My Wife Is Missing(82)
“I need someone to guard the kids,” Natalie said. “Chuck, can you wait out in the hall? I’ll come with you, Kate. I’ll show you where I saw him.”
Kate seemed to know when a fight wasn’t going to go her way.
“Okay,” she said. “Chuck, keep an eye out.”
Moments later, Natalie and Kate were standing together on the rain-soaked ground in the back of the house. Kate wielded a powerful flashlight she had procured from the kitchen on their way outside. She trained the beam at the tree out back, moving from left to right then back again.
Nothing.
Emboldened, Kate went to the tree. Natalie stayed behind.
“Kate, be careful.”
Kate was shining the light on something Natalie couldn’t see, so she approached.
“The wind may have knocked down this branch,” Kate said.
Sure enough, a long branch swayed back and forth close to the ground, clinging perilously to the tree by a sliver of wood. Kate aimed her flashlight at the base of the tree.
“Honey, the ground is muddy from rain, but there are no footprints here,” she said.
The flashlight cast a glow, allowing Natalie to see sympathy brimming in Kate’s eyes.
“Nat, did you get any sleep tonight?” she asked. “Have you been sleeping at all?”
Natalie pursed her lips in a tight grimace.
“I didn’t imagine it,” she said. “I saw a shadow in the hallway. I heard a knock, footsteps outside my door. There was a man out here.” She pointed to the tree. “I saw him. I heard him.”
Kate tugged at the branch.
“With everything going on, this could easily look like a person. And this branch here might look like a gun.”
She pulled Natalie into an embrace.
“Nat, whatever you heard, whatever you thought you saw, it came from your mind, not from behind this tree.”
There was a moment, brief as a breath, when Natalie could pick up her friend’s thoughts hanging in the silence between them.
Have you become paranoid? Is the threat of Michael real or imagined?
Natalie now feared that she’d come to the wrong place. Hildonen Farms wouldn’t be her safe harbor if Kate believed the children could be in danger under her care.
CHAPTER 35
MICHAEL
He found Kennett hanging out in the bar at the Renaissance Hotel in Toledo, where they decided to spend another night to rest, recharge, and come up with a new game plan. The bar, like the hotel itself, was more serviceable than fancy. Fine place to sit and have a drink and decompress—which Michael desperately needed to do.
His hair still felt damp from a refreshing shower, and from the looks of it, Kennett had cleaned up as well. Wearing a blue polo, signature blazer draped over the back of his barstool, Michael got a good look at the detective’s fit physique. Kennett sipped a drink idly from an ice-filled tumbler, appearing quite relaxed for a guy who’d been chasing bad leads across the Midwest. Kennett’s cop sense must have kicked in when Michael arrived, because he spun around on his stool to issue him a greeting before Michael had a chance to say a single word.
“Hey there, Mikey,” Kennett said as he patted the stool next to him. Before Michael could get settled in his seat, Kennett handed him a drink menu.
“Get anything you want, Mike,” Kennett said, “and by anything, I mean nothing that costs more than twenty bucks.”
Kennett gave a little chuckle, but Michael knew he was also being serious, so he ordered a Wild Turkey, neat.
“How you doing there?” Kennett asked. “I know it’s hard to come so close and yet be so far.”
Kennett eyed Michael up and down carefully the way a doctor might when giving a patient an exam.
“I’m a little discouraged, to be honest,” Michael admitted. “I don’t think I’m cut out to do your job.”
He took a long, slow drink of his bourbon, embracing the burn as it settled in his throat.
Kennett huffed his agreement—or disagreement, Michael wasn’t entirely sure.
“Look, I appreciate everything you’ve done to help me. But maybe we should end it. I’ll pay for your flight back to Boston, New York, wherever you want to go. I’ll stay and look for Natalie and the kids because I’m sure they’re somewhere in the Midwest. You’ve got big violent crimes to solve. I’m grateful for your help, I really am, but this is my problem to solve.”
Michael would have paid double the airfare to rid himself of the uncertainty and guilt that came with having Kennett’s help.
“To be honest with ya, Mike,” Kennett said with a laissez-faire air, “looking for your wife has made me rethink my job. I guess I didn’t realize how much I needed a break from the violence. Seeing what people do to each other, how callous and cruel they can be, living with that day in and day out really gets to you.”
Again, Michael shifted uneasily in his stool. He didn’t like the way Kennett kept looking at him, as if he were a part of that problem.
“I imagine those cases stay with you,” said Michael, who spoke too brightly for the subject, but he’d done so with the hope of easing some of the odd tension between them.
“Stays with you like ghosts,” Kennett answered wistfully. “Even when you put the bad guys where they belong, it doesn’t take the sting out of it. You still saw what you saw. That never goes away. No matter how much time a perp spends behind bars, the memory of what they did lingers.”