The Hiding Place (11 page)

“I remember,” Veronica tried to say but it was hard to form her thoughts and words. Damned drugs. Why had she started using again? Was someone using her? Could she use this woman?

“I’m so sorry we had to meet again here,” Elin said. “I’m not supposed to be in your cabin, but I thought I’d pop in for a sec when I saw your nurse had stepped out for some fresh air. You just have the doctor let me know when I can help. I think it helped you last time to play for hours. I still have all those
Phantom
songs in my head. My favorite was ‘Masquerade’ and yours was ‘Think Of Me.’ Do you remember?”

Remember. Yes, she had to remember something. “Think of Me.” Something about Laird? Or was it Tara? Yes, that was it.

“Call Tara Kinsale,” Veronica whispered, but it came to her ears in the blur of one hissing sound. She wanted to speak clearly, but she had to whisper, too, so no one else would hear. “Tara Kinsale.”

“Oh, sure. Tara. But she’s been gone from here for a long time—you remember, don’t you? I overheard Dr. Middleton tell them at the reception desk that you might be kind of—well, distracted for a while and wouldn’t be getting visitors, so Tara can’t come to see you right now.”

“Call her. Say, Jen’s not in Los Angeles.”

“What’s that? I’m having trouble hearing you,” the angel said, pulling her long, straight hair back and leaning closer. “It’s all right though. You’ll be here for a while, so don’t worry about—”

Veronica tried again, but her speech still sounded slurred. It was just something they must have given her, but she had to try. “Jen’s not in Los Angeles,” she whispered again. She had more to add, but that was all she had time for now. She heard new footsteps.

Another voice in the room. “Dr. Middleton says she’s not to be disturbed, Ms. Johansen. She’s on heavy meds for a while because she was so distraught they thought she might hurt herself or someone else.”

The angel stood up and turned away. “It’s only that we worked closely together last time she was here,” she told the nurse. “Mrs. Lohan is a fantastic organist, classical performance level. I was just assuring her we could work together in the later stages of rehab.”

“Right now, it’s just the sedatives talking until we can get them all calibrated.”

“Sure. Well, I know her doctors will let me know when I can help get her back on her feet again and all.”

The angel-faced girl moved away, and the sour-looking one took her place. Now, who had that angel been? Veronica wondered, and finally surrendered in her battle with heavy, heavy sleep.

“This used to be my bedroom, when I was a kid,” Nick told Tara as she sat at her desk and he took the only armchair in her office, with Beamer flopping instantly next to his big feet.

Her insides cartwheeled to think that she, too, had spent hours in his room. “Oh, I didn’t know. I could move my office downstairs, and you could come up here if you want it back.”

“No, this is fine. If—only if—I decide Claire and I are moving east for a while, I thought you might want to rent the place—at a great price. But I’ll find and stop that lurker first,” he promised, with a glance at the back window. If he was surprised she’d lowered the blinds, he didn’t say so.

Nick’s promise to find the lurker seemed a small consolation prize for losing Claire, however upset Tara was about someone watching the place. But she nodded and turned away before he could see she was tearing up. She did not want him to think she was as fragile as she felt lately, or he’d really question her ability to look after Claire.

As hard as she fought accepting the idea, she was becoming obsessed, absolutely haunted, by the possibility she had borne a child of her own and the child had died. She prayed that at least, if she
had
lost a baby, it had been early in the pregnancy. But, two to one, the doctors didn’t indicate that. And Jen—she would have known about a pregnancy, but she could have been bribed to lie. She had to know the truth, but Veronica had been taken away from her. She was getting so desperate she was considering asking Jordan Lohan—or worse, Laird—and she wanted nothing to do with either of them. And she kept coming so close to blurting all of that out to Nick.

She forced herself to get down to business. They had just put Claire to bed together and then come in here so Tara could try to trace Dietmar Getz online. They wanted to know if he was in the area. The candy bar wrapper wasn’t much, nor was a bike tread, not in an area where so many people biked. Coloradans were hiking and biking crazy. Cyclists enjoyed everything from slightly uphill pedaling to extreme biking in body armor, crashing up through the woods, then careening down the mountains. Still, other than trying to find out more about Rick Whetstone, the disgruntled Getz was the best candidate for their lurker right now.

Before dark, they had made two six-inch plaster molds of the best indentations of bike tire treads. They were going to let them dry overnight before trying to pry them out. Tara was betting she might find something else online to implicate Getz, or at least put him in the area. Motive, means and opportunity, the police always said. Getz had the motive. And a mountain bike taken up and down Black Mountain or Shadow Mountain could be the means. If he was traveling out of California again, would that mean he had the opportunity?

She went to the mountain bike Web site she’d used to find Getz in the first place.

“Yes!” she said.

“Yes, what?” Nick asked, and came to lean so close over her shoulder she could smell his tart aftershave. It was something fresh and free, like the pines in the alpine forests here. Yet it reminded her of some secret scent hidden deep within her memory, a smell sharper than that. Something close, clean, astringent—but her brain would go no further. It was like her deepest fears roused by
Psycho,
the black blood that seemed scarlet to her.

“What is it?” He repeated his question so close to her ear that she startled, and came back from her agonizing.

“He’s definitely in the area,” she said, pointing at the monitor screen. “He’s on the competitor list for an Extreme Bike Rally—tomorrow, no less—just about fifty miles from here, see?”

Nick leaned closer and read aloud:

“X-Treme MB Race and Rally

Conquer the Divide

At the Continental Divide

Loveland Pass, Colorado

SW of Denver

Join us at the Loveland Pass S of Route 70, Arapaho Basin Entrance to Grays Peak Park. 10:00 a.m. till 4:00 p.m., race at noon. Vendors, food, money prizes, sponsored by—

“That’s a long list of sponsors, so there must be some good money to be won,” Nick went on. “But where’s his name?”

“Here,” she told him, scrolling down the page, “under the maps of the location and the layout of the race.”

“Which I see is through mountainous, wooded terrain. Getting up to and then down from the land above this property would be a piece of cake—German chocolate cake—for this guy.”

“Here’s his name—and what’s evidently a nickname,” she said, pointing.

“Yeah,” he said, so close that his cheek brushed the hair along her temple. “Dietmar (Whacker) Getz, San Jose, CA.”

“I hate that nickname, Whacker,” Tara said, sitting back a bit. She had the strangest desire to turn her head and rub her lips against the light gold stubble on Nick’s face.

“‘Whacker’ doesn’t mean what it does in cop and mafia lingo here,” Nick told her, “not a hired gun or sniper. To extreme bikers it’s short for bushwhacker, which means somebody who pushes ahead through the worst risks, whether on or off the marked trail. I had a couple of college friends who were into X-treme, as they called it. The opposite of a bushwhacker is a backtracker, somebody who’s supposedly more sensible and rational.”

“Like me—once,” she whispered.

“I was going to say, like me, despite the fact I learned a lot living with some of the best, most skilled fighters I’ve ever seen. They almost always got their man. They were efficient, purposeful and disciplined, not mavericks or rebels. I was proud to be a part of their unit, even if…”

His voice trailed off.

“If what?” she asked as she hit the print button to run off the race information.

She saw him shake his head as if to clear it. He straightened up, towering over her again. “I think I’m off to the races tomorrow morning,” he said, in an abrupt change of topic. “The X-treme races. One thing I’ve learned is that the best defense is often a strong offense, so—like with Rick—I’m going to have at least a chat with Herr Dietmar Getz, alias Whacker.”

“Not without me there, you’re not,” she said, standing to face him as the printer hummed the material onto paper. “And you promised Claire an outing for all three of us. If you’ll go with me, I want to face him down, to let him know we’re onto him. After all, what’s he going to do with all those other people who know him standing—riding—around? We need to cart one of those concrete impressions of the treads with us and see if his bike tires match.”

“You’re something,” he said with a tight smile as his gaze went over her like a firm caress.

“I will
not
be threatened by another one of the despicable moral cowards who snatch their children. Lately, I’ve come to understand a bit more how Alex could have been so obsessed with getting Claire back, even if she had to lie and steal from me and face Clay alone.”

“So that’s what’s been eating at you. Coming to terms with all that, not just worries about a possible stalker.”

She gazed into his sky-blue eyes. They seemed to bore deep into her. Desperately, she wanted to share her burden with him, ask his advice. But she didn’t want to break down in front of him, for fear he’d really want to get Claire away from her, too.

Too? she thought. Too, as if you now accept that you had a baby and lost that baby? Do you believe that now? she asked herself.

Nick was saying, “…so I guess mother instinct is that strong. My mother once dove into an icy cold stream after me when I was screaming for her.”

Tara felt jolted into some other dimension. “Icy cold,” he’d said. “Screaming for her.” She recalled herself being so cold…in the snow…screaming for someone…some child. But where and when?

His deep voice went on. She nodded. Her eyes were still locked to his laser-blue gaze, but she wasn’t thinking of his mother. She was thinking of herself. She felt pregnant with the deep, driving need to find, not some stalker who hid outside, but the child she might have carried within.

“A
re we there yet? What does the constant divide divide, anyway? Will we see a big line on the ground?”

Tara was tense and she knew Nick was, too, but Claire was having the time of her life, asking continuous questions from the backseat of his truck.

Driving in fairly heavy traffic on I-70W, Nick had let Tara do most of the talking, but he answered Claire’s last question. “It’s an invisible line that marks where rainwater and rivers flow in different directions on the Contin-en-tal Divide, not the Constant Divide. If you had a rock and you poured water on top of it, the water would slide off in different directions. To the east of Continental Divide,” he went on, gesturing broadly so she could see from the backseat, “water flows into the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean. To the west, it goes toward the Pacific. This pretend line goes through five different states.”

“Colorado and what else?” came the clear voice from behind them.

If Claire didn’t have a seat belt on, Tara was certain she would have tried to crawl up into the front seat so she could keep an eye on every nuance of her and Nick’s facial expressions. All of a sudden, the child was not only into matchmaking but gauging how well her aunt Tara and uncle Nick were getting along at any given moment. As if it wasn’t enough, Tara thought, to have a possible watcher outside the house, they had one in their midst.

She could almost read Nick’s thoughts. Beamer, however excited about their outing today, was content to be a quiet backseat companion. That was what Nick had been expecting from Claire. Nick McMahon had a lot to learn about rearing a child. He’d been successfully training dogs for years and giving or taking orders working with the military. But that did not translate into dealing with a little girl, and he was probably going to have to learn that lesson the hard way.

Tara saw she was resting her arms protectively on her belly again. When she realized what she was doing, she forced herself to put them on the center and door armrests while Nick dutifully recited the other Continental Divide states. “Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and New Mexico. We’re going to be really close to one part of the line near the Arapaho Basin at Loveland Pass. And, no, we’re not there yet.”

“Loveland Pass?” Claire cried with a whoop. “That’s a good name, right? Maybe the biker guys will want to bring their girlfriends there, and other men who go there will fall in love, too.”

Nick gave an imperceptible shake to his head and darted a sideways glance at Tara, who was biting back a grin. “Nothing like comic relief,” she told him, “even in the midst of a grim mission.”

She saw Nick’s smile go taut, then disappear. His lower lip almost quivered, and a frown crunched his forehead and narrowed his eyes. She could grasp why he might be a bit exasperated with Claire, but what had she said? Grim mission? She was starting to think she wasn’t the only one walking around with a hidden trauma, where an innocent remark could set off an explosion.

In his college days, Nick had been to a couple of X-treme mountain bike rallies with his buddies, but this was a big one. It might be really tough to find Dietmar Getz here, despite the fact Tara had printed an online picture of him from the Denver paper. It was a small, grainy photo, taken when Getz had been indicted for snatching his son. The other one she’d found online was of Getz, alias Whacker, winning an X-treme race trophy in California. But he wore his helmet and body armor and looked like a dust-and mud-speckled storm trooper from an old
Star Wars
movie. They’d probably have to ask around to find him.

“Okay, we’re going to have a few ground rules today,” Nick announced to Tara and Claire as they walked through the parking lot. It was loaded with vans and cars with bike carriers attached to the tops or back bumpers.