You Don't Want To Know - By Lisa Jackson Page 0,38

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“God help me.” Her fists clenched on either side of the keyboard and she lowered her head.

Concentrate.

Don’t let the heartache overcome you.

And yet the pain was always there, scraping at her soul, reminding her that it was her fault he’d gone missing. Her damned fault.

And now you have to find him.

No one else will.

Swallowing hard, her eyes burning, she set her jaw and forced her thoughts again to that last night.

The party had wound down early, a little after eleven, but for the most part, those who had remained in the house were still hanging out downstairs. Wyatt had been in his study, sharing a glass of rare Scotch with Uncle Crispin, father to the bevy of Ava’s cousins.

Trent and Ian had been playing billiards in the rec room that was located half a floor down from the main living area, and their sister, Zinnia, had stepped through the French doors to the garden to take a call on her cell. Through the half-open door, they’d felt the cold of winter and heard her chewing out her most recent boyfriend, the guy who’d refused to spend the holidays on “some fuckin’ rock in the middle of nowhere.” He’d ended up jetting off to Italy, which royally pissed off Zinnia. Fueled by several Irish coffees and a temper she’d never learned to control, Zinnia had let the boyfriend, Silvio, have it, according to both her brothers.

Aunt Piper had kicked off her high heels and was reading in the sitting room while her son, Jacob, had walked outside to smoke a cigarette on the front porch. Ava remembered catching a glimpse of him through the window. His body had been in shadow, but the tip of his cigarette had glowed red in the darkness.

Jewel-Anne had already gone upstairs for the night; she was the only member of the family who’d admitted to being on the second floor, though she’d sworn she never went near Noah’s room. Later, she said she was certain his door had been shut.

Ava remembered leaving it slightly ajar, and it was heavy enough not to have blown closed. Someone had to have shut it on purpose.

“Who?” she whispered as she wrote it on the legal pad and circled it, over and over again. Next to it, she wrote WHY?

Sheriff Biggs and his detectives had thought there was a chance Noah had gotten out of bed himself and wandered down the long hallway to the back staircase, therefore avoiding being detected by anyone downstairs. From those steep back steps, the authorities surmised, he could have climbed upstairs to the third floor or even to the attic, though a search of the upper floors had found nothing. The police had then surmised that the boy could have gone to the kitchen and out the back door in a moment when all the staff were elsewhere or just didn’t notice him. There was the chance, too, that he’d wandered around the basement, but, like the attic, a search of the underground rooms had provided no clues to Noah’s whereabouts.

Of course, there was the chance that Noah had been abducted, though in the following days, no ransom call or note had been received, and Sheriff Biggs had fallen back to his original theory that the boy had wandered outside and gotten lost.

Now the pencil in Ava’s fingers snapped. “No way.” She just didn’t believe it, though Biggs had his reasons. Excuses, she thought.

Ava had always thought the idea that no one had seen Noah escape outside was lame, but it was true that the back door to the porch had been left open sometime in the evening. The screen door had been banging in the wind, a sound no one had noticed during the festivities. Only later had Virginia mentioned the noise. “I did hear something,” she’d admitted, “but I thought it was farther away, like the barn or the stable window. There’s always something rattling or banging around here.”

Most of the night, Virginia had been in the kitchen. Khloe and her husband, Simon Prescott, had been working that night, Khloe helping out in the kitchen while Simon had taken turns with both their ranch hand, Ned Fender, and Butch Johansen, ferrying the guests to and from the island.

Graciela had helped prepare and serve the hors d’oeuvres and drinks, while keeping the room picked up and tidy. She disposed of used napkins, dirty plates, forgotten flatware, and empty glasses.

Demetria had spent some of the night attending to Jewel-Anne and had spent the