“Caroline, please. Don’t make me leave you here alone. If anything were to happen to you, I don’t think I could live with myself.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me. I’m a big girl. This is my decision. You don’t have to feel guilty about leaving.” Caroline knew he felt as guilty as she did about Samantha, maybe even more so. She’d heard him crying in the bathroom last night when he thought she was asleep. She’d even considered getting up and going to him, clinging to his side and crying with him, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. “You should go now. My mother will be getting anxious.” Caroline pictured her mother waiting in the coffee shop with Michelle, repeatedly checking her watch.
“Please come with us.”
“I can’t.”
“Michelle needs you.”
“My mother will take good care of her.”
“I need you.”
Caroline said nothing.
The phone rang. Hunter walked to the side of the bed and picked it up. “Yes. Okay. I’m on my way.” He replaced the receiver. “At least come downstairs, say goodbye.”
“I’ve already said goodbye.”
Hunter approached the side of the bed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Don’t I even get a kiss?”
“Hunter…”
“You have to stop blaming me,” he said, his voice a plea. “This isn’t my fault.”
Caroline scrunched the paper in her hands into a tight little ball and hurled it angrily at the TV before jumping to her feet. “Not your fault? Really? Because I distinctly remember it was you who insisted that we leave the girls alone, that I was overreacting, that I was sounding just like my mother…”
“I never said that.”
“You promised they’d be safe…”
“And I will be sorry to my dying day…”
“Sorry isn’t enough.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to find our daughter!”
“You don’t think I want the same thing?”
We’re asking for your help, Hunter was appealing from the TV in yet another repeat of the press conference. We just want our daughter back.
“How could you let this happen?” Caroline asked him, hearing her mother’s voice echo through the room. She could tell by Hunter’s face that he’d heard it, too.
“I’ll call you when we get home,” he said, picking up his suitcase and walking out of the room.
“You’re late,” Mary said instead of hello.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” Caroline said, ignoring the rebuke and giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. “I brought dessert.” She held out the box containing the pumpkin pie she’d picked up from the gourmet grocery store on the way over.
Her mother made no move to take it from her. “Store-bought,” she said with a lift of her well-plucked eyebrows, making the words sound vaguely obscene.
Caroline closed the front door behind her. “I thought you liked Nicola’s pies.”
Mary shrugged. “They’re all right. Overpriced, like all their stuff. Steve and I prefer their apple to their pumpkin.”
“They didn’t have apple.”
“Well, I guess when you leave things until the last minute…I’m surprised they were even open.”
“Sorry. It’s been a little hectic…” Caroline peered over her mother’s shoulder into the empty living room. “Where is everyone?”
“No one’s here yet.”
“So I’m the first to arrive?”
“You’re still late,” her mother said.
Caroline sighed. “What do you want me to do with the pie?”
“Put it in the kitchen,” Mary said, exiting the foyer for the living room.
Caroline proceeded down the hallway toward the kitchen at the back of the tidy bungalow. “Something smells good,” she said, inhaling the aroma of roasting turkey and depositing the pumpkin pie on the counter. The small room had changed very little over the years. Despite new appliances and an update from laminate to granite countertops, it was essentially the same kitchen she remembered from her childhood: a slightly elongated square with a table and four chairs in front of a large window that overlooked a tiny backyard. Peering into the darkness, she pictured the old clothesline on which her mother used to air-dry the family’s freshly laundered clothes. When Caroline was little, Mary would secure her to that clothesline with a long rope tied around her waist. “Stop squirming. It’s for your own protection,” she’d insist when Caroline tried to wiggle out of its grasp. Steve, of course, had endured no such curbs on his freedom. When Caroline had protested this unfairness to her mother and argued that she, too, should have the freedom to play unfettered on the streets with her friends, Mary pointed out that Caroline had no friends.