LITMIR.BIZ

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you know and I know that Matt would never harm anyone. Just keep an eye out for him. If he makes it that far, he’ll be tired and hungry—and scared.”

      “I’ll look after him. You know that. And if those fools get within fifty feet of my house, I’ll give ’em what-for, and you’d better believe it.”

      “Call the minute you hear from Matt. I’ll have my cell phone.”

      “Don’t worry, I’ll call you. And I’ll be waiting up for Matthew. In fact, I’m going to go put on the coffee now—”

      “Mom, he won’t make it to your house until early tomorrow morning.”

      “Well, he might call! Now stay calm, son. We can handle this. I’m going to phone Irene next door. She’ll come over and sit up with me. We’ll play Skip-Bo.”

      Cole let out a breath as he said goodbye and put down the phone. Though Geneva Strong could be a handful, he almost wished his mother hadn’t moved back to her childhood hometown in Texas. But Cole had been happily married at the time. With a combination of endless hours and back-breaking work, he had rescued the family ranch from the brink of bankruptcy. His degree in agriculture had prepared him to use innovative technology and aggressive marketing strategies, and he held dreams of making the ranch a model of profitability. Though Matt had been a difficult baby, he also was the source of great joy, and Cole had been hoping the boy would have siblings soon. No one had expected Anna to be diagnosed with cancer.

      Wondering if his wife’s death had erased any natural tenderness he’d ever had, Cole again thought of Matt and all the lonely years his son had spent on this ranch. The aloneness had consumed both of them—so much that they no longer really knew each other. Jill Pruitt, Billy, Josefina, and now Geneva had been quick to deny that Matt could be capable of murder. Why didn’t Cole feel that certainty? Why didn’t he know his son well enough to be sure?

      To him, Matt was distant, odd, almost alien. The things boys were supposed to enjoy didn’t interest him—fishing, hunting, horseback riding on the ranch, sports, cars, girls. Actually, Cole didn’t know whether Matt was interested in girls yet. They’d never spoken about it. Instead of acting like an average kid, Matt focused on his strange fascinations—math and science mostly. He hadn’t wanted a dog. No, he’d bought a mouse and trained it to run through mazes and perform tricks.

      Once, Cole had found Matt high in a tree, where he was building a tree house. Wonderful and normal. But the tree house had turned out to be a platform for Matt’s telescope. The boy was calculating the height of the tree and the distance from his branch to the ground and whether this would make any difference in his ability to observe the stars. At the time, he was seven years old.

      Cole stood and stretched the taut muscles in his shoulders. Penny had discouraged him from setting out after Matt. Maybe she was right. He didn’t really know where his son might have gone. And the sheriff would put out an all-points bulletin. They probably would locate him in an hour or so.

      But the thought of a highway patrolman handcuffing Matt and shoving him into the back of a police car sent a shudder through Cole. His son was just a boy, after all. Barely sixteen, and so naive about the world. There was no telling how he’d react to an accusation of murder.

      “We used Miss Pruitt’s account and sent Matt an e-mail,” Billy announced, stepping into the living room. “You should see what she’s doing on the computer. She’s getting into all Matt’s files and stuff. It’s awesome! Hey, what’s that I smell? Is Josefina cooking?”

      “Carne adovada. In the kitchen.”

      Billy veered in that direction, and Cole grinned in spite of himself. He went down the hall and found Jill Pruitt seated at Matt’s desk.

      She came across as a bundle of compressed energy in a turquoise skirt and a sleeveless white top. Though she couldn’t be forty yet, he figured she ought to be married by now. She was pretty enough, in a frizzy sort of way. He wondered if teaching and famine relief kept her too busy to be interested in marriage. Or was there something else?

      “Billy says you sent Matt an e-mail,” he said.

      “And I’m going through all this data he downloaded,” she replied without looking up. Her slender fingers sped across the keyboard.

      “What was he copying?”

      “Lots of things. The amount of information he compiled on the food industry is incredible. By the way, you’ll be happy to know your son is not into pornography. I can’t find anything suspicious here at all. The gaming sites are weird, of course, all those mythological characters and fantasy worlds.”

      “I’ve watched Matt and Billy play.”

      “It’s a lot of strategy—I think that’s what appeals to Matt. The RPGs are a concern, but—”

      “Wait. RPGs?”

      “Role-playing games.” She glanced at him for the first time. “Do you know anything about your son, Mr. Strong?”

      His hackles rose. Add abrasive to the list of Miss Pruitt’s attributes. “I know Matt is impressionable,” he shot back. “I know he’s susceptible to the influence of people he admires.”

      “Look, I’m aware you want to blame me for his disappearance, but it’s not going to work. Matt’s interest in famine relief was his own.”

      “Is that so?” Cole put one hand on the back of her chair, bent down, and tried to read the computer screen over her shoulder. How could anyone who smelled so good be so testy? She was like a rattlesnake hiding in a lilac bush.

      “Didn’t you tell my son about your little famine-relief jaunts around the world?”

      “Of course I did. I talk about a lot of things in my class.”

      “I thought the subject was computer science.”

      “If a person has tunnel vision, Mr. Strong,” she said, peering at him with those glittering emerald eyes, “then maybe he or she can only do one thing at a time. Some people let their jobs become their lives. They don’t leave time for family or hobbies…or volunteering…or ministry. I strive for a full, balanced life. And my enthusiasm for it spills over into my job.”

      He stared back at her. “Some people don’t have a job that demands constant vigilance—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and no weekends or summers free to flit around having a full, balanced life.”

      “Yeah, well, some people have children, and they ought to—”

      “They ought to stop listening to people who don’t.” He reached over her shoulder and touched the computer screen. “Who are all these messages from?”

      As she swung around, her curls fluffed out, grazing the hair on his arm. A jolt of adrenaline raced up his skin, shocking him in its intensity. Irked at this as much as at her words, Cole straightened and jammed his hands into his pockets. Miss Jill Pruitt was a stuck-up little do-gooder who thought she knew how to parent Matt better than his own father did.

      “I think it’s them,” she said. “Look at this stuff they’ve written to him. This is appalling. Poor kid!”

      Drawing a deep breath, Cole bent over again and read the message Jill had pulled up on the screen. Whoever wrote it had every intention of intimidating and threatening Matt. The writer informed him that he was in violation of privacy laws and that he had better stay out of the company’s business if he knew what was good for him.

      Jill closed that message and opened another. More of the same. As she clicked chronologically backward through the long list, Cole saw that the tone of the e-mails had gone from fairly polite to downright hostile. Now she opened another window and found the messages Matt had sent.

      “Bingo!” she called out. “It’s Agrimax, all right. This is who he’s been writing to, see? In this message he’s trying to get information. And in this one he’s broaching his concept—that

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