Authors: Liz Talley
“Other than that one time he wet himself, he's never just wandered off but found his way back?”
“Not once. In seventeen years, not once.”
They'd reached the day care. Grant squeezed her hand and let it go, standing off to the side as she opened the door and stepped into the small foyer.
“You can come in,” she told him, holding open the door.
Leaving him in the front entryway, she went through another door, down a small hallway and peeked into the dance class, praying that it was ending. Kara wouldn't be happy about being pulled out early.
The class was still underway.
But she couldn't see Kara at first. So she moved over to get a different view from the big window into the room. And still, even when she peered in the mirror straight ahead of her to get a view of the back of the room, she couldn't find Kara.
With all that had been going on that day, Lynn's nerves were frayed. She was staff. A nurse. She could interrupt any function on campus. So she did. Pulling open the door, she stepped inside, an apology to the teacher on her lips as she sought her toddler out from the other seven or eight kids, male and female, absently registering that they'd brought kids over from the public day care to take part in the class.
But not really caring at the moment.
“Where's Kara?” she blurted out over the children's music blaring from a boom box on the floor by the instructor.
“Kara?” The twentysomething woman asked. She'd been abused by her mother's boyfriend, if Lynn remembered correctly. Sexually. Thankfully there'd been no internal damage.
“My daughter. She was signed up to take this class.”
“I thought she was with Maddie,” the girl said. “I saw her in the hallway...walking behind Maddie. They told me Maddie has jurisdiction over her and I thought she'd decided not to put Kara in class....”
The girl was babbling. Seemingly unaware of the other kids in her careâmost of whom were standing there staring, as if someone was getting in trouble and they didn't want it to be them.
“Maddie isn't here this afternoon,” Lynn bit out. Everyone knew,
everyone,
that where the kids were concerned, no one assumed anything. “She'd have had to sign her out and clear it with you face-to-face if Kara wasn't going to be in class. She knows the rules.”
And clearly this young woman didn't.
Lynn would have to deal with that later. Right now, she had to find Kara.
Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she tore out of the roomâand straight into Grant Bishop's arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
W
HEN
L
YNN
'
S
BODY
slammed into his, Grant
knew, instantly, that something was terribly wrong.
She turned before he could pull her fully into his arms, and righted herself. She was on her phone before she said a word to him.
“Lila, I need a lockdown. Immediately. Kara's missing.”
She hung up and called the police. A tense fifteen minutes later, a couple of detectives met them in Lila's office.
They wanted pictures. Descriptions of clothing and shoes and distinguishing marks. While the female officer was on the phone, checking for any reports of unattended children in the area, the male officer, Detective Smith, talked to Lynn.
She answered his questions as stoically as she had earlier when the police had requested the same information for Darin.
“There has to be some connection here,” Grant said as he paced the office. He needed everyone on the same page. “Kara and Darin know each other. They eat dinner together regularly. Darin thinks he wants to marry Kara's caregiverâwho happens to be away from the complex at the moment. They have to be together.”
Lynn stared at him openmouthed. “You think Darin and Maddie have Kara?”
“I think that Darin wouldn't set foot in your home that first time he was thereâbecause he won't go anyplace he hasn't been before unless I take himâbut the minute he saw Maddie there, he went in.”
He could see the confirmation of his memory in Lynn's gaze.
“He would never wander off on his own. But for Maddie...”
“You think her parents are in on it?” Lynn asked.
“Where is this Maddie person?” Detective Smith asked.
“With her parents,” Lynn told him. “Shopping.”
She pulled out her phone. Dialed.
“I'll take that,” Smith said, reaching for the phone. Lynn elbowed his hand away.
“Maddie's...special. She'll clam up if you...”
Grant understood. Smith was male. Maddie was scared to death of men.
Except Darin.
“Maddie.” Lynn turned her back to speak on the phone as the door opened and more officers entered the room along with Lila and some of the security personnel from The Lemonade Stand.
“We're on lockdown,” Lila told Detective Smith, after asking who was in charge. “All staff and residents have been ordered to check their offices and bungalows and report to the rec hall stat.”
“We'll want to speak with each one of them,” Smith said. “No one is to enter or leave this campus until we release them.”
“I understand, Detective. Thank you for your prompt response.”
Grant would have added his thanks if anyone had noticed him standing there.
One thing was clear: once a child was involved, the search and rescue policies escalated.
He nodded to himself, quietly going out of his mind. Would his brother really stoop to kidnapping to be with Maddie? Would Maddie put Kara at risk that way?
He just didn't think so. Couldn't find a way to make the pieces fit. Darin and Maddie both knew right from wrong. They might not realize how much of a panic they would create if Kara went missing, but they'd still know that it was wrong to take her in the first place.
The female detective called Kara's father. The police had insisted on making that call so that they could get a true read on him. The conversation was short. From the tone Grant heard coming from the other end of the line, Brandon was shocked and distraught. Not the sound of a guilty man.
“He's on his way to the airport,” the detective said as she ended that call.
“Maddie just about had a meltdown when we strayed from Lynn's list of instructions just to let me read Kara a bedtime story when she asked. There's no way that woman would take Kara without following protocol.” He was speaking to the room at large. Everyone, except Lynn, who was on the phone in the corner, stopped talking to look at him.
“And if she tried, my brother would tell her that they had to ask permission first. I know they think they're in love and that they give each other courage to do things they might not normally do, but the one thing we can count on with both of them is that they don't break rules.”
He didn't mean to hold the floor. But after seventeen years of living and breathing Darin, he knew his brother.
“If we waste time assuming they're fine and together, we're letting the danger they're in escalate.”
He did agree with one point: Darin and Kara were most likely together. The thought didn't relieve him at all.
Darin wouldn't have just wandered off with Kara. Which meant that something had happened...
Lynn dropped her cell phone back into her pocket and walked up to stand beside Grant. She leaned into him and said, “I spoke with Maddie
and
her parents. I spoke to her mother and father individually so they didn't repeat to each other what was going on in front of Maddie. They are definitely together. At the strip mall on Mountain View. They're bringing her back immediately. They aren't telling Maddie that either Darin or Kara are missing. Her mother, Martha, did say that Kara was upset when Maddie left her at class. She wanted to go shopping, too. Maddie started to get upset at leaving her that way, so her parents each put an arm around her and rushed her out.”
She looked at Grant. “Maddie's dance teacher said that she saw Kara walking behind Maddie and thought they were together.”
“Kara never walks behind Maddie,” Lila blurted out before Grant could.
“Maddie either holds her hand, or lets Kara run in front of her where she can see her,” he added. Though now that he thought about it... “Ever since Kara almost fell into a service hole I had opened, Maddie has clung to the little girl's hand anytime they're outside.”
An image of Darin walking beside Maddie on the sidewalk outside, his head held high, took his voice away.
He recalled his older brother's laugh when Maddie had belched loudly at the dinner table the other night.
Grant swallowed back tears.
They'd find him. And he'd keep him under lock and key after they did. No more relaxing, leaving Darin to walk by himself anywhere. No more...
“Wait.” Lynn's weight against him grew a little heavier. Standing with her, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, he gladly withstood whatever she had to give him. “They weren't outside yet,” she was saying, her gaze darting around from one of the serious expressions in the room to another. “Kara was walking behind Maddie inside the day care. The dance teacher is new. She thought Kara was going with Maddie. She didn't seem to know that every child has to be physically signed out before any of the children are released.”
“She knew,” Lila said. “I'll take care of that. But could this mean that Kara did walk out of the day care behind Maddie?” she said aloud what Grant was thinking.
“It sounds like it,” Smith said. “We need to know how Maddie and her parents exited the premises.”
Lynn already knew. And told them.
Did this mean that Darin wasn't with Kara? That the little girl was out in the world somewhere, wandering the streets by herself?
“Maybe she followed them and when they took off in their car without her, she couldn't get back inside the locked facility.”
“She could still be out there...” Lynn said, and the detectives dispatched a flurry of officers to comb the area.
Lila followed them to the door. “I'm going to go talk to the women and children gathering in the rec hall. We don't want panic to ensue.”
The managing director left, her expression calm but solemn. Grant wondered how these women did what they did day after day. Week after week.
The constant dangers and emotional and physical traumas would drive him over the edge.
Hell, he couldn't even keep him and Darin together.
* * *
S
HE
WAS
GOING
to fly out of her skin and burst into a million pieces that would never be able to be put back together.
Lynn knew the thought was crazy. And she couldn't stop it. Leaning against Grant, she listened while the detectives dispersed to perform their various duties, all revolving around finding Kara. It had been less than half an hour since she'd discovered her missing.
She was grateful for the tremendous response. Still...
Her phone rang. Grabbing it from her pocket with shaking fingers, she had to push three times to engage the answer button.
“Lynnie? Oh, my God, Lynnie. I just had to talk to you. Please tell me what's going on.”
She laced her fingers through Grant's and talked to her ex-husband, keeping an eye and ear on the detectives in the room, as well. Brandon was booked on a flight to Santa Raquel but wouldn't be arriving for another three hours.
He was distressed, pacing the airport, he said, but determined that they would find Kara and she would be fine.
Lynn agreed. And after she hung up, she laid her head on Grant's shoulder. It was either that or fall apart, and a mother lying supine on the floor was not going to help her toddler at all.
“We should be out there,” she told him softly as those in charge made decisions and gave orders around them.
“They want us here for now.”
She knew that. She just didn't agree with the decision to keep her and Grant in Lila's office, the current search headquarters, so that they could be available to anyone involved in the search at any time.
To identify a body? She tried not to think so. And was scared to death for the sweet man who'd been injured trying to save his wife's life, as well as for her precious little curly-haired angel.
“I pray they're together,” she said.
“If they are, Darin will keep her safe.” Grant spoke softly, and this time, he looked her in the eye.
She knew that if Darin was with Kara he would do all he could to help her. There were just too many ifs.
* * *
B
EFORE
M
ADDIE
EVEN
made it back, the phone rang again. Smith's phone.
“It's Detective Martinez,” he said to the room at large, as if the name meant something.
Grant had no idea who Martinez was but hoped he was part of the search team. And was calling with good news.
The helplessness, as he stood there with Lynn, moving from one part of the room to another, shaking his head right along with her every time Smith suggested they sit down, was diminishing what bit of control he had thus far managed to maintain.
Smith had told them it could be a long night.
The man had no idea.
Smith still had his disconnected cell phone in his hand as he approached Lynn and Grant. Her scrubs were purple today. The color of lilacs.
It was an inane thought that kept his feet on the ground.
“Martinez is in our forensics lab. She's going over the security tapes.”
His heart was pounding. Lynn's chin held high.
“She identified Kara on them, wearing the denim overalls and red shirt you described. She sees her running out after Maddie. Sees her stop when Maddie's parents drive away. And she sees Dan Cleveland approach her....”
Oh, God, no. Lynn's sharp intake of breath, her only reaction as she continued to give the detective her hard, focused stare, resonated all the way through him. Cold seeped into the room.
“He grabbed her, pulling her out of the camera's range.”
“You talked to him, right?” Lynn asked. “Ask him where she is.”
Grant did some calculations. “He couldn't have had her long,” he said. Based on the time stamp reported on the tape and when the man was arrested.
“He was still in the area when he was arrested,” Lynn said.
Smith nodded. “They're talking to him now. We'll get a call as soon as they know anything. I just wanted you two to know where we're at.”
“Is there any sign of Darin on the tapes?” Lynn asked the question.
“We don't know yet. Not to that point there wasn't. Martinez stopped viewing them as soon as she saw Kara.”
“But they're resuming looking at the footage now, right?” Grant asked.
“They've got a team on them at this point. If your brother is there, we'll know soon.”
He needed to get out of the room. Get outside. Breathe air. And comb the streets for the one person he couldn't live without.
Except that he couldn't leave Lynn standing there all alone. She was leaning on him. And he couldn't let her fall.
* * *
M
ARIA
C
LEVELAND
'
S
HUSBAND
buckled as soon as he was told he was caught on tape trying to snatch Kara.
“He did try,” Detective Smith told Lynn and Grant quietly fifteen minutes later. Maddie and her parents had arrived and were in another corner of the room with Sara and a couple of other police officers.
Sara had given a whispered message to Lynn as she'd come in. Maria had agreed to press charges. And was filing for divorce.
“He said he figured if he couldn't get to his wife's kids to use them for leverage, someone else's kid would do just as well. He figured the women who were keeping his wife hostage from him would release her to get one of their own kids back.”
Lynn's stomach cramped. She didn't have time to be sick but was afraid she might be anyway.
“You said he tried.” Grant's voice was firm beside her. Strong where she felt weak. “Not that he succeeded.”
“That's right. He said there was no way he was going down for kidnapping when he didn't do it. He said he saw Kara come out, tried to grab her, but some big guy came out of another door from the locked area, hit him once, hard, grabbed the kid and ran.”
“Darin?” Grant asked. “What other man would have been in the locked area?” She could feel his renewed tension as he stiffened. They were sitting on a leather couch, having finally given in to Smith's persuasions to do so, holding hands.