Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(77)

“Here . . .” Randi is beside her, reaching out for the baby. “I’ll take him. Go talk to Nate. Ben is on the phone in our room.”

“He’s wet.”

“I’ll change him. Go ahead, Al.” Randi sounds worried.

Mack—where is Mack? What’s going on?

Feeling dizzy, she hurries from the guest sitting room and out into the hall. There, she makes a wrong turn and winds up at the foot of the stairs leading up to Greta’s third floor quarters.

Hastily backtracking, feeling more frantic—not to mention sick to her stomach—by the moment, she finds her way to the other wing of the house. The door to the master suite is open, and she can hear Ben on the phone.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing only boxer shorts and five o’clock shadow, he looks up when she enters. “Where’s Mack?”

“I don’t know.” Taken aback by the concern in Ben’s dark eyes, she forgets to be embarrassed by his state of undress. “He’s not in bed.”

Ben frowns and says into the phone, “No, he’s not. Yes. Allison. Okay, hang on.” He passes the receiver to her wordlessly.

“Hi, Allison.” She recognizes Nathan Jennings’s voice. “Do you know where Mack is?”

She has some idea, and shudders inwardly at the thought of him wandering around the Webers’ kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards.

But she doesn’t know if Mack ever confided in Ben about the sleep medication, or—if he did—about the bizarre side effects that accompany it. And even if he did, surely Nathan Jennings doesn’t know.

“He called me and said his car was broken down just off the Saw Mill and he needed a ride.”

“But that’s not . . .”

Yes. It is. If sleepwalking and sleep-eating are possible, then surely sleep-talking—over the phone, or otherwise—is also possible.

“The last thing I knew,” she tells Nathan, her stomach churning, “he was in bed.”

Even that isn’t the entire truth. She doesn’t even remember coming to bed last night; only that Mack turned in much earlier than she did, soon after the Jenningses left. He must have been here asleep when she came up. Surely, she’d have noticed if he wasn’t.

Or would she?

But Nathan doesn’t need to know any of that. Her only obligation is to protect Mack from . . .

Well, she has no idea what, but her instincts are telling her to tread carefully.

“Where are you now?” she asks Nathan.

“I’m standing on the side of the road, off Exit 37, where he said he would be.”

“Why would he call you for a ride though?” she asks, not bothering to add the no offense that pops into her head. She really doesn’t care whether she offends this man who, with his wife, barged into her life at the worst possible time.

Remembering the way Zoe Jennings reminisced with Mack—and Ben, too, for that matter—and having picked up on her attitude of easy familiarity toward him, Allison feels the same irrational pinprick of jealousy she experienced earlier, when Mack smiled at Zoe.

Zoe, and her husband, too, had known a Mack Allison herself never had the opportunity to meet—a Mack who was young and single and unencumbered by a doomed marriage, a terrorist attack, a high-pressure job . . . the weight of the world.

I was cheated, Allison found herself thinking earlier as she listened to the easy banter—a silly thought, she knew then, and knows now—but she’s only human.

“I’m wondering the same thing,” Nathan Jennings tells her, “and I have no idea why he called me.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“I looked at the caller ID on the phone after he hung up, and it had his name on it, so . . .”

“Oh. Well, did you call him back?”

“I tried to. He didn’t answer. It just rang right into voice mail. I left a message. So you don’t know where he is?”

“No. I don’t. I’m sorry.” Too overcome by worry and nausea to keep going around and around with him, Allison gestures for Ben to take the phone.

After handing it over, she paces across the carpet as he says into the receiver, “Nate? Ben again. Listen, I’m not sure what to tell you. I have no idea why he called or where he is, but—”

He curtails what he’s saying as Allison stops abruptly in her tracks with a startled gasp.

If Mack were stranded on the side of the road, he’d have called for help from his cell phone—and that would have come up on caller ID as private, not with his name.

Their home phone, though, would be listed James MacKenna.

“I know where he is,” she whispers to Ben, who raises an eyebrow. She hurriedly touches her index finger to her lips, indicating that she doesn’t want him to let on to Nathan Jennings. She isn’t sure why.

Something strange and frightening is going on, and she needs to get to Mack as soon as possible.

Please, please let him be all right . . .

“Allison! Where are you going?” Ben calls as she bolts from the room.

She doesn’t answer, rushing into the adjoining bathroom and vomiting into the toilet.

Pulling into the garage back at home, Nate Jennings is aggravated—with himself, mostly, for getting caught up in this elaborate wild-goose chase when he could have been sleeping.