Where the Road Ends. Tara Quinn Taylor
she backed out of the parking space.
Kathy had at least five minutes on her.
They seemed like five years.
3
Squealing out onto County Road 215, gravel flying behind her, Amy choked back emotion until she could no longer feel the acidic burning inside her. She was going to get this woman.
Kathy had taken Charles. Amy knew it as surely as if Johnny were speaking to her from heaven. Knew it despite what Brad and the police had said. The feeling was stronger than intuition. Stronger than desperation.
The first bend didn’t faze her. She leaned to the right as the powerful car took the curve, her eyes intent on the road unfolding before her. A straight stretch. But the two-lane road gave her nothing she wanted. No green Grand Am. Only a slow-moving rusty blue pickup with two sheep in its bed, a bearded and bent old man at the wheel, and windows so clouded she could hardly see through them. It was blocking her view.
“Damn!”
Jerking the wheel to the left, Amy crossed the center yellow line far enough to see beyond the truck. A station wagon was coming from the opposite direction.
“Get out of my way,” she growled at the driver of the pickup, which was only inches from her front bumper. Every second these people took from her gave Kathy an edge.
The station wagon passed. Amy crossed the center line again. A sport utility vehicle was coming at her now. And then another pickup truck.
The car’s defrost was blowing at full speed. Every muscle in her body tense, Amy rode the back of the blue pickup, laying on her horn, willing the driver to get nervous and pull over. He was doing ten miles under the speed limit. It wasn’t fair.
But then, life wasn’t fair. Nothing had been made clearer to Amy these past months. Intellectually she’d always known that, but now she understood what it really meant, understood—viscerally, emotionally—how it felt to be the recipient of perpetual unfairness. Life had never been fair. Her privileged existence had simply made her unaware of it.
The pickup driver didn’t slow down and pull over to let her pass. He didn’t speed up. With nearly frozen fingers she pulled the cheap black gloves from her pocket and put them on.
It took her a precious ten minutes to finally get around the old man. Ten minutes that stretched her already dangerously taut nerves.
Engine roaring as it slipped into high gear, the Thunderbird sped up till the speedometer needle flew to the end of its range. The road continued straight for a mile or two. And there were no cars in sight. At least not on the side of the road that mattered to her. The damn blue pickup had given Kathy a chance to get away.
When Amy started to wonder if the driver of the pickup was an accomplice of Kathy’s—perhaps he’d even hidden her the night before—she gave herself a mental shake. She couldn’t afford this kind of paranoia; it only obscured her goal. Okay, she’d lost ten minutes. She’d find them. The roads were clear, the day crisp and sunny. At the rate she was driving, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to catch up with Kathy.
So she started to plan. How was she going to handle the apprehension? Call the police? They’d exonerated the younger woman.
She had to stay calm. Act precisely, correctly, to ensure that her new life with Charles began that day, immediately. There would be no further investigating. No charges filed against Kathy for illegal behavior. All Amy wanted was her son.
Glancing at her speedometer, she frowned. The illegal behavior in question might well be hers—a traffic violation. She kept her foot on the gas. So what if she got a speeding ticket?
She’d willingly pay.
“I need your help.”
Clutching his cell phone—it was the number she always called—Brad Dorchester looked out at, but didn’t see, the panoramic view of snowy Denver from the thirtieth-floor window of his office high-rise.
“Amy,” he said, the stiff muscles in his jaw making words difficult. “Where are you?”
Would there be time for him to save her pretty ass?
“On the road. It was Kathy I was following yesterday, Brad. I saw her again this morning—at a convenience store across the street. The clerk and a customer both ID’d her from her picture.”
Brad’s gaze returned to his office. To the mass of papers and photos and reports spread on the conference-size table across the room. He didn’t have to look at them to know what they contained. He knew them all by rote, played them over and over in his mind like an irritatingly catchy tune.
The papers and photos represented hundreds of hours of work—all generated because of one very small boy. Charles Wainscoat Dunn.
Brad shook his head, then wrapped one hand around the back of his neck, which had taken on a habitual soreness. He had all the information. And it wasn’t doing a damn bit of good.
Dared he hope that his second thorough investigation of the world of construction business would turn up something new?
“Did you follow her?” He hated to ask. Hated to give Amelia Wainscoat any encouragement in her current endeavor.
“I’m trying, Brad,” she said now. His stomach sank at her eagerness. “I’ve been on 215—you know one of those two-lane roads that—”
“—only go to one place,” he finished for her. He knew. Not only had he been up and down them himself, he’d been hearing her talk about them for months. Picturing her racing over them all alone in a vain search that was going to kill her sooner or later.
If not physically, then emotionally and mentally. He just wasn’t sure which would come first.
“I haven’t seen her since she left the convenience store. I’m approaching M-43, which ends in South Haven. She’d have to take the highway from there.”
If anything happened to Amelia Wainscoat while she was out there trying to do his job, he was sure as hell going to end up carrying that guilt around forever. He didn’t appreciate the burden.
Goddammit! If she’d just let him concentrate on doing his job, instead of making him waste time worrying about her.
“So should I stop in South Haven and risk letting her get farther ahead of me, or do I skip the town and risk the possibility that she might have stopped there?”
“I’d check the town. If she didn’t stop, it won’t take long to figure that out.”
He couldn’t believe he was giving her reinforcement to continue with this futile course.
“But what if she went on ahead?”
Phone lodged between his ear and his shoulder, Brad rolled up the sleeves of the white cotton shirt he’d tucked into his slacks at an ungodly hour that morning. “She’ll only have an hour or so. It shouldn’t be hard to follow her trail.”
“Okay.”
“Amy, I’m putting some of my men on this.” Even though he knew the nanny was a dead end. He’d assigned two men to make absolutely certain of that. They’d checked every aspect of her background, spent weeks doing surveillance—and they’d come up with nothing.
“Good.”
He’d already called in the license plate number. “Keep your phone on. I’ll be checking in every hour. Call me sooner if you find anything.”
“Okay.”
He studied the table across the room again. He could rearrange the papers there. Stare at the photos until he went blind. And still, the facts weren’t going to change.
“She was exonerated, Amy.”
“I know.”
“She’s perfectly free to travel