don’t think that increases the likelihood that she didn’t hesitate to take off without consulting you?”
“No.” Ms. Greenway bit the word off. “No, I don’t. She’s not like that. I did think about it when I couldn’t find her, because she does do things without asking, but not like this. She’s too sensible. Sicily is everything Rachel wasn’t. She looks ten, but inside she’s more like a thirty-year-old who has been on her own for years. She’s not impulsive. Today I was pleasantly surprised that she was willing to join the other kids. I thought of it as her playing with them, but she doesn’t. I don’t think she knows how to play.”
He digested her burst of speech. Her voice had risen toward the end, a hint of passion or even outrage infusing it. For a minute there, she’d almost seemed like a real person. Some pink showed in her cheeks. He’d have liked her the better for it, if he’d totally believed in it.
“Okay. Do you have a phone with you?”
“Yes.” Her head turned. “In my bag.”
“Does Sicily know the number?”
“Of course she does.”
“She’d call it instead of your landline?”
“I don’t have a landline. This is the only way to reach me outside of work.”
“And you’d have heard it ring.”
“I… Oh, God. Not while I was hunting for her.” She dropped the blanket and scrabbled in her purple tote, retrieving a cell phone. After pushing a button, she exhaled. “Nobody has called.”
“Make sure you keep it close now.”
Her look said, Do you think I’m stupid?
The answer was no. He knew she wasn’t stupid. She was something else, but he didn’t know what. Unfeeling? Nuts enough to have made up this entire story? Cold-blooded enough to have killed the kid she didn’t want dumped on her and come to the beach with the intention of claiming the girl had disappeared? He didn’t want to believe that, but couldn’t be sure. There was something off about this woman.
What he couldn’t understand was why pity wanted to take the place of his suspicion.
Frowning, he rose to his feet, looking down at her. She gazed up at him, still fighting to hold on to her composure, but unless he was imagining things some cracks were appearing. Through them, he could see anguish.
Maybe pity wasn’t so unreasonable. If Beth Greenway wasn’t truly unfeeling, if she wasn’t crazy or cold-blooded, then she was damaged in some other way. She had to be. He’d seen people under stress act in a lot of different ways, but never like this, as though nothing in the world scared her more than showing what she felt.
He grunted, turned around and walked away from her. Who was he kidding? The chances were really good that she had something to do with her niece’s disappearance. Sure she knew how to put up a front. That’s what people with something to hide did.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DAY WAS INTERMINABLE. BETH began to doubt her ability to hold in all the terrible emotions moving inside her, but she had to. Every time she felt herself slipping, she dug her fingernails into her flesh wherever she could reach and concentrated on the pain. When she hurt, she could empty herself. She hadn’t had to do it in a long time.
I will not feel.
But she did. Today, most of all, most horrifyingly, she felt helpless. Being always and entirely in control was as basic to her as breathing. She planned everything. Everything.
Except she hadn’t foreseen the consequences of her sister’s death. She might have if she hadn’t been so certain Rachel hated her.
Rachel had hated her. Of course she had. In the end, though, she hated their parents more. Beth should have realized that.
From the moment Sicily came home with her, Beth had battled panic. There was a reason she’d never shared her life with anyone else. And a child…she knew nothing about children. She couldn’t even bear messes at home. She knew she was obsessive, but that’s how she survived. How was she supposed to juggle another person’s needs with her already full schedule and her need for order?
The irony was that in the past week she had begun to relax. Her niece was quiet, organized and trying very hard to fit in. Too hard. Beth could see that, and it made her feel guilty because a kid should be confident she could belong without changing herself. But she could also tell that Sicily was skilled at going unnoticed, which meant she’d worked at it. That caused Beth to feel a rare flash of fury—what kind of men did Rachel keep around, that her daughter had to learn to be invisible? Or had Rachel herself been abusive?
But that, of course, led to more guilt, because Beth could have tried harder to have a relationship with Sicily—Rachel might have given in—and she hadn’t.
Still, even with all the turmoil, they were working out a routine and she was finding her ten-year-old niece unexpectedly easy to live with.
Now this.
Swept by a maelstrom of terror and guilt and that overwhelming sense of herself as small and useless and unable to do anything at all to impact the outcome, she drove her fingernails into the inner flesh of her upper arms.
I will not feel.
It didn’t help at all.
Her initial gratitude to that cop—Detective Mike Ryan—slowly changed to resentment and eventually anger and something even more bitter over the course of the afternoon. It was like food left out, spoiling until it would have sickened anyone who took a bite. She kept thinking there wasn’t a single thing left he could ask her, that he’d go away and leave her alone, but he never went for long. The crunch of footsteps on the pebbles would herald his return. Sometimes she refused to look up until he was right in front of her. Other times she couldn’t help but turn her head to watch him stride toward her. It was hope, she tried to tell herself, that made her look at him. He was going to say they’d found Sicily—she’d taken one of the nature trails and sprained her ankle, or gotten lost exploring in the woods, or… Beth couldn’t think of any other explanations that were innocent, that meant Sicily would be returned to her now, today, safe and sound.
Those small, irresistible spurts of hope might have been part of why she couldn’t help but look at the detective, but they were only part. He stirred something in her. Something dangerous.
It wasn’t that he was a gorgeous man. He had a rough-cut face and hair not quite light-colored enough to be called blond. No talent scout would have grabbed him to be a GQ model. He did have nice broad shoulders and an athletic build and the walk of a man able to get where he wanted to go with speed and no deviation from the path. With that body, he probably would have worn beautifully cut suits well—if he didn’t shed the suit coat, roll up the shirtsleeves, tug loose the tie, scuff the shoes and get the whole ensemble wrinkled.
When he’d hunkered down next to her, Beth had found herself staring at the powerful muscles in his thighs outlined by the fabric of his slacks. He likely ran, or something like that, to keep in shape. People in law enforcement were supposed to stay fit, weren’t they? She doubted he did anything like lift weights to increase muscle definition—his haircut looked barbershop
