Wednesday's Child Read online

  Richard was dead. He had been dead for seven years, making a lie of all the times she had told herself that no matter what else he might be guilty of, Richard had genuinely loved Emma. Loved her enough to give up his life for her. The thought that, no matter what happened, he would take care of their baby was all that had kept her sane.

  Now she knew that wherever Emma was, there was no one of her own to look after her. And there had been no one during all those long years she had prayed and longed for her daughter.

  WHEN SUSAN MET Sheriff Adams the following day, she realized immediately that he was older than she had pictured him during their conversation. She estimated now that he must be in his mid or maybe even late forties.

  His face bore the perpetual tan of someone who virtually lived outdoors, however, so her guess could be off by several years. His skin’s darkness was unrelieved except for the pale green eyes and the delicate web of small white lines radiating from their corners. Even now, despite the bright sunshine of the October afternoon, he wore neither hat nor sunglasses.

  His features were angular, matching the rangy body. The slight paunch around his midsection gave additional evidence for her estimate of his age, although he wore his fading blond hair longer than she would have expected from the sheriff of such a rural community. Or maybe that was because it was still the style here rather than any attempt to appear younger.

  As soon as she’d arrived in Linton, he had taken her in his squad car out to the site where the SUV had been found. The old two-lane bridge across the narrow river stood side by side with a wood-and-metal railroad trestle.

  According to the sheriff, it had been a train derailment that had led to the discovery of Richard’s body. During their efforts to recover the railcars that had gone into the river, the salvage company had stumbled across the submerged SUV.

  “Gave that crew a shock, I can tell you.” His eyes were focused on the cranes, still parked on the riverbank below. Since it was Friday afternoon, they were idle.

  “And they’re the ones who pulled the car out?”

  “Thought it was a junker. Some folks just as soon roll ’em into the river or push ’em over a ravine as take ’em to the junkyard. You know how people are.”

  Apparently realizing how far off the subject of her husband’s death that had taken him, the sheriff turned from his contemplation of the equipment to look at her.

  “Sorry. That ain’t got nothing to do with why we’re here.”

  “And that’s when they discovered his body?” she asked, ignoring his attempted apology.

  “They called the office, and we notified the coroner.”

  “And no one found any evidence Emma had been in the car?”

  “Nothing but that infant seat. Like I told you, there was no second body, Ms. Chandler.”

  Almost without her conscious volition Susan’s eyes returned to the slowly moving water below. There were questions she didn’t want to ask right now because she was afraid of the answers. Since Adams’s phone call, she had managed to regain control of the emotions that had momentarily escaped the long restraint she’d forced on them. She didn’t want to do anything that might put that fragile containment into jeopardy.

  “Were the windows rolled up when the car was found?”

  “All I can tell you is they were when I got here. The driver’s-side door was open, however.”

  The men would have had to open it to find the body, she supposed, but the information made her wonder if Richard might have tried to get out. He was a good swimmer, and the current didn’t look strong enough to keep him from reaching shore. Unless he’d been too badly injured to try.

  “But was it open when they pulled it out of the river?”

  Adams’s mouth pursed slightly as if he were thinking about that. After a moment he shook his head.

  “Don’t know. Have to confess I didn’t ask. We all knew what had happened. If you live around these parts, you know all about this place. More cars than I can count have missed that turn in the dark. No guardrail. Nothing to keep you from driving right off into the river if you misjudge the entrance. State ain’t gonna do nothing about it since they built the new bridge up on 84. Now this road don’t get enough traffic to make fixing this worth their while. It could even have been raining that night. Slick pavement. Poor visibility. Your husband a drinker?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A lot of folks who miss that turn have had a few too many, if you know what I mean.”

  “Richard didn’t drink. Not to excess.”

  How confident she sounded. Almost smug. And how ironic that was coming from a woman who’d had no idea her husband was planning to disappear, taking everything they owned with him. Everything including their daughter.

  “The current doesn’t look very powerful.” She was still thinking about the terrible possibilities of that opened door.

  The sheriff’s lips pursed again as he looked over the water. “Can be. Depends on the rain upriver. And if you’re out in the middle of the channel, it runs a lot faster. Could have been what happened that night.”

  “I’m sorry?” She turned, her eyes questioning as they focused on his weathered face.

  “If the door was open, I mean. Maybe the current just took her out of his hands.”

  Emma. He means Emma, she realized, sickness stirring the pit of her stomach.

  But if Emma had been in the car when it had gone off the bridge, she knew Richard well enough to know Emma would have been strapped into her seat. Open door or not, there was no way the current could have washed her out of those restraints.

  “She would have been strapped in.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Maybe when your husband realized what was happening, he tried to get her out. Maybe he had her free and the current just took her—”

  “No,” Susan said.

  The single syllable was loud in the afternoon stillness. The scenario he had just suggested wasn’t an idea she was willing to entertain. Not yet.

  Adams had already admitted that he didn’t know if the door had been open when the car was pulled from the water. And if it had been, then why hadn’t Richard, an experienced swimmer, gotten out of the car and swum to safety.

  Because he was trying to locate his baby in that dark, rushing water? Struggling to unfasten straps he couldn’t see? Trying desperately to get them both to safety?

  “I didn’t mean to upset you, Ms. Chandler. I’ll be glad to find out about the doors and the windows. Did you ever think that maybe your husband left your daughter in the care of a relative or some friends? Maybe she wasn’t with him at all when he come down here.”

  Did you ever think…

  There was literally no one she hadn’t questioned about that possibility. No relative or mutual acquaintance that she had been aware of—and some she hadn’t been aware of until after Richard’s disappearance—that she hadn’t asked about Emma. And about Richard, of course.

  None of them had professed any knowledge of their whereabouts. And despite her desperate need for information, there had not been one of them she’d doubted. Now she knew they’d been telling the truth. Richard had contacted no one in the weeks after his disappearance because he had been here, hidden by the waters of this narrow, marshy river.

  “When will they be back?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The people those belong to.” She tilted her chin toward the cranes on the bank below. “Will they be back out here on Monday?”

  “I’m not sure what their schedule is. I can call the main office of Southern Georgia first thing Monday morning. See if I can talk to the men who were here that day. I’ll let you know what they say as soon as I find out. You do understand that nobody had any idea at the time that we ought to be looking for your daughter.”

  There should have been a cross-reference to Emma in the national database of missing persons the sheriff had searched for Richard’s name. Apparently that had been another bureaucratic screwup. There had
been plenty of those.

  Emma had always been listed as an abducted child. Susan had been advised that was the best way to draw attention to her case. Not that she had ever been able to tell it had made any difference. After all, Emma was with her father. And Susan, unaware at that time of how the system worked, had admitted that Richard had no history of mistreating their daughter.

  That was the truth, of course, as well as what had kept her sane through the years. But it had lowered the urgency with which the various agencies had responded to her pleas for help.

  “I’d like to talk to those men myself, if you don’t mind,” she said, thinking of all the other “comforting” platitudes she’d listened to during those first few months.

  There was too much at stake to trust that another set of law enforcement officials would do everything in their power to find her baby. She was no longer as naive as she had once been.

  She had been given another chance to find Emma. A chance to right all the things she had done wrong seven years ago.

  “In all honesty, ma’am, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Adams said. “First place, it’s bound to be upsetting. And those men might not tell you everything they’d be willing to say to somebody who’s not as…emotionally involved in this.”

  “Is there a motel nearby?” she asked, ignoring his advice.

  That was something else she had done the first time. Listened to all the people who were supposed to know the best thing to do. And look where it had gotten her.

  “A motel?”

  She couldn’t remember seeing any near the exit to Linton. It seemed there had been only miles and miles of trees along both sides of the interstate, their leaves just beginning to be tinged with color from the fall nights.

  “Somewhere I can stay while I’m in town.”

  The green eyes widened in surprise, exposing the network of lines at their corners. “Plenty of motels in Pascagoula.”

  Which was more than sixty miles away. Despite the fact that most of the distance was state highway and interstate, she didn’t want to make that commute every day. And until she found out what had happened to Emma…

  “I mean here. Somewhere I can stay in Linton.”

  Somewhere close enough that she could talk to anyone who might have encountered Richard—and please, dear God, encountered Emma—while they were here.

  “No motels around here. We had a hotel at one time, but—” The sheriff stopped abruptly, his lips still slightly parted.

  “What is it?”

  “I was gonna say that the hotel closed due to lack of business once the state highway opened up, but then I remembered Miz Lorena’s.”

  “Miz Lorena?” The title the sheriff had used was the old-fashioned Southern one that had nothing to do with women’s rights and a great deal to do with age and respect.

  “Miz Lorena Bedford. Got a big ole house a few miles outside the city limits. Tried to make it into one of those bed-and-breakfast places, aiming to get the Yankees heading to the Gulf and the casinos. Once that stretch of the four-lane opened, there wasn’t enough traffic on the Linton cutoff for her to make a go of it. Same thing that happened to the hotel. That’s what made me think of her place.”

  “And you think she might rent me a room?”

  The sheriff shrugged, looking back down on the river. “Got no idea how she’d take to the idea, but she’s got the space and the bathrooms. Had ’em put in special for all those guests that didn’t show up. It’s worth a try. I can tell you how to get out there. You tell Miz Lorena what you’re here for, and I doubt she’s gonna turn you down.”

  Susan nodded, taking a last look at the sluggish current below. She wasn’t going to leave Linton until she had some answers. Maybe that determination was simply a recognition that this place represented her last chance of finding Emma, but in her heart—the one that had been frozen for the last seven years—there was again a delicate flame of hope.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DESPITE THE SHERIFF’S repeated reference to Lorena Bedford’s “big ole house,” Susan’s first sight of it through the trees was a shock. Classic Greek Revival in style, its graceful columns soared from the porch to the roof of the second story. The structure was situated at the end of a long, unpaved driveway, bordered by two perfectly spaced rows of oaks, strands of picturesque Spanish moss hanging from their low branches.

  She slowed the car as she made the turn onto the property. The rays of the dying sun touched the white paint with gold and shimmered off the glass of the front windows. The house looked like some Hollywood producer’s fantasy of the antebellum South.

  As she approached, reality was less kind. There were areas of flecked paint on the Doric columns, and the side veranda was devoid of furniture. The foundation plantings were neatly trimmed, however, and the grass, although not closely mown, was still, despite the season, thick and green.

  The driveway circled around a garden, which had been planted directly in front of the steps leading up to the front door. A few of the small old-fashioned roses that comprised most of it were, surprisingly, still in bloom.

  She pulled her car parallel to the steps and shut off the engine. Before she got out, she sat a moment in the twilight stillness. The murmur of insects could be heard from the surrounding woods. There were no other sounds. No traffic out on the two-lane she’d followed here. Not even the small-town noises she’d been aware of in the hours she’d spent in Linton.

  She opened her door, stepping out again into the heat and humidity. She had discarded the jacket to her navy linen suit before she and Adams had gone down to the river. She thought about retrieving it from the back seat and then decided the temperature should preclude any such attempt at formality.

  She brushed her hands over the wrinkles on the front of her skirt, deciding that, too, was a lost cause. Miz Lorena would just have to take her—or leave her—as she was.

  Her keys still in the ignition, she walked around the front of the car and climbed the steps. Her heels echoed as she crossed the wooden boards of the porch.

  The front door was open, probably as a concession to the late-afternoon heat. She tapped on the molding of the screen door, the sound echoing down the inside hallway she could see only dimly. She waited, politely looking at the roses beyond her car rather than watching for someone to answer her knock.

  After a few moments without any response, she turned back to the door. She could hear no movement from inside the house. She cupped the outside of her hand against the screen, peering in under her arched palm.

  Was it possible no one was home, despite the open door? Of course, the screen might be latched. Maybe this far out of town that was considered protection enough against intruders. She touched its frame, pulling the door toward her just enough to determine that it wasn’t fastened.

  She let the screen slip back into place and again tapped on its molding. Although she tried to apply more force than before, the resulting sound didn’t seem appreciably louder.

  This time she watched the hallway as she waited. Again there was no response.

  She should have phoned before she drove out. The sheriff hadn’t suggested that, and, as he apparently had, she’d assumed the old woman would be home.

  Despite the fact that the hotel in town had closed, she had noticed a café on the square. She could drive back into Linton, look up the Bedford number and place a call from there. Actually, she would probably be wise to have dinner in town, she realized. Even if Miz Lorena agreed to rent her a room, the sheriff hadn’t said she would also be willing to provide meals.

  Decision made, Susan crossed the porch and descended the front steps. Her hand had already closed around the handle to the car door when a creak announced the opening of the screen.

  Her eyes were drawn back to the porch. Since her arrival the daylight had faded enough that, under the overhang of the second-floor balcony, the area was now as dark as the interior hallway had been. She could see a figure in the open doorway, but
little else.

  “Mrs. Bedford?”

  “She’s not here.” The voice was masculine, its accent not local, and its tone decidedly unwelcoming.

  “Could you tell me when she’ll be back?”

  The pause after her question stretched far past politeness. So much for Southern hospitality.

  “That depends on who wants to know.”

  Susan controlled a spurt of anger at the man’s rudeness, acknowledging most of that was due to emotional exhaustion rather than his treatment of her request. After all, she’d shown up here without so much as a phone call asking permission.

  Mrs. Bedford’s house was no longer a commercial establishment. It was someone’s home. And she needed a favor from the owner. Whoever this was, he might be able to exert some influence in that direction.

  “My name is Susan Chandler.” She tried to make her voice as pleasant as possible, considering the circumstances. As she talked, she walked back around the front of the car and headed toward the steps. “I had hoped Mrs. Bedford might rent me a room for a few days. I’m aware she’s no longer in business—”

  “Then why ask to rent a room?”

  He had apparently turned on a light in the front of the house as he’d come to the door. His body was silhouetted against its glow, wide shoulders almost filling the frame.

  Looking up at him from the foot of the steps, Susan’s impression was that he was also taller than average. In spite of the width of his shoulders, his torso narrowed to a lean waist and slim hips. She could still see nothing of his face.

  “Because Sheriff Adams suggested I ask her. It’s…”

  She let the sentence trail. She might have been willing to try and explain her compulsion to stay in town to another woman, but something about this man’s attitude made her doubt he would sympathize with anything she might say.

  “It’s what?”

  “Are you a relative of Mrs. Bedford’s? Or…”

  A guest? The yardman? As she tried to settle on a second option, he made the process unnecessary.

  “You seem to have a proclivity for unfinished sentences.”