A Hero in Her Eyes
Marie Ferrarella
Eliza Eldridge saw through other people's eyes. And now her dreams of a missing little girl were becoming urgent. Eliza couldn't ignore them, and she vowed to reunite the child with her father.While Walker Banacek would do anything to find his daughter, he'd been devastated in the past by charlatans who promised to help him. But when Eliza mentioned a little girl's pink toe shoes–something only he and his daughter knew about–he had to wonder. Was Eliza the one woman who could help him…and then love him?
Eliza covered the hand that was holding Bonnie’s pink ribbon and gave it a gentle squeeze.
Struggling with his thoughts, Walker raised his eyes to hers again. He could feel her empathy, feel her excitement. It was as if she were telegraphing it to him somehow.
His breath caught in his throat.
Was it the emotion-packed moment that had him hallucinating this way, or was there something about this woman that spoke to him? Something that delved into his innermost being and somehow connected with what he kept hidden there?
He made no movement to withdraw his hand, enjoying, instead, the warmth. “Thank you.”
His thanks embarrassed her. She hadn’t accomplished what she’d set out to do yet. “Save that for when we find her.”
A Hero in Her Eyes
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Jessi,
The heart is an incredible muscle. It bounces back,
and to remain healthy it needs to be exercised.
If at first…
Love,
Mom
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Prologue
She was running, running because someone was after her.
She ran blindly through grass that came up to her hips, threatening to trip her as she made her way to where the oak tree stood. Her heart was pounding so hard, it blotted out the sounds of the meadow.
Reaching the oak, she stopped, panting and pressing her cheek against the coarse bark as if it were an old friend. Her only friend.
She had no friends.
She wasn’t allowed to have any. He wouldn’t let her. She wasn’t allowed to talk with anyone, couldn’t play with anyone.
She was afraid of him.
The lady tried to be nice, but she was afraid of her, too. Afraid of the wild look in the lady’s eyes. Afraid of those big hands that stroked her too hard, hugged her too close. Afraid of the lady who called her a name that wasn’t hers.
He was coming. She could feel it. Deep down in her chest, she could feel it.
Daddy, where are you? Come find me. Please!
And then she heard him.
Heard him calling her. Calling that name he told her to answer to.
“Miranda, where the hell are you?”
Hiding by the tree, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut and wished she could disappear.
But she didn’t disappear.
And he found her.
She whimpered as hands reached out and roughly snatched her from the ground.
Dragging her away.
Back to the ugly house.
Eliza bolted upright, drenched in perspiration despite the chill in the air.
Slowly, the things around her came into focus. She was in bed, in her own room.
Safe.
Gasping for air to steady her erratic pulse, she leaned forward and dragged her hand through her hair. That was the fifth time she’d had that dream in as many nights. Wasn’t it ever going to stop?
She sighed and leaned her forehead against her knees, hugging her legs to her. She knew the answer to that question. It wasn’t going to stop.
Not until she figured out who the little girl was.
Chapter 1
“No offense, Eliza, but you look like hell.”
As the words penetrated her brain, Eliza glanced up from the computer screen. Her eyes felt dry from staring at Internet photographs for the last two-and-a-half hours. Ever since six this morning.
Unable to sleep, she’d come in early and planted herself in front of her computer, determined to put a name to the face in her dreams. She’d looked up the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Web site, the first resource everyone at the agency turned to.
Right now, the faces she was looking at were all beginning to run together in her mind.
Holding back the sigh that had taken possession of her, Eliza massaged her temples where a serious headache was starting to take hold.
Nevertheless, the smile she offered Cade Townsend, the founder of ChildFinders, Inc., was genuine. “No offense taken.”
“When did you last get a good night’s sleep?” Cade crossed his arms before him as he regarded her face more closely. “And if you don’t mind my asking, just what are you doing here so early? Don’t clairvoyants sleep?”
“On occasion.” Eliza deflected his question neatly. “And I could ask the same of you,” she added, flipping to the next file.
“You could,” he allowed affably. “And my answer would be that sometimes I like coming in while the office is still quiet, before the day and chaos catch up to it. It gives me the illusion that I’m actually on top of things.” And then he smiled. “And I’m here because my wife said I was driving her crazy.”
Amusement highlighted Eliza’s fine-boned face as she welcomed a respite from the darker things that occupied her thoughts. “Oh?”
“McKayla says I was hovering around her and her swollen belly like a starving man watching the timer on a stove, waiting for the roast to be ready.” Cade paused, then asked, “You don’t, by any chance, have any clue as to when Mike might give—”
She’d wondered what had taken Cade so long to ask. There were those who regarded her and her gift to be in the same realm as carnival performers, as turbaned pretenders who could tell a fortune or suddenly “see” the future at the turn of a coin. She’d grown up with people like that coming in and out of her life.
But Cade Townsend, as well as the others here at ChildFinders, had given her nothing but the utmost respect, treating her not like an oddity, an anomaly of nature, but a woman with something very real, very tangible to offer the organization. Cade was the first to cite her hard work and dedicated professionalism. That she was one of the few true clairvoyants, he’d once said, was only a plus, but not her greatest asset.
She liked Cade. He made her feel as if she actually belonged.
Eliza laughed. “I’m not sure that McKayla would welcome my touching her belly, trying to divine an answer for you.”
She knew he’d seen her do it before, touch things that belonged to a kidnapped victim, trying to commune with an essence the rest of them could not fathom. Though McKayla liked Eliza, Eliza could just hear his wife’s very vocal reaction to that.
Cade waved away his unfinished request. “You’re absolutely right. I’ve never seen a woman get so testy before. Not that she was the most easygoing woman to begin with, but she was at least reasonable,” he confided in an uncustomary moment of intimacy.
She understood exactly what he was saying. Eliza stretched, leaning back in the chair. Her back ached. “They’re called hormones, Cade. We’re all blessed—or cursed—with them to some extent. Hers are just a little out of sync right now.”
He seemed to appreciate the charitable explanation, and laughed softly. “Now there’s an understatement.”
About to leave, Cade paused, curious. He looked over Eliza’s shoulder at the monitor. They were all acutely familiar at the agency with the Web site she was looking at. Ever changing, ever growing, the Web site was filled with a preponderance of photographs of smiling children of all ages. Children who had vanished out of lives that had been carefully or carelessly laid out, breaking the hearts of those who cared about them.
From the looks of it, Eliza had gone through at least two-thirds of the listings. He vaguely recognized the face she was looking at. The girl had been on the site ever since he’d founded ChildFinders, when his own son had been kidnapped. Darin had eventually been found. This girl had not.
He rested his hand on the monitor. “You didn’t tell me you’re working on a new case.” His only rules were that he be kept apprised of every new case that came in and that the first client interview be taped to prevent any misunderstandings down the line.
Eliza half turned in her chair to look at him. “That’s because I’m not. At least, not exactly.”
“Can you get a little more specific than that?”
Though Cade was an incredibly understanding man Eliza had a great deal of respect for, a lifetime of having to defend herself, of being thought of as “the different one” had her unconsciously bracing herself for unpleasantness.
“There’s this child in my dreams—” She stopped, wondering how to phrase what she needed to say.
Cade’s eyes were nothing if not kind. “Go on,” he coaxed quietly, interested.
Feeling suddenly self-conscious, she gave a seemingly careless shrug. “You don’t have time to listen.”
“Sure I do. It’s early, remember?” Cade leaned a hip against the side of her desk. “And my last case wrapped up five days ago.”
Okay, he asked for it, Eliza thought, taking a breath. “There’s this child. She’s running through a field. There’s tall, tall grass that makes it hard for her to run, but she pushes on anyway. She’s about four, maybe five, blond, green-eyed and very frightened. She keeps calling out to her father to come find her. Except he doesn’t.”
Listening intently, Cade nodded. “Anything else?”
She closed her eyes for a moment to focus. “I see a farmhouse in the background.” Eliza opened her eyes again and looked at Cade. “It has that old, run-down look, like one of those places you see in those old documentaries about the Depression.”
“Abandoned?”
She’d gotten that feeling, but she couldn’t be sure. It was the little girl who had held all of her attention. “Maybe.”
“What makes you think the little girl is real?” Cade asked. His tone was tactful, kind. “I mean, she might be a fabrication of your mind, a holdover from a movie you saw or television program you caught, or even a composite from your past cases.”
It was a question she’d already asked herself. “No, she’s real. I know it.” Eliza was as certain of that as she was of who and what she was. “Someone’s taken her, I’m sure of it. I’ve had this dream over and over again, Cade. In the last week, I’ve had it for five nights straight.” She looked back at the monitor. The little girl had to be in there somewhere. “She’s real, Cade, and she’s out there. Lost. Looking to come home.”
“Anything I can do?” Cade asked.
Until she found a match somehow, there was nothing any of them could do. Eliza sighed. “You can ask Carrie to buy more coffee when she gets a chance. We’re almost out.” She nodded at the mug on her desk. “I made a double batch this morning.”
Cade moved away from the desk, inadvertently brushing against Eliza’s arm. “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll be sure to steer clear of it.” And then he grinned. “Although Megan will probably tell you it’s too weak. If you need any help, let me know.”
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.
But each time, it wasn’t.
Instead, there’d been a bevy of reporters, a squadron of ghouls calling with “sightings” of his daughter, all feeding off the situation. He’d gone on countless emotional roller-coaster rides, only to be disappointed over and over again. Until he’d shut himself off completely, knowing that the call, the knock he was waiting for, would never come.
Expecting no one, angry at being invaded, Walker crossed to the front door. He yanked it open and fairly growled out the single word.
“Yes?”
Startled, Eliza almost took a step back from the man in the doorway. It wasn’t his expression that had her temporarily thinking of retreat, or even the way he’d snapped out the word in something far less than an actual greeting. Rather, it was the aura of pain she felt hovering around him that had unsettled her. Pain so vividly present, she felt she could literally reach out and touch it with her hand.
He was a man who had suffered a great deal, and her heart went out to him. He had Bonnie’s eyes, she thought, looking at him.
“Mr. Banacek?”
“Yes?” This time, the word came out a little more civilized sounding, though it was by no means intended to be friendly.
He wanted to be left alone. Alone to repackage the box and find some way to store it away again. It was hard enough to find a place for himself tonight without having to deal with some wispy dark-blond stranger who looked as if the wind had literally blown her to his doorstep.
“My name is Eliza Eldridge. I’d like to speak to you about Bonnie.”
His jaw tightened so rigidly, had it been made out of glass, Eliza was certain it would have shattered.
“What about her?”
“I believe she’s still alive.” In her entire experience, she’d never found an easy way to say this. “I’ve had this dream about her—”
His eyes darkened to the color of a storm. The next moment, he’d slammed the door shut in her face.
Chapter 2
The ringing began again, more insistent than the last time.
Walker felt himself beginning a not-so-slow burn. Didn’t these people have lives? Didn’t they have anything better to do than torment people touched by tragedy?
He strode back to the door, growing angrier with the woman leaning on his bell with every step he took.
“Go away, Ms. Eldridge,” he shouted through the door. He made no attempt to sound civil. At this point, he just wanted her to get out of his life. “I’m not about to talk to you.”
Eliza placed her outstretched hand on the door, wishing there was some way to touch the man behind it. Wishing she could make Walker Banacek understand and accept what it was that she wanted to do for him. But this part had never come about easily. It wasn’t quite like tilting at windmills, but it came close. People regarded clairvoyants as something between certified lunatics and fairy folk.
“Just give me a few minutes of your time to explain, please.”
The door didn’t open.
“If you don’t leave now,” he called to her, “I’ll call the police.”
If he thought that was a threat, he was going to be disappointed, she thought. She’d been subjected to far worse. “Ask for Lieutenant Trent Lanihan. He’ll vouch for me.”
For a moment there was nothing but silence, and she thought that perhaps he had walked away, after all. And then, to her surprise, the door opened, but not enough to allow her to come in.
“Look, trust me, I’ve heard it all,” Walker snapped coldly as he stood in the doorway. “So you can take your crystal ball, your tarot cards, your channeling persona, or whatever the hell you claim to use to bilk people out of their money and prey on their paltry hopes, and get the hell off my doorstep because I promise you, I am not in the mood for whatever bill of goods it is you’re trying to sell me.”
But before Walker could close the door on her again, Eliza wedged her body into the doorway, deterring his attempts to throw her out. He would have to do it bodily, or be forced to listen to her.
When he glared at her incredulously, she met his gaze not defiantly, but with such understanding that it took his breath away. Stunned, he stopped holding the door firmly in place and listened.
“I don’t use a crystal ball, tarot cards or a channeling persona,” she told him in a soft voice meant to inspire confidence and soothe an impassioned beast. Her mouth curved slightly; she knew exactly what he was thinking. “I’m not a quack, Mr. Banacek. I have no explanation for my abilities, I only know that there are times when I’m made aware of things that other people aren’t, and at times I can see things that other people don’t.”
He sincerely doubted that. She didn’t “see” things; what she accomplished she did with hypnosis. In his opinion, there was no other explanation for why he’d momentarily ceased pushing her out. No other explanation why he wasn’t pushing her out this second. It had to be hypnosis. One look into her eyes would convince anyone of that. They were a light shade of blue, so light that it made him think of the nylon used in making translucent nightgowns. Even now they seemed to be invading his very mind.
He blinked, rousing himself. Whatever tricks she was attempting to pull, they weren’t going to work on him. He’d been through too much already. “Go away,” he ordered sternly.
Eliza hated being put in the position of forcing herself on someone, but this was too important for her to turn away. A child’s life could be hanging in the balance.
“Not yet, Mr. Banacek, not until you hear me out. When I’m finished, if you still want me to leave, I will. No calls to the police will be necessary.”
Walker was torn. He didn’t like being played for a fool, but he had to admit that no matter how hard he tried to smother it, to bury it, there was still a small part of him that clung to irrational hope, hope that flew in the face of all the statistics to the contrary. Hope of finding Bonnie.
His eyes held hers. Then, after a beat, he opened the door a little wider. But his body remained in the way, blocking access to his house. He wasn’t about to let her mistake this for an invitation.
“What is this to you?”
He had a right to question. “A lost child, Mr. Banacek,” she replied softly. “What is it to you?”
How dare she? His eyes dissolved into angry slits as he glared at her. “A trick, a ploy. I don’t know whether you’re a reporter, a tragedy groupie or just a crackpot—”
And he had been besieged by all of them, Eliza thought. In large numbers. There was nothing she could do about that. But to have his help, she needed to change his mind. “There is a fourth choice.”
“Which is?” His tone was guarded. Hypnotically beautiful eyes not withstanding, he wasn’t about to be suckered into anything. Those days were gone.
Her eyes looked straight into him. “That I’m on the level.”
Looking away, Walker laughed shortly. Even if he might once have been inclined to believe the kind of nonsense she was spouting, he’d learned his lesson the hard way. His wife had paid clairvoyants to help. All they had done was help separate Rachel from her money. Bonnie was dead and he had to accept that. Had accepted it. He wasn’t about to retrace his steps or retract his decision, the decision it had taken him months of soul-wrenching searching to reach.
He placed his hand on the door, ready to push it closed again. “Sorry, I don’t believe in things that go bump in the night.”
Her hand touched his as she moved to stop him. A volley of lights blazed before her eyes. House lights. Bedroom lights. “Is that why you keep the lights on at night?”
Because he couldn’t summon a single word to answer her with, Walker stared at her in stunned silence.
“When you go to sleep at night,” she continued in a gentle voice, knowing that he desperately needed comfort, needed hope, not someone who raised her voice to match his in a dual of words, “is that why you don’t turn off the lights?”
“How did you know…?” For the briefest of moments, Walker actually entertained the thought that she was on the level. And then he came to his senses. There was a logical explanation, there always was. He just had to look for it. “You read that somewhere, didn’t you?”
Although, in all honesty, he didn’t remember ever telling anyone that, not even his sister. It was just something between him and the memory of the child he still carried in his heart. The child who was no more.
“No.” The single word was devoid of guile. “Until this morning, I didn’t even know who you were.” She’d missed the news media’s coverage of the tragedy, missed the stories on page one and then page three until they had worked their way to the back of the newspaper. “I wasn’t in the city the month your daughter was kidnapped. I was in Georgia.” Holding the hand of a man who had never accepted her. Holding his hand as he lay dying.
Eliza pushed the memory away. She was here to offer her help because Bonnie Banacek was missing, not to remember things that caused her pain. Pain only interfered with her ability to see things clearly.
Walker crossed his arms before his chest, a physically and emotionally immovable force. “Uh-huh. And just what is it that brings you to my door now?”
He didn’t believe her, she thought. She’d caught him off guard with her question about the lights, shaken him up, but he still clung to his disbelief. In his place, maybe she’d do the same.
All she could so was tell him the truth. “I’ve been having dreams about Bonnie. I think she’s using me to get a message to you.”
A sneer crept into his eyes, over his lips. He’d caught her in a lie. “I thought you said you didn’t ‘channel.”’
“It’s not channeling,” she corrected gently. As far as she knew, that had never happened to her. “Channeling a spirit supposedly involves someone who’s passed on. Your daughter is very much alive, Mr. Banacek.”
Walker wanted to shout at her, to shake her until she recanted. He didn’t know how, but he managed to hold on to his temper. “Oh, and I have your guarantee on this, Miss—” He broke off in frustration.
“Eldridge,” she repeated quietly. “Eliza Eldridge.” Opening her purse, she took out a business card and handed it to him.
Now they were getting to it, he thought cynically. The pitch. He glanced down at the card.
“ChildFinders, Inc.?” Angry, he shoved the card back into her hand. “What is this, some alternative form of ambulance chasing?”
She had no choice but to take the card back. “No, that’s just a number where you can reach me during the day.” And she hoped he would. “This has nothing to do with the agency.”
He was going to close the door, she saw it in his eyes. Eliza placed her hand on his arm in a silent entreaty. “The dream keeps recurring,” she told him. “I went to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Web site and looked for someone who resembled the girl in my dream.”
A very convincing cover story, but that was all it was: a story. A one-story-fits-all with no truth to it. He made no effort to hide his contempt. “Is that how you drum up business?”
She could almost feel the wall of hostility he’d erected around himself. “No, we have no need to drum up business. Sadly, there’s more than enough to go around. We get calls to search for missing children from all over the country.”
“Then why are you bothering me?” he demanded, suddenly drained. Too drained to even pretend to be polite. “Go answer them and leave me alone.”
She tried to stop him, but even as she did, she felt it was futile. He’d already made up his mind. “Please, Mr. Banacek, I know I can help. I just need you to let me see her room, touch some of her things.”
He wasn’t about to parade Bonnie’s things in front of a stranger, no matter how altruistic she pretended to be. “No. Now go back and pull your innocent act on someone else. I’ve been through it all and I’m not buying.”
One swift movement was all it took. The door was closed.
Eliza looked down at the card still in her hand. She knew that even if she rang the bell again, Walker Banacek wouldn’t answer. Wouldn’t listen to what she had to tell him. Wouldn’t be swayed. He’d isolated himself so far away from hope that right now, there was no way to reach him. She needed something tangible to show him, to make him change his mind.
After debating for a moment, she took her business card and inserted it between the double doors just above the doorknob. Walking away, she glanced back at the card. She had no way of knowing whether he’d take it when he opened the door tomorrow morning.
Not for the first time, she wished her insight would allow her some way to access it at will.
But she was as much in the dark about what caused the visions, the sudden rifts in her own present, as most people. All she knew was that it worked when it worked.
Glancing again over her shoulder as she walked back to her car, she thought of the man holed up inside the big house.
Despite his pain, Walker Banacek wasn’t the important one here, she reminded herself. It was his daughter. Eliza couldn’t lose sight of that.
Things would probably be a great deal easier for her if the girl’s father gave her his help, but one way or another, she intended to try to find the lost girl. She knew she wouldn’t get any sleep unless she did at least that much.
He hardly slept.
As he got out of bed the next day, Walker blamed his endless night on the woman who had come to his door, offering to do magic for him. Offering to find a child whom he had forced himself to accept was forever out of his life. Several times in the wee hours of his night, he damned the petite woman for disrupting the life he struggled to keep orderly.
If he were honest with himself, he thought as he got dressed, his life was in a continuous state of disruption and had been for the past two years.
Nothing was ever going to be the same again. The ache that had suddenly surged through him threatened to undo him completely. He banked it down.
She had brought it to a head, he thought angrily, this Eliza Eldridge and her claims of clairvoyance. It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that she was just out to make some money for herself and this so-called organization she belonged to.
Well, she wouldn’t be making it off him, or his grief. He wouldn’t allow it.
Too agitated to eat, Walker deliberately walked past his refrigerator without stopping. Crossing to the front door, he decided to pick up a coffee on the way to the office.
Maybe coffee would wake him up.
A small, pearl-colored rectangle floated to the step by his foot as he opened the door. He stooped to pick it up, then cursed softly.
She’d left her card.
What part of “no” didn’t she understand?
About to throw the card away, Walker stopped and looked again. Changing his mind, he pocketed it. He’d call his lawyer this morning when he got a chance and tell Jason to look into getting a restraining order against this Eliza Eldridge and ChildFinders, Inc. Undoubtedly, she didn’t give up easily.
There was something in her eyes…
He didn’t have time to think about a nicely packaged huckster. Didn’t have time to think about anything that had to do with Bonnie and the life he’d had before everything had turned pitch black for him.
Forcing himself to think of nothing but the work piled up on his desk in the office, Walker hurried to his car.
“She’s on the level, Walker.”
Walker frowned, wondering if the connection had somehow gotten scrambled. Hand on the phone receiver, he sat up in the rigid office chair. “What? Aren’t you too old to believe in witches and women who cast spells?”
There was a deep chuckle on the other end of the line. “God, I hope I’m never too old to believe in women who cast spells.” Jason’s comment was directed at Walker as his lifelong friend rather than as the client who kept him and his law office on year-round retainer. “But I looked into her just as you asked me to yesterday, and Eliza Eldridge isn’t any of the things you accused her of being. As far as the police are concerned, she’s the real McCoy. She’s helped solve several prominent kidnapping cases here, in Texas and in Georgia.”
Walker found that impossible to believe. “By doing what, looking into her crystal ball?”
Of the two of them, Walker had been the more practical one, even as far back as grammar school. His only dreams had revolved around the creation of the company he now headed.
“Hey, even Shakespeare said there were more things in heaven and earth than we could ever possibly understand.”
“Yeah, like people who prey on other people’s grief.”
“Hey, you’ll get no argument from me, Walker. I’ve come across plenty of those in my time. All I’m saying is that it looks as if Eliza Eldridge and the agency she works for are one of the good guys. From everything I’ve read, ChildFinders, Inc. has a one-hundred-percent track record for recovering the children they’re hired to find,” Jason said.
“And you don’t find that somehow suspect?”
“There’s a place for everything in this world, Walker. Even miracles. If she came looking for you with some kind of message, I say go for it. What have you got to lose?”
“What have I got to lose? How about the bits and pieces of me that I’ve managed to pull together over the past two years? Damn it, Jason…”
Jason felt for Walker, he really did. He’d been there for him, as much as Walker would allow anyone to be there for him, and had seen what the kidnapping had done to him. And to Walker’s wife, Rachel. One tragedy had begat another. “Yeah, I know.”
“No, you don’t,” Walker said with finality. “You don’t know. You couldn’t possibly know until it’s happened to you what it feels like to lose your little girl. To finally have to admit to yourself that there’s no hope, that she’s never going to come back, never going to throw those little arms around you and hug you as if you’re the most important person in the world. Never feel those tiny little lips on your cheek when you’ve won her heart because you bought her a stupid pair of pink toe shoes—”
Abruptly, Walker stopped, knowing he’d said too much, had gotten too angry at a friend whose only sin was in wanting to help.
When he spoke again, his voice quavered. “I just don’t know if I can go through it all again, Jase. I don’t know if I could live with myself.”
“Could you live with yourself if you turned your back on this, knowing there might be some chance, however slim, that you could find Bonnie? And that you passed it up?”
Walker made no answer.
He didn’t have to.
There were no two ways about it. Savannah Walters was an absolute gem. Eliza wondered what the firm had done without her before Sam had found her daughter, married her and subsequently talked her into leaving her job and coming to work for ChildFinders. The woman was an absolute whiz at the computer. More to the point, she knew her way around what was, to Eliza, the mysterious world of the Internet. Savannah could uncover information in seconds where it would have taken her weeks, Eliza marveled as she went over the stacks of files, clippings and random bits of information Savannah had assembled for her.
Specifically, she’d asked Savannah to see if she could dig up any information regarding the Banacek kidnapping. Savannah had unearthed old news articles dealing with the kidnapping and any bodies that had subsequently turned up fitting Bonnie’s general physical description over a nine-state area. She’d also asked for the names and known whereabouts of any registered child molesters.
It was a humbling mound of information, but Eliza intended to do it all justice. Maybe reading the files would trigger something for her, she thought. She felt she owed it to Bonnie, no matter what the girl’s father thought of her.
“Hey, there’s the brand-new Daddy now.” Eliza heard Megan Andreini Wichita crow almost right outside her door. It sounded as if Megan was hugging Cade. “How does it feel?”
Cade had taken the day before off to be with his wife, after having spent the previous evening coaching her through labor and delivery.
“I’ll let you know when and if I get some sleep. Right now, I’m so tired I feel like I’m walking around in someone else’s dream.” He stopped to pop his head into Eliza’s office. “You were right. Mike had the baby at 3:32. A beautiful baby girl.” Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out the instamatic photo he’d taken and passed it around for the women to see. “Her face’s a little flattened right now, but—”
“Her face,” Eliza said, taking the photograph from him to get a better look, “is absolutely perfect. And so is she.” She handed the photograph over to Savannah. “You must be very, very proud.”
Normally a man of few words, he wasn’t given to bragging. “Just relieved it’s over.”
“Hey, it’s not over, Papa,” Savannah, the mother of two children herself, told him affectionately. “You should know that. It’s not over for eighteen years. And even then, I hear it doesn’t stop.”
Megan handed the photograph back to the man she had originally met when she’d come as an FBI agent to question him about his missing son. “Boy, you people really know how to sell motherhood.”
“Nothing better in this world,” Savannah swore solemnly.
Megan chewed on her lower lip, seeming uncustomarily uncertain. “That’s good.” She took a deep breath as the others looked at her questioningly. “Because I think I’m on my way.”
“My God, really?” Savannah asked.
Megan had only been back to the office for a couple of days. She and her husband, Garrett, had finally managed to coordinate their schedules to take a long overdue honeymoon.
“Wow, you certainly know how to end off a honeymoon right,” Cade commented.
Eliza threw her arms around Megan, then stepped back. Megan looked at her with an unspoken question in her eyes. Eliza nodded with a smile. “Yes, you are.”
Megan squealed and hugged her hard.
Chapter 3
The sleek, gray Jaguar slipped into a spot that availed itself of the shade from one of the older benjamina trees that framed the perimeter of the parking lot closest to the office building.
His palm resting on the hand brake, Walker paused to gather his thoughts as he looked out at the building through the tinted window.
He wasn’t certain exactly what he’d been expecting. He supposed that in his mind, he’d thought any place that numbered a clairvoyant among its active employees would look like something out of a second-rate, melodramatic movie, maybe even one of those simpleminded screamers that dealt with the supernatural. The entrance to the building would come with a fog machine billowing out dry ice to create the proper surreal atmosphere.
That ChildFinders, Inc. had an address that put it squarely in the heart of one of Bedford’s most upscale business plazas was almost as encouraging as the verbal voucher Jason had given him over the phone regarding the agency’s sterling reputation.
A place that dedicated itself to finding missing children—and continually succeeding at it, if he was to believe the publicity—couldn’t be all bad, he told himself.
Braced for anything, Walker got out of his car and entered the building.
ChildFinders’s offices took up the entire top floor of the five-story building. The rent on that had to be a pretty penny, Walker mused, getting into the elevator whose outer wall was made of Plexiglas. It allowed him a view of the parking lot he’d just left as he got in.
If the rent was high, that meant that altruistic publicity notwithstanding, ChildFinders had to charge astronomical rates to stay ahead of the game, he decided, pressing for the fifth floor.
Not that money was a problem for him. It hadn’t been for almost ten years now. It was everything else that had become a problem, Walker thought darkly, watching the cars below become progressively smaller as he drew closer to the fifth floor.
When the elevator came to a smooth halt, Walker found himself stepping out into a tastefully decorated reception area. Looking around, he half expected the walls to be decorated with prominent citizens and celebrities the agency had helped, a visual testimonial to its incredible success rate.
Again, he was wrong.
Instead of photographs of grateful parents, there was a gallery of children’s photographs. Children, he assumed, that the different operatives had recovered and reunited with their families. Beyond that were several large, colorful pastels scattered about in understated frames. The two blended in to create an atmosphere that was at once soothing and brightly encouraging.
It was a place meant to put a person at their ease, not impress them.
Good business sense, he noted absently. Whoever had done this knew what they were doing.
He looked around for someone to talk to.
The young woman behind the reception desk at the entrance to the offices hardly looked old enough to be out of high school without a written excuse note from her mother. He vaguely wondered if she was one of the agency’s success stories.
Approaching the desk, Walker cleared his throat. He was nervous, he realized. Was he was making some sort of ridiculous mistake in coming here?
Maybe yes, but Jason was right. If he didn’t come here, if he didn’t follow up this absurd—for lack of a better word—lead, he would always wonder if he’d turned his back on the only and last chance he would ever have of finding Bonnie. As far-fetched as this seemed, he couldn’t ignore it.
Walker stopped short of the desk. Somewhere during the ride here from his corporate offices at the other end of Bedford, he realized, he had given himself permission to think of his daughter as being among the living again.
The thought startled him.
He feared that he would live to regret this. But his heart wanted so badly to believe that it was really true—that Bonnie was alive somewhere and that he would find her if only he tried hard enough.
As if he hadn’t tried hard before, doing everything in his power, hiring everyone he could…
And it had all come to nothing.
The girl at the reception desk flashed a thousand-watt smile. “May I help you?”
“Is Ms.—” His mind suddenly blank, Walker had to pause and look at the card he’d shoved into his jacket pocket just before he’d gotten out of the Jaguar. Funny, he was usually so good with names. Why did hers keep eluding him? Probably had to do with the fact that he was so skeptical. “Is Ms. Eldridge in?”
She answered his question with a question. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No, I don’t. I—”
Fear leaped in from nowhere. Fear of going on the same gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride he’d been on before to the same spirit-destroying destination. Fear of subjecting himself to all the same emotions, to the same heartache.
He just couldn’t do it to himself again. Coming here was a mistake.
“Never mind, I’ll come back when I have an appointment.” Turning abruptly on his heel, Walker started for the elevator.
“You could make one now.”
Her words reached him just as he was about to press for the elevator.
It was the same low, melodious voice he’d heard coming from the other side of his front door two days ago. The clairvoyant. He hadn’t seen her come out.
Somewhat embarrassed, like a child caught with his hand wedged into the forbidden cookie jar, Walker turned around to discover that Eliza was standing directly behind him.
He hadn’t realized she was so delicate looking. She seemed smaller somehow, more petite. Here, on her home territory, she appeared almost elfin. Or maybe it was just his imagination.
Weren’t elves the ones who were supposed to grant you wishes when you found them in their own lair? Or was he getting that confused with leprechauns? He wasn’t sure. Most of all, he wasn’t sure anymore just what he was doing here.
She’d felt his presence. Sitting in her office, poring over information that ultimately might or might not have to do with Bonnie’s disappearance, she’d suddenly become aware that something had changed. Walker was entering the building.
It would probably spook him if she told him that, she thought with a smile. It had taken her a long time to learn exactly what she could share with someone and what she needed to keep to herself, if she didn’t want them to think of her in the same belittling way her father had.
She’d ventured out of her office, curious to see if she was right, if she actually had sensed his presence, or if concentrating so hard on recovering Bonnie had made her think Walker had come. She’d certainly been hoping that he would. It would make things a great deal less difficult for her to do her job if she had access to Bonnie’s things.
Her job. That was what she’d decided it would be, even as she’d walked away from Walker’s closed front door. Her job. Her mission. To find Bonnie, no matter how long it took. She had to.
Eliza took his hand as if she were drawing out a reluctant child, encouraging him to join the others.
It surprised Walker how delicate her fingers felt against his skin.
It was her job to do that, he reminded himself, to distract him so she could take him where she wanted him to go. Because he’d been a hustler in the practical sense of the word all his life, hustling first for supporters, then for clients, for people to recognize his designs, and then finally for financial backing—he’d come to think of the rest of the world in those same terms. People hustling to convince others that they both needed and wanted the goods or services the other had to offer.
In this case, there was no question that he did. If the services were really legitimate.
That was the doubting Thomas in him, he thought. The practical side that had come by way of his engineer father. The man who had taught him to test twice before he trusted once.
He had yet to really “test” this Eliza Eldridge and her firm.
“You’re in luck—I’m in between cases,” Eliza informed him quietly, still holding his hand in hers.
She’d probably say that whether or not it was the truth. “Right, luck.”
He was still skeptical. Not that she blamed him. He really hadn’t witnessed anything that would make him change his mind. “Don’t underestimate luck, Mr. Banacek. It plays a large role in almost everything.”
His resistance to the whole ludicrous idea of someone being clairvoyant was beginning to strengthen. It was all he could do to keep the sarcasm bubbling within him to a simmer. He wasn’t usually rude, but this had brought out his vulnerability, and he was going to do everything he needed to in order to protect himself.
“So you do what, hand out rabbits’ feet to your clients or tell them to gather up a bouquet of four-leaf clovers, just to be on the safe side?”
She’d been subjected to a great deal worse and had long since learned that fear and ignorance colored the way people spoke. And Walker was afraid. Afraid to believe. Afraid to be disappointed. And afraid of finally, unequivocally, giving up.
If he had given up the way he thought he had, he wouldn’t have come.
“It’s not going to make you feel any better to be antagonistic, Mr. Banacek. I just meant that every decision we make has some effect on the way our individual timelines are formed.” She smiled into his eyes, trying to give him some of her faith. “A lot of good things have happened to people because they were in the right place at the right time.”
“And a lot of bad things have happened to people because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he countered.
There was nothing quite so daunting as when reason joined forces with pessimism, she thought. But she was up to the challenge.
“Still luck,” she replied. “Just this time, bad. Would you like to step into my office?”
He glanced toward the elevator. It would still be here later, he reasoned. He could always leave.
“Sure.” The shrug was careless. “I’m here, why not?”
Eliza smiled. “Why not, indeed?”
He sounded as if he hadn’t made the effort to get behind the wheel of his car and seek out ChildFinders. As if he’d just decided, on a lark, to drop by the offices. But she refrained from pointing that out as she led him down the hall to her office.
The office that she occupied had a view of the ocean, and in the evening, the sunset. Together, they made for a breathtaking scene—whenever she was in the office to witness it. She was comforted to know that the view was there whenever she was in desperate need of tranquillity.
Eliza paused by her door, waiting for Walker to step through.
“Opened or closed?” She indicated the door.
He was busy looking around. It looked like an ordinary office, much smaller than his. There was no incense; there were no candles, no voodoo masks, not even a cluster of books about out-of-body experiences by ghosts who roam the earth. Instead, the only books she had lined up on the single shelf that ran along the sill of her window concerned investigative techniques. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
Maybe he was a little of both. “I’m a private person.”
“Closed,” she concluded with a nod, shutting the door behind her.
Rounding her desk, she sat down behind it. She would rather have sat beside him, unencumbered by the desk, but she knew that he preferred the traditional. Besides, she knew she still made him uneasy. Gentling techniques took time.
Folding her hands before her, she smiled at him. “I take it I passed muster.”
“Excuse me?”
Maybe the term was too old-fashioned for him. It’d been one her great-aunt liked to use. “You’re here. That means you had me and or the agency investigated. I’m just assuming that our passing grade was impressive enough to you to bring you here.”
Walker shifted in his chair. More body language for her to read, he upbraided himself. He didn’t like being so easy to read. Moving to the edge of his chair, he locked eyes with her. “Do you do that sort of thing all the time?”
“Do what?” she asked.
“Read a person’s thoughts?”
Even as he asked the question, Walker didn’t know if he actually bought into that on any level. It seemed like a bunch of garbage.
But there was just something about her eyes, about the way she looked at him, into him, that made him think Eliza Eldridge could actually see his thoughts if she was so inclined.
Maybe he was losing his mind, he thought. Given the stress he’d been under—and was still under, if he was honest with himself—it was small wonder. Not every man lost his child and then his wife within a few months of each other.
“I can’t read a person’s thoughts, Mr. Banacek. Like everyone else, I read expressions, and, at times, I sense thoughts or emotions. Perhaps a little better than most people.” The smile she offered him somehow made her statement almost intimate. “But I don’t read minds, cards or the bumps on your head if you have any. That’s strictly carnival stuff. The business the people in this agency and I are in is a very serious one, and I for one can’t think of anything more worthwhile than recovering children wrongfully separated from their families.”
He believed her. As long as he looked into her eyes. Striving to hold on to reason, he looked somewhere else. “Very altruistic.”
Because he was in more pain than he would admit or perhaps even realized, she gave him a great deal of leeway and took no offense at his tone. She knew it was the skeptic in him.
“I’ll settle for noble.” It was time to get down to business. “So, you didn’t come to verbally go ten rounds with me, Mr. Banacek. You came because you weren’t so sure you didn’t believe me anymore.”
The smile came from nowhere. He wasn’t even conscious of it until he saw his reflection in the window behind her. “I thought you said you didn’t read minds.”
“I don’t.” He had a nice smile, she thought, but it didn’t reach his eyes. And wouldn’t, until he found his daughter. “I was doing my impression of Sherlock Holmes for you. I was deducing.”
“But you did have that dream about Bonnie.”
“I did have that dream about Bonnie,” she assured him with quiet intensity.
If he were someone else, listening to himself talk, he would call himself a fool. And yet, here he was, grasping at straws. “And in your dream, she was alive.”
“Very much so.” Reaching, Eliza placed her hand on top of his. “She is alive, I’m sure of it.”
He couldn’t believe he was actually asking questions like this. But he was a man who had come face-to-face with his desperation all over again.
“How often are these dreams—?” He stopped, trying to find the right word that wouldn’t make him look like some talisman-clutching fool. He was angry at himself for being here, for hoping. But he continued to do both.
“Accurate?” she supplied. She took a breath, wondering how to phrase this to his satisfaction. He hadn’t come here wanting to be convinced, he’d come here daring her to convince him. “There’s no easy answer for that.”
Double-talk. He might have known. Disgust filled him. “I thought so.”
“No,” she countered, raising her voice ever so slightly as he rose from his seat, “you didn’t.” He sat down again, his body language telling her that he was ready to walk out in a heartbeat unless she said something to convince him to remain—and said it soon. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come here, when doing so flies in the face of everything you hold logical. And to get back to your question, it isn’t easy to give you a straight answer because my dreams aren’t predictions. They’re things that somehow, on some level, I sense. At times, they’re other people’s pasts—at others, their futures.”
Belatedly he realized he was holding his breath, and released it. This wasn’t true, none of it. Why was he even listening to her?
Because he wanted her to convince him. Somehow, some way, he wanted her to make him believe there was some connection between her and his daughter. A connection that would lead him to Bonnie.
“Which was this?”
“The past. The recent past,” Eliza clarified. “Perhaps even the present.”
He could feel his patience wearing thin. “Can’t you give me a straight answer?”
She didn’t see the anger, she saw the anguish. “This isn’t a science. And even if it were, not even science always gives you a straight answer. Just a hypothesis that might or might not be proven, under the right set of conditions.”
He’d listened long enough. This time, he rose to his feet and remained there. “Look, if this is all going to be just mumbo jumbo, then I’m wasting my time and you’re wasting yours.”
As he began to turn away, she called after him in a strong, steady voice that was far more forceful than the one she’d just used. “Fact, I had the dream. Fact, the girl in the dream was your daughter. Fact, I heard her calling out to you.”
He turned to her. There was a dangerous look in his eyes, like that of a man who’d been asked to endure too much.
“To me? What did she say?”
She could still hear the voice in her head. “‘Daddy, where are you? Come find me. Please!”’
Damn her, she was playing on his emotions, nothing more. He was wrong to have allowed himself to be led by his feelings. He had to get out of here before he lost his temper completely—and before she found a way to sucker him into this.
He was certain she had no difficulty doing that with her marks. She had the look of breeding about her: genteel, but uncommonly attractive. With eyes that could see into a man’s soul. But no matter how she dressed herself up, no matter how lovely her features, she was still nothing more than a con artist. She’d probably gotten her training very young, learning how to use her assets to separate people from their money, and play on their hopes and fears.
But he wasn’t a player. Not anymore.
“All well and good.” He crossed to the door. “And when you have another dream—” he took hold of the doorknob, twisting it “—maybe you can—”
“There’s something else.”
He didn’t bother hiding his contempt. “I rather thought that there would be, but I’m not—”
She sensed this was important to him and said the words very slowly. “She had a bedraggled pink toe shoe with her.”
Walker’s mind went numb. And then anger washed over him. White, hot anger. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”
She tried not to take offense. “Nothing about kidnapping, or finding a kidnapped child, is a joke, Mr. Banacek.”
His anger had no direction; she was the only target available. “Stop calling me Mr. Banacek—you make me feel like this is a corporate meeting.”
“All right—Walker, then,” she allowed cautiously, watching his eyes.
He struggled to be reasonable. “How did you know about the toe shoe?”
In all the stories, the police had kept this one fact back, thinking somehow it might be a clue that would allow them to separate the truthful from the frauds who called in, looking for their fifteen minutes of fame.
“I saw it.”
He told himself not to believe. But no one knew about the shoes that had meant so much to Bonnie. “Saw it? Saw it where?”
“It was in the pocket of her overalls. She was wearing a pair of worn overalls that were too large for her. She kept the toe shoe in her pocket to make her feel better, careful to hide it from whomever it was who’d taken her.”
It took effort to keep the wave of emotion in check, to keep it from pounding down on him like a driving rain. Very quietly, he walked back to the chair he’d just vacated and sat down.
Gripping the arms of the chair, he tried to make himself relax, and succeeded only marginally.
“All right, Eliza, you have my attention.”
Chapter 4
There wasn’t much of the dream left to tell. She had given Walker the highlights.
What remained was a haze of feelings—oppressed, frightened feelings emanating from the little girl. It was that, more than anything else, that had sent her searching through the myriad faces on the Internet site.
But that was also something the man sitting on the other side of her desk didn’t need to hear right now. There was no reason to make him acutely aware that his daughter was afraid. It was a silent given; both knew it to be true, without having to exchange the actual words.
Eliza told him what she could, repeating the description of both the farmhouse and the land surrounding it. She gave him as accurate a picture of Bonnie as she could.
And when she was finished, Eliza could read the question in his eyes. He was afraid that Bonnie had forgotten him. It wasn’t uncommon for minds that young to mix reality with fantasy, fact with fiction, until the truth faded away into the misty past. Maybe Bonnie had begun to believe she’d dreamed about having another father, another mother, and had accepted the ones who had her now as her parents.
“She still remembers you,” Eliza told him softly. “Still won’t accept her situation.”
Like an arrow shot straight and true, her words hit his heart dead center. It was as if she’d read his mind. No matter what her claims to perception were, the reality of it startled him. Had she read his mind?
“Her situation,” he echoed. It was a euphemism that could mean anything, encompass anything. He needed everything spelled out so that somehow, some way, he could find a little bit of peace, grasp on to a little bit of hope. “Can you tell what her ‘situation’ is?”
She heard the quiet edge in his voice. The storm was coming.
“I don’t think they’re treating her badly.” At this point, she couldn’t tell him that with any certainty, and she refused to lie.
Walker’s temper erupted again. He was having less and less success keeping it in check. “How can they not be treating her badly? They kidnapped her.”
She wished there were some way to calm him. All she could do was tell him what she knew. “There’re many reasons people kidnap children. It’s not just for ransom, or for child pornography,” she added, reading the unspoken fear that had surfaced in his eyes. “Some children are abducted to fill a void left by either a child who died, or one who was never there to begin with.”
He shook his head. It was as if her words were bouncing off him, refusing to sink in. Emotionally frustrated, with no outlet, he felt himself becoming almost dull-witted. “Meaning?”
“People, women predominately, want a baby so badly, they’ll do anything to get one.” She spoke slowly, measuring out her words. Trying to reach him before he became lost in the place where he’d retreated. “When they can’t get pregnant either because of infertility or lack of opportunity, they become obsessed with having a baby. Some women have been known to go through all the stages of pregnancy, right up through the contractions involved in labor, when they’re not pregnant to begin with.”
He looked at her as if he thought she were making it up. He was a skeptic, through and through, Eliza thought, smiling. She’d encountered more than her share.
“The mind is a very powerful, underused tool. Any scientist will tell you that,” she added as she saw him open his mouth to protest. “Whoever took Bonnie wanted a child so badly, when they saw yours, everything just clicked into place. They had to have her. Desire, means and opportunity all came together for one split second, and they grabbed that second and ran.”
If he was to control his anger, he couldn’t think about that, about someone swooping down and snatching his little girl away.
“Which would explain why the ransom note never came.” He shook his head, remembering. “I was so certain she was taken for the money. I didn’t sleep for three days, waiting for the kidnapper to call. The phone rang off the hook,” Walker added bitterly, “but it was never the kidnapper. Half the time it was some reporter wanting to interview us. As if Bonnie being kidnapped was some kind of diversionary entertainment for the public to watch on the evening news.”
She understood where he was coming from. She’d had a few run-ins with insensitive reporters herself, though she’d found others to be tactful and caring, putting people above stories. “Being on the Fortune 500 list unfortunately makes you a target for all sorts of things. Invasion of your privacy included. It’s only natural that the first thing you think of is that your daughter was taken for the money. You might find this hard to believe, but in a way, it’s a good thing that she wasn’t.”
“A good thing? How could it possibly be ‘a good thing’?” he demanded angrily. “How can having your daughter kidnapped ever be a good thing?”
“Not the kidnapping itself,” she corrected gently. “I meant the fact she wasn’t taken for ransom.” She chose her words carefully, knowing that, his rugged appearance to the contrary, Walker Banacek was in a delicate state. “There are times, too many times, when the child is not returned in exchange for the ransom money. The money’s taken and the child is never seen again.”
He looked at her, stealing himself off from her words, his expression stoic. “Because they’ve been done away with.”
She accepted the euphemism, understanding Walker needed to use it in order to keep the horror at bay. “Because they’ve been done away with,” she echoed. “Whoever took Bonnie from that parking lot wanted to have a child to love. That will keep her safe.”
Usually, she added silently.
That was something else Walker didn’t need to be made aware of: the fact that there were no hard-and-fast rules to this, only generalities that formed patterns.
Eliza couldn’t help wondering how the man in her office would react if he knew she was acting as his protector, keeping things from him she sensed might be too devastating for him to deal with. Probably not well at all, despite the good intentions behind it, she concluded. Walker Banacek didn’t strike her as a man who took kindly to being kept in the dark.
“You said ‘they,”’ Walker began, then hesitated. He couldn’t believe he was asking this. Moreover, he couldn’t believe that he was actually ready to believe whatever her answer might be. But Eliza had somehow known about the toe shoes, and no one but the FBI had been given that piece of information. That did make her claim more credible.
“Did you see how many of them there were? In your dream?” he added, feeling foolish and agitated at the same time.
Eliza continued watching his expression, knowing that the answer she gave wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I didn’t see anyone else.”
He could feel his frustration beginning to build again. “But then, how do you know it’s not just a man or a woman involved?”
“I sensed them, their presence,” she clarified before he could say anything. “They were close by, looking for her.”
“Looking for her?” He didn’t understand. Part of him still felt this woman was just toying with him, seeing how far she could lead him down the garden path before he yelled, “Enough!” “Why? Where was she? Did she run away from them?”
Eliza shook her head. She knew how all this had to sound to him and she wished she could give him more concrete answers, but she wasn’t about to make up anything. One fabrication, one stretch of the truth, and any trust she might be able to build up in him would be irrevocably shattered.
“I’m not sure. Maybe she was just playing in the field and had gotten separated from them.”
It made sense, he supposed. But with the logic came a numbing realization. It felt as if something had died within him.
“Then it was someone else she was calling ‘Daddy,”’ he concluded bitterly.
“No—”
The firm note in her voice surprised him.
“It was you she was calling to.”
He couldn’t tell if Eliza was just saying what she knew he wanted to hear. “How could you tell?”
“I just knew,” she told him simply. “I could feel what she was feeling.”
He couldn’t allow himself to get strung out on false hopes. Though it cost him, Walker tried to approach this as logically as he could. “Couldn’t you have just gotten confused—dreamt about the actual search that went on at the time of her kidnapping?”
The background had been hazy, but not the feelings she’d experienced. “No, these were the people who had kidnapped her. They were looking for her. A man and a woman.”
“A man and a woman,” he repeated. All right, if he was buying into this, he was going to go all the way and pretend she was telling him something that was real. “What did they look like? Can you describe them?”
If it were only that easy. But at times, her gift just frustrated her, teasing her with pieces of a puzzle that refused to take its true shape. “I wish I could, but as I told you, I didn’t actually see them.”
“You didn’t actually ‘see’ her, either,” he said pointedly. The disdain in his voice was aimed more at himself than at her.
It was going to be a struggle for him to come around. But she already knew that. “Not in the sense you mean, no.”
He didn’t want to be patronized. His eyes narrowed. “Not in any sense.”
This wasn’t getting them anywhere. “If you want to help me find your daughter, Mr. Banacek, you’re going to have to stop challenging me at every turn, and accept some things on faith.”
He laughed shortly. “Faith is something that I find in very short supply right now. And it’s Walker, not Mr. Banacek,” he reminded her.
He realized that he’d snapped the last part at her, and took a breath to calm himself. He was coming at her like an angry timber wolf emerging from a gutted forest, and that wasn’t helping matters.
Walker tried again, his voice lower this time. “What did you mean just now, when you said if I wanted to help you find my daughter?”
She folded her hands before her, her gaze locking with his. She couldn’t make it any plainer than she had. “Just what I said.”
“What you said made it sound as if you intended to look for her whether or not I hired you.” That couldn’t be right.
To his surprise, she nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”
No one did something for nothing. There was always an angle being played. He’d learned that the hard way, and until he’d learned it, he’d never gotten ahead. “Why? Why would you do that?”
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