her eyes questioning as they focused on his weathered face.
“If the door was open, I mean. Maybe the current just took her out of his hands.”
Emma. He means Emma, she realized, sickness stirring the pit of her stomach.
But if Emma had been in the car when it had gone off the bridge, she knew Richard well enough to know Emma would have been strapped into her seat. Open door or not, there was no way the current could have washed her out of those restraints.
“She would have been strapped in.”
The sheriff shrugged. “Maybe when your husband realized what was happening, he tried to get her out. Maybe he had her free and the current just took her—”
“No,” Susan said.
The single syllable was loud in the afternoon stillness. The scenario he had just suggested wasn’t an idea she was willing to entertain. Not yet.
Adams had already admitted that he didn’t know if the door had been open when the car was pulled from the water. And if it had been, then why hadn’t Richard, an experienced swimmer, gotten out of the car and swum to safety.
Because he was trying to locate his baby in that dark, rushing water? Struggling to unfasten straps he couldn’t see? Trying desperately to get them both to safety?
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Ms. Chandler. I’ll be glad to find out about the doors and the windows. Did you ever think that maybe your husband left your daughter in the care of a relative or some friends? Maybe she wasn’t with him at all when he come down here.”
Did you ever think…
There was literally no one she hadn’t questioned about that possibility. No relative or mutual acquaintance that she had been aware of—and some she hadn’t been aware of until after Richard’s disappearance—that she hadn’t asked about Emma. And about Richard, of course.
None of them had professed any knowledge of their whereabouts. And despite her desperate need for information, there had not been one of them she’d doubted. Now she knew they’d been telling the truth. Richard had contacted no one in the weeks after his disappearance because he had been here, hidden by the waters of this narrow, marshy river.
“When will they be back?”
“Ma’am?”
“The people those belong to.” She tilted her chin toward the cranes on the bank below. “Will they be back out here on Monday?”
“I’m not sure what their schedule is. I can call the main office of Southern Georgia first thing Monday morning. See if I can talk to the men who were here that day. I’ll let you know what they say as soon as I find out. You do understand that nobody had any idea at the time that we ought to be looking for your daughter.”
There should have been a cross-reference to Emma in the national database of missing persons the sheriff had searched for Richard’s name. Apparently that had been another bureaucratic screwup. There had been plenty of those.
Emma had always been listed as an abducted child. Susan had been advised that was the best way to draw attention to her case. Not that she had ever been able to tell it had made any difference. After all, Emma was with her father. And Susan, unaware at that time of how the system worked, had admitted that Richard had no history of mistreating their daughter.
That was the truth, of course, as well as what had kept her sane through the years. But it had lowered the urgency with which the various agencies had responded to her pleas for help.
“I’d like to talk to those men myself, if you don’t mind,” she said, thinking of all the other “comforting” platitudes she’d listened to during those first few months.
There was too much at stake to trust that another set of law enforcement officials would do everything in their power to find her baby. She was no longer as naive as she had once been.
She had been given another chance to find Emma. A chance to right all the things she had done wrong seven years ago.
“In all honesty, ma’am, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Adams said. “First place, it’s bound to be upsetting. And those men might not tell you everything they’d be willing to say to somebody who’s not as…emotionally involved in this.”
“Is there a motel nearby?” she asked, ignoring his advice.
That was something else she had done the first time. Listened to all the people who were supposed to know the best thing to do. And look where it had gotten her.
“A motel?”
She couldn’t remember seeing any near the exit to Linton. It seemed there had been only miles and miles of trees along both sides of the interstate, their leaves just beginning to be tinged with color from the fall nights.
“Somewhere I can stay while I’m in town.”
The green eyes widened in surprise, exposing the network of lines at their corners. “Plenty of motels in Pascagoula.”
Which was more than sixty miles away. Despite the fact that most of the distance was state highway and interstate, she didn’t want to make that commute every day. And until she found out what had happened to Emma…
“I mean here. Somewhere I can stay in Linton.”
Somewhere close enough that she could talk to anyone who might have encountered Richard—and please, dear God, encountered Emma—while they were here.
“No motels around here. We had a hotel at one time, but—” The sheriff stopped abruptly, his lips still slightly parted.
“What is it?”
“I was gonna say that the hotel closed due to lack of business once the state highway opened up, but then I remembered Miz Lorena’s.”
“Miz Lorena?” The title the sheriff had used was the old-fashioned Southern one that had nothing to do with women’s rights and a great deal to do with age and respect.
“Miz Lorena Bedford. Got a big ole house a few miles outside the city limits. Tried to make it into one of those bed-and-breakfast places, aiming to get the Yankees heading to the Gulf and the casinos. Once that stretch of the four-lane opened, there wasn’t enough traffic on the Linton cutoff for her to make a go of it. Same thing that happened to the hotel. That’s what made me think of her place.”
“And you think she might rent me a room?”
The sheriff shrugged, looking back down on the river. “Got no idea how she’d take to the idea, but she’s got the space and the bathrooms. Had ’em put in special for all those guests that didn’t show up. It’s worth a try. I can tell you how to get out there. You tell Miz Lorena what you’re here for, and I doubt she’s gonna turn you down.”
Susan nodded, taking a last look at the sluggish current below. She wasn’t going to leave Linton until she had some answers. Maybe that determination was simply a recognition that this place represented her last chance of finding Emma, but in her heart—the one that had been frozen for the last seven years—there was again a delicate flame of hope.
