Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,40
purse and studied the raised silver lettering that spelled out Riverbend Lodge and Bandera, Texas. Why would Nick write down a local fax number in a book of matches that came from a location that was a near six-hour drive west of here? But maybe it wasn’t a fax number, Abby thought, searching in her purse for her cell phone. Maybe she had misdialed.
Holding open the tiny flap, she carefully picked out the number Nick had written there with the tip of her finger, then she waited with breath held, only to hear the same rhythmic bleating of a fax machine as last time. She tried to imagine the place where it was, in her mind’s eye seeing an office, a woman named Sondra. But where? In what location? Houston or Bandera? Abby stowed her phone and the matches in her purse and shouldered it. There was only one thing she knew for certain: She would never find the answers to her questions by staying here. And something else she knew: If Nick and Lindsey were still alive, they weren’t coming home on their own.
Chapter 11
Before she left, Abby called Charlie and was relieved when he agreed to take Miss Havisham and Delilah off her hands for the nominal sum she named. She’d have given the horses to him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
He offered to keep an eye on her place, and Abby thanked him again and paused, long enough that Charlie was prompted to ask if there was something wrong.
“Just—you haven’t seen anyone over here, have you? Any strangers, I mean.”
“No one except Jake, and I don’t think he goes inside. He just looks in on the horses now and then. Why?”
“Oh, no reason. I’m sure it’s nothing.” Because it was nothing, she told herself. A bedroom window cracked open, a couple of lights left on. Charlie might not say it was probable that she’d left these things untended herself, but he would think it, and he’d be right. She thanked him a third time for his trouble, for all that he’d already done, and she was grateful when he didn’t question her further. She didn’t want to tell him she was going back to the Hill Country. He might have asked what her plan was, what did she hope to find this time that would be any different than the last time she was there, and she wouldn’t have known what to say. She had no real plan. The only thing she knew for sure was that the answers she was looking for weren’t here.
* * *
At the western edge of Houston, when the city’s skyline wasn’t more than a gilded smudge in the BMW’s rearview mirror, it occurred to her that she could go anywhere: California. Hawaii. Farther, she thought: Japan. Kuala Lumpur. Who could stop her? Who was left to wonder where she was? She was like a kite, floating untethered.
It was dark when she saw the sign for Griff’s Café outside Sealy, and her stomach grumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything since the toast her mother had made for breakfast, and she’d thrown most of that out to the squirrels. She could stop at the restaurant and make herself eat a decent meal or go on, find a gas station and a candy bar. As unwilling as she was, as nervous as it made her, she took the exit.
The bell over the restaurant door jingled loudly when it shut behind Abby, and she paused. There wasn’t much of a crowd. Two rough-faced men sitting over mugs of coffee at the counter turned idle stares toward her, and she made herself smile as if she had spent her entire life walking alone into places like this at night.
She slid into a booth along the wall and made a lengthy production of setting her purse down beside her, stowing her keys. A husband and his wife and three misbehaving children were stuffed into a booth near the door. There wasn’t a waitress in sight, but a man’s voice and woman’s big-booming laugh drifted through the order pickup window behind the counter. Smoke mixed with steam wafted through the opening, too, along with the smell of old grease. Abby wrinkled her nose. Whatever appetite she’d had deserted her.
“Eat your spaghetti,” the mother near the door told her children, “all of you, finish up or no dessert.”