Sleeping in Eden (40 page)

Forever.
The thought made her heart seize, her chest feel tight. She knew she should turn around, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. There was an instant of complete immobility, a few seconds during which the world seemed to sputter, gasp, and start, and Meg stood rooted to the ground as if she had been planted there before the beginning of time. Then something in his face changed, and she knew that he realized she had seen him. Her fate was sealed.

He grinned at her. A slow-moving, all-encompassing smile that started at his lips but didn't end there. His joy seemed to envelop the rusted lines of his truck, the space between them, her. The force of it hit her at the same time a cool wind lifted from the south, a quick exhalation of air that carried with it
the scent of rain and the first few rumbling notes of thunder in the distance. Meg didn't mean to, but she smiled back. And when she crossed the drop-off lane to meet him, his name was waiting on her tongue, sweet and warm and begging to be whispered. To stitch together the small span of space between them.

To bring her back to a time before everything had changed.

I
t wasn't hard to find Jess Langbroek. Lucas did a quick search on his phone and came up with a half dozen possibilities that he quickly whittled down to one. There was a dentist in New Jersey and an artist in a small town in the Netherlands, as well as a handful of women named Jessica who went by Jess. But the man they were looking for was Jesse Elliot Langbroek, a presidential scholar and the resident of a small town that was only a forty-minute drive from Omaha.

“Sutton, Iowa,” Lucas said, showing Angela the address on the LCD screen of his phone. “But the information is a decade old. Jess Langbroek graduated from high school ten years ago. He's probably long gone by now.”

“There's nothing more recent on him?”

“Not that I can tell. Maybe he goes by Jesse now. Or his middle name.”

“Well, we have to go,” Angela said, leaving no room for discussion. “We're less than an hour from knocking on the door of the guy who bought the ring. Her ring.”

“I'm familiar with the ring,” Lucas assured her. “I stole it, remember? But you're jumping to conclusions. He could have moved. She could have given it away. It could be a dead end, Angela. You need to consider that possibility.”

“It's not. I'm sure of it.”

“This article is about his presidential scholarship. We don't even have an address.”

“I do.” Angela held up her own phone. There was a Yellow Pages entry for a Donald and Gayle Langbroek at 439 Ninth Street Circle NE, Sutton, Iowa. “It's kind of an unusual name. There's only one Langbroek family in Sutton. His parents? Definitely a relative.”

Lucas rolled his eyes, but the truth was that even without her prodding, he would have taken the road to Sutton instead of the interstate home. His heart was thumping a fast, irregular rhythm at the thought of being so close to where her story began. “Fine,” he said. “I'll call Jenna and let her know we won't be back for supper.”

But Jenna didn't answer her cell, and Lucas was forced to leave a short, strangled-sounding message that he was sure crackled with the guilt he felt over his blunder with Angela in the car. Had she kissed him? Had he let her? Had he just cheated on his wife? Again?

Although men were supposed to belong to some sort of womanizing boys' club by virtue of nothing more than their gender, Lucas had never joined. He had no idea how to handle the lingering effects of Angela's almost-kiss and her subsequent confession. I love my wife, he thought, and he felt the need to say it aloud, to make it true by forcing Angela to hear the words. But underneath his instinctive reaction, he felt something living and insistent poke through the cracks of his carefully constructed pretenses.

When was the last time that Jenna had looked at him the way Angela did in the car? Had his wife ever looked at him like that? It was an unsettling thought, and Lucas was convinced that he could feel doubt growing like an eager weed as it raised jealous fingers toward the sun. Jenna had always been quiet, a bit of an enigma, a puzzle to be solved. But throughout their courtship and most of their marriage, he had considered her inscrutability to be one of her more intriguing qualities. At what point had her admirable autonomy become a liability? A root of
uncertainty that, he had to admit, deep down made him question everything?

“You're going to miss the turnoff if you don't slow down,” Angela said, tapping her window to indicate the hidden road that intersected the highway they were on. “That's the way to Sutton.”

“How do you know?”

“Sign, genius.”

Lucas flicked on his blinker and stepped on the brakes hard enough to make their seat belts lock. He hid a smug smile when Angela gave a little gasp.

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

Though he hadn't been paying much attention to the drive, the road to Sutton required his full attention. They had climbed from the flatlands of the Iowa prairie to what he knew from hearsay were the rippled mounds and sheer ridges of the Loess Hills. The brown fields had given way to burr oak forests, their gnarled branches bent and arthritic. As the car wound through unfamiliar terrain, the smoky sunset of a gray sky was obscured by the soft curve of hills and the trees that grew in abundance. Lucas found it all rather pretty in an ominous, enchanted sort of way, as if the world had shifted to envelop the fable of the Woman and lend a sense of folklore to her tragic story.

“These are silt hills, you know,” Angela said, sounding more like a tour guide than the troubled woman he knew. “In some places the silt is ninety feet deep. The only other place in the world that exhibits loess to such a dramatic extent is somewhere in China.”

“I had no idea you were so interested in geology.”

“I'm not,” she muttered, turning her face from him so she could look out the window. “Jim and I didn't take vacations, but once a year he sobered up enough to make the two-hour drive to DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge. It's a state park that borders the hills.”

Lucas tried to imagine Jim hiking trails or baiting a fishhook for his ponytailed daughter. No matter how he attempted to
frame the picture of a happy father-daughter duo, it didn't work. “That's nice,” he finally said. “Sounds like a happy memory.”

“He went deer hunting and left me in the visitor center for hours on end,” Angela said dryly. “I read the natural and cultural interpretive exhibits so many times, I swear I still have them memorized.”

By the time they pulled into the city limits of Sutton, the sun was nothing more than a remembrance on the horizon, a trace of thin and wavering light that pressed the clouds like a watermark. It was close to suppertime, and Lucas could see the lights on in nearly every house they passed. The windows glowed golden and welcoming, and the quiet scene was so peaceful and inviting, it was hard to absorb the fact that they were about to disrupt a stranger's solitude with questions about a woman long gone. Lucas couldn't imagine what awaited them behind the door of one of these houses. He pulled over to the side of the wide residential road and put the car in park.

“What are you doing?”

“Stopping,” he said. “We can't just drive up to this address and knock on the door with no plan whatsoever. What are we going to say? What are we going to do if Jess Langbroek is still living there?”

“Be happy?”

“Be serious. If he's still there—if he lives at this address, we could be on the verge of changing his life.”

Angela chewed her bottom lip, looking for once like she didn't know where to go from here. “I don't know, Lucas. But we've made it this far. We can't stop now. I say we stick to the story we told Mr. Kane: we found the ring and now we're trying to return it.”

“What if he smiles, says thanks, and takes the ring?”

“We won't give it to him.”

“He bought it, Angela.”

“For someone. It's a woman's ring—quite possibly a dead woman. We'll demand to see her. There's no other way.”

Angela's slapdash plan was so full of holes, Lucas felt his resolve leaking away like water from a sieve. But she was right: they had made it much farther than he imagined they'd go, and it seemed cowardly, almost irresponsible to turn around now. He sighed in resignation, and drove the final blocks in silence, determining to let Angela and her cunning charms take the lead when they rang the doorbell.

The small cul-de-sac was easy to find as they neared the outskirts of town. A green sign announcing the street was situated directly below a streetlamp that flickered to life just as they approached. It seemed fortuitous, and Lucas pulled into the empty drive with a fledgling sense of anticipation. Maybe, just maybe, everything would work out exactly the way they hoped. Easy answers. Black and white. Right and wrong outlined so clear, so stark and obvious there was no room for second-guessing.

There were only three houses in the circle, and the largest bore the numbers
439
in wrought-iron scrollwork above the brick garage. An old basketball hoop with a bent rim and the shredded remains of what used to be a net stood sentry beside the driveway, but it seemed obvious to Lucas that the structure was a relic. No bikes, children's toys, or youthful paraphernalia littered the yard, and there was a distinctly old and unused feel to the dark house. No lights illuminated the windows.

“I don't think anyone's home,” Lucas said, but Angela already had her car door open. “It's dark,” he called. “I don't think—”

The car door slamming cut off his unasked-for observations.

Lucas wondered if he should join her, but it was all over before he had a chance to make up his mind. Angela jogged up the driveway, her feet falling lightly, her long hair swaying with every stride. She seemed eager as she flew up the three short steps to the front door, and she rang the doorbell with the open palm of her hand, as if she had to do it quickly and decisively or risk losing her nerve. Then she took a step back and waited, fingers looped in her front pockets, elbows akimbo, head cocked in expectation.

Nothing happened. She reached for the doorbell again. Waited. Rang it two more times before Lucas stepped from the car and called, “No one's home, Angela.”

She threw up her hands and cursed, forgoing the bell to knock loudly on the door one last time. When the echo of her pounding faded and not even a drape had rustled in the house, she slunk down the steps with her shoulders rounded and walked at a snail's pace back to the car.

“Get in,” Lucas told her. “It's cold.”

“This can't be a dead end,” Angela moaned, slumping in the car and pulling the door shut weakly. She had to reopen and shut it twice before it latched properly. “I had such a good feeling about this.”

“Me, too,” Lucas admitted.

Her eyes widened with a hungry look and she sat up straight, fixing him in a desperate stare. “Let's stay. We'll find a motel and try again later. In the morning. Whenever. It doesn't look like an empty house. Someone's got to live here . . .”

But Lucas was already shaking his head. “We can come back.”

“Stay,” she begged. “I'll call Jenna. I'll explain that we're held up . . .”

The thought of Angela calling his estranged wife to explain an overnight stay chilled Lucas's blood. No matter what he felt about their relationship and how it had changed over the years, he couldn't stand the idea of giving Jenna any reason to mistrust him. Not now. Not when his marriage dangled by little more than a fragile strand of broken promises. “No,” he said, the tone of his voice enough to wipe the hopeful look off Angela's lovely face.

She glared at Lucas, startling him with the whiplash of her emotion. Then she blinked and the anger was gone. Gentling her features, she said, “I'm starving. Let's find a place to grab supper and then we'll head back to Blackhawk.”

“But before we leave, we'll swing by here one more time,” Lucas said, completing her scheme for her.

Angela nodded, a triumphant assurance in the dip of her
head because she'd known that Lucas would agree to this one small request.

“Surely someone will be home in an hour or two.” Lucas grimaced a little to show her just how long-suffering and patient he really was. But the idea sounded good to him, too, and as he mentally reviewed their short trek down Sutton's historic main street, he remembered seeing a pizza and sandwich joint that made his mouth water in spite of the situation. “We didn't have lunch, did we?”

“I'm still working off a cup of tea.”

Lucas did a U-turn in the cul-de-sac and headed back toward the shops. “There was a—”

“Pizza place just past the gas station,” Angela finished. “I bet they have hoagies.”

He laughed. “You're a vegetarian,” Lucas reminded her.