Military Heroes Bundle: A Soldier's Homecoming / A Soldier's Redemption / Danger in the Desert / Strangers When We Meet / Grayson's Surrender / Taking Cover. Merline Lovelace
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then opened it. For an instant she didn’t register what she was seeing. For an endless, eternal instant, she couldn’t put the pieces together.
“Sophie?”
No answer.
“Sophie?” She turned from the bedroom and ran to the hall bathroom, finding it empty.
Then she screamed. “Sophie!”
Only silence answered her.
Five sheriff’s cars filled the tree-lined street. Gage and Micah were there, along with her other friends. Other cars were already out on the streets and ranging the countryside, searching. Every one of them had Leo’s arrest photo.
Connie had pulled on her own uniform and gun, ready to get going. But Gage wouldn’t let her, not just yet.
“The doors were locked,” she kept saying.
Gage looked at Ethan. “You’d have heard her.”
“If she’d come downstairs, yes,” he said. “I know myself well enough that even when I sleep, I’m still alert if I need to be. And those stairs creak.”
“So that leaves...” Gage’s scarred face frowned at the dormer of Sophie’s room.
“Exactly,” Ethan said. “It wouldn’t have been hard for her to get down.”
“Or someone to get in,” Connie said.
Ethan shook his head. “A normal-size man would have made too much noise. This room’s right over the living room.”
She turned on him. “Are you saying Sophie left on her own?”
He didn’t answer, but his dark eyes said everything.
“Why would she do that, Ethan? Why?”
“She said she saw him on Friday. Maybe she talked to him. If it’s Leo...”
Connie bit her lip. “You think he could have talked her into meeting him?”
“Remember her questions?”
Connie nodded slowly. It was all starting to make sense, and she hated the sense it was making. She looked from Gage to Ethan. Her voice came out as little more than a terrified whisper. “He won’t hurt her. Will he?”
Nobody could truthfully answer.
“Why the hell couldn’t he just knock on the door like an ordinary person?” she demanded.
Gage pulled no punches. “I know you’re upset, Connie. Hell, I’m upset, too. But if he’d knocked on the door, would you have let him meet Sophie?”
Despair swamped her. “No.”
“That’s probably why, then.”
“But what if he takes her away? What if he kidnapped her?”
That was the ugly possibility. The one they all feared.
“We’re working on it,” Gage assured her. “I’m assuming she didn’t leave until the storm let up, so she’s only got a few hours lead on us. Everyone’s looking, Connie, and I’ve notified the neighboring counties. He won’t get past us.”
Given the wide-open spaces that made up so much of this part of the state, Connie had her doubts. Doubts she didn’t want to think about right now.
“Okay,” Gage said. “We’re all fanning out. Julia, you stay here to wait for Sophie. She might just come skipping home. Micah, see that Julia has a radio, so she can call us directly.”
Micah nodded and went to get a spare from his car.
Gage turned to Ethan and Connie. “You two stay together. I know I can’t keep you from looking, Connie. But don’t do something you’ll live to regret. Something Sophie will live to regret.”
She knew exactly what he meant, because right now, in the midst of her terror, she could have killed Leo without a second thought.
“She won’t,” Ethan said, speaking for her. Taking responsibility for her. “She won’t.”
Gage clasped Connie’s shoulder. “Word’s getting out, Connie. At the church, at Maude’s. Everyone in town is going to be looking very soon.”
She nodded, trying to take heart from that, but she couldn’t. What if someone angered Leo or scared him into doing something awful? But she knew as well as anyone that when this county went on alert, there was no way anyone could keep her neighbors from taking a hand. That was the way they’d always lived. Today they would beat the bushes, and if they found any kind of information about where Sophie had gone, they would gather and form a search party faster than you could say lickety-split.
Cars began to peel away as directions were given, but Connie and Ethan remained. He kept looking at the dormer and the cottonwood that nearly brushed the roof.
Connie spoke. “You think she climbed down that tree.”
“That or one of the others. Weird, but the first time I walked around the house, I saw those trees as a security risk. I had to remind myself I wasn’t in Afghanistan.”
“You’d have cut them down?”
“Back there, yeah.”
She nodded, trying to focus on the problem in the now, not on her fears. Fear could only inhibit clear thinking, and she needed her mind as clear as it had ever been.
Okay, she told herself. It was probably Leo. The only reason she could think of for him to develop this interest in Sophie was to get at her. The terrifying question, of course, was what kind of punishment did he want to inflict on her?
But another possibility existed, a slim one. Maybe during his years in prison he’d learned something. Maybe...
No, she couldn’t allow herself to think he might be a changed man. Without proof, that could only be a vain hope.
Ethan started toward the side of the house, to the tree nearest the dormer. Connie’s heart rose to her throat at the thought of Sophie crawling across the wet roof to grab on to that tree and climb down. Had her daughter lost her mind?
No, of course she hadn’t. Sophie wanted something she felt her mother had denied her. Talk about a knife in the heart.
Near the base of the tree, Ethan paused and pointed. “There? You see?”
She did indeed see. Someone had walked on the wet grass, although with all the rain they’d had, the grass had bent, not broken.
“Small footprints.”
Connie nodded. It was then that Micah joined them. “Julia has a radio,” he said. “Am I seeing what I think?”
Ethan looked at him. “I think she went toward the park.”
“That general direction.” Father and son locked eyes. Micah spoke. “I’ll follow in the car.”
Ethan nodded. “Connie, why don’t you ride with Micah?”
“Ethan...”
“I can track better if I’m not disturbed.”
Feeling almost as if she’d been slapped, she finally gave a short nod and went to join Micah in the car.
“It’s nothing personal,” Micah said to her as he began to ease down the street behind Ethan. “A tracker can’t afford to be disturbed.”
“I get it.” But her voice came out tight from her huge number of warring emotions. The only things she didn’t feel right now were happiness and peace. All the rest of it was there, though. All the ugly, terrifying emotions people associated with their less civilized parts.
Ethan was walking