Patrick smiled wryly. “Actually, leaving the house seems to have worn me out. I think I’ll just go to bed.” He climbed the staircase to the second floor, and as he started along the corridor to the master suite, steeled himself against everything he was about to see. But when he finally passed through the door into the small sitting room and saw the portrait of Renee that had hung over the fireplace since the day they were married, his resolution nearly failed him. Then he determinedly tore his eyes from the portrait, went through to the bedroom itself, stripped off his clothes, and slid between clean, fresh sheets. The soft bed, after months of sleeping on the library sofa, felt delicious.
But the feeling was short-lived, as all the memories of his wife and children rose out of the darkness, and he felt once again the overwhelming urge to reach out to them, to take them in his arms, to protect them.
But he hadn’t protected them. Instead, he’d failed them, and as long as he lived, that failure — and their faces — would haunt him.
He sat up and switched on a light to clear the darkness and the memories from the room, and as the images of his family faded, the words Claire had spoken over dinner echoed in his mind.
There are groups you could join, Patrick — groups of people who’ve gone through what you’re going through.
But who else had lost everyone they loved on Christmas Eve?
As the pain of his loss threatened to overwhelm him once more, he picked up the remote control and turned on the television.
And was instantly confronted with the face of the girl whose image had dominated this morning’s front page of the newspaper.
Kara Marshall’s daughter.
Lindsay — that was her name.
Patrick clicked off the television, but the image of Lindsay Marshall — who looked so much like Jenna — lingered.
The silence grew almost as massive as the house itself, and Patrick found himself straining to hear the little cry that Jenna used to utter when a bad dream had awakened her in the night.
It was a cry so soft that it rarely woke Renee, but it had always pulled him from sleep instantly.
Except on Christmas Eve…
And then he heard it! He heard Jenna!
In an instant Patrick was out of bed, out of the suite and rushing down the hall to Jenna’s room. Was it possible? Would he open her bedroom door and see her face puffed with sleep and surrounded by tousled hair?
But when he pushed open the door, the bedroom was dark and cold and its emptiness chilled him even more than the cold itself.
He turned on the light. It was exactly as Jenna had left it when they went to Vermont for the holidays.
Her bed was covered with stuffed animals, her walls with posters.
Her schoolbooks were stacked on her desk as if she might pick them up tomorrow morning.
The sound of her voice had, indeed, been nothing but a dream.
Patrick sank down onto her bed and ran his hand over her quilt.
The pain in his chest felt as if it might actually burst through his ribs, and with a strangled cry, he grabbed an armful of her stuffed animals and hugged them to him.
He curled up on Jenna’s bed then, aching for one more hug from his little girl. Just one more hug.
Just one more good-night kiss.
But it was not to be.
It was never to be again.
At last Patrick released his grip on his daughter’s toys, uncoiled his body from the tight ball into which he’d curled up, and forced himself to stand.
This could not go on. Claire was right — somehow he had to learn to deal with what had happened, to accept that his family was gone and get on with his life.
But how?
Leaving Jenna’s room, he went back to his own suite. As his eyes swept the room — and the door to the bedroom beyond — he knew that he could not sleep here tonight.
As long as the rooms were filled with Renee’s things, the memories would only return to haunt him once again.
He went downstairs to the bathroom off the library and opened the medicine cabinet, picking up the bottle of sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed three months ago. He shook two of the tiny tablets into his hand, washed them down his throat with a glass of water, and made a mental note to ask Neville to begin removing Renee’s things from the master suite tomorrow morning.
Then he switched off the bathroom light, made his way through the darkness to the hard sofa, and lay down.
He’d try his own bed again another night.
And in the hall outside the library, Neville Cavanaugh waited for his employer’s breathing to fall into the even rhythms of sleep…
Chapter Twenty-two
The sharp pain of Kara’s nails digging into the flesh of his upper arm jerked Steve out of the semistupor to which he’d finally succumbed after forty-eight nearly sleepless hours, but it still took a moment or two before his mind — and his vision — cleared enough for him to recognize the image on the television at the foot of the bed.
Lindsay’s face, smiling at him.
Her junior class photo.
“… search continues for missing seventeen-year-old Lindsay Marshall today,” the anchorwoman was saying. “She was last seen Sunday afternoon about four-thirty, walking home from Camden Green High. Lindsay is five feet six inches tall, one hundred twenty pounds, blond, with blue eyes, and her hair is shorter than in this picture. If you have any information regarding Lindsay’s whereabouts, we urge you to call the Camden Green police department or this station.” Two phone numbers were now superimposed over Lindsay’s photo, then her photograph was replaced with the face of the anchorwoman, flanked by the sportscaster and the weatherman, all three of them wearing the kind of empathetic expressions Steve had never seen anywhere but on TV. They clucked with sympathy for a moment, but their expressions shifted quickly back to bland smiles and the anchorwoman began speaking again. “On a national level—” Kara turned away from the television. “That wasn’t enough,” she said. “They had more! They had me telling them what happened, and they had…” Steve barely heard her, the memory of Lindsay’s face on the television screen still filling his mind. Somehow that image made the whole surreal experience all too crushingly real, and her absence from the house came crashing down on him like a blow from a sledgehammer.
Lindsay was not at camp.
She was not spending a few nights with Dawn’s family.
She had not gone out of town to a cheerleading competition.
None of those occurrences had ever made the house feel as empty of her presence as it felt now, for before, he always knew where his daughter was and when she’d be home.
But this time was different.
This time they didn’t know what had happened.
Had she left with a boyfriend — a boyfriend he knew nothing about — in a fit of pique?
Had she run away to spite him and her mother?
He didn’t know.
All he knew was that she was gone, and that he’d never felt so helpless.
“They should have shown videos of her,” Kara was saying, her voice taking on the edge of hysteria that Steve had grown all too familiar with over the last two days. “I gave them video footage from our trip to Disney World. And what about the reward? They should have said we’ve posted a reward!” She picked up the phone from the bedside table, pulled a phone book from the nightstand drawer and dialed, her fingers jabbing furiously at the buttons. Steve turned down the volume on the TV as she began to speak.
“This is Kara Marshall,” she said, her voice quavering. “I want to speak to someone at the news desk.” He watched as Kara drew dark arrows pointing to the telephone number in the book. “Hello?” she finally said after nearly two full minutes had gone by. “This is Kara Marshall. You just ran a short — really short — piece about my daughter who has been abducted? Yes, well, it was too short. I gave your people all kinds of pictures, and they talked to me on camera, and we’re offering a reward—” Abruptly, she fell silent, listening, and a moment later her shoulders sagged. “Yes, all right,” she said, her voice cold now. “I understand. Okay. I’ll call back in the morning.” She hung up the phone and set it back on the nightstand.