The Innocent. Amanda Stevens

Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

      Prologue

      The first child disappeared from Eden ten years ago.

      The abduction occurred on a muggy August afternoon. The kindergarten class at Fairhaven Academy, a private school on the north side of town, had just been dismissed for the day, and in spite of the heat, the children who were waiting to be picked up by their parents were engaged in a rowdy game of hide-and-seek on the playground.

      No one missed Sadie Cross at first. The children, and even the teacher who was watching them, simply thought she’d gone off to her favorite hiding place and wouldn’t come out until one of her classmates found her or until her mother came for her.

      When the latter happened, the alarm still hadn’t sounded. This was Eden, after all. Children did not disappear from school playgrounds in broad daylight. Sadie was holed up somewhere, enjoying the commotion of the hunt, or else she’d wandered off too far and couldn’t hear her name being called. She would turn up eventually, the other mothers assured Naomi Cross. It was just a matter of time.

      But she hadn’t turned up, not that day or the next, and in ten years no trace of her had ever been found. She’d simply vanished into thin air on that hot summer afternoon.

      And now another child was missing from Eden.

      Chapter One

      Wednesday

      The exhaustive search for five-year-old Emily Campbell was fast approaching the forty-eight-hour mark, and, like every other cop on the case, Sergeant Abby Cross had to fight off a growing sense of desperation. She would have gladly devoted her every waking hour to the hunt, but tramping through woods and muddy fields in one-hundred-degree-plus weather took its toll.

      She pushed back her damp hair as she walked into the command post, which had been set up in a community center a few blocks over from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The heat and humidity were bad enough, but a series of thunderstorms the night before and early that morning had made the possibility of finding tire tracks or footprints extremely remote and had grounded for several hours the chopper that had been conducting the aerial search.

      Spirits were flagging, and that was a dangerous thing. Each and every member of the search and rescue team had to remain sharp and focused because a child’s life depended on their efforts.

      Abby’s gaze slid to the faded banner over the stage at the end of the community center which proudly proclaimed: Eden, Mississippi—Where Heaven Meets Earth. Maybe that had been true at one time, but not any more. Not since Sadie Cross, Abby’s niece, had gone missing ten years ago.

      The town had never been the same since that day. Eden’s innocence had been lost forever, and dangerous suspicions had begun to simmer about the people who lived on the other side of the lake—the city dwellers who came every summer to bask in the sun and play in the water but who weren’t really a part of the community; who left at the end of the season to go back to their busy lives in the city; who couldn’t understand—and perhaps didn’t care—about the darkness that had invaded Eden.

      And now that darkness was back. Another child had disappeared.

      Battling her exhaustion and fear, Abby glanced around the chaotic center. The volunteers, including dozens of law-enforcement personnel and civilians from all over the state, had been assigned various tasks, but their mission was the same—to find the missing child. To that end, deputies manned a hotline twenty-four hours a day, and Emily’s name and physical description had been entered into the National Crime Information Center to ensure that any law-enforcement agency in the country would be able to identify her. Flyers with her picture were being distributed nationwide, and all the major news stations had sent crews to film the mother’s heartrending plea for her daughter’s safe return.

      The search would continue, aided by K-9 units and the helicopter, but after the first forty-eight hours had passed, the investigation would enter a different phase.

      Across the room, Abby saw her sister, Naomi, sitting with Tess Campbell, the mother of the missing child. Tess was crying softly, and Naomi had her arms around the distraught woman. But in comforting little Emily’s mother, Abby knew that Naomi’s thoughts had inevitably turned to another missing child. Just as Abby’s had.

      When she saw Abby, Naomi excused herself from Tess and moved with that astonishing grace of hers across the room toward her sister. At thirty-three, Naomi was a gorgeous woman—tall, thin, with glossy black hair and deep brown eyes. She could have been a model, Abby had always thought. Or an actress. But Naomi’s driving ambition, even after ten years, was still to find her daughter.

      Sadie’s disappearance had left a terrible vacuum in all their lives, but as close as Abby was to her sister, she couldn’t begin to imagine the pain and emptiness Naomi had lived with for the last ten years. The same pain and emptiness now faced Tess Campbell.

      “I was hoping you’d come by,” Naomi said.

      “I heard Tess was here. I need to talk to her.” The poor woman had already been interviewed by Abby and by Dave Conyers, another detective in the Criminal Investigations Division, but there would be other investigators with more questions. Harder questions. Questions that delved into the most intimate details of Tess Campbell’s life.

      And that’s where they’d run into problems, Abby thought. Tess didn’t want to talk about her past. No one did really, but a child’s life was at stake, and no stone could be left unturned. No secret left unexposed. Tess Campbell’s privacy—and her secrets—would become another victim of this kidnapping.

      Naomi, her eyes deeply troubled, took Abby’s arm and pulled her away from the crowd. She’d helped on searches like this all over the state since Sadie had gone missing, but every abduction took its toll, this one even more so because of the similarities to her own daughter’s disappearance. “You have news?”

      Abby sighed. “No, and it doesn’t look good.” Her stomach knotted as she glanced in Tess Campbell’s direction.

      The woman had somehow regained her composure and was now stuffing flyers into envelopes. Her expression was almost fierce as she went about the mindless task, and her strength, like Naomi’s—like so many others—was amazing. Sometimes Abby wondered how they did it, these mothers. How they managed to hold on the way they did.

      “She shouldn’t be here,” Abby murmured.

      “I know, but she had to get out of the house for a while. She needs to feel a part of the search even in a small way. Besides, there’s a deputy sitting by her telephone.”

      “But if the abductor calls, he’ll