Page 4 of Find Me

So, no, Scott would never convince her that they’d both be better off if they leaned on each other less. But she had made a promise to Hope, and she needed to keep it. She’d wait a few days before checking in with her to plan a visit. Until then, Hope would be fine. Like Scott said, she was a survivor.

3

Saturday, June 12, 10:45 p.m.

Nearly seventeen hundred miles away, NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher felt the weight of a warm, bare arm wrapped across her chest. Her skin felt clammy. She couldn’t move. She was pinned against the bed.

A scream jarred her awake. It took her a few seconds to realize that it had come from her own throat. The arm moved, and a hand stroked her shoulder soothingly. “Sssh,” a voice whispered, “it’s just a dream.”

Ellie opened her eyes and blinked several times before she remembered where she was. She registered the faint sounds of the ceiling fan—click, click, click—and crickets outside the window. Frogs? Some sort of tiny creature.

It was so damn quiet. Too quiet. At home, she was used to a constant symphony of sirens, car horns, and garbage trucks on Third Avenue, Ellie’s version of white noise, allowing her to disappear until she reemerged into the world the next morning.

She had no idea whether she’d been muttering, sweating, or kicking, but somehow she had managed to awaken Max, who could sleep through anything. She rolled over to face him. This was their first trip beyond the tristate area together. Hell, it was her first real vacation since making detective with the NYPD five years earlier.

“Are you okay?” His voice was sleepy. Even though they had showered before dinner, he smelled like sun, salt water, and coconut.

“I’m fine.” She nestled her head in the crook of his arm and placed one hand across his stomach until his breath became deep and rhythmic. He was already snoozing again. The fan continued to click as Ellie alternated between blanket-off and blanket-on, trying to find the right temperature.

It had been Max’s idea to come to St. Barts. He thought she was kidding when she asked where it was. Ellie had been outside the United States exactly three times: once in high school, when she and two of her friends decided one Friday night that it would be fun to drive to Mexico; once two years before, when she’d flown to Toronto to interview a witness in a shooting connected to the Russian mafia; and once to London with the only other man she had ever tried to live with.

At least Max had chosen a warm place with beautiful white-sand beaches instead of a rainy version of New York City. The original plan had been to come in March, but Max’s trial schedule had veto power.

She knew plenty of people would cut off a limb to enjoy a week looking out over turquoise-blue water with the best man they’d ever known. But the very fact that Max had chosen a place she still wasn’t sure how to pronounce—Was it Saint or Sahn? Bart or Barts or Barth or Barths?—was another reminder of how different they were. Max made a government salary as an assistant district attorney, but had friends who were partners at major law firms, with second homes in East Hampton and the Berkshires. He’d been to Paris multiple times and seemed perfectly at ease ordering foie gras and escargot on this trip. As far as Ellie was concerned, a beach vacation should mean tacos, barbecue, and margaritas.

She kicked off the covers once again. How in the world could the most expensive hotel she’d ever stayed in not have better air-conditioning? Say what you will about Kansas, but at least the Midwest understood the importance of climate control.

And there it was. The reason she was tossing and turning in the middle of the night—Wichita, Kansas. It was a good enough place to grow up, the kind of little city where a cop dad and a bookkeeper mom could afford a three-bedroom ranch house, complete with a finished basement and a picket fence. The public schools were better than average and, at least back then, provided a haven where kids were all treated the same, regardless of zip codes. It had been a middle-school PE teacher who convinced a skeptical Ellie to enter a junior-miss beauty pageant to start squirreling away some college money, a few hundred dollars at a time. Kansas had turned her into the kind of person who could move to New York City at the age of twenty-one and sign up for criminal justice classes at John Jay.

But Kansas was also the state she never left—not once, not even to Kansas City, Missouri—until she was in the tenth grade for that impromptu trip to Mexico. It was the home that had never taught her about delicacies such as foie gras and escargot. And it was the place where her father died when she was only fourteen years old.

She shifted from her comfortable spot in the crook of Max’s arm and fumbled around on the nightstand until she found her phone. The glow of the screen lit the room in a yellowish haze, but Max seemed undisturbed.

She suddenly remembered she was in a foreign country and would have to pay data fees. Fuck it. A few texts would cost less than dessert at tonight’s overpriced restaurant.

Are you up?

Dots immediately appeared in a text box on the screen, suggesting that her brother was indeed awake.

I am now. You know I leave my phone on in case of last-minute cancellations.

She felt a pang of guilt. Jess was a barely-working musician. Here she was, feeling sorry for herself for being a fish out of water in St. Barts, but she was a detective with a salary, benefits, overtime, and a pension waiting for her down the road. Jess had to keep his cell phone on max volume next to his pillow in case some dive bar needed an over-the-hill punk band on short notice.

Sorry,she typed.I had a dream about Dad.

No dots. No response. Jess never wanted to talk about Dad or Wichita or anything else that brought up old feelings. But he was her only person when it came to this particular subject.

Finally the dots reappeared. His reply was brief.

What about him?

Some kids, they remember their parents pushing them on swings or coaching their teams or hugging them at graduation. But Jess would know those weren’t the kinds of dreams Ellie would have about their father. When she thought about her dad, it was almost always about either his death or the deaths that obsessed him while he was still alive.

When we went to the hospital,she typed.

More dots.Yeah, that sucked.

You were right, you know. About the hospital. You knew before anyone.

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