16 Lighthouse Road (Cedar Cove #1)

16 Lighthouse Road (Cedar Cove #1) Page 18

“Call me,” Olivia said as they strolled toward the parking lot. The air was damp and cold, and their breath came out in little puffs of fog. The huge lights in the asphalt lot cast a bluish glow.

“I’m sure Dan’s home by now,” Grace murmured.

“I’m sure he is, too,” Olivia said, but her words rang false.

Grace waited until Olivia was inside her car before she got into her own. As she turned down Rosewood Lane, her heart beat so loudly it sounded like a distant drumbeat in her ear. She felt almost as though she were sitting in a theater and the music preceding a tense moment in the story had begun, growing louder and louder around her.

Other than the porch light, the house was still dark. Dread suffused her whole being. She could hardly breathe.

Where the hell was Dan?

Then it occurred to her that he might be in bed. If he’d had to work overtime or been delayed in traffic, he’d probably arrived home exhausted. In that case, he’d have showered and gone straight to bed.

Only Dan’s truck wasn’t in its usual parking space. Going inside, Grace sat her gym bag in the laundry room, then moved into the darkened living room and slowly lowered herself into her husband’s recliner. The cushion gave, broken down by years of use, and she sank into the comfortable old chair he loved so much. That was when she started to shake.

She waited fifteen minutes, then walked into the kitchen and reached for the phone. Without turning on the light, she dialed Olivia’s number and let it ring until her friend answered.

“Dan isn’t here.”

Olivia didn’t say anything for several tense moments. Then calmly, as though this was an everyday occurrence, she said, “I’ll be right over.”

Seven

Grace sat up all night, her fears out of control. Olivia had stayed up with her until after midnight, when she’d fallen asleep on the sofa out of sheer exhaustion. Grace let her friend sleep. There wasn’t anything Olivia could say that would reassure her. Nothing either one of them could do, for that matter. None of this felt real.

At six-thirty, just as the first light of morning crept toward the horizon, Olivia woke. Bolting upright, she blinked rapidly and looked around.

“Have you heard anything?” she asked, rubbing her face with both hands.

Grace shook her head. She’d brewed a pot of coffee, more for something to do than any desire for caffeine.

“I think it’s time I called Troy Davis,” Olivia said in that no-nonsense way of hers. “It’s been almost twenty-four hours, hasn’t it?”

Grace nodded, and automatically poured them each a cup of coffee. She stood in the kitchen, sipping hers, while Olivia made the call to the local sheriff’s office. She found it difficult to keep her mind clear and focused. The sleepless night hadn’t helped. Her thoughts were fearful and obsessive—ideas of where Dan might be, what could have happened, what plausible reason he might have for not coming home.

“Troy isn’t on duty until seven,” Olivia explained when she’d finished.

“Should we go there ourselves?”

“No, I talked to Lowell Price and he said Troy would take a drive out here. He knows Dan and he’ll want to handle this personally.”

Grace felt a tremendous sense of relief. “Should I phone the girls?” After all those sleepless hours of worrying, she seemed incapable of making decisions.

Olivia appeared to weigh her answer. “Why don’t you wait until after you’ve talked to Troy?”

“All right.” She hated the idea of alarming her daughters, but they had a right to know their father had disappeared. Dear God, where could he be? Never in all the years they’d been married had Dan done anything like this. Something had to be very wrong.

“Have you given any more thought to where Dan might’ve gone?”

She had, but Grace found it hard to voice the words. “Lately…before Kelly announced she was pregnant, Dan’s been…” She didn’t know how to continue and struggled not to break into tears. “I think there might be another woman.”

“Dan? No way! He’s not the type.” Olivia shook her head adamantly. “Not Dan,” she repeated. “No way.”

Grace found it hard to believe herself. But unlikely though it seemed, the thought refused to leave her mind. “I realized a long time ago that we don’t have a perfect marriage, but lately it’s…it’s as though something’s changed in Dan. He’s different.” There, she’d said it, but putting into words exactly what was different about her husband proved far more difficult. She knew he was restless. He’d been moody for thirty years, ever since Vietnam, but lately the swings had been wider, more extreme. Whenever she tried to draw him out, get him to confide in her, Dan seemed to resent her effort. That had led Grace to wonder if there was someone else he was talking to, someone else he’d come to care about. The only time he’d been himself lately was when they’d heard Kelly’s wonderful news. After their daughter’s announcement, everything had been better—for a while. Now this.

“Dan just isn’t the kind of man who would cheat on you,” Olivia said in a confident voice.

“Do any of us really know our husbands?” Grace asked quietly. She didn’t mean to be cruel, but her friend had learned that lesson the hard way. Apparently Stan had met his current wife while commuting on the ferry to his job in Seattle. Grace didn’t think he’d been involved in an actual affair with Marge, but she’d offered a sympathetic ear after Jordan’s death and had helped Stan deal with the guilt and anger that followed. His relationship with Marge had been one of emotional rather than sexual intensity. It was the only thing that could explain how quickly he’d remarried.

Olivia didn’t answer right away. Carrying her mug, she paced the area in front of the sofa. “What makes you think Dan might be seeing someone else?”

Grace didn’t have any specific details. “It’s more of a gut feeling,” she said with a helpless shrug.

“Think back over the last six months. Has he taken special care with his appearance, attended meetings at odd times of the day or night?”

Her mind was a blank. “Uh…not that I recall.”

“Didn’t you say he went hunting last fall?”

Grace nodded. He’d taken up the sport after a long absence, and while it wasn’t something she could possibly like, she’d been grateful that he was showing interest in an activity other than watching TV. He’d left on a Friday afternoon in late October and returned on the Sunday evening. He’d spoken enthusiastically about his trek through the woods, more voluble than he’d been for quite a while.

“He went alone?” Olivia asked.

Dan hadn’t mentioned anyone else, but at the time Grace hadn’t thought of that as odd. He didn’t have a lot of friends and often preferred his own company.

“Did he bring home any game?”

“No.” But that made sense, too, since it’d been years since he’d gone hunting. Putting down her coffee, Grace frowned, remembering that weekend. “Are you suggesting he was with someone else?”

Olivia boldly met her look. “I wouldn’t know, but deep down I think you do.”

Perhaps she did. That free weekend had been wonderful for her. She’d spent a delightful two days with Maryellen and Kelly, shopping at an outlet mall in Oregon. It’d been their first “Mother-Daughter Getaway Weekend,” an event they hoped to repeat annually.

“He seemed…happy,” Grace murmured. He was so rarely in a good mood that it’d struck her as unusual. She couldn’t believe that a man would go from another woman’s bed and then home to his wife, without somehow betraying his guilt. She couldn’t accept that her husband was capable of such a thing, and yet…

They heard a car outside and Olivia glanced out the living-room window. “Troy’s here.”

Grace had opened the front door and was standing on the porch as Sheriff Davis came up the walkway.

“Thanks for coming,” Grace told him, grateful he’d decided to attend to this himself.

Troy removed his hat as he stepped into the house and nodded in Olivia’s direction.

“I wasn’t sure who else to call,” Olivia explained.

“You did the right thing.” Troy was a good-looking man who’d been two years ahead of them in school and the biggest heartthrob in Cedar Cove. He’d gone into the service after graduation, then joined the sheriff’s department on his return. For the last thirty-eight years, he’d kept order in their community; ten years ago, he’d been elected sheriff. Folks liked and trusted Troy.

Grace invited him to make himself comfortable and he chose to sit in Dan’s recliner. He carried a clipboard and had a pencil ready.

“I take it you’d like to file a missing person’s report.”

“Please,” Grace said, nearly choking on the word.

“Tell me what you know,” he said gently.

Grace told him everything she could think of. Although it broke her heart, she mentioned the hunting trip and Olivia’s suspicions that there could be another woman in his life.

“Do you think there’s someone else?”

Grace raised her hands in a gesture of defeat. “What is it people say? The wife is always the last to know.” The more often she acknowledged the possibility, the more real it seemed to become. She told herself Dan wouldn’t do that to her, to their daughters. She had to believe it. Yet she knew something wasn’t right and hadn’t been for a very long time.

“What happens next?” Grace asked once the report had been completed.

Troy glanced at Olivia and then back at her. “Actually, nothing.”

“Nothing?” Grace was appalled.

“I’ve checked both hospitals in the area, but they don’t have anyone admitted under Dan’s name, nor do they have any unidentified patients.”

“He hasn’t been arrested, has he?”

“No,” Troy confirmed. “Not by us and not by the State Patrol.” In other words, no one knew anything about Dan or could guess where he might have gone. “As far as I can see, there isn’t any evidence of foul play.”

Grace nodded. She’d walked through the house a dozen times during the night, looking for even the tiniest clue that would tell her where Dan might be. She’d combed through his pockets, his dresser, everything.

“Then we have to assume Dan is missing of his own accord,” Troy said calmly.

Confused, Grace looked at her friend. “What Troy is saying,” Olivia told her, “is that it isn’t a crime for an adult to run away.”

“Husbands and wives abandon their families. Unfortunately it’s a common occurrence.”

“If that was the case,” Grace snapped, “then Dan would’ve taken something with him, don’t you think? All he had were the clothes on his back.”

“I realize it might not make sense,” Troy went on.