"I'm afraid we don't know" came the officer's reply. "We're trying to find someone who might be able to help us locate her."

Nudging Lucky to one side, Cheyenne got up, trying to prepare herself for whatever news she was about to hear. "Because..."

"We found her car on Interstate 5. Her purse, her phone, everything was inside. Except her."

"What if you could figure out where you were born and where you really came from-whether your mother was Anita or someone else? Would you want to pursue it?"

Cheyenne was half-asleep when Dylan posed this question. But he sounded wide-awake, which gave her the impression that he'd been thinking about her situation for some time.

Shifting onto her back, she covered a yawn. "Definitely."

"Even though Anita's gone and you're happy with where you're at in life?"

She was glad he hadn't mentioned that Presley was gone, too. Surely Presley's "gone" wasn't as permanent as Anita's. Since the police had recovered her car, Cheyenne was feeling a resurgence of hope. At least Presley hadn't crashed; they hadn't found a body. And Chief Stacy was finally making some calls. She'd contacted him after hearing from the CHP earlier. Because of where Presley's car had been left, they thought maybe she'd hitchhiked to Los Angeles, which seemed like something she'd do. In the morning, Dylan was going to drive Cheyenne to Los Banos to pay the impound fees and pick up the Mustang.

"I could have a different mother out there. A better one. Maybe even a father or other family. Why wouldn't I want to find out about that?"

"Because you'll have to face the resentment and anger of knowing what Anita did to you. It won't be just a suspicion anymore."

As she heard rain pelting the roof, Cheyenne felt glad Dylan was here with her. Otherwise, it would be such a lonely sound. Maybe snowy days wouldn't make her melancholy now that Dylan was in her life. "I realize that. But, either way, I need closure. I think everyone wants to be certain of where they came from, don't you?"

Those details might be important to her children someday, she thought, but she didn't say that. She didn't want Dylan to think she was already considering a family. She hadn't had her period since she'd been with him, but it wasn't due yet, which left her hopeful that she wasn't pregnant. She preferred not to deal with that kind of complication so early in their relationship.

"We could hire someone to look into it," he suggested.

"We?" Scooting closer, she kissed his whiskered cheek. "I don't have the money, and it's not your problem."

"I'm happy to help."

"I appreciate your generosity, but now that I won't be chained to this house every minute I'm not at work-" and she wouldn't have to contend with her mother daily "-I'm going to make a more concerted effort to do some searching on my own."

"Where will you start?"

Leaning over him, she rubbed her nose against his. "I'll go state by state, if I have to. Send a letter to every single county, asking for my birth certificate."

He held back her hair. "And if Anita changed your name?"

That was a very real and depressing possibility. "I'll know if there's no record of a Cheyenne Rose Christensen being born on my birthday."

"If it's your birthday."

"If it's my birthday."

"And then?" he prompted.

Cheyenne toyed with the hair leading down from his navel. "And then I'll call every police department in America. I'll start on the West Coast, since I don't think Anita was ever out East, and I'll ask about any cases they might have involving a missing girl."

His hand slid up her bare back, moving in a gentle caress. "There might be a less tedious way."

The rain was falling harder, and the wind was picking up. "How?"

"If you were kidnapped, there's a good chance Presley knows about it."

Cheyenne sat up. "No. She would've told me."

He propped his hands behind his head. She couldn't see his expression clearly in the moonlight streaming through her window, but she could make out the general shape of him. "How old were you when you were wearing that party dress?" he asked.

She knew where he was going with this and didn't like how it made her feel. Doubting Anita was one thing. She'd always doubted Anita. But Presley was a different story. Presley had been her ally, her confidante, the one person she trusted, in certain ways even more than Eve, to have her best interests at heart. They'd made incredible sacrifices for each other over the years-going hungry so the other could eat, taking a beating to spare the other further blows, lying to avoid seeing the other punished. There were some lines they didn't cross, and this would be one of them.

"About four," she admitted grudgingly.

"That would make her..."

"Six."

"That's old enough to remember something."

She could hear the frown in his voice. "Not necessarily," she argued. "Anita could've told her I was her sister but had been staying with someone else. That would make it seem less remarkable when they *picked me up.' Anita would've had to invent some excuse, right? Maybe it all happened so smoothly, Presley had no reason to be aware of anything unusual."

"Are you serious? She didn't have a sister and then she did? That's not unusual?"

"You have to understand what our childhood was like, Dylan. People came and went. It wasn't out of the ordinary for us to call men Daddy when we'd known them for less than a week. And the next man who came around? Suddenly, he was Daddy, and it meant nothing that the last guy was gone. We called women we'd met five minutes earlier Aunt Whatever. So I'm not sure Presley, especially at six, would find anything odd."

He seemed to be choosing his next words carefully. "You've asked her about it, then? What she remembers?"

"Hundreds of times."

"And she always gave the same answer?"

For some reason, Cheyenne flashed back to the night she'd brought up the Amoses after talking to Dylan in the park. At some point in the conversation, Presley had said, "You should've been born in a different era. Or to a Quaker family. Sometimes I wonder where the hell you came from."

The way she'd acted right after that statement made Cheyenne even more uncomfortable now than it had then. But she wasn't willing to admit it, wasn't willing to doubt Presley. Not on this. Presley would know how important this was to her. "Every time."

"So you trust her completely."

"I do."

He raked a hand through his hair. "Then I hate to tell you this, but...pursuing the truth might break your heart."

"You don't want me to start digging? You'd rather I just left things as they are?"

"I don't want you to be hurt." He sat up, too. Sounding reluctant but resolute, he added. "Listen, Chey. I had a long talk with Aaron this afternoon."

"About Presley?"

"She was top of the list. I grilled him on whether or not she'd said or done anything out of the ordinary in the past couple of weeks. I was looking for details he might've forgotten or considered too inconsequential to mention."

"And?"

"At first, he denied that she'd acted strange in any way. But then he recalled something about a private investigator."

"Crouch."

"That's him. Eugene Crouch."

Her hands clutched the bedding. "What about him?"

"Aaron said she was afraid of him, afraid of what he might do."

"Why?"

"He wasn't clear on that, but one night she was so agitated he was all she could talk about. And the drunker she got, the more worried she became."

Cheyenne thought she had the answer. "Because my mother was always doing stuff that could get us in trouble. I heard Presley refer to Crouch, too. He approached her, looking for my mother, but he wouldn't say why."

"You don't find that odd?"

"Not necessarily." She explained about the hit-and-run that had haunted her and Presley ever since it had happened, and their guess that Crouch's visit had something to do with that.

"But you don't know. You've never talked to him."

"No."

"Maybe you should."

Suddenly, she remembered how secretive Presley had been when Cheyenne had overheard her first talking about Crouch to Anita. She hadn't even admitted that he was a P.I., not at first. When Cheyenne had asked who Crouch was, Presley had said he was just some guy she'd met at work.

Why hadn't Presley guessed, from the very beginning, that it was the hit-and-run and come to her instead of Anita?

"Whatever he wanted...it couldn't be about me," she said in an attempt to shore up her crumbling confidence.

"Yes, it could," Dylan insisted.

"She wouldn't have told Aaron about Crouch if she was afraid it might get back to me."

"Until very recently, you and I lived in separate worlds. The thought that it could get back to you probably never crossed her mind."

Cheyenne's stomach tightened into a hard knot as she considered his implication. Could she really trust Presley as much as she claimed? Or would Eugene Crouch, someone she would've overlooked if not for her relationship with Dylan, have the answers she craved about the little girl in the party dress and the black patent leather shoes?

29.

Most of the next day was spent picking up Presley's car. The impound and storage fees added insult to injury after what Cheyenne had already been through. Her bank account was feeling the strain. She still wasn't sure how she could afford to bury her mother. She'd have to ask the funeral home if she could make monthly payments and put the burial plot on her Visa. That was the only way she could manage it. She'd promised Anita she wouldn't cremate her, even though that would've been cheaper.

At least she had the Mustang. She and Lucky were following Dylan back to Whiskey Creek.

It felt strange to smell the familiar scent of the cigarette smoke that lingered in her sister's car and to wonder if she'd ever see Presley again. It felt even stranger to have her sister's purse and cell phone on the passenger seat. Although she'd been more optimistic about Presley's well-being since that first call from the CHP, her hope was dwindling. She couldn't imagine any woman leaving her purse and cell behind. How could Presley be getting by without them?

The police had searched the contents of her purse-her phone, too, once they'd had the Mustang towed and were able to track down the right kind of charger, since the battery was dead by then. They said there was nothing to indicate where she'd gone. They'd called everyone on her contact list, even Aaron. No one could tell them a thing. There were no airplane or bus tickets, no travel brochures, no receipts in her car or in her email that gave any clue. The last internet sites she'd visited on her cell had no connection to her absence, either.

She must've hitched a ride. That was their best guess.

The question was: With whom? And was Presley safe?

Cheyenne drove as long as she could before pulling over. She hadn't examined Presley's belongings herself, because she hadn't wanted to break down in front of the officers who were handling the transfer of her personal property. She figured there'd be time to see what Presley had abandoned once she'd reached the privacy of her own home.

But she couldn't wait that long. She wanted her sister back so badly she had to go through those items now, in case she found something the police had missed. They didn't know Presley the way Cheyenne did.

After easing onto the shoulder of Highway 88, she cut the engine. Dylan was in front of her. She wasn't sure he'd immediately notice that she'd stopped following him, but that was okay. She could catch up with him later.

"Pres, you've really done it this time," she murmured as she moved Lucky out of the way and picked up her sister's purse.

Presley's ID was in her wallet. Tears rolled down Cheyenne's cheeks as she gazed at it. She wished her efforts to help her sister, to be there for her, had made more of a difference.

Loose change jingled in the bottom of Presley's purse, but there were no bills. She never carried much money. She spent whatever she had, on friends if not on herself.

Besides the coins, Cheyenne found various kinds of makeup, mixed with a host of snack wrappers, notes and old gas receipts. Presley didn't keep her purse any cleaner than her car- She heard a door shut behind her and twisted around to see that Dylan had circled back. He was walking along the shoulder to her car, coming up on her left.

With a sniff, she wiped her tears and rolled down her window.

"You okay?" he asked.

She managed a watery smile at the sympathy in his voice and nodded.

He slid his hands into his pockets and hunched against a biting wind. The rain they'd gotten last night had stopped, but the wind was stronger than ever. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. I just..." She gestured at the items in her lap.

"Were the police right?" He knew they were, of course. But he seemed to understand why she'd feel the need to check for herself.

"Yeah." She was piling everything back inside Presley's purse when a business card fluttered out from a handful of wrappers and other garbage. She almost picked it up and shoved it back in without looking at it. Cheyenne didn't expect Presley's trash to reveal anything useful. But the name on the card caught her eye. Eugene Crouch, Private Investigator.

Presley had told Cheyenne she'd thrown his card away. So what was it doing in her purse? And how had the police missed it or deemed it irrelevant?

Turning so Dylan could see, she squinted up at him.

"Looks like Crouch is going to be even easier to find than we thought," he said.