Vanished (The Saved Series, A Military Romance) (6 page)

Almost a month
had passed since Abby vanished, and no one had seen anything. Eric had barely slept for weeks, spending his days searching the city and the surrounding area for any sign of Abby. His emotions were all over the place, between anger, sadness, hurt, and betrayal. He hadn’t heard one word from Abby. No one had seen her. The NCIS officers had taken all the information and the dirty, sordid history of Abby’s year as a trafficked young woman, and they’d used it to find Hossein’s profile, but they’d soon learned that was a crapshoot. He hadn’t been spotted in the country. In fact, they’d confirmed that he was in Bahrain.

There was
a knock at the front door. Eric was barefoot, holding his son in the crook of his arm, dressed in yesterday’s blue jeans and an old T-shirt he’d yanked from the drawer. He strode to the door and opened it to Terri. She was staring up at him, offering him a quick smile. The icy air drifted in, and Eric realized it had snowed the night before.

“
Good morning, Captain,” she said, wearing a purple wool hat, her dark coat zipped up.

Eric left the door open and walked away
, leaving her standing there. He strode back to the kitchen and the cluttered countertop, covered with cups, bottles, and last night’s dinner. Rachel was in her booster seat at the table, cramming cold cereal into her mouth with her fingers. “Finish your breakfast, honey,” he said, rubbing the tangled dark hair that touched her shoulders. The floor squeaked behind him, and he glanced at Terri, who was taking in the mess, his children, him.

“So
, anything new to tell me, or is this going to be your routine every morning, showing up on my doorstep and taking pity on me?” Eric said. He pulled a carton of orange juice from the fridge and opened the cupboard to grab a glass, but there wasn’t a clean one there. “Shit.”

He searched the cupboard and
sighed. Dirty dishes filled the sink. An empty pizza carton was on the counter. He grabbed a dirty plastic cup from the sink and ran the tap to rinse it out but then discovered he was out of dish soap. He heard a rustle and glanced over at Terri as she slid off her coat and set it over the back of the chair, resting her hand on the table beside Rachel.

“Hey
, sweetheart, is that good cereal?” she asked. Rachel just stared at her and kept munching away. “Here, let me.” She stepped toward the sink, taking the dirty cup from Eric.

“Won’t do you much good
. I haven’t had time to go to the store, so there’s no dish soap. Life goes on, doesn’t it?” he said, cursing to himself at the injustice. Even though he would kill for his children, being a full time father and a Navy captain at the same time was a job he totally sucked at. There wasn’t a moment during the day or night that his thoughts didn’t drift to Abby. He didn’t know what to believe, and it made him furious to think she could have just walked away, leaving him and his children. In the next breath, he would feel guilty for thinking she’d abandoned him. He kept seesawing back and forth, not really knowing for sure if someone had taken her or she had simply walked away.

“How about laundry detergent?”
she asked.

“You plan on doing my laundry?” He pointed to the back door
, where the laundry room was.

“No.
” She wandered around the corner and returned with the box of laundry detergent. “I grew up in a small house, with a big family and not enough money. Times were tough growing up, and too many times we were running out of something. I’ve used detergent in a pinch to wash dishes.”

She ran hot water in the sink and sprinkled some pow
der in. She pushed up the sleeves of her purple turtleneck, and Eric stepped back and studied this slim, attractive woman. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail today. She had blue eyes, but where Abby’s were heavenly blue, Terri’s were closer to granite, a hard, different blue that made him wonder what she’d seen in her life. She was confident, quiet, and never wore a stitch of makeup. As he stared at the dark, silky strands of her hair, he wondered what she’d look like if she allowed it to fall loose, just a few feminine touches here and there.

She set a cup on the count
er and picked up at towel beside the sink. She took the orange juice and poured some. “For your daughter?” she asked, holding up the cup.

Eric nodded. “Yeah.”

He watched as Terri helped Rachel drink, and Rachel babbled to her, “Goo, tanks,” and smacked her lips.

“
You didn’t answer me,” Eric said. “Any news, any ideas on where to look, what rock to uncover next?” His arm was damp, and Charlie scrunched his face and made an awful racket as he filled his diaper. What next, this morning? He still needed to shower, clean this mess up, and get to the base, as he’d been ordered to appear today.

“You have your hands full
, Captain,” she said, gesturing to the baby and the kitchen. “Do you have anyone coming in to help?”

“
I asked you to stop calling me Captain if you’re going to keep showing up here every day. Driving all over Norfolk with me, talking to everyone and anyone about my wife, you should call me Eric.”

“Okay, Eric. What about some help
with the kids?”

“
Mary-Margaret is still taking them. I suppose it’s time I found someone, as I have to be on base today.”

“Oh
, I didn’t realize.” She glanced away, setting her hand on her hip. His eyes went right to her hands, both without rings, with short, clipped nails. He’d wondered before about her dedication to the job.

“Terri, don’t you have a husband at home
? I know you’ve put everything into finding my wife,” Eric said, feeling a painful lump jam his throat.

“No,
no one. Just never worked out, you know?”

Charlie started fussing
, and the ripe smell of his diaper was beginning to take over the stale kitchen.

“Here
, let me.” She held out her arms to take the baby.

“If you’re sure
,” he said, passing his son over to the woman who’d stepped into his house a month ago and had been there every day since.

She carried Charlie
into the bedroom and set him on his changing table, cooing and fussing over him. Eric noticed how comfortable she was and how easily she moved around his house. He lifted Rachel from her booster seat, all sticky with bits of cereal stuck to her nightgown. He wiped her down in the bathroom and set her to the floor, and she took off running into the bedroom she shared with her baby brother. Terri was just fastening a new diaper on the baby and was already fitting him with a clean, dry sleeper. Eric leaned in the doorway and just watched her.

“
You still didn’t tell me if you heard anything. Do you have any new leads? How about your boss?”

Terri glanced over her shoulder
, her face glowing, and something flashed in her eyes. She frowned and picked up the baby. “Jason, no. He’s working on another case, but I have some ideas. There’s a shelter, actually, in South Norfolk, a women’s shelter, and another run by a nun. I’d like to go there, show Abby’s picture around, and talk to that nun.”

“
Haven’t we been there? I thought we went to every shelter in Norfolk, talking to everyone on base and on the streets. Abby just vanished into thin air, and no one’s seen her.”

“Well
, the thing about the streets, Eric, is that those living there go unseen. Every day there can be different people. We haven’t talked to this nun yet. I just heard about her.”

She
was still holding his baby, swaying back and forth. He’d pictured Abby with his child, holding him, loving him, raising him, but she’d been gone for almost Charlie’s entire life. Would he even recognize her now if she came back, if Eric found her? He felt bitter and angry for a moment that it was Terri holding his son and not the mother of his child. It was Eric who stumbled out of bed at night to soothe him, to hold Rachel when she’d wake up crying for her mommy. As he watched his children and how Rachel was standing closer to Terri, he knew they needed a mother.

“What do you think happened to my wife?” Eric asked
, feeling foolish for the sting of tears he couldn’t believe had sprung to his eyes.

“I think something happened to her.” She glanced down at his baby. “From what I
’ve been able to figure, as I’ve gone through everything of Abby’s and learned what she went through, I don’t think she left you. I think something happened.”

“
What are you talking about? You’ve already made it clear that no one broke in here,” Eric said, watching her with his baby as Rachel pulled open a drawer and dragged out a pink shirt. He hurried behind Rachel and helped her. “You want this shirt? What pants do you want today?” He pulled open the bottom drawer, which was empty. “I guess Daddy needs to do laundry, too.”

He set the long
-sleeved shirt over her head as she wandered to the dirty clothes and pulled out yesterday’s pants, which had soup spilled on them. “No, let’s find something a little cleaner,” Eric said. He sifted through and found the cleanest pair after helping her step into a dry pair of Pull-Ups. Eric just couldn’t make potty training happen right now, and Rachel needed to have a settled home and environment to be successful.

“When we spoke to Abby’s doctor
, he said Abby had left Rachel in the bath and didn’t know it. He said then that he thought she was overtired, but he didn’t have details of her abduction two years earlier or what she’d been through. If he had, with what you’d said after her delivery, how odd she was acting, he said he would have taken it more seriously.”

Eric glanced up
and over at Terri as he helped Rachel dress. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at. With that worthless excuse… he was just covering his ass because he couldn’t be bothered to talk to Abby and take more time.”

Terri looked away
, uncomfortable. He didn’t know what she thought. When she glanced back his way, she said, “One of the shelters I want to talk to sees a lot of vets with PTSD.”

Eric stood up a
s Rachel raced to her toy box in the living room. He stepped into the hallway so he could see his daughter and faced Terri, trying to figure out where she was going with this. “Are you telling me my wife has PTSD?”

“I think so
, and I also think that’s what happened here. I mean, when you brought Abby home with you, did she get help after what she’d been through?”

Eric didn’t know why he was feeling defensive
, but he reached for his son, cooing in Terri’s arms, staring up at her. “No,” he said, and he left the bedroom.

“Eric
, I’m not pointing fingers,” she said. He turned so fast she bumped into him, and her soft breast brushed his arm. She stepped back. “I’m just saying that to go through what she did and not have trauma is unlikely. Some can hide it. Sometimes you bury things, hide them so no one around you knows, and for years you get by. Then bam, something will happen to trigger it.”

“So what
, are you a shrink now?” he snapped.

Someone knocked
on the door right before it popped open. “Hello? Oh, hey there, Terri. Didn’t know you were here,” Mary-Margaret said. As she stepped inside, her gaze drifted from Eric and his disheveled appearance to Terri, standing so close they were touching. She frowned.

Eric didn’t think he could take anymore
, so he handed Mary-Margaret his son and said, “I need to get cleaned up.”

“Any news?”
she said to Eric, but it was Terri who replied, “No, nothing new.”

Mary-Margaret frowned again, her eyes flashing
. Eric really wasn’t too interested in trying to figure out what her problem was. He took in both women and noticed how the air had suddenly thickened.

“Look
, Terri has some ideas. We’re going to check out some shelters in South Norfolk.”

Mary-Margaret patted his arm. “That’s good. You need to find your wife. Don’t give up hope
, Eric. You’ll find her.”

Eric
didn’t answer. He couldn’t, so he just turned away and went into his bedroom, shutting the door.

Eric was sitting in the passenger side of Terri’s
burgundy four-door sedan. As usual, she drove and Eric searched the streets, seeking out all the people walking by. He had begun to notice the homeless more and more every day they’d been out searching for his wife. They pulled in beside an older red brick building. There was concrete everywhere, covered in graffiti, and a large dumpster at the edge of an alley was full of garbage.

She parked in front of the building, taking the only empty spot. The homeless pushed carts
, and some were huddled in the corner while others stepped up the concrete stairs from the basement. They wore lots of worn layers and mismatched clothes, all trudging around and looking defeated.

“So
, what stop is this?” he asked, opening the door as she lifted her keys from the ignition.

“The nun I wanted to talk to
,” Terri replied. “Sister Carmen is her name.”

Eric stepped out into
the snow on a sidewalk that hadn’t been shoveled. As he looked up and down the street, he could see how the city overlooked this part of town. He looked around at the unkempt, the rundown, the poverty that seemed to stare out at him from a neighborhood that showed its years of being let go.

“Guess the cit
y has no money in the budget for this part of town,” he said.

Terri was wearing lace
-up boots, and she stepped through the bank of snow. “It’s about taxpayers, voters. You know the city aldermen—this would be political suicide for them. These are the lost souls down here, this part of town.” She jammed her hands in her pockets and gestured to the steps. “Let’s go in.”

Eric followed Terri down the concrete steps
, which, at least, had been cleared, and into a basement. There were tables set up inside, and the room was filled with hundreds of people who seemed to gather to keep warm. There was a kitchen at the back and an urn of coffee. Some men and women were wiping the tables, while a large, dark man with a pockmarked face talked to an older woman. She wore a red wool cap, her gray, greasy hair poking from the ends, and a burlap coat that was covered with grime and dirt.

“Excuse me
, we’re looking for Sister Carmen,” Terri said.

The man took in Eric,
scanning the tan uniform he wore. He firmed his lips. “She’s in the back office, down the hall.” He gestured with his large hand. “You stationed here, sailor?”

Eric watched him and recognized something in him
. Military, navy… he wasn’t sure, and, for the first time, he found himself not correcting the man for his slight. Anyone knew the difference between enlisted and officer, and so did this fellow. Eric would bet everything he had on it.

“Yeah
, I’m looking for my wife.” He pulled out the picture he’d run his fingers over a thousand times, the one taken the first day home from the hospital with Charlie. She was holding him, and Rachel was beside her. He felt a lump jam his throat as he stared at the first woman he’d ever truly loved, a woman with such innocence. She’d stood beside him no matter what. She had needed him, and he felt guilty for having left. As he looked closer, trying to see the worn picture of Abby as everyone else would have seen her, he noticed it wasn’t just fatigue he saw in her expression—it was sadness. How could he have missed that? He extended the photo to the man, who glanced at the homeless woman beside him. She, too, looked at the picture.

“Pretty. Can’t say I’ve seen her here. You got kids
? She pack up and leave?” the man said.

Eric shook his head
. “No, they’re… my kids are at home. She disappeared.”

The man frowned and then said, “You hit her
? Is she running because you beat her?” He was watching Eric as if he would fight him.

Eric swore under his breath and glanced at the door.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” When he turned back to the man watching him, he said, “Hell, no.”

Terri interrupted and gestured to the photo the man held. “She
’d just had a baby, and she walked out. She’d been depressed. We think something happened.”

The man was looking from Eric to Terri and at
the badge she had fastened to her jeans when she unzipped her coat. Something changed in his expression as he glanced at her.

“Eric
, give us a minute,” she said. She moved away with the large man. The entire time she was talking, he watched Eric with dark eyes: hard, unforgiving, as if he’d figured Eric for a son of a bitch who beat his wife and was deciding on his guilt.

“So you’re in the Navy, an officer
,” the old woman beside him said. She was hunched over in a bulky jacket, and the top of her head didn’t reach his shoulders.

“Yes,
a captain.” He crossed his arms and set his gaze to the discussion across the room, trying to figure out why the man was shaking his head at whatever Terri was saying.

“You miss this woman, this wife of yours?”
the woman asked, and Eric started to catch a whiff of her body odor. He guessed that living on the streets, she didn’t get much of a chance to bathe.

“Yeah
,” he said, his throat closing up again.

“Don’t mind Frank. He’s just mighty protective when guys like you come sniffing around.”

Well, that had Eric’s attention. “Guys like me?”

He looked down
at the woman. She had bloodshot eyes and deep lines in a face that might at one time have been lovely but now showed how unforgiving the streets could be. “What do you mean, guys like me?”

“Military guys, officers, who beat their wives. Frank will never tell you if he
’s seen her. It’s the only chance women like that have to get away. The streets are a place they can hide.”

In that second
, as he stood and watched the woman, several things went through his mind. Of the twenty-nine days his wife had been gone, what if she’d been here and no one had said anything? What if they’d jumped to the same conclusion, that she’d escaped him? That made no sense, though. Abby would never say that about him. He’d never hurt her. He loved her.

“Have you seen my wife? Please
, if you have…” Eric pleaded, hating the way he sounded.

“Why’d she leave if you’re not hitting her? Did you not treat her okay
?”

By t
he way she asked, Eric wondered if she knew something. When he started to talk, he didn’t know how to explain Abby and her mental state, how she was behaving, to anyone. “I don’t understand why she’d leave, why she’d leave our children. She disappeared sometime in the night, leaving our newborn and two-year-old alone. I was on the other side of the world, in the middle of the ocean, and I could do nothing. I need to find her,” he said just as Terri and Frank approached.

“Could I see that picture again?”
the homeless woman asked. The entire time, her pale brown eyes watched Eric.

She held out a chapped
, dirty hand, and Eric held out his wife’s photo. She took it and glanced from it to Eric before saying, “Frank, isn’t this the woman you said you found in here who had no coat and only slippers on her feet?” she asked. The man studied Eric, and the homeless woman said, “Frank, he’s not one of those.”

“You
’d best to talk to Sister Carmen,” Frank said as he glanced at the photo the old woman held. “It could have been her, and she’d have been taken to the women’s shelter. No matter who you are, that shelter is to protect women. Doubt very much Sister Carmen will tell you where it is.”

Eric wanted to reach out
and shake the man. Maybe that was what showed as he stepped toward him, as Terri set her hand quickly on his chest and raised her eyebrows.

“Eric
, enough. We need to talk to Sister Carmen,” she said. When Eric didn’t move, she put herself between him and Frank and touched his arm, leading him down the hall. “Eric, look. Come on.”

He walked with Terri
, taken by the force and strength she had, considering she was such a tiny woman.

“Look
, don’t let him get to you. He’s trying to push your buttons,” she said.

“He thinks I beat my wife
,” Eric snapped. He was walking down a narrow, dingy hall.

Terri hesitated outside the only door that was slightly ajar.
“He was trying to get you to react. He sees enough women fleeing from a bad place, husbands who only know how to use their fists.”

Eric was furious
, as that wasn’t him. He’d never laid a hand on Abby.

Terri
tapped on the door.

“Come in
,” an older woman’s voice called out.

Terri pushed open the door, greeted by the rear end of a large woman in tan slacks
. She was bent over, rifling through papers or something in a box.

“Excuse me
,” Terri said as she stepped in. Eric set his hand on the door, opening it wide.

The woman didn’t give them her attention but pulled out some
papers from the pile and started around the desk. “If you need a hand with anything, Frank is out in the kitchen.” She gestured absently with a pen and then slid on an older pair of glasses, something Eric hadn’t seen in twenty years. They were large and rimmed in plastic.

Terri held up her badge.
“Sister Carmen, I’m Terri Marks. I’m with NCIS. This is Captain Eric Hamilton.”

The woman glanced up
. Her short hair was a mix of gray and light brown, and she had hazel eyes. Her round face was free of any makeup. She was older, as her skin was translucent, with wrinkles here and there. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for my wife.” Eric stepped forward and held up the photo. “Her name is Abby. We just had a baby, Charlie
. That’s him in the picture.”

Sister Carmen
was watching him, and he realized she was sizing him up. Eric knew he needed her on his side, and he was going to make sure she understood the situation.

“I found her two years ago in a war zone in a dinghy,
” he began, going on to explain the circumstances of Abby’s rescue. “We have a little girl, Rachel,” he added. “That’s her in the picture, too.”

The nun was still watching him and saying nothing.

“I thought she was going to be okay,” Eric said. He explained Abby’s odd behavior after Charlie was born, as well as his shock at hearing that she had left. “I think something happened,” he said. “Please… please, if you’ve seen her…” His throat started to close up as he continued to hold Abby’s photo in front of Sister Carmen’s face.

S
he stared at the photo and back at Eric before reaching for the picture. This time, she really looked. “You love this woman, your wife?” She held on to the photo and seemed to relax a bit, looking at Terri and back to Eric.

“Yes
,” he said.

“I saw her,
” Sister Carmen began. “She was here, terrified, freezing. She had no coat, and she made no sense at first. She kept saying someone was after her, that he was going to hurt her. I asked her if it was her husband, if he’d hurt her. She was so upset and freaked out that it took a while to calm her down. She said the father of her daughter owned her and said he’d never let her go.”

“What the hell, Terri
?” Eric barked. “You told me you checked. Is Hossein in the country?” He touched his mouth, trying to contain the icy chill racing through him, the panic. He felt as if he had been blindsided.

“He’s not
. We know that for sure, so I don’t understand why she’d say that, unless it was someone else. Why wouldn’t she go to your friends next door? Why disappear? Your friends heard nothing. This makes no sense, Eric. Sister Carmen, where is she? We need to talk to her,” Terri added, standing her ground.

“I took her to the women’s shelter. They patched her up, gave her a bed.
She was safe there,” the nun said.

“Patched her up
—was she hurt?” Eric asked, trying not to panic. He stepped closer, feeling as if the floor were about to fall away under him.

The nun
pointed to her forehead. “A bruise and a small cut, but she was so upset that I couldn’t reason with her. We just thought you had done it. She needed rest. We didn’t know how long she’d been wandering in the cold. A month ago, being out as she was… the nights were chilly. She was cold and confused, panicked, just like a woman fleeing a bad scene. I’ve seen it a hundred times, maybe more.”

“Why wouldn’t you call the police or take her to the ER
? Why?” Eric was furious. For twenty-nine days he’d worried, and this woman had known all along where Abby was.

“
With a woman as traumatized as Abby, going to the police would be a mistake,” Sister Carmen replied. “She wouldn’t tell us more. We got her the help she needed. You have no idea the number of domestic abuse victims we see, and they need to hide, feel safe, get away, not to be reported so their abusers can find them. We had someone look at her at the shelter. She didn’t need the ER.” The nun stood her ground, and Eric was sure she would have barred any door and refused to budge an inch to protect what she believed in, helping those in need.