No!
Suddenly the walls of the kitchen — the whole house — seemed to be closing in on him.
He had to get outside!
“I’m going to look in the garage and the shed,” he said. “If she went outside, maybe she just got confused in the dark or something.” Without waiting for his mother to reply, he went out the back door. Pausing on the steps, he took a deep breath, then another.
What was happening to him?
Where were the dreams coming from?
What did they mean?
But what about his grandmother? If what he’d seen last night was only a dream, why hadn’t Gram been in her room this morning?
It was a coincidence. Just a coincidence. Wasn’t that one of the reasons his mother had moved her into the house? Because people with Alzheimer’s disease sometimes just wandered away from their homes, and got confused, and couldn’t find their way back? Of course! Gram was out here somewhere, in the carriage house, or the old stable. She had to be somewhere.
Except she wasn’t. Matt searched the buildings, then went through them again, calling out to his grandmother, opening every door, even climbing into the hayloft in the barn.
Nothing.
Finally he went back to the house, re-entering through the same door he’d come out of fifteen minutes earlier. As he stepped into the mud room, he heard his mother talking in the kitchen.
“Trip? I need you to come out — Mother’s gone.”
Mr. Wainwright? Why had she called him?
“I think she must have wandered off sometime in the middle of the night. If you’ll just come out and — ” Her voice broke off abruptly, then: “No, don’t call the police, Trip — at least not yet. The chances are she’s somewhere on the property and — ”
Once more his mother fell silent, and when she spoke again, her voice had dropped so he had to strain to hear her. “I really don’t think you should call Dan Pullman. Not after — well, not after what happened, and what they’re already thinking about Matt. Besides, we don’t really know that anything’s happened to Mother, do we?” Her voice took on a pleading note. “Please? Just come out, and then we can decide what to do.”
For an instant Matt felt an impulse to go back out the door, to get away from the house, to escape to —
To where?
Nowhere.
There was nowhere at all to go.
What was happening? Was he going crazy? How could his mother even think —
But then, before he could finish the thought, his mother was standing in the door of the mud room, looking worriedly at him. “Matt? What is it? You look — ”
“You think I did something to her, don’t you?” he whispered. Finally he managed to look at her. “You think I did something to Gram.”
The abject misery in her son’s face wrenching at her heart, Joan pulled Matt close, wrapping him in her arms.
“No,” she whispered. “Oh, no, Matt. Of course not! How could you even think such a thing?” But even as she spoke the words, Joan remembered the look on Matt’s face when she’d asked him if he’d heard anything last night.
She remembered the hesitation in his voice as he told her that he hadn’t heard anything at all.
* * *
TRIP WAINWRIGHT DIDN’T need to look at his watch to know that it was getting close to ten: if the angle of the sun hadn’t told him it was mid-morning, the gnawing in his belly would have; ever since he’d given up breakfast in the latest of his ongoing battles against an irreversibly expanding waistline, his stomach had begun demanding food — preferably an apple Danish — at exactly nine-thirty. By ten o’clock, when his teeth literally began to hurt and he was unconsciously snapping at his secretary, the need for a Danish usually became so overwhelming that he left his office and went next door to the bakery, promising himself that tomorrow morning he would find the strength to resist his stomach’s demands. So far his broken promises had resulted in five more pounds and an extra half inch on his waistline, and he was still only a month into the no-breakfast diet.
But it was more than his stomach that was gnawing at him right now, for during the nearly three hours he had spent helping Joan and Matt search for Emily Moore, they found no trace. They had started in the house, searching every room again, opening every closet. Then the lawyer retraced Matt’s route through the outbuildings, even climbing the ladder to the hayloft himself, though he knew by the third step that there was no way Emily Moore could have made it even as far as that.
Certain that the old woman wasn’t in any of the buildings, they searched the grounds. For an hour they had slowly moved back and forth in an ever-widening semicircle through the forest that half surrounded the house. But finally, half an hour ago, Wainwright had insisted that they give it up. They were in the midst of a thicket of underbrush which had twice nearly succeeded in immobilizing the attorney, whose hiking — for the last twenty years, anyway — had been confined to the neatly trimmed fairways of the Granite Falls Golf Club, which, if not exactly kept up to the standards of some of the wealthier country clubs down around Boston, were at least mown once a week.
“There aren’t even any trails, Joan. There isn’t any way your mother could have gotten in here — not even in the daylight, let alone in the middle of the night.”
For a moment he thought Joan would refuse to give up, would insist that they keep on pushing through the heavy undergrowth, but then her shoulders sagged and the hope had gone out of her eyes. “I know,” she sighed. “I know you’re right, but…” Her voice trailed off, and the defeated look in her eyes made him want to reach out and comfort her.
“We’ll find her, Mom,” Matt had said. “I know we will.”
Barely responding, Joan followed along as Matt started guiding them back toward the house.
They were at the edge of the forest now; the house was visible through the trees, and the low stone wall that edged the lawn was only a few yards ahead. Joan suddenly stopped short.
“What is it?” Wainwright asked, scanning the area but seeing nothing except a trail that would lead them to a gap in the wall, and the broad expanse of closely mown grass that surrounded the house.
“The river path,” Joan said, her voice hollow, her gaze fixed on the narrow path. “We never looked there.” She looked at Wainwright. “The trail leads to the falls. Mother always liked the falls.” Her eyes glistening with hope again, she started down the path. “That’s where she would have gone! I know it!”
Wainwright’s first instinct was to try to stop her, but the sudden buoyancy in her step made him abandon the impulse. Determinedly ignoring his growing hunger, he followed Joan down the trail, Matt behind him.
They were no more than two hundred yards from the falls, and starting to feel the chill of its mists in the air, when Joan stopped so abruptly that Trip Wainwright almost bumped into her.
“Look!” The word was more of a yelp than anything else, and when Wainwright followed her gaze, he at first saw nothing. But then he spotted it.
Half buried in the soft dirt of the path was a slipper.
A worn shearling slipper, the same kind that Wainwright himself liked to wear when he was home alone at night. “It’s a man’s slipper,” he said, starting forward.
Joan’s hand closed on his arm, stopping him. “Mother has a pair just like that,” she said, her voice trembling. Wainwright wasn’t sure whether the quaver in her voice was from fear or excitement, but her next words made it clear. “She came down here! I know she did!” Snatching up the slipper before the lawyer could stop her, Joan hurried down the trail, her step now quick and eager. “Mother?” she called out. “Mother, where are you?”
With Matt still following him, Wainwright started after Joan, but they’d gone no more than fifty yards when his own eye was caught by something.
