know. All we can guess is somewhere between midnight and four-fifteen this morning when she called.”
“Thanks, Del.” He moved around the officer and strode toward the door.
Maggie might be his brother’s widow, but she’d been Joe’s woman first. Until he’d gone to Iraq. He didn’t regret the time he’d served for his country, but he did regret the time he’d been away. He’d never thought Maggie would marry Paul.
But why wouldn’t she? Joe hadn’t made any promises—he’d actually told her they had no future and not to wait for him.
Standing in desert BDUs with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, he’d fought his desire to take her into his arms as her face paled and her eyes pooled with tears. Had he really expected her to wait around for his return from the dangers of war? He’d been a bastard and gotten what he deserved when he came home to find Maggie married.
Too tired to think or to allow old memories to clutter his head, he sighed and turned toward the door. A state policeman was unrolling yellow crime scene tape around the yard to cordon off Maggie’s house from curious neighbors.
A cameraman from the satellite station out at the casino was already panning the scene. Joe bypassed the man and headed for the door.
“Hey, Joe,” Del called out. “Sorry about your nephew.”
Joe nodded briefly, his gut clenching the closer he got to the door. He hadn’t seen Maggie since his stepbrother’s funeral. But she’d called him. Fear for her child must have made her desperate. Joe knew she’d rather call anyone but him after how he’d treated her over a year ago.
Brown grass crunched beneath his feet, brittle from the subzero nights. A few tenacious leaves clung to the ash tree in the front yard, soon to be whipped away by forty-mile-an-hour winter winds. He tried to focus on the insignificant details, instead of on his imminent meeting with the woman he’d spent the better part of a year trying to forget.
Had she married Paul out of revenge?
No. Maggie wasn’t the vengeful type. Then, had she always been in love with Paul? Joe felt his chest contract. Had their night of passion been nothing but lust, just as he’d told her?
The letter from Leotie two months after his deployment to Iraq said it all. Maggie and Paul had gotten married not long after Joe’d left. She said they were happy, in love and expecting a baby.
The news hit him like a mortar to his belly.
As he’d walked night patrols in the desert, he’d wondered what Maggie would have done if he’d asked her to wait for him. Would she have married Paul anyway?
He’d been certain Maggie had no place on the reservation or in his Indian way of life. Just as he’d made a promise to his mother to watch out for his stepbrother, he’d made another promise to his father to raise his sons to know the Lakota ways. Maggie would not fit in with that promise. She was white, he was Indian. Their two worlds could not converge—or so he’d thought a lifetime ago, before he’d gone to war.
Now he was here for Dakota. The little boy with the face of an angel. With dark auburn hair curling around his head, he was the image of his mother. It hurt Joe to look at him. The child perched in his mother’s arms at Paul’s funeral, staring with wide, brown eyes at the gathering of people. Oblivious to the seriousness of the occasion, he hadn’t understood the finality of his father’s death.
Joe told himself the boy was his primary reason for standing in front of the little clapboard house, not his mother.
Maggie appeared in the doorway as if conjured from his deepest thoughts. Her pale skin was almost translucent, the light dusting of freckles even seeming faded. Yet, despite her red-rimmed eyes, she was every bit as beautiful as the first time he’d seen her in the tribal youth center. She’d stood out like a flame amidst the dark-haired, dark-skinned teenagers she was shooting hoops with.
Standing with her hands drooping at her sides, the agony in her gaze pierced Joe’s soul in a way he hadn’t expected, and his arms ached to hold her and soothe away the fear and anguish.
Then he remembered how quickly she’d gone into another man’s bed after he’d left—the bed of his stepbrother he’d resented as a child growing up.
His lips firmed into a straight line and he nodded. “Maggie.”
A single tear slid down her cheek. “Dakota’s gone.” She wrapped her arms around her middle and shivered. Dressed only in jeans and an oversized green sweatshirt, she wasn’t up to the cold of the late-October prairie breeze.
Joe had the sudden urge to walk away—no, make that run—as far away as he could get from her. But he couldn’t leave Maggie when she was so vulnerable. “Let’s go inside.” For the better part of the last month, he’d avoided her at every turn—a tough thing to do in such a small community. Especially when he was a tribal policeman and she worked with the reservation youth. Sometimes they crossed paths. He worked hard to make those occasions brief.
She led the way into the living room and waved at the couch, muttering something about sitting. Yet Maggie stood half turned away from him, her gaze on the scene outside the window as if watching for her son’s return.
Joe shrugged out of his coat and slung it onto a chair. The two state police officers moved in and out of the house, talking to each other and into the radios they carried. To Joe, Maggie might as well have been the only one in the room.
After one long minute, he couldn’t stand the silence any longer. He walked up behind her and pressed a hand to her shoulder. “Maggie, sit. I can’t talk to you when you have your back to me.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just…” Her hand made a weak wave. “I can’t focus. I can’t think.” Then she turned and stared straight into his eyes. “I want my son back. Oh, God, I want him back.” Her head hung down and her shoulders shook with the force of silent sobs.
Joe stood helpless in the face of her grief. When words wouldn’t come, he pulled her into his arms and pressed her face against his shoulder. He held her for a long time without speaking.
“It’s so cold outside,” she whispered, her breath warm against his chest. “They didn’t even take his blanket.” Burrowing against him, her tears soaked into his chambray shirt.
A twinge of jealousy skittered across his consciousness to be squelched in the rightness of a mother’s tears for the son she’d lost. The son she’d had with Paul. Joe swallowed the knot of regret in his throat. “We’ll find him.”
WITH JOE’S ARMS around her, Maggie felt as though she’d come home. Hope feathered the inside of her stomach. Even after her tears dried, she didn’t lift her head, didn’t want to move from the certainty of Joe’s embrace. She knew if she did, the gaping black horror of the past would rush back to overwhelm her.
Joe pressed a finger beneath her chin and tipped her face upward, breaking through her wall of thoughts. “Maggie, what time did you notice Dakota missing?”
The blinking red of her alarm clock pierced her clouded memory. “Four-fifteen. I woke because it was cold in the house. They could have taken him between the time I went to bed around midnight and when I awoke.” His touch made her want to lean on him and let him shoulder her burden. But this was Joe.
She
