LITMIR.BIZ

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spent some time talking with the sheriff who was questioning the supervisor and counselors there, then started to retrace their route back to Virginia. Joe suggested they get a hotel room—actually, he wisely suggested they get two—but Janine couldn’t lock herself, safe and secure, into a hotel room when she had no idea where Sophie was.

      Leaning her head against the window of Joe’s car, Janine closed her eyes. Instantly, a familiar, unwanted image slipped into her mind, as it often did when she was in a moving vehicle and slightly disoriented. She was suddenly flying her helicopter through the smoke above the Saudi Arabian desert. The smell was acrid, filled with the chemicals that she, in her darkest moments, feared had altered something inside her and caused her to produce a child whose kidneys did not work correctly.

      If it had been Lucas with her in the car, rather than Joe, she would have told him about those memories, but she had no energy to recount them to her ex-husband. He would have no sympathy for her, anyway.

      “Tell me more about this Alison,” Joe said grimly, bringing her back to the present.

      Janine opened her eyes to see that they were driving slowly past a restaurant, while Joe tried to determine if it was still open. It was not, and he sped up again.

      “Is there a real chance that Alison might have taken off with them?” he asked.

      “She’s a free spirit,” she said, only half aware that those were the same words Joe had often used to describe her in their early years together. “She’s made a few mistakes working with the girls, but I just can’t believe she’d do anything that extreme.”

      “What do you mean, a few mistakes?”

      “Oh, she talked to them about the birds and the bees without getting parental permission, that sort of thing.”

      “Well.” Joe let out a sigh. “Let’s face it, Jan. They never got back from this trip, and I know it’s dark, but we’ve scoured this route, and her car is not anywhere along it. Wouldn’t you agree?”

      She nodded.

      “That has to mean that she and the car and the girls are somewhere we’re not looking. Somewhere they’re not supposed to be.”

      The thought was strangely reassuring. “Maybe Holly’s mother…Rebecca…was right and Alison decided it would be fun for them to go to an amusement park or something, and she’ll bring them back tomorrow. She can probably get by without the dialysis tonight, but she has to be back tomorrow to get her—” She stopped herself, but Joe knew what she was about to say.

      “To get that damned herbal crap,” he said.

      Janine turned her face to the window again. “It’s made her feel so much better,” she said weakly. Tears burned her eyes. “I just wanted to see a real smile on her face again.”

      “At what cost, Jan?” Joe glanced at her. “Maybe she’ll get a few weeks or a couple of months of feeling good before the disease catches up with her again and kills her.”

      “Shh!” She didn’t want to hear him say those words.

      “What are you shushing me for?” he asked. “It isn’t news that she’s going to die. The only real remaining chance she had was the legitimate study at Hopkins, but you were determined to do this no matter what I wanted.” He braked the car abruptly. The driver behind them honked, swerving sharply to avoid hitting them, and with a yelp, Janine grabbed the dashboard.

      She saw what had caught his attention—a car parked on the side of the road. Her heart still pounded from the near accident as she opened her car window to get a better look. The parked car was huge and looked deserted, a white paper stuck to its antenna.

      “It’s a…I don’t know, some big car,” Janine said. “Not a Honda, anyway.”

      “Sorry.” Joe apologized for his erratic driving. He reached across the gear shift to touch her hand, a surprising gesture. “Are you all right?”

      “Fine,” she said. She would have braked with equal force had she been the one driving.

      Joe sighed again. “So,” he said. “Back to Sophie. Here’s what I don’t get. You and I have always talked to each other about how to deal with her, whether we were communicating about her medical care or her behavior or anything. Isn’t that right?”

      She nodded. Joe sounded genuinely perplexed, and she felt guilty. She had always consulted with him in the past and taken his feelings to heart. Decisions about Sophie had, in every instance, been mutually made.

      “I loved that about us,” Joe continued. “I was proud of us. We might have been divorced, but we were still a team when it came to her. Then you go off and do something half-assed like enrolling her in that study. Something that goes completely against what I want.”

      “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I thought it was the right thing. I still think it was the right—”

      “What possessed you?” He looked at her. “You’re usually smarter than that. Whatever made you think Schaefer’s herbs could fix what no one else has ever been able to fix?”

      “I didn’t go into it blindly,” she said. She heard the weakness in her voice. She always felt weak around Joe, as though being near him sucked the strength and self-esteem right out of her. “Lucas Trowell knows a lot about herbs and he researched the ingredients in Herbalina for me. He really felt it might have a chance of—”

      “You know, Jan.” Joe shook his head. The muscles in his cheeks contracted, and she knew he was trying to control his anger. “Lucas Trowell is a gardener. He’s not a doctor.”

      “He knows a lot about herbs, though,” she said.

      “How do you know that? Because he told you so? I think he’d tell you anything to get close to Sophie.”

      There it was again. That Lucas-Trowellis-a-pedophile paranoia.

      “That’s crazy, Joe,” she said. “He’s been very kind to Sophie. She adores him.”

      Big mistake. Joe nearly lost control of the car, sending it over the line into the middle lane, and again, a driver honked his horn at them. “You keep him away from her, Janine,” Joe shouted as he steered the car back into the slow lane. “I mean it! I am damn serious. I don’t want that guy anywhere near her.”

      She hated it when he yelled. Joe had never laid a hand on her, but he didn’t need to. He was big and muscular, and his anger could be so powerful that it alone was enough to frighten her into submission. She lowered herself farther into the seat and shut her eyes.

      “What does it matter to him if the treatment works or not?” Joe continued his argument. “Sophie’s not his daughter. She’s nothing to him. Your judgment is all screwed up.”

      Eyes still shut, Janine pressed her temple to the window. She was not wrong about Lucas, although she’d twisted the facts of Sophie’s enrollment in the study a bit. It was actually through Lucas that she’d learned of the study; she probably never would have known about it had he not told her.

      Lucas had heard a short ad on the radio about a researcher who was looking for pediatric subjects to be in a study of an alternative treatment for pediatric kidney disease. Janine had called about the study and learned it involved an herbal remedy, delivered intravenously. When she told her parents and Joe that she wanted Sophie to participate in the study, they refused to even discuss the matter with her. Instead, they wanted Sophie to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of one more horrid, toxic medication—that if it didn’t kill her—might help her.

      The herbal approach had no such side effects, Dr. Schaefer had told her. As a matter of fact, Sophie would feel much better very quickly. Even so, Janine did not enroll her right away. Schaefer was a bit strange, a mousy man of few words who seemed remarkably unsure of himself to be leading a study of any kind, but she checked into his background and learned he had conducted some research of minor importance in the past, in which his hypotheses

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