to have gone that close to the deadly edge above the whirlpool.
He’d known the searchers wouldn’t follow his order to stand down, but he’d needed to give it so he’d have a better chance of talking his superiors into treating this as a serious incident.
“Sir,” he said down the phone line. “We’re now looking at either a drowning—which is unlikely, given how well she knew the area—or an abduction.”
“Will, I’ve run this girl,” his commander replied. “She has a history of running away from home.”
Fuck.
Will had been hoping Miriama’s past would slip under the radar. “That was when she was fifteen and her aunt had a boyfriend who took a little too much interest in her.” It was Mrs. Keith who’d told him that, after the older woman flagged him down for a visit one day a couple of months ago.
Miriama had run by on the road while the two of them were chatting, and lifted a hand to wave, and Mrs. Keith had said, “Look at her. Like a flower just opening up. Good thing that no-good bastard didn’t bruise her.”
All Will’d had to do was look at her and she’d given him the full story. “Mattie, she’s a sweet woman. A good friend. But she has the worst taste in men.” A censorious shake of her head, her jowls trembling. “You’d think she’d have a little more sense after Miriama came to live with her as a wee thing—her mother was Mattie’s sister, you know. Went up to the big smoke, made some wrong choices.”
A look of true sadness, her eyes an incredibly beautiful blue in the fleshy roundness of her face. “Lovely girl, she was. Overdosed in a motel, poor little Miriama in there with her for more than two days before someone found them.” Coughing, she’d taken a drink from the wineglass she kept on the table beside her. “There was no question but that Mattie would take her niece. She’d been trying to get Kahurangi—that was the sister—to send Miriama down here forever.”
Another small sip of wine. “You know Mattie’s first name is Atarangi,” Mrs. Keith had added. “Her ma had a good friend called Matilda, and that’s how she got that as a middle name. But you know how it goes with names. For whatever reason, everyone just started using Matilda. It’s a shame really. Atarangi’s such a pretty name.”
Will had sat there on the porch and kept on listening, not because he was particularly interested in gossip or in Matilda’s first name, but because he’d already come to understand that Mrs. Keith was lonely. According to Nikau, who sometimes went over to fix up her fence or clean the guttering, she used to walk into town two or three times a week, but she’d gotten too big to move far these days. She’d hired one of the local women to keep her house neat as a pin, and to help with her hair and makeup every morning, but, for the most part, she was confined to the porch where she watched life go by.
And perhaps to the bedroom where she might offer certain intimate services to truckers and forestry workers—or so went the rumors in town. If she did, it was none of Will’s business. If it assuaged her loneliness and that of others, so be it. And if the whole thing was just a tale Mrs. Keith fostered to give her life a little excitement, it was a harmless one. Either way, she certainly didn’t seem to mind. In fact, from the occasional subtle comment she’d dropped into her conversations with Will, she reveled in her notoriety.
“But,” she’d said that day, “Mattie, good soul that she is, is as blind as a bat when it comes to men.”
A huff of breath. “Well, you can see how it went. Miriama grew breasts and legs and the useless man Mattie kept around back then started trying to touch her. The girl ended up in Christchurch a few times, trying to get away from him, until poor Mattie finally realized what was happening and kicked him out. She never once took the bastard’s side, that’s one thing, and it’s why Miriama never turned against her. She just can’t pick the good ones.”
“Be that as it may,” Will’s commander said in response to his clarification of Miriama’s history, “it’s a pattern. Can you say definitively that she didn’t just hitch a ride out of town?”
Will’s free hand curled on the pale wood of his desk. “She