Rebecca Davidson Armfield awoke before dawn. Though she hadn’t made a sound, tears streaked her cheeks. Remembering the dream, she brushed the moisture away and closed her eyes. As often happened, she had awakened in the middle of one of her baby dreams. This one had been different, though. For the first time, the baby had a face.
The face of her younger sister, Mindy, when she was a little girl.
As usual, Rebecca had been unable to save the baby. In each dream the child died a different death. This time, it had slipped from her hands and fallen over the side of a boat. She’d seen its little face disappear under the murky water.
The doctors had assured her these dreams would go away in time. She wondered how much time. They had occurred almost nightly during the weeks following her fall down the stairs. The fall that robbed her womb of her much anticipated child.
Now, six months later, she still had the dream almost weekly.
Rebecca wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tried not to disturb Vernon. She was fighting a losing battle. Unless she took one of her sleeping pills, she always had trouble getting back to sleep after one of the baby dreams. Vernon would be of no help if she woke him. He’d already said he’d heard all he wanted to on the subject of her nightmares and had told her she should concentrate on other things. She couldn’t handle one of his logical lectures tonight.
Regardless of Vernon’s accusations, her mind wasn’t always on the baby. She did concentrate on other things. Tonight, until she had gone to sleep and dreamed, she hadn’t thought about the baby at all. She had been consumed with the whereabouts of her sister—and figured that was why she’d given the baby Mindy’s face.
She leaned over and looked at the bedside clock. Five-twenty-eight. Much too late to take a pill. If she did, she’d sleep half the day. After several minutes of internal debating, she decided to go downstairs and occupy herself until time for Vernon to get up. She slipped her feet into pink satin scuffs that matched the pink and white silk robe she threw over her shoulders as she left the bedroom.
Without turning on the light, she went down the winding stairs to the first floor, pulling her shoulder length brown hair back into a ponytail and clipping it with a pearl clasp she found in her pocket as she walked. Once she reached the foot of the stairs, she went into the library and closed the door. Only then did she turn on a light.
Rebecca loved the library. She’d spent many happy hours inside it with her father when she was a child. She’d sit on the floor with paper and pencil and do business while he took care of company business at his desk. When she was six, he’d given her a ledger pad, and she had filled it with numbers. Some black, and some red. She always made sure there were more black numbers than red numbers, however, because her father told her it was best to have a lot of black numbers in business. She was determined to become as good with those numbers as he was.
By the time she reached high school, she often helped him with simple accounting matters. After college, he put her to work in the financial department at the family business, Davidson Industries.
“You have to start somewhere, Rebecca,” he’d said. “You could probably run the place, but for now I’m in charge, and I’m not yet ready to turn it over to anyone.”
Rebecca had loved working at the company, and even after her marriage had continued her job until her father’s illness. Now she missed being a part of it. She wanted to go back, but Vernon claimed she was still recovering from the accident and wouldn’t hear of it.
She hadn’t pushed the issue. “But I want to go back to work soon, Vernon,” she kept telling him.
“You will, my dear,” he promised, “but you don’t need to hurry things. I want to be sure there are no questions about your health.”
During their last discussion, Rebecca had reluctantly agreed with him, but she would insist on getting back to work soon. After all, her doctor had agreed she was her old self. He even said that going back to work might keep her dreams at bay.
Tonight, going back to the company was not the most pressing thing on her mind. She sat in a reclining, burgundy leather high-backed chair, closed her eyes, and recalled the tiff she’d had with Vernon earlier. They argued more and more lately.
This time, she had to admit he was probably right. More than likely it was silly for her to be overly concerned about her sister’s absence, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Yes, Mindy often left town for as long as a week without telling them. And yes, she was careless and forgetful, but after Rebecca had lost the baby, her sister had promised not to go away again without letting her know.
Vernon was sure Mindy had broken that promise, but Rebecca wasn’t convinced. As she often did when things were on her mind, she decided to make one of her famous lists. This time she would think of all the reasons why Mindy may have left town.
Rebecca brought her recliner to a sitting position, stood, and moved to the polished cherry desk in the center of the room. Vernon would make fun of her if he knew she was making another list.
“I think you’d make a list about anything,” he’d said when he found the one she’d made of the things she wanted to tell him when he got home.
At the time she’d laughed with him, but he’d been right. She was a compulsive list maker. She had a list of the clothes in her closet, even the ones that had gotten tighter in the last few months. She had a list of the books she’d read in the past year, a list of the movies she wanted to see, and many others.
She kept most of her lists in little leather notebooks. Often she had one of these notebooks in her pocket. In fact, she had had one in the pocket of her robe, but she had removed it last night to start the list of why she needed to go back to work. She’d put it on the nightstand when Vernon came to bed. It was still there.
Pulling open the middle drawer of the desk, she found stationary. It would do. She took the gold plated pen from the stand and tried to write, but the pen didn’t have any ink. She stuck it back into the stand and made a mental note to buy refills for it.
She looked in the middle drawer again and found some sheets of paper with notes and doodles, probably made during a telephone conversation. She also unearthed a paper with some shapes on it and a list of words beside the shapes. They made no sense to her. Probably just more doodling.
After a thorough search, she opened the left top drawer, then the second and the third. Still nothing. She moved to the right side of the desk and pulled out the bottom drawer and finally found a pen under a file.
“Success at last,” she said, moving the file.
Then she saw the pictures and forgot the pen.
Stunned, she picked them up and stared at each one. They were of Mindy. In some, she wore sexy underwear; in others she was nude. Most were shots of Mindy alone, but two pictures were of her and another woman posing in provocative positions. Rebecca didn’t recognize the other woman. Two shots were of Mindy and a man. His back was turned to the camera. Rebecca couldn’t see his face, but he had well developed muscles and dark hair pulled back in a three-inch ponytail.
Almost sick to her stomach, Rebecca threw the photographs back into the drawer and covered them with the file. In no mood now to make a list, she got up and moved to the window, her mind reeling. Mindy posing nude bothered her, but she knew Mindy would do it without giving it a second thought. Her younger sister had always played the part of the rebel.
When Mindy was in college, Rebecca had bailed her out of trouble more than once to keep their parents from knowing what her sister had been up to. Since their parents’ deaths, though they were complete opposites, she and Mindy had remained close. Rebecca accepted the fact that she and Mindy had different outlooks on life and lived by different sets of rules.
Rebecca couldn’t help wondering why and how the pictures had ended up in a desk drawer in her house. Had Mindy put them there? If so, when? Rebecca also wondered if they had anything to do with why Mindy was missing. Her sister kept company with some strange and possibly dangerous people. The fleeting thought that Vernon might know the pictures were here upset her a little. If he did know, why hadn’t he told her about them? Did he not want to let her know Mindy had modeled nude?
“No,” she muttered, shaking her head. “If Vernon knew about them, he would’ve destroyed them to keep me from finding them. It’s common knowledge I use this desk, and he’s smart enough to know that if he left them here long enough, I’d find them.”
She frowned and added under her breath, “Unless for some reason he wanted me to find them. He has been implying that I should try harder to lose weight so I’d have a perfect figure like Mindy…”
She frowned. No, that couldn’t be the reason. He’d know she’d be shocked to see them. He didn’t believe she could cope with worldly things. Someday, she’d have to show him just how strong she really was.
Another thought hit her, and she returned to the desk and removed the photographs from the desk drawer. Flipping through them, she took out one of Mindy and the man, one of Mindy with the woman, and one of Mindy alone. She put the rest back into the drawer.
She put the three pictures into her pocket and headed for the dining room. Vernon always came down for breakfast at seven. She’d be waiting for him.