Marie Ferrarella - A Hero In Her Eyes

About to push away from the computer to take a breather, thinking she might need some distance before she continued the search, something compelled her to look at the next photograph on file.

Eliza’s mouth fell open.

Afraid to blink, to look away, she pressed a key to zoom in. “There you are.”

She had no idea why she was surprised—not when the feeling came, the one that led her to places she would never have thought of going. The feeling that went hand in hand with being clairvoyant. That forced her into people’s faces with bravado when she would much rather have retreated.

Her body at attention, Eliza moved her chair closer to the monitor. “So, hello,” she whispered to the little girl in the photograph. The little girl in her dream. “I’ve been looking for you.”

The moment she’d clicked on the file, seen the small, animated face, a sliver of the dream flashed through her mind’s eye, confirming the identification.

If she concentrated very intently, Eliza could almost swear she heard someone calling for the child. Bonnie.

An eagerness swept over Eliza, erasing her tiredness, erasing everything but the desire to find this child in real life, just the way she had on the Web site.

Quickly she printed out the page with the information. She needed to contact the family.

“Hang on, Bonnie,” she murmured. “We’ll find you.”

He’d discovered that grief, like the possessions scattered within a child’s room, could be boxed up and put out of sight. But unlike the boxes that held his daughter’s clothes and toys, the box that his grief was stored in would periodically appear right before him, without warning, tripping him. Bringing a pain with it that was almost insurmountable.

But he dealt with it.

He had no choice.

He’d made his peace and moved on, not once but twice. Moved on and kept moving. Moving so the box wouldn’t trip him. Moving so that he could pretend he was among the living instead of the walking wounded. Or worse, the walking dead.

And in moving, he went through the motions of living. Those who knew him were taken in by the facade, the performance, and believed Walker Banacek to be a man who had healed from profound wounds that would have felled a lesser person. He had survived his tragedies and found the strength to continue. There was nothing more admirable than that.

It wasn’t even remotely true, but he pretended, for his own sanity, that it was. It was how he got through each day and forced himself to get up each morning. All pretense.

In place of a family life, he dedicated himself to his work. The irony of it never failed to strike him. He dealt with security. Computer security. He’d developed software that kept computers and sensitive information safe—while the security of his family had been breached.

He was the first one in the corporate offices in the morning, the last one to leave at night. Weekends would find him there, as well, working so he wouldn’t have to think, wouldn’t have to feel. He anesthetized himself, and for the most part it worked.

Until he tripped over the box again. Always without warning.

Today had been just that kind of day. He’d tripped over the box, releasing a plethora of memories, of emotions, none of which he was capable of dealing with. Tripped, because today his daughter would have been six years old.

Someone in the office down the hall had been celebrating a birthday. An off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday” was all that was necessary; the thoughts had hooked up to one another instantly, bringing him back to the emotional abyss he’d struggled, time and again, to flee.

Worn from the inside out, Walker made it home, entering the house where lights went on automatically at sundown so that he didn’t have to contend with shadows. So that his mind wouldn’t play tricks on him and make him believe he was seeing an elfin, dancing figure out of the corner of his eye.

Bonnie used to love to dance around the room, pretending to be a ballerina. He’d bought her toe shoes for her fourth birthday, over his wife’s protests. Bonnie had worn them everywhere in place of her shoes. She’d had them on the day she disappeared.

The thought of dinner came and went in a single heartbeat. He wasn’t hungry. He never was anymore. Eating was just something he did to keep going. He vaguely remembered having lunch, and decided that would be sufficient to sustain him until breakfast tomorrow. If he remembered to eat then. A housekeeper came daily, to wipe away the cobwebs and prepare simple meals that were hardly touched. Life went on, in a way.

Walker debated turning on the television set, not because there was anything he wanted to watch, but because the sound of it might interfere with this overwhelming loneliness tripping over the box had triggered.

He didn’t like being alone, but in all this time, he couldn’t make himself allow anyone in to witness the pain he was grappling with.

Riffling through the mail on the counter that the housekeeper had brought in earlier in the day, he heard the doorbell. Ignoring it, he sorted the mail into two piles. Everything that wasn’t a bill went into the pile to be thrown away.

The doorbell rang again. And then again, defying his determination to ignore it. He stopped sorting. Whoever was on the other side of his door obviously refused to accept the obvious—that he wasn’t about to answer.

The ringing continued at one-minute intervals. They weren’t going to go away. There was a time when he would have flown to the door at the first indication of a knock, picked up the phone before the first ring was completed, praying each time that it was someone with news that Bonnie had been found.

But each time, it wasn’t.

Instead, there’d been a bevy of reporters, a squadron of ghouls calling with “sightings” of his daughter, all feeding off the situation. He’d gone on countless emotional roller-coaster rides, only to be disappointed over and over again. Until he’d shut himself off completely, knowing that the call, the knock he was waiting for, would never come.

Expecting no one, angry at being invaded, Walker crossed to the front door. He yanked it open and fairly growled out the single word.

“Yes?”

Startled, Eliza almost took a step back from the man in the doorway. It wasn’t his expression that had her temporarily thinking of retreat, or even the way he’d snapped out the word in something far less than an actual greeting. Rather, it was the aura of pain she felt hovering around him that had unsettled her. Pain so vividly present, she felt she could literally reach out and touch it with her hand.

He was a man who had suffered a great deal, and her heart went out to him. He had Bonnie’s eyes, she thought, looking at him.

“Mr. Banacek?”

“Yes?” This time, the word came out a little more civilized sounding, though it was by no means intended to be friendly.

He wanted to be left alone. Alone to repackage the box and find some way to store it away again. It was hard enough to find a place for himself tonight without having to deal with some wispy dark-blond stranger who looked as if the wind had literally blown her to his doorstep.

“My name is Eliza Eldridge. I’d like to speak to you about Bonnie.”

His jaw tightened so rigidly, had it been made out of glass, Eliza was certain it would have shattered.

“What about her?”

“I believe she’s still alive.” In her entire experience, she’d never found an easy way to say this. “I’ve had this dream about her—”

His eyes darkened to the color of a storm. The next moment, he’d slammed the door shut in her face.

The ringing began again, more insistent than the last time.