Flashback Page 7

  “That’s when they took a shot at you.”

  “Two, actually. Underwood knocked me down after the first. Maybe saved my life. I hit my head on something as I fell.” She touched the place again and then deliberately lowered her hand.

  It reminded her of what might have been. She had literally felt the bullet go by. Whoever fired it hadn’t been trying to frighten her.

  “You need to get that looked at?” Dean asked.

  “It’s fine.”

  “I can do this on my own, Chief.”

  “I know. I just think it might go better if I’m with you.”

  They didn’t talk again during the fifteen minutes or so it took to reach the turnoff, each lost in his or her own thoughts. And too many of hers revolved around the man who’d rescued her from her own naïveté.

  “Hit the light bar,” she ordered, as they turned down the road leading to the Wells’ home place. “Let him know who we are.”

  Dean obeyed, the flashing strobes adding a touch of surrealism to the festoons of moss that decorated the trees. As they approached the rear of the vehicle they’d come to impound, Jake Underwood stepped out of the shadows in front of them, the rifle he’d carried earlier still expertly cradled in his hands.

  Dean slammed on the brakes, stopping the car with only inches to spare. The tall, militarily erect figure before them didn’t waver, despite that near miss.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Dean breathed.

  More a prayer than a profanity, Eden decided, amused despite herself. She opened the door and stepped out.

  “I’m going to send somebody out to pick that up,” she indicated the truck behind him, “and take it into town.”

  “You might want to take a look at what’s in the bed.” Jake still hadn’t moved.

  The words, or perhaps the tone in which they’d been spoken, chilled her. A dozen possible scenarios involving “what’s in the bed” raced through her mind.

  Not Raine, she prayed, rejecting the worst of them. Dear God, don’t let it be Raine.

  If there was a child in the car—even a child’s body, she realized belatedly—Jake Underwood would never have told her to take a look. That kind of sadistic behavior didn’t fit the characterization of the man that was building in her head.

  She walked toward the truck, reaching for the latch of the tailgate. Dean’s command stopped her.

  “Don’t touch anything until we’ve had a chance to print it.”

  “You can see it from here.” Jake moved beside her, shining the flashlight she hadn’t been aware he carried into the bed.

  It took a moment to identify what she was looking at. Some kind of wadded-up fabric. Her brain registered details automatically, even as she attempted to make sense of why Jake had thought this was important.

  Tiny pink-and-white checks, like a child’s sundress. Except it wasn’t a dress. It was…

  A gingham quilt, she realized. In the glare of the light Jake held, the stitches that crisscrossed the material were discernible.

  “I didn’t remember this from any of the news stories,” Jake said. “I thought maybe it was something your department was withholding from the public. Something to help discriminate between someone who has real information…”

  The sentence trailed as Eden stepped away from the truck. She swallowed the bile that had climbed into her throat. On some level she was aware that Dean had moved around her to peer into the bed.

  “What the hell?” he breathed softly.

  “I thought maybe that belonged to the Nolan girl.” Jake’s voice had lost its certainty.

  “Not that we’re aware of. Did Margo mention a blanket like that to you, Chief?”

  Eden shook her head, fighting the urge to shiver, despite the humid blanket of Gulf Coast heat that surrounded them. “It’s a quilt.”

  “Quilt. Whatever. Did the Nolans mention something like that was missing?”

  Eden knew the silence following her deputy chief’s question stretched too long, but she couldn’t seem to formulate an answer that made sense. None of this made sense.

  You’re being ridiculous. Snap out of it and start acting like the person who’s in charge of finding a missing child. A child who went missing four days ago.

  “They never indicated that any kind of bedding was taken,” she managed.

  She forced her gaze up and found that, although Dean was still focused on the quilt, Jake was watching her. She opened her mouth, trying to pull in enough of the thick air to fight the light-headedness that threatened to take her down.

  “We’ll bag it and take it over to Margo in the morning. See if she can identify it,” Dean said. “In the confusion, maybe they didn’t even realize it was gone.”

  Eden nodded, still aware of the intensity of Jake’s scrutiny. This time—thankfully—he didn’t ask if she was all right. Nor did he mouth any of the platitudes people usually use to someone who appears on the verge of fainting. The gray eyes simply held on her face, as if offering a strength she desperately needed.

  “Eden?” Dean asked, pulling her gaze back to him. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Maybe she had. The now-ghostly memory of another little girl who had gone missing more than twenty years ago. Taken from her bed. Taken from the same room where her sister slept.

  The kidnapper of that child had wrapped her in a pink-and-white gingham quilt. One her grandmother had made for her by hand.

  And then no one had ever seen her again.

  Chapter Eight

  “Are you sure, Margo? Kids have so much stuff these days. Maybe it was something somebody gave her…” Eden knew she was pressing too hard, but she had tried to convince herself through most of the night that this had nothing to do with her sister’s disappearance. The surest way to do that would be to connect the quilt to the Nolans.

  “I don’t remember ever seeing that before. Raine’s favorite color is purple. Everything we bought the past few years has been some shade of that. You want me to ask Storm? She’s the one who likes pink.”

  Other than the brief questioning the MBI had insisted on, Eden had tried to protect the Nolans’ other daughter from any kind of interrogation. Perhaps Storm was a witness to what had happened that night, but the child had insisted to the agents that she’d been asleep when her sister was taken.

  “I don’t want to cause her any more distress than she’s already endured,” Eden said.

  “Either she recognizes this or not. If she does…” Margo’s voice broke. “If she does,” she began again, “we need to know. If she doesn’t, and I don’t think she will, then there’s not gonna be any kind of emotional reaction to it. Right?”

  Eden hesitated, remembering the hours of interrogation the police in Ohio had put her through. Asking the same things over and over again. As if they believed that, if she only tried a little harder, she might suddenly think of something that would help find her sister.

  But Margo was right. They needed to know. And if Storm was the best source for this information…

  “I think you’re probably right,” she conceded.

  “Then I’ll go get her.” Margo rose, handing Eden the quilt on her way out of the room.

  Slightly soiled from the bed of Lincoln Greene’s truck, the fabric had been carefully bagged by the department’s evidence technician. As Eden placed it across her knees, her eyes fell to the stitches.

  They were small and far too regular to be handmade, even by a quilter as skilled as her grandmother. The technician had verified her impression that this was not only machine-made, but relatively new. The eerie similarity to the one her grandmother had sewn so long ago was apparently a bizarre coincidence.

  “You go on now,” Margo said from the doorway. She urged her daughter forward with her hands on her shoulders. “The chief wants to see if you recognize what’s in the bag.”

  The little girl walked forward until she was standing at Eden’s knee. She smelled of sunshine and baby shampoo, the
sweet, clean fragrances of childhood.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a quilt. I just wondered if it belonged to you or to Raine.”

  The blond head moved side to side, but the blue eyes didn’t lift from the bag. “It’s dirty.”

  “I know. You think Raine had a quilt like this?”

  “Raine doesn’t like pink all that much. Everybody knows that.”

  “I didn’t. Maybe somebody else who didn’t know gave this to her.”

  The child raised her eyes, seeming surprised by Eden’s comment. “She likes lavender best. Only sometimes, she calls it lilac. Like the flower.”

  “And you’ve never seen this before.”

  “We don’t have dirty stuff. Do we, Mama?”

  “Look at it, Storm. It’s important. You ever seen that before?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Okay.” Margo’s eyes met Eden’s, her brows raised in question.

  Eden nodded.

  “You go on back upstairs and play,” Margo directed. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

  “Maybe he gave it to her.” The little girl’s comment had been directed to Eden rather than her mother.

  “He?” she asked softly.

  “Whoever took her. Maybe he gave it to her to make her feel safe.”

  “Safe?” Margo’s question was full of the same horror Eden felt. “What in the world do you mean, Storm?”

  “Like a lovey. Something for her to hold on to. Maybe he gave it to her so she wouldn’t be afraid of having to sleep away from home.”

  WHEN EDEN GOT back to the station, she found Dean had also returned. She tossed the bagged quilt onto her desk and then poured a cup of coffee from the pot that was always kept full.

  “The Nolans recognize it?”

  “Margo said it wasn’t theirs. She suggested the sister look at it. Storm said she’d never seen it before. Then she said…” For some reason Eden’s throat tightened, but she forced the words out. “She said maybe the kidnapper gave it to Raine to make her feel safe when she had to sleep away from home.” She raised her gaze to watch the impact of that on her deputy.

  “Good Lord almighty. Where’d she get that idea?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just because we were asking if it belonged to Raine. I guess I need to tell the agents what she said. What’d the Greenes say about it?”

  “No quilt in the truck. Never has been. Lincoln was sure it wasn’t there when he parked it last night. He stopped to pick up some stuff at Winn-Dixie, and he put the groceries in the bed. Said he would have noticed something like that if it had been there then.”

  Eden nodded, her eyes on the evidence bag. “What do you think?”

  “May not have a thing to do with the kidnapping. May just belong to whoever took the truck.”

  “Why bring it along?”

  “Hell, Eden, I don’t know. None of this makes sense. Why did they go out to Underwood’s in the first place? Why did they take a shot at you? It’s all crazy.”

  “They find any prints in the truck?”

  “Wiped clean as a whistle. Steering wheel. Dash. Door handles.”

  “That ought to make Lincoln feel better.”

  “How so?”

  “He wouldn’t take the trouble to wipe down his own truck and then leave it out there. That makes no sense, either.”

  Winton stuck his head into her opened door. “Major Underwood’s out front. He wants to see you.”

  Eden met Dean’s eyes. He shrugged and began to rise from the chair he’d been sprawled in when she’d arrived.

  “Stay,” she told him. And then to Winton, “He say what he wants to see me about?”

  “Nope. Want me to ask?”

  “Not really. Send him on back.”

  “Maybe he’s here to file a complaint against the trespasser last night,” Dean said, when the younger deputy disappeared. “Make it official.”

  “Of course.”

  Eden was relieved to have such a logical explanation. One she should have thought of herself. Instead, the only thing that had come to mind when Winton said Jake wanted to see her was that he’d had another flashback.

  In her more rational moments, she was able to dismiss those as the result of whatever injury Jake had suffered, combined with the incessant media coverage of the kidnapping. As the search had grown more desperate and the pressure had built, however, Jake Underwood’s “visions” had become almost the only thing standing between her and total despair.

  The thought that he might come to tell her that Raine Nolan was no longer haunting his flashbacks was something she’d been dreading almost as much as someone calling to say they’d found the child’s body. Almost as much.

  “He’s moved her.”

  Eden looked up to find Jake standing in the door to her office. His shoulders filled the frame, the muscles of his chest stretching the navy T-shirt he wore. She had time to acknowledge both before his words registered.

  “Moved her?”

  “She isn’t in the dugout anymore.” He shook his head, the movement clearly indicating puzzlement. “I don’t know how to describe where she is. It’s still dark. Damp. But it doesn’t appear to be underground. Or at least not in the ground.”

  “You had another flashback.”

  Jake’s eyes briefly considered Dean, but he didn’t respond to his stating the obvious. He looked back at Eden instead.

  “Maybe concrete. It didn’t last long enough for me to be certain. That’s nothing more than an impression, but I know the roots weren’t there. And it wasn’t dirt.”

  “Okay. Anything else?” Despite the surge of relief she’d felt at Jake’s description, Eden worked at keeping her responses neutral. Dean didn’t place any faith in what Underwood claimed to see. And as far as he knew, neither did she.

  “She didn’t seem as scared.”

  “Because he’d moved her?” Dean asked. “You think she was more afraid of the other place?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is the level of fear didn’t seem as strong.”

  “That’s good to hear. Thanks for coming to tell us.” Too patronizing, Eden realized belatedly. As if she was making fun of what he’d just said.

  When Jake looked back at her, there was a furrow between his dark brows. “You asked me to let you know.”

  She had. She just hadn’t admitted to Dean that she’d done that.

  “Was this…” she hesitated, knowing she needed to choose her words carefully. “The flashback. Was that last night or this morning?”

  “Sometime before dawn.”

  “You sure you weren’t dreaming?” Dean asked.

  “I didn’t get all that much sleep last night.”

  The image of Jake appearing before them out of the darkness, that rifle cradled in his hands, was suddenly in Eden’s head. He’d probably kept watch at his place all night.

  On patrol. Like the soldier he’d once been.

  She realized then that she had gone off the deep end with this. Giving credence to the visions of a man who’d been physically and emotionally damaged by his experiences in combat.

  Maybe the townspeople were right. Maybe Jake had passed that lie-detector test because he was no longer able to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

  Making sure this investigation did exactly that was her job. Not chasing ghosts from Jake Underwood’s past.

  Or from her own.

  “We’re setting up new grids for our teams this morning,” she said, to ease the tension that seemed to have sprung up between the three of them. “We’re also going to re-cover some of the territory that we searched during the first twenty-four hours. The possibility existed from the beginning that Raine would be moved. Maybe he’s taken her to a place he thinks is safe because it’s already been searched.”

  “I’d like to help,” Jake said. “Something may seem familiar.”

  Because he’d seen it in his
flashback. Could this conversation become any more insane?

  “Given what happened last night,” Dean said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Folks were pretty riled up when they heard what you’re claiming.”

  Again Jake looked at the older man. “Claiming?”

  “The only people who believe in visions around here are the Pentecostals. And they don’t see dead children in theirs.”

  “Dean,” Eden warned.

  “Missing children,” he amended. “No matter what we believe about what you’ve told us—or about you, for that matter—it’s what the people who were out at your place last night believe that you need to be worried about.”

  Although Eden could see only Jake’s profile, she was aware of the slow upward lift at the corner of his mouth.

  “I think I can manage to deal with them and help with the search. Chief Reddick?” His eyes returned to her, clearly waiting for permission.

  “I know you want to help. And I commend you for that. Frankly, I don’t have the officers to spearhead the search teams and protect you. You’d be taking away resources that can be better utilized elsewhere.”

  “I’m not asking for protection.” There was amusement in his voice this time.

  “No, but if the anger directed at you that was expressed to this department yesterday flares up again, I’ll have to provide it. To you. Or to whoever believes they need to take some action because they think you had something to do with Raine’s disappearance.”

  The silence lasted long enough to be uncomfortable. When Jake finally broke it, his voice was controlled, but no longer amused. “I don’t want to make your job harder. Good luck with your search.”

  He nodded to Dean before he went back through the doorway. They listened again to his limping footsteps down the tiled hallway and then to Winton’s goodbye.

  When the outer door closed behind him, Dean laughed. “You had me going there for a minute, Chief.”

  “About what?”

  “Thinking you were taking all that vision stuff seriously.”