When Claire and Nick finally got home, there were hugs all around. Jace even gave her a quick shoulder hug after he shook hands with Nick. Nita was beaming to see her back—and, probably, to finally get away from Lexi’s and Jilly’s questions—and go home to Bronco. But where was Steve?
It was getting dark. Fireflies lit the lawn and twinkled through the patio window to make the reflections of everyone gathered around seem to sparkle. In her continued fear and grief, Claire hoped, wherever Darcy was now, that she might be comforted by memories of happier times like when they used to catch what they then called lighting bugs. As girls, they used to put them in a jar and they would light up their room at night...
“Mommy, did you hear what Cindy just said?” Lexi’s high voice broke her reverie.
“No, I’m surprised I didn’t. What did she say?”
As Jilly hovered close, Lexi said to the doll in her arms, “Can you say that again, Cindy?”
“I am glad you are home, Mommy. Tell us where you have been,” the doll said—no, actually commanded. So did this little robot give Lexi stern orders sometimes, too?
That’s all she needed, Claire fumed, to be ordered around by that doll. And since Jilly was here, she wanted to ask her where her daddy was. Perhaps exhausted, lying down at last.
“Mommy,” Lexi repeated as if she were the interactive doll, “where have you been?”
Darned if she or Nick were telling these kids they’d found a body, so Claire said to her daughter, not to the doll, “Dad and I have been to the beach and talked to some people we saw there.”
But the doll answered. “Oh, that’s nice. But Lexi is sad, even though we took a plane trip. Where is her aunt Marcy?”
Lexi said, “It’s not Marcy, Cindy, but Darcy, with a D.”
“Oh, sorry,” the doll said. “Tell me more about Aunt Darcy.”
“Well, that thing made one mistake at least!” Steve’s voice came from across the room. “I swear, it’s smarter than me.”
Everyone looked his way. Claire gasped, and Nick asked, “What in the world happened to you?”
“Gotta admit I had a couple of brews at the sports bar and fell going out to the car. Hit my head, got scratched up.”
A moment of silence followed as everyone stared at him, and Jilly went over to take his hand to comfort him. He had a bump on his forehead slowly turning brownish blue. Claire noted the beginning of a black half-moon under his left eye and a swollen lower lip as well as a few cuts on the backs of his hands and arms. So he fell on the backs of his knuckles, not put his palms out to catch himself?
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Steve said in the awkward silence. “My mistake. Yeah, okay, I got into it with a guy there who asked if the little lady ran off with someone else—you know,” he added with an I-don’t-want-to-say-more look at the girls. “He was no one I know. After our disagreement, he left. I bribed the manager not to call the cops. So, if everyone would please stop staring, let’s figure out our next move.”
Claire put the girls to bed—including the walking-talking marvel doll—then hurried back to the Florida room. Nita had left a hefty tray of snacks and a pitcher of iced tea; Claire and Nick were famished. Nick had Heck on speaker phone so he could explain his latest research. Steve, looking sheepish for once, didn’t take any food and kept fingering a tooth that looked to Claire like it might have come loose.
“We could try another public plea,” Nick was saying, “but that means letting the media mavens poke around again. It could help, but they could get in our way if we do more investigating on our own.”
“And then,” Claire said, “Detective Jensen might lock us up just to shut us up. He’s already ticked off at us for overstepping. Here’s the full story of what Nick and I did today.”
They explained their attempts to question two members of the possibly militant Fly Safe pro-butterfly protection group, Linc Yost and Larry Ralston. Everyone was aghast at their retelling of finding the body in the net and the arrival of the dead man’s next of kin. Nick concluded things with, “So the one guy clams up and changes the topic from butterflies to dolphins, and the other ends up dead before we can talk to him. Just the sort of puzzle my private business, South Shores, looks into. Was Captain Larry Ralston’s death natural, accidental, suicide or murder?”
Nick’s investigation and support outreach was known to those present, so he didn’t say more. Those closest to him knew the reason he tried to help families whose loved ones had committed suicide—or was it suicide? His own father had been murdered but the scene was staged to make it look as if he had killed himself. Nick had finally tracked down the murderer. Then, through investigation and legal support, his South Shores project became his way of helping others who had gone through the hell that he had faced.
“And,” Claire added, “does this death link to Darcy’s disappearance or not?”
“More important, where the hell is Darcy?” Steve muttered, tears in his eyes. “Can she—she be gone, too? Or is she dead, too?”
“We can’t jump to conclusions,” Claire put in. “Detective Jensen assured me her disappearance is officially still a missing-persons case.”
“But what happened to her?” Steve said, and his voice broke. The big guy’s hands were shaking. “How can she just be missing? I’m scared to death for her.”
Claire reached out to cover his hand with hers, and he flinched from the bruises there. Thank heavens he hadn’t been arrested for a barroom brawl. They really needed to keep him home, but then she thought that was exactly what Ken Jensen wanted from them all, and they could hardly stay home and wait around for someone else’s news. Things were taking too long.
“Like I told you,” Heck said on the speaker phone, “even though the focus is obviously on butterflies, the fact that Larry Ralston and Lincoln Yost were both involved with dolphins might mean something. I’ll look into that as well, along with trying to learn more about this mystery man Clinton Ralston, since there doesn’t appear to be much about him online.”
“Sounds good, my man,” Nick told him. “Heck, I’m going to have to go into work Monday because that trial delay I asked for is over, so be aware I may not have access to a phone right away, depending on how it goes. At least that still gives me tomorrow to help here.”
“I’ll leave you a message and let Claire know, too,” he said. “Bye for now.”
Claire had a feeling Nick didn’t want Heck feeding her information while he was in court, but she didn’t mention that. Not with everyone here and again not later when they went to bed and tried to get some sleep, as exhausted as they were. While she said her jumbled, panicked prayers, she asked that Steve not lose control again and for Darcy to be somehow, somewhere safe. After all, she’d read news items where captive women, like that terrible case in Cleveland, finally made it free, and the abductors and rapists were arrested. She shuddered, just admitting that possibility to herself.
Tired as she was, she carefully edged out of bed so she wouldn’t disturb Nick. Heck was going to research dolphins. Yet she had another obsession right now. She needed to skim that book she’d taken from Darcy’s house, The Collector, about the butterfly freak who kept an innocent woman prisoner in his isolated house. Maybe there was a clue in that story. Besides, something about Will Warren, butterfly expert and very helpful friend, kept haunting her—his soft heart toward Darcy and obsessive concern over her disappearance, his drifting through their past... Could he have become overly fond of Darcy years ago or even now? Like the demented kidnapper in The Collector, Will evidently lived alone in a fairly isolated house.
And she could not get seeing that bloated body of the boat captain out of her mind. She and Darcy had once gone swimming with the dolphins down in the Caribbean when they were on break from college. How ironic that Captain Larry had hurt a dolphin and then had ended up swimming with them, paying with his life as if he were now cursed? Surely it was not God’s justice—payback—for him going to Tara’s place to protest her butterfly “prison” and finding Darcy there and one thing led to another. But if he was murdered for that, who was behind it?
She turned on a light in the den and opened the lid of her laptop. In the search box, she typed in Dolphins + Suspended Animation.
Claire’s brain took in the information and her amazement kept her somehow awake in the heavy silence of the house. She read and printed several articles she would have to show Nick. One was about how susceptible these marine mammals were to sonar. Navy ships emitting pulses of sound had been blamed for a mass beaching. The animals talked to each other with sounds. But she also found proof of what she’d heard before: dolphins could put themselves into a partial sleep while swimming, resting half their brain at a time, before switching to the other half. They controlled their breathing, and one eye at a time kept watch. But they were still quite functional.
So that, she thought, was like the butterflies in the regard that these animals had control over suspending some or all of their lives and then coming back to full or half consciousness at will. Granted, if mankind could master that, as Will Warren had said, that would be information leading to great riches and power. Not only would that mean overcoming the long distances and time in space travel, but it could lead to a sort of extended life, a step toward immortality.
Yes, as kind and concerned as Will seemed, she had to find out more about him. But how could this arcane information lead to finding Darcy?
She nearly jumped out of her chair when Nick spoke behind her. “Sweetheart, don’t just go off like that. Not with your sister missing. When you weren’t in Lexi’s room, I nearly freaked out.”
“Sorry,” she said, swiveling toward him in her desk chair as he sank into the club chair nearby. “I wanted to look up the dolphin info and take a look at a book I took from Darcy’s bedroom.”
“Listen, Heck said he’d do the dolphin research, and we can try to further nail down Yost. Seems he wants to talk about that at least,” he said, trying to stifle a huge yawn. He looked exhausted, hair mussed, his cheek with a wrinkle from his pillow; his eyes, even in this fairly dim light, were bloodshot.
“We need to get you back to bed,” she said. “You have tomorrow, but then court the next morning.”
“I hope we know more by then. When I couldn’t find you—”
“Nick, I’m trying to function, to think straight. And Steve getting in a fight like that...”
“I just don’t want you to go off on something iffy or dangerous while I’m a captive audience at the courthouse this week.”
A captive audience—the words snagged in her exhausted mind. Was Darcy being held captive as they spoke? A random kidnapping? Or was it someone she knew, someone who had motives other than ransom? She’d be careful, all right, but she’d take a look at that book in the morning, would have done it right now if Nick hadn’t woken up. They had plans for more interviews with the media tomorrow, but Monday she’d spend time after breakfast with Lexi—and that darned doll. But then she was going to make sure Will was at work and take a little trip out to that isolated house of his.
And unless she found something suspicious, Nick would never even know about it because he’d blow sky-high. But she had to take risks. She’d leave him a note about it in case anything went wrong, and take all the precautions she could. But truth be told, she’d risk her own life to save Darcy’s.