She got up from the window box. 'I'll let you know as soon as we have any new information.'
Valerie took Serena's hands. Her fingers were slim and warm. Serena could feel the woman reaching out to her, as if for a lifeline. 'You have to find her, Serena. I need my baby home with me. If you don't have children, I'm not sure you can understand how desperate I feel.'
Serena squeezed Valerie's hands in reassurance. She knew that Valerie, like Stride, had gone off a bridge, with nothing and no one to keep her from falling. She'd seen too many parents like her grasping for a fragment of hope, and she wished she could give Valerie a promise:
But she couldn't. She could only make that promise in her own head.
'I do understand,' she said.
Chapter Six
Stride found the Sago Cemetery on a dirt road off Highway 2, twenty miles southeast of Grand Rapids. There was no town, just an occasional dented mailbox marking the trail to an old farm tucked away among the trees and fields. He parked on the shoulder and got out of his truck. A hundred or so gravestones climbed a gentle slope from the road, some in the open grass, some shadowed by towering pines. The thick trunks of sixty-foot evergreens groaned as the wind blew. A white flagpole sat beside the cemetery sign, and the metal brackets on the flag rope banged rhythmically against the pole, creating a lonely clatter.
Stride didn't see another living soul in any direction. Not that he felt particularly alive himself right now. He couldn't remember a time when he had felt so disconnected from who he was. He wanted to care about something, but he didn't seem to care about anything at all. Each panic attack left him more and more remote, until he felt as if he were standing at the rim of a desert canyon and his life was a mile away, on the opposite edge.
With his hands shoved in his pockets, Stride strolled among the graves. He read the names on the headstones and brass markers built into the turf: Tolan, Niemi, Sorenson, Davis. Halfway up the slope, he found twin gray monuments for Edward and Lavinia Glenn, parents of Marcus Glenn, who had died two years apart more than a decade earlier. He had a difficult time imagining Marcus Glenn, who was so particular about the finer things in life, growing up in these remote, lower-class farmlands.
'You're the cop, aren't you?'
Stride looked up and saw a girl about nineteen years old standing near the edge of the cemetery land, where the dormant grass ended at the trees. She held a rake in her hand and stood next to a hillock of dried leaves.
'Are you Migdalia Vega?' he asked.
'Call me Micki,' she said, scraping the ground and gathering leaves into the pile. 'You find Callie yet?'
'No.'
'I hope you find her soon. She's a beautiful girl.'
Stride approached her. Micki Vega looked like a girl who hadn't outgrown her baby fat. Her wide hips were packed solidly into beige corduroys. She had a round face, with a tiny mole above her upper lip, and golden skin. Her black hair was tied into a ponytail. She wore a red sweatshirt, which didn't hide the pooch that bulged over the belt of her pants.
'Are you the caretaker for the cemetery?' he asked.
Micki shrugged. 'I cut the lawn, rake the leaves, throw out the flowers when they die. That sort of thing.'
'Do you live around here?'
She gestured over her right shoulder, where he saw a cluster of mobile homes and a few dated pickup trucks hidden behind the trees. 'Me and my mama, we live there.'
'You work for the Glenns too, is that right?'
'Yeah, they call me when they need someone to look after Callie for a few hours. They're busy people. I work a lot of jobs, because Mama has lung disease, and she has to stay home.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Yeah, well, that's how it is. My dad skipped out a couple years ago. Mama has her lung thing from smoking. Somebody's got to make the dough.'
'How did you meet Marcus Glenn?' Stride asked.
Micki pointed down the slope. 'You saw the stones. Dr Glenn visits his family every month. I met him here a couple years ago, and he knew I did babysitting and stuff. I really needed the money, so when Callie was born, he said I could help. That was real nice. If it was up to his wife, she wouldn't have let me in the house.' 'Oh?'
'Oh yeah, I heard her talking. She didn't want me around her baby.'
'Why not?'
'I'm Hispanic, and I live in a trailer. You think a woman like her is going to trust a girl like me? But she saw how good I was with Callie. We didn't have any problems after that. She still looks down her pretty little nose at me, but she knows Callie likes me. That's all that matters to Mrs Glenn. That baby is everything to her.'
'What about Dr Glenn? Does he feel the same way?'
Micki's eyes narrowed with suspicion. 'I know what you want me to say. You want me to say that Dr Glenn did something to Callie. Well, that's bullshit. The TV people, they have it all wrong. Dr Glenn does more to help people around here than just about anybody else in the world. If you knew him like I did, you'd know he would never do anything to hurt another person, let alone his baby girl.'
Stride realized that Migdalia Vega was the first person he had met who had bothered to defend Marcus Glenn. 'You like him, don't you?'
'Damn right I do. This thing with his daughter, it's terrible, but he had nothing to do with it.'
'So do you have any idea what happened to Callie?'
Micki shook her head. 'Somebody took her. Probably somebody trying to shake down Dr Glenn. When you have money, everybody wants a piece of you.'
'But you have no idea who it could be?'
'If I did, don't you think I'd tell you? It could be anybody.'
'We're trying to figure out how somebody got into the house,' Stride told her. He added, 'You have a key, don't you?'
'Sure I do.' She folded her arms over her chest in anger. 'What, you think I had something to do with this? Is that what Mrs Glenn said? Because I would never do anything to hurt Callie. Never.'
'I didn't say you would. I was just wondering if anyone could have stolen your key.'
'No way.' Micki dug in the tight pocket of her pants and pulled out a bulging set of keys. 'The houses where I babysit, the keys are all right here. I always have them with me. I never set them down anywhere except when I go to sleep at night.'
'I have to look at all the possibilities, Micki. I'm not saying you would intentionally do something wrong, but it's easy to make a mistake. Maybe you told somebody what a nice house the Glenns have or how much money Marcus Glenn makes. Maybe a girlfriend said something to a boyfriend. Things happen.'
'I already said no,' Micki insisted. 'You think I have time to hang out in bars and drink margaritas and tell stories? You think I can park my pussy in somebody's bed when I'm working every day of the week? I already learned my lesson about boyfriends. They're happy to stick it between your legs, but they don't want to be there to watch you brush your teeth in the morning. So I'm doing this for me and my mama, and that's it.'
'OK,' Stride told her. 'I understand. If you remember talking to someone, even if it was totally innocent, I want you to call me. It's very important. This is about getting Callie back home safely.'
'I know that, but I can't tell you what happened. I didn't hear anything, OK?'
Micki's eyes darted to her feet. She knew what she'd said. So did Stride. The truth hung between them like laundry on a clothes line.
'When was the last time you babysat for Callie?' he asked.
'Last weekend, I think.'
