Savage Beauty - Peggy Webb Page 0,14

short visit with her mother and leave her wallet, her IDs and a change of clothes behind?

None of it made sense. Even Stephen’s reassurances and the fact that Jack was searching for the elusive birthmother didn’t reassure Lily.

Cee Cee could be anywhere. Dozens of possibilities roared through her mind, all of them scary. She could have gone off exploring and fallen somewhere. Right this minute she could be lying at the bottom of one of the many stone walls around the estate. Or she could be curled into some dark cranny of the manor, some place Graden and his men forgot to look, too injured to cry out for help.

As Lily went toward her bedroom suite, she shivered thinking about Graden. Considering his uncaring attitude when she’d asked about Cee Cee, how much time and effort had he put into a search? What did she know about him, really?

She powered up her laptop for a search. It didn’t take her long to discover that the most important and influential employee on Stephen’s staff was an ex-con. He’d been convicted of aggravated assault. She shivered as she continued her search on him.

Suddenly she heard a sound that froze her blood. Not a scream. Not a cry. But a muffled despair, something that could only have come from the throat of the desperate.

Chapter Six

With the horrible sound echoing through her mind, Lily flung open her door, and a shadow at the end of the hall caught her attention. Was that a man coming from the locked second floor east wing?

“Hey!” She hurried in that direction, but the shadow vanished. She didn’t know if it was real or a figment of her imagination. As she approached the bedroom nearest to the east wing--her daughter’s room--fear for Annabelle took precedence over everything.

The bedroom door was still closed. The hallway now quiet.

She eased open the door. A nightlight shone over her daughter, still curved into the same ball of bedclothes, just as Lily had left her. Had she made the sound? Had she been having nightmares?

Lily stood there a while, watching and waiting.

There. The sound came again. Down the hall. A faint echo that seemed to be coming from the east wing.

Lily headed toward the massive oak door that stood guard over the Allistair archives. She tried the old-fashioned brass handle. Locked. Of course it was. She’d known before she tried. Still, she put her ear to the door. Nothing but dead silence.

Had she been mistaken? Had the sound come from Toni’s room? It wouldn’t surprise Lily. It had taken her only fifteen minutes with Stephen’s mother to see that she was deeply unhappy. And she’d been missing from tonight’s family ritual. She could be having night terrors.

Lily decided to make more effort to befriend her. Being Mrs. Stephen Allistair would be so much easier if Toni were her ally rather than her enemy.

She stood there a moment longer, uncertain, restless, worry gnawing at her. Had Stephen or Clive come to the second floor to look for something in the archives?

Still feeling skittish and apprehensive, she went downstairs to the kitchen. Low lights underneath the cabinet were always kept burning in case someone wanted a glass of milk in the middle of the night, or a sandwich from the variety of meats and cheeses always in the refrigerator.

Lily searched the kitchen drawers until she found a flashlight. Then she grabbed Stephen’s old knock-about sweater from a clothes rack beside the back door and eased outside.

It was a dark night, with the threat of rain in the air and only the sliver of a moon peeking through the storm clouds. She pulled the sweater closer and trained her flashlight around the back yard.

“Where are you, Cee Cee?”

Wait. Someone was in the kitchen garden, her white dress flowing around her as she bent over the Swiss chard, face hidden from Lily’s view. The light pooled around the apparition, and she looked up, her face pale as the moon, silver hair glowing, eyes like two blinding lights.

No. That wasn’t eyes. It was the lens of her glasses. Lily mentally sorted through the list of Stephen’s staff. This woman was definitely not one of them.

“Who are you?” she called. The women took off running, and Lily took off after her. “Stop! I’m not going to hurt you.”

The woman kept going. But Lily bogged down in the soft dirt of the kitchen garden, the heels of the impractical shoes she’d worn for dinner sinking into the earth between the winter