"If he did that," Jack said, so intent on me he had read my silent thoughts, "you couldn't let her marry him anyway."

I nodded, still trying to accommodate this sharp pang. For all the years we'd spent apart, for all our estrangement, Varena was my sister, and we were the only people in the world who shared, who would remember, our common family life.

"This has to be resolved before the wedding," I said.

"Two days? Three?"

I actually had to think. "Three."

"s.h.i.t," Jack said.

"What do you have?" I pulled away from him, and his head began to lower to my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as if drawn by a magnet. I grabbed his ears. "Jack, we have to finish talking."

"Then you'll have to cover up." He got his bathrobe out of the tiny closet and tossed it to me. It was the one he carried when he traveled, a thin, red, silky one, and I belted it around me.

"That's not much better," he said after a thorough look. "But it'll have to do." He pulled on a T-shirt and some Jockeys. He set his briefcase on the bed, and because it was cold in that bleak motel room, we both crawled back under the covers, sitting with our backs propped against the wall.

Jack put on his reading gla.s.ses, little half-lens ones that made him even s.e.xier. I didn't know how long he'd used them, but he'd only recently begun wearing them in front of me. This was the first time I hadn't appreciated the effect.

"First, to find out who the little girls were, Roy hired Aunt Betty."

"Who?"

"You haven't met Aunt Betty yet. She's another PI, lives in Little Rock. She's amazing. In her fifties, hair dyed a medium brown, looks respectable to the core. She looks like everybody's Aunt Betty. Her real name is Elizabeth Fry. People tell her the most amazing things, because she looks like ... well, their aunt! And d.a.m.n, that woman can listen!"

"Why'd Roy send her instead of you?"

"Well, surprise, but in some situations I don't blend in like Aunt Betty does. I was good for the Shakespeare job since I look just like someone who'd work in a sporting goods store, but I don't look like I could go around a small town asking for the names of little girls and get away with it. Right?"

I tried not to laugh. That was certainly true.

"So that's the kind of job Aunt Betty's perfect for. She found out who prints the most school memory books in the state, went to them, told them she was from a private school and she was looking for a printer. The guy gave her all kinds of samples to show her parents committee."

Jack seemed to want me to acknowledge Aunt Betty's cleverness, so I nodded.

"Then," he continued, "Betty comes down to Bartley, goes in to see the elementary school princ.i.p.al, shows her all the samples of memory books she has, and tells the princ.i.p.al she works for a printing company that can give them a compet.i.tive bid on the next memory book."

"And?"

"Then she asks to see this year's Bartley memory book, notices the slide picture, asks the princ.i.p.al who the photographer was, maybe her company might be able to use him for extra work. Betty figured the shot was good enough to justify the lie."

I shook my head. Betty must be persuasive and totally respectable and nonthreatening. I'd known the elementary school princ.i.p.al, Beryl Trotter, for fifteen years, and she was not a fool.

"How does it help, having the whole book?" I asked.

"If worst had come to worst, we would have looked at all the faces in the cla.s.s section until we had them matched, so we could get their names. Or Betty would have called on the man who took the picture and coasted the conversation along until he told her who the girls were. But, as it happened, Mrs. Trotter asked Betty to have a cup of coffee, and Betty found out everything from Mrs. Trotter."

"The names of the girls? Their parents? Everything?"

"Yep."

This was a little frightening.

"So, once we had the names of the parents, we were able to do some background on the O'Sheas, since he's a minister and they have several professional directories that give little biographies. Dill, too, because the pharmacists have a state a.s.sociation. Chock full of information. The Osborns were harder. Aunt Betty had to go to Makepeace Furniture, pretend she'd just moved in and was shopping for a new table. It was risky. But she managed to talk to Emory, find out a few things about him, and get out without having to give a local address or mention any local relatives whom he could check up on."

"So then you knew the names of the girls and their parents, and some facts about their parents."

"Yep. Then we got busy on the computers, and then I started traveling."

I felt overwhelmed. I'd never talked to Jack in any depth about what he did. I'd never fully realized that one of the qualifications for a successful private detective is the ability to lie convincingly and at the drop of a hat. I pulled away from Jack a little. He took some papers from his briefcase.

"This is a computer-enhanced drawing of Summer Dawn as she may look now," he said, apparently not conscious of my unhappiness. "Of course, we have photographs of her only as an infant. Who knows how accurate this is?"

I looked at the picture. It looked like someone, all right, but it could have been any of the girls. I decided that the drawing looked most like Krista O'Shea, because it depicted Summer Dawn still plump-cheeked, like the baby snapshot the newspaper had printed.

"I thought these were supposed to be really accurate," I said. "Does it look so anonymous because she was a baby when she vanished?"

"Partly. And as it happens, none of the pictures of Summer Dawn was really good to use for this. The Macklesbys took fewer pictures of her than of their other two children because Summer Dawn was the third child, and the third child just doesn't get photographed as much as number one and number two. The picture that appeared in the newspaper was really the best one the parents had. They had an appointment to get Summer's picture made the week she disappeared."

I didn't want to think about that. I shuffled the top drawing, looked at the other three. The second was of the same face but framed by long, straight hair. In the third, a somewhat thinner-cheeked version of Summer Dawn was topped with short, wavy hair. There was a fourth, with medium-length hair and gla.s.ses.

"One of her sisters is nearsighted," Jack explained.

Eight years.

"She has sisters?" I kept my voice level. At least I tried.

"Yeah. Two. They're fourteen and sixteen, now. Teenagers, with posters on their walls of musicians I've never listened to. Closets full of clothes. Boyfriends. And a little sister they don't remember at all."

"The Macklesbys must have money." Hiring a private detective for all those years would be expensive, and paying for the extra services of Aunt Betty and Jack.

"They're well-off. Simon Macklesby reacted to the kidnapping by throwing himself into his work. He's a partner in an office supplies business that's taken off since offices became computerized. No matter how much money they've got, the Macklesbys were lucky they went to Roy instead of to someone who would really soak them. There were months when he didn't have anything to show them, no work to do. Some guys . . . and some women . . . would've made things up to pad the file."

It was a relief to find that Roy was as honest as I'd always thought him, after Jack's obvious admiration at Aunt Betty's creative lying. There was a separation, thank G.o.d, between lying on the job and relating to people in real life.

"What do you know?" know?" I asked him, my fear finally showing in my voice. I asked him, my fear finally showing in my voice.

"I know that the O'Shea girl is adopted, at least that's what the O'Sheas' neighbors in Philadelphia recall."

I remembered the slight change in Jess O'Shea's face when I'd asked him how the big-city hospital had been different from the tiny one in Bartley.

"You've been to Pennsylvania?"

"Their Philadelphia neighbors were seminary students like Jess, so naturally they've scattered. I've used other PIs in Florida, Kentucky, and Indiana. According to the people who'd talk to us, the O'Sheas arranged to adopt the baby girl of the sister of another seminary student. The O'Sheas had gotten a pretty discouraging work-up from a fertility specialist in Philadelphia. The sister had to give the baby up because she was in late-stage AIDS. Her family wouldn't take the baby because they believed the baby might be carrying the disease. It didn't matter that the baby had tested negative. In fact, the couple in Tennessee, the one I interviewed myself, are still convinced the little girl might have been 'carrying' AIDS, despite the testing the doctors did."

I shook my head. "How do you get people to tell you this?"

"I'm persuasive, in case you hadn't noticed." Jack ran his hand down my leg and leered at me. Then he sobered.

"So why are the O'Sheas still on your list?"

"One, Krista O'Shea is in the picture that Roy got. Two, what if this isn't the same girl they adopted?"

"What?"

"What if the tests were wrong? What if that child was born with AIDS, or died from some other cause? What if Lou O'Shea abducted Summer Dawn to take her place? What if the O'Sheas bought her?"

"That seems so far-fetched. They were up in Philadelphia for at least a few months after they adopted Krista. Summer Dawn was abducted in Conway, right?"

"Yes. But the O'Sheas have cousins living in the Conway area, cousins they visited when Jess finished the seminary. The dates coincide. So I can't rule them out. It's circ.u.mstantially possible. If they bought Summer Dawn from someone who abducted her, they would know that was illegal. They maybe pretended the baby was the one they'd adopted."

"What about Anna?" I asked sharply.

"Judy Kingery, Dill's first wife, was mentally ill."

I'd resumed studying the pictures. I turned to stare at Jack.

"Her auto accident was almost certainly suicide." His clear hazel eyes peered at me over his reading gla.s.ses.

"Oh, poor Dill." No wonder he'd taken his time dating Varena. He would be extra cautious after a h.e.l.lish marriage like that, yoked to a woman with so many problems after his upbringing by a woman who was not exactly compos mentis.

"We can't be sure the wife didn't do something crazy. Maybe she killed their own baby and stole Summer Dawn as compensation. The Kingerys were living in Conway at the time the baby was taken. Maybe Judy Kingery s.n.a.t.c.hed Summer Dawn and gave Dill some incredibly persuasive story."

"You're saying ... it might be possible that Dill didn't know?"

Jack shrugged. "It's possible," he said but not with any great conviction.

I blew out a deep breath of tension. "OK, Eve Osborn."

"The Osborns moved here from a little town on the interstate about ten miles from Conway. He's worked at furniture stores since he got out of junior college. Meredith Osborn didn't make it through a whole year of college before she married him. Emory Ted Osborn ..." Jack was peering through his gla.s.ses at a page of notes. "Emory sells furniture and appliances at Makepeace Furniture Center. Oh, I told you that when I told you Betty went to meet him there."

Makepeace Furniture Center was Bartley's best. It sold only upscale furniture and appliances, and it was located on the town square, having gradually crept through two or three buildings on one side.

"Emory have any criminal record?"

Jack shook his head. "None of these people do."

"Surely there's something that excludes Eve Osborn?"

"You know her?"

"Yes, I do. The Osborns own the little place my sister lives in. It's right in back of their house."

"I've driven by. I didn't realize your sister rented the cottage."

"Did you know that Meredith Osborn baby-sits both Anna and Krista from time to time? I met the mother and the little girl, Eve, when I was at Varena's a couple of days ago."

"What did you think?"

"There's a new baby, a girl. Mrs. Osborn is about as big as some twelve-year-olds, and she seems nice enough. Eve is a ... well, a little girl, maybe a little shy. Real thin, like her mother. I haven't met Emory."

"He's small, too, thin and blond. He's got that really fair coloring, light blue eyes, invisible eyelashes. Looks like he still doesn't have to shave. Very reserved. Smiles a lot."

"So, where was Eve born?"

"That's why she can't be eliminated. Eve was a home birth," Jack said, both eyebrows raised as far as they could go. "Emory delivered her. He'd had some paramedic training. The baby evidently came too fast for them to get to the hospital."

"Meredith had the baby at her house?" Though I knew historically that women had been having their babies at home far longer than they'd had them in hospitals, the idea jarred me.

"Yep." Jack's face expressed such distaste that I found myself hoping Jack was never trapped in a stalled elevator with a pregnant woman.

We stayed snuggled in the bed and each other's warmth a while more, talking ourselves in circles. I could not make this go away, and I could not stop Jack from investigating, even if I thought that right... which I didn't. I had tremendous pity for the anguished parents who had been wanting their child for so many years, and I had pity for my sister, whose life might be ruined in the three days before her wedding. There didn't seem to be anything I could do to affect the outcome of Jack's investigation.

It had been a long day.

I thought of the scene in the doctor's office, the devastation that had visited the two aging workhorses in their old office.

Wrapping my arms around my knees, I told Jack about Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong. He listened with close attention and asked me a lot more questions than I could answer.

"Do you think this could be connected with what you're investigating?" I asked.

"I don't see how." He took off his gla.s.ses, put them on the night table. "But it does seem like quite a coincidence that they're killed this week, just when I come on the scene, just when there's a new development in the Macklesby case. I've tried to be very discreet, but sooner or later in a town this size, everyone's gonna know why I'm here. You're providing me with cover right now, but it won't last if I ask the wrong questions."

I looked at Jack's watch then and slid out the bed. The room felt even colder after I'd been warmed by Jack. I wanted more than anything to lie beside him tonight, but I couldn't.

"I have to get back," I said, pulling on my clothes and trying to make them look as neat and straight as they had been earlier.

Jack got out of bed, too, but not as rapidly.

"I guess you have to," he said with an attempt at wistfulness.

"You know I have to go to their house tonight," I said, but not harshly. He'd pulled his slacks on by then. I was putting on my jacket when he began kissing me again. I tried to push him away when he made his first pa.s.s, but at his second, I put my arms around him.

"I know that you having gotten the implant, me not using a condom anymore, means you know I'm sleeping only with you," he told me.

It meant something else, too. "Ah ... it means I'm not sleeping with anyone else, either," I reminded him.

After a moment of pregnant silence, he squeezed me so tightly I could not breathe, and he made an inarticulate noise. Suddenly I knew we were feeling exactly the same thing-just for a second, a flash, but it was a flash so bright it blinded me.

Then we had to bounce away from each other, frightened by the intimacy. Jack swung away to put on his shirt; I sat down to slide my feet into my shoes. I ran my fingers through my hair, took care of a b.u.t.ton I'd skipped.

We were silent on the ride to my house, the bitter cold biting into our bones. When we pulled into the driveway I saw one light burning on the dimmest setting, in the living room. Jack leaned over to give me a quick kiss, and I was out of the car in a wink, running across the frosty lawn to the front door.

I locked the door behind me and went to the picture window. Looking out the small triangle un.o.bscured by the Christmas tree, I saw Jack's car back out and start back to the motel. The sheets of his bed would smell like me.

Once in my room, where my mother had left a lamp on, I slowly undressed. It was too late to shower; it might wake my parents, if they weren't in their room lying awake to make sure I was home safe, like they'd done when I was a teenager. There was no counting the sleepless nights I'd given them.

Fleetingly, I thought about Teresa and Simon Macklesby. How many good nights' rest had they managed in the eight years since their daughter had vanished?