Evidence of Life. Barbara Sissel Taylor
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slowed, hunting for her Cherokee, praying to catch sight of it.
The BMW had barely come to a stop before Kate had the door open. “What are you doing here?” She hauled Abby from the driver’s seat and searched her face, both of them heedless of the falling rain.
Abby shook her head, starting to cry from fear and exhaustion. She stammered that her family was missing. “You haven’t seen them?”
“No. Oh, Abby.” Getting the sense of it, Kate folded Abby into her arms, held her tightly and released her. “Come on,” she said. “We’re getting soaked.”
They went up the front walkway and onto the porch. Kate made introductions as they worked their way through the throng. Abby met neighbors, a lot of them in uniforms, and quickly learned that because the ranch was high and dry, and maintained near-full electrical power from a built-in generator system, it made an ideal base for rescue operations. She was reassured that evacuations and search efforts were ongoing, but then someone mentioned the dozens of people who were missing.
Abby turned to the porch rail and braced herself.
“But not Nick,” Kate said. “I’m sure he’s found shelter somewhere.” Kate brought Abby around, walked with her toward the kitchen door, keeping up a reassuring stream of chatter, and then George spotted them.
It was almost comical the way his astonished glance bounced from Abby to Kate, and once she explained what Abby was doing there, he said, “She needs to talk to Dennis.”
“Dennis Henderson is the Bandera County sheriff and a good friend of ours,” Kate told Abby.
And then Dennis was there, and once Kate introduced them, he took charge, putting his hand under Abby’s elbow, guiding her into Kate’s kitchen where it was warm and quiet. He sat Abby down and assured her he would do all he could to help her locate her family. By then, she was shivering, and he brought her a towel and a cup of hot coffee that Kate had generously laced with brandy.
Kate brought Abby a pair of dry tennis shoes and socks, and while she changed into them, the sheriff sat across from her and began asking a series of questions: Why did she think Nick and Lindsey had come this way? Did she know what route they’d taken? What was the reason for their trip? Could Abby describe what they were wearing when they left home?
She managed to give him the physical descriptions, but when it came to the rest, her eyes teared. She didn’t know the answers. “I thought they were going to camp out, but they didn’t. They spent Friday night in San Antonio. I don’t know why.” She clamped her lips together, chin trembling. She was horrified. How could she not know?
“Do you know what campground they were headed to?”
Abby shook her head, miserably. “There are several that we’ve gone to before, but I don’t know where Nick made reservations. I didn’t ask. How could I not ask?”
“It’s all right,” the sheriff said. He found a tissue and handed it to her.
She blew her nose and described Lindsey’s phone call, saying she was almost positive Lindsey had said they were at a gas station. “A Shell gas station,” Abby said, “in Boerne.”
Sheriff Henderson seemed pleased with that; he said it gave him a place to start, and he did go there a few days later, once the water receded, and he spoke to the gas station attendant, a high school kid who remembered Lindsey. She was really cute, the kid said. She asked for the restroom key, but he’d gotten busy and couldn’t recall whether she’d been the one to bring it back. But it was there, on its hook behind the cash register, so he guessed someone must have returned it. He told the sheriff he thought he saw the Jeep leave the station and head east on Highway 46. And like everyone else, he spoke of the rain. But then no one who was in the Hill Country would ever talk about that April weekend again and not mention the rain.
In the end twenty-six people would lose their lives, many of them drowned, but many others were rescued. There was one story about a woman, a tourist, who folks heard had been taken out of the water near Bandera alive. Rescuers who treated her said it was a miracle she survived, that her injuries weren’t more severe, then somehow, they lost track of her. No one seemed to know what became of her. Some began to wonder if she was real or the stuff of legend, one of those urban myths, but many continued to tell the story and to believe in it for the hope it brought them.
* * *
When Abby finally reached Jake, she had to grope for the words to explain, and once she found them, his reaction struck her as odd. Something in the way he said, “Oh, God,” made her think for just a moment that he would say he’d known something awful was going to happen. But he didn’t. “When did you last hear from them?” he asked.
Abby told him about Lindsey’s call and what she thought Lindsey had said and her doubts about it, and her voice cracked.
“It’s okay, Mom, I’m on my way. We’ll find them.”
Abby said, “No, Jake,” and paused. Her eyes welled with tears at how calm he was, how he took such care to reassure her—as if he were the parent. “You can’t get through,” she said when she recovered her voice. “All the roads are washed out. Anyway, you have finals.”
“I’m coming, Mom.”
The line went dead in her hand. Phone service was still unreliable. She looked at Kate.
“What?”
“He says he’s coming. What if he gets lost, too?” The tears Abby had so far contained spilled over now. “Oh, God, Katie. Where are they?”
* * *
It was after nine o’clock on the night of Abby’s arrival at the ranch, and she was on the porch alone when a woman wearing a yellow rain slicker approached her. The woman’s blond hair was wet and plastered to her forehead and cheeks; she looked exhausted. She looked to Abby like one of the rescue workers, and when she asked if Abby was Mrs. Bennett, the wife of Nicholas Bennett, the attorney from Houston who was missing, Abby nodded and braced herself to hear the worst.
The woman gave her name, Nadine Betts, and said she was a reporter. She gave the call letters of a local television station, too, but Abby didn’t catch them. She was terrified of what the reporter would say next.
“Your husband and daughter weren’t out here camping, were they?”
Abby could only stare.
The woman inclined her head in a conspiratorial manner. “Look, it’s just you and me here, okay? You can talk to me. You’re meeting them later, right? Then at some point, your son will join you.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Come on. You must realize how it looks, Mrs. Bennett,” the reporter insisted. “Your husband goes missing within days of Adam Sandoval jumping bail?”
Abby frowned, nonplussed.
“The attorney for Helix Belle? The one they arrested for embezzling—”
“I know who he is,” Abby said. Two years ago, Adam Sandoval had been on the legal team for Helix Belle Pharmaceutical when Nick’s law firm had brought suit against them for distributing pediatric flu vaccine that had been tainted and caused the death of one child and irreparably damaged the hearts of a number of other children.
“Your husband worked with Sandoval,” the reporter said.
“They were on opposite sides. Nick defended those children. He’s the one who secured the settlement funds for them. He would have no reason to steal—”
“Oh, there are plenty of reasons, Mrs. Bennett. A half million of them. Surely you aren’t going to tell me it’s a coincidence that the cash, along with Sandoval and your husband, is missing.”
“That’s enough, Nadine.”
Abby looked around and saw Dennis Henderson, and she was grateful for his support when he slipped his hand under her elbow.