Forever After (38 page)

The steep drive was drifted shut. Her Volvo would never have made it through, and the only tracks visible came from his truck. And the mobile home was dark. He’d pounded on the door a few minutes ago, just to make sure, but no one answered. It was clear Jenna hadn’t come back here.

Maybe she’d gone to his house. She’d returned the keys to Ma, but maybe Ma had showed her where the spare key was hidden. Maybe
once she made it to the Falls, she hadn’t wanted to risk driving in the country. But when he got there, it was the same story. No lights on in the house, and no tire tracks or footprints in the snow to indicate she’d ever been there.

Where could she be?
He tried calling her again and got the same message. He clicked off and dialed Bryn. Maybe she’d heard from Jenna. A sleepy voice answered.

“Hey, Bryn, sorry to wake you up, but I’m looking for Jenna. You haven’t heard from her, have you?”

“No … I thought she was in Oklahoma. With you.” He heard her stirring, then a little gasp. “Oh! It snowed! What time is it anyway?”

“Almost five thirty. Sorry.” He explained about Jenna driving back in the storm and told Bryn when he’d last talked to her. “But she’s not answering her phone now, and I can’t think of anywhere else she might have gone, can you?”

“No … It doesn’t make sense.” Bryn sounded as confused as he felt. “You don’t think she would have gone to the Morgans’, do you?”

“I doubt it, but maybe. Do you have their number?”

“I can find it. I’ll call them and give you a call either way.”

“Okay. If they haven’t heard from her, I’m going to head back toward Springfield … see if I can find her, or at least get through on the phone.”

“I’ll call you in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Bryn.”

Lucas drove through Java Joint for a cup of black coffee, killing time waiting for Bryn to call back. The coffee shop was empty except for a lone barista serving the drive-through window. While he waited for his order, his gaze was drawn to the corner table where he and Jenna had first reconnected after the fire. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

He drove slowly through town, trying to think the way Jenna would. Bryn called to say she’d spoken to Bill Morgan and they didn’t know anything about Jenna. Turning onto Grove Street, Luc headed for Main. The windows of the homeless shelter were dark, but smoke poured from
the chimney stack and swirled against the haze of a streetlight. He wondered how many people were sleeping there tonight. What would they all do on another night like this if the shelter shut down?

Intent on getting back on the Interstate as quickly as possible, he pressed the accelerator. But something made him slow down again. Jenna wouldn’t have gone there. Would she?

Movement behind the shelter caught his eye. Dogs maybe. No, something bigger. Deer? They sometimes wandered down from the woods in Ferris Park. He slowed the car and leaned across the seat to wipe condensation from the passenger side window.

A man in a long coat stood at the corner of the building. A shelter resident out for an early-morning smoke, probably. He stood with his head down, appearing to be talking to himself.

Lucas shifted into drive and started to pull away, but the figure turned and walked toward him—staggered was more like it. And it was a woman! A baseball cap obscured her features, but the gait and mannerisms were definitely feminine. Something about her seemed vaguely familiar. She held a bottle in her hand and seemed oblivious to his presence.

In the cab beside him Sparky pressed his nose to the window, watching the woman, his ears pricking. Lucas watched until it became obvious the woman was drunk. He didn’t have time to get involved, but he’d call the Hanover Falls police and have them come and pick her up. He slipped his cell phone out and pulled away from the curb. He looked back just in time to see the woman stumble and fall into the snow. She lay there, stone still.

He hit the brakes. He grabbed his cane and jumped from the truck, crossing the uneven lawn as fast as his leg would allow. Sparky beat him to the still form and dropped at her side with his nose on the ground, as if he was working. Odd. He’d been trained to alert on fifteen different substances, but vodka wasn’t one of them.

Lucas punched 911 into his phone as he hurried to the woman’s
side. He was relieved to hear her moaning. At least she wasn’t dead. The stench of vomit and liquor hit him before he dropped to one knee beside her. But there was something else. Something even stronger.

Acrid vapors stung his nostrils and he turned away, covering his nose.

Gasoline.

His phone came to life. “911. State your emergency, please.”

“Send paramedics to the homeless shelter on Grove Street,” he said. “And you’d better send the fire chief, too.”

A gray Volvo wasn’t going to be easy to spot in this monochromatic landscape.

45

T
he rearview mirror reflected a rim of light on the eastern horizon that illumined a cloud-free, lavender sky. Lucas was still shaken after the odd encounter with the woman at the homeless shelter earlier this morning. He’d left as they were loading her into an ambulance, still barely conscious. Chief Brennan had arrived on the scene and Andrea Morley was on her way when Lucas excused himself, far more concerned about Jenna than the fact that they’d likely caught their arsonist.

Lucas felt his hopes rise with the sun as he headed west on I-44 past Springfield. At least he could see more than three feet around him now. He drove slowly, keeping his eyes peeled.

His only hope was that as the sun came up they’d be able to spot Jenna’s car. Two of the vehicles they’d towed last night had slid thirty and forty feet beyond the shoulder into dense woods. If the drivers hadn’t called for help, they’d never have seen them in the dark—certainly not while it was still snowing. But even in broad daylight, a gray Volvo wasn’t going to be easy to spot in this monochromatic landscape.

His cell phone rang and he jumped. He slid it open. His mom.

“Any word yet?”

“Not yet, Ma. I’ll let you know.”

“Where are you now?”

“Probably half an hour west of you. But I’m about ready to turn around and head back to the Falls again. She’s got to be somewhere between here and there.”

“This is making me crazy,” she said.

“Yeah … me too. So help me if she just forgot to charge her phone—and if they find her alive—I’m going to kill her.” He chuckled, imagining the relief of being able to spring that line on Jenna.

It would make her laugh.

His mother, on the other hand, did not think it was even a little bit funny. “Lucas! What is wrong with you?”

“Don’t worry, Ma. We’ll find her.” His words rang false in his own ears. He was past worried. …

He hung up and swung around in the median and headed back east toward Springfield and the Falls. Judging by the time he’d last talked to Jenna, along with the weather reports, she had to have made it at least this far east. He would concentrate his search between this exit and the Hanover Falls interchange.

The sun was climbing quickly and he slipped his sunglasses on, training his eyes on the right side of the roadway, where her car should be if she’d slid off the road. The radio said the temperature was headed for the upper forties today, and thankfully, the snow was already beginning to melt wherever patches of sunlight landed.

His gaze darted from the shoulder of the road—keeping a lookout for errant tracks in the remaining snow—then back to the woods in the distance where the snow was still deeply drifted.

He drove east for three or four miles before he noticed tracks in the median that looked like something more than the usual pattern he’d seen from emergency vehicles and cars that’d decided to turn around and drive out of the storm last night.

Something made him pull off onto the median, and that’s when he saw it—the gray top of a car blanketed in snow one hundred feet off the opposite side of the Interstate. How in the world had she gotten clear over there?

He drove his truck as far into the ditch as he could without getting stuck, then flung open his door. “Come on, Sparky. Let’s go, boy.”

They slogged through snow that had drifted to ten or twelve inches in last night’s winds. A trickle of water ran through a ravine at the bottom of the ditch. Sparky leapt over it gracefully, but Lucas picked his way over a natural bridge of stepping stones, praying he didn’t slip and fall into the icy water.

His left leg ached like an abscessed tooth and his right one wasn’t much better. But he kept going, pushing his way through the woods to where the car rested.

It seemed as if they’d been trudging for hours without getting any closer to the car, but finally they got near enough that Lucas could have seen through the windshield if it hadn’t been covered with snow.

Sparky must have recognized Jenna’s car because he started barking and raced ahead.

Lucas finally caught up to him and moved through snow that felt like concrete. He shuddered when he pushed away enough snow to see that the front of the car had been crushed like a soda can.

He fell against the driver’s side fender, knocking on the door even as he brushed more snow away with the broad sleeve of his jacket.

“Jenna? Open up! It’s me!” He tried the car door. Locked.

“Jenna!”

Nothing. He held his breath. “Jenna?” He banged on the windows now, not caring if he broke the glass.

The windows were frosted over and he scraped beneath the remaining snow, clearing a patch big enough to look in and see if she was okay, terrified of what that porthole in the snow might reveal.

He bent and peered inside. She wasn’t in the driver’s seat, but it was
so dark inside the car—the other windows and windshields obscured by snow—that he couldn’t tell where she was. She must have climbed into the back, trying to keep warm. He shouted her name again, pounding on the car as he made his way through the snow around to the other side of the car.

He cleared the snow off of there, too and peered into the windows. The interior was well lit now, with light coming through the other side. The airbag had deployed and lay in a heap across the front seat.

But the car was empty.

There didn’t seem to be a trail leading from her car …

46

S
parky barked at the trees limbs swaying overhead, and Lucas turned 360 degrees, scouring the woods, trying to figure out where Jenna could have gone. There didn’t seem to be a trail leading from her car, but then, the snow had probably obscured it.

She couldn’t have been thrown from the car. The windows and windshields were intact. Had she somehow walked out of there?

Or had someone seen her go off the road last night? Had she been rescued hours ago? He pictured her warming her hands by a fire in some hotel along the road to Tulsa and prayed it was prophetic.

He imagined himself giving the missing person’s report and wracked his brain to remember what Jenna had been wearing when she’d left the Cheesecake Factory.

Something purple, he thought. She would have called it plum or magenta or some fancy-sounding name. Her coat was black leather, he remembered that. He couldn’t have named one other item she was wearing—except for her goldfish necklace, which she was never without.

A woodpecker drilled in a tree high overhead, and a mockingbird
gave his lonesome call from somewhere across the wood. Sparky was having a heyday, barking at the birds and chasing imaginary squirrels. He took off up the other side of the ravine. Lucas called him back, using his sharp I-mean-business voice.

Sparky stopped and turned at the sound of his voice but turned again and kept running until he’d disappeared over the ledge behind a copse of trees.

“Sparky! Get back here!”

In reply a sharp bark echoed back at him.

“Sparky! Come!” Fine time for the dog to abandon all his training.

He waited a moment, thinking surely Sparky would get tired of chasing whatever he was barking at and obey his command.

Instead he barked again. His dark head appeared at the top of the rise, and he looked down and gave Luc a good chewing out, then disappeared again.

Grumbling, Lucas started the steep climb up the side of the ravine. Using trees for leverage, he prayed he didn’t twist an ankle. As the sun rose higher in a blue morning sky, the thaw turned the leaves into slippery mush underfoot.

Sparky must have heard him coming because he chose that moment to charge down the slope. But when Lucas reached for his collar, the dog pranced out of reach and headed back up the ravine.

No amount of yelling could get him to obey a simple command. When Lucas finally pulled himself over the ledge to the top, he understood why.

Jenna lay on her back, her coat unbuttoned and spread beneath her. Her face was ghostly pale. He couldn’t see any blood, but her left leg was bent at an odd angle. Sparky stood over her, alternately nudging her and barking his heart out.

Lucas caught his breath and took off running—as fast as his legs would let him. His mind seemed to work at high speed and in slow motion all at the same time.