She put it out of her head now as if it had meant nothing at all.
It wasn’t late—just nine thirty—but the house was quiet. Leah hadn’t been feeling well when Lauren picked her up at the ranch. She had barely eaten dinner and had gone to bed not long after.
Anne Leone had told Lauren her daughter had done fine at her sleepover, but in practically the next breath had expressed her concern that Leah was possibly wound too tight, masking feelings that would have to find an outlet somewhere. And it was true. Leah was very good at masking her feelings. She didn’t like calling attention to herself. Where Leslie had always felt the need to challenge and push boundaries, Leah had always contained herself and meticulously followed every rule. She had always been the perfect child.
Lauren had to admit she had too often been willing to take advantage of that in these years since Leslie’s abduction. The burden of it all was exhausting. If her remaining child chose not to come to her with problems or fears or feelings too difficult to deal with, it was so much easier for her to accept relief than question that illusion of peace. Don’t borrow trouble, her own mother always said. Don’t borrow trouble when you can just ignore it.
She went to her daughter’s room now. A light was still glowing through the crack of the barely open door. Lauren knocked softly and pushed the door open another couple of inches.
Leah hastily swiped tears off her cheeks and pulled the covers up around her. She sat tucked up against the headboard, hugging a pillow. In that instant she looked eight instead of nearly sixteen. A little girl lost in sadness.
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” Lauren said quietly, coming to sit on the edge of the bed.
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not,” Lauren said softly, reaching out to touch her daughter’s cheek. “Sad?”
The tears welled up and over her lashes like big raindrops. “I miss Daddy.”
“I do too, baby,” Lauren confessed, taking Leah in her arms and holding her close. “I miss him so much.”
She couldn’t help but wonder where they would be if Lance hadn’t left them. Would they have pulled themselves together by now? Would they have found some way to cope? Would they have left Santa Barbara? Or would the wound have closed up around them and scarred over, the memory of it fading over time?
Or would they have come apart at the seams? The statistics of marriages surviving the loss of a child had been against them. Guilt and blame infected relationships. The differences in how each partner handled the grief often caused resentment.
Lauren would never have given up or given in on the idea of finding Leslie. Would Lance?
“I’m doing the best I can, sweetheart,” she murmured, not sure if her words were for Leah or for her husband.
“I know, Mommy,” Leah whispered.
“Do you know how much I love you?” Lauren asked.
Leah nodded.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded again, looking down.
Lauren knew that was a lie told for her benefit, and as she had done so many times, she accepted it as truth, more willing to take the brief hit of guilt than find out what kind of disaster might be brewing behind door number two. Even if she vowed not to, she would put off changing her ways for another night, using exhaustion as an excuse.
She kissed her daughter’s forehead and told her to get some sleep, and hoped that Anne Leone was wrong.
In the hall, she went to the window that looked out on the front yard, her skin crawling at the memory of last night. He had been out there, looking in at her. Tonight she had twice seen county cruisers turn around in front of the gate. Detective Mendez’s doing, she supposed.
She went downstairs and made yet another patrol, checking locks on doors and windows before going to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea. She thought again of Anne as she went about the task. She liked Anne’s no-nonsense yet compassionate way. She wondered if maybe Anne was the better person to help Leah on her path through the grief of losing her sister and her father. Lauren knew she herself wasn’t qualified to help anyone. For her to help Leah was like sending a person who couldn’t swim to save a drowning man. The blind leading the blind, as Anne had said.
She thought of little Haley Leone, the only witness to a terrible crime—her mother murdered literally before her very eyes. Anne and her husband had given the child stability, safety, security. Lauren didn’t feel as if she could offer any of those things to her own daughter—or even to herself.
She wondered how Leah would feel about talking with Anne.
Lauren curled into a corner of the sofa in front of the great room’s massive stone fireplace and sipped her tea. She thought of Leah before all of this had happened—Leah as a little girl Haley’s age and a little older—and realized she wasn’t exactly right in thinking her youngest didn’t share her feelings.
She remembered long quiet talks with Leah about all kinds of things—her love of butterflies and her kindness for children who were different or awkward, her sense of fair play and justice, her very serious concerns about hurting the feelings of her favorite dolls when she became too grown up to play with them.
No, Lauren thought, Leah wasn’t a child who closed herself off; she was a young lady too sensitive to her mother’s fragility. She was a shy younger sister pushed into the shadows by a sibling whose presence was huge and bright, even in her absence.
What a sorry excuse for a mother you are, Lauren.
She was more concerned with vengeance for the daughter she didn’t have than with being a parent to the daughter she did have.
She would talk to Anne.
Setting her cup on the coffee table, she picked up the pile of the day’s mail and began to sort through it. Bills and junk mail. An invitation to join a gym. A brochure advertising all the events of the upcoming summer festival of music.
It always struck her as odd how the rest of the world went around the catastrophes of the people in it, like water parting around boulders in a river and running on as if it didn’t matter. That was life. It just kept going, whether any one person wanted it to or not.
The Oak Knoll Summer Festival of Music was going to go on as planned without anyone caring that Roland Ballencoa had come to live in their midst, or that Lauren Lawton was struggling with the need to do something about that.
She set the brochure aside and went on to the next piece of mail, a plain ivory envelope with no address and no stamp.
Her heart began to pound. No address, no stamp.
Goose bumps prickled her skin.
The flap of the envelope was stuck shut just at its very point. She popped it free with a flick of her thumb, pulled the card from it, and read the single typed line.
Did you miss me?
29
Mendez owned a small Spanish-style house less than a mile from Roland Ballencoa as the crow flew. The neighborhood, built mostly in the forties and fifties, was quiet and safe. His neighbors were a mix of young families and empty nesters. He knew most of them by name.
He had fixed the place up himself—and with the help of buddies and brothers-in-law—knocking down walls, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms. The back door led out to a small walled courtyard garden with a fountain gurgling in one corner.
He had built a covered patio on the back side of his single-car garage for a workout area, and hung both his speed bag and heavy bag from a sturdy beam along with a chin-up bar bolted between a pair of posts.
He worked at the speed bag now, falling into the mesmerizing rhythm where his fists stroked the bag and his mind floated, almost as if in meditation. A fine sheen of sweat coated his bare chest as he channeled his anger and frustration into the focused energy needed to work the bag. The sweat beaded and ran down between his shoulder blades to pool in the shallow dip at the small of his back and soak into the back of his shorts.