Agent Daddy. Alice Sharpe

Hell of a thing.”

      “Thank you,” Trip said. If Lenny hadn’t called Novak by name, Trip was pretty sure he would never have merged the skinny kid from their high school days with the corpulent man standing in front of him. “We need to talk.”

      “You here about Gina Cooke?”

      “That’s right. I have some information you might want—”

      “See that, Lenny,” Novak interrupted, as he took off his glasses and began polishing the lenses with a tissue he plucked from a box on the counter. “Mr. Tripper here is a FBI big shot but he’s going to take the time to help us out. Isn’t that nice?”

      Lenny slid Trip a glance.

      “Gina is my babysitter,” Trip said. “And I’m no longer with the Bureau.”

      “I know that.”

      “You went out to my place when you found her car—”

      “I was just following procedures. The hunt is over.”

      “You found here? Where?”

      “We haven’t found her, but we figured out what happened. She ran off with that boyfriend of hers.”

      “Peter Saks?”

      “Yeah.”

      “My housekeeper said you found Gina’s car abandoned.”

      Novak folded his glasses into his shirt pocket and leaned on the counter, resting his weight on his forearms. “Her car was found outside the Quik Mart on Apple Street. She apparently stopped there every day to buy a cup of coffee before heading out to your place. What got a pedestrian to call in was she’d left the window open and the rain was pouring in. Then there were the keys in the ignition.”

      “A bad habit of hers,” Trip said.

      “That’s what I hear. We sent someone out to your place to see if she showed up for work and someone else to talk to the girl’s boyfriend and her mother. The mother said Gina always leaves her keys in the ignition and that she and the boyfriend had a fight. The boyfriend wasn’t at home, neighbors said he packed up this morning and told them he was going on vacation.” He shrugged. “That Quik Mart is right on the way to the interstate. We figure Saks ran across her, maybe even waited for her to show up there if he knew it was her habit to stop. Maybe he talked her into a little make-up trip. It looks like she decided to go with him. End of story.”

      Novak straightened and looked at Trip as though daring him to challenge these conclusions.

      “And Gina’s mother is comfortable with this supposition?” Trip asked after a long moment of debating whether to share his suspicions about Neil Roberts with the chief.

      “Says it makes perfect sense. Says her daughter was a pushover for Peter Saks.”

      “Where did Saks go, exactly?”

      “The neighbors don’t know. Camping, maybe.”

      “In this weather? In December?”

      “Maybe he went south. Hell, it’s a free country.”

      Trip stared at Novak. “I can see where you’re coming from, but the fact Gina didn’t call bothers me. It’s not like her to just leave.”

      “There you’re wrong,” Novak said. “Her mother said she ran off without a word a year or two ago.”

      Trip hadn’t known that. “Gina told me Saks had a history of domestic violence.”

      Chief Novak flipped his hand. “The boy’s a hothead, that’s all.” The big man heaved a sigh that put even greater pressure on his buttons and added, “Listen. I know you had a fancy career in the FBI. I bet it sucks to be out of the action. But this is my town, so why don’t you just go back to ranching?” Novak slapped his hands on the counter. Case closed.

      Trip left before his temper got the better of him.

      IT WAS GETTING DARK. The rain had let up, but the temperature had dropped, making the roads icy. Faith had taken the children to a big-box store where she changed Colin’s diaper and fed him some of the dry cereal and fruit she found in the diaper bag. She’d bought Noelle a banana, they’d returned to her car and now it seemed the baby had fallen asleep. By the hush in the backseat, Faith thought it likely Noelle had nodded off as well.

      How had her life gotten to this point?

      Six months before, she’d known who she was and what she wanted. It had been her friend, Olivia, who wanted out of Westerly, not Faith. And now she was driving two very small children around on a stormy night in a town she barely knew, while their uncle tried to find their babysitter. To add insult to injury, she couldn’t even take them somewhere decent, somewhere warm, somewhere safe because her landlady and her son made the Bates Hotel seem like a day spa.

      “Ms. Bishop?” Noelle said. Guess she wasn’t asleep after all.

      “Yes, sweetie?”

      “Can we go home?”

      Home. “Well, I don’t want to run into those people again—”

      “My home,” Noelle said. “Mrs. Murphy makes cookies sometimes.”

      They were at the northeast edge of town. Faith knew Trip lived on a ranch with the children, she knew about where it was, as she’d passed a sign on one of her weekend drives. It was called the Triple T.

      Dare she drive to his house? Would he think she was being pushy? Did it matter what he thought?

      “What kind of cookies?” she asked as she headed out to the highway. At this point, any decision was better than no decision.

      “Sometimes chocolate with peanuts, only Uncle Trip doesn’t like peanuts, so now she leaves them out.”

      “I sure hope she made some today,” Faith said.

      “Me, too.” It was quiet for a mile or two, and then Noelle spoke again, her voice ominous this time. “Uh-oh, Ms. Bishop.”

      “What’s wrong?”

      “Colin is waking up.”

      IT WAS ALMOST DARK by the time Trip pulled up in front of the Quik Mart. Gina’s car was nowhere in sight. For a second, it crossed his mind she’d come back for it, or her mother had taken it or the cops had impounded it, and then he remembered the way Gina always parked on a hillside, facing down, when she came to the ranch, in case the engine wouldn’t start. There was a slope beyond the store. He topped the hill and looked down the road that bordered a ravine on one side and a few stores on the other side, and sure enough, there was Gina’s car, pointed downhill.

      Gina’s car windows were up now and the doors were locked. The car itself looked like it always did, battered and old, the tattered front seat bare, except for a fluff of something very white and purple, just visible on the passenger side, stuffed between seat and seat back. Trip hitched his hands on his waist and looked up and down the street. A gas station on the corner, a flower shop and a shoe repair directly opposite. He checked his watch and decided he could spare a few more minutes.

      The man in the shoe repair shop worked in the back and came to the front only when he heard the bell ring over the door. Trip asked him about the car across the street, but the repairman hadn’t even noticed the police, let alone a nineteen-year-old woman. He did say he’d seen the car there before.

      The flower shop was better staffed. The three female employees, all in their thirties and all smiling up a storm, agreed they’d seen Gina’s car parked on the hillside before, but none of them had actually seen her, not today, anyway. Since Trip didn’t have a photo to show around, there wasn’t much else to be learned.

      He went to the service station last. It was an independently owned station, with higher prices than could be found elsewhere, hence it appeared to do a neighborhood