Callie's Christmas Wish. Merline Lovelace

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      While the boy tore at the brown paper, Joe nodded hello to Dawn before shifting his gaze to Callie. In their short time together, she’d discovered that his silvery eyes could turn as opaque and impenetrable as a Massachusetts coastal fog when he wanted, which was most of the time. But they glinted now with a triumph so clear and sharp that she knew instantly his sudden trip Down Under had yielded results.

      “The emails!” she exclaimed. “You nailed the sender.”

      “To the wall,” he replied with such savage satisfaction that Dawn whooped and flung up a palm for a joyous high five.

      “All riiiight, Russo!”

      The exuberant exclamation startled Tommy and the pup. Blue eyes wide, the boy clutched his boomerang to his chest and demanded to know what was going on while his pet made indiscriminate lunges at any and all adults.

      “Down!”

      Joe’s low command caught the terrier in midlunge. It dropped instantly onto its haunches, looking as uncertain as a cuddly, curly-haired puppy could.

      “Let me take your jacket,” Dawn said in the sudden, blessed silence. “Then we’ll go into the kitchen and you can tell us every detail.”

      “Mooooom.”

      Tommy stretched the single syllable into a mile-long protest that stopped Dawn in her tracks. Despite the butterflies in her stomach, Callie had to smile at her friend’s goofy expression. The bubbly, irrepressible Dawn still wasn’t used to being a mother to anyone, much less a blue-eyed imp with the face of an angel and enough energy to propel the Hubble Space Telescope into extended orbit.

      “Joe’s gotta show me how to make my boomerang come back,” Tommy insisted. “Or...” He assumed an air of patently false innocence. “I guess I could take it outside and figure out how it works myself.”

      “Yeah,” Dawn snorted. “Like I’m going to turn you loose with an ancient hunting weapon.”

      The Ellises’ home was in an older part of Bethesda, just over the Maryland border from Washington, DC. The neighborhood consisted of gracious brick and stone houses set on large, tree-shaded lots. Their backyard was enclosed in mellow brick and graced by a fanciful gazebo now dusted with a light snow. It was also overlooked by a half dozen plate-glass windows, all of which were at risk despite Tommy’s assurances that he would be real careful.

      “We want to hear Joe’s news,” Dawn told the boy firmly. “Then we’ll all put on our jackets and go out with you.”

      His lower lip jutted mutinously. “But...”

      “Chill, dude.”

      Always a man of few words, Joe got his point across without raising his voice. Dawn flashed him a rueful smile as she created a diversion for boy and dog.

      “Why don’t you go into the den and get on the computer? You can pull up that website on the aerodynamics of boomerang flight your dad bookmarked for you. I bet Joe would like to see it after we talk.”

      Reluctant but outnumbered, Tommy caved. “’Kay. Just don’t talk too long.”

      Still clutching his prize, he scampered off with the pup hard on his heels. Joe shrugged out of his jacket and raised a brow as Dawn hooked the well-worn leather on the hall coatrack.

      “Aerodynamics of flight, huh?”

      “What can I say? Brian and his first wife were both engineers. It’s in Tommy’s genes.”

      It was a measure of Dawn’s basic warmth and security in her two-month-old marriage that she didn’t want Tommy to forget his birth mother. Caroline Ellis had died of a brain tumor less than a year after her son’s birth. Tommy had no real memories of her except those captured in the exquisite digital book Dawn had made for him using all her skills as a graphic designer.

      “C’mon. I’ll brew you some coffee while you tell us all.”

      Dawn turned to lead the way down the hall, so she missed the casual hand Joe laid at the small of her friend’s back. Callie, on the other hand, felt the light touch right through her baggy purple sweater and cotton camisole.

      When Joe called to say his plane had touched down, she’d almost dashed to the gatehouse to change, slap on some lip gloss and drag a brush through her mink-brown hair. She’d been thinking about taking Dawn’s advice and getting the shoulder-length mass shaped at one of DC’s elegant salons. With her life pretty much on hold these past weeks, though, she’d settled for just pulling it back in a ponytail or clipping it up.

      She made a futile effort to tuck back some of the wayward strands as she and Joe settled in high-backed stools at the kitchen counter and Dawn plugged a fresh, single-cup, dark arabica blend container into the coffeemaker. As hot water steamed through the cup, the coffee’s rich aroma competed with the sappy tang of the fresh-cut pine boughs on the kitchen table.

      “Okay,” Dawn demanded when the super-fast appliance delivered a steaming mug. “Talk! We’ve all been speculating like crazy since you took off so suddenly for Sydney. Tell us who the creep is who’s been sending those emails and why.”

      Joe swiveled to face Callie. “Do you remember acting as ombudsman for a girl named Rose Graham?”

      Frowning, she flipped through a mental filing cabinet of the cases she’d worked in her six years with the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate. Some files were slender; others were fat and crammed with tragic details. Still others were truly horrific. As best Callie could recall, though, Rose Graham’s case file was one of the thinner ones.

      “I remember the name.”

      “She was five when her parents duked it out in divorce court.”

      From the corner of her eye Callie saw an all-too-familiar mask slip over Dawn’s normally expressive face. Her friend had been a young teen when her parents’ increasingly bitter arguments led to an even more acrimonious divorce, with their only daughter caught smack in the middle. Kate and Callie had acted as buffers as much as possible, but sharing Dawn’s heartache had been a significant factor in Callie’s decision to pursue a master’s degree in family psychology and accept an appointment as a children’s advocate.

      “The mother worked as a paralegal,” Joe prompted. “The father was a software developer at one of Boston’s ultra-high-tech medical research companies.”

      The details seeped back. Callie could visualize Rose Graham—fair-haired, small for her age and very bright.

      “I remember the case now.” Her forehead crinkled. “As best I recall, it was pretty open-and-shut. The child was well adjusted, doing fine in preschool and clearly adored by both parents. Judges are predisposed to leave a female child that young with the mother unless there’s evidence of gross neglect or abuse. But...” Her frown deepened. “I’m pretty sure I recommended generous visitation rights for the father.”

      “You did, which was why we didn’t give the Graham case as much scrutiny as some of the others. Only after I had my people go back and do a second scrub did we learn the father’s company transferred him to their Australian office earlier this year.”

      “Uh-oh.”

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