“Are you coming?” Mary asked as soon as she answered.
“Yes. I’ll be right there.”
* * *
After Mary ended the phone call with Autumn, she leaned back, feeling the soft sand give slightly beneath her palms as she watched her grandchildren bodysurfing in the ocean. She loved this small part of the world. Living in Sable Beach had brought her peace and safety. She walked down to the water almost every night to visit the sea and be heartened by its constancy and beauty. It was more of a mother to her than her own mother had ever been—her real mother, anyway. She loved watching the gulls swoop and land and study her as curiously as she studied them.
One gull who visited this beach quite often was missing an eye. He would cock his head and look at her with the eye he had left, but he wouldn’t venture close, not as close as the others.
She felt a certain kinship with him. Although hers were less visible, she had scars, too. They both clung to the sanctuary Sable Beach provided and weren’t willing to trust too much.
Would the peace she’d found here last? Or was everything about to change? For so long, her secret had felt safe. But thanks to the interest Autumn had shown in finding her father—right before Nick went missing—and the technological advances that made DNA testing commonplace, she was on edge again, like she’d been in the beginning, always wondering what might sneak up from behind.
Taylor had mentioned something only two weeks ago that indicated Autumn had been talking about her father again. Mary could remember the exact words and even the tone of her granddaughter’s voice: I think it bugs Mom that she doesn’t know more about her father’s side.
Mary had glossed over that statement by saying she didn’t know anything, either, but she felt that was a harbinger of doom. The subject would come up again—this time with Autumn—and probably before the summer was over. Mary desperately wanted to stick with her story, to keep everything status quo, but she knew she couldn’t get away with that, not when a simple DNA test could give Autumn the means to track him down and prove her a liar.
And if she came out and told her? What would Autumn do with the information? Mary was afraid she’d reach out to people she didn’t want her to have any contact with—and was loath to allow back into her own life.
The thought of that nearly caused her to pump her fist at the sky and scream, “Over my dead body!” It was the fight in her that had carried her through those terrible years. But despite all she’d done to protect Autumn and create a new life for them both, and despite all she might do to keep the past from catching up with her, in the end she might not have any say in it.
Secrets had a way of coming out.
“There you are!”
Mary turned to see Autumn trudging toward her and waved.
“Taylor and Caden are having a blast,” she said as soon as Autumn arrived and let her bag drop onto the sand. Sometimes Mary marveled at the banal things that came out of her mouth when there was so much more going on inside her head.
Autumn slid her sunglasses higher on the bridge of her nose as she turned to watch her children out in the waves. “For once they’re not fighting.” Pulling a towel from her bag, she prepared a spot where she could sit down. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. That private investigator I hired in Ukraine called.”
“Did he have any news?”
“Not really. Just more of the same. He’s found someone who might’ve seen Nick. He’s taking more pictures to show this contact or that contact. A friend in the government might be able to help. He’s managed to speak to the person he told me about last time, so we can at least cross one more potential lead off the list. That’s all I ever get.”
Mary could see why she’d be discouraged. “He has to be methodical, I suppose.”
“That’s true, but it’s been so long. Is this investigator doing anything that will make a difference?”
“Who can say?”
It was difficult to watch her daughter suffer. For a long time, Autumn had been so intent on finding Nick that Mary could scarcely reach her. She was up night and day, always on the internet or the telephone, trying to get more information, to push the government to help her, to speak to people who might have more power, to circulate his picture around various groups in Ukraine, to find someone over there who might be capable and willing to look into his disappearance. It terrified Mary to think that Autumn’s efforts might draw the attention of the wrong sort of person or persons. What if Nick had indeed infiltrated a terrorist group, and they were so bothered by Autumn’s dogged efforts to track him down that they decided to put a stop to her nosing around—by putting a stop to her?
When Mary mentioned the possibility to Laurie, Laurie had said she shouldn’t let her imagination run away with her. The odds of something that terrible happening were one in a million.
But Mary didn’t care how remote the chance might be. The odds of what’d happened to her were just as slim—and yet she’d been that one in a million.
“Do you trust him?” Mary asked.
“I did at first. He’s the one who gave me that fuzzy photograph taken by a security camera at the airport in Kyiv, remember? That was how I knew Nick made his flight and landed in Ukraine, which was huge.”
Mary remembered. Autumn had made a big deal of that picture, calling out the FBI on social media, claiming they were trying to sweep her husband’s disappearance under the rug. His “handler” had finally reached out and admitted that Nick had been doing a few “low level” things for the bureau but only online. They wanted her to accept that he’d gone to Ukraine on his own and pipe down, but she kept saying she couldn’t believe he’d do that—not without telling her he was going out of the country.
“Isn’t there something more that could be done to track Nick’s cell phone?” Mary asked. “I know I’ve asked before, but they can do so much more now than they could even a year ago. I see it all the time on those forensic shows.”
“His cell phone should’ve yielded more information,” Autumn replied. “Believe it or not, if it were an older model, it would’ve had a baseband processor that powers up every ten minutes or so to retrieve text messages—although not phone calls—and I would’ve had a chance.”
“But he didn’t have an older model.”
“Of course not. He relied on his phone a great deal, always had the latest and greatest. He loves—” she frowned and cleared her throat “—loved technology.”
“But most people have new technology these days. And I’ve read about the NSA being able to track cell phones, even when they’re turned off.”
“The new phones have a unibody design where the battery can’t be removed,” she explained. “As long as there’s a battery, a phone can be tracked even when it’s turned off.” She grimaced. “But only if it’s infected with Trojans. According to everything I’ve been able to find, that’s how the NSA does it. Anyway, I’ve tried. There’s nothing more I can do in regards to his cell phone. And everything Olynyk provided of any real significance was almost a year ago. Yet, I keep paying him.”