Where the Road Ends

He didn’t say a word, but Amelia’s heart lurched at the expression on her son’s face as he saw the two of them together. He knew something was up.

What was she doing?

Charles had already lost so much. Far too much.

She couldn’t meet Kathy’s eyes as the woman hesitated at the door.

“Charles…” Both women spoke at once.

Kathy approached the little table, kneeling down until she was nose to nose with Amelia’s son.

“Charles,” she said, a forced smile stretching her unnaturally taut lips, “I just came in to say goodbye.”

His feet stopped swinging beneath the table. “Where ya’ goin’?”

“To my mother’s,” Kathy said. “I spoke to her a little while ago and she asked me to come for a visit.”

Charles wrinkled his nose. “I thought you said she’s not good at games.”

Kathy shrugged. “So I’ll teach her.” She ran a finger lightly down his nose. “Before I go, though, I want you to promise me you’ll be a good boy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know it’s what your daddy would want.”

Amelia didn’t miss the nanny’s lack of reference to her.

Charles nodded, picked up his picture of four square-bodied people standing in the air above what could have been a grove of purple trees or a crowd of very sunburned people at a baseball game. “You think he’ll like my picture?” he asked Kathy, the need for his nanny’s approval evident.

“Oh, yeah, buddy, he’s gonna love it,” she said, real warmth in her voice.

Charles sat up a little straighter, grinning at Kathy. His denim-clad legs were swinging again. “I know he will.”

Throat tight, Amelia was tempted just to call it off. Kathy’s love for Charles was so obvious—as obvious as Charles’s was for her. How could Amelia rob them of something so precious? What kind of mother did that make her?

Just as she was about to change her mind, a mental flashback to the scene in her living room half an hour ago held Amelia rigid. There’d never been any doubt that Kathy loved Charles. The doubt lay in whether or not that love was healthy.

Charles grew still again, his brows drawn together beneath those black frames that made him look too serious sometimes. His dark hair skimmed the collar of his polo shirt when he tilted his head back slightly to peer at Kathy. “Will you be done visiting to come home for the annivers’y party? That’s what Daddy would want, right?”

“My mom’s pretty lonely, Charles,” Kathy said. “I’m going to be living with her for now and then probably getting a little house of my own.”

“You don’t like our house?”

“Of course I do!” Kathy said, moving a little closer to the boy. “I love your house! But I’ve been here a long time and everybody needs a house of their own when they’re grown up.”

“Is that why Daddy went to live in heaven? To have a house of his own?”

“I don’t think so, Charles,” Kathy said. “This is your daddy’s house. He didn’t choose to go away from you. It was an accident.”

Feeling completely ineffective, Amelia simply stood there. Kathy was handling things so well—and deserved the chance to handle them.

Kathy knew exactly what to say to Charles. How to say it. And she was, even now, putting all her effort into making her departure something Charles could accept.

She had been a remarkable nurturer from the very beginning. It was one of the qualities that had made her such a great addition to their home.

Still frowning, so serious for his five years, Charles asked, “But you’re choosing to go away from me?”

“Oh, sweetie, no!” Kathy shot Amelia a half gloating, half lethal glance. “I don’t really have a choice, either, just in a different way.” Amelia was poised and ready to discontinue the conversation before anything damaging was said. Only the loving tone of Kathy’s voice as she spoke to Charles gave her pause.

“I’m a daughter,” the nanny said softly, “just like you’re a son. And as a daughter, I don’t have any choice but to mind my mother, who told me this morning that I should come home.”

“Like we do what Daddy would want?”

“Just like that.” And then, with another glance over her shoulder, “and what Mommy wants, too.”

Charles was silent, his legs swinging slowly, as he seemed to ponder his nanny’s words. At last he spoke.

“But if you go make your mom not lonely, doesn’t that make me be lonely?”

Tears sprang to Amelia’s eyes.

“Oh, buddy, come here,” Kathy said, pulling Charles onto her lap. She hugged him tightly, rocking back and forth slowly. “No matter where I go, I’ll always be loving you,” she said. Charles’s chubby little face was visible over the nanny’s shoulder. His eyes were squeezed shut.

“You only have to think of me and you’ll be able to feel me loving you, okay?”

“’Kay.”

Amelia started to panic. Wondering what had ever made her think she could cope without Kathy’s help.

Kathy set Charles back enough to gaze into his eyes. “Promise me you’ll remember that? That you’ll think of me?”

The little boy hesitated and then slowly nodded. “I promise.”

Amelia might as well not have been in the room.

She cleared her throat.

Kathy slowly set Charles back in his chair, straightening. “And besides,” she added, “I won’t be far away. My mom lives right here in Chicago. I can still visit you.”

Amelia had already established that much. She had no intention of robbing them of the right to care about each other, to see each other.

The visits would be supervised, of course, but Charles didn’t have to know that.

Charles was staring down at the table. “Will you come back to see my pictures when you’re visiting your mom’s? And take me to swimming lessons?”

Kathy’s shoulders stiffened. “I don’t think your mom—”

“It’s Kathy’s turn to be busy with other things in her life right now, Charles, just like Mommy’s been busy at work,” Amelia interjected quickly. “And now I’m through with that.” She crossed the room, kneeling to put an arm around Charles’s shoulders. “I’m going to be here from now on to take you to all your lessons and play ball with you and everything else. But I’ve invited Kathy to have dinner with us as soon as she can.”

She let go of a very tightly held breath when Charles’s face cleared. “Just don’t come on the meat night when it’s hard to chew and gets stuck in your teeth,” he said to Kathy before returning his attention to the box people he was coloring red.

“He doesn’t like roast tenderloin,” Kathy told Amelia.

Amelia nodded. She knew that.

“Okay, well, I’ll see you soon, buddy,” Kathy said, heading toward the door.

The little boy looked up briefly and then resumed coloring. “’Kay. Bye.”

Kathy turned for one last glance at that bent head before she left.

Her eyes clouded with pain.

Trying perhaps a little too hard, Amelia filled the days immediately following Kathy’s departure with far more activity than Charles was used to.

She broke the rules she and Johnny had established together during those long hours late at night when they’d lain awake in bed, her head on his chest, his hand on her belly, and planned how it would be once their baby was born. She knowingly spoiled Charles. Despite her certainty about the rightness of what she’d done, she overcompensated in her attempt to divert his affection away from the young woman with whom he’d spent most of his waking hours.

She told herself that wasn’t why she and Cara were standing in line with Charles at Six Flags amusement park that August afternoon. The park was one of Charles’s favorite places; they had season passes and more hours to fill than Amelia and Charles had ever had before. The park had been one of Kathy’s favorite places, too.

The park was crowded, surprising, since it was only Thursday. As soon as they entered, Charles’s brows came together in a considering look that was familiar to his mother and her redheaded manager of operations and best friend, Cara Carson. “I think we should do the Looney Tooter first,” he said, the barely contained excitement in his voice making it an octave higher than normal. “’Cause it goes everywhere around and then after that, we can remember what we should do next.”

“Looney Tooter it is,” Amelia said, grinning at her friend as Charles pulled at them, eager to get on with his afternoon. He was making it a little difficult for her and Cara, one on either side of him, to keep a firm grip on his hands.

In deference to the ninety-degree weather, or maybe more to fit in with the crowd, all three of them were wearing shorts, thin cotton shirts and tennis shoes. Amelia also had on a floppy straw hat and sunglasses that she hoped would disguise her. Her face would be recognizable to anyone who read the business section of any Chicago paper.

“We’re going to be there pretty soon,” Charles informed her with an extra tug. Amelia felt a pang as she noticed how Charles was starting to show promise of having his father’s tall, muscled body. She wondered if Johnny was watching over them. If he approved of her decision to dismiss Kathy. If he thought she’d waited too long to do so. If he disapproved of her bringing Charles to the amusement park for no special reason on a weekday afternoon.

And then it was time to ride. The Looney Tooter. Waddaview Charter Service, Porky and Petunia’s Lady Bugz and Buzzy Beez…

“It’s been two weeks since Kathy left, and he doesn’t seem to have suffered any great damage,” Cara said as the two leaned on the wrought-iron fence surrounding one of the kiddie rides Charles had insisted on riding alone. He’d had his fifth birthday, he’d reminded them, and was now officially “a big boy.”

“He misses her,” Amelia murmured, eyes on Charles’s bright-green shirt going around and around. “But right now, the novelty of having Mommy home more often—and of having his own little office at Wainscoat—has been a good distraction.”

Cara was frowning, although when Charles passed them and waved, she bestowed a huge, engaging grin on him.

“Isn’t it possible that having you around now has made her expendable to him?”

“I guess.”

“How are you doing without her?” The words were spoken softly, both women looking straight ahead.

Amelia didn’t even think about prevaricating. Not with Cara. There was no point. “The evenings are hard once Charles goes to bed.” Shifting her weight from her right foot to her left, Amelia rested her elbows on the fence. “You know, after my dad died, things weren’t great between Johnny and me, but I never realized how much I still relied on his companionship at night.”

“You were out a lot.”

“Yeah.” At the business functions Cara had been attending for her since Johnny’s death. While she wouldn’t trade her time with Charles for anything, Amelia yearned for the days when everything was clear—or she was too busy to notice that it wasn’t. “I shouldn’t ask this, Cara,” she said now, “but you’ve been talking about getting out of your neighborhood, selling the condo. And with Kathy’s apartment vacant…”

“You’re asking me to move out to the estate?”

“You don’t have to. It’s just an idea.”

“A great one,” Cara said, elbowing Amelia in the ribs. “I’ve always loved your house, you know that. But I’d insist on paying rent.”

“No way.” Amelia shook her head. “Consider it a well-deserved raise.” Each time Charles passed them, he waved. God, she loved that kid.

“We always talked about living together when we were young, remember?” Cara was smiling.

Cara had been raised by her aunt—her father’s older sister—after losing both of her parents in a car accident when she was five. Amy’s mother had been killed by a drunk driver before Amy’s first birthday. It was something that had drawn her and Cara together from the very beginning, losing a parent that way, and kept them together during all the years of their growing up.

And while Amelia had adored her father and Cara her aunt, they’d both thought that somehow the void in their hearts would be filled if they could live together. A childish dream but one that still meant something.

Amelia couldn’t help smiling at her friend’s reaction. “Kathy’s apartment has its own entrance and kitchen,” she said. “You’d have as much privacy as you wanted.”

“It would sure be convenient for me to be out there on the days you don’t come into the office,” Cara said. “I could just bring stuff home and we could work at night after Charles is asleep.”

For the first time in weeks, Amelia felt a lessening of the dreadful loneliness that had been gripping her.

“You’ll tell me if you’re not happy with that arrangement?” she asked, shifting to meet her friend’s eyes.

“I will.” Cara’s gaze was as forthright as always.

“Okay.”

Amelia turned as Charles came barreling over to the Buzzy Beez exit. She grabbed the back pocket of his shorts before he could get swept up in the crowd.

“Oh, Mom, that was so cool! Did you see me go faster and faster, maybe sixty-four miles an hour, and no hands or anything?” The little boy pushed his glasses back up his nose.

“We sure did, Charles! You’re going to be as big and brave as your dad was pretty soon.” Amelia grinned.

“Yeah,” Charles said solemnly. “Next week, pro’bly.”

After an ice-cream bar, a ride on the Ferris wheel and an encounter with Elmer Fudd that included, on Charles’s insistence, a hug for each of them, the trio started on their second go-round of Charles’s favorite rides.

“I’m going to make a dash for the ladies’ room,” Cara said when Amelia rejoined her on the sidelines after buckling Charles into Lady Bugz.

Nodding, Amelia continued to watch her son and he want around and around. His grin pulled at her, reminding her of his dad. It had been a year, and the pain of his loss hadn’t diminished at all. Johnny had been a great father. The best.

And as a husband—

Amelia couldn’t see Charles.

The ride came to a stop with the little boy on the opposite side of the enclosure, the machinery between them. She moved quickly, vaulting over the rail. She braced herself, expecting him to barrel into her as she dashed around the ride.

Charles wasn’t there.

In the couple of seconds it had taken Amelia to get to the other side, he’d disappeared.

Impossible.

Looking around frantically, trying to calm her frenzied heart, telling herself Charles had to be there, that panic was ridiculous, Amelia panicked.

“Charles?” she called, her heart pumping so fast she could hardly breathe.

He had to be there.

“Charles?” she called again, more loudly, weaving through the masses of kids exiting the ride, searching for a glimpse of that bright-green shirt. He’d just gone around the other way. She was sure of it.

He knew the rules. She’d tested him just a minute or two before he’d boarded Lady Bugz.

“Don’t ever be alone,” he’d recited. “Always hold hands when we’re walking. Don’t talk to anyone but the exact ones I came with today and if I have to throw up, tell you…”

Charles Wainscoat Dunn was worth a lot of money.

The rules were what kept him safe.

“Charles!” she shrieked, consumed by terror as she reached her original vantage point and her son was nowhere to be seen.

“God, no.” Tears sprang to her eyes and she angrily blinked them away. She had to find him. This wasn’t happening.

“Charles!” She hollered again and again, running around the entire ride, which was now being invaded by a new mass of children who’d been waiting for their turn.

A couple of little girls looked scared as she ran past. People were starting to stare.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” A ride attendant appeared. “You really can’t be in here.”

“My son,” Amelia panted, half-hysterical with fright. “He was just on this ride and now he’s gone.”

“The exit’s that way,” the young man said, pointing in the direction Amelia had just come from.

“I know that!” she snapped. “He’s not there!”

“Have you looked outside the fence? He probably just wandered out with the rest of the kids.”

“Charles wouldn’t do that. He knows the rules.” Amelia continued to scour the area, certain her son had to be there someplace.

Oh. God.

She choked back blinding tears. Johnny. I need you.

The skinny young man looked around at the restless kids now buckled in and waiting impatiently for the Lady Bugz to start moving.

“Sometimes kids get excited and take off for the next ride,” he said, his tone reassuring. “Don’t worry, he’ll turn up. If he’s not right here or in the vicinity, then head over to Lost Parents in Hometown Park. It’s across from The Orbit. That’s where whoever finds him will take him.”

“You don’t understand…” Amelia started to explain, and then stopped.

If Charles wasn’t here, he was someplace else. And she was wasting precious time.

Stumbling in her haste, Amelia tore around the outside of the ride, hardly seeing anything, searching only for that bright-green shirt.

Her worst nightmare was coming true and she was helpless. Helpless!

“Charles!” she screamed, desperate, her entire body shaking.

“Amelia!” Cara’s familiar voice, her touch on Amelia’s shoulder, slowed her panic, but only for a moment. “What’s wrong?” Cara was asking urgently. “Where’s Charles?”

“I don’t know!” Amelia cried, the last of her composure disappearing. “When the ride stopped, he was gone!”

“He’s got to be here, honey,” Cara said, her calm voice belying the worried look in her eyes as she twisted her head. “He knows the rules. He’d never let someone haul him off without a helluva lot of hollering, and you were standing right here. You would’ve heard him.”

Cara was right, of course. Amelia straightened. Shoulders back, she looked over the heads of the people passing in front of her. “Where is he?” she demanded, autocratic, commanding, in an odd parody of leadership. “Where is he, dammit?” The bravado ended abruptly with a gulping sob.

Cara’s arm slid around Amelia just as she might have fallen to her knees. “Come on, sweetie, we’ll take one more walk around the immediate vicinity and then go to Lost Parents. Charles knows where it is, and even if he doesn’t, anyone who finds him will take him there.”

Amelia nodded, allowing herself to be led as they walked around the ride one more time, checked behind trees, under benches and behind a vendor’s cart.

“He’s gone,” she whispered, desperation making her light-headed even while something inside her was pushing her to be strong.

“Let’s go to Lost Parents,” Cara said, right beside her. “He’ll get scared if he has to wait there too long.”

Adrenaline propelled Amelia through the park faster than she’d ever traveled it before, guiding her as she ducked around and through people. Her straw hat was knocked off and she hardly noticed, leaving it to be trampled. She could feel Cara right behind her, but wouldn’t have slowed if the other woman got held up.

Charles needed her.

And she needed him. More than anyone knew.

She and Cara burst through the entrance to Lost Parents together. And somehow were standing there hand in hand when an attendant told Amelia that Charles wasn’t there.

“He has to be here!” She heard herself screaming as if she was somewhere outside, watching the whole horrible incident from a safe place.

“What’s our next move?”

She heard Cara ask the question, grateful on some level for her friend’s strength, her ability to think when Amelia couldn’t.

“We’ll search the park, put everyone on immediate alert. I’m sure he’ll turn up. They always do…”

Sometime over the next grueling hours, while park security, the police and eventually—as dusk and then darkness fell—the FBI conducted searches, Amelia slipped into shock.

Cara was holding her when the park finally closed, was cleared out, thoroughly searched a final time—and the official word came in.

Charles was not in the park. He might have wandered away. Might be in the vicinity. But no one seemed to think that. They were going under the assumption that the Wainscoat heir had been abducted.

Cara was holding Amelia when the wrenching sobs wracked her friend’s body.

And was still holding her when, so lost in her fear and grief Amelia didn’t even know where she was, they were escorted out of the park.

1

Five months later…

Another town.

There’d been so many.

But this town, on this cold January day, was the one. It had to be.

She didn’t even glance at the dirty snowbanks, the barren trees.

Her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, Amy Wayne, as she called herself on the road, couldn’t take the time to care which fast-food places were being advertised on the billboards she whizzed past, or what the economic atmosphere in this particular Michigan town seemed to be. Depressed. Run-down. Thriving. Prosperous. Gray and broken. Beautiful. She’d seen them all.

She’d come to Lawrence, Michigan, to find her son. Nothing else mattered.

Without taking her gaze from the road, Amy reached for the thermostat, flipping it on defrost to clear gathering condensation from the windows.

A few minutes ago she’d lost sight of the car she’d been tracking all day, but she was intimately acquainted with the fact that county roads went in only two directions. To the next town. Or back.

Her ex-nanny’s vehicle was a spruce green, four-door Pontiac Grand Am—purchased after she’d been exonerated, at least by the law, of any suspicion in Charles’s disappearance. The car hadn’t passed in the other direction, so it had to be up ahead.

And almost out of gas.

As far as Amy could tell, that sedan hadn’t stopped for several hours. Which meant its driver would probably be forced to stop in Lawrence.

And Amy was going to be right there when it did.

After almost five months on the road alone, chasing down every hint of hope while the officials investigated everyone Amelia Wainscoat had ever known, Amy would see her son again. To fill her aching arms with his sweet, robust little body.

She’d made only occasional visits home, primarily to deal with business matters. The few people who knew what she was doing, who knew she’d undertaken this search a few weeks after her son’s disappearance, wondered about her sanity. But no one had been able to stop her.

Amy could hardly remember what it felt like to be the confident, in-control woman who’d accompanied her son to the amusement park that afternoon so many months before. Some days she could hardly remember what it was like to feel at all.

How much did five-year-olds grow in five months? she wondered, her eyes alert, darting here, there, everywhere at once, ensuring that nothing—no one—got by her. Had he lost that baby fat she and Johnny had loved so much?

The multimillionaire mother might not look so powerful in her department-store clothes and polyester-filled parka, with her barely made-up face, as she drove the ordinary black Thunderbird she’d purchased to replace the chauffeur-driven limo she’d left at home. But her slender appearance, still sporting remnants of the sleekness she’d once worn so naturally, was as deceptive as the car she was driving. Over the past months of searching for her abducted son, she and her car had proved just how high performance they were.

They were going to win this one. Johnny had always said she could do anything she put her mind to. He’d told her many times, usually while shaking that gorgeous blond head of his, that he’d never met anyone who could make things happen the way she could.

Of course, that had been B.A. Before the accident. Before she’d known she could take nothing in life for granted. That all the money in the world did nothing for her at all. Bought nothing that mattered.

Her stomach in knots, Amy pressed a little harder on the accelerator, the eight-cylinder coupe sliding only slightly when she rounded the next bend. Where was that green car?