Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,59

some advice.”

“Slow down, I know.”

“No,” he said. “Let me do my job. Okay? Let the sheriff’s department do what we’re trained to do. If there’s more going on here the way you think, we’ll find it.”

“And if there isn’t?”

He stood up. An eighteen-wheeler roared by, leaving a curtain of dust and the smell of diesel fuel hanging in the air.

“Dennis?”

He met her glance. “Have you found out something I should know?”

Circumstantial. The word rose in Abby’s mind. A cop word, a detective word she’d heard on television. It meant when evidence wasn’t solid, when it couldn’t connect the dots. Hers didn’t. She was dealing in hunches, intuition. Matchbooks and fax numbers. There was the hearsay about a difficult client; there was a tenuous connection to missing settlement money, some fuzzy surveillance footage. There were the phone calls. None of it was proof of anything, and no one, including Dennis, believed the phone calls were even real. And anyway, Abby wasn’t so sure she wanted to know the truth.

Because once it was known, she couldn’t unknow it. She would have to live with it.

“What makes you think they’re not dead, Abby?”

She shook her head. The threat of tears tangled in her throat. If only she could, she would bury her face against his uniform shirt. She imagined it, the starched feel beneath her cheek, the relief of his arms around her. If only she could lean on him just until she could feel her own strength again. If only she could forget a little while.

“I’m going home,” she said, blinking in the clear morning light. “I’m going to try to put my life in order and that’s all.”

Dennis rested his hands on his belt. The butt of his gun jutted from his hip. “You won’t do anything crazy?”

Abby shook her head.

“You’ll call me first?”

She nodded and started the car, then before he could walk out of earshot, she put her head out the window. “The little fawn, how is she?”

He turned. “Missing her mama,” he said and saluted. He’d put on his sunglasses; she couldn’t read his expression. But she knew he was unhappy with her as well as she knew he wouldn’t stop looking for her family. Because it was his job; he wanted the facts as much as she did.

And he wasn’t afraid of the truth.

Chapter 16

Abby had her house key in her hand, ready to unlock the back door, but as she came up the steps she saw that the door was already open, ajar by maybe three inches. She paused, and her first thought was Jake, that he was home. But his car wasn’t in the driveway. She nudged the door, widening the gap. The floor was tracked with grit, not a lot. What would come in on your shoes, Abby thought, if you didn’t wipe your feet. Had to be Jake. She stepped over the threshold and stood in the mudroom, but rather than shouting out his name, she pulled her cell phone from her purse and called him. “Are you home?” she asked when he answered.

“Home?” He echoed in a voice that said she must be nuts. “I’m at school. Why?”

Abby told him, her eye tracking the trail of grit. Maybe she’d dragged it in herself the last time she was here, but when she said that to Jake, he said, “No, Mom, get out of there. Call 911. Somebody’s broken in.”

“Who would—?” Abby was already backing out onto the porch, and although she told Jake she would call the police, she didn’t. She called her neighbor Charlie instead.

“Don’t go back inside,” he told her. “Wait for me. I’ll be right there.”

When he came, he examined the door, running his gaze and then his big-knuckled, work-worn hands over the lock mechanism, the frame. “Doesn’t look as if it was forced.”

“Maybe I forgot to lock it when I left and the wind blew it.” In her state of mind, Abby thought, anything was possible.

“Does anyone else besides you or Jake have a key?”

Abby shook her head. “Not that I remember. Maybe my mother does, but she hasn’t been here.”

“Well, let’s go in and have a look around, or maybe you’d rather wait out here?”

“No,” she said over her growing sense of unease. She was grateful that Charlie seemed so calm, so frankly undisturbed. She remembered a summer day a few years ago when Jake fell out of a tree. He’d bitten through his lower lip, and she hadn’t been able to stop the bleeding. Charlie had