Janice Johnson - Making Her Way Home

If only were two of the ugliest words in the English language, especially when spoken by an adult who’d been negligent where a child was concerned. His slow burn was gathering force, ready to jump the fire line.

Not yet, he cautioned himself. People didn’t all react the same to fear or grief or any other strong emotion. He knew that. This woman might be holding herself together by the thinnest of threads. If he severed it and she got hysterical, he might not get answers.

“Your name?” he asked.

“What? Oh. Beth Greenway. Elizabeth.”

“And is your niece also a Greenway?”

“No. Her name is Sicily Marks.”

He processed that. “Sicily. Like the Italian island?”

“Yes.” She sounded impatient and he couldn’t blame her.

Somebody shouted down the beach and they all turned to look. A question was yelled down the line. Did Sicily have a blue-and-white-striped towel?

Beth shook her head. “We only brought one towel. It’s right here.”

Mike glanced down at the towel, folded neatly and apparently unused. It was a sea foam-green and more of a bath sheet than a beach towel.

But this woman wasn’t Sicily’s mother. No surprise that she had to improvise for an outing.

The ranger hurried away to talk to the people excited by the abandoned towel. Mike looked at Ms. Greenway.

“All right,” he said quietly. “Tell me what happened.”

He knew the basics of what she had to say and didn’t listen so much to the words as to her intonation, the way she paused over certain words and hurried over others. He hoped to see emotions and failed. She’d battened down the hatches with a ruthless hand. The only giveaway at all was the way she clutched herself, seemingly unaware that she was doing so.

“So then I talked to these teenagers.” She turned her head, looking for them. “They’re still here, helping search. They said they’d watch for her while I…”

As she spoke, he had the uncomfortable realization that anger wasn’t the only reason his belly was churning.

He was attracted to her. Extremely, inappropriately attracted.

Beth Greenway wasn’t a beautiful woman, exactly. She should have been too thin for his tastes, for one thing. The bones were startlingly prominent in her face, like a runway model. That was it exactly, he decided; her face was all cheekbones, eyes and lips. Those lips might be pouty and sultry in other circumstances, but were being held tightly together between sentences, as if she were thinning them deliberately.

Her hair was brown, but that was an inadequate description for a rich, deep color that was really made up of dozens of shades. Chin-length, it was straight and thick and expertly cut to curve behind her ears. Her eyes were brown, too, but lighter than her hair. Caramel, maybe, flecked with gold.

Fortunately, he was good at compartmentalizing. In the couple of minutes that passed while she talked, he’d assessed her appearance, decided his reaction to it was one hell of a stupid thing he could ignore and begun to question whether a single word coming out of her mouth was the truth.

“Will any of these folks looking for your niece be able to recognize her?” he asked.

She stared at him. Her eyes dilated at the instant she understood what he was really asking. Did any of these people ever actually see your niece?

“I…I don’t know.” It was the first time she’d faltered. She rotated 360 degrees, her eyes so wide and fixed he wondered if she would even recognize a familiar face. “There was a family sitting near us. They had four kids.” Her forehead creased briefly. “Or maybe a couple of the kids were friends. I don’t know. But they were all close enough to Sicily’s age, they latched right onto her. They were looking at tide pools when I—” her pause was infinitesimal “—fell asleep.”

Rage came close to choking him. Instead of sleeping, Ellen had been busy chatting with her friend; that had been her excuse. She thought Nate was napping. Well, yes, the sliding door was open but she could have sworn the screen door was closed and latched. “It was only for a few minutes,” she’d whispered. Then screamed, “That’s all! A few minutes!”

A few minutes was all it took.

Beth Greenway had brought her ten-year-old niece to a crowded public beach and then settled down for a nap, contentedly believing the kid was completely safe because she was playing with some other children.

“Did you talk to the parents?” he asked.

She shook her head. “We smiled.”

“You smiled.”

“My niece was studying crabs in a tide pool with their children. There was no need for me to interview the parents for suitability.”

Her voice and expression were marble cool. He kept waiting for her to shiver or something, but it wasn’t happening.

“But these people are gone.”

“Yes.”

He could see the first people from search-and-rescue arriving in the parking lot. He excused himself from Beth Greenway and went to talk to them about where to start. Nobody suggested that the beach had been adequately searched; these men and women knew as well as he did how easy it would be for an adult who’d raped and murdered a child to pretend to examine the spot where the body had been stowed. No one wanted to believe yet that this was anything other than a case in which a kid had thoughtlessly wandered away. Maybe she had gone for a hike with someone, maybe gotten lost, maybe gone to sulk and hide from the aunt if the two of them were fighting.

“I need to ask the aunt some more questions,” he said, and they proceeded to organize themselves.

When he returned, Beth had her back to him. Purposely, or was she truly engrossed in what the cluster of people way down the beach was doing? He looked to see if there was a flurry of activity, but there wasn’t.

“Ms. Greenway.”

Maybe she was hiding tears. But when she turned, her eyes were dry and curiously blank.

“Does your niece have a habit of wandering or hiding?”

“I don’t know.”

“What can you tell you me about her?” His voice had sharpened.

She blinked a couple of times. “Well…she’s a good student.”

“There’s not much to read down here.”

Her sharp chin was one of the features that kept her from true beauty. She lifted it now. “Was that meant to be sarcastic?”

“I apologize,” he said expressionlessly. “Tell me whatever occurs to you.”

“I think she does like science. That’s why I checked out the nature trail right away.”

“Can she swim?”

Both of them cast involuntary looks toward the choppy blue water of the Sound. Until now he’d been too preoccupied to notice the salty sea air and the faint scent of rot that was usual during a low tide.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Nobody swims here anyway, so the subject didn’t come up. She didn’t wear a bathing suit.”

“Ms. Greenway—” civility was becoming harder to maintain “—perhaps we should call Sicily’s parents.”

Those beautiful eyes met his. “She doesn’t have any. I have custody.”

Every instinct he had went on red alert. Did this kid even exist? This whole thing could be a hoax, an attention-grabber. Worse possibilities jumped to mind and if Sicily Marks didn’t materialize pretty damn quickly, he was going to have to take those possibilities seriously.

“Her mother died a month ago.” Ms. Greenway sounded stiff. “Sicily came to live with me then. We’re still feeling our way.”

He shoved his fingers through his hair and resisted the urge to give it a yank. Could this whole situation get any more unsettling?

“I take it you hadn’t spent much time with your niece.”

Was it possible the arms wrapping her had tightened? “My sister and I were estranged. I sent Sicily birthday cards and the like, but she tells me that Rachel—her mother—never gave them to her.”