Нора Робертс - Hideaway

“What did they say? Are they going to let her go? Are we getting the money?”

“He wants the money by midnight tomorrow. He won’t say where yet. He’ll call again. Dad and Nan are arranging it. He says when he gets the money, he’ll tell us where we’ll find Cate.”

“We’re getting her back, Aidan.” She wrapped around him, rocked. “And then we’re never letting her go again. When she’s safe, with us again, home again, we’re never coming back to this house.”

“Charlotte—”

“No! We’re never coming back to this house where this could happen. I want Nina fired. I want her gone.” She pulled back, eyes filled with tears and fury. “I’ve been lying here, sick, scared, picturing my daughter trapped somewhere, crying for me. Nina? At best she was negligent, but at worst? She could be part of this, Hugh.”

“Oh, Charlotte, Nina loves Cate. Listen now, listen. We think it must be one of the catering or event staff, or someone who got through posing as one of them. They had to have a car or truck or van to get her away. They had to have it planned out.”

Tears sheened over the arctic blue of Charlotte’s eyes, spilled down her pale cheeks. “It could’ve been someone in the family, a friend. She’d have gone with someone she knew.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“I don’t care about that.” Charlotte brushed it away. “I only want her back. I don’t care about anything else.”

“It’s important we find out who and how. If we contacted the police—”

“No. No. No! Is the money more important to you than Caitlyn, than our baby?”

He’d forgive her for that, he told himself. She looked ravaged, looked ill, so he’d forgive her for that eventually.

“You know better. I don’t give a damn how upset you are, don’t you say such a thing to me.”

“Then stop talking to me about police when calling them could get her killed! I want my baby home, I want her safe. She’s not safe here. She’s not safe with Nina.”

Heading toward hysterical again—he recognized the signs. He couldn’t find it in him to blame her.

“All right, Charlotte, we’ll talk about all this later.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right, but I’m terrified, Hugh. I’m letting myself get wound up again because I can’t stand thinking about our baby, alone and afraid. Oh God, Aidan.” She dropped her head on his shoulder. “Where is our baby?”

CHAPTER THREE

Running, until she couldn’t run any more, until she had to sit on the ground, shivering, shaking. She’d tripped a couple of times when the trees blocked out the moonlight and now her hands bled a little, and she’d torn her jeans. Her knee hurt, and her ankle, her elbow, but she couldn’t stop too long.

She couldn’t see the lights anymore from wherever she’d been, and that was good. How could they find her when they couldn’t see her?

The bad? She didn’t know where she was. It was so dark, and she was so cold.

She heard coyotes off and on, and other things that rustled. She tried not to think about bears or wildcats. She didn’t think she was high enough in the hills for that—Grandpa told her they lived higher, and stayed away from people—but she didn’t know.

She’d never been in the woods, alone in the dark before.

All she knew, for certain, was that she had to keep going in the same direction. Away. But she wasn’t even sure of that because at first she’d been so scared she hadn’t paid attention.

Instead of running, now she walked. She could hear better when her own breath wasn’t whistling in her ears. She could hear if someone—or something—came after her.

Tired, so tired, she wanted to curl up and sleep. But something might eat her if she did. Or worse, she thought, worse, she might wake up back in that room.

Where they’d break her fingers and shoot her.

Her stomach hurt from hunger, and her throat clicked from thirst. When her teeth chattered, she didn’t know if it was from fear or cold.

Maybe she could sleep, just for a little while. She could climb a tree, sleep in the branches. It was so hard to think when she was so tired, so cold.

She stopped, leaned against a tree, laid her cheek on the bark. If she climbed a tree, slept, maybe when the sun came up, she could see where she was. She knew the sun came up in the east, knew the ocean was west. So if she saw the ocean, she’d know …

What? She still wouldn’t know where she was because she didn’t know where she’d been.

And they could find her when the sun came up.

She trudged on, head drooping with fatigue, feet shuffling as she just couldn’t lift them anymore.

Half dreaming, she walked. And smiled a little at a sound. Then shook herself awake, listened.

Was that the ocean? She thought, maybe … And something else.

She rubbed her tired eyes, stared ahead. A light. She saw a light. She kept her eyes on it, walked on.

The ocean, she thought again, getting louder, closer. What if she missed a step and fell over a cliff? But the light, it was closer, too.

The trees opened up. She saw a field in the moonlight. Wide and grassy. And … cows. The light, well beyond the edge of the woods, the edge of the field, came from a house.

She nearly walked into the barbed wire that kept the cows inside.

She cut herself a little getting through it, ripped her new sweater. She remembered from making the movie in Ireland that cows grew a lot bigger for real than they looked in books or from a distance.

She stepped in cow poop, and said “Gak,” with a ten-year-old girl’s disgust. From there, after swiping her sneaker on the grass, she tried to watch her step.

A house, she saw now, that faced the ocean, with decks up and down, with a light through the lower windows. Barns and stuff that meant ranch.

She navigated the barbed wire again—more successfully.

She saw a truck, a car, smelled manure and animals.

After stumbling again, she started to run toward the house. Someone to help, someone who’d take her home. Then stopped herself.

They could be bad people, too. How could she know? Maybe they were even friends with the people who locked her in the room. She needed to be careful.

It had to be late, so they’d be asleep. She only had to get inside, find a phone, and call nine-one-one. Then she could hide until the police came.

She crept toward the house, onto the wide porch in front. Though she expected to find it locked, she tried the front door, nearly dropped with relief when the knob turned.

She eased inside.

The lamp in the window burned low, but it burned. She could see a big room, furniture, a big fireplace, stairs leading up.

She didn’t see a phone, so she walked back toward a kitchen with green things growing in red pots on a wide windowsill, a table with four chairs, and a bowl of fruit.

She grabbed an apple, shining green, bit in. As it crunched between her teeth, as juice hit her tongue, her throat, she knew she’d never tasted anything so good. She saw the handset on the counter beside a toaster.

Then she heard footsteps.

Because the kitchen offered no place to hide, she rushed into the dining room open to it. Clutching the apple, more juice dribbling down her hand, she squeezed herself into a dark corner beside a bulky buffet.

When the kitchen lights flashed on, she tried to make herself smaller.

She caught a glimpse of him as he walked straight to the refrigerator. A boy, not a man, though he looked older than she, taller. He had a shaggy mop of dark blond hair, and wore only boxers.

If she hadn’t been so terrified, the sight of a mostly naked boy who wasn’t a cousin would have mortified and fascinated her.

He was pretty skinny, she noted, as he grabbed a drumstick out of the fridge, gnawed it while dragging out a jug—not like a store carton—of milk.