Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,45

She had her role to play, Nick had his. Of necessity, their daily routines were separate, involved different places, different people.

The clerk pushed the sales slip across the counter toward her.

Abby signed it and pushed it back. “I’m trying to locate someone,” she said.

The clerk waited.

Abby’s cheeks warmed. “Never mind. Can you cut these?” She indicated the tags on the jacket, slipping it on once they were removed. Leaving the store, she stowed her shopping bag in the car and walked down Main Street toward the river. Bandera had been settled in one bent elbow of the Medina River in 1856. Now more than one hundred fifty years later, the river still wasn’t much of a hike from the center of town.

She crested the hill where Main crossed Maple and dipped toward the junction with Highway 16. Last time she was here, the Medina had been raging over the intersection. Now as she threaded her way around twiggy clumps of possumhaw, buttonbush and gnarled mesquite, her steps raised powdery dust. Dry blades of yellow switchgrass brushed the sides of her boots. Nearer the water, where a thick layer of cypress needles mixed with oak and sweetgum leaves cushioned the ground, she paused to look at the water flowing east.

After the storm, when she’d come here with Kate, she had watched for her Jeep, certain that she would see it with Nick and Lindsey inside. She had imagined diving in. Somehow she would swim against her fear of water, swim against the furious current and save them. A miraculous rescue. Today the water level was normal, the flow sedate. Still, Abby hunted the river’s edges for a sign. The sun’s glitter off the car’s roof, a tire partly concealed in the gnarled fist of a tree’s roots. But there was nothing like that. The water passed her, placid, heedless of what it had done, what it had taken. Did she intend to walk its length? If she spoke to it, prayed to it, would it give up its secret? Tell her where it had left her husband and daughter? Would it deny it had ever taken them?

“Abby?”

She wheeled. “Oh, Katie.” Abby walked into Kate’s embrace. “Who called, Mama or Jake?”

“Your mama, early this morning. She thought you’d be at my house or that you would have at least called me by now.”

“I was going to.”

“I saw the BMW outside Gruenwald’s, and when I didn’t find you inside, I figured you were here.”

“Your nutty friend.”

“Insanity,” Kate smiled, “the tie that binds.”

“I can’t seem to give up.” Abby surveyed the river.

“Where did you stay last night?”

“Riverbend.”

“Oh, Lord, how depressing. Come on.” She linked Abby’s arm with hers. “Let’s get your stuff. George can bring one of the men later for the car.”

* * *

The road leading out of town was edged by a thick limestone shelf, and the view shot into the blue, vacant nowhere, down the wall of a canyon that would end in a boulder-filled crevice. Looking out the window, Abby wondered, Was the Jeep there? In this one? That one? The one fifty feet on?

Stop! The word shouted in her mind. She bit both lips to keep it inside. They could go from dawn until dark and never see into all the canyons and gorges. The land was like a rumpled sheet. If only she could, Abby would pick it up and shake it out flat.

Kate said, “I think I saw Nadine Betts in town.”

“The reporter? Say you didn’t. Say she doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Umm, not sure. I was coming down the street toward Gruenwald’s. Looked like she, or somebody who looked an awful lot like her, was checking out your car. She was gone by the time I found a parking place.”

Abby thought of the blue sedan she’d spotted leaving the motel parking lot late last night, too late for it to have been there for any good reason. “What does she drive? Do you know?”

“Ford. Taurus, I think.”

“What color?”

“Dark blue. Why?”

Abby explained and then groaned. “How does that woman know I’m here when I didn’t even know myself that I was coming?”

“Hah!” Kate said. “You’re forgetting where you are.”

* * *

Long ago, according to legend, in the midst of a terrible drought, a Comanche chief came to the highest bluff near his village in the Hill Country to survey the brown wasteland that lay in every direction. Nothing moved; there was no sign of anything left alive. All the game that had fed his people—the deer and the