LITMIR.BIZ

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to tell her that everything was going to be fine, that Billy would be back in her arms in a matter of minutes. But Mariah had never had anyone to hold her when she was afraid, to calm her when she was upset.

      She released Lucas’s hands as she suddenly realized she was going to have to tell Lucas the truth about herself, about her past. She was going to have to confess that her life here in Conja Creek was built on lies.

      It was possible Frank had found them, and it was equally possible he’d taken Billy. Jenny could have just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. And even though she knew that telling Lucas would destroy the facade of respectability she’d worked so hard to create, she’d do whatever it took to get Billy back.

      “I have to tell you something,” she said. “I don’t know of anyone Jenny was seeing who might be involved in this, but I know somebody from my past who might be.”

      Lucas sat up straighter. “Who?”

      Mariah clasped her hands together. Even thinking about the man whose name she was about to utter created a knot of new fear in her chest. “His name is Frank Landers, and last I knew he lived in Shreveport.”

      A deep frown etched across Lucas’s forehead as he pulled a notepad and pen from his pocket. “What’s his relationship to you and why would he want to kidnap Billy?”

      She drew a deep breath. “He’s my ex-husband and Billy’s father.”

      LUCAS LOOKED AT HER in surprise. Her ex-husband? “I thought you were a widow, that Billy’s father was dead.”

      Her blue eyes refused to meet his as she stared at her hands in her lap. “That’s because I wanted everyone to believe I was a widow. Because I wanted to forget Frank Landers and my marriage to him.”

      “You need to unforget now,” he said with an edge of impatience.

      She reached up and twisted a strand of her hair between two fingers. “Frank and I were married for five years. We’ve been divorced for two. We lived in Shreveport.” She dropped her hand to her lap and rubbed her left wrist like an arthritis sufferer feeling a weather front moving in.

      “If you’ve been divorced for two years, why would your ex-husband decide to grab Billy now?” Lucas asked.

      She looked at Lucas. Her cool blue eyes betrayed nothing of what might be going on inside her head. “I don’t know. It’s possible it took him all this time to locate us.”

      “He didn’t know where you and Billy were going when you left Shreveport?”

      She shook her head. “I didn’t know where we were going when we left Shreveport, and I haven’t been in touch with Frank since before my divorce.”

      He was less interested in what she was saying and more intrigued by what she wasn’t telling him. “You don’t have a custody arrangement with him?” he asked.

      “I have full custody.”

      He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. The woman definitely had secrets, but he didn’t have time to be curious about her past.

      All he cared about was finding Jenny and Billy, and if she thought this Frank Landers might be responsible, then he needed to call the Shreveport police and see if they could locate the man.

      “You have an address for him?” he asked.

      “I imagine he still lives in our old house.” She told him the address and he wrote it down.

      “I’ll contact the Shreveport police and see if they can hunt him down.” Lucas looked at his watch. Almost midnight. Hopefully the authorities in Shreveport could go to Frank’s home and find out if he was there. It was a five-hour drive from Conja Creek to Shreveport. Even if Frank was home, he could have taken Billy and Jenny and gotten back by now.

      He tried not to think about where Jenny might be. If Frank Landers had come to get his kid, then what had he done with Jenny?

      Mariah stood, her entire body taut with tension and her eyes haunted. “If he’s taken Billy it isn’t because he wants his son. It’s because he wants to hurt me.”

      He’d always looked at Mariah as nothing more than a barrier he needed to get through to see the mayor, a respectable widow who might be a good influence on his flighty, dramatic sister. Now he saw her as neither of those things, but rather as a woman who had apparently suffered some sort of heartache in her past. Lucas knew all about heartache.

      “Within an hour we should know if Frank is in Shreveport. In the meantime, why don’t you make a fresh pot of coffee? My deputies should be checking in anytime and they’d probably appreciate the caffeine since it’s getting so late.”

      He knew the moment those last words left his mouth that they were the wrong thing to say. She lifted her wrist to check her watch, and her features seemed to crumble into themselves as a sheen of tears filled her eyes.

      “Billy has never been away from me this long,” she said, but before he could reply she left the living room and disappeared into the kitchen.

      The next couple of hours passed in agonizingly slow increments. Lucas called the state police, and an Amber Alert went out. He also spoke to the FBI, who indicated they would have a field agent there the next morning. The deputies checked in with the news that nobody had seen anything suspicious at the home during the day.

      “I’m not surprised,” Mariah said. “All my neighbors work except Sarah Gidrow across the street, and she spends most of her days watching soap operas in the family room in the back of the house.”

      They couldn’t be sure Mariah’s house was a crime scene, which was problematic. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing to indicate that anything untold had happened there. It was possible the crime scene was the front yard, or the park, or a sidewalk a block away.

      Jenny’s e-mail had yielded nothing to raise an eyebrow, and Deputy Maylor had reported that there was no sign of forced entry or tampering at any of the windows or doors, leaving Lucas to suspect that if the crime had happened here, Jenny had opened the door to whomever had taken them.

      If they’d really been taken.

      It was that particular thought that haunted him as the night hours passed. Were Jenny and Billy really in danger from a kidnapper, or had Jenny orchestrated this whole drama? What better way to get the attention of Phillip Ribideaux, the young man who had recently broken her heart?

      Although this was certainly beyond the pale of any stunt Jenny had pulled in the past, he had to admit that it was something he thought she might be capable of doing.

      It was in her genes. He had plenty of memories of his mother pulling crazy stunts in an effort to hang on to whatever man happened to be in her life at the time.

      He shoved away those thoughts, not wanting to remember the woman who had possessed the maternal instincts of a rock. She’d died when Jenny was twelve and Lucas was twenty-two, and for the past thirteen years Lucas had spent his time raising Jenny and trying to make sure she didn’t turn out like Elizabeth, their mother.

      Despite the late hour, he began calling Jenny’s friends to find out if anyone had spoken to her that day or knew where she might have gone.

      Mariah sat on the edge of the sofa and listened to him making those calls. With each minute that passed, the tension that rolled off her increased and her eyes gazed at him with the silent demand that he do something, anything, to bring her baby boy back home.

      By three he had nobody else to call, nothing else to do but wait until morning or for another phone call to come in.

      “You still aren’t sure that they’ve been taken by somebody, are you?” she asked when he hung up the phone after talking to one of Jenny’s girlfriends. There was a touch of censure in Mariah’s eyes.

      “I have to look at all possibilities,” he replied noncommittally.

      “It must be

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