“Isn’t that a bit boring?”
“Of course not!” Amy said, then drained her glass and washed it out. “I think that tomorrow I’ll check out some of those search engines that help you find people.”
“What do you know about this man Ty that you’ll be able to find him?”
“His name, the town where he grew up, and that his brothers moved to Alaska. I think I can piece together enough to find out something. Okay, I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.”
When Amy was gone, Zoë stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, then she went into her bedroom and got her laptop. Even though it was close to midnight, she wasn’t tired. Since she’d been in the hospital she’d had trouble sleeping and rarely got more than four hours of rest a night. Usually, she stayed up painting, but tonight, she thought she might see what she could find on the Internet. As her computer warmed up and the wireless Internet came on, she poured herself another glass of wine and sat down.
“Well, Mr. Tyler Parks, if you still have the same name, I’m going to find you,” she said to the screen as she began typing.
Seven
Amy was dreaming.
She was in bed, but it was different from her own. The covers enveloping her were heavy and there seemed to be a foot-tall stack of them. Yet in spite of them, her nose was freezing. She pulled back under the covers, trying not to let any of her body be exposed. The room seemed to be unheated. She stuck out her foot to feel for Stephen. Maybe she could get him to turn up the thermostat.
In the next second, she sat upright. The boys! If their room was cold, so was the boys’. As she sat up, she hit her head on something hard. Rubbing it, she turned and put her feet on the floor, but instead of her soft bedroom carpet, she felt something rough that hurt the bottoms of her feet. “What in the world have the boys spilled on the carpet while I was in Maine?” she murmured as she ran her hand over the foot of the bed, looking for her bathrobe, but it wasn’t there.
It was so cold in the room she could see her breath. She glanced at the window and saw that it had panes that were diamond-shaped, not the Colonial windows that she and Stephen had chosen when building the house. What had they done while she was away?
With her hands on her upper arms, trying to protect them from the chill, she walked across the rough carpeting and headed for the door. “Stephen!” she said when she got to his side of the bed. She could see the top of his head, but nothing else. “Stephen!” she said louder. “Something’s wrong with the furnace. You need to call someone.
“And I’m sure they’ll come out in the middle of the night,” she said under her breath. She saw her husband move a bit, but he didn’t look out from under the covers.
“Men!” she said under her breath as she went to the door. It was dark in the room, with only the moonlight shining through the window illuminating it. But she knew the room well so she didn’t need to turn on the light.
When she got to the door she reached for the brass doorknob, but her hand came in contact with an odd contraption that was more like a latch for a barn than for a bedroom. “What is going on?” she said aloud, while wondering what she was going to say to her family for making changes while she was away.
Annoyed, she lifted the latch and went into the hall. It was darker there than in the bedroom. Where were the night-lights that she kept all over the house? She knew the boys sometimes got up at night, so
she’d wanted them to be able to see where they were going. The fixtures were supposed to be light sensitive, coming on only when it was dark, but they weren’t on now. Amy wondered if the electricity had gone out and that’s why the furnace had stopped working.
She hurried the few steps down the hall to her oldest son’s room. Again when she reached for the knob, there was just a latch. Frowning, she opened it.
She lifted the latch, but before the door opened, a strong arm reached out and grabbed her.
“I would not do that if I were you,” said a man’s voice above her head. His voice was deeper than Stephen’s and it had an old-fashioned English accent, like something from an old black-and-white movie.
“Stephen?” she asked. “What are you doing? Let go of me and go down and check the furnace. It’s freezing in here.” She turned back to open the door.
The man put his hand over hers. “Nay, do not.”
“Will you stop it!” she said, pushing his hand away.
“Ah, I see. You are not who I thought you were. I see now that you are in your nightdress. Go on, then. And mayhap you will come to my room later.”
“Great,” Amy said. “The house is an ice cube and you want to play sex games. Tell me you didn’t put on those ridiculous tall leather boots you bought.”
“Boots?” the man said. “Aye, my boots are leather.”
Amy couldn’t help laughing. “Stephen, you have the strangest timing. Go downstairs and see what you can do with the furnace. I’ll get the boys and put them in bed with us. Go on now and do it!”
For a few moments the man didn’t say anything. “You are mad, woman,” he said. “Your mind is deranged.”
“It’ll arrange itself back once it’s above fifty degrees in this house.”
She heard him moving—it was too dark to see anything—then a match was struck, he lit a candle, and he held it up. Amy’s eyes widened as she looked not into the face of her husband but at a stranger. He was as dark as Stephen was fair. His black hair was long, ending just at his collar, and his eyes were dark, with thick lashes above them. His brows were black and shaped like a bird’s wings.