Kelley Armstrong - Made to Be Broken

He'd said once that if I'd known him years ago, I'd have sooner shot him than talked to him. But talk we did, long nights in the woods behind the lodge. Admittedly I carried most of the conversation – Jack wasn't the chatty type – but he'd seemed to enjoy those visits, passing on tips and tricks to me, listening to me chatter about the lodge. He'd kept coming back, so it couldn't have been too painful.

I hadn't known how important those nights were to me until they stopped. With Jack, I had something I didn't get these days: an honest relationship. He knew who I was – both sides of my life. On the job last fall, I'd realized he'd even seen the parts I'd congratulated myself on keeping hidden. At this point in my life, no one knew me better than Jack.

Now, apparently, he'd decided he didn't care to know me at all.

And it hurt like I'd never imagined it could.

At the stroke of midnight, I was creeping around Janie's home. The back door was indeed open and, as expected, she was asleep on the couch. From the rough rise and fall of her chest, she was snoring loud enough to bring down the rotted rafters, but the sound was drowned out by the booming television. That was a problem.

One might think I'd appreciate loud noise to cover my own sounds, but I've learned to open doors, windows, drawers, even shuffle through papers in silence. If a house is quiet, I can work with confidence, knowing that a key in the front door lock or the creak of bedsprings will resonate like thunder, giving me time to clean up and clear out.

The blaring television meant I wouldn't hear Janie if she woke. I considered turning it off, but even if Janie somehow did wake and catch me, the only thing she could do was call the police, who hated her as much as they hated me. By the time an officer bothered to stop by, I'd be home in bed, having left not so much as a shoe print to support her story.

To be safe, I unplugged the old rotary phone. That'd give me a few extra minutes. Hell, she'd probably spend an hour pounding on the plunger before realizing it was disconnected.

I looked down at Janie. If I wanted information, my best source was lying right here, drunk and helpless. I fingered the gun under my jacket, and thought of how easy it would be to make Janie talk to me. Throw her onto the carpet, pin her down, let her sputter in a puddle of her own vomit for a few minutes, and she'd decide maybe she could spare the time to answer my questions after all.

Don Riley would love to have me up on an assault charge, but not if it meant dealing with Janie. And he'd be setting the word of the town drunk against that of a hardworking member of the business community.

I could put Janie Ernst into a six-foot hole and most people would say exactly the same thing she'd said about Sammi's disappearance: good riddance. In the end, that's why I didn't do it. If I asked Janie about her daughter and granddaughter, and saw that sneer of hers again, heard her say she didn't give a damn what had happened to them, as long as they didn't come back, I'm not sure I could stop with a beating.

I found Sammi's bedroom. Not exactly a feat of brilliant deduction when there were two bedrooms and only one held a crib. Sammi's room was half the size of her mother's with a twin bed pushed against the wall, crates stacked for storage, a crib, and nothing more. The walls were covered with what might once have been rose-dotted wallpaper, but now was a dingy yellow backdrop with pinkish-brown splotches.

The only decorations were pages ripped from parenting magazines – checklists for infant development, tips on breast-feeding, ads for baby gear. I imagined Sammi in here, ripping down all the signs of her teenage years and putting up all these symbols of motherhood, then surveying the results, not with regret but with satisfaction, the knowledge that she was recentering her world in a worthy direction.

I found their clothing in two crates, one for Sammi and one for Destiny. Having seen them wear the same outfits several times a week, I knew they hadn't owned much, and it all seemed to be there.

There was very little else to search. No diary, no journal. There were no novels or textbooks in which she might have hidden a letter. As Tess said, Sammi was barely literate. The only books I found were a baby memory book, a dog-eared copy of What to Expect the First Year, and a few back issues of parenting magazines with the local doctor's name on the mailing label.

Under the bed was an empty cigarette carton stuffed with photographs of Sammi, Tess, and Kira growing up. Under the pictures lay Destiny's hospital bracelet. Sammi's treasures. Her friends and her baby. That was all she had, all she cared about. If she had run away, would she have left these things behind?

I flashed my light around the rest of the room. A baby carrier and folded playpen were stacked in the corner, both things that could be replaced once Sammi resettled. Wait. I shone the light back at the carrier. It doubled as a car seat, and fit on top of the stroller.

Sammi always walked to the lodge with the stroller and the car seat attached, in case the weather turned ugly and she needed a lift home. One gorgeous cloud-free day, she'd decided to leave the seat at home. Then, just before she was to leave work, it started pouring. I'd offered her a lift, saying she could hold Destiny on her lap and I'd drive slow. She'd freaked. Her baby did not travel in a car without a proper infant seat. She'd sat in the lodge for two hours until the weather cleared enough for her to walk.

So now, when Sammi had supposedly run off and stolen a car or met someone, she'd taken Destiny in the stroller without the car-seat attachment? Never. When Sammi left for her walk that evening, she'd been planning to come home.

By 3 a.m. I was on the 401 heading toward Toronto and, ultimately, Buffalo. I figured I could make it back before lunch, so I'd call Emma around eight and claim I'd zipped out early to get the ATV parts Owen needed from Peterborough. All of our guests were leaving in the morning, meaning there were no activities scheduled and no one had signed up for the morning jog.

I had a long night of driving ahead, but if I went home, I'd only lie awake waiting for morning so I could resume the hunt for Sammi. Since I had no idea where to resume that hunt, I might as well spend the time driving and thinking, while accomplishing another task.

Evelyn was right. I had to look Jack in the eye and hear him tell me that he wasn't coming around anymore. A reason would be even better, but probably too much to hope for.

My first thought on arriving at the Blue Sky motel was that Janie Ernst would feel right at home. The sign was the only thing visible from the highway, probably hoping to lure in tired travelers who'd round the bend into the driveway, see the building, and be unable to muster up the energy to escape. I parked between two cars so rusted that I opened my door with extreme caution, afraid a bump would reduce them to a pile of scrap metal. For the first time in years, I locked my old pickup's doors.

I tried to find a front walk, gave up, and cut across the grass. The motel was long and squat. Robin's-egg-blue paint peeled from the stucco… in the places where the stucco was still affixed to the backboard. I stayed on the grass, to avoid walking under the eaves. Portions were held on with duct tape; the remainder crackled in the wind, threatening to fall. In the distance I could see the shiny new sign by the highway, promising "clean, affordable rooms," the vacancy sign blinking with a note of desperation.

No doubt the Blue Sky qualified as affordable, though Jack could afford better – much better. At his tier, he was probably pulling in a hundred grand a hit, tax free, with no dependents and no bad habits to spend it on. His tastes were utilitarian. Working class, Evelyn sniffed. But it meant he had money – lots of it, I was sure – and while the Hilton really wasn't his style, this was well below it. Still, this was the kind of place where you could plunk down cash for a week and no one would ask for a name, much less ID, which was likely its chief attraction.