Exposure (9 page)

"How come Mawy gets two ice cweams and Gwacie ownny gets one?" Gracie's expression was full of indignation as she craned her head around to stare up into her mother's face.

"Because Mary won't end up wearing her second scoop on her pretty dress," Emma said calmly and then added with absolute firmness before her daughter's indignation had a chance to escalate, "Gracie will get no scoops at all if she tries to make a big deal outta this. When you're a big girl like Mary you can have two scoops, too."

Bottom lip stuck out sulkily, Gracie looked up at her mother for a long, silent moment. Finally she said, "Wanna sit with Shewiff now." It was the closest she dared to come to rebellion, knowing from past experience that her mother would follow through on her threat in a red-hot minute if she persisted. She held her arms up to Elvis.

Emma looked at Elvis' crisply ironed khaki shirt and fresh jeans. Before she could protest, however, that his uniform would not benefit from an almost certain soiling by strawberry ice cream, he'd lifted her daughter out of her lap, parked his buns more firmly on the stool he'd been leaning them against, and plunked Gracie down in his lap. He pulled a stack of napkins from the dispenser and shook one out, wrapping it around the base of the cone Sam handed him for the little girl. "Strawberry, huh?"

She looked up at him solemnly. "It's my fave-wit. You wanna lick?"

"Thanks, Gracie. I'd like one very much."

"Don't eat the big stwawbewwy, though," she cautioned him, using both hands to hold the cone up to his mouth. "Thaz mine."

Staring at Emma over her daughter's head, Elvis opened his mouth and lapped his tongue in one strong, slow motion around the cone from the base of the ice cream up to its very tip. His gaze dropped to her breasts, and his cheeks flexed as he sucked in the little swirl his tongue had created. Then his heavy lids rose again, locking his gaze back onto hers. "Good," he said in a husky voice.

Emma had to fight the sudden desire to tip her scoop of French vanilla right off her cone and into the neckline of her top to cool herself down. She took a savage bite out of the ice cream, feeling flushed all over and tight and achy in spots that hadn't received attention in more than three years. Damn him; what did he think he was playing at here? Deliberately, she swiveled around to face Mary, giving him her back.

She was wrung out by the time Gracie finally finished her cone and they were able to leave. When Elvis Donnelly did not want to be disregarded, then he just plain was not disregarded. It seemed as though every time Gracie asked him a question—and Gracie being Gracie, she asked a million of them—he would answer her as best he could, but would then say, "But I could be wrong, sweetheart. What do you suppose your Momma has to say about that?"

Knowing darn good and well that Gracie would immediately demand Emma's opinion and she'd be forced to turn around and deal with him once again.

She finally made her escape and, with Mary accompanying her and Gracie, went back to the boarding house. She visited with the Kellys for a few moments before excusing herself to take Gracie upstairs to clean her up—although she had to grudgingly admit that Elvis had done every bit as good a job as she would have in keeping her daughter halfway presentable. He must have gone through a good-sized stack of napkins.

They caught the tail end of the parade, watching it wind down from their room. Then it was time for lunch. The ice cream hadn't been that long ago, but Gracie's cheeks were starting to fly red flags—a sure sign of fatigue—and Emma wanted her fed with something a little more substantial than sugar and fat before she put her down for her nap. They went downstairs and staked claim to a table before the cafe filled up with the post parade crowd.

Gracie wandered off as she always did once the meal was finished and Emma dawdled over a cup of coffee, thumbing through a newspaper that someone had left on the table. She visited with Ruby for several moments when the cafe owner brought the pot over to her table to freshen her coffee, and finally she pushed back from the table. Smiling, she looked around for her daughter. A nice long nap was certainly indicated. Then Gracie would be bearable for the fireworks this evening.

"Come on, angel pie," she said, bending to look under the table. "Time to go."

Gracie wasn't there.

She looked over to table seven, the one by the kitchen door that was always the last to be filled. Gracie wasn't there either. Her smile fading, she pushed to her feet, her eyes searching out every nook and cranny in Ruby's cafe.

It was all she could do to fight back the sickness that crawled up her throat when she discovered that Gracie wasn't in any of them.

Elvis was pecking out a report on the computer keyboard, using his right index finger and the eraser end of a pencil held clamped in his hook, when Emma burst into the sheriff's office. His first reaction when he looked up to see her bearing down on him, sans Gracie, was that she was coming to give him hell for playing games with her this morning.

He straightened, his blood running a little faster. He'd had fun messing with her earlier, a circumstance so rare these days as to seem almost alien. The brief opportunity to tease Emma at Sam's fountain had given him a feel-good rush; it had been exhilarating. Not too many occasions to participate in any sort of male-female sexual contests had presented themselves since he'd become disfigured nearly two years ago. He'd forgotten how aware of a woman you could get, how exciting it could be. One look at Emma's face, however, was enough to tell him she didn't share his excitement.

A closer look made him forget about male-female games altogether, and he surged to his feet. He was around the desk, through the open doorway, and standing in front of her before she got half-way across the room. "What?" he demanded. "What is it?"

"Gracie's gone." She stopped and looked up at him. She'd been desperately trying to hold herself together ever since she'd first realized her baby was nowhere in the cafe or boarding house. Telling herself to hang on, that she had to be strong, somewhere in the back of her mind had been the belief that if she could just get to Elvis he'd bring her daughter safely back to her. Seeing his solid bulk and calm expression now, tears rose in her eyes and her bottom lip lost its firmness.

Gracie was gone? Elvis felt as if someone had just slugged him in the gut. He watched Emma as she sucked her quivering lip into her mouth and brutally clamped her teeth down on it, clearly struggling for control. "She's—"

"Missing. Oh, God, Elvis, I've looked all over the boarding house, I tore the cafe apart, and I can't find her anywhere." She grabbed his forearm with both her hands, her fingers digging in just above the spot where warm flesh gave way to cool plastic. Tears spilled over her bottom lashes as she gripped him tightly. "Please," she beseeched him. "You've got to find her for me."

"I will." Extricating his arm, he put his hand under her elbow to usher her over to his work station.

"I will, Emma. Come on over to my desk. I'm going to need some information—"

The next thing he knew she'd torn herself away and was staring up at him in anguished betrayal, like a pup who'd expected to have its stomach scratched and had found itself brutally kicked instead. And like a wounded animal, her pain caused her to lash out blindly. "I don't need a paper-shuffler," she snarled, staring at him with bitter eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself in a puny attempt to stem the shakes that were beginning to make her quake from the bone on out. "Damn you, Sheriff, my bebe is missing!" On the ragged edge of hysteria, each word grew louder, shriller, as it left her mouth. "I don't have time to fill out forms and dot r's and cross t's; I need someone who will help me go out and look for her."

Jesus, such pain. "That's enough now; shhh." He tugged her trembling, resistant form into his arms, and when she would have pushed him away held her firmly. His good hand came up to stroke her hair, and he bent his head to speak with no-nonsense firmness directly into her ear. "Hush, now, Emma, stop it. We're not going to fill out forms and we aren't going to shuffle papers. I just need a little information to give me a place to start. Then I am going to find Gracie for you."

She stood in the circle of his arms, quivering and panting raggedly as the incipient hysteria slowly faded.

A little bit at a time his strength and warmth began to penetrate the red fog engulfing her; the subtle scents of clean man and laundered cotton began to soothe. Finally, drawing a deep breath, she held it a moment, released it in a slow, shuddering sigh, and then nodded against his chest. "Okay," she said hoarsely. "Oui. All right." She pulled back slightly and looked up at him, eyes awash, bottom lip quivering, chin wobbly. "I'm sorry, Elvis."

"No." He brought his hand around to swipe at the tears on her face. Using his thumb to wipe them briskly from her left cheek and then whisking his finger down her right cheekbone as if he were brushing away crumbs, he looked down at her with the unsmiling directness she'd come to expect from him and said forcefully, "You haven't got a thing to apologize for, you hear me? Your little girl is missing, and you're scared to death. But we're going to find her, Em. I promise you, nobody in this office will rest until we've found her for you." One way or another, his professional alter ego qualified.

Her brown eyes were enormous as her gaze locked with his. She stared up at him a moment before she swallowed, nodded, and then professed in a heartfelt whisper, "Oh, Dieu, I love you."

Elvis' heart slammed up against the wall of his chest, even though he knew perfectly well that she was responding solely to his oath to deliver her baby, safe and sound, back into her arms. The arm that was still wrapped loosely around her waist involuntarily squeezed her, but almost im-mediately he was setting her loose and taking a step backward. "Come on over here and have a seat," he instructed her briskly. "I need you to tell me what the circumstances were when you first noticed Gracie missing." Escorting her over to his desk, he pulled out a chair.

"Sandy," he directed the dispatcher who had been watching the drama unfold with unabashed interest, "put in a call for Ben. Unless he's right in the middle of a shootout, tell him to drop whatever he's doing and shag his butt on back here. Call George at home, too, and tell him his day off has been canceled. Then see if you can rustle up a cup of coffee for Mrs. Sands."

"Gotcha." She set to with efficient purpose.

Elvis turned back to Emma. "Okay, tell me everything," he said briskly, so she related her routine, telling him how Gracie played in the cafe for a while each day after their meal was finished.

She managed to maintain a grasp on her composure when she went on to relate how on this day, when she'd expected Gracie to be in the cafe when she'd finished her coffee, her daughter was nowhere to be found.

"Did you look up in your room?"

"Oui, of course. As soon as we realized she wasn't in the cafe, Ruby and Bonnie pitched in to help me look. But Gracie hadn't gone into the kitchen and she hadn't gone up to our room." Emma shoved her fingers through her hair, and holding it off her face, stared across the desk at the large sheriff. "Even if she had, Elvis, she wouldn't have been able to get in. I'm not accustomed to this small-town habit of leaving doors unlatched; it's just second nature to lock them behind me." Dropping her hand back to her lap, she blew out a breath. "So we went floor to floor then, calling. And I checked out in the back lot, where I've worked on the cars. S'il vous plait." Her lip started to tremble again as she stared at him imploringly. "Can't we go out and look for her now?"

He knew she'd probably be in hysterics again if he didn't keep her occupied and moving, so he stood up, pulled his gun out of the drawer and holstered it, gathered his keys, and without thinking held out his hook to her. "Come on."

She latched onto the proffered prosthesis as if it were a lifeline and allowed him to pull her to her feet. When she showed no inclination to release him, he gently extricated himself and led her to the door. Pausing by the dispatcher's desk, he said, "Have Ben and George split the square between 'em. Instruct them to talk to as many people as possible; somebody has to have seen her. Mrs. Sands and I are going to start with the waterfront. I'll be in and out of the Suburban, Sandy, so keep trying me on the radio if you have need to reach me."

"You got it." Sandy turned to Emma, extending a steaming mug. "Here, Mrs. Sands," she said. "Take this with you. And try not to make yourself sick with worry. We're gonna find your baby."

But they didn't. Emma and Elvis scoured the beach on which Gracie had collected shells; they talked to people on the waterfront and went into every business along the harbor, up to and including the tavern that would never allow a three-year-old past its doors. Emma listened to Elvis talk to his deputies on the car radio. As she watched the digital clock on the dashboard tick inexorably forward, she grew colder and colder, hope increasingly difficult to hang onto. Where was her baby?

Oh, God, where was she?

"You might as well go on home and get yourselves ready for the fireworks," Sam Mackey said to his two employees at four o'clock. "Things are pretty dead around here, so I'm going to lock up early."

In the wake of their departure, he flipped the Open sign on the door to read Closed, twisted the lock, and turned back to the register to cash out the till.

He couldn't stop thinking about Emma Sands' face when she'd been in with Elvis earlier to inquire about her little girl. She had tried so valiantly to hold herself together, but he'd never in his life seen such public fear and naked pain. He wondered if Gracie had been found yet. Knowing only too well what it was to lose a child, there was a rawness in his gut, and he prayed she had been.

This was a quiet island; they didn't get the kind of crimes committed in the big cities—by psychotics. Oh, sure, drugs and alcohol abounded—he sometimes thought substance abuse was more prevalent on this small island than in its urban counterparts, especially among the young, because aside from the old movie theater and the occasional dance or bingo night at the VFW hall there wasn't much organized entertainment to speak of. And where the boredom factor is high, booze and recreational drug use tend to flourish. But the crimes that occurred on Flannery Island from overindulgence in such substances tended to be vehicular in nature or acts of aggression against property and/or domestic partners. They'd had no pedophile snatch a little girl out from under her mother's nose.

Or they hadn't until now.

He knew it wasn't fair to make comparisons, yet he couldn't seem to avoid doing so during the brief drive home. Navigating the country roads by rote, he contrasted Emma's flagrant distress with the way Clare had shut down emotionally when they'd lost Evan. God, he wished Clare had worn even a tenth of her ragged emotions on her sleeve the way Emma Sands did, instead of burying everything she felt so deep inside of herself it had become virtually impossible to reach her. Perhaps then they could have propped each other up in their time of need and grieved together . . .

Perhaps then he could have prevented her from slipping away from him.

He'd try talking to her again tonight, he vowed as he pulled into the circular driveway and shut off the engine. He'd seen glimpses of the old Clare reemerge every now and then in the past few weeks, and it gave him hope that she was at long last coming out of her deep depression. He was determined to persist until he got her back, even if it meant digging and poking and prying. He missed his wife.

He heard the light patter of footsteps against tile as he tossed his keys in the bowl on the entryway table, and smiling, he turned to greet his wife.

The sight that greeted him caused his smile to congeal in place. His heart surged against the wall of his chest and then seemed to stop dead. When it commenced beating once again it was with a sick, irregular rhythm. Sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip. Oh, Jesus, Clare, he thought despairingly, what have you done?

"Hi, Mis-too Mackey," Gracie Sands said, looking up at him. "You know when my maman's gonna come pick me up?"