The Bookstore on the Beach Page 3

  Who?

  Oliver Hancock.

  She didn’t want to talk about Oliver. Danielle and her other friends assumed she liked him—he probably did, too—because she’d had sex with him at a party two weeks ago. But that incident held no meaning for her. She’d simply been trying to shock herself into feeling something.

  Too bad that night hadn’t fixed anything. Even when she’d been with him, she hadn’t felt anything. She’d just stared at the ceiling, totally numb, wishing he’d hurry up and finish. Although she’d been vaguely aware that they hadn’t used a condom, she’d also been too reckless to do anything about it—couldn’t bring herself to care—and now she had to worry about the possible consequences.

  Can’t talk right now. What’d he say? she wrote back, acting interested only because she knew Danielle would expect her to.

  He wanted your number!

  Taylor grimaced.

  Did you give it to him?

  I did.

  “Shit,” she muttered.

  “Something wrong, honey?” Mimi was wearing a long turquoise beach dress, her knees pulled into her chest and rope-like sandals on her feet. Taylor had always thought her grandmother was beautiful in an ethereal, almost untouchable way. With silver hair, light blue eyes that slanted slightly upward and high cheekbones, she could’ve been a model. She was definitely prettier than the grandmothers of Taylor’s friends, but Mimi was also a lot younger than most of them. She’d had Autumn when she was only sixteen.

  Taylor hated that she might be following in her grandmother’s footsteps and having a baby when she was way too young. She knew better and should’ve been more careful. “No. Nothing.” Why say yes? Where would she even begin to explain?

  This was where the acting came in...

  Caden got to his feet, caught her eye and jerked his head toward the water. “Want to go for a swim?”

  She knew part of the reason they fought so often was because she’d withdrawn from him. But she couldn’t help it; she was hurting too badly to try any harder than she was. “No.”

  She could tell he was disappointed. Even Mimi glanced over as though she wished Taylor would change her mind. So she forced herself to relent. “Okay,” she said grudgingly. “Go ahead. I’ll be out in a sec.”

  “Are you excited for your senior year?” Mimi asked as they both watched Caden run into the ocean and dive beneath the surf.

  Taylor turned off her phone and slipped it into her bag. She didn’t want anyone to touch it, including her grandmother and especially her brother, if, for some reason, he came out of the ocean before she did. He’d be disgusted if he learned what she’d done with Oliver. Since she wasn’t even attracted to Caden’s ex-best friend, she was disgusted at herself. “Yeah,” she lied. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Where would you like to go to college?”

  Her grades had fallen so much she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get into college—although she had done surprisingly well on the SAT. That could save her, providing something else didn’t get in the way, like a pregnancy. She wished she knew when to expect her period, but she hadn’t been paying any attention to her monthly cycle. Since she’d broken up with her boyfriend just before Christmas and had gone off the pill, there hadn’t been any reason to. “Mom said that Old Dominion is only two and a half hours from here. Maybe I’ll go there, so I can drive over and see you whenever I have the time.”

  “I’d love that,” Mimi said. “It would be great if Caden chose Old Dominion, too.”

  She stood and dusted the sand off her legs. “He’s hoping to get a water polo scholarship, so I doubt we’ll go to the same college.” That was another reason she was pulling away from her brother. They were going to be separated soon, regardless, and she couldn’t face another loss, had to be more prepared for the next one.

  “Of course.” The bangles on Mimi’s wrist jangled as she shaded her eyes. “How’s your mother been doing?”

  Taylor could tell by the tone of Mimi’s voice that this wasn’t a casual question. “I couldn’t tell you. She doesn’t talk to us about how she’s feeling.”

  “Because she doesn’t want to make what you’re going through any worse,” Mimi explained, always quick to defend her daughter.

  Caden came to the surface, threw back his hair and went under again.

  “I think Mom’s decided Dad’s not coming back,” Taylor admitted.

  Mary blinked several times before speaking. “Do you think he might?”

  Taylor’s chest suddenly felt as though it was buried beneath a thousand pounds of sand. “No,” she admitted for the first time and ran down to the water.

  * * *

  Mr. Olynyk had a thick accent, making it hard for Autumn to understand him. She’d spoken to him many times since she’d hired him over a year ago, before she went to Ukraine. But it’d been months since he’d had anything of substance to report. Although he claimed he was working with various contacts inside the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, she was beginning to suspect that whatever he could do had already been done. So many people—from various governmental agencies, as well as chat rooms and forums she’d visited while trying to get help online—had warned her about her vulnerability and how easy it would be for an unscrupulous person to take advantage of her. After all, how would she know if he was telling the truth?

  Now that she was no longer in the country, she felt so out of touch, so helpless. But she couldn’t go back. It had been hard to leave her children, who each went to stay with a friend while she was gone so they could continue going to school. Not only had those three weeks seemed interminable, she also hadn’t accomplished anything. She had a face to put with Mr. Olynyk’s name and had spent some time with him. But that certainly didn’t stop her from lying awake at night, imagining that he’d proved Nick was dead months ago but had decided not to say anything.

  Meanwhile, she couldn’t tell her children what’d happened to their father, and she couldn’t bring Nick’s body home, where she could give him a proper burial and be satisfied that, even though his life was over, she’d done everything she could. While she hoped that he was alive and would come back to her, if they found him dead, that would at least put an end to the questions that nearly drove her mad. Not knowing when to quit, when she’d fulfilled her duty to the love they’d shared, was one of the worst parts of what she was going through.

  “Say that again?” she said, when Olynyk mentioned something about the Donetsk region, which was held by separatists.

  “A friend of the man I told you about last time, Ananiy Kushnir, recognized your husband’s photograph. He believes he saw him.”

  She clutched the phone tighter. It was dangerous to get her hopes up. How many times had she been through this? But she craved news of her husband so badly she simply couldn’t avoid taking the bait. “How long ago?”

  “Months. Many months. Nick was in the company of known rebel forces.”

  “You think he came to your country to infiltrate the separatists.” This was a theory they’d floated before, but there’d never been anything to suggest it was actually true.

  “Possibly.”

  He’d called her in the middle of what would be his night to tell her this? Apparently, she’d imbued his timing with more meaning than she should have, because this sounded like more of nothing to her.

  “You want me to keep going, yes?”

  That was his way of asking if he should spend more time. And more time meant more money. Should she continue with this? Was he on the right trail, or was this “friend” fictitious?

  “What could’ve happened to him?” she asked for the millionth time. This was always how their conversations went—she pummeled him with questions and he danced around in his efforts to answer them.

  “He could be working somewhere. I am looking. But it’s very dangerous. The Russ
ian government has sent many sabotage groups—you understand? Sabotage is the correct word?”

  “Yes. I know what that means.”

  “These groups, they work...um...how do you say...independent.”

  “Independently,” she said.

  “Very dangerous,” he repeated. “Maybe...maybe they don’t like your husband.”

  “Are you suggesting that Nick might’ve become a target of one of these Russian groups?”

  “Could be. If they deem him an enemy, they could...do anything,” he finished weakly.

  Had they murdered him? It sounded like something out of a movie, not her life.

  She gripped the railing as she sank down onto the wooden steps. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  She let every bit of the longing she felt fill her voice. “In your honest opinion, do you believe Nick’s dead?”

  He hesitated as though uncomfortable with the question. Then he said, “I think...yes. Otherwise, I find him long time ago.”

  It was one thing for her to say Nick was most likely dead. It was another thing entirely to hear it from someone who knew the area and the situation far better than she did. This one response sounded completely frank—so frank that along with all the other emotions zipping around inside her, she felt a degree of guilt for suspecting Olynyk of trying to cheat her. Maybe she just hadn’t asked the right questions.

  “Where could his body be?”

  “Anywhere. But you want me to keep trying to find it, yes?”

  Squeezing her eyes closed, she let her head fall back. Now they were searching for a body?

  God, what should she do?

  Tears trickled from her eyes and rolled back into her hair while she struggled to decide. For the most part, she’d quit weeping at random moments. Having Nick gone had become normal. What was new was the realization that she’d come to the end of the road. It was time to give up no matter how difficult it was to let him go.

  She thought of those rain boots in the corner upstairs. The fact that he would probably never come back to wear them made it almost impossible to speak. “I’ll send you another two thousand. That should take you through June. But if you can’t provide something concrete by then—something that shows you’re on the right trail—that will be the end of it. Do you understand?”

  “Tak.”

  After the past eighteen months, she’d learned enough Ukrainian to know that meant yes. She also knew how to say thank you: “Dyakuyu tobi.”

  “Nemae problem.”

  No problem. She shook her head as she disconnected, but another call came in before she could finish going down the stairs. It was her mother.

  “Are you coming?” Mary asked as soon as she answered.

  “Yes. I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  After Mary ended the phone call with Autumn, she leaned back, feeling the soft sand give slightly beneath her palms as she watched her grandchildren bodysurfing in the ocean. She loved this small part of the world. Living in Sable Beach had brought her peace and safety. She walked down to the water almost every night to visit the sea and be heartened by its constancy and beauty. It was more of a mother to her than her own mother had ever been—her real mother, anyway. She loved watching the gulls swoop and land and study her as curiously as she studied them.

  One gull who visited this beach quite often was missing an eye. He would cock his head and look at her with the eye he had left, but he wouldn’t venture close, not as close as the others.

  She felt a certain kinship with him. Although hers were less visible, she had scars, too. They both clung to the sanctuary Sable Beach provided and weren’t willing to trust too much.

  Would the peace she’d found here last? Or was everything about to change? For so long, her secret had felt safe. But thanks to the interest Autumn had shown in finding her father—right before Nick went missing—and the technological advances that made DNA testing commonplace, she was on edge again, like she’d been in the beginning, always wondering what might sneak up from behind.

  Taylor had mentioned something only two weeks ago that indicated Autumn had been talking about her father again. Mary could remember the exact words and even the tone of her granddaughter’s voice: I think it bugs Mom that she doesn’t know more about her father’s side.

  Mary had glossed over that statement by saying she didn’t know anything, either, but she felt that was a harbinger of doom. The subject would come up again—this time with Autumn—and probably before the summer was over. Mary desperately wanted to stick with her story, to keep everything status quo, but she knew she couldn’t get away with that, not when a simple DNA test could give Autumn the means to track him down and prove her a liar.

  And if she came out and told her? What would Autumn do with the information? Mary was afraid she’d reach out to people she didn’t want her to have any contact with—and was loath to allow back into her own life.

  The thought of that nearly caused her to pump her fist at the sky and scream, “Over my dead body!” It was the fight in her that had carried her through those terrible years. But despite all she’d done to protect Autumn and create a new life for them both, and despite all she might do to keep the past from catching up with her, in the end she might not have any say in it.

  Secrets had a way of coming out.

  “There you are!”

  Mary turned to see Autumn trudging toward her and waved.

  “Taylor and Caden are having a blast,” she said as soon as Autumn arrived and let her bag drop onto the sand. Sometimes Mary marveled at the banal things that came out of her mouth when there was so much more going on inside her head.

  Autumn slid her sunglasses higher on the bridge of her nose as she turned to watch her children out in the waves. “For once they’re not fighting.” Pulling a towel from her bag, she prepared a spot where she could sit down. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. That private investigator I hired in Ukraine called.”

  “Did he have any news?”

  “Not really. Just more of the same. He’s found someone who might’ve seen Nick. He’s taking more pictures to show this contact or that contact. A friend in the government might be able to help. He’s managed to speak to the person he told me about last time, so we can at least cross one more potential lead off the list. That’s all I ever get.”

  Mary could see why she’d be discouraged. “He has to be methodical, I suppose.”

  “That’s true, but it’s been so long. Is this investigator doing anything that will make a difference?”

  “Who can say?”

  It was difficult to watch her daughter suffer. For a long time, Autumn had been so intent on finding Nick that Mary could scarcely reach her. She was up night and day, always on the internet or the telephone, trying to get more information, to push the government to help her, to speak to people who might have more power, to circulate his picture around various groups in Ukraine, to find someone over there who might be capable and willing to look into his disappearance. It terrified Mary to think that Autumn’s efforts might draw the attention of the wrong sort of person or persons. What if Nick had indeed infiltrated a terrorist group, and they were so bothered by Autumn’s dogged efforts to track him down that they decided to put a stop to her nosing around—by putting a stop to her?

  When Mary mentioned the possibility to Laurie, Laurie had said she shouldn’t let her imagination run away with her. The odds of something that terrible happening were one in a million.

  But Mary didn’t care how remote the chance might be. The odds of what’d happened to her were just as slim—and yet she’d been that one in a million.

  “Do you trust him?” Mary asked.

  “I did at first. He’s the one who gave me that fuzzy photograph taken by a security camera at the airport in Kyiv, remember? That was how
I knew Nick made his flight and landed in Ukraine, which was huge.”

  Mary remembered. Autumn had made a big deal of that picture, calling out the FBI on social media, claiming they were trying to sweep her husband’s disappearance under the rug. His “handler” had finally reached out and admitted that Nick had been doing a few “low level” things for the bureau but only online. They wanted her to accept that he’d gone to Ukraine on his own and pipe down, but she kept saying she couldn’t believe he’d do that—not without telling her he was going out of the country.

  “Isn’t there something more that could be done to track Nick’s cell phone?” Mary asked. “I know I’ve asked before, but they can do so much more now than they could even a year ago. I see it all the time on those forensic shows.”

  “His cell phone should’ve yielded more information,” Autumn replied. “Believe it or not, if it were an older model, it would’ve had a baseband processor that powers up every ten minutes or so to retrieve text messages—although not phone calls—and I would’ve had a chance.”

  “But he didn’t have an older model.”

  “Of course not. He relied on his phone a great deal, always had the latest and greatest. He loves—” she frowned and cleared her throat “—loved technology.”

  “But most people have new technology these days. And I’ve read about the NSA being able to track cell phones, even when they’re turned off.”

  “The new phones have a unibody design where the battery can’t be removed,” she explained. “As long as there’s a battery, a phone can be tracked even when it’s turned off.” She grimaced. “But only if it’s infected with Trojans. According to everything I’ve been able to find, that’s how the NSA does it. Anyway, I’ve tried. There’s nothing more I can do in regards to his cell phone. And everything Olynyk provided of any real significance was almost a year ago. Yet, I keep paying him.”

  “Because you’re hoping he’ll eventually find a thread you can use to unravel the whole mystery.”

  Autumn bit her lip. “Yes. But am I letting my attention be diverted when I should be giving it to the kids instead? Am I throwing away money on a dream that will never come to pass? I need to know whether I should be chasing it.”