The Country Guesthouse (Sullivan's Crossing #5)(16)

“They must be so proud of you,” she said.

“My mother is. She brags. I hope she’s not giving out my address. She always has someone who needs to talk to me about professional photography and publishing. But...I lost my father about ten years ago. I really miss him. He passed too young. He was sixty. He’d never had any retirement. My mom is now seventy, living on her own, driving herself everywhere, is in fantastic health, active in the community. After my father died, she moved to Denver to be close to my sister.” He thought for a minute. “I better visit her pretty soon.”

“Do you stay in touch?”

“Oh, sure. We call and text and FaceTime. She hates that, but I want to see her when we talk, as if it will tell me something about how she’s getting along. My sister sees her every week. Sometimes more often.”

They talked until it was pitch-dark.

“You should get some sleep,” Owen said. “Noah’s going to be recharged by morning.”

“I know,” she said with a laugh. “I’m thinking of trying to find horses. He so loves animals. He’d be so thrilled to have a ride.”

“I’ll help you find horses,” Owen said.

“My God, I think you are my prince! Don’t get any ideas, Owen,” she teased. “I’m not planning any more weddings! It’s just me and Noah now.”

  Owen puttered around the barn for a little while before going to bed. He would have company tomorrow, of that he had no doubt. He tidied up, not that it needed much. He put things that had run astray in neat piles or in their proper places. He put his few dishes and cups in the dishwasher, clothes he had dropped or draped in the laundry basket. He gave the bathroom a quick wipe. It didn’t take him long. He was by nature tidy. But he could get a little distracted sometimes...

He was honest with Hannah when he said he’d had a perfect childhood. But he hadn’t mentioned the painful fact that his son hadn’t.

He didn’t ever talk about it. Sometimes people managed to find out, he supposed because of his ex-wife’s notoriety. She still worked under the name Abrams, though she’d remarried and had two more children. But he didn’t like telling people because the tragedy of it was so overpowering that the look of shock and pity in their eyes was just plain unbearable.

His seven-year-old boy, Brayden, was playing in the front yard one minute, gone the next. Owen had been putting out trash and straightening up in the garage while Brayden was riding his skateboard up and down the driveway, up and down the sidewalk—he had a three-house distance limit. Owen was organizing because the mess on the workbench and shelves, tools and photography equipment, was all his. It moved around as he slept, he told Sheila.

It couldn’t have been more than five minutes. He had not heard a car. He came out of the garage and there was the skateboard and no Brayden.

He’d heard other parents who’d experienced such travesty talk about how everything was a blur, a haze. Not so for Owen. He remembered every detail. Since Owen had been working in the garage and Brayden had not passed by to enter the house, he went in search and found the skateboard a couple of doors down. He called out to Brayden and there no response. Then he knocked on a few doors. Only one family had kids Brayden’s age and they weren’t home, but none of the other neighbors had seen him. He checked, yelling into the house, but his wife said he hadn’t come in. Sheila was making dinner so he raced up and down the street, calling Brayden’s name. It only took a short block and half for him to know—this was not going to be okay.

The police were called. There were hours of questioning while they assured Owen and Sheila that other officers were looking everywhere: playgrounds, schoolyards, strip malls, empty lots. They gave the police a picture; there was an Amber Alert. Days passed, days of not sleeping, days of crying, trying to comfort his wife, hearing about small leads that went nowhere. At first, Owen and Sheila were treated like suspects. The FBI was called. There was no ransom call. Owen’s parents offered a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information that led to the discovery of their grandson—money Owen couldn’t imagine them actually having.

They all lived in constant fear and pain—Owen and Sheila, their parents, their siblings, the neighborhood, the school. The city. Owen and Sheila made public pleas for information, for help. Volunteers manned phone banks and knocked on doors and walked through nearby fields.

Days and then weeks and then months passed. All the while the police and FBI had certain ideas of suspects but no trace of Brayden could be found. Owen and Sheila couldn’t hold it together. He withdrew into himself, single-minded about finding his son but just not up to any public scrutiny. Sheila, on the other hand, became a PR genius overnight and turned to all the help agencies and organizations that advocated for lost and missing and abducted children. She became vocal about trafficking and abuse and was making speeches and televised public service announcements. She was interviewed on all the major talk shows.

Even before Brayden’s remains were found Owen knew they weren’t going to be able to keep the marriage together. And then they discovered that Brayden had been buried in the desert outside LA in a place that could have been seen from the road, had anyone been connecting the dots. He’d been dead eighteen months. His kidnapper was one of the police’s prime suspects and was identified and convicted through DNA testing. That brought a whole nightmare of images that threatened to rip Owen’s guts out.