Page 3 of Entranced
“He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.”
Mel had made the mile from her office to the Merrick home in record time. The police had already been there. Stan and Rose had been clutched together on the sofa like two lost souls in a choppy sea. Both of them crying.
David was gone. Snatched off his playpen mat as he napped in the shade on the little patch of grass just outside the rear door of their first-floor apartment.
Now two months had passed, and the playpen was still empty.
Everything Mel had learned, everything she’d been trained to do and her instincts had taught her, hadn’t helped get David back.
Now Rose wanted to try something else, something so absurd that Mel would have laughed—if not for thehard glint of determination in Rose’s usually soft eyes. Rose didn’t care what Stan said, what the police said, what Mel said. She would try anything, anything, to get her child back.
Even if that meant going to a psychic.
***
As they swept down the coast to Big Sur in Mel’s cranky, primer-coated MG, she took one last shot at talking sense to Rose.
“Rose …”
“There’s no use trying to talk me out of this.” Though Rose’s voice was low, there was steel in it that had only surfaced over the last two months. “Stan’s already tried.”
“That’s because we both care about you. Neither one of us wants to see you hurt by another dead end.”
She was only twenty-three, but Rose felt as old as the sea that spread out beneath them. As old as the sea, and as hard as the rocks jutting out from cliffs beside them. “Hurt? Nothing can come close to hurting me now. I know you care, Mel, and I know it’s asking a lot for you to go with me today …”
“It’s not—”
“It is.” Rose’s eyes, always so bright and cheery before, were shadowed with a grief and a fear that never ended. “I know you think it’s nonsense, and maybe it’s even insulting, since you’re doing all you can do to find David. But I have to try. I have to try just anything.”
Mel kept her silence for a moment, because it shamed her to realize that shewasinsulted. She was trained, she was a professional, and here they were cruising down the coast to see some witch doctor.
But she wasn’t the one who had lost a child. She wasn’t the one who had to face that empty crib day after day.
“We’re going to find David, Rose.” Mel took her hand off the rattling gearshift long enough to squeeze Rose’s chilled fingers. “I swear it.”
Instead of answering, Rose merely nodded and turned her head to stare out over the dizzying cliffs. If they didn’t find her baby, and find him soon, it would be all too easy just to step out over one of those cliffs and let go of the world.
***
He knew they were coming. It had nothing to do with power. He’d taken the phone call from the shaky-voiced, pleading woman himself. And he was still cursing himself for it. Wasn’t that why he had an unlisted number? Wasn’t that why he had one of those handy machines to answer his calls whenever anyone dug deep enough to unearth that unlisted number?
But he’d answered that call. Because he’d felt he had to. Known he had to. So he knew they were coming, and he’d braced himself to refuse whatever they would ask of him.
Damn it, he was tired. He’d barely gotten back to his home, to his life, after three grueling weeks in Chicago helping the police track down what the press had so cleverly dubbed the South Side Slicer.
And he’d seen things, things he hoped he’d never see again.
Sebastian moved to the window, the wide window that looked out over a rolling expanse of lawn, a colorful rockery, and then a dizzying spill of cliffs dropping down to the deep sea.
He liked the drama of the view, that dangerous drop, the churning water, even the ribbon of road that sliced through the stone to prove man’s wiliness, his determination to move on.
Most of all, he liked the distance, the distance that provided him relief from those who would intrude, not only on his space, but also on his thoughts.
But someone had bridged that distance, had already intruded, and he was still wondering what it meant.
He’d had a dream the night before, a dream that he’d been standing here, just here. But there had been a woman on the other side of the glass—a woman he wanted very badly.
But he’d been so tired, so used up, that he hadn’t gathered up the force to focus his concentration. Andshe’d faded away.
