“Twenty-five years.”
“What?” She sat up, turned to him. “She’s been missing for twenty-five years? With no trace of her at all?”
“That’s right.”
“You had to have been just a kid then!”
“I was seven.”
“And yet you remember…”
“Like it was yesterday. I…knew the little girl. Her mother worked with my father.” He spoke slowly, choosing his way carefully. Like each word landed on a minefield and risked imminent explosion.
Rose and Frank had met at an educators’ conference. She’d been an elementary schoolteacher, while Frank was a high school principal and basketball coach. A match made in heaven.
Or could have been.
“Where did this happen? Here in Tyler?”
“No.” She seemed to be waiting for more. “It was in Massachusetts.” He was saying too much.
“What happened to the parents? Are they still there?”
“I have no idea where they are.” Claire’s father was dead. A shady man from the docks who’d run off when he’d found out that Rose was pregnant with Claire. Sanderson, Sr., had died in a bar brawl less than a year later, killed by the husband of the woman he’d just bedded.
And Rose? He didn’t want to know. “We moved away shortly after that and all we knew was what was on the news, which wasn’t much.”
“But you know she wasn’t found.”
“I was an impressionable kid. The incident stuck with me. I still periodically check the missing-persons database.”
“You don’t ever go back to a state of unawareness.”
She understood. And in a strange way, on a night when his only purpose was to give a measure of support, he’d found a moment of peace.
“When I get Sammie back…he won’t… I… Neither of us will ever be able to go back. We’ll be different.”
“Yes, but different might be better, too.” He knew with all of his being that she had to think that. Had to believe. To hope.
“Julie said something this morning shortly after I got to school. She apologized for not watching over Sammie more closely. She felt so guilty. And so do I. It’s my job to protect my son. And I didn’t. How can he ever forgive me?”
“Hey.” He nudged her arm, wanting to take her hand, but not doing so. “You have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.” Guilt ate a body alive with insidious tenacity. “Your son was at school right where he belonged. You aren’t allowed to be there babysitting him even if you wanted to.”
“My son left class.” Her voice had dropped an octave. “He misbehaved and put himself in harm’s way and that is my fault. I’m the only one in charge of teaching him. Training him. I try so hard but he butts heads with me on a constant basis. Probably because he doesn’t have a father around and that’s my fault, too.”
Cal debated his response in terms of being kind to her. And then spoke. “He left class, with permission, to use the restroom. That’s all you know. The kidnapper has it in for your father. He obviously planned this whole thing. He didn’t just happen to be in the right place at the exact time that Sammie misbehaved. And while Sammie doesn’t have a father, you’ve been discussing things with me, getting male perspective and allowing Sammie some freedoms based on our conversations.”
Her silence gave him pause. He sure as hell hoped he hadn’t made things more difficult for her.
“You think this…this monster was watching Sammie? That he’d have taken him, anyway, the first chance he saw?” Her leg bounced up and down. Continuously. Getting faster.
“Probably.”
“I keep a close eye on him. As you know, that’s part of what he complains about.”
“You obviously do a great job if this guy thought his best chance of getting to your son was while Sammie was in a secure school situation being watched over by trained professionals.”
The bouncing stopped. She rocked forward. And back. And then forward again.
“Sammie says I don’t let him grow up and be a man, but this is why…” Her voice broke with the threat of more tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said on a sigh. “I’m losing it here.”
“You have absolutely nothing to be sorry about and you are not losing it. As a matter of fact you’ve held up astonishingly well, considering. This is the first time I’ve seen you really cry.”
“It’s not something I do in front of my father.” She sounded stronger again.
“In front of your father? You’re kidding.” He said the words, and yet, thinking of the man inside the door behind them, what she’d told him made sense.
“From the time I was little I learned to hold back my tears around him,” she said softly. “Crying pisses him off. He says it’s a tactic females use to try to control men. It’s a sign of weakness. Of victimization rather than accountability.”
The guy was a first-class bastard.
But he was there. Insisting that mountains would move and his grandson would be brought home to them. From what Cal had seen, George Lowen was willing to get out there and move the mountains himself if need be.
“I must respectfully disagree. Crying is normal. Healthy. And part of being human.”
“When’s the last time you cried?”
He didn’t answer, knowing that his silence was an answer in itself.
“You just said it’s part of being human.”
He wasn’t surprised that she’d called him on the inconsistency.
“Which is why I’ve always envied people who could cry,” Cal said, the night, the circumstance, putting him in strange territory, making him a stranger to himself.
This night, these circumstances—it wasn’t real life.
It was a snippet of time outside of ordinary living. An anomaly that would seem surreal once Morgan’s son was home safe and sound.
“So why don’t you cry?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not like I sit around and try,” he said, giving her a sideways glance, glad he seemed to be distracting her. She was listening so he continued. “Might have something to do with the fact that I never knew my mother. She died when I was six months old.”
“That’s horrible! What happened?”
“She taught a program for accelerated students and was on an oceanography field trip. She went into the water at night with a couple of other teachers, on an ocean life study, and she and another teacher got tangled in the reef and drowned.”
“I’m so sorry! That’s awful.”
For his father it had been. Cal didn’t have any memories of her at all. But he missed knowing a mother—her absence had made him particularly eager to accept and return Rose Sanderson’s motherly care.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Nope. It’s just me and Dad.”
“He never remarried?”
“No.”
“So you went into teaching because of her? Because of your mother?”
It wasn’t that simple. “I teach because I enjoy it.” And because his father—who’d lost his prestigious career in education because of something Cal had told the police that had incriminated an innocent