The Hiding Place (23 page)

She surprised herself by not breaking down in sobs. Her pain was now too deep for tears. She knew Nick would go east with Claire and leave her here. Last week that realization would have almost killed her, but now she was dying inside anyway, dying to know all of the truth about what had happened to her baby.

The day after Jordan had told Veronica about Laird’s lost child, she finally managed to stop crying. Her nurse, Anne, thought she was in the depths of drug withdrawal and, in a way, that was true. Since Jordan had confessed that Tara had borne a baby who had died—and whom he and Laird and Jen had cremated and told no one else about—Veronica Britten Lohan realized she had indeed been drugged by Jordan’s twisted version of family love and loyalty.

Tara’s words kept clanging in her ears as if set to Tchaikovsky’s dirgelike melody, “None but the Lonely Heart.”

“I walked all the way in from the back entrance,” Tara had said. Imagine that, walking by oneself, against rules and regulations, despite fences and gates, through storm and distance, defying Jordan Lohan all the way. How inspiring! Tara had always reminded Veronica of her better self, of what she should have been, and she vowed right now to resurrect that self as soon as possible.

Veronica had decided, whatever the price she would pay, she was withdrawing from the Lohan clan.

However Tara had gotten in, Veronica had hatched a plan to get out. Of course, that would involve theft, threats, lying, flight and a new life of her own choosing, but if her despicable son Laird could do all that, so could she.

Nick had scented Beamer with one of Claire’s flip-flops, and now he and Tara followed the eager Lab on a trail Nick and Claire had laid down the previous day. Tara tried to enjoy the crisp, sunny September weather, but it just made her heart heavier. A two-and-a-half-year-old child should be by her side, toddling along, chattering, taking in the sights, sounds and scents.

She knew Nick was doing his best to distract her with a change of scene from her office. It scared her that she found it hard to concentrate. Maybe she did need a break.

“In a way,” he told her, “trackers have to be what we call fence walkers. They need to walk the line, to stay rational, not emotional. As a tracker, you might have demons within, but you’ve got to react like a battle-hardened veteran on the outside.”

“That sounds like army lingo—like what you might have told the guys you were training with the dogs,” she said as they followed Beamer’s lead down to the mailboxes and then uphill again. “And I get the personal point, because you know how obsessed I am with my own hunt for answers. If the shoe fits…” she said, pointing at Claire’s flip-flop, which he had jammed in his jeans pocket.

“I was also thinking of myself,” he admitted, frowning, as his longer strides easily kept up with her and Beamer. “I can preach rationality all I want, but I was ready to fall apart in the Middle East, not only from losing Alex and my mother, but two guys I was training.”

“Nick, I’m sorry. That must have been terrible for you. Did you blame yourself? And did you fall apart?”

“To the latter question, no way. Not in front of heroes who face that sort of tragedy all the time.”

“But now that you’ve been home and left your buddies there, it’s still bothering you—maybe even more.”

“Tara, we’re out here to learn some tracking skills, and that’s it, okay?”

So close but so far away from what he had buried inside, she thought. She’d finally shared her problems with him. Why couldn’t he just open up to her? But she knew enough to answer her own question. Because he was a man, of course. She understood at least that much about the male sex. But he had chinks in his macho, duty-bound, rationality-at-all-cost armor. He had admitted he’d been too brusque with Claire and her, and she thought he was finally realizing that rearing a kid was not like training a dog.

Tara wished she could help Nick fight his pain, but she was trying to build all sorts of walls against her own demons right now, and the effort was draining her.

“Beamer, halt,” Nick commanded, and the dog obeyed. “Here, Tara,” he said, pointing ahead as if eager to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. “See my tracks next to Claire’s small ones? Besides the different sizes, what else can you tell about the man walking with the child—just from the prints?”

Tara bent over to study Nick’s footprints, impressed in the soil between two small rocky outcrops. Loving puzzles as she did, this challenge would ordinarily have intrigued her, but she just wanted to get back to her office.

“The adult is a big man, probably not more than middle-aged,” she said. “His weight is mostly in muscle and height, not girth, because the prints seem quite deep but not wobbly, like a fat or older man might walk. And the strides are long but the prints aren’t blurred, so he probably wasn’t walking too fast. In short, he must not know I’m after him.”

“I bet he’d walk even slower if he knew you were after him,” he teased. “But from the prints alone, how do you know it’s a man?”

He had her there. She’s the one who had overstepped. “Depth of the footprint, especially around the heel?” she ventured.

“Many men put their heels down first, but so do some women.”

“I get the hint. These adult prints show someone who walks with his or her weight quite evenly distributed, not to one side or the other. And the person, probably a man, must not have been in too much of a hurry.”

“Better. Now you’re studying pressure points. Such close observations can reveal weight and height, but also hesitation, indecision, confidence or fear. So soon you’re into the realm of emotions and personality as well as physical traits.”

“But such close observation will give you a sore neck and back,” she said, straightening. “And you won’t look ahead to see what’s coming up next, such as maybe your prey, hiding around the next tree, waiting to get you.”

“Good thinking. You need to be especially careful if you’re dead tracking—that is, following your prey faster than he or she is moving, trying to catch up.”

“Dead tracking. It’s a scary term, let alone a scary idea. So, besides watching what the dog’s doing, you have to balance your time between studying the tracks and keeping an eye out.”

“Roger that. Besides, if you stare at tracks too long, you start to lose depth perception and can get not only neck and backaches but eyestrain or a headache. After a while, you can be affected by what’s called ground surge, where the earth seems to be moving in waves. You can almost get nauseous from it.”

“I’ve already been suffering from ground surge, ever since I fainted in Jordan Lohan’s office. It’s as if the earth is going to rise up to smack me in the face or swallow me right up.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been feeling I’m light-headed, at a high emotional altitude, since I laid eyes on you six days ago. Tara,” he said, turning her to face him, “I can’t promise much right now, but I’m asking you to go with Claire, Beamer and me to North Carolina. I can’t leave you here, and I want to protect you. I need to do my duty—my mission—to train those dogs for the troops. But I also need to be a parent to Claire, and I could really use your help. Tara, in all kinds of ways,
I need you!
”

She longed to throw herself into his arms and agree to anything he wanted. To keep Claire—to be with Nick! Though he had most certainly not proposed marriage—and, even for her, it was far too early for that—she wanted to scream out,
Yes! Yes!
It was her happily-ever-after dream come true, just like in Claire’s favorite fairy tales.

But he was asking her to leave her own mission. She could not do that, not for anyone, until she’d settled how little Sarah had died and somehow found a way to make the child’s short, short life worthwhile. When Nick had come home, she’d briefly seen him as her enemy because he might take Claire and leave. Now, he was asking her to go with them, but he’d become her enemy again, tempting her to leave her quest. She cared deeply for him, was starting to love him. She admitted that to herself at least, but she could not give in.

“Nick, I’m sorry, but the timing’s wrong now. I’m sure you understand why. I have to do my duty, too. I’m on a mission, in a way, tracking someone who’s dead.”

Jaw tight, he nodded. He seemed so stoic, but that telltale vein on the side of his throat throbbed. She could tell he wanted to say more, maybe wanted to grab and shake her.

“I understand,” he whispered, not looking at her now but down the trail. “Well, hey, there’s not much more of this exercise left. Beamer’s really getting too old for long treks, so this won’t take long. Beamer, find.”

With Nick walking behind, either hurt or fuming, Tara followed the dog along the path above their closest neighbor’s house and finally, toward their own. She couldn’t bear to look at him again right now. Soon they’d be at the spot where someone had sat or lain to spy on her or on them. How that had upset and frightened her at first, and now it seemed like nothing—unless she could tie her watcher to the Lohans somehow. Could they have hired someone to alert them if she caught on to their scheme? No, that didn’t make sense, because just watching the house would not tell them if she was trying to expose them from her actions within.

At least she knew they had no worries from Rick anymore, and she’d checked on Dietmar Getz earlier only to find he was back in Germany for an extreme biking race there. Marv Seymour seemed too weird and weak to do more than leave roses, and she hadn’t heard a thing from him since she’d cut ties.

“You took Claire to the scent pool?” she called back to Nick when she saw where Beamer was headed.

“Yeah, we went this far, but not up to the old cabin. The trail ends here.”

“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t,” she said in a shaky voice. She’d seen something small glitter in a wayward shaft of sun through the scrim of pine branches and thought she recognized it.

“What?” he asked, as she stooped and pointed. “Damn!”

On the ground, surrounded by dried pine needles and fallen aspen leaves, lay two sequins, one silver and one gold.

W
hen Tara went back to her office to check her calls and e-mails, Nick followed, still arguing.

“Two sequins doesn’t automatically mean Marcie was the one watching the house,” he insisted. “What’s her motive? I guess it’s possible that she just stepped out for a walk that night she was here, and I didn’t hear her. Distraught, she wandered around, sat down for a while above the house, losing the sequins off her jacket, then—”

“Oh, you would defend her. Maybe she was fixated on you and was up there stalking you before she dropped in when Rick died—ran right to you for comfort, which you quickly gave her. She said you were ‘so nice’ when you visited them, and she sure hung on you that night.”

He muttered something she luckily didn’t hear. Beamer sat in the middle of the room, his head turning from one to the other as they raised their voices. Hands up, palms out, Nick said, “Okay, okay, let’s look at this a different way.”

Despite his strident tone, she turned away and played her messages. One was from Robert Randel, the longtime Lohan family photographer. He’d be back in the office tomorrow, and she could stop to see him about having a picture taken with her niece, the pretext she’d used to get an appointment without tipping him off, just in case he was on the Lohan payroll for more than his photography.

“Look at it what different way?” she asked, scrolling through her e-mails. Two from clients, none from Elin Johansen at the clinic, whom she’d taken a chance on e-mailing. That pretext was that she wondered if Elin could give Claire private piano lessons; the real reason was to see if Tara could jog her memory about the night she was found bleeding in the snow.

“You’re not even listening,” Nick said. He spun her to face him. Thrown off balance, she sat back on the corner of his desk with him leaning over her between her spread legs as if to pin her there. “Let’s say,” he went on, “that Rick was the one who was up there spying on you, maybe the one who was at Red Rocks that day the boulder just missed you. So he told Marcie what his deal was with Clay, and she agreed to help him with it. When he was busy, she came up here to keep an eye on you.”

“For Clay?”

“That’s my guess.”

“That’s possible, I guess. At least we can question Marcie tomorrow after Rick’s funeral,” she said, pushing him away, though he helped her up.

“Or maybe,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest, “when Rick killed himself, she picked up where he left off, to keep the money coming in. Working at the L Branch tavern, she can’t have earned much on her own, and then there are funeral expenses.”

“I agree with you that Clay could have a vendetta against me, but the man’s in prison and most of his funds must have gone to lawyer’s fees. And I think Rick and Marcie would have been living higher on the hog if he hadn’t been strapped for cash in the first place.”

She faced him squarely, hands on hips. “Nick, haven’t you ever heard the saying, ‘Follow the money trail’? It’s more or less what you’re doing, working for the army until you can build your own dog-training business here. I mean, I know duty calls, but you also need to support yourself and Claire.”

“True. So?”

“So Clay
might
have some money stashed somewhere, but if I had Beamer’s nose, I’ll just bet I could follow the stench of big bucks to Jordan Lohan. He probably wanted me watched to be sure I didn’t…” Her voice wavered and trailed off.

“Didn’t what? Put a big banner up outside saying the Lohans lied about your child? What could Jordan get out of having someone watch the house?”

“I—I don’t know. Maybe to see how you and I were getting along?”

“What the hell does he care, as long as you leave his little Laird alone—Oh, now I see where you’re going.”

“You said some big shot with power and money, some local person, has upped the ante again for you to take the Fort Bragg job. Maybe someone besides Claire was hoping you’d take me with you—get me out of this area, out of the Lohans’ hair, so to speak. You took a good look at those power photos of Jordan with local and national politicos in their house. He could have pulled some strings to get your army contacts to push you to go and take me, too. I mean,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm now, “it wouldn’t be the first time someone in political office did something illegal and immoral.”