The Truth About Comfort Cove

No huge lightning bolt flashed inside her mind. No voices spoke. But Lucy knew when it was time to move on. Walking out to her car with the basket, she imagined herself unloading groceries. She opened the driver’s side door.

Why? Why was that door open with a baby in the cart? Wouldn’t Sandy have gone to the passenger’s side door first, strapped Allie into her car seat and then proceeded to the driver’s side?

They’d found the car with the car seat intact, bearing no fingerprints but her mother’s and Allie’s, and the driver’s door open. Did that mean that Allie was already in the car when Wakerby appeared? Had her mother left her door unlocked as she got into the car? Lucy could picture the man yanking open her mother’s door, hauling her mother out of the car, but what about Allie? How did he contain her mother, who would have been frantic to protect Allie if nothing else, and get a child out of a car seat all without attracting attention?

Or had Sandy had Allie in her arms, planning to sit in the driver’s seat and from there lift Allie into her car seat?

Had Wakerby come upon her while the door was still open and hauled her, holding her baby, out of the car?

Once he had them both, Sandy would have done anything he said to keep him from hurting Allie. Standing at her car door, Lucy could picture the whole thing. Wakerby had probably pulled up right next to her mother.

“Get in the car without making a sound or your baby dies.”

If he’d had Sandy in his grasp, while she had Allie in hers, what would Sandy have done?

She’d have gotten in the man’s car.

Lucy got into her own car. Pulled out the map she’d marked that morning with different colors highlighting different routes.

Amber Locken was interested in the numbers they’d found written down among Wakerby’s things, too. She was pursuing different theories regarding them and some of the other things in that box, too. Like Lucy, Amber thought the numbers might be coordinates, but she was looking at Sloan Wakerby as a rapist, looking for other rapes that he could have committed. Thinking that if the numbers were map coordinates, they might lead her to another crime. And another woman.

As Lucy drove, she kept young Sandy and six-month-old Allie focused in her mind. Tried to imagine how they might have felt that day. What they might have suffered.

And she watched every inch of the road—in front of her and both sides. She had no idea what she was looking for. Just knew she had to look.

She’d followed Amber’s theory and mapped the numbers they’d found in Wakerby’s things on an Aurora map, leading from the grocery store. But she wasn’t looking for another rape victim.

She was in hell. Feeling the blows to her mother’s skin as if they were her own. Feeling desperate. Afraid.

When had Sandy’s eyes swollen? At the beginning of her hours-long ordeal? Had she been nearly unconscious, nearly blinded, before the man had raped her?

Or had those blows to her eyes come later? How conscious had she been when her arm had been broken?

Lucy took the shortest route first, between the grocery store and the place where the numbers came together on the area map. The site was less than twenty miles from the parking lot she’d left.

“In point four miles, turn right.” Bonnie’s voice sounded foreign in the car.

And Lucy didn’t see any road upon which to turn.

She slowed, ready to take up one of her regular pastimes and argue with Bonnie, but at the last second, she saw the dirt road to her right. It was hard to believe the strip of tire marks would be on a GPS system, or even on a map.

Lucy inched her way around the corner, watching intently. Right. Left. For a ditch. A mark on a tree. Anything that might give her indication of life, twenty-five years earlier in time.

“Drive point six miles and arrive at destination, on right.”

Keeping her car at less than five miles per hour, Lucy approached the unknown. Bare, gnarly branches entangled so tightly she couldn’t see where one tree began and another ended, forming a canopy above her. Dried-out remnants of the glorious oranges and reds and yellows of the fallen leaves covered the ground and most of the track upon which she drove. Clearly no other car had been on the road in a while.

She rounded a corner, about three-tenths of a mile from her destination. The road grew darker. She imagined Sandy there, knowing what had to be coming in her near future. Fearing for her baby’s life.

Had Allie been crying then?

Had she still been with them?

Had she ever been with them?

In her mind’s eye Lucy saw her favorite picture of the sister she’d never known, taken just a week before the abduction. The baby had been dressed in a red dress with white stars and underneath had been white pantaloons. Her cheeks were chubby and so were her arms. They were reaching out toward someone—Lucy knew that someone was Sandy. And the look of pure joy on that baby’s face, the smile, had been with Lucy all of her life.

Picturing that baby here, picturing her mother here, knowing what had happened to Sandy, being unable to prevent it, hurt so badly she wasn’t sure she could bear the pain. Wasn’t sure she could continue.