are you? You don’t know me,” Abra argued back at the television.
But the unknown woman wasn’t finished. “Abra has always been so together,” she said with conviction. “Her life is perfect. Wouldn’t she just use the Ten Steps to Personal Growth, which, you know, she invented, to work through whatever it is?”
And then this alleged biggest fan held up a copy of a New York tabloid with the screaming headline Where’s Our Abra?
“We need to know she’s okay,” the woman declared, starting to choke up. “We need our Abra Cadabra to come home, wherever she is, whatever the problem is. Abra, if you’re out there listening—please come home. We need you. Please?”
“So there you have it.” The polished anchorwoman folded her hands on her desk. “A real mystery surrounding Abra Holloway. The question of the day has become, ‘Where’s our Abra?’ But no one seems to know the answer.”
In an airport in Baltimore, Abra Holloway ducked under her baseball cap, picked up her bags and moved farther away from the TV.
1
DETECTIVE SEAN CALHOUN was running late. And if his cell phone didn’t stop ringing, he swore he was going to throw the thing in Lake Michigan.
“Damn it.” When he pulled it out of his jacket pocket, he saw he’d missed a call, too, somewhere between cleaning the paperwork off his desk and his last meeting with the supervisor of detectives to brief him on a couple of things before Sean left on vacation.
So first he looked at the number from the other call, noted it was his older brother, Jake, the person he was supposed to meet a half hour ago, cursed again, and then answered the new call, only to immediately wish he hadn’t.
“Sean, you gotta come over right away,” his mother’s voice ordered.
“Ma, I don’t have time for any more fix-ups, I don’t care who they are,” he returned.
“You still haven’t called my friend Bebe’s niece, have you?” she asked smartly. “Or Aunt Ruthie’s neighbor, the girl who makes such good meat loaf? She brought Aunt Ruthie cookies yesterday, just to be nice. Can you believe it? Such a sweetheart. She would make a wonderful mother.”
Yeah, like that was a real bonus. The last thing he wanted was a wife and kids. He’d been trying to get out from under his family’s thumb as long as he could remember. Why create a new generation of Calhouns and prolong the misery?
“Why don’t you try Jake?” he suggested, trying not to sound too annoyed, which would only make his mother dig in her heels harder. “He’s hitting thirty in a couple of months. I’ve got a few good years left. So why don’t you work on Jake instead of me?”
“Jake, ha!” she said dismissively. “He is so much like your father it’s not funny. Why would I waste a good woman on that?”
“Yeah, well, don’t waste them on me, either,” Sean said flatly. “No fix-ups.”
“That’s not even why I called in the first place. Sean, you got such a chip on your shoulder, I swear.”
“So why did you call?”
“I need you to come over as soon as you can get here,” she whispered, hissing into the phone. “I think your father is having an affair.”
“Oh, man.” This was even worse than another fix-up. “Ma, you know there’s no way Dad is having an affair.”
Michael Calhoun, one of five deputy superintendents of police for the city of Chicago, was as straight an arrow as they came. An affair? Yeah, right. That would be way too interesting for his by-the-book old man.
“I got evidence,” his mother contended.
“Yeah, okay, well, I’m already late to meet Jake,” he explained, trying to be patient. This affair thing was a new one for his mother, but not entirely surprising. She had a tendency to be jealous and to keep her husband and her sons, especially Sean, on a short leash. “Jake and I are supposed to pick up Cooper and head to Wisconsin, to the fishing cabin, remember? So it’s not a good time.”
“Your brothers will just have to wait. This is important.”
“Listen, I have a message from Jake here. Let me see what that is and call you right back, okay?” Without giving her a chance to object, he disconnected her and punched in the code to hear his message.
“Something’s come up, Sean,” Jake’s voice growled in his ear. “Sorry. Dad’s sending me on this weird errand and I’m not going to make it to Wisconsin. You and Coop go ahead without me, okay? Have a great time.”
“Damn it, Jake.” Sean clenched his jaw. First Mom and the craziness about Dad having an affair, and now Jake was bailing on him, leaving him with custody of their flaky younger brother Cooper. At times like this, he was really sorry he was a Calhoun.
And his phone was ringing again.
“Sean?” his mother asked. “You didn’t call me right back.”
“I didn’t get a chance.”
She made a harrumphing noise. “I’m expecting you within the next ten minutes. Get over here.” She hung up on him this time.
Funny that Jake had said their dad was sending him on some kind of errand he couldn’t get out of. When Dad called, Jake jumped. But when their mother needed something, it was always Sean who got the call, whether he wanted to or not.
His father constantly got on his case about being the family rebel. Some rebel. Hadn’t he ended up on the police force like all the rest of them? Wasn’t he constantly at his mother’s beck and call?
Frowning, wondering if it was too late to become an only child or an orphan, he quickly dialed Cooper, the only member of the family still unaccounted for, but got voice mail. “Hey, Coop, it’s Sean. I’m tied up. Jake says he’s off on a mission for Dad and Mom is giving me grief about something else. You can go ahead to the cabin if you want, and I’ll try to meet you there later.”
He dropped his phone in his pocket, shrugged into his jacket, and made tracks to his car. Might as well see what bee Mom had in her bonnet.
He laughed. Dad having an affair. Yeah, right.
“I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER get here,” Yvonne Calhoun declared, swinging open the door before he had an opportunity to knock. He noticed immediately that her face was red, her eye makeup was smudged, and she had chewed off her lipstick, all of which was very unusual.
So she was very upset. It didn’t take a detective to figure that out.
“Mom, you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Just come in already, will you?”
Sean ducked in the door, feeling eighteen and surly, like he did every time he came back to the Calhoun family house. It was impossible not to revert to a teenage attitude under that roof. Wipe your feet, say please and thank-you, don’t eat or drink in the living room… Remembering
