Despite Dylan’s earlier words, he and Chloe became a team, leaving fliers at every store on the way. It was well into the night when they stopped at a pizza joint for dinner.
They ate buttery rolls covered with garlic as they waited for their pizza. He watched her lick the butter from between her fingers and wished the woman didn’t have such a hold on his libido. She was cute, and she was tender, neither of which he wanted in a woman. Because he didn’t want a woman at all, he reminded himself. Yet, she tantalized and bewitched him. He liked the way the corners of her mouth turned up, as though she knew a secret no one else knew. A good secret. And though her hair was cropped short, the strands still looked so silky, he wanted to run his fingers through them.
“Oh, the heck with fat grams,” she muttered, grabbing another roll.
“Tell me about your father,” he asked, hoping to steer his mind away from licking that buttery mouth of hers.
“Only if you tell me about yours.”
“I don’t have anything else to say about mine.”
“Then neither do I.” She nibbled around the edge of her third roll. “He was a truck driver. Produce. He drove fruit and vegetables all over the state of Florida. Sometimes he’d drop off a case of oranges or beans, but he never stayed long.” She kept licking the butter off her roll as she talked, running the tip of her tongue along the edge, totally oblivious to the erotic effect it had on him. Dylan lined up the bottles and jars on the table.
“He always said he loved me, but he never hugged me. Don’t you hug someone if you love them? Oh, you probably don’t hug either. Except for in the hospital, and I had to ask you, and you hated it.”
She paused, as though remembering. He remembered that hug too, how he hadn’t wanted to let her go. Had the craziness started then? “I didn’t hate it.”
“You didn’t?”
“Go on with your story.”
“Anyway, after my mom died — after she killed herself — my aunts moved me down here, and I hardly ever saw him. Sometimes he’d call, or send a card for my birthday, but that was all. Not even a green bean. He probably didn’t want to be associated with the weird women of Lilithdale either.”
She said it all so casually, but he could see the pain in her blue eyes. There wasn’t much she could hide with expressive eyes like that. Dreamy eyes.
When the pizza came, Chloe wrestled one of the cheesy pieces from the pie. He sat back and watched her for a few minutes. She rolled her slice from the tip upward until it resembled a long roll, then started eating it from the end. Pepperoni grease and tomato sauce oozed out the back end and dripped down her pinky finger. She stopped mid-chew when she realized he was watching her.
“Do you miss your father?” he asked before she could ask why he was watching her. He wasn’t quite sure why, or why he was enjoying it so much.
She swallowed her bite. “Yeah. But there isn’t anything I can do about it. I don’t even know where he is anymore. Not like you. Your father is here, and he wants to make peace. I wish my father would do that.”
“Would you forgive him for deserting you?”
“I thought I was too mad at him, but now I know … yes, I would. Think about this, Dylan. What if your father died before you had a chance to make things right?”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
She blinked in surprise, then took another bite. “Theoretically. I mean, we’re all dying if it comes to that.” She looked at his untouched pizza. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I haven’t been hungry lately. Too much on my mind.”
“You have to eat. You’ve got to keep yourself healthy for Teddy.”
They both looked down at the pizza and laughed.
“Pizza’s healthy,” she said. “All four of the food groups are represented. Bread, vegetables, dairy and protein. If pepperoni has protein, that is. Now eat.”
“Bossy, aren’t you?”
“I can be. Someone’s got to take care of you.”
Her voice had gone soft at those words, and the tenderness in her eyes snagged his heart. For a moment he forgot that he took care of himself. For a moment he wanted her to take care of him and soothe his aches and pains. Just as he understood how a man would be drawn to take care of Chloe, he also knew how magical it would be to let her take care of him. She hadn’t moved as their gazes locked together, and he realized he hadn’t moved either. If he didn’t do something, he was going to lean across the table and kiss her. Or worse, the crazy words flying through his mind would burst out of his mouth. How beautiful she was, how lonely he’d been and hadn’t even realized it, how much he needed a woman like Chloe to bring him back to life.
So he did what he had to do. He stuffed a piece of pizza in his mouth.
Before they left, Chloe told the man working behind the counter about Teddy and asked if they could hang up a poster. He nodded toward a bulletin board at the end of the restroom hallway.
Dylan watched her take the poster to the crowded board and look for someplace to put it. He saw her body stiffen, and before he knew what he was doing, he’d joined her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She nodded toward another poster that was half-covered with bulletins about a diving trip and a john boat for sale. A boy’s face peered out from between them, and above his picture the words: “Missing! Stranger abduction.” He’d been missing for three months.
She shivered, and he instinctively put his hands on her shoulders. She started to lean back against him, caught herself, and pulled back. Dylan walked to the end of the hall and asked the man if the boy had been found yet.
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“Then why is his poster buried under this other garbage?”
The grizzled guy shrugged. “What do I look like, the bulletin board police? It’s not my problem.”
Every muscle in Dylan’s body tensed. “A missing child is everyone’s problem. Our society is responsible for raising the perverts who take them; it’s our responsibility to make sure they don’t hurt anyone’s kid.”
“Dylan,” Chloe said softly from behind him, tugging his arm. “Let’s get going.”
He walked back to the cluttered board. That poster could be Teddy’s, that’s all he could think about, that in one, two, three months, his son’s poster would be buried beneath a poster of … he ripped down a sheet of paper … a trailer park’s rummage sale!
“It’s only news right after they disappear,” he said, tearing down the johnboat sign. “Or if there’s some juicy story surrounding it.” He ripped down another paper, then another, anger roaring through him. His face felt as though it were on fire. “A missing child should never fade into the background. It’s not right.”
A woman walked out of the restroom and stared at him with wide eyes before scooting down the hall. He kept tearing everything off the board until only the boy named Mac smiled at him from the corkboard. Then he added his own poster.
“Mister, you’d better leave,” the grizzly guy said from a safe distance.
“Dylan, we should go,” Chloe said, touching his arm.
He shook off her touch and stared at the board. That’s how it should look, both boys center stage until they were found. Only then could he turn and leave. The man moved behind the counter as they passed.
“You’re lucky that guy didn’t call the police,” she said the second they stepped out into the warm evening air.
He ran his fingers through his hair, realizing he was still shaking from anger. He’d lost control. He’d gone crazy for a few minutes. The reflection in his car window revealed not the together professional but a desperate man. He watched Chloe start to touch his arm, but she pulled back before making contact.
“Anger isn’t the way to express your emotions,” she said.
He met her gaze in the reflection. “What do you want from me, Chloe? Do you want me to break down and cry? Would that be more appropriate?”
She took a deep breath, taking in his face. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. But anger is never the right way to handle anything. Or doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“What you always do, mask your feelings. Your face closes up. You close yourself in and everybody else out. That’s why you exploded back there. You’ve been holding it all in, trying to be Mister Strong and Tough. Why can’t you accept that you’re not strong and tough all the time? That you need to reach out and share with someone?” He heard a strange thickness in her voice when she said, “Why can’t you reach out to me?”
Her pained expression in the window nearly broke him down, but he held firm. “Because one day I’ll reach out and you won’t be there.”
“I’m not your father.”
He almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that statement. But he held it in the way he held everything in. Or almost everything. “No, you’re not.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You know what I mean! I’m not going to let you down. I’m not your former wife either, hiding herself to please you. This is me, what you see is what you get. I may look … tender, but I’m not. I’m tough and I’m strong and I’m here. You saved my life; let me give you something back.”
Those last words made him look at her. He wanted to reach out to her, or at least some crazy part of him did. Which is why he absolutely couldn’t.
How shallow his marriage to Wanda had been, he realized. They’d never shared these kinds of moments. She never challenged him, or made him think, or made him need. Chloe made him look deeper. In these last five days, there were too many feelings to pad himself against. Chloe was sneaking under those layers, and he didn’t like it. Those layers had kept him sane for a long time. It was going to take all of them to stay that way.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, pulling at his arm, trying to get him to look at her and not just her reflection. “Just when I see a glimpse of who you really are, you put on that mask again.”
He turned to her, his mask firmly in place. “This is who I am. What you see is what you get. I’m not a soft-hearted poet. And I never will be.”
“Well, think about this: What do you have inside you to give your son when we do find him? I just hope you have an answer before then.”
* * *
Chloe and Dylan had said nothing more than a curt, “Good night,” before retiring to their respective rooms. When she joined him on the front porch of his bungalow the next morning, he was already looking over a map of the Keys. He pointed to Key Largo, one of the upper keys. “We’re here now. We can canvass this section today if we get a move on. Ready?”
“Good grief, I haven’t even had my coffee yet!” she said, sitting down next to him.
He got up and returned with a cup of coffee. “Here you go.”
“You’re either more thoughtful than I suspected or you’re in a huge hurry. Hm, let me think about that.” She shot him a look that bespoke her conclusion. “You’re lucky I’m not one of those women who requires an hour to prepare herself for the day.” She fluffed her hair, but he wasn’t amused. “Fine, let me see that map. Lena said there was something about birds. I know, there are birds everywhere down here. But maybe the name of the key has a bird’s name. She also said she saw a skull.”
“I don’t think we’re likely to run into a pirate ship.”
“I didn’t think about the flag. I guess I was thinking an island that looks like a skull from the air. All right, let’s look at the keys. Look how many of them there are. There’s Eagle Key up by the Everglades National Park. Nest Key … that has something to do with birds. There’s Duck Key. And Pigeon Key farther south. Cottrell, is that a bird? There’s Man Key.”
“And Woman Key.”
Chloe met his eyes, then shifted away. “Definitely not birds.”
“No.” He cleared his throat. “All right, we’ll launch the boat here and explore these upper Keys this morning. Let’s not forget Crane Key. Then we’ll head down toward Duck Key.”
* * *
It was a breezy morning with lots of sunshine and minimal cloud cover. All the little islands reminded her of the Ten Thousand Islands that stretched south from Lilithdale. Maybe she should have asked Dylan to explore those clusters of mangroves, just in case. But that was her gut feeling about Teddy being nearby, and she’d obviously been wrong. She tried to concentrate on Teddy, but felt nothing.
Please don’t let that mean something’s wrong.
They stopped the boats they saw and showed them the poster, but no one had seen him or Anne Dodson. But, as one man explained, “People tend to mind their own business ‘round here long as no one messes with their stuff. Then they shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Lovely,” she said with a forced smile.
Neither Nest, Eagle, nor Crane Key showed signs of Teddy’s existence. By mid-afternoon, they pulled the boat back on the trailer and headed to Duck Key. That’s where they started seeing wreckage from the hurricane: debris littering yards and rights-of-way and collecting in coves, crumpled homes and splintered boats.
It was late afternoon by the time they reached their destination and re-launched the boat. Instead of getting relaxed by the sea breezes, Chloe was getting edgy. She kept running her fingers through her hair, pushing the strands back out of her face. Kept catching Dylan watching her. And those looks shot an awareness through her body. Get your mind way off him, Chloe.
She started running calculations, this time silently. She walked to the back of the boat, then returned to her seat. A minute later, she was up again.
“Chloe, what’s the matter? You’re as antsy as a cat.”
She pulled on pink sweatpants and the matching shirt as the breeze got cooler and the sun got lower. “Something doesn’t feel right. Maybe we’re not on the right track. I don’t know.”
Miles and miles of open water stretched out, and now only a few boats dotted the horizon. They skirted the coast for a while, covering the west side first, then venturing to the east side. They passed a marina that had been nearly devastated by the hurricane. Parts of boats and piles of broken wood spoke of lost dreams.
“We’ll head farther south, hit Pigeon Key and then call it a day.”
She pulled out a bag of chips and threw some to a seagull that floated nearby. Dylan wasn’t saying it, but she could feel the weight of those unspoken words. This had been a wild goose chase. Or duck chase.
“Just don’t forget that you came willingly,” she said, hating the defensive sound in her voice.
“What?”
She threw more chips and more birds came. “Before you say this was a waste of time, that I was crazy to put my faith in visions, and that you were even crazier to go along with me … just remember you insisted on coming.”
He turned the boat around. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were thinking about saying something, though.”
“Oh, brother–”
His gaze settled on the horizon, and his expression froze. He cut the engine. She followed his gaze to a small house nestled in a patch of mangroves. Not nestled exactly. It was warped and twisted by the storm, sitting halfway in the water. Abandoned. Sort of a house, sort of a boat. It was two stories with white vinyl siding and a tiny deck in front. The front corner was tilted into the water, and it creaked as it scraped against the shattered dock.
A pirate’s black skull flag hung off a broken antenna to keep the curious away.
A chill skirted down her spine. She and Dylan exchanged glances, then looked back at the house. Sitting in shadows with the drooping skull flag, the house looked ominous.
Dylan angled their boat next to the structure. Several seagulls took flight from the front deck, piercing the air with their indignant cries. Seconds later they returned to perch on the slanted deck railing.
“Birds,” Chloe whispered.
“Hello!” Dylan called out.
No one answered. The house rocked and groaned with the slight wake they created. Then she heard the sound that came to her dreams, of water tapping against the side. And then another sound, a very faint one. She couldn’t tell exactly what it was. Maybe a cat. Maybe not.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
She could tell he had. His head was cocked as he tried to pick out the sound. There it was again, a mewling sound. Another chill raced down her spine.
“Should we call the Coast Guard?” she asked, searching the horizon. “Remember what that guy said about people shooting first and asking questions second.”
“Take my boat out of sight and use the radio.” He kicked off his shoes, stripped off his shirt and slipped over the side.
Her heartbeat pulsed in her throat as she looked into the opaque green water. Another glance over the horizon. Nobody in sight. Please don’t let anyone shoot us, she prayed before tearing off her sweats and boat shoes and dropping into the water.
He helped her up onto the deck first, then she gave him a hand up. The whole structure dipped lower into the water. Her heart was hammering, sending a crushing sensation through her chest. If they didn’t get shot, they were going to drown — or worse, drown whoever or whatever was inside.
Newspapers and discarded food containers littered the deck. The newspapers were current which meant the place wasn’t abandoned after all. Four seagulls circled the mess, wary of the intruders. The door was bolted shut, and on it a black sign read, “Keep out! Private Property.”
They heard the mewling sound again, and it prickled the hair on her neck. “Maybe it’s a cat,” she whispered. But it didn’t feel like a cat.
“Why would someone lock a cat inside?”
Dylan tried the windows, but they were nailed shut with pieces of broken wood. He looked for something to pry the door open with while she searched the empty horizon again. Maybe they should have radioed the Coast Guard first.
He nodded toward a dangling rope where a small boat could be tied off. “Whoever lives here must be out getting groceries or something.” And whoever it was would be back.
He wedged a piece of wood beneath the bolted latch and pried and twisted it. It came loose after a few minutes of struggling. Something was jammed up behind the door. Apparently whoever lived here didn’t exit through this door. He shoved his whole body against it and finally the door gave in.
Beer cans littered the floor, and the place smelled like waste. It was dark inside, with the windows in the back covered with plywood. They listened for more sounds, but heard nothing. They searched the small living room area. She headed down the hall, momentarily losing her balance on the tilted floor. He grabbed hold of her arm to steady her.
The only sounds they could hear were water lapping against the side and the screech of seagulls fighting over the garbage outside. She nodded in answer to his silent question: I’ve got my balance; let’s keep going.
She followed him down the dark hallway. The front room was filled with piles of junk. The right side was partially flooded. She came to a sudden halt when Dylan stopped, and she didn’t. His body went stiff. The door in back was bolted shut from the outside.
Chloe swallowed hard. What if they were wrong? What if —
Dylan slammed into the door shoulder first. Wood splintered as he pushed through the doorway. He stopped, and she scrambled past him into the tiny bedroom. Her chest was crushed in a grip of hope and fear. In the dim light, all she could see was a lump beneath the blankets on a bed.
And the lump was crying.