It’s on her death certificate.”

      “Okay. What about your parents?”

      “Their names are Laurence and Rowena Greenway. They live in Seattle.” He sensed a reserve so deep he doubted she could swim up through it.

      He nodded. “Do you have other siblings? Step or biological?”

      “No. There’s no one else.”

      “Aunts? Uncles?”

      “My father has a brother, but he lives in Dallas. I don’t know him well. I doubt Sicily has ever met him. My mother had a brother, too, but he was killed in a small plane crash when I was a child.”

      “Was your sister involved with anyone recently?”

      “I think,” she said carefully, “men came and went. My impression from Sicily is that none of them stayed long.”

      “How did your sister die?”

      “It was…an accident.”

      His knees were beginning to protest his squatting position, but he didn’t move. He was looking right into those caramel eyes, watching for every deeper swirl, however subtle. “What kind?”

      “They think she fell from the ferry.”

      “From the ferry? Wait. I remember that,” he said slowly. It had dominated local news recently. He thought it had been the Kingston-to-Edmonds run. The ferry had arrived and no driver showed up to claim one of the cars, which of course created a godawful tangle in trying to unload in an orderly way. Apparently this happened regularly, but usually the missing driver had fallen asleep on one of the bench seats on the passenger deck. This time, workers scoured the ferry from end to end and the woman never turned up.

      “Her body washed ashore, didn’t it?”

      “Yes. She had some barbiturates in her system.”

      “Did she have a drug problem?”

      Her lips compressed before she said, “Since she was a teenager. Alcohol and downers. I understand from Sicily that Rachel mostly managed to hold a job, but I suspect Sicily had been handling many of the practicalities of their life for some time. She admitted she was used to being left alone for two or three days at a time.”

      He stared at her in exasperation. “Why didn’t СКАЧАТЬ